The motto of wit seems to be, Light come, light go. A touch is sufficient to dissever what already hangs so loose as folly, like froth on the surface of the wave; and an hyperbole, an impossibility, a pun or a nickname will push an absurdity, which is close upon the verge of it, over the precipice. It is astonishing how much wit or laughter there is in the world—it is one of the staple commodities of daily life—and yet, being excited by what is out of the way and singular, it ought to be rare, and gravity should be the order of the day. Its constant recurrence from the most trifling and trivial causes, shows that the contradiction is less to what we find things than to what we wish them to be. A circle of milliner’s-girls laugh all day long at nothing, or day after day at the same things—the same cant phrase supplies the wags of the town with wit for a month—the same set of nicknames has served the John Bull and Blackwood’s Magazine ever since they started. It would appear by this that its essence consisted in monotony, rather than variety. Some kind of incongruity however seems inseparable from it, either in the object or language. For instance, admiration and flattery become wit by being expressed in a quaint and abrupt way. Thus, when the dustman complimented the Duchess of Devonshire by saying, as she passed, ‘I wish that lady would let me light my pipe at her eyes,’ nothing was meant less than to ridicule or throw contempt, yet the speech was wit and not serious flattery. The putting a wig on a stupid face and setting it on a barber’s pole is wit or humour:—the fixing a pair of wings on a beautiful figure to make it look more like an angel is poetry; so that the grotesque is either serious or ludicrous, as it professes to exalt or degrade. Whenever any thing is proposed to be done in the way of wit, it must be in mockery or jest; since if it were a probable or becoming action, there would be no drollery in suggesting it; but this does not apply to illustrations by comparison, there is here no line drawn between what is to take place and what is not to take place—they must only be extreme and unexpected. Mere nonsense, however, is not wit. For however slight the connexion, it will never do to have none at all; and the more fine and fragile it is in some respects, the more close and deceitful it should be in the particular one insisted on. Farther, mere sense is not wit. Logical subtilty or ingenuity does not amount to wit (although it may mimic it) without an immediate play of fancy, which is a totally different thing. The comparing the phrenologist’s division of the same portion of the brain into the organs of form and colour to the cutting a Yorkshire pudding into two parts, and calling the one custard and the other plum-cake may pass for wit with some, but not with me. I protest (if required) against having a grain of wit.[[64]]
PERSONAL POLITICS
‘Ay, every inch a king!’
Many persons are surprised at the conduct of Charles X. in pushing things to extremities: the wonder would have been, if he had not. All the time of the Restoration under a charter, he was employed in thinking how to get rid of that charter, to throw off that incubus, to cancel that juggle, to breathe once more the air of divine right. Till this were done—no matter by what delays, after what length of time, by what jesuitical professions, by what false oaths, by what stratagems, by what unmasked insolence, by what loud menaces, by what violence, by what blood—the French monarch (whether Charles or Louis), felt himself ‘cooped, confined, and cabined in, by saucy doubts and fears;’ but this phantom of a constitution once out of the way he would be ‘himself again.’ He would then first cry Vive la Charte! without a pang—with his eyes running over, and his heart bursting with laughter. If he had a right to be where he was, he had a right to be what he was, and what he was born to be. This was the first idea instilled into his mind, the last he would forget. All else was a compromise with circumstances, a base surrender of an inalienable claim, a concession extorted under duresse, so much the more eagerly to be retracted, as an appearance of compliance had been the longer and more studiously kept up. A throne not founded on inherent right was a mockery and insult. All power shared with the people, supposed to be derived from them, for which the possessor was accountable to them, held during pleasure or good behaviour, was pollution to his thoughts, odious to him as the leprosy. Be sure of this, popular right coiled round the sceptre of hereditary kings is like the viper clinging to our hands, which we shake off with fear and loathing. There is in despots (born and bred) a natural and irreconcilable antipathy to the people, and to all obligations to them. The very name of freedom is a screech-owl in their ears. They have been brought up with the idea that they were entitled to absolute power, that there was something in their blood that gave them a right to it without condition or reserve, or being called to account for the use or abuse of it; and they reject with scorn and impatience anything short of this. They will either be absolute or they will be nothing. The Bourbons for centuries had been regarded as the gods of the earth, as a superior race of beings, who had a sovereign right to trample on mankind, and crush them in their wrath or spare them in their mercy. Would Charles X. derogate from his ancestors, would he be the degenerate scion of that royal line, to wear a tarnished and dishonoured crown, to be raised by the shout of a mob, to wait the assent of a Chamber of Deputies, to owe every thing to the people, to be a king on liking and on sufferance, a sort of state prisoner in his own kingdom, shut up and spell-bound in the nickname of a Constitution? He would as soon consent to go on all-fours. The latter would not shock his pride and prejudices more: would not be a greater degradation in his eyes, or a more total inversion of the order of nature. It is not that the successor to a despotic throne will not, but he cannot be the king of a free people: the very supposition is in his mind a contradiction in terms. It is something base and mechanical, not amounting even to the rank of a private gentleman who does what he pleases with his estate; and kings consider mankind as their estate. If a herd of overloaded asses were to turn against their drivers and demand their liberty and better usage, these could not be more astonished than the Bourbons were when the French people turned against them and demanded their rights. Will these same Bourbons, who have been rocked and cradled in the notion of arbitrary power, and of their own exclusive privileges as a separate and sacred race, who have sucked it in with their mothers’ milk, who inherit it in their blood, who have nursed it in exile and in solitude, and gloated over it once more, since their return, as within their reach, ever be brought to look Liberty in the face except as a mortal and implacable foe, or ever give up the hope of removing that obstacle to all that they have been or still have a fancied right to be? The last thing that they can be convinced of will be to make them comprehend that they are men. This is a discovery of the last forty years, that has been forced upon them in no very agreeable manner; by the beheading of more than one of their race, the banishment of the rest, by their long wanderings and unwelcome return to their own country, from whence they have been driven twice since—but up to that period they find no such levelling doctrine inscribed either in the records of history or on their crest and coat of arms or in the forms of religion or in the ancient laws and institutions of the kingdom. Which version will they then believe or turn a deaf ear to: that which represents them as God’s vicegerents upon earth, or that which holds them up as the enemies of the human race and the scoff and outcasts of their country? Every, the meanest individual has a standard of estimation in his own breast, which is that he is of more importance than all the rest of the world put together; but a king is the only person with respect to whom all the rest of the world join or have ever joined in the same conclusion; and be assured that having encouraged him in this opinion, he will do every thing in his power to keep them to it till his last gasp. You have sworn to a man that he is a god: this is indeed the most solemn of compacts. Any attempt to infringe it, any breath throwing a doubt upon it, is treason, rebellion, impiety. Would you be so unjust as to retract the boon, he will not be so unjust to himself as to let you. He would sooner suffer ten deaths and forfeit twenty kingdoms than patiently submit to the indignity of having his right called in question. It is said, Charles X. is a good-natured man: it may be so, and that he would not hurt a fly; but in that quarrel he would shed the blood of millions of men. If he did not do so, he would consider himself as dead to honour, a recreant to fame, and a traitor to the cause of kings. Touch but that string, the inborn dignity of kings and their title to ‘solely sovereign sway and masterdom,’ and the milk of human kindness in the best-natured monarch turns to gall and bitterness. You might as well present a naked sword to his breast, as be guilty of a word or look that can bear any other construction than that of implicit homage and obedience. There is a spark of pride lurking at the bottom of his heart, however glozed over by smiles and fair speeches, ever ready (with the smallest opposition to his will) to kindle into a flame, and desolate kingdoms. Let but the voice of freedom speak, and to resist ‘shall be in him remorse, what bloody work soever’ be the consequence. Good-natured kings, like good-natured men, are often merely lovers of their own ease who give themselves no trouble about other people’s affairs: but interfere in the slightest point with their convenience, interest, or self-love, and a tigress is not more furious in defence of her young. While the Royal Guards were massacring the citizens of Paris, Charles X. was partridge-shooting at St. Cloud, to show that the shooting of his subjects and the shooting of game were equally among the menus plaisirs of royalty. This is what is meant by mild paternal sway, by the perfection of a good-natured monarch, when he orders the destruction of as great a number of people as will not do what he pleases, without any discomposure of dress or features. Away with such trifling! There is no end of the confusion and mischief occasioned by the application of this mode of arguing from personal character and appearances to public measures and principles. If we are to believe the fashionable cant on this subject, a man cannot do a dirty action because he wears a clean shirt: he cannot break an oath to a nation, because he pays a gambling debt; and because he is delighted with the universal homage that is paid him, with having every luxury and every pomp at his disposal, he cannot, under the mask of courtesy and good humour, conceal designs against a Constitution, or ‘smile and smile and be a tyrant!’ Such is the logic of the Times. This paper, ‘ever strong upon the stronger side,’ laughs to scorn the very idea entertained by our ‘restless and mercurial neighbours’ (as if the Times had nothing of the tourniquet principle in its composition) that so amiable, so well-meaning and prosperous a gentleman as Charles X. should nourish an old and inveterate grudge against the liberties of his country or wish to overturn that happy order of things which the Times had so great a share in establishing. But he no sooner verifies the predictions of the French journalists and is tumbled from his throne, than the Times with its jolly, swaggering, thrasonical air falls upon him and calls him all the vagabonds it can get its tongue to. We do not see the wit of this, any more than of its assuring us, with unabated confidence, that there is not the least shadow of foundation for the apprehensions of those who are perverse enough to think, that a Ministry that have set up and countenanced the Continental despotisms, and uniformly shown themselves worse than indifferent to the blood and groans of thousands of victims in foreign countries (sacrificed under their guarantee of the deliverance of mankind) may have an arrière-pensée against the liberties of their own. We grant the premises of the Times in either case, that the French king was good-humoured and that the Duke has a vacant face; but these favourable appearances have not prevented a violent catastrophe in the one case and may not in the other. Mr. Brougham a short time ago, in a speech at a public meeting, gave his hearty approbation of the late Revolution in France, and clenched his argument by asking what fate an English monarch would merit, and probably meet, who acted in the same manner as the besotted Charles; who annulled the liberty of the press, who prevented the meeting of the representatives of the people, who disfranchised four-fifths of the electors by an arbitrary decree, and proposed to reign without law, and raise the taxes without a Parliament? This is not exactly the point at issue. A more home question would be, what fate a king of England would deserve, not who did or attempted all this in his own person, but who fearing to do that, as the next best thing and to show which way his inclinations tended, aided and abetted with all the might and resources of a people calling itself free, and tried to force back upon a neighbouring state, by a long and cruel war and with the ruin of his own subjects, a king like Charles X., who by every act and circumstance of his life had shown himself hostile to the welfare and freedom of his country, and whose conduct, if repeated here, would justly incur the forfeiture of his own crown? It would be ‘premature,’ in the judgment of some, to give an opinion on this subject till after the thing has happened, and then it would be neither loyal nor patriotic to condemn the conduct of our own cabinet; but we hope at least that the next time the English government undertake to force a king upon the French people, they will send them a baboon instead of a Bourbon, as the less insult of the two!—To return to the question of personal politics. Our last king but one was a good domestic character; but this had little or nothing to do with the wisdom or folly of his public measures. He might be faithful to his conjugal vows, but might put a construction on some clause in his Coronation-oath fatal to the peace and happiness of a large part of his subjects. He might be an exceedingly well-meaning, moral man, but might have notions instilled into him in early youth respecting the prerogatives of the crown and the relation between the sovereign and the people, that might not quit him to his latest breath, and might embroil his subjects and the world in disastrous wars and controversies during his whole reign. His son succeeded him without the same reputation for domestic virtue, but adopted all the measures of his father’s ministers. If the private character and the public conduct were to be submitted to the same test, this could not have happened. But the late king was cried up for his elegant accomplishments, and as the fine gentleman of his family; and this, with equally sound logic, atoned for the absence of less shewy qualities, and stamped his public proceedings with the character of a wise and liberal policy. We are already assured of a fortunate and peaceful reign, because the present king looks pleased and good-humoured on his accession to the crown; though the smallest cloud in the political horizon may scatter the ruddy smiles and overcast the whole prospect. Mr. Coleridge complains, somewhere, of politicians who pretend to guide the state, and yet have ruined their own affairs. Would the author of the Ancient Mariner apply the same rule to other things, and affirm that no one could be a poet or a philosopher who had not made his fortune? One would suppose, that all the people of sense and worth were confessedly on one side of the question in the great disputes in religion or politics that have agitated and torn the world in pieces, and all the knaves and fools on the other. This is hardly tenable ground. Charles IX., of happy memory was we believe a good-tempered man and a most religious prince: this did not hinder him from authorising the massacre of St. Bartholomew and shooting at the Huguenots out of the palace-windows with his own hands. This was the prejudice of his time: we have still certain prejudices to contend with in ours, which have nothing to do with the looks, temper, or private character of those who hold them. We wonder at the cruelties and atrocities of religious fanatics in former times, and would not have them repeated: were none of these persecutors honest, conscientious men? Take any twelve inquisitors: six of them shall be angels and the other six scoundrels, yet they will all agree in one unanimous verdict, condemning you or me to the flames for not believing in the infallibility of the Pope. This is the thing to be avoided by all means; and not to lose our time in idle discussions about the amiableness of the characters of these pious exterminators, nor in admiring the fineness of their countenances, nor the picturesque effect of the scenery and costume. Charles X., the gay and gallant Count d’Artois, wears a hair-shirt, is fond of partridge-shooting, and wanted to put a yoke on the necks of his subjects. The last is that on which issue was joined. Let him go where he chooses, with a handsome pension; but let him not be sent back again (as he was once before) at the expense of millions of lives![[65]]
EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS
‘Player. We have reformed that indifferently, my lord.
Hamlet. Oh! reform it altogether.’
The emancipation of the Jews is but a natural step in the progress of civilisation. Laws and institutions are positive things: opinions and sentiments are variable; and it is in conforming the stubbornness and perversity of the former to the freedom and boldness of the latter, that the harmony and beauty of the social order consist. But it is said, ‘The Jews at present have few grievances to complain of; they are well off, and should be thankful for the indulgence they receive.’ It is true, we no longer burn them at a stake, or plunder them of their goods: why then continue to insult and fix an idle stigma on them? At Rome a few years ago they made the Jews run races (naked) in the Corso on Good Friday. At present, they only oblige them to provide asses to run races on the same day for the amusement of the populace, and to keep up the spirit of the good old custom, though by altering it they confess that the custom was wrong, and that they are ashamed of it. They also shut up the Jews in a particular quarter of the city (called Il Ghetto Judaico), and at the same time will not suffer the English as heretics to be buried within the walls of Rome. An Englishman smiles or is scandalised at both these instances of bigotry; but if he is asked, ‘Why, then, do you not yourselves emancipate the Catholics and the Jews?’ he may answer, ‘We have emancipated the one.’ And why not the other? ‘Because we are intolerant.’ This and this alone is the reason.
We throw in the teeth of the Jews that they are prone to certain sordid vices. If they are vicious it is we who have made them so. Shut out any class of people from the path to fair fame, and you reduce them to grovel in the pursuit of riches and the means to live. A man has long been in dread of insult for no just cause, and you complain that he grows reserved and suspicious. You treat him with obloquy and contempt, and wonder that he does not walk by you with an erect and open brow.
We also object to their trades and modes of life; that is, we shut people up in close confinement and complain that they do not live in the open air. The Jews barter and sell commodities, instead of raising or manufacturing them. But this is the necessary traditional consequence of their former persecution and pillage by all nations. They could not set up a trade when they were hunted every moment from place to place, and while they could count nothing their own but what they could carry with them. They could not devote themselves to the pursuit of agriculture, when they were not allowed to possess a foot of land. You tear people up by the roots and trample on them like noxious weeds, and then make an outcry that they do not take root in the soil like wholesome plants. You drive them like a pest from city to city, from kingdom to kingdom, and then call them vagabonds and aliens.