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2)75-

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:,q,-z.-dbvGoOglc

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

AND

ENGLISH LITERATURE

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PRINCETON LECTURES.

A tiriti of volumis cmttaining tkt notable licturis df

livtrtd on the occasion ofThe SrsjvichttetmiaUt

ctlebralion of Princtton Univtriity.

Ha Tradi Revolttlai Md ZncUih Utentnrc. Ki Lsanro.

By Piot Edwaid DowniH. Tnnil; CollEge, Dublin.
Tbdim. Two LeciutM. By Pruf. Akdbfw Skth, Univenicy of

Edinbnish.
IhaUKharEeof EkCtHdtyinGMM. Faur Lcciurei. ByPnl

J. J. Tho-SON, UnLcnity ol OrrbridRe.
ncKitlMBatlctlTkearTaftbeTaf. four Lccturea. By Proi.

Feux Klkih, UnivBmiyorGSitingen.
Tlie Dacent <rf tbe PrlmttM. By Prol. A. A. W. Hubhckt,

Umvenily of Utrecht.

ne Batire «sd Oriflii of tlie Bosb Gender* 1b tlie lBd«(er-

, ByPiof. Karl Bbugkahn, UniKmilyof

:,q,z.<ib, Google

FEENCH EEVOLUTION

ENGLISH LITERATURE

I4ECTCBES DELIVERED IN CONNECTION WITH THE

SfiSQUICENTENNIAL CELEBKA.TION OF

PEINCBTON UNIVEESITY

EDWARD DOWDEN

NEW YORK

CHAELES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1897

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!^ 20.9
075

Copgrighl, 1S97,
Bt Cbaklbs Scbibneb's Sons

N Wilson and Son, Cahbhidgb, U.S-A.

:,q,-z.-dbvGoOg[c

PREFACE

The substance of this volume was embodied
in lectures given in Trinity College, Cambridge,
when I had the honor to hold the Clark Lecture-
ship in English Literature. On receiving the
honor of an invitation from the authorities of
Princeton University to deliver a series of lec-
tures in connection with the Sesqui-centennial
Celebration, I revised my material and made
some additions. It is the wish of those who
organized and carried out that brilliant Celebra-
tion that these lectures should be published ; and
I am further encouraged to publication by the
great kindness of many of my American fellow-
students, and by the generous welcome which I
received from an American audience. I think
of my days spent in the autumn of last year
at that old and distinguished seat of learning,
which has contributed so much to the best life
of the United States, with a feeling of happy
gratitude.

:,q,z.<ib, Google

In these lectures I go over some ground which
I have previously traversed ; the point of view,
perhaps, gives unity to the results of various
studies. I do not attempt to prove a thesis. I
have tried to enter in a disinterested way into
the spirit of each writer who comes within the
scope of my subject, and to let the meanings
of the French Revolution, as they entered into
English literaturejlexpound themselves. To pre-
sent some important figures on a background of
history — history of ideas rather than of events
— has been my aim.

I have acknowledged a debt to M. Angellier in
what I say of Burns, and to M. Legouis in some
things which I say of Wordsworth. A passage
of the last lecture is reclaimed from an article
of my own contributed to a magazine.

K D.

TeINITT CoLLBCB, DtJBLlM,

January 7, 1897.

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CONTENTS

I. Pkecursors of Revohttioij .... 3

JI. Theorists of Revolution 47

HI. Anti-Revolution: Edhl-nd Burke . . 93
IV. Earlt Revolutionary Group and

Antagonists 141

V. Recovery and Reaction 197

VI. Renewed Revolutionary Advance . . 243

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iv,Goog[c

I

PREODESOES OF REVOLUTION

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THE FEENCH REVOLUTION AND
ENGLISH LITERATURE

PRECURSOES OF REVOLUTION

Before the stream of Revolutionary thought and
feeling gathered to flow in a channel, its diffused
substance existed in the form of what may be
described as a mist. From a fortunate distance
certain wreathings of that mist may be observed,
Taine, in the opening volume of his book on the
" Origins of Contemporary France," resolves into
two chief elements the Revolutionary spirit: first,
the progress of natural and experimental science,
with the application of the methods of science to
the study of human society and human history ;
secondly, the classical tendency, which reduces the
particular and individual to general ideas, or sub-
stitutes an abstraction for a group of things con-
crete with all their manifold details. The second

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4 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

of these influences was active in England, — we
feel its presence in such abook as Godwin's " Politi-
cal Justice," — but it had not in our country, as it
had in France, the weight of a predominant tradi-
tion, and the character of the-Euglish mind held it
in check. The acquisitions and the methods of
science deeply afifected the temper and habits of
thought in both countries. In astronomy, in
optics, in chemistry, in geoli^y and mineralogy,
in botany, in zoiJlogy, in physiology, great names
make the eighteenth century illustrious ; great dis-
coveries were co-ordinated under ruling ideas., But
is not man a portion of nature 7 And if so,
why should not the ideas and methods of science
be applied to the study of man as an individual,
to the study of society and of its development ?
It was not authority, it was not conceptions in-
herited from the past, which had given this
powerful impetus to scientific discovery ; these
had been reversed or set aside. Reason had
taken the place ot authority. Why should not
reason also become supreme in the study of
humanity, and in all arrangements for the social
and political life of man ? Why should there
not be a mathematics dealing with the units,
and groups of units, which make up society ?
Why should not society be established, though

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PRECUKEOES OF BEVOLUTION 5

now for the first time, on the basis of reason ?
Might this not be, if only authority and prescrip-
tion, customs and conventions, inherited beliefs
and the prejudices of ignorance^ were once for all ,
displaced or overthrown ? The new faith in (
reason became an enthusiasm with something
of the force of a new religion.
' An idea of nulimited human progress had
been generated by the vast scientific movement jl
of the century. Man is not a perfect creature,
but surely he is perfectible ; and the motive-
power in his endless advance can be no other
than the human reason. But in order that
reason may have full scope and play, absolute
freedom is essential, a complete emancipation
from prejudice must be attained. The chain of
inference appeared to he unbroken and strong ;
" Is it possible for us," asked Godwin, " to con- *
template what man has already done, without
being impressed with a strong presentiment of
the improvements he has yet to accomplish ?
There is no science that is not capable of addi-
tions ; there is no art that may not be carried
to a still higher perfection. If this be true of
all other sciences, why not of morals ? If this
be true of all other arts, why not of social insti-
tution } The very conception of this as possible

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6 THE FBENCH SETOLmON

is in the highast degree encouraging. )' If we can
still further demonstrate it to be a part of the
natural and regular progress of mind, our confi-
dence and our hopes will then be complete.
This is the temper with which we ought to
engage in the study of political truth." The
same doctrine has been taught to our own gen-
eration, and has been pushed even farther in the
direction of homage to the reason. In Draper's
ambitious work the author stated, in language
which is strange as coming from a professedly
, scientiiie writer, that Nature, the abstraction
Nature, has an aim, and that this aim is not a
moral but an intellectual development. Buckle,
in hia " History of Civilization," maintained that
the intellectual element is the dynamic force in

i society, having an activity and a capacity for
adaptation which make it the chief mover in an
indefinite prc^esa of humanity. It is perhaps
worth noting, as a symptom of one tendency
of thought in our own day, that a recent con-
..tribution to the study of Social Evolution, that
by Mr. Benjamin Kidd, argues on grounds, which
claim to be scientific, in favor of a theory pre-
cisely the opposite to that of Buckle. The con-
clusion which Darwinian science must eventually
establish is, in Mr. Kidd's view, that the evolu-

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PHECDRS0R3 OF BEVOLUTION 7

tion slowly proceeding in human society has
primarily a religious rather than an intellectual
character.

However this may be, the eighteenth century,
1 the scBculum rationalisticum, believed, as a car-
I dinal article of faith, in the supremacy of reason
I as an agent in the prepress of society. This belief
was nourished and sustained by the great scien-
tific discoveries of the age ; and it tended to
produce that assurance or that dream of the
possibility of boundless advance for the race,
which formed part of the Revolutionary creed,
and which was summed up in the expression
human ■perfectibility. The new evangel had its
apostles and prophets and niartyik There is
something sublime and something pathetic in
their unalterable optimism. ' The most glowing
words, perhaps, celebrating the promised golden
age, seen in vision from the undelectable
mountains of Revolution, were written by the
proscribed Condorcet in the closing pages of his
unfinished "Progrfes de I'Esprit humain." The
contemplation of the happier future of humanity
he describes as a refuge for the philosopher, into
which the recollection of his persecutors can
never follow him, — " in which living in thought
with man reinstated in the rights and the dig-

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u

8 THE FRENCH HEVOLUTIOS

nity of his nature, he forgets man tormeDted and
corrupted hy greed, by base fear, by envy." '" It
is here," criea Condorcet, " that he truly abides
with his fellows, iB an elysium which his reason
has known how to create for itself, aad which
hia love for humanity adorua with all purest
delights." Condorcet's sympathetic critic, Mr.
Morley, admits that the " Progr&s de I'Esprit
humain " fails to consider the history of moral
improvement, and is seriously marred by the
philosopher's angry and vehement hostility to
the religions of the world.

But the eighteenth century was not merely
a sceeulum rationalisticum. There had been in
England, as well as in France and Grermany, a
great enfranchisement of the passions. There
ad been a great outbreak of reli gious emotion s in
the movement which was represented by White-
field and Wesley. In literature the sentimental
movement, of which the spirit is present in such
representative works as Rousseau's " La nouvelle
H^loise," Goethe's " Werther," and Sterne's "Tris-
tram Shandy," ran its course, and probably would
have perished through its own excesses, had it
not turned somewhat away from literature and
coalesced with the new philanthropy of the
time. The worship of pas sion, the abandonment

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PRECUBSORS OF REVOLUTION 9

to sentiment, ha ^ been disBo l yi?Tila nf mnntl j^ nrl
social order : the first of duties was no longer to
act aright, but to Ido touched by a delicate dis-
tress. Yet under the affectations of the senti- ^ j
mentalists lay a real refining of human symp athy. ■*'*'*'^
In its more robust form the tender emotion of
the time passed into the new philanthropy ; and
among the sources which went to form the Kevo-
lutionary stream this is not the least important.
The cause of Revolution seemed to many thinkers,
and especially to the younger and more ardent
spirits, to be the cause of human ity, ^he laws
were harsh, and were administered with little
pity ; the criminal, generous or amiable, became
a favorite with imaginative writers. Human
nature — so it had been eloquently preached —
essentially good; the unreasonable and unfeeling
arrangements of society are the chief causes of
crime. All that philanthropy had been striving
for in this direction and in that was to be at-
tained in its unity and completeness by the
Kevolution. When the Bastille fell, what was
this but the fulfilment of the unaccomplished
work of John Howard ? Fox only gave expres-
sion to the sentiment of many of his contempo-
raries when he exclaimed, " How much the'
greatest event it is that ever happened in the

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L

10 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION /

world ! and bow much the best ! " Not that as
a fact the fall of the Bastille quite enfranchised
the whole of humanity ; it had held in confine-
ment seven prisoners, four of whom were accused
of forgery ; one was an idiot ; one was detained
at the request of his family ; while, on the other
band, the bodies of upwards of fourscore dead
compatriots lay in the governor's court, and
certain heads were borne in triumph on the
pikes of fraternity. But the Bastille served well
enough as a symbol for the imagination ; its ruins
typified the ashes of the old regime; and from
those asbes the pbcenix of human happiness and
freedom seemed to rise. Philanthropy was enter-
ing on its revolutionary apotheosis, when the
evangel of humanity was most clearly to be read
if it were written in blood.

But in the days before this apotheosis, im-
agination had also played its part, and it was
set "p|m ^ofi"iiig fiirtnin Hpt.iigl evils, and ascer-
taining the way to practical reforms. The Penal
Code of England was still one of savage severity,
and little had been done to amend its provisions.
It was something when in 1783 the cruel pro-
cession to Tyburn was abolished. And at least
one great statesman, — but he proved himself to
be no admirer of the French Eevolution, — Ed-

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PHECURSOKS OF REVOLUTION . 11

mund Burke, pleaded for a revisal of that code,
which he described as abominable. The great
' work of Howard's life on behalf of prison reform
begaa with hia appointment, in 1773, as High
Sheriff of Bedfordshire. His personal inspection
of prisons was carried out 'under circumstances
which involved on hia own part heroic fortitude,
in which he was supported not only by his pas-
sion of humanity, but by a deep sense of religious
duty. Indeed, the example of Howard and that
of Wilberforce are instances of the debt which
the philanthropic movement of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries owed to the Evangelical
revival. Howard did his work patiently and
well, thoroughly informing the public as to the
condition of the prisoner and his wretched abode, i
— the scanty food, the lack of warmth, the over- 1
crowding, the poisonous atmosphere, the conse-i
quent diseases, the untended condition of the
sick, the ponderous chains and iron collars, the!
fees extorted by unpaid jailers, the languishing
for years of those incarcerated for petty debts.

Among the philanthropic efforts of the time,
that on behalf of the a bolition of t.he ^lavp-t. radft
was the most considerable. Into it entered some-
thing of the Revolutionary feeling for l iberty .
and yet more of the sentiment of fraternity. Aa

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12 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

early as 1668 William Peno had denounced the
cruelty of the trade, aod his successors in the
Society of Friends had never been quite insen-
sible to its evils. The exertions of the Quakers,
in days preceding the great upheaval in France,
were ably seconded by Granville Sharp, Clarkson,
and Wilberforce, members ot the Church of Eng-
land. Evidence was collected by Clarkson ; the
system ot kidnapping, the native wars that fed
the trade, the horrors of the Middle Passage, were
exposed ; and on this subject at least there was
no serious difference of opinion between Pitt and
Fox and Burke. In 1780 Burke prepared a code
for the mitigation and ultimate abolishment of the
traffic in human lives, but he lost hope in the
possibility of bringing it to a successful issue.
In 1788 he "spoke strongly to the effect that
the trade was one which ought to be totally
abolished, but if this was not now possible, it
ought to be r^ulated at once. All delay in such
a matter was criminaL" ^ It is melancholy to
recall the fact that the direct cause why this
reform was not attained before the close of the
eighteenth century was that violent outbreak
on behalf of freedom, in which its admirers saw
the immediate emancipation of the world. In
> Leek;, England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. vi, p. 291.

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PRECURSORS OF REVOLUTION 13

\the panic created by the French Revolution the
interests of the oppressed Africans receded. Dan-
ton declared that slavery had been abolished in
the French colonies in order that the negroes in
the colonies of England and Spain might be ex-
cited to revolt. The century, in the words of
Mr- Lecky, " terminated with the temporary
defeat of a cause which twelve years before
seemed on the eve of triumph." Neverthe-
less, the younger spirits of the Revolutionary
movement in our literature, and in particular

I Southey, remained ardent champions of negro

^^mancipation.

The idea of progress and human perfectibility,
tjt>ft-4wmfl |iitiaTiP" p""""", — we have seen how
these entered into the Revolutionary spirit before
the Revolution. A third element which entered "S
into that spirit produced remarkable eiTects in
literature as well as in life. Mr. Morley has
said thatlthe keynote of the Revolutionary time
is expressed by the word " simplification." The i ^
Revolution was, or aimed atteing, as we are often
told, "a return to nature," Return to nature, —
it is an elastic word which is capable of many
meanings. When Pope and Addison pleaded for
a return to nature, they meant a return to good
sense, the con^inon intelligence, and the pbserva-

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14 THE PBENCH KEVOLUTION

tion ot actual life in place of the fantastic ingenui-
tiea of false wit and the ecceutricities of private
conceit. Now the meaning was different. The
"return to nature " signified a simplification in
social life in contrast with the artificialities and
conventions which had aceumulated in a highly'
complex age, and especially in cities and in courts ;
a sigh, genuine or affected, for the simplicities of
rural existence, or it might be for " a lodge in
some vast wilderness ; " a fresh delight in beauty
of the mountain and the woods ; a discovery of
the dignity of human passions in the shepherd
and the tiller of the soil ; a recognition in politica
of the rights of man as man, regardless of the
claims of aristocratic caste or class ; an assertion
of unbounded freedom for the individual, or a
freedom limited only by such duties as were im-
posed by universal fraternity. ■ In these and in
other respects, the Eevolution professed to sim-
plify life. As a young man. Fox had worn
elegant costumes, red-heeled shoes, and blue hair-
powder; during the American war he and his
friends distinguished themselves by a studious
indifference to the refinements of dress, " From
the House of Commons," says Wrdxall, " and the
clubs of St. James's Street it spread through the
private assemblies of London. But though grad-

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PRECURSORS OF REVOLUTION 15

ually undermined and insensibly perishing of an
atrophy, dress never totally fell till the era of
Jacobinism and of Equality in 1793 and 1794."
" This period," writes Mr, Lecky, " marks a com-
plete revolution in English dress. It was then
that the picturesque cooked hat went out of fash-
ion. . . . Then, too, the silver buckle was ex-
changed for the ordinary shoe-tie. Muslin cravats,
pantaloons, and Hessian boots came into fashion,
and the mode'of dressing the hair was wholly
changed. Like the Roundheads of the seven-
teenth century, the democrats of the eighteenth
century adopted the fashion of cutting the hair
short, and they also discarded as inconsistent
with republican simplicity that hair-powder
which, since the aboHtion of wigs, had been in-
variably worn by the upper classes. It is inter-
esting to notice that among the young students
of Oxford who were foremMt in taking this step,
were Southey and Savage Landor," ^ Then, too,
the powder and paint of poetic diction were
discarded by the younger poets ; it was declared
that the actual language of common discourse
sufficed for the highest needs of hterature, and
that the best part of our vocabulary is that which
can be gathered from the lips of peasants who
1 Eaglaud in the Eighteenth Centar/, toL t1. pp. 147, US.

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16 THE FRENCH HEVOLUTION

are accustomed to express their feelings witb
simplicity, and who live in communion with
the majestic and ennobling presence of external
nature.

An indication of the tarn which feeling was
taking in the direction of simplification as r^ards
social life is found long before the Revolution,
as early as 1757, in a hook which in its own day
made a considerable stir, — Brown's "Estimate
of the Manners and Principles of the Times." It
speedily passed through several editions. "The
inestimable Estimate of Brown," says one of the
speakers in Cowper's " Table-Talk," " rose like a
paper kite and charmed the town;" and indeed
the town from time to time enjoys hearing ita
own vices or foibles criticised or satirized. The
book is a protest against the luxury and effemi-
nacy of the age. Two merits Brown allows to
Englishmen, — they value liberty and they pos-
sess humanity; for the rest they deserve little
but censure. Some sentences from Mr. Leslie
Stephen's summary of the indictment brought
against his countrymen by Brown will sufficiently
indicate the drift of the writer : " At our schools
the pupils learn words, not things ; on the grand
tour young men contract foreign vices without
widening their minds; money is lavished on

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PRECUR60BS OF REVOLUTION 17

foreign cookery instead of being spent on plain
English fare; conversation la trivial or vicious;
silly plays, novels, and pamphlets have replaced
works of solid literature ; the fine arts are de-
praved ; opera and pantoraime are preferred to
Shakespeare's plays ; men's principles are as bad
as their manners ; religion is universally ridi-
culed, yet tl)^ fashionable irreligion is shallow ;
vices are laughed at on the stage, and are re-
peated at home without a blush ; the professions
are corrupt, except law which ministers to the
selfish, and physic which assists the effeminate ;
politicians are mere jobbers ; oflScers are gamblers
and bullies; the clergy are contemned and are
contemptible ; low spirits and nervous disorders
have notoriously increased, until the people of
England are no longer capable of self-defence." ^ ■
And so the indictment, with many counts, pro-
ceeds. Brown was no revolutionist ; but he gave
an early expression to the feeling in favor of
simplification which was part of the Revolu-
tionary mode of feeling. The sentiment was far
more powerfully expressed, if also with certain
extravagances of theory from which Brown is
free, by Eousseau; and Eousseau, who was a

> L. Stephen, En);IiBh Thaaghe io the GighteeDtb Ceutaiy,
vol. ii. pp. 19S, 196 (abbreviated).

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18 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

chief inspirer of the doctrine and the passions of
Eevolution, gained a not inconsiderable following
in England.

Johnson^ who stood on the old ways, who sus-
pected novelties of thought and scorned whatever
seemed to be sentimental nonsense, maintained
that the dread of luxury was visionary. " Lux-
ury," he declared, " so far as it reaches the poor,
will do good to the race of people; it will
strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation
was ever hurt by luxury, for it can reach but to
a very few." And he went on to challenge Gold-
smith to take a walk from Charing Crosa to
Whitechapel, examining the shops with a view
to investigating which of them sold anything,
except it were gin, that could 'harm any human
being. " Well, air," answered Gloldsmith, " I '11
accept your challenge. The very next shop to
Northumberland House is a pickle-shop." John-
son, as usual, when brought to bay, rose to the
height of the great argument: " Well, sir, do we
not know that a maid can in one afternoon make
pickles sufficient to serve a whole family for a
year ; nay, that five pickle-shops can serve all the
kingdom ? Besides, sir, there is no liarm done to
anybody by the making of pickles, or the eating
of pickles." In 1767 J ohn Wesl ev wrote in his

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J'

PEEcnRaoRa of revolution 19

Journal : " T had a conversation with an ingeni-
ous man who proved to a demonstration that it
waa the duty of every man that could to be
' clothed in purple and fine linen ' and to ' fare
sumptuously every day ; ' and that he would do
abundantly more good hereby than he could do
by ' feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.'
Oh the depth of human understanding! What
may not a man believe if he will ? " The in-
genious acquaintance of Wesley, who held that
private extravagances are public benefits, was
adopting the same line of ai^ument as that
which Johnson, thirty-three years previously, had
introdu(^ in one of hia "Debates," and some ten
years afterwards repeated in conversation when
he mamtained that it did more good to eat a dish
of green peas at half a guinea than to give the
same sum to the poor, who might not be, Uke the
market^ardener, industrious.' Wesley's protest
against luxury is repeated on the eve of the
Revolution, by Hannah Mo ra, in her " Thoughts
on the Importance of the Manners of the Great
to General Society" (1788). Hannah More
was a reformer, hut she did not desire the over-
throw of thrones and of churches ; her pamphlet,
" Village Politics," in which the conservative
> Boswell'H Johnson, ed. Q. B. Hill. vol. iii. p. 56 and note.

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20 THE FRENCH BEVOLDTtOH

working-man, Jack Anvil, a blacksniith, convicts
the Jacobin worbitig-man, Tom Hod, a mason, of
the error ot his ways, had a wide circulation in
the year 1793. But the tendency towards simpli-
fication passed beyond the Eevolutionary group.
With Hannah More it was allied to her religious
convictions ; while admitting as Brown had done
the humanity of the time, she mourns over the
neglect of religious duties by persons commonly
esteemed as " a good kind of people," and over
"this voluptuous age, when a frivolous and re-
laxing dissipation has infected our very studies,"
and infidelity itself will not be at the trouble of
deep research.^'' * *

In the voKiptuoufl age, however, some Stoics
were to be found. The student ot eigl^eenth-
century literature cannot afford to overlook a
book which has had probably a larger number of
readers than any other work of the period ; he
may find something of the spirit ot the time em-
bodied in that edifying manual for youth, " Sand-
ford and Merton." T homas Day , the author of
that exciting narrative, and Day's intimate friend,
the father of Maria Edgeworth, were deeply in-
fluenced by the views on education put forth in
Rousseau's "£mile." As a genuine child of nature,
Emile is to be reared, yet with all the tenderness

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PRECDRSORS OF REVOLUTION 21

of an innocent and rural home. He ia to be
begailed by. amiable stratagems into acquiting
knowle<^. He is never to be the victim of
punishment iaflicted as such. The room which
he occupies is to be as simple as that of a peas-
ant He is t« think with a just abhorrence of
the luxury of extravagant banquets. He may be
indulged in a preference for bright colors in
dress, but the material chosen must be plain and
of enduring fabric. His wants must be reduced
to a minimuni. He must learn a trade, — that
of a carpenter, if it be convenient. The book, as
Mr. Morley justly observes, vras an e^prfiaaion-uf
the democratic t endencv i n educati on. - Bi char d
Lovell Edgp-woTth 's elilftst son was born in 1764.
The father determined to make a fair trial of
BoQssean's system, and a compliant mother agreed
that the child should, as far as passible, be
formed, both in body and mind, by the benignant
powers of nature. He wore no stockings; his
arms were bare; he became fearless of danger,
and capable of enduring many privations. "He
had," writes the father, "all the virtues of a
child bred in the hat of a savage, and all the
knowledge of things which could well be acquired
at an early age by a boy bred in civilized society.
I say knowledge of things, for of books be had

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22 THE FKBSCH BETOLUTION

less knowledge at seveii or eight than most chil-
dren have at four or five." Yet with these rare
advantages, the experiineat, somehow, did not
prove a complete success. He showed himself
to be, in the strictest sense of the word, a liberty-
, boy, a young Revolutionist ; " he was not," saya
his father, " disposed to obey ; ... be had little
deference for others, and he showed an invincible
dislike to control," The Harry Sandford of Edge-
worth's friend, Day, was a boy of happier dis-
position, " the most obliging, honest creature in
the world," full of the tenderest benevolence, and
so courageous that on one memorable occasion he
plucked "with as much dexterity as resolution"
the snake from round Master Tommy Merton's
leg. -Young Sandford had a true republican sim-
plicity of manners ; he was not like many other
children who place their whole happiness in eat-
ing ; give him but a morsel ot dry bread for his
dinner and he would be satisfied, though you
placed sweetmeats and fruit and every other
dainty in his way. He considered his father's
horn flagons to be superior to Mrs. Merton's silver
cup. When Mr. Merton asked Harry, " Should
you like to be rich, ray dear ? " the admirable boy
answered, " No, indeed, sir, because the only rich
man I ever saw is Squire Chase, who lives hard

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]^CUR80RS OF REVOLUTION 23

by; and he rides among people's com, and breaks
down their hedges, and shoots their poultry, and
kills their dogs, and lames their cattle, and abuses
the poor ; and they say he does all this because
he 's rich." " But should you not like to have a
fine coat," — so proceeds the test of viri.ue, — "and
a coach to carry you about, and servants to wait
on you ? " " As to that, madam," the youthful
Stoic replies, " one coat is as good as another, if
it will but keep me warm ; and I don't want to
ride, because I can walk wherever I choose; and
as to servants, I should have nothing for them to
do, if I had hundreds of them."

In the main, th e type of mind which the Eng-
lish eighteenth century tended to produce was of
t he common-sense, p r osaic, kind, often ardently
benevolent, but not carried away by extremes of
passion or extravagances of imagination. When
the new ideas of the second half of the century,
the Revolutionary ideas, struck upon such a
mind, the effects were strange. The prose and
the poetry did not alway.s happily blend together.
If the man were somewhat deficient in a sense of
the ridiculous, his case was worse; if he were
prone to experiment and to the direct application
of his ideas to Ufe, these new ideas might lead
him through the strangest of dances. It was an

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24 THE FRENCH KEVOLUTION

experimental age; the great Erasmus Darwiu's
defioition of a fool was a man who does not ven-
ture to make an experiment. There is no one
more dangeroua or more diverting than the man
of prosaic common-senae, who is ^devoid of im-
agination and of humor in a saving degree, and
who, having an experimental turn, becomes poa-
sessed hy new ideas. He will play such tricks
before high Heaven as might wreathe with smiles
the faces of the most serious angels. And this,
in truth, was what happened with the excellent
ThjunaS— Day- He was a worthy eighteenth-cen-
tury Briton, essentially prosaic, though much out
of the common in the degree of his benevolence
and generosity; and the burning rays from Rous-
seau's " Nouvelle H^loise," " Contrat social," and
" £mile " fell direct irpon his British brain. He
resolved to cultivate the life of simplicity and
nature; hair-powder he abhorred; even comb and
brush were enervating luxnriesV it was sufficient
to let his raven locks sway in thJtounning brook.
Although insensible to the attracti*is of -v^man-
hood, scornful of elegant domesticVccompIiah-
ments and regardless of female beautj^yfcept, it
is confessed, the attraction of large and w@|^ arms
(for there is always some weak point in a philoso-
pher's panoply). Day arrived at the rational con-

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PREOUBSORa OF KEVOLUTION 25

dusioB that he ought to talie to himself a wife.
He accompanied Edgeworth to Ireland, where his
sentiment in favor of savage life was somewhat
disturbed by .the misery of the bogland hovels ;
and he would gladly have converted Kdgeworth's
sister into Mrs, Thomas Day. Unluckily she
had a prejudice against unconventional man-
ners ; she did not perceive the advantages of her
suitor's simple and natural manner of eating
food, and she preferred hair that had been sub-
mitted to the comb. When, a year later, the de-
cision against' her suitor was announced. Day
determined that the next time he would take
securities (gainst failure: he would rear from
childhood two girls, chosen from among found-
ling orphans ; he would instruct them in all the
wisdom of Nature and Eousseau, until she who
approached the nearer to the true standard of
perfection should be honored by becoming his
wife. One, the brunette, he called Lucretia ; the
other, Sabrina Sidney, was named after the river-
goddess of the Severn and that eminent repub-
lican, Algernon Sidney. Day took his pupils to
France, as an appropriate place where they might
learn to despise dress and luxury, fine people and
fashion. But, according to the testimony of Miss
Seward, the Swan of Lichfield, they gave their

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26 THE FEEBCII REVOLUTION

patron much trouble and qaarrelled with each
other. The lioman heroiae, Lucretia, was found
to be invincibly stupid, or, what amounted to the
same, unwilling to follow Day's r^imen; she was
placed with a milliner, and in time married a
linen-draper. Sabrina Sidney grew into a pleas-
ing girl of engaging countenance, wearing her
auburn ringlets without powder or pomatum.
Yet still Day had a few things against her; when,
to give her hardihood, he fired pistols at her
petticoats, Sabrina screamed; when he dropped
melted sealing-wax on hei lai^e and white arms,
she started. Finally, she did, or she did not,
wear certain long sleeves which had been the
subject of his aversion or his liking ; and Day, re-
garding this as a fatal proof of her want of
strength of mind, quitted her forever. It is sad
to relate that, for the sake of Miss Elizabeth
Sneyd, the philosopher squandered seven or eight
hours each day in learning to dance, to fence, to
manage the great horse, together with every other
species of artificial torture, only to be informed,
when with all his accomplishments he returned
from Lyons to Lichfield, that Elizabeth preferred
" the blackguard " that he had been to " the fine
gentleman" who now appeared in her presence.
At length Day found his fate, and it was a happy

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PRECURSORS OF REVOLUTION 27

one. Miss Milnes was a person of unbounded
benevolence and of an understanding so superior
that her friends named her Minerva; the only
serious objection to his union with her was that
Miss Mi]ne3 was encumbered with a fortune.
Mrs. Day was delicate, and under her husband's
advice walking in the snow was tried as a natural
remedy ; he allowed her no servants, and forbade
the enervating harpsichord ; but he built for her a
dressing-room, and found that he had omitted to
leave any space for the admission of light or air.
Mr. Day, as Edgeworth says, at last fell a victim
to his own benevolence. He observed that horses
suffer much in the breaking, and decided for
himself to apply the pedagogic principles of Kous-
seau to equine training ; the author ot " Sandford
and Merton" was thrown on his head, and re-
ceived a fatal concussion of the brain. His wife
died two years later, and, it is said, of a broken
heart.

Dax, like his Lichfield friend Erasmus Darwin,
was a reformer in politics . Jjle was strongly on
the side of America when the Colonies revolted
from the mother country! He advocated an en-
lai^ement of the basis of Parliamentary repre-
sentation. His addresses were published by the
Constitutional Society ; but he did not seek a seat

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28 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

in the House of Commopa, preferring, as Mr.
Lealie Stephen puts it, " to take Cincinnatus aa
bis model." Before the outbreak of the French
Edvoluttou there had been in Euglish politics a
considerable popular agitation, which connected
itself with American Independence and with the
affair of Wilkes. Democratic teaching had been
, undertaken with great vigor and with no small
. effect by Paine, whose ^Common Sen se" (1776)
had a large circulation, in England as well as in
America. Starting from the doctrine that the
more simple anything is the leas likely it is to be
disordered, and the easier it ia to repair if dis*
ordered, Paine violently attacked the English
Constitution aa a complex system, compounded,
with some new republican materials, from two
ancient tyrannies, — the remains of monarchical
tyranny in the person of the king, and the re-
mains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of
the peers. " In England," according to Paine's
" Common Sense," " the king hath little more
to do than to make war and give away places ;
which in plain terms is to impoveriah the people
and set it together by the ears. A pretty busi-
ness, indeed, for a man to be allowed £800,000 a
year for, and worshipped into the bargain 1 i^t
more worth is one honest man to society, and in

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I'RECDKSOES OF EEVOLUTION 29

the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians
that ever lived^ It would lead us away from
literature were we to trace the efforts made by
Cartwright and others on behalf of Parliamentary
reform, annual Parliaments, the ballot, universal
suffrage, or to bring under review the various
democratic associations which rose and fell and
rose again. Naturally dissenters, who had suf-
fered from reUgious disabilities and who hated
the tithe-system, constituted a large proportion of
the reforming body. ■ Alike through his scientific
pursuits, his confidence in intellectual progress,
his eminent position among Unitarians, and his
connection with a centre of manufacturing indus-
try, Priestley was prepared to sympathize with
the for ward movement, in pt^ liticji. Dr. Price,
whose sermon before the Revolution Society gave
occasion to Burke's " Reflections on the French
Eevoluti<wi,'' belonged to the same religious persua-
sion. , Jebb, who worked with C artwrigh t. was in
holy orders ; hut he rescued his preferments, and
passed over to the theological position of Priest-
ley. Thomas Christie, who was employed by the
Assembly on the polyglot edition of the new
constitution, was the nephew of a Presbyterian
minister who withdrew from the communion of
his fathers, preached to the ftrst Unitarian con*

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r

30 THE FKENCH EEVOLUTION

gregation established in Scotland, and followed
Priestley to America. Williaia_J^end, of Jesus
College, whose influepce on Colerid p:e when . a
student at Cambridge was considerable, and who
took a zealous part in reform, both political and
ecclesiastical, became in 1787 a convert to
Unitarianism ; six yeare later he was hamshed
from the University. jThe same temper of mind
that led to free speculation in religion showed
itself in political speculation which sought to re-
place tradition by ideas of the reasoiiJ Unsuc-
cessful attempts were made on the eve of the
Fre nch Eev olut ioo to obtajn a repeal of t^he Jwh
and Corpor ation Act3;Ulie forces of conserva-
tion and the forces of-o;hange were knit in a
struggle for supremacjj

But when we turn to pure literature, and loot
for the writer who, undesignedly and unawares,
was the chief representative of Revolutionary
sentiment in days before the Revolution, it is
remarkable that we find that representative — at
least so far .as concerns the humanitarian feeling
and the tendency towards simplification — in one
who was a devout member of the Evangelical re-
vival in the Church of England, one of a gentle,
unaggressive, yet manly temper, the poet Ctueper.
By his family connections Cowjier was a Whig,

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J

PREC0B3OES OF EEVOLDTION 31

and at all times was ready to express the correct
Whig sentiments on the theme of British free-
f^""" In a note appended to a passaf^e of " The
Task " he defends himself for what might he
thought unnecessary warmth in the praise of
freedom ; " he is aware." he says, " that it is be-
come almost fashionable to stigmatize such sen-
timents as no better than empty declamation ;
but it is an ill symptom, and peculiar to modern
times. When the Revolution came, Cowper was
close upon his sixtieth year, — a period of life at
which new causes are not often adopted with
ardor. His mind was much pr eoccupied with
the nninadfl ;n Tfi.in3t. slflvpry. When_Paine's

" Eig hts of Ma n " was ofiered to him, he refused
to open the book ; " no man," he writes to Lady
Hesketh, " shall convince me that I am improp-
erly governed, while I feel the contrary." " The
dissenters, I think," he writes again, " Catholics
and others, have all a right to the privileges of
all other Englishmen, because to deprive them is
persecution ; and persecution on any account,
but especially on a religious one, is an abomination.
But, after all, valeat respullica. I love my coun-
try, I love my king, and I wish peace and pros-
perity to Old England." In an early poem,
" Tatilfl^alk," after suggesting that the British

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32 THE FBENCH REVOLUTION

love of freedom arises from the vigor induced by
a stem climate, Cowper had described the French
- in the same spirit as that in which they were
represented by Goldsmith in " The Traveller ; "
they are slaves, but so Dght and bright of tem-
per that they do not feel the oppression of

" The FreDchman, easy, debonair, and brisk,
Give him his lasa, his fiddle, and his frisk.
Is always happy, reign whoever may.
And laughs the sense of misery fat away."

Something of the same conception of the
French people appears in a letter of December,
1792, to Lady Hesketh, in which the writer
speaks of them as vain and childish, " conduct-
ing themselves on this great occasion with a levity
and extravf^ance nearly akin to madness." He
thinks it were better if Austria and Pru^ia had
let France aloue ; he declares himself in ravor of
the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people as
self-evident, — " whenever the people choose to
he masters they always are so, and none can
hinder them.*^ "God grant that we may have
no revolution here," he goes on ; " but unless we
have a reform we certainly shall. Depend upon it,
my dear, the hour is \ppie when power founded
on patronage and corrupt^i^orities must govern

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I

PRECURSORS OF BETOLUTION 33

this land no longer." The poet of OIney was a
more masculine spirit than is commonly supposed,
and when he advocated reform he did so with the
seriousness of .his mature age. Six years before
that event hailed by Fox as the greatest and the
best that the world had ever known, Cowper
looked forward with ardent desire to the hour
when the Bastille should be a niin: —

" Te horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,
Te dungeons, and ye cages of despair.
That monarchs have supplied from age to age
With music such as suits their sovereign ears.
The sighs and groans of miserable men I
There 's not on English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye are fallen at last ; to know
That even our enemies so oft employed
In forging chains for us, themselvea were free."

Liberty, be declares, is the cause of man ; but
he distrusted the patriotism of professed patriots
who were themselves the slaves ot private pas-
sions, and whose universal philanthropy left
* them indifferent to those humbler charities " for
whose dear sake their country, if at all, must be
beloved."

It is less by virtue ot his ardor on behalf of
political liberty, genuine as that was, tlian by his
feeling for simplification and his humanitarian
sentiment that Cowper belongs to the Kevolu-

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54 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

tioii. Mr. Leslie Stepjieii has described Cowper's
first indepeadent volume o£ poems — that of
1782 — as "Id substance a religious version of
Bousseau's denunciations of luxury." It ia, in
large measure, a restatement of the criticism of
society found in Brown's " Estimate of the Man-
ners and Principles of the Age." Cowper had
retired from the world ; he firmly believed in the
gains of retirement, though not of a hermit's soli-
tude. From his retreat at Olney he observed the
world, and would fain play the part of a monitor
to his countrymen. Were be worthy to wear the
prophetic mantle, he would prophesy as well as
. preach. It seemed to him that literature itself
\^^y4/&s infected by the effeminacy of a luxurious age.
He had himself a very admirable gift for elegant
trifling in verse ; but his conception of the func-
tion of poetry was lofty: that an eagle should
stoop from on high to pounce a wren, he held,
- was hardly worthy of an aquiline spirit He,
alas, was no eagle ; yet he might achieve some-
thing towards the reform of poetry : first, by re-
covering simplicity and truth ; secondly (but this,
he feared, was a task beyond his powers), by in-
fusing into it some of the true prophetic fervor
and insight ; thirdly, by directing it towards a
new and lofty theme, that of religion. He was

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PEECURaOEa OF REVOLUTION 35

sickened by the creamy smoothnees of modern
song ; his eat was fatigued by the " clockwork
tintinnabulum of rhyme ; " he loved the vigoroos
line that ploughs its stately course

" Like a proud Bwau, oonquering the stream by force."

He conceived the poet at his highest, as a bard
who foresees the future in its moral causes, and
is deeply moved by his own vision ; —

" A terrible utgacity informe
The poet's heart, he looks to distant atorms,
He hears the thunder ere the tempest lovers,
And, armed with strength Burpassing hnmau poirerS)
Seizes events aa yet unknown to man,
And darts his soul into the dawning plan."

It were, indeed, something new in eighteenth-
century poetry, if such a bard — "a bard all
fire" — were to sing of the holiest theme with
lips touched by a coal from heaven.

Looking abroad from his retirement, Cowper
seemed to perceive that England was ailing at
the heart. He saw avarice, luxury, venality,
perjury, alike in Church and State. He pictures
Occidius, the fiddling priest, who, when he has
prayed and preached the Sabbath down, con-
cludes the day with wire and catgut ; and Bufil-
Ills the elegant trifler, —

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36 THE FRENCH KBVOLUTIOS

" Exqubitely formed by rale.
Not of the moral but the daDcing aohool ; "

and Gorgonius, the gourmand,

" Abdominous and wan.
Like a fat squab upon an Indian fan ; "

and PetroDius, vhose original iras Lord Chester-
field,—

" Polished and finished foe to troth.
Gray-beard corrupter of our listening youth.'

Like BrowD, he laments the lack of diaciphne
at school and college, and the errors, vices, and
affectations acquired by the moneyed youth on
his grand tour of Europe. Learning in itself
ia good, and wit is good, but what if both be
corrupt ? What if the salt have lost its savor ?
Happier, as he says in a well-known passage, the
poor cottager, weaving all day for a scanty pit-
tance, and knowing no more than that her Bible
is true, than the Parisian demigod Voltaire, the
possessor of spirit, genius, and eloquence.

Cowper, in his recoil from the luxury and arti-
ficiality of e%hteenth-century society, did not go
to the extremes in which Kousseau sometimes
indulged his morbid sensibility ; he held that
civilized life is friendly to virtue, but not such
perverted civilization as is seen in modem cities,

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PEECCEBOBS OF BEVOLUTION 37

■^"God made the- country, and man made the

town " : —

"Rank abundance breeda
In gross and pampered cities, sloth and lust,
And wantoanesB and gluttonous escess."

The varieties of evil are countless, — pecula-
tion, fraud, conuption, perjury, sale of honor,
tricks, and lies ; but of all these the source is
one, — "profusion unrestrained," a hungry vice,
which eats up all that gives society its beauty,
strength, and use. Even the simphcity of rural
Ufe has been invaded ; the country is no longer
the Arcadia of Vii^il or of Sidney, — "no, we are
polished now;" fashion has travelled from the
city streets to the village; the rustic beauty
adonis her head with ribbons, and totters on high
French heels ( the ploughman follows the red-
costs, and returns to his native cottage instructed
how to swear, to game, to drinkl Cowper feared
that the whole course of human things was tend-
ing from good to ill and from ill to worse. Hu-
man nature left to itself appeared to Rousseau
essentially beautiful and pure ; Cowper held a
different creed, and he was no sharer in the
optimism of the Revolution. The Second Book
of " The Task " was named " The Time-Piece,"
because it was intended, as the author informed

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38 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Newton, to strike the hour that gives notice of
approaching judgment.

Thus, although he was far from heing a spirit
of Revolution, Cowper mourns in fievolutionaiy
fashion over the growth of luxury and the evils
of a spurious civilization; thus he pleads for a
return to simplicity of manners. He expresses
no less clearly the humanitarian sentiment of the
time. One of the pieces in his first volume is
named " Charity ; " the whole race of mankind,
he maintains, constitutes a great fraternity; he
contrasts the brotherly kindness of Captain Cook
to his freeborn brethren of distant isles with the
inhumanity of Cortez; he does honor to com-
merce, the providential purpose of which is to
bind together land to land and race to race, but
he reprobates with deep indignation the commerce
in human flesh and blood, those cargoes of despair,
against which Olarkson and Wilberforce pleaded ;
he celebrates the generous devotion of Howard
in quitting rural peace for scenes of woe,
and traversing Europe not to bring home the
treasures of art but the knowledge that dun-
geons teach.: In an age of humanity and sen-
sibility the tender emotion naturally passed
beyond the bounds of our own species, and
spread over the whole animal creation. We re-

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PBECUESOHS OF EEVOLUTION 39

member bow Cowper found a solace for bis haunt-
ing grief in affection for bis tame hares, Fuss,
Tiny, and Bess. In " The Task " be tells of his
delight in the happiness of the bounding fawn,
the hoiBe'B voluntary race, the uncouth gambol-
ling of cattle. Prophet though Balaam was, he
might not -without rebuke strike the blameless
ass on which be rode. The poet would not
include in his list of friends, —

" Though graced with polished manners and fine eensB,
Yet wanting sensibility, the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step may crash the snail
That crawls at evening in the public path ;
Bnt he that has humanity, forewarned,
Will tread aside, and let the reptile live."

The sentiment to which he gives utterance ia
that which inspired Burns in bis poem, " To a
Mouse on turning up her Nest with the Plough,"
and gave its moral —

" He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small " — '

to Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." It is the
eighteenth-century sensibility united with the
Revolutionary sentiment of fraternity spreading
ftself abroad over the whole animal world.
But though Cowper gives expression to the

iv,Goog[c

40 THE FKENCH BEVOLDTION

Eevolutionary feeling ia favor of simplification
and to the passion of human brotherhood, no one
can imagine the poet of Olney, masculine as hiB
Bpirit was, Ringing himself with fuiy against the
thrones of kings or the palaces of prelates. In
political matters he desired not revolution but
temperate reform. And with Cowper the cir-
cumference which rounded all subjects of thought
and feeling, and towards which his mind con-
stantly expanded, was the idea of God. If he
reverenced truth, it was not in the spirit of those
proud forerunners of the Revolution who did
homage to human reason ; he bowed the head
and bowed the knee before what he deemed to
be divine truth. If he spoke of equality, it was
of the equality of all souls before the Supreme.
The fraternity which he regarded as most perfect
is the fraternity of those who are brethren in
Christ. He invokes charity as the first and fair-
est of virtues, but he maintains that genuine
charity Is the offspring of divine instruction ; we
become sensible of our own poverty, our frailty,
our deep disease, and so we learn pity for our
fellows. He chooses Hope for his theme; but
he has no vision of a terrestrial paradise to be
realized by scientific progress or the overthrow -
of earthly tyrannies. It is from the very vanity

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PKEODBSOBS OF BEVOLUTIOK 41

of this world that our highest hope is born ; the
whole creation groans and travails. But hope
that is seen is not hope ; and the fulfilment shall
be only when the Lord of earth shall descend,
" propitious in his chariot paved with love."
Cowper pleads for simplicity, for a return to
nature ; but he adds that Nature of herself can-
not restore to man the glories he has lost; to
effect this, grace must come to the aid of Nature.

Thus the gospel of Bousseau is translated by
Cowper into the gospel according to St. Paul.
The combination is a curious and interesting one
for literary study, of the sentiment of the Ecvo-
lutioQ with the faith and fervor of the Evan-
gelical revival.

Were the village folk of England really threat-
ened, as Cowper alleges, by the invasion of
luxury ? A diiferent report was made by one
of his younger contemporaries who had himself
known the life of the poor, and who had resolved
to state nothing in verse that could not be veri-
fied to the letter. With the development of
manufactures by machinery the domestic in-
dustries were perishing ; small farms were con-
solidated into larger properties which necessarily
passed into the hands of the wealthy ; the small
farmer became a day-laboier; common landa

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42 THE FBBNCB KETOLUTION

were enclosed ; prices rose out ol proportion to
the increase of wages. Tlie tranaitioii of indus-
try from the field and the cottage to the factory,
beneficial and inevitable as that transition was,
could not but be accompanied by much suffering
for the rural population, much demoralizatioii for
the artisan. Within a year after the appearance
of Cowper's first volume was published a poem
which depicted with uncompromising realism the
life of the poor on the southeastern coast of
England, — "The Village," written by Crabbe,
read in manuscript by Burke, revised and
emended by JohnBon. The romance of happy
swains and nymphs seemed to Crabbe to insult
the wretchedness of the peasant; he would de-
clare the fact and nothing but the fact. He
describes the niggard sandy soil ; the scanty
harvest beset with weeds ; the wild amphibious
race, half peasants, half fishers, who gain more
by smuggling than by lawful dealings, bold, art-
ful, surly, savage. If they toil half-fed in the
fields, fevers and agues are their only certain
reward ; a manhood of hopeless labor is fol-
lowed by an old age of neglected misery. The
parish work-house is the refuge of despair,
where the happiest inhabitants are "the mop-
ing idiot and the madman gay." At last the

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PBEC0E80RS OF KETOLUTION 43

bitter day closes ; the pauper's bier is borne to
the pauper's grave; the mourners follow, "se-
dately torpid and devoutly dumb ; " the bell
tolls somewhat tardily ; the priest has weightier
cares to engage him — a fox-hunt or a whist-
party — than the dull business of assisting at a
mendicant's funeral

" And waiting long, the crowd retire distrest
To think a poor man's bones should lie unblest."

Has Crabbe any consolation to offer, any
power to point to a bow of promise in the
clouds, or even any indignant cry for justice ?
He has none ; the weight of misery oppresses
him; if the poor suffer, they have the vices
of the poor, and some of their misery is de-
served; only he would have the great ones of
the earth know that they are allied to their hum-
bler fellows, if by nothing else at least by vice ;
and the poor should learn that those whom they
envy are allied to them by hidden miseries hardly
less than theirs, though of another kind. The
age of patrons was not yet past ; and " The Vil-
lage" arrives at a most inappropriate and impo-
tent conclusion, with an eulogy of the virtue and
gallantry of a young sailor of the house of Kut-
land who had died in action with the French.

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44 THE FRENCH BEVOLUTION

Crabbe aets forth with unfaltering fidelity the
3tate of things which caused others to look upon
the popular outbreak in France as the signal for
a general revolt of the proletariat. But he does
not dream of revolt ; he will not be cheated by
iUusions ; he thinks only of hopeless endurance.

:,q,-z.-dbvGoOg[c

THEOEISTS OF EEVOLITTION: GODWIN,
MAEY WOLISTONEOBAFT

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:,q,-z.-dbvGcX")g[c I

THEORISTS OF REVOLUTION

The doctrine ot the Revolution was presented
to English readers, not in immediate relation to
politics, but in the way of jihilosophical specula-
tion, more impressively than elsewhere in GqJ -
; win' s " Enquiry concerning Political Justice " I
'(1793). Occupying a position at some distance |
from the actual events of the French Revolution,
Godwin could the more easily speculate on the
theory ot society. To do this was more easy for
him than for a practical politician ; but perhaps
it was more daugerous, for the pressure of facta
exercises a wholesome influence on speculation.
Two great revolutions had taken place, — the up-
4 rising of the American colonies and the uprising
liBgainst the French monarchy and the old r^me.
A thinker would naturally be led to consider the
meaning of these vast phenomena. By the char-
acter of Godwin's mind, he was in a high degree
qualified for the construction of a theory, and for
the uncompromising application of ideas to life.

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48 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

He was not a man of simple and warm fi

— feelings which may serve to enrich a doctrine
of life or to hoM it in check ; he was somewhat of
a pedant among facts, chastising them into line
and order to suit his rectilinear arrangement ; a
pedantic morality that reduces duty to a kind of
geometry had more attraction for him than a mo-
rality that winds itself into the truths of human
nature. He had a certain haughtiness of intel-
lect ; he preferred the method of deduction from
a general principle in morals and politics to the
more modest method of induction. His imagina-
tion was not wide-orbing and comprehensive,
but it had considerable analytic power when ap-
plied to this point or to that He had a re-
markable gift for imposing upon himself; he
reverenced his own understanding, and pro-
foundly believed that his character was that of
a benevolent sage. Such men as Godwin, nar-
rowed in by a doctrinaire intellect, a contracted
imagination, and the egoism of unwavering self-
esteem, are dangerous. Tbey have in them the
material for the making of fanatics. It might be
supposed that Godwin's coldness of temperament

— a coldness which disappeared when his vanity
was touched — would have saved him from fa-
naticism ; but as there is a fiery fanaticism of the

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THEORISTS OP BEVOLUTIOH 49

passions, so there is a . cold fanatietam- of the idea.
At another time his cumbrous speculations might -
have remained lifeless or ioert; the genius of
Eevolution gave them a vitality and energy which
were not properly their own. From the heart of
his icy doctrine there gleamed an mdeseeace of
extravagant hopes.

TT JR infliiencfl "JtT^ jmimg anf) ardept spir its
was great . He seemed to provide a comprehen-
sive theory of conduct, — a^ doctrine embra cing
both private and public duties. This doctrine
: was one which gave unbounded freedom to the
individual reason; the law was a proclamation of ,
liberty ; moral anarchy was exhibited as the high- \
est moral order. For a time Godwin's teaching I
was accepted with characteristic ardor by Southey, !
Coleridge submitted to the force of his reasonings, I
but before long became a revolter. " Throw aside
your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a
student in the Temple, " and read Godwin on Ne-
cessity." A remarkable though a neglected poem —
f of Wordsworth, his early tragedy " The Borderers,"
' marks the precise moment at which he recoiled
in alarm from the lessons of Godwin. In that
drama a generous youth is seduced into crime
through the sophistical reasoning of an elder man,
who by a specions abuse of the intellect dis-

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60 THE FRENCH BEVOLDTION

integrates all natural feelings, all habitual moral
checks, and would replace these by the unaided
guidance of the private reason. It has been
pointed out by M. Legouis, in his admirable study
" La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth," that cer-
tain of the " Lyrical Ballads " in their vindication
of the natural affections and the deep reverence
with which they regard the permanent passions
of humanity, furnish a reply and a rebuke to those
doctrines of Godwin which had once dominated
Wordsworth's mind. But if we would see the
principles of the " Political Justice " translated
into poetry and realized in action, we have only
to study the writings and the life of his pupil
and son-in-law, Shelley. Shelley, unlike Words-
worth and unlike Coleridge, was deficient in the
power of original thought. Here, indeed, lies the
capital infirmity of Shelley's genius. He accepted
en bloc a system which, though doubtless it had
af&nities with his mind, was not the native growth
of his intellect, — a system which was imposed
upon him by a master. In M. Paul Eourget's novel
" Le Disciple " the young hero of the story be-
comes the intellectual pupil of a scientific sage,
a man of aspiring ideas and almost ascetic lite, a
saintly compounder of poisonous theory ; and by
acting out the doctrine formulated by his master,

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THEORISTS OF HEVOLUTIOS 51

but never by him tested in the stress ot life nor
carried fully into action, the disciple wrecks his
whole existence, and inflicts irreparable injury on
others. How far was the master responsible —
such is M. Paul Bourget's problem — for the dis-
ciple's errors and crimes ? The case of Shelley
was not ao unfortunate ; his action upon the world
has been, in the larger reckoning, beneficent ; but
it is demonstrable that many of the errors of his
life and almost alt the fallacies which lie behind
the color and music of hig art were iJirectly due
to his uncompromising discipleship to Godwin,
together with that zeal which possessed Shelley
for carrying immediately into practice those ideas
which he accepted as true.

To form a just estimate of the concussion, as
Godwin calls it, which the minds of men under-
went through the impact of the Eevolution, it is
well to make acquaintance with " Political Jus-
tice " in the first edition. For later texts the first
four books and the last book were in great part
rewritten ;_ variations are scattered everywhere
throughout the books ; and some of the most
striking doctrinaire extravagances disappear.
The design of Godwin's treatise was formed in
May, 1791, when he was in his thirty-sixth year;
and for sixteen months be devoted himself to his

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52 THE FRENCH EEVOLDTION

task with the utmost ardor. Twelve years pre-
viously, as he informs his readers in the Preface,
he had become satisfied that monarch y is a apecies -
of goyernmenlL essentially corr ug t, — a conviction
which he derived not directly from observatijiji,
but from books, in particular from the political
writings of Swift and from the Latin historians.
At the same time he was much influenced by the
works of the French philosophers of the eigh-
teenth century, — by CHolbach's " Systdme de la
Nature," the writings of Bousseau, and those of
Helv^tius. The events of the French Kevolution
/ ctmvinced him of the evils of a complicated sys-
tem of government; and by d^rees he arrived
at the conclusion that government by its very
nature counteracts the improvement of the indi-
vidual mind. His early faith in Providence mnd
in God had faded away ; but it was from one
whose theological orthodoxy was pre-eminent,
from Jonathan Edwards, that he adopted cer-
tfun of his arguments in favor of the philosophical
doctrine of necessity. Atheist, materialist, and
necessarian as at this time he was, no man ^er
asserted more strongly the omnipotence of mind ;
and it would be unjust to Godwin not to recog-
nize the fact that, while sapping at the bases of
morality, he did so in the cause of what he con-

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THEORISTS Of REVOLUTION 53

ceived to be a higher a,iid stricter system of
morals. Hia power of persuasion ^ith young
men of generous temper and speculative intel-
lect is in itself an attestation of the magnani-
mous aspect which at the first view his system
presented.

By the words Political Justice Godwin means
the application of justice to society and to all its
arrangements. But what ia justice ? It means
the impartial treatment of every man in matters
that relate to his happiness, and thus it may be
said to comprise all moral duty. With Godwin
politics is no mere affair of party expediency, but
lather a department of the science of morals.
In "BASselas" Johnson makes his astronomer
' speak of the task of a king who has only the care
of fi few millions to whom he cannot do much
good or harm. In a like spirit be conceived the
lines which he contributed to the close of " The
Traveller," —

" In every government, though terrore reign,
Though tyrant iiagB, or tyrant laws, teatrfun,
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure I "

" Sir," said Johnson to Adam Fergusson, " I
would not give half a guinea to live under one
form of government rather than another. It is

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54 THE FRENCH EEVOLUTION

of no moment to the happiness of an individual
Sir, the abuse of power is nothing to a private
man. What Frenchman is prevented from pasa-

(ing his life as he pleases ?" Against this opinion,
that the happiness of individaals is little affected
; by governments, Godwin justly and energetically
protests. Millions of men in former i^ea were
led to war under the standards of great con-
querors, and they ravaged innumerable provinces.
In domestic administration the established and
approved methods of persuading the subject to
obedience have been wliips, axes, gibbets, dun-
geons, chains, racks: do not these son^ewhat dis-
turb the happiness of the individual ? The moral
characters of men are formed, according to God-
win, by the play of circumstance upon mind, and
of all modes of acting upon mind he held that gov-
ernment is the most considerable. Fortunately
f^iiiman nature is capable of indefinite growth;
man is not a perfect being, but he is perfectible;
and among the causes that contribute to his
moral improvement the most important are edu-
cation, literature, and political justice. Vice and
ain, as we understand these terms, have no real
existence ; vjce^ according to Godwin, is only an
intellectual error, an erroneous perception, con-
verted into action ; and on the other hand the

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THEORISTS OF REVOLUTION 55

most essential part of virtue coaaigts in endeavor-
ing to inform ourselves more accurately upon the
subject of utility and right. Unhappily wide-
spread errors have been embodied and made per-
manent in the prevailing institutions of society;
and the tendency of every government is to
prompt us to seek the public welfare, not, aa
should be the case, by means of innovation and
improvement, but in a timid reverence for the
decisions of our ancestors. What has been the
result ? What is the state of things as regards
human happiness that we see around us ? In the
most refined countries of Europ^vast numbers of
the inhabitants are deprived of almost every
accommodation that can render life secure or even
tolerable. The misery of the many is a^ravated
by the ostentatious luxury, the magnificence, the
usurpation, the insolence of the fortunate few.
Nor is this a passing phase of society ; the un-
endurable evils are perpetuated by legislation,
which in almost every country grossly favors the
rich as against the poor, and by the iniquitous
administration of iniquitous laws. Entire classes
of men are banded together to operate as organ-
ized bodies against social progress ; priests, who
are accustomed on all occasions to have their
opinions listened to with deference, are iuevita-

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56 THE PKENCH 8EV0I.UTI0S

bly imperious, dogmatic, and impatient of oppo-
sition, and yet there exists a priestly caste ;
" their importance is connected with their real or
supposed mental superiority over the rest of man-
kind ; they must therefore he patrons of prejudice
and implicit faith ; their prosperity depends upon
the reception of particular opinions in the world;
they VI list therefore be enemies to freedom of
inquiry."

And now, seeing such a world lying around us
in error, what is justice? What is that moral
principle which should be embodied in the insti-
tutions of society, and in every act of every one
of its members ! The principle of justice is this,
' — that each individual should do to others all
the good that is in his power, and that society
should do everything for its members that can
contribute to their welfare. ' All personal and
private feelings must be repressed and finally
destroyed ; family ties, special preferences, friend-
ship, gratitude to benefactors are prejudices un-
worthy of an enbghtened lover of his species.
In distributing benefits among others I am bound
to consider solely how they may he most con-
ducive to the general good. Suppose the choice
lay before me of rescuing from fire the author of
the immortal " Telemachus," or my mother, my

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THEOBiaiS OF EETOLUnON 57

wife, or my child; who can question that the
author of " Telemachus " is more likely to render
important service to mankind ? What magic is
there in the pronoun my / My mother may be a
fool ; she may be malicious, mendacious, or dis-
honest. As for the superstition of gratitude,
why should I suppose that I owe my benefactor
a debt } He can have done no more than it was
his duty to do. My own property and my own
life I must equally hold in trust for others. The
sole question that should determine conduct is
this : How can I produce the greatest quantity
of general good ?

In place of the present system of inequality,
with its distinctions of rank and class and wealth,
political justice admits only natural inequalities :
first, a certain physical superiority or inferiority,
which, however, has been much exaggerated ; and,
secondly, the inequality of men's merits and
virtuss, A career should he left open to all
talents ; " we should endeavor to afford to all
the same opportunities and the same encourage-
ments, and to render justice the common interest
and choice." Eights of man were pleaded for ;
43odwin, a stem moralist, acknowledges no such
rights ; man has only duties, or rather a single
duty in all its varieties of application, that of

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58 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

benefiting his fellows to the utmost. This is our
eole duty, and to ascertain the particulars of tliat
duty there is but one meaus, — the exercise of
the understanding. Hence, if we would make
other men virtuous, we can do so in no other way
than by enlightening and convincing their Intel-
lect. Hacks, whips, and chains may disappear
forever. To punish a murderer is both unjust
and absurd; and for two reasons, — in the first
place, he acted as he must of necessity have
acted, he had no more freedom than the knife
which he employed; and in the second place,
the gallows is an appeal to selfish fears and not
to the murderer's intelligence. Ai^ue with him.
convince him of his erroneous estimate of hap-
piness, and you have done all that you ought,
you have done all that you can.

The cultivation of truth, accordingly; is one
of the chief human duties. But in order that
we should ascertain truth, we must be con-
stantly prepared to correct past errors, wo must
perpetually revise our opinions in the light of
our n'ew attainments. Hence the individual man
must guard against the sense of obligation to his-
former self, and in like manner a nation ought
at every moment to be prepared to break with
its past. Each act of our individual lives, each

iv,Goog[c

THEORISTS OF REVOLUTION 59

i act of national life, oi^ht to arise from an imme-
j diate perception of the truth, so far as at the
moment truth can be ascertained ; nor should
any act of our former selves nor any national
, act of our forefathers shackle or hamper our
: freedom of the present hour. It necessarily
; follows that promises and vows are in their very
nature immoraL They are needless, for every
instant prescribes its own duty, to which a
promise can add no authority. They are mis-
chievous, inasmuch as they substitute a fictitious
obligation derived from the past for the living
and immediate voice of reason. For a like reason
the obedience of one man to another or to a gov-
ernment partakes of the nature of immorality.
It deprives our reason of its sovereign preroga-
tive. To justice and to truth we are bound to
submit, because they approve themselves to our
understanding ; hut in no case can we be bound
to submit to authority or to force. It were best
if society were permitted to develop itself with-
out government of any kind, as a body of inde-
. pendent units, each subject to justice and to
I reason, each, therefore, devoted to the good of all
the rest. But if a government be established,
let it, at least, be the simplest possible of gov-
ernments in its necessary arrangements ; and

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60 THB FRKNCH BETOLUTION

that its action may be free and intelligent, let
every member of the community have a share
in its formation. Thus only can each man be
inspired by a consciousness of his own impor-
tance, and " the slavish feelings that shrink up
the soul in the presence of an imagined superior "
cease to exist At any moment it may become
a duty to resist the government and effect a
revolution. But Godwin maintained that physi-
cal violence is unworthy of a rational being;
revolutions are to be conducted by means of
argument and persuasion. The best security
for an advantageous issue to a revolutionary
movement lies in free and complete discussion
of individual with individual. Anything of the
nature of political associations is to be feared as
tending to tumult and unreason.

So Godwin, with a kind of implacable idealism,
erected his fabric of/ political justice. This he
did, not as one who would construct an imaginary
commonwealth, or picture an Utopia. He was
possessed by an ardent faith in bis own ideas as
about to be realized, by an unquenchable hope
in the future of mankind. The keystone of his
entire structure he held to be a genuine system

61 property. To whom, he asks, does any article
of property, suppose a loaf of bread, justly be-

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THEOBISTS OF KEVOLUTION 61

long ? Assuredly to him who wants it most, or
to whom the possession of it will be most bene-
ficiaL Every man is entitled, so far as the
general stock will suffice, not only to the means
of being but of well-being. Every man should
make his contribution to the common stock, and
every man should possess his share. Eeligious
teachers have indeed urged upon their disciples
the practice of charity ; but they have represented
charity as an affair of spontaneous generosity, a
species of bounty ; whereas the distribution of
every shilling that we possess is in truth a mere
act of justice. " Religion," adds Godwin, " is in
reality in all its parts an accommodation to the
prejudices and weaknesses of mankind." He
calculates that half an hour out of each day
employed in manual labor by every member of
the community would sufficiently supply the
whole with necessaries. Let it not be supposed,
however, that Godwin was of the school of
modern socialism. On the contrary, he is an
uncompromising individualist. Everything of the
nature of co-operation was repellent to his mind.
He even anticipated the time when a musical
concert in which several performers take part
will be felt to be an intolerable anomaly ; and -
when, for truly rational auditors, a solitary musi-

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62 THE FEEHCH EEVOLUTION

cian will perform the whole, rendering his own
compositions, since no other than his own can be
native to his reason and his imagbation ; a time
when theatrical exhibitions must cease, because
no human being in the age ot enlightenment will
come forward to repeat ideas and words that are
□ot his own. la that happier epoch, moreover,
man and woman will co-operate as husband and
wife only for so long as each may deem it bene-
ficial. The institution of marriage is "a system
of fraud; "it is "law and the worst of laws;"
it is a violation of individual liberty, — the en-
grossing of one human being by another. The
family, as we know it, will jnerge itself in the
universal family of mankind. Each human unit
being independent, yet bound to every other
human unit by justice, Godwin expected that
at no distant date surnames would pass out of
use ; man will at last be man, no less and no
more, — •

" ScaptreleSB, free, uncircnmacribed, but man
Equal, unclasaed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, TCorship, degree, the king
Orer himself; joat, gentle, wise."

As mind advances in its mastery over matter,
it may well be that the secret of terrestrial im-
mortality shall be discovered. The immortals of

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THEOEISTS OP EEVOLDTION 63

earth, with their improved understandinga, will
perceive the evil consequencea of multiplying the
population. In that golden age of reaaon all men
will be adults ; the existence of children will be
known only by the records of ancient history.
There will then be no crimes, no bolts or bars,
no enforced obedience, no gratitude, no sentiment
of the family, no love of country, no administra-
tion of juatice (as it ia called), and no government.
" Theae latter articlea," writes Godwin, " are at
no great distance ; and it is not impoasible that .
some of the present race of men may live to see
them in part accomplished. But beside this,
there will be no disease, no anguish, no melan-
choly, and no resentment Every man will seek
with vine ffable ardor the good of alL" Is it to
Godwin or to Shelley that we are Kstening ? It ia
indeed to both, for the disciple in his more doc-
trinaire poems only translated into terms of emo-
tion and imagination the intellectual oracles of
the master.

" He is a dreamer ; let us leave him ; paaa."
And pass we might, save for two reasons: Firat,
Godwin, and Shelley with him, if dreamers,
dreamed a portion of the truth ; fragmenta of
the dream were prophetic of actual tendencies
in modem soctety. That is one reason why it

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64 TBS FRENCH BETOLUnOM

is worth attending to the voice that epeaks in
" Political Justice." And the second reason is
that the book, with all its fantastic illusions, is
in a high degree representative of the time. Its
utilitarian ethics are the ethics of the second half
(Of tb6 eighteenth century ; the reining personage
I of the treatise ia the revolutionary abstraction, —
I Man ; man, denuded of all distinctions, viewed
apart from all conditions and circumstances. The
three sacred words of the Revolution — liberty,
equality, fraternity — are adopted and written
large by G-odwin : liberty the most absolute ;
equality as complete as can be attained, for cer-
tain natural inequalities the theorist is unable to
deny ; fraternity, realized in principles of univer-
sal benevolence. The whole body of Godwin's
' thought ia inspired by that boundless- faith in
human nature which sustained and animated the
nobler spirits of 1789; human perfectibility is a
cardinal article in his creed ; bis hopes for the
future are as assured as they are extravagant
The worship of Reason is celebrated in the sys-
tem of the philosopher with the pious orgies of a
frigid enthusiasm. "Mankind," says Mr. Leslie
Stephen, " is, or ought to be, in Godwin's view a
vast collection of incarnate syllogisms." God-
win's conception is of something yet more for-

bvGoog[c

THEORISTS OF EEVOLUTION 65

midable; every incarnate syllogism is, or ought
to be, possessed by the zeal of an aggressive be-
nevolence. Happily each is isolated ; each human
intelligence is a single, separate entity. No
writer expresses more clearly than Godwin the
individualism of the opening of the Revolutionary
movement of Europe. Nor does any writer ex-
fhibit more strikingly its entire lack of historical
' thought and feeling. Man is not conceived as
growing out of the past ; the heritage from for-
mer generations is a herit^e of superstition,
tyranny, unreason; it exists only to be relin-
quished or destroyed. The Year One has arrived ;
and the whole world is to be reconstructed, with-
out reference to inheritance or accumulated ten-
dencies, on the principles of the Reason. There is
something sublime, something pathetic, something
ludicrous in the heroic folly with which the phi-
losopher in his study calmly remodels the entire
world of humanity. But the fallacies as well as
the truths of " Political Justice " belopg less to
the individual writer than to the extraordinary
epoch in the world's history in which he lived
and moved.

The " Enquiry concerning Political Justice "
was published in February, 1793. " In this year
also," says Godwin, " I wrote the principal part

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66 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

of the novel of 'Caleb Williams,' which liifiy
perhaps be considered as affording no inadequate
imt^e of the fervor of my spirit ; it was the off-
spring of that temper of mind in which the cpm-
position of my 'Political Justice' left me."' In
"Caleb Williams" we have before us a revolu-
tionary work of art, the imaginative work of a
theorist, a tale which enforces s. doctrine. It
gains and loses by the concentration of spirit
with which Godwin in it studies and works out
a moral problem. To read it is te.enter and ex-
plore a cavern ; it is narrow ; it is dark ; we lose
the light and air, and the clear spaces of the fir-
mament; but the explorer's passion seizes upon
us, and we grope along the narrowing walls with
an intensity of curious desire. As the work of
a political thinker, the book is an indictment
of society, "'Things as they are" — this, and
not the name of the hero — is the first title of
Godwin's novel ; and things as they are present
themselves to the reader as, in the main, things
as they ought not to be. The gentry of England
are exhibited under two types. Mr. Falkland, a
gentleman sensitive, refined, benevolent, possessed
by all the sentiments of a romantic chivalry, is
brought into antagonism with a brutal and over-
bearing country squire. He opposes himself with

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THEOBISTS OF REVOLUTION 67

firm yet gentle magnanimity to Tyrrel's acta of
tyrannic injustice ; at length, in the whirl of
passion following an outrageous insult, Falkland
stabs to death his antagonist. The thought of
making hia own exit from the world on the gal-
lows with a dishonored name is intolerable to hia
sense of aristocratic dignity. He permits two in-
nocent rustics, a father and a son, who are sus-
pected of the murder, to bear the penalty of hia
crime ; and forever after he is haunted by re-
morse, afflicted by sudden spasma of anguish and
of shame, while to counterbalance his evil deed
he devotes his life to the service of his fellows.
Mr. Falkland's young secretary, Caleb Williams,
drawn on by the very enthusiasm of curiosity,
dominated by a passion to probe the mysteries
of the human spirit, penetrates to the dreadful
secret of his master's guilt, and thenceforth be-
comes the victim of a persecution which is unfal-
tering so far as it is essential to the preservation
of Falkland's fair fame, and yet is unstained by
the baseness of personal malignity. Falkland
dies in the agony and blessed relief of a public
confession of his crime,

Godwin's ambition aa a thinker and a man of
letters was arduous and lofty. The most char-
acteristic features of his mind in childhood, be

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68 THE FEKNCH REVOLUTION

tells lis, were religion and a love of distinction.
His religious zeal transformed itself into political
enthusiasm ; his love of distinction remained, and
took the form of literary ambition. During ten
years he had toiled without success. " Everything
I wrote," he says in the preface to "Fleetwood,"
" fell still-born from the press." At length,
with the publication of " Political Justice," fame
arrived, and with it came an enhanced sense of
power. He had always believed that he possessed
the gifts of an inventor of fictitious narrative,
and in setting to his task he repeated to himself,
again and again, the words : " I will write a tale
that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the
reader, and no one, after he has read it, shall ever
be exactly the same man that he was before."
" Caleb Williams " is indeed a product of the will,
— a work of strenuous resolve rather than the
offspring of genial creation. The writer first
constructed a problem, and then set himself to
unravel its difficulties. He began by thinking
out the close of liis story, and then worked back-
ward from the catastrophe to its causes ; having
formed the plan of his third volume, he pro-
ceeded as it were along necessary lines of causa-
tion to the second volume, and from that again
to the first. There is a strong concatenation of

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THEOEISTS OF REVOLUTION 69

plot interest, and the characters are constructed
to support and expound the plot ; but in a work
so calculated we miss the joy which comes with
a sense of free imaginative growth. Godwin
wrote in the first person, after having tried the
more usual way of narrative, because it suited
better his purpose of analysis, and guided what
he terms his " metaphysical dissecting-knife " in
tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive.
He planted himself at his desk only when his
theme possessed him, laying aside his manuscript
for days or weeks when he was not fully in the
vein. " Idleness was only time lost . . . ; it was
merely a day perished from the calendar. But a
passage written feebly, flatly, or in the wrong
spirit constituted an obstacle that it was next to
impossible to correct and set right again," Thus
for twelve months he lived during his best hours
in his realm of invention, and then his task was
achieved.

To understand aright the motives of Godwin's
novel, it is necessary to collate the book with his
other writings. A preface to the first edition,
dated May 12, 1794, was withdrawn in compli-
ance with the bookseller's alarms ; it appeared,
when the second edition was published, towards
the close of the following year. The acquittal

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70 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

of Hardy and Home Tooke, on the charge ot

high treason, in the autumn of 1794, was taken
to indicate the collapse of what Godwin styles
" a sanguinary plot against the liberties of Eng-
liahmen." In his preface to "Caleb Williams," the
author explains his design of showing how " the
spirit and character of the government intrudes
itself into every rank of society," Kepresenling
" thinga as they are," he is compelled to exhibit
the various taodes of " domestic and unrecorded
despotism by which man becomes the destroyer
of man." The fatal error of Godwin's hero, Falk-
land, — an error maintained through life, and
only abandoned at the moment of death, — pro-
ceeds from his acceptance of a false standard
of morals; his is the aristocratic, the chivalric,
the traditional standard ; he wrongs his nature
as a man, his humanity, in order to preserve
unstained his reputation as a gentleman and a
man of honor. In Tyrrel is presented the dul-
ness, the grossness, the overbearing self-will, the
boisterous arrogance of one who possesses power
and position, not through desert, but merely by
inheritance. He is an oppressive landlord, who
does not scruple to ruin the industrious tenant ;
a domineering head of a house, who would force
hia brute will upon his dependanta. Falkland is

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THEORISTS OP REVOLUTION 71

made of finer metal ; he is shocked by his rival's
coarseness of feeling and perception ; he actively
opposes the tyranny of this rude lord of many
acres. But Falkland is himself tainted by a sub-
tler pride of rank and class, and when he suffers
physical violence at the hands of his brawny an-
tagonist all his blood turns to flame. Instead of
rccojyiiziug, in a philosophic spirit, that no real
dishonor could lie in the fact that his muscles
are less powerful than those of a giant, he loses
all senseof the truth of things, and sweeps on
the instant to his revenge. That he may still
live in the eyea and the memories of his fellows
as a loyal gentleman, his whole existence be-
comes a lie. He is at once the culprit and the
martyr of the chivalric ideal.

With the resources of wealth and influence at
his command, it is easy for Falkland, under the
forms of English law, to make his secretary the
victim of legalized injustice. On a false accusa-
tion, Caleb Williams is thrown into prison, and
long lies awaiting his trial, punished by a
weary captivity before he lias been convicted.
" Thank God, exclaims the Englishman, we have
no Bastille ! Thank God, with us no man can be
punished without a crime ! Unthinking wretch !
Is that a country of liberty where thousands lan-

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72 THE FHEHCH REVOLUTION

guish in dungeons and fetters ? Go, go, ignorant
fool ! and viait the scenes of our prisons ! Witness
their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny
of their governors, the misery of their inmates 1
After that show me the man shameless enough
to triumph, and say, England has no Bastille!
Is there any charge so frivolous upon which men
are not consigned to these detested ahodes ? Is
there any villany that is not practised by justices
and prosecutors ? But against all this, perhaps
you have been told, there is a redress. Yes, a
redress that it is the consummation of insult
so much as to name 1 Where shall the poor
wretch reduced to the last despair, and to whom
acquittal perhaps comes just in time enough to
save him from perishing, — where shall this man
find leisure, and, much less, money, to fee counsel
and officers, and purchase the tedious dear-bought
remedy of the law ! No, he is too happy to
leave his dungeon, and the memory of hia dun-
geon, behind him ; and the same tyranny and
wanton oppression become the inheritance of hia
successor." Naturally, if law was tyranny, the
offenders, or alleged offenders, against the law
were amiable and admirable victims of its evil
sway. Godwin, confident in his own originality
as a writer, did not fear to make studies for

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I

THEORISTS OF REVOLUTION 73

" Caleb Williams " from the writings of former
authors, — from "The Adventures of Mademoi-
selle de Saint Phale," a French Protestant of
the times of the Huguenot persecutions, from
that tremendous compilation "God's Eevenge
against Murther," from the "Lives of the Pi-
rates." In the "Newgate Calendar" he found
an incident which he adapted to the purpose of
his novel The ministers of the law are venal
tyrants; but among his fellow-prisoners Caleb
finds a young soldier of a most engaging counte-
nance and a character distinguished by integrity
and refinement, who has been committed on a
false accusation of highway robbery, " His hab-
its of thinking were peculiar, full of justice, sim-
plicity, and wisdom." His favorite solace was
derived from the works of Horace and Virgil.
He spoke without bitterness of the injustice
under which he suffered, and predicted that the
time would come — but such happiness was re-
served for posterity — when the possibility of
such intolerable oppression would be extirpated.
Brightwel, the young soldier, dies in prison, and
Caleb Williams receives his parting breath.

Escaped from confinement, Caleb secures for a
time an asylum in the lurking-place of a band of
robbers, and among these he discovers virtues

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74 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

unknown to the men whose business it was to
administer the laws of his country, that is, to
wrest those laws to the advantage of the wealthy
and the powerful. At least these freebooters
knew the joys of freedom : " they could form
plans and execute them ; they consulted their
own inclinations; they did not impose upon
themselves the task, as is too often the ease in
human society, of seeming tacitly to approve that
from which they suffered most ; or, which is
worse, of persuading themselves that all the
wrongs they suffered were right; but were at
open war with their oppressors." Among them
were to he found benevolence and comradeship ;
they were strongly susceptible of emotions of
generosity. They had no part in " the debilita-
ting routine of human affairs;" and hence they
frequently displayed " an energy which from
every impartial observer would have extorted
veneration." That it was a misapplied energy
Godwin admits ; but energy, as such, is " perhaps
of all qualities the most valuable."

Godwin's benevolent and venerable highway-
men stand in the moral scale far above the servile .
tribes of lawyers and parsons; but they fall short
of his ideal of manhood. This ideal is indicated
in his outline sketch of Mr. Collins, the steward of

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THEORISTS OF EBVOLUTION 75

Falkland's estate. Mr. Collins had befriended Caleb
Williams in early youth as his father's executor.
Almost to the end he remains convinced of his
master's innocence, and believes that Caleb is
guilty of the crimes laiij to his charge. He is
instructed in a mild and enlightened philosophy,
and when he speaks, his words sound like a
paragraph from " Political Justice." In that
treatise Godwin had pushed to its furthest con-
sequences the doctrine of necessity ; there is no
such thing as freedom of the will ; therefore no
indignation against wrong-doing {unless, perhaps
the tyranny of rulers and the frauds of priests) .
can be reasonable. All vice is merely error, a
miscalculation of consequences. The murderer
is no more to be detested than is the knife with
which he perpetrated the murder. Mr. ColHns
has banished from his enlightened understanding
the very ideas of crime and guilt. " You know,"
he says to Caleb, " my habits of thinking. I re-
gard you as vicious; but I do not consider the
vicious as proper objects ot indignation and scorn.
I consider you as a machine; you are not con-
stituted, I am afraid, to be greatly useful to your
fellow-men ; but you did not make yourself; you
are just what circumstances irresistibly compelled
you to be. I am sorry for your ill properties ;

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76 THE FRENCH KEVOLUTION

but I entertain no enmity against you, nothing
but benevolence. Considering you in the liglit
in which I at present consider you, I am ready to
contribute everything in my power to your real
advantage, and would gkdly assisfyou, if I knew
how, in detecting and extirpating the errors that
have misled you." So philosophizes the sage in
presence of the unhappy youth, and no benevo-
lent machine could creak out pedantic morals
with more mechanical precision. Too evidently,
among Godwin's gifts a sense of humor was not
the most considerable.

" Caleb Williams " is the one novel of the days
of Eevolution, embodying the new doctrine of the
time, which can be said to survive. No power of
evocation can reanimate the forms which once
moved as men and women through the tales of
Holcroft and of Bage. Holcroft's "Memoirs,

written in part by himself and continued to his

death by Hazlitt, are indeed a piece of veritable

life, a genuine record of heroism in literature.

The child of a London shoemaker, whose wife
sold greens and oysters, Holcroft came early to
know the hardships and injuries of the poor. He
tramped the country, hawking peddlery with his
mother; he begged alms from the passers-by.
He had risen in the world when as a stable-boy

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THEORISTS OF EEVOLUTION 77

he groomed horses at Newmarket. In his pt^es
we are on terms of pleasant intimacy with famous
racers and jockeys whose moments of triumph
are more than a century gone by. Between stable
hours he learnt the rule of three, and, with an
old nail for pencil, cast up sums on the paling of
the stable-yard. In due time he set up a country
school, had one scholar, and lived on potatoes and
buttermilk. As a poor player he appeared in
Macklin's company and trod the boards of Dublin
theatres. From actor he climbe4 to author, writr
ing many pieces for the stage which are now i
forgotten, and one, " The Road to Ruin." which
has some claim tfi b" r'""?"'>"'"i"i — la 1761 hek
was attracted to Paris by the celebrity of Beau-
marchais' "Marriage of Figaro," — that drama
which caught the colors of the^ Revolutionary
dawn before the sun had risen. With the assist-
* ance of a friend Holcroft transcribed the play
from the recollection of successive performances ;
he adapted it to the English stage, himself acted
the part of Figaro, and received an ample reward
from the theatre. Spnmg from the people, and
acquainted with the lot of the poor, ardent and
aspiring of temper, he became a zealot for the
principles of the French Revolution, and was
indicted with Hardy and his companions for high

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78 THE FKENCH REVOLUTION

treason. In his novel "Aona St. Ives" he
creates his personages — so Hazlitt cannot but
admit — as the vehicles of certain general senti-
ments, or " machines put into action," with a view
to reducing those sentiments to the supposed test
of imagined action. Deeply stirred as Hazlitt
himself was by the passions of the movement in
France, he was too true^ his feeling for litera-
ture to admire the pitiful drapery in which Hol-
croft clothes his political abstractions, in or3er
that, " petticoated, booted, and spurred," they may
show their paces on the liigh horse. " Hugh
Trevor," which may be regarded as a sequel to
"Anna St, Ives," aims at presenting a view of
things as they are, of society with its decaying
and demoralizing institutions, from which misery
and vice are spread abroad as by some pestilen-
tial miasms. Holcroft's indictment of the estab-
lished order in the pages of his novel is forgotten,
but we still remember those verses of his which
tell of the cold comfort ofTered to Gaffer Gray in
the bitter January weatlier by parson, squire, and
lawyer ; it is only the poor man — so concludes
the song — who can feel for the misery of the
poor, and share his morsel with a fellow-sufferer.
Three of the novels of Kobert Bage had the
distinction of being included by Scott in Ballan-

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THEORISTS OF EETOLOTlOif 79

tyne's Novelist's Library. A Quaker by his edu-
cation, Bage found bis way to free thougbt in
religion and in politics. His period of authorship
began late in bis life. He was fifty-three wben
" Mount Henneth," his first novel, was published ;
other tales followed, and were well received ;
and to the days of Revolution belong two with
significant and contrasted titles, — "Man as be
13 " (1792), and " Hermsprong ; or, Man as be is
not " (1796). In private life Bage was mild,
^niable, temperate ; he reserved his audacities
for tbe field of opinion on affairs of general inter-
est, and those audacities proceeded in part from
his ardent benevolence. Scott is generous in
recognition of Bage'a literary gifts, his quaint,
facetious, ironical style, his truly English vein o£
humor ; but for his own part, Scott was not dis-
posed to regard every person of superior rank and
station as the wicked giant of a chivalric romance,
■ nor every poor man as a being composed of virtue
and generosity. The misrepresentation of tbe
different classes of society was not the only error
of Bage's novels ; Scott could not approve of their
dangerous tendency to slacken tbe reins of dis-
cipline in tbe matter of the relation of tbe sexes.
In tbe Revolutionary " return to nature," external
law, custom, and tradition were treated as oppo-

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80 THE FRENCH EEVOLDTION

nents rather than regulators of the impulses of
the heart and the dictates of the individual rea-
son : " Hermsprong, whom Mr. Bage produces as
the ideal perfection of humanity, is paraded as a
man who, freed frbra all the nurse and all the
priest has taught, steps forward on his path,
without any religious or political restraint, as one
who derives his own rules of conduct from his
own breast, and avoids or resists all temptations
of evil passions, hecause his reason teaches him
they are attended by evil consequences." It ia
the doctrine of Godwin transferred to the world
of im^inative creation; the doctrine which
Wordsworth had once embraced with ardor, and
from which he afterwards recoiled in alarm ;

"What delight!
How glorious I in self-knowledge and self-rule,
To look tlirough all the frailties of the world.
And, with a resolute mastery shaking off
Infirmities of nature, time, and place.
Build social upon x>ersonal Libert;,
Which, to the blind restraints of general laws
Superior, magisteriaUj adopts
One guide, the light of circum stances, flashed
Upon an independent intellect." '

The riader of Bage's novels should compare

— so Scfllt-_s»^gests — his philosophic heroes

> The Prelude, book xi. II. 235-244.

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THEORISTS OF KEVOLDTION 81

with the philosophic Square of Fielding's " Tom
Jones," and consider seriously " whether a sys-
tem of Ethics, founding an exclusive and para-
mount court in a man's own bosom for the
regulation of his own conduct, is likely to form
a noble, enlightened, and generous character . . .
or whether it is not more likely, as in the ob-
server of the rule of right, to regulate morals
according to temptation and to convenience, and
to form a selfish sophistical hypocrite, who, with
morality always in his mouth, finds a perpetual
apology for evading the practice of abstinence,
when either passion or interest solicit him to
indulgence." We cannot expect to perceive the
results of a new code of ethics or a new princi-
ple of conduct until a generation springs up with
which it has become a formative power ; even
then its full effect is held in check by a sur-
rounding or intermingling part of society which
still accepts the traditional standards. Happily
the Kevolutionary body of doctrine set forth in
" Political Justice " was never fully tested in, act-
ual lite. Some of its consequences when put io
action appear in the errors of the youthful Shel-
ley, — errors in which something of noble aspiring
and devotion to an idea was mingled with unwar-
ranted self-confidence and passionate self-will.

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82 THE FRENCH KBVOLUTIOH

The calamities which almost overwhelmed
Godwin's first wiEe are in like manner directly
traceable to the new ethics of the time playing
upon an enterprising understanding and an im-
pulsive sensitive heart " As for panegyric,"
wrote Southey to a friend in 1801, "I never
yet praised living being except Mary, Wollstone-
, craft." " She was a delightful woman," he wrote
to Caroline Bowles, a quarter of a century later,
"audin better times, or in better hands, would
havti been an excellent one. But her lot had
fallen in evil days, and the men to whom she
. attached herself were utterly unworthy of her.
- . . Few persons but those who have lived in it
can conceive or comprehend what the memory of
the French Eevolution was, nor what a vision-
ary world seemed to open upon those who were
just entering it. Old things seemed passing
away, and nothing was dreamt of but the re-
generation of the human race." The title of
Mary Wollstone craft's best-known work, "A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman," has sug-
gested to many persons a misconception of her
personal character and of the nature of her writ-
ings. She was, before all else, an ardent, sensi-
tive human being, needing more than anything
else to love and to be loved. But she feared,

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THEORISTS OF KEVOHJTION 83

and with good reason, her own eager, craving,
intemperate heart ; she- set her brain to work as
a sentinel over that heart; but some of her
intellectual conclusions only encouraged the au-
dacity of her emotions. She speaks in "The
Eriglits of Woman " of that " sanguine ardor
which it has been the business of my life to
depress." If we would study the emotional side
of her nature, we must turn to the " Letters to
Imlay," some of which are exquisite with strokes
of genius prompted by the affections. Her trea-
tise on the Eights of Woman was written with
urgent speed, not merely to assert and maintain
the claims which she made in favor of half the
human race ; it was written also to assert for her
own benefit, and as it were against her own emo-
tional temperament, the claims of reason. Her
plea is not a plea for woman a^ gainst man,
but for woman as against the sensual and the
sentimental estimate of many men, and at the
same time as against that part of her own sex
which accepted and turned to their account this
unworthy estimate. Her conception of the ideal
woman was neither that of the doll of the doll's
house, nor that of the chivalric queen of the
court of love, nor that of the Eastern odalisque.
It approached very near to the ideal of Words-
worth's lines, —

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\

■ THK FKENCa EEVOLUTION

" i Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveller between life and death;.
The reason firm, the f^mperate will,
Endurance, foreaight, strength, and skill."

With such an ideal in view, Mary WoUstone-
craft's book became in large part a pleading
on behalf of a more serious and enlightened edu-
cation for women. At the basis of all lay a "
sincere piety ; she maintained that woman holds '
her prerogative direct from God, and can accom-
plish her complete tasks only in a life immortal.
On a groundwork of religion she would have a
structure established of reason, self-control, and
good sense. Such is the teaching of the book,
though its lessons are often enfeebled by intem-
perate utterances, by crude rhetoric, and a want
of becoming reserve. It is representative of the
writer in its eagerness, its passionate accent ; it
is no less representative of her in its effort to
place reason above passion, not to suppress pas-
sion, but as a controlling and regulative principla
While thus expressing the mind and the temper-
ament of an individual, " The Eights of Woman "
is also essentially a document of the Eevolution-
ary period. The Kevolution professed itself to
be an assertion of the reason in opposition to
custom, prescription, tradition ; such also is the

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THEOlilSTS OF REVOLUTION 85

professioQ" made in Mary Wollatonecraft's " Vin- X
dication." *• The Revolution treated with scorn xr"^
the chivalric ideals •Mary Wollstonecraft's pro-
test is vehement and repeated against the chiv-
alric sentiLQent, its woman-worship springing
from over-strained gallantry, its romantic exal-
tations which she takes to be only a rarified form
' of the creeping mists of sensuality. " It is not,"
she says, " against strong persevering passions,
but romantic, wavering feelings, that I wish to
guard the female heart by exercising the under-
standing." She admits that in tiie order of na-
ture or of Providence enthusiastic illusions play
a part in education ; only through the exercise
of human passions, she declares, can the lesson \J
of life be (ully leamt. But she would have the ^
weight of the passions balanced by the weight of
reason and a temperate will.

Ardent admirer of Rousseau, the 5)rophet of Rev- j
olution, as Mary WoUstonecraft was, she strenu- |
ously set herself to oppose his teaching as far as j
it related to the position of her own sex and the !
education of women. While in the education i
of his Emilius Rousseau thinks primarily of the 1
human virtues, in the education and training of
hia Sophia he thinks especially of the qualities
of her sex. Woman is to be formed, not in order

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86 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

that she may be an admirable human being, but
that she may attract and gratify man, her mas-
ter. " We are confronted," as Mr. Morley puts
it, " with the O.rieutal conception of woman.
Every principle which has been followed in the
education of Emilias is reversed in the educa-
tion of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of
virtue among men, is among women its high
throne. The whole education of women ought
to be relative to men ; to please them, to be use-
ful to them, to make themselves loved and hon-
ored by them, to console them, to render their
lives agreeable and sweet to them, — these are
the duties which ought to be taught to women
from their childhood." Against such an ideal -^
I Mary WoUstonecraft protested with all the ve- '
j hemence of her nature. She would have woman
honored and honorable as a human creature, and
pleasing to man as a comrade and a helpmate,
not as a flatterer, a subject, or a slave.

Having set forth her general principles in " A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman," Mary
WoUstonecraft attempted to give imaginative
embodiment to her convictions in a novel. The
unfinished " Wrongs of Woman ; or, Maria," bears
a relation to the " Vindication " resembling that
which " Caleb Williams " hears to " Political

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THEORISTS OF REVOLUTION 87

Justice ; " but bitter personal experiences and
memories of her kinsfolk and her friends in-
flamed the spirit of Mary, and gave a character
to her tale which contrasts strongly with the
calculated logic of her husband's memorable
work. The heroine, Man^,^ the victim of a
miserable marrHJ^Tffleflies from her husband,
but is seized by him, ia separated from her child,
and thrown, on the allied ground of her lunacy,
into a madhouse. Deluded by the ardor of her
own heart, she escapes from captivity with a
man who is unworthy of het ; she is deserted by
him, makes an attempt upon her life (but not in
the precise manner of the narrator when aban-
doned by Imlay), recovers, and resolves to live
for her child. The writer's main object, as stated
in her Preface, is to exhibit the misery and op-
pression peculiar to women, that arise out of the
'partial laws and customs of society. It is a bitter
cry of woman against the injuries of men, and as
a statement of one side of the case by an advocate
it had perhaps a certain value. The movement
of society has to some extent justified the remon-
strances of Mary Wolistonecraf t ; under the pres-
ent law of England, her heroine, if art were life,
could doubtless obtain a divorce from her domes-
tic tyrant on thegrounds of infidelity and cruelty.

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88 THE FKEKCH REVOLUTION

Unfortunately, Mary WoUstonecraft's genius was
little suited to continuous narrative ; the story is
repulsive without being powerful. The lecturer
on moral ulcers should possess something of the
scientific spirit ; to pluck away the bandage, to
expose the naked horror, and to declaim violently
may not assist a cure ; it may confuse and revolt
the intelligence and even the senses of the witr
neases. Possibly a female physiciaa is not always
the most judicious adviser in the moral maladies of
her sex. The book, however, may be considered
not as the physician's advice, but as a patient's
statement of her case, or rather as the patient's
cry of agony, wrung from her by intolerable pain.
That cry is heard often in real life ; to transfer its
poignancy to art needs more self-restraint and
higher imaginative gifts than were possessed by
Mary Wollstonecraft.

NOTE.

Marj WolUtonecraft'B experimeot in pbilosophical history,
" Ad DiBtorical aud Moral View of the Origio aud Progress of
the French Itevoliition ; and the EfEect it has produced ia Ea-
rope " (1794, first volame, all publit^hed), was an attempt beyond
hec powers, yet it may still be read with interest. In fnll Tiew
of the disasters and crimes of the Revolution, her optimism is
nnahalten. It is an optimism founded on a faith in the salutary
effects of the advance of political enlightenment; the crimes
were crimes of passion, natural to a time of violent convulsion ;

iv,Goog[c

THEORISTS OF KBVOLUTION 89

the gu'ns are gains of the reason, and are therefore of permaneot
and iacreasiog worth.

More than one Dovel was written with the desijp of confnting
Godwin's principles bj exhibiting the consequences to which
the; lead. The l)eBt remembered, or the least forgotten, of
these is "Edmund Oliver," dedicated to Charles Lamb, by his
friend Charles Lloyd. The reproduction in fiction of some of
S. T. Coleridge's early adventures has given the book an inter-
est which ita literary merits in themselves fail to justify. Thtf
heroine, Lady Gertrnde Sinclair, is a ilisciple of " Political Jns-
tice," and at the same time a representative of the passionate
sensibility admired and caltivated in the second half of the
eighteenth century.

Among contemporary criticisms of " Political Jostice " one
of the ablest is "An Eiamination of the Leading Principle of
the New System of Morals " (1798), an anonymons pamphlet by
Thomas Green, who is best remembered as the author of the
" Diary of a Lover of Literature." The argument of the writer
is directed to prove that although the general good, utility, the
happiness of the greatest number, may be the final cause of all
Tiltnooa action, it is not therefore the proximate cause. We
act from many legitimate motives; to act from these motives
tends to the general good; but to attempt a calculation of all
the results of our action, and to regard the general good as our
sole legitimate motive, woold be to lose all capacity for action
in the calculation of consequences. The reply to Godwin
includes a reply to Fale^.

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bGoogle j

Ill

ANTI-EEVOLUTIOS: EDMUND BCEKE

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ANTI-REVOLUTION: EDMUND BURKE

In one of the most remarkable of Burke's later
writings, his " Letter to a Noble Lord," he pleads
for the repose due to old age, and in doing so he
expresses himself in one of those violent images
with which he was accustomed to relieve his
overwrought feelings. "Why," he asks, "will
they not let me remain in obscurity and inac-
tion ? Are they apprehensive that if an atom
of me remains, the sect has something to fear ?
Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca'a,
my akin might be made into a drum, to animate
Europe to eternal battle against a tyranny that
threatens to overwhelm all Europe and all the
human race?" No one at the present day can
desire to convert Edmund Burke's skin into a
drum on which to beat an anti-re vol utuinary
tattoo. The time is past for that kind of polemi-
cal criticism ; it is nearly a century since the
words which have been quoted were written.
The subject of our inquiry is literature ; it is as

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94 THE FEENCH KEVOLDTION

a part of literature, in the lai^er sense of that
■ word, that Burke's political writings must here be
considered. 1 desire to contribute sometliiug
towards the study of a great mind, a great nature
and character, aa affected by the most important
events of the time. A,nd as we have seen how a
different type of mind, the doctrinaire type, was
^ected, in the example of William Godwin, so
it will be worth observing how a mind fed by
concrete fact, an understanding enlarged and
sustained by great a£faiia, and a heart alive with
every generous passion, were moved. The inter-
est of the study will perhaps be rather psycho-
logical than political. Whether Burke help us
to understand the Revolution or not, assuredly
the Revolution should help us to understand
Burke.

In a well-known canon of style Burke lays it
down that the master sentence of every para-
graph should involve, first, a thought, secondly,
an image, and, thirdly, a sentiment. The rule is
certainly not one of universal application; it is
one not always followed by Burke himself, but
it expresses the character of his mind. A
thought, an image, a sentimeut, and all bearing
upon action, — it gives us an intimation that the
writer who set forth such a canon was a com-

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ANTI-REVOLUTION 95

plete nature, no fragment of a man, but a full-
formed human spirit, and that when he came
to write or speak, he put his total manhood into
his utterance. This is, indeed, Burke'a first and
highest distinction. He was deficient in none of
the, parts or passions of a man ; all were lai^e
and vigorous, — judgment, affections, imagination,
will, — and each played into and through the
others. He did not isolace one province or section
of his nature for the uses of authorship ; he did
not say, in Godwin's manner, " Gro to, I will not
declare myself as pure and disembodied Eeason ; "
when he wrote, what guided his pen was noth-
ing less than the whole man. And when Burke
looked abroad he saw the organism of society at
lai^e, formed as it were on the same pattern as
that on which he himself was formed ; he saw
reason, passions, imagination, will, native instincts,
and'inherited customs, and all these alive and in
a state of mutual interaction. These, and much
besides, helped to constitute society. He felt
that unless he entered into sympathy with all of
these he could utter no adequate word. It is
related of Napoleon that when he had seen and
conversed with Goethe, the exclamation broke
from him, " There is a man ! " The same expres-
sion involuntarily rises to our lips when we have

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96 THE FEESCH KEVOLUTION

remained for a time in the presence of Edmund
Burke.

And this great nature had been formed and
developed amid great affairs. Burke was no
closet philosopher. He had lived and moved
among the eminent figures of his time. He had
become an important member of a powerful
political party. He had a share in the rise and
fall of ministries. He had an interest in a great
people, and cherished all its gains acquired
through the centuries. He was one with the
nation of England. Of the life of two continents
— of tliree continents, Europe, America, Asia, he
was a part. Such a man, so trained, could never
be a mere pedant ; he could not be the oracle of
a coterie ; he could not he the prophet or philoso-
pher of a sect. At the least one entire side of
truth must find a voice when he spoke. His
writings form a broad stream into which many
affluents flowed ; as it has been happily expressed,
they " drain a lai^e area."

The position from which Burke viewed affairs
was the most fortunate position for the attain-
ment of practical wisdom. He did not forever
creep through the by-ways of petty detail; he
did not soar into the clouds of glittering generali-
ties. His feet were on the subst-antial earth ;

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ANTI-SKVOLDTION 97

but they were upon the heights, from which he
gained a lai^e proapect'and saw things in their
broad relations to one another. Such a position,
not nested in some najrow valley, not pinnacled
in the inane, but on the heights, is tJie best posi-
tion for a teacher of civil prudence. .It is there
that those axiomata media, of the importance of
which Bacon hag spoken, are most readily and
as it were inevitably apprehended. The politi-
cian who is guided from day to day by the max-
ims of hand-to-mouth expediency seemed to Burke
to be unworthy of the name of a politician ; and
yet Burke held that expediency in a larger sense
is the true rule in politics,' " People not very well
grounded in the principles of public morality,"
he says, "find a set of maxims in offtce ready made
for them, wliich they assume as naturally and
inevitably as any of the insignia of the situation.
A certain tone of the solid and practical is imme-
diately acquired. Every former profession of
public spirit is to be considered as a debauch of
youth, or, at best, as a visionary scheme of unat-
tainable perfection. The very idea of consistency
is exploded. The convenience of the business of
the day is to furnish the principle for doing it.''
In a well-known passage of the speech on
American taxation Burke traces the errors of

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98 THE FRENCH EKVOLDTION

Grenville, whose masculine understanding and
reeolttte heart he applauds, first to the nartowiog
infiueoce of the legal profession, which, though
admirable in its power to quicken and invigorate
the intellect, is not apt, he says, to open and lib-
eralize the mind in the same proportion ; and,
secondly, to the fact that' on quitting the profes-
sion of the law, Grenville plunged into the busi-
ness of office and the limited and fixed methods
and forms established there. " Persons who are
nurtured in office," Burke writes, " do admirably
well as IdDg as things go on in their common
order; hut when the highroads are broken up,
and the waters out, when s new and troubled
scene is opened, and the .file affords no precedent,
then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind
and s far more extensive comprehension of
things is requisite than ever office gave, or than
office can ever give." Such is one error in the
training of a statesman, — for the general princi-
ples of civil prudence to substitute mere astute-
ness and manipulative skill in dealing with
details. The other error, that of soaring in
search of first principles wholly out of view "of
reality, is more dangerous. To speculate after a
fashion in vacuo i.9 easy, and in this manner
many difficulties can be evaded by the thinker;

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ANTI-BEVOLOTION 99

bnt it ia ft cbeap and cowardly mode o£ attaining
credit for superior wisdom. To manufacture
doctrinaire systems that will not_ work i8, after
all, a poor trade, which requires only an unskilled
and a pretentious mechanician. In one of his
happy phrases Burke censures political meta-
physics for their " clumsy subtlety ; " the toys
are ingenious, and yet their ingenuity is that of
a bungler. From the experiences of the French
Revolution Godwm learnt to estimate the value
of a form of government according to the simpli-
city of its arrangement. Snch simplicity was
regarded by Burke as sufficient evidence of
inadequacy or entire unsoundness in construc-
tion: "The nature of- man is intricate; the '
objects of society are of the greatest possible
complexity ; and therefore no simple disposition
■ or direction of power can be suitable either to
man's nature or to the quality of his affairs.
When I hear of simplicity of contrivance aimed
at and boasted of in any new political constitu-
tions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers
are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally
negligent of their duty. The simple govern-
ments are fundamentally defective, to say no
worse of them." Burke's standpoint, then, to
which the nature of his mind conducted him, ,

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lOQ THE FREKCe BEVOLUTION

was neither with the misnamed practical politi-
cians, whose principles of expediency are only a
superior kind of cunning, nor with the system-
mongers, who ignore all details and efface all
distinctions in order to attain a crude or spurious
simplicity. He studied human affairs most oh-
servantly, most laboriously ; but he studied them
from the heights, and the general principles
which he accepted were principles which he de-
sired to submit to the test of practice.

What has been said will serve to explain the
apparent anomaly that our wisest political thinker
should often appear hostile to political specu-
lation. With all the fervor of his eloquence
he declaims against theorists ; yet Burke was
a theorist himself. Coleridge, when criticising
Burke in " The Friend," declares his belief that
an erroneous system is best confuted, not by an
abuse of theory in general, nor by an absurd
opposition of theory to practice, but by a detec-
tion of the errors in the particular theory, " for
the meanest of men has his theory, and to think
at all is to theorize." And Mackintosh, in a
remarkable estimate of Burke, published post-
humously, while commending Burke for his
resistance to those precipitate generalizations,
which are as much the bane of sound political

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ANTI-REVOLUTION 101

theory as they are of safe practice, adds that
from a more elevated position Burke might have
discovered that such hasty generalizations were
as unphilosophical as they were impracticable,
and that " the error consisted not in their being
metaphysical, but in their being false." It is,
indeed, the case that the error lies in the false-
ness of such generalizations ; but this is precisely
what Burke himself has said. He talks, it is
true, with passionate contempt of " metaphysical
theorists," but his contempt arises not from the
fact that they are theorists; it arises from the
fact that they are, as he puts it in one word,
" sophisters," He could have no claim to the
title of a political thinker if he despised ideas.
Just ideas Burke did not despise. " I do not,"
he says, "put abstract ideas out of the question,
because I well know that under that name I
should dismiss principles, and that without the
guide and light of sound, well-understood prin-
ciples, all reasonings in politics, as in everything
else, would be only a confused jumble of particu-
lar facts and details, without, the means of draw-
ing out any theoretical or practical conclusion."
And again ; " I do not vilify theory and specula-
tion, — no, because that would be to vilify reason
itself. No I whenever I speak against theory, I

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102 THE PKENCH REVOLDTION

always mean a weak, erroueous, fallacioas, an-
founded, or imperfect theory; and one of the

i ways of discovering that it is a false theory ia
to compare it with practice. This is the true
touchstone of all theories which regard man and
the affairs of men." As a practical statesman,
Burke was naturally led to disprove erroneous
theories by con^dering them in the light of prac-
tice rather than by seeking that more elevated
platform of philosophy recommended by Mack-
intosh.

Burke then, as he says, did not vilify theory
and speculation. In what respect were the the-
ories against which he declaimed erroneous or
incomplete? This was common to them, — and
it is characteristic of the Revolutionary way of
thought, — they overlooked or omitted an essen-
tial part of the facts ; they omitted the circum-
stances of the case, and yet, in a right view,
the circumstances formed an important part of
the case. They reduced things concrete to spec-
ulative abstractions. The eighteenth -century
classical spirit in literature, with its generaliz-
ing tendency, and its passion for barren per-
^. sonification, had united with the methods of

'. geometrical science, and was now applying it-
self to political thought "Man" was spoken

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ANTI-HEVOLUTION 103

of, and the "Rights of Man;" by "man" waa
signified not the actual men to whom presently
the doctrine was applied, not men as formed
by society and surrounded with all its complex
and varying conditions, but some bare meta-
physical entity of the philosopher's own inven-
tion. Government was the subject of conflicting
theories ; not this government ot that, with a
history and an environment, to which, however,
the theory was about to be fitted, hut some
abstract government as ideal as the geometer's
point or line or circle, — some government de- ■
nuded of everything substantial, and such as *
had never existed on this earth. All such the-
ories, according to Burke, are necessarily false
theories. " Nothing universal," he maintains,
" can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any
political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction
does not belong to these matters. The lines of
morality are not like ideal lines of mathematics.
They are broad and deep as well as long. They
admit of exceptions ; they demand modifications.
These exceptions and modifications are not made
by the process of logic, but by the rules of pru-
dence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of
the virtues political and moral, but she is the
djirector, the regulator, the standard of them alL"

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104 THE FHENCH EEVOLCTION

" Circumstances," he writes again, " (which with
some gentlemen pasa for nothing) give in reality
to every political principle its distinguishing
color and discriiniuating effect. The circum-
stances are what render every civil or political
scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind."

Burke, then, our highest teacher of political
wisdom, was himself a speculator, a reasoner in
politics; bnt he tried to reason and to speculate
with the facts of the case before him. The late
Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen, in one of several ex-
cellent articles on Burke, printed in the third
volume of bis " Horae Sabbaticae," asserts that
Burke was an d pnori reasoner. It is true that
in forming a theory of society, its nature and
the duties of its members, he investigates and
interprets the facts in the light of his own moral
nature. He brings bis total self to bear upon
the subject of his inquiry. Burke's nature, com-
plete in all the parts and passions of manhood,
was profoundly religious. In the irreparable
affliction of his old age, the loss of that son
around whom all his deep affection, his pride,
his fond hopes had gathered, he suffered with
such resignation as was possible to the Divine
will : " I am stripped of all my honors, I am torn
up by the roots and lie prostrate on the earth.

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ANTI-EEVOLUTION 105

There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly
rect^nize the Divine justice, and in some degree
submit to it." In the same " Letter to a Noble
Lord," in which these sentences occur, there ia
a yet more comfortable word for those who are
called on to toil or to endure in the years of
our infirmity : " No man lives too long who lives
to do with spirit, or suffer with resignation, what
Providence pleases to command or inflict, and
indeed they are sharp incommodities which beset
old !^e." Such was the temper of Burke's mind ;
and when he came to think on social questions,
he must needs think in the way which the facts
of his own moral nature justified. " Like Berke-
ley," wrote Sir I'itzjames Stephen, "whose phi-
losophy harmonizes singularly with Burke's
writings, and in all probability had powerfully
affected his mind, Burke makes d\ity to God the
foundation of everything else; and also, like
Berkeley, he referred to the will and disposi-
tion of God all the principal relations between
man and man, and regarded the great moral
duties, and the rights which arise out of them,
as divinely instituted, and superior in kind and
degree to all other obligations whatever." There
is, indeed, something in common between God-
win, whose theory of human society when he

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^

106 THE FRENCH EEVOLUTION

> wrote "Political Justice" was atheistic, and
r Burka Justice, according to Godwin, is ante-
/ cedent to human law; all that law can do la
. to interpret the principles of justice; it cannot
"^ create them. The same doctrine is maititained
' by Burke, with this difference, that the order
of nature and of society ^as held by him to
be a divinely instituted order. Mr. John Morley
speaks of a certain mysticism which lay at the
bottom of all Burke's thoughts about commu-
nities and governments : " To him there was an
element of mystery in the cohesion of men in
societies, in political obedience, in the sanctity
of contract ; in all that fabric of law and charter
and obligation, whether written or unwritten,
which is the sheltering bulwark between civili-
zation and barbarism." When he wrote these
words, Mr. Morley not improbably- had in his
memory a passage from Burke in which he con-
templates with wonder and admiration the tran-
sitorinese and the continuity of human society.
An order has been appointed by our Divine
Ruler for the successive generations of mankind :
" A mode of CKistence decreed to a permanent
body composed of transitory parts, wherein,
by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom
moulding tt^ther the great mysterious incor-

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ANTI-KIVOLUTION 107

poration of the human race, the whole at one Ei'f^'''
time ia never old or middle-aged or yoxmg
but in ft condition of unchangeable constancy
moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual
decay, full of renovation and progression.
The awful Author of our being is the Author
of our place in the order of existence ; and hav-
ing disposed and marshalled us by a divine tac-
tic, not according to our will, but according to
his, he has in and by that disposition virtually
subjected us to act the part which belongs to the
place assigned us." If to believe that the order
of the world is a Providential order be mysticism,
then the teaching of Burke may be described as
political mysticism. Perhaps, however, it falls
short of that mysticism affected by Mr. Morley
himself, or by his master in philosophy, which
constructs a Deity out of the transitory atoms
of the human race.

"If Burke's generalities," wrote Fitzjames
Stephen, "are reduced to special cases, they
look very much the reverse of imposing. Did
Burke mean to say that God gave two members
to Old Sarum, and, if not, what precisely does he
mean ? " Burke did not mean to say that God
gave two members to Old Sarum ; he was far
from alleging that everything in the existing

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108 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

order of society is of divine and immutable ap-
pointment. His meaning was akin to that of
Hooker, who looked to God as the fomuain
of law, while maintaining that certain laws of
ecclesiastical polity — the laws of God'a Church
— are mutable. His view of things had much la
common with that of another remarkable thinker
of the eighteenth century, Bishop Butler, who
held that it would be indeed mysticism or un-
meaning verbiage to ascribe the order of the
world to the words or idea " course of nature,"
but who believed that this becomes intelligible
and full of meaning as soon as we acknowledge
that the " course of nature " is equivalent to the
operations of an Author of nature, and moral
governor of the world ; and who, admitting as he
did, all the confusion and disorder in the world,
yet contended that the principles and beginnings
of a moral government are discernible here and
now. Burke did not mean to say that God gave
two members to Old Sarum ; but he did mean
that in attempting to reform the Parliamentary
representative system we should proceed in the
spirit which Butler describes as befitting such
creatures as men — "a settled moderation and
reasonableness of temper, the contrary both to
thoughtless levity and also to tliat unrestrained

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ANTI-EEVOLUTIOM 109

aelf-will . . . which may be observed id undis-
ciplined minds ; " and that if we proceed to aboliali
the represeubation of Old Sarum in this spirit, the
spirit of reform and not of revolution, we shall, as
Butler puts it, " be on the side of the Divine ad-
ministration and co-operating with it/' If Burke's
generalities tend to b^et this temper, the gain is
not inconsiderable, and it matters little whether,
when reduced to special cases, they look imposing
or the reverse.

With his devout reverence for a Divine order,
not fully realized, yet ever present, in human
society and human institutions, Burke's imagina-
tion co-operated. It is common to speak of him
as a great prose poet, and the critics who so de-
scribe him commonly cite in illustration some
pass^e brilliant with the colors of a rhetorician's
art. In general Burke's imagery is not for orna-
ment, but for use; it is, as De Quinoey justly
observes, not the mere dressing of his thought,
but the body in which his thought is incarnated
and through which it operates. But it we would
really bring home to ourselves the power of
Burke's imagination, we should think less of this
or that passage of resplendent eloquence than of
his constant imaginative realization of the great-
ness and the majesty of social order. There ia

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110 THE FBEHCH EEVOLUTION

much that we encounter in lite from day to day
which tends to kill or to enfeeble our sense of the
dignity of human life. The dross aud slag of the
world accumulate around us ; as we advance in
manhood, how h^h the pile has grown I The
smoke becomes denser as mgruiog deepens to
noon ; the smuts drop on our hands and faces ;
life looks, after all, a poor afTair. But the worth,
the grace, the majesty of human existence none
the less survive ; and if only the imagination
could- be set free, we should feel that such is the
fact. We move about, even in this visible sphere,
jn worlds not realized. So it is in our domestic
life, in the communities of the hearth and the
home. The cares of each day are too apt to fill
our hearts as it were with dust; the petty anxie-
ties, the petty dithculties, the trivial round, the
tedium, the monotony of the weeks, dull our
sense of what is beautiful. And then perhaps
death comes, and our imaginative power is liber-
ated — too late for its beat uses — and we recog-
nize the hidden lines of beauty, and perceive in
its fulness the half-apprehended joy. Happy is he
who with the aid of a wisely informed imagina-
tion discovers in good time the beauty of his own
daily life. To conceive aright the greatness aud
majesty of a nation's life demands a larger and

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AKTI-RKTOLUnOM 111

richer tmaginatiDn. It is cleverer, no doubt, to
be daintily critical, to be elegantly cynical ; but
the cleverness is of a somewhat cheap kind.
Edgar Poe.. speaks of " the glory that was Greece,
and the grandeur that was Rome." Those ancient
civilizations have passed away ; we see in imagi-
nation their forms, enfranchised from what was
unlovely, as we see the forms of the dead. But
have we no thought to think, no word to say of
the grandeur that is England or of the glory that
is America ? Are we even unable " to feel " — in
Wordsworth's memorable phrase — " that we are
greater than we know " ! Burke, assuredly, was
not aware that to revere one's country and to
honor her people is an offence gainst the refine-
ment of culture ; when he spoke of the splendid
inheritance which Englishmen have received
from their forefathers, his imagination as a poet
was not inventing imagery or constructing
phrases, but, as he believed, was discovering
truth. If it be not good manners to glory in
ourselves and our own possessions, or, as some
would say, to beat the big drum to the tune of
"Rule Britannia," we may listen for a moment or
two to Burke as he speaks of a country that is not
ours : " When I consider the face of the kingdom
of France ; the multitude and opulence of her

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112 THE FRENCH BEVOLPTION

cities ; the useful magnificence of her spaciouB
highroads and bridges; the opportunity of her
artificial canals and navigations, opening the con-
veniences of maritime communication through a
solid continent of so immense an extent; when I
turn my eyes to the stupendous works of her
ports and harbors, and to her whole naval appa-
ratus whether for war or trade; when I bring
before my view the number of her fortifications,
constructed with so bold and masterly a skill,
and made and maintained at so prodigious a
chaige, preaenting an armed front and impene-
trable harrier to her enemies upon every side;
when I recollect how very small a part of that
extensive region is without cultivation, and to
what complete perfection the culture of many of
the best productions of the earth have been
brought in France ; when I reflect on the excel-
lence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to
none but ours, and in some particulars not sec-
ond ; when I contemplate the grand foundations
of charity, public and private ; when I survey
the state of all the arts that beautify and polish
life; when I reckon the men she has bred for
extending her fame in war, her able statesmen,
the multitude of her profound lawyers and theo-
logians, her philosophers, her critics, her histo-
1

i,vGoog[c

AHTI-EEVOLDTION ,, 113

rians and antiquaries, her poets and her orators,
sacred and profane, — I behold in all this some-
thing which awes and commands the imagina-
tion, which checks the mind on the brink of
precipitate and indiscriminating censure, and
which demands that we should very seriously
examine what and how great are the latent vices
that could authorize us at once to level so spe-
cious a fabric with the ground." In this stately
enumeration there is no im^ery ; but the imagi-
nation orders its materials with an architectonic
power and to majestic resulta. With such an
imagination the conservative temper of Burke
was closely connected. It is true that in this
passage Burke presents only one aide of things ;
another and a different enumeration, an inventory
of vices and miseries — latent and patent — had
been possible. Burke's point of view presents at
least one important aspect of the truth, and an
aspect which his opponents were willing to dis-
regard. The cumulative method of the passage
produces, without any rhetorical outburst, the
effect of the swells of an organ, broadening and
prolonging the volume of the central thought ;
we begin with the highroads and bridges ; we
close with the historians, the orators, and the
poets.

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114 THE FEEKCH HBVOLUTION

" He saw life steadily," says Matthew Arnold
, of Sophocles, "and saw it whole." One of Burke's
critics, Mr. Augustine Binell, substituting tor
the word " life " the words " organized society,"
adopts the sentence and applies it, so altered,
to Burke. " He knew," writes Mr. Birrell,' " how
the whole world lived. Everything contributed
to this; his vast desultory reading, bis education,
bia wanderings up and down the country, his
vast conversational powers, his enormous corre-
spondence, his unfailing interest in all pursuits,
trades, manufactures, — all helped to keep befoie
him, like motes dancing iu a sunbeam, the huge
oi^anism of modem society. Burke's imagina-
tion led him to look out over the whole laud ;
the legislator devising new laws, the judge ex-
pounding and enforcing old ones, the merchant
despatching his goods and extending his credit,
the ancient institutions of Church and University
with their seemly provisions for sound learning
and true religion, the parson in his pulpit, the poet
pondering his rhymes, the farmer eying his crops,
the painter covering his canvases, the player
educating the feelings, — Burke saw all this with
the fancy of a poet, and dwelt on it with the eye

:,q,-z.-dbvGoOQ[c I

J

ANTI-REVOLUnON ^ 115

of a lover. But love is the parent of fear, and
none knew better than Burke how thin is the
lava layer between the costly fabric of society
and the volcanic heata and destroying flames of
anarchy." It was impossible that the conclusions
of a thinker who saw men thus could be identi-
cal with the conclusions of one who saw men
as mathematical units, each like every other,
stripped of all distinctions, and each equal to
every other.

To see the life of society in this rich, concrete,
imaginative way, was to supply political passion
with its appropriate nutriment. When Godwin
speculated, he endeavored to make his whole
mind a mere organ of the reason. His aim and
his pride were to argue with the coldness and the
precision of a machine. Yet there were wild-
eyed hopes which peered through the grates of
Godwin's argument; and if he did not exercise
his imagination in vivifying and interpreting the
facts of existing society, his imagination had its
revenge. Cut off from the sustenance and sup-
port of reality, it created that dream of the future
life of man on earth, v/hich Shelley afterwards
glorified with the iridescent colors of his poetry.
The passions of the Revolution lived in Godwin,
and roused his intellect in the search for first /

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116 THE FREHCH EEVOLUTIOtl

principles ; but he failed to recognize them as
among the sources of his own tendency to gen-
eralization, and he attempted to cut his under-
standing off from ita vivifying springs in the heart.
Burke never doubted that passion aids a thinker
in the discovery of truth. "Political truth,"
Mackintosh writes in his criticism of Burke,
" seems, as it were, to lie too deep to be reached
by calm labor, and it appears to be only thrown
up from the recesses of a great understanding by
the powerful agency of those passions which the
contests of politics inspire." Burke's heart was
as large and fervid as his intellect. His domes-
tic affections were deep-seated and constant.
How he was shaken and broken by the death,
of his son has been describea by his friend
O'Beirne, Bishop of Meath. In the records of
sorrow there are tew incidents more affecting —
and it is none the less affecting because it
touches the ludicrous — than that which tells of
the sudden wave of grief which overwhelmed
the aged man when at Beaconsfield the worn-out
horse, formerly ridden by his son, approaclied
him and rested ita head against his breast ; in
an instant Burke's firmness gave way to an agony
of recollection, and, throwing his arms over his
old follower's neck, he wept loudly and long

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ANTI-REVOLUTION

49

It would be untrue to say that in hie political
writings Burke's passions did not at times ob-
scure or overmaster his judgment; they aggran-
dize one mass of facts until another is hidden from
view ; they render him an impatient listener to
his adversary's case. But far more freq^uently
Burke's reason was stimulated and illuminated
by hia feelings. When he showed Francis some
proof-sheets of the " Eeflections on the French
Ke volution," his jritic assured him that the
well^nown passage about Marie Antoinette was
"pure foppery." "I tell -you again," Burke re-
plied, "that the recollection of the manner in
which I saw the Queen of France in the year
1774, and the contrast between that brilliancy,
splendor, and beauty, with the prostrate homage
of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of
1789, which I was describing, did draw tears
from me and wetted my paper. These tears
came again into my eyes as often as I looked at
the 'description, — they may again." The feeling
was natural to Burke, and, as he says, '* in those
natural feelings we learn great lessons." " Men
are we," exclaims Wordsworth, in his sonnet on
the extinction of the Venetian Eepublic, —

" Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great is passed away."

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118 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

There is no true wisdom in seeking to tran-
scend the elementary passions of our humanity.
" Why," Burke asks, " do I feel so differently from
the Eev, Dr. Pric€, and those of his lay flock,
who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his
discourse? For this plain reason, — because it
is natural I should ; because we are so made as to
be affected at such spectacles with melancholy
sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal
prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of
human greatness; . . . because in events like
these our passions instruct our reason ; ... we
are alarmed into reflection ; our minds (as it has
long since been observed) are purified by terror
and pity ; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled
under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom."
And again, in defence of emotion as an adjunct
and an aid to reason ; " Never was there a jar
or discord between genuine sentiment and sound
policy. Never, no, never, did Nature say one
thing and Wisdom say another. Nor are senti-
ments of elevation in themselves turgid and un-
natural. ... It is when a great nation is in
great difficulties that minds must ^alt themselves
to the occasion, or all is Iost\ ptrong passions,
under the direction of a feeble reason, feed a low
fever, which serves only to destroy' the body

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ANTI-RBVOLDTION 119

(that entertains it. But vehement passion does
not alvraya indicate an infirm judgment. It
often accompauiea, and actuates, and is even
auxiliary to a powerful understanding : and when
they both conspire and act harmoniously, their
force is great to destroy disorder within and to
repel injury from abroad."

Burke's outbreaks of passionate pity tor the
royal family, for the aristocracy and the cleigy, of
France were met in his own day with the cry of
sentimentalism. Had he no sympathy with the
victims of monarchy, — with the peasant ground
down by taxes, with the serfs of the Church, with
those who languished in the prisons of France ?
In a phrase which was remembered and after-
wards served Shelley as the motto for a pamphlet,
■ Paine retorted upon Burke : " He pities the plu-
- mage, and foi^ets the dying bird. . . , His hero or
his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in
show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding
into death in the silence of a dungeon." Mary
Wollstonecraft adopted the same line of com-
ment. " It was," writes that able and sym-
pathetic critic, Mr. Morley, " no idle abstraction,
no metaphysical right of man, for which the
French cried, but only the practical right of be-
ing permitted by their own toil to save them-

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120 THE FRENCH RETOLUTION

selves and the little ones about their koees from
hunger and cruel death." It was for both mate-
rial relief and for metaphysical rights that the cry
went up ; and the material claims were based by
the exponents of the Kevolution on the meta-
physical rights. We should at least bear in mind
the fact that Burke's feelings towards those suf-
ferers with whose griefs he came directly into
contact, were not merely rhetorical, and were
proved to be genuine by Belf-sacrifice. Leaders
of the Bevolution declaimed in Paris concerning
liberty and fraternity, while thew hands were red
with blood from the prison miissacres. Burke
did more than declaim ; be founded a school for
the destitute children of those who had perished
by the guillotine or the assassin's knife, and until
the close of bis life he watched over it with the
tenderest solicitude. As to the social condition
of France prior to the Revolution, Burke, as Mr.
Morley tells us, was imperfectly informed. Ar-
thur Young's " Travels in France " was not pub-
lished until after the " Reflections " had appeared.
But had his information been far less incomplete, '
we may be assured that Burke would have re-
mained of the opinion that there werectber and
better ways of amending the condition of the
French peasant and artisan than the way of over-

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ANTI-EEVOLUTION 121

throwing existing institutions, — the way of con-
fiscation, of massacre, and the theatiical worship
of Beason. Burke's wliole mind and strength
and life had heen devoted to the service of hia
fellows, — not of a class, not of an aristocracy, but
of the peopla He had been the advocate of free-
dom of trade (I cite a portion of Buckle's enumer-
ation of the great measures of later times which
Burke anticipated and supported) f he pleaded
for the just claims of the Catholics, which during
his lifetime were refused ; he ui^d that dis-
senters should be relieved from oppressive ecclesi-
astical restrictions ; he opposed the cruel laws
against insolvents ; he vainly attempted to soften
the Penal Code ; he desired to abolish the hard-
ship of enlbtiug soldiers for life ; he attacked the
slave-trade, which the king wished to preserve as
part of the British constitution ; he was one of
the first and one of the ablest financial reformers
in Parliament.^ The benefits which Burke en-
deavored to obtain were benefits for the people ;
if they have been won by others than him, they
■ were won in Burke's way of reform, not by the
sanguinary process of a revolution leading directly
to an enormous military tyranny. Did Burke

> BttcUe, Historj of Civilization m England, voL i. pp. 46^

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122 THE FRENCH EEVOLDTION

then pity the plumage and forget th& dying bird 1
The answer is that, right or wrong, he did not
believe that plucking away the plumage was the
best way of restoring the dying bird to vigor and
enabling it to fly.

Burke, then, was not of opinion that the cause
of suffering humanity could be really served by a
system of ideas which he held to be false, by
methods which he considered criminal, and by
men who seemed to him to be at best pretentious
bunglers. "To innovate," he says, "is not to re-
form. The French revolutionists complained of
everything ; they refused to reform anything ; and
they left notjiing, no, nothing at all, unchanged.
The consequences are be/ore us, — not in remote
history, not in future prognostication ; they are
about us, they are upon us. They shake the
public security ; they menace private enjoymenti
They dwarf the growth of the young ; they break
the quiet of the old." Burke would at once con-
serve and reform; the obstinacy which rejects
all improvement, and the levity that is fatigued
with everything actual, seemed to him to be alike
vices. But such a process of reform, it is ob-
jected, is slow ; it might take up many years.
"Without question," Burke replies, "it might;
and it ought." Each year, however, would give

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ANTI-BEVOLUTION 123

proof of the souDdoess of the method. The Eev-
olutioa, which changed everything 6f a sudden,
had certainly not brought immediate happioeas to
Franca. Its defenders, as at all times the de-
fenders of violent and criminal methods are com-
pelled to do, prophesied a glorious future, , " It is
remarkable," wrote Burke, " that they never see
their way to'their projected good hut by the road
to some evil. , . , Their humanity is at their
horizon, and, like the horizon, it always flies be-
fore them." Meanwhile men and women might
suffer ; if 6nly the cause- progressed, it only the
idea was maintained, all must be well : " These
philosophers consider men in their experiments
no more than they do mice in an air-pump, or ia
a recipient of mephitic gas." The burden of
proof lay heavily, as Burke held, on those who
tore to pieces the whole frame and contexture of
their country, that no other method of attaining
wise government than the way of violence, which
caused such widespread immediate misery, would
have succeeded. " Men have no right," he said,
" to put the well-being of the present generation
wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only
moral trust with any certainty in our hands is
the care of our own time. With regard to futu-
rity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not

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124 THE FRENCH KEVOLUTIOS

SO to attempt an improvement of his fortune aa
to put the capital of his estate to any hazard."

Burke, as Mr. Morlej states, had insufficient
acquaintance with the social condition of France.
But he was no idealist enamoured of the feudal
regime. He admitted that the French govern-
ment before the Eevolution, though the best of
" the unqualified or ill-qualified monarchies," wfe
full of abuses. " Upon a free doRstitutifHi,'' he
wrote, " there was but one opinion in France.
The absolute monarchy was at an end. It
breathed its last without a groan, without a
struggle, without convulsion. All the struggle
r arose afterwards, upon the preference of a des-
potic democracy to a government of reciprocal
control.7 When he advocated war against the
Eepublio, he did so with no view of restoring a
despotic monarchy as a substitute for anarchy.
To a Eepublic, considered in the abstract, he could
not be opposed. The Eepublic of Berne he speaks
of as one of the most happy, the most prosper-
ous, and the best governed countries upon earth ;
and he lamented that it was one of the great
objects at the destruction of which the French
Revolutionary party aimed. Neither monarchy
in the abstract nor a democracy in the abstract
could receive praise or condemnation from him ;

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ANTI-REVOLUTION 125

he would consider nothing without ita circum-
stances. Speaking in an abstract way, liberty and
government are both needful, "Old as I am,"
he wrote, " I read the fine raptures of Lucan and
Corneille with pleasure ; " but the moment we
come to deal with human affairs we must put
the questions -^ What kind of liberty ? What
kind of government ? The liberty of a madman
escaped from the asylum is not a thing to elate
our hearts ; we do not congratulate a highway-
man who has broken from jail on the recovery
of his natural rights. What Burke cherished
] is "a manly, moral, regulated liberty," coinci-
1 dent with order, ^ " Men," he says, " must have
a certain fund of natural moderation to quahfy
; them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to
themselves twid a perfect nuisance to everybody
. else/^ Looking at the facts before him, he could
^ot see that France had attained, or was on the
way to attain, a rational freedom, "When I
shall learn that in France the citizen, by what-
ever description he is qualified, is in a jjerfect
state of legal security with regard to his life, to
his property, to the uncontrolled disposal of his
person, to the free use of his industry and his
faculties . . . when I am assured that a simple
citizen may decently express his sentiments upon

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126 THE PEENCH REVOLUTION

public affairs without hazard to his life or lib-
erty, even against a predominant and fashionable
opinion, — when I know all this of France, I shall
be as well pleased as any one must be who has
not forgot the general communion of mankind
... in local and accidental sympathies," Burke
does not deny what he calls the real rights of
men ; but these are rights of society, not of un-
covenanted nature ; and among such rights not
the least important are certain restraints. In
the partnership of human beings which consti-
I tutes society, all men have their rights ; all men
I have equal rights, but not to equal things. The
right of each man to this or to that is settled
by convention ; not by nature, but by a kind of
social fine art, which is indeed nature at one
remove, for art, aa Burke puts it, is man's ,
nature.

Burke, undoubtedly, saw only a portion of the
great phenomenon which was unrolling itself
before Europe. He laid himself open to rebuke
by an imperfection of vision, by excesses of
temper, and by un discriminating extravagances
of statement. " Mackintosh," writes Mr. Mor-
ley, " replied to the ' Reflections ' with manli-
ness and temperance in the ' Vindieise Gallicse.'
Thomas Paine replied to them with an eaeigy.

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ANTl-HEVOLnnOH

courage, and eloquence worthy of hia cause in
the ' Eights of Man.' But the substantial and \
decisive reply to Burke came from his former \
correspondent, the farmer at Biadfield in Sul-"^
folk. Arthur Young published his ' Travels in
France ' some eighteen months after the ' Re-
flections ' (1792) ; and the pages of the twenty-
first chapter, in which he closes bis performance,
as a luminous criticism of the most important
side of the Revolution, are worth a hundred
times more than Burke, Mackintosh, and Faine
bU put together. Young afterwards became panic-
stricken, but his book remained. There the
writer plainly enumerates without trope or in-
vective the intolerable burdens under which the
great mass of the^rench people had for years
.been groaning. "N ■ Bnt Burke's contention was
not in favor of the old regime ; though his sense
of the oppression of the French peasantry was
inadequate, he admitted the abuses of the gov-
ernment. His contention was that the Revolu-
tionary method of remedying abuses was an
unsound method, and that it had not led to
happy results^ Young's " Travels in France," \
far from constituting a "substantial and deci- )
sive reply " to Burke, supports his conclusions, — ^
A change in France, a reform or a series of

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128 THE FRENCH EETOL0TION

reforms, had, in Young's opinion, become a
necessity; but he held with Burke that a con-
stitutional reform was possible, and that unmeas-
ured evils had been brouglit upon the country
by the Revolution. It was not only the nobil-
ity or the clergy who were the suEFerers ; manu-
factures decayed; many thousands of families
were condemned to death by starvation. Young
had himself seen the miserable wretches at
Lyons, at Abbeville, at Amiens. He had a
faith that the effects of the Eevolution on the
small landed proprietors must " in the end " be
happy; hut under the system adopted by the
Assembly he declares, with the emphasis of
capital letters, " Agriculture cannot flourish."
He maintains that to effect all that was neces-
sary, it did not require that " all France should
be overthrown, ranks annihilated, property at-
tacked, the monarchy abolished," civil war ren-
dered imminent. No ; he was of Burke's opinion.
" France," he writes, " might have been free with-
out violence. . . . The weight of the commons
would have beeu predominant; bnt it would
have had checks and a control, without which
power is not constitution, but tyranny." As he
wrote tlius, Young regarded the Eevolution with
more favor than he did a year later, when he

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AHTI-HEVOLDTION 129

could study its fuller development. In 1793 he
wrote still cautiously, not in a panic but with
fresh facts before him. He tells the reader of
his pamphlet " The Example of France a Warning
to Britain," that he has a constitutional abhor-
rence of theory ; he is a farmer, who patiently
observes positive facts ; he will speak only of the
results of the great political experiment He
considers, first, the actual state of France, and,
secondly, the causes of her ills, before applying
her warning example to the landed, moneyed, com-
mercial, and laboring interests of Great Britain.
" We may say with truth and moderation,"
writes Young, " that [the new French constitu-
tion] has brought more misery, poverty, devasta-
tion, imprisonment, bloodshed, and ruin on France
in four years than the old government did in a
century." The state of France as regards the
personal liberty of her subjects be describes in
five words, — there is no such thing. " A gigantic
and devouring despotism has levelled in the dust
all security to those whose properties raise them
above the mob." Young, Mr. Morley tells us,
knew of the intolerable burdens under which the
French people had groaned. What is his state-
ment ? (and he wrote, not as a Tory, but as a
friend to reform in England.) " The old govern-

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130/ THE FRENCH EEVOLCTION

no/

HKnt

Drent of France," he declares, " with all ita faults,
"was certainly the best enjoyed by any conaider-

/' able coimtry in Europe, England alone excepted ;

'i but there were many faults in it which every
class of tlie people wished to remedy. ... At
^e commencement of the Eevolution, France
possessed a very flourishing commerce, the rich-
est colonies in the world, the greatest currency
of solid money in Europe ; her agriculture was
improving; and her people, though from too
great a population, much too numerous for the
highest degrees of national prosperity, were yet
more at their ease than in many other countries
of Europe ; the government was regular and mild.
. . . Her present state may thus with truth be
described : Her government an anarchy that
values neither life nor property; her agriculture
fast sinking, her farmers the slaves of all, and
her people starving; her manufactures annihi-
lated, her commerce destroyed, and her colonies
absolutely ruined ; her gold and silver disap-
peared ; her national revenue diminished three-
fourths ; her cities scenes of revolt, of massacre
and starvation ; and her provinces plundered by
gangs of banditti. ... It is the legislation ot
wolves that govern only by destruction ; and all
these massacres, and plundertags, and burnings.

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ANTI-REVOLDTION 131

and horrors of every denomination are so far from
being necessary for the establishment of liberty
that they have most effectually destroyed it."

So much for the testimony of Arthur Young,
both in his Travels and his pamphlet Paine,
Mr. Morley informs us, replied to Burke's " Re-
flections " "in a manner worthy of his cause."
Apparently the Cause waa not worthy of Thomas
Paine. In 1793 he was elected to the Conven-
tion as deputy for the Fas de Calais ; a little
later he was arrested, imprisoned, and denounced.
" The state of things in the prisons," lie says,
" was a continued scene of horror, No man could
count upon life for twenty-four hours." What
he desired above all else was " forgetfulness."
Thanks to the efforts of his adopted countrymen,
he was liberated as an American citizen. While
remaining faithful to his Republican principles,
he has to describe the Revolutionary government
as " a thing without either principle or authority."
" Virtue or crime," he says, " depended on acci-
dent, and that which was patriotism one day
became treason the next." As to Mackintosh,
whose " Vindiciae Gallicie " Mr. Morley justly com-
mends, it should not be forgotten that he made
a manly recantation of his earlier opinions, and
soi^ht for the friendship of Burke. " From the

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132 THE FRENCH KKVOLCrfoN

earlieBt moment of reflection," he wrote, "your
writings were my chief study and delight. . . .
For a time, indeed, seduced hy the love of what I
thought liberty, I ventured to oppose, without
ever ceasing to venerate, that writer who had
nourished my understanding with the most
wholesome principles of political wisdom. I
speak to state facts, not to flatter: you are above
flattery, and, permit me to say, I am too proud to
flatter even you." Mr. Morley can hardly be ac-
counted happy in his choice of witnesses against
Burke.

Trained to public life as a member of the Whig
party of the e^hteenth century, Burke in his
sympathies was aristocratical. He speaks of the
People as a venerable object ; but it was a dis-
ciplined, ordered people that he regarded with
veneration ; in the people reduced to a mob of
jarring atoms he saw only a disbanded race of
deserters and vagabonds. " For a while they may
be terrible indeed; but in such manner as wild
beasts are terrible. The mind owes to them no
sort of submission." Here is the explanation of
the words which roused such strong indignation
among Burke's opponents, and which were so
often turned against him, — "the swinish mul-
titude." The multitude, according to Burkev is

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ANTI-REVOLUTION 133

not swinish while it forms a true People ; then
it ia venerable and mysteriously sacred : but a
disorganized mob is not the People ; it is a " dis-
banded race of deserters ; " it may soon acquire
the rapacity, the ferocity, the dulness, the gross-
ness of the beast. For the sake not of a class but
of the whole people he estimated highly the value
of what he terms a natural aristocracy ; he views
such an aristocracy not as a separate interest in
the state nor as separable from it. Its origin is
in nature, and in the facts of social life which
are a part of nature : " To be bred in a place of
estimation ; to see nothing low or sordid from
one's infancy ; to be taught to respect oneself ; to
be habituated to the censorial inspection of the
public eye ; to look early to public opinion ; to
stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled
to take- a lai^e view of the widespread and infi-
nitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in
a large society ; to have leisure to read, to reflect,
to converse ; to be enabled to draw the court and
attention of the wise and learned wherever they
are to be found ; to be habituated in armies to
command and to obey; to be taught to despise
dangers in the pursuit of honor and duty ; to be
formed to the greatest d^ree of vigilance, fore-
sight, and circumspection, in a state of things in

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134 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

which no fault is committed with impunity, and
the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous
consequences ; to he led to a guarded and regu-
lated conduct, from a sense that you are eonsid-.
ered an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their
highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler
between God and man; to be employed as an ad-
ministrator of law and justice, and to be thereby
amongst the first benefactors of mankind ; to be
a professor of high science or of liberal and in-
genuous art ; to be amongst rich traders who
from their success are presumed to have sharp
and vigorous understandings, and to possess the
virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regu-
larity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard
to commutative justice, — these are the circum-
stances of men which form what I should call a
natural aristocracy, without which there is no
nation."

Even the prejudices created by rank and sta-
tion were not viewed with entire disfavor by
Burke. "That a man should be looked up to
with servility and awe," wrote Godwin in " Po-
litical Justice," " because the king has bestowed
on him a spurious name, or decorated him with a
ribband; that another should wallow in luxury,
because his ancestor three centuries ago bled in the

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ANTI-REVOLUTION 135

quarrel of Lancaster and York, — do we imagine
that these iniquities can be practised without in-
jury ? " Such a violent outcry against aristocracy
■Burke took to be a mere work of art. " To be
honored," he says, " and even privileged by the
laws, opinions, and inveterate usages of oiir coun-
try, growing out of the prejudice of ages, has
nothing to provoke horror or indignation in any
man." For even in prejudices there lay, as Burke
conceived, a certain sanctity and a certain utility.
He boldly asserts that be will cherish old preju-
dices for the reason that they are old. Xltf Jong
lif£_of_ a prejudice ai^u esin f avor of^ its containing
amnflj atent wisdom : " We are afraid to put men
to live and trade eacli on his own private stock
of reason, because we suspect that the stock in
each man is small, and that the individuals would
do better to avail themselves of the general bank
and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our
men of speculation instead of exploding general
prejudices employ their sagacity to discover the
latent wisdom whieh prevails in them." Even
from superstition resources may be derived for
the public advantage — that is to say, not from
the untruths of superstition, but from its hidden
truth. The movement of thought in the nine-
teenth century has been along the line indicated

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\>or

136 THE rRENCH. REVOLUTION ,

by Burke ; the Eevolutionary rage against the
pptb-bebefs of mankind has gjven place to an his-
torical study of their or^ns and their significance.
When Mill pointed to Coleridge "^a dividing with
Bentham the best mind of the age, — Bentham
asking in regard to any ancient or received opin-
ion the question, Is it true ? and Coleridge ask-
ing, What is the meaning of it ? — he might
• hftve added that Coleridge in his way of thinking
was in fact the follower of Burke.

Burke's view of the Revolution was incom-
plete ; he was not fully informed, and perhaps he
did not sufficiently allow for the recuperative
forces of society working in and through and
after a great cataclysm. But he expressed, with
incomparable power, one entire side of the truth.
And his wisdom was confirmed by events. " Oh,
heavenly philanthropists," exMaimed Price, in a .
speech on the occasion of the first anniversary of
the fall of the Bastille, " well do you deserve the
admiration not only of your own country, but of
all countries I You have already determined to
renounce forever all wars of conquest and all
offensive wars. This is an instance of wisdom and
attention to human rights which has no example.
But you will do more ; you will invite Great
Britain to join you in this determination, and to

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ANTI-REVOLUTION 137

enter into a compact with you for promoting
peace on earth, gooi^ will among men. , , , Thus
united, the two kingdoms will be omnipotent." ^
Such was the political prediction in July, 1790,
of a Eevolutionary optimiBt. In November of
the same year — still in the golden days of the
Revolution — appeared Burke's " Ketlections."
Mr. Leckj has gathered together some of its
anticipations of things to come. Burke pre-
dicted the transitoriness of the new government,
the fall in the value of paper money, the confis-
cation of Church property, the national bank-
ruptcy, the destruction of the monarchy, the
abolition of the Christian religion, the transfer- I
ence of power to the hands of the most extreme
and violent party. He added that the anarchy
of the Eevolution would close with a military
■ despotism. "The'officers of the army," he said,
" will remain for some time mutinous and full
of faction, until some popular general who
understands the art of conciliating the soldiery
and who possesses the true spirit of command
shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.
Armies will obey him on hia personal account
. . . But the moment in which that event

^ Quoted hj Lecky , England in the Eighteenth Ceutor;',
toL v. pp. 450, 451.

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138 THE FRENCH BEVOLUTION

shall happen, the person who really commands
the army is your master; the master (that
is little) of your King, the master of your
Assembly, the master of your whole republic."
Burke's prophecies were fulfilled to the letter.
His vision did not advance to the remote future.
He did not describe the recuperative energies of
France. But neither did he describe how France
staggered from Revolution to Revolution, from
monarchy to republic, from republic to empire,
from an empire to a commune, and again to a
republic. The great movement inaugurated in
1789 has not yet reached its term ; we have seen
a century of its evolution with mingled good and
evil. It was much that Burke, as early as 1790,
discerned the portentous figure of Napoleon
Bonaparte.^

' Since this lecture was delivered, Princeton UniTereity has
made two valuable additions to the stndjof Buike, — ProfesBor
Woodrow Wilsou'g maay, "An Interpreter of English Liberty,"
in his TOlame " Mete Literatnre ; " and Professor Perry's " f e-
leclioDS from Edmaad Bnrke," with ao Intiod notion, notes, and
bibliography.

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IV

EAELY EEVOLUTIONAEY GROUP AND
ANTAGONISTS: SOUTHEY, COLERIDGE,
THE "ANTI-JACOBIN" (WITH A NOTE
ON BUENS).

:,q,z.-3b,.Google

X

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IV

EAELY EEVOLTJTIONAEY GROUP AND
ANTAGONISTS

When the Revolutionary uprising in France con-
centrated upon itself the attention of Europe, the
original work of Cowper as a poet was virtually
ended From 1785 until 1791 he was chiefly oc-
cupied with his translation of Homer. After that
date he employed himself upon a translation of
Milton's Latin poems. The verses " To Mary **
and his last original verses, " The Castaway,"
show that amid sadness and gloom the poet still
lived within him. He was, however, far removed
from the possibility of seizing and interpreting
the puhlic passions of the time. Another poet,
who died four years before Cowper, is at once a
*predecessor and a contemporary of the Eevolution.
The Kilmarnock edition of the poems of Burns
appeared in 1786 j'his death took place ten years
later, in the summer "of 1796. 'While pre-
eminently a national poet, he was more than

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142 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

national ; he belonged in a true sense to the Euro-
pean movement of his time. His strength was
partly an inheritance from the singers of his na-
tive land. It is often said that Burns created
Scottish song ; it would be more true, observes
Principal Shairp, to say that Scottish song created
Bums, Not indeed the old ballad poetry of Scot-
land : if Burns admired such poetry, it did not
profoundly influence liis art ; bis imagination was
less romantic than passionate. The popular songs,
often wedded to melodies gay or pathetic and
penetrating, sank into bis spirit and became a
part of his inmost self. The forms of verse which
seem most characteristically his own were caught
from his predecessors ; the intensity of feeling, the
heart of his poetry, was given by his own tender
and impetuous heart Matthew Arnold deplored
the fact that the poetry of Bums deals with the
unlovely world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion,
and Scotch manners. Perhaps it is wise, even in
the interests of the highest literature, to be less
fa.stidious ; perhaps much genial life, much beauty
underlay what seemed unlovely to one whose work
is so little rooted iu the homely soil, and so largely
the outcome of a period of spiritual trouble re-
sulting from the conflict of creeds and cultures.
The environment of- Burns was not unfavorable

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EAELY REVOLUTIONARY GROUP 143

to his geniua/ He drew strength from the soU.
We cannot wish that he had sung out of the air.
If be was to be inspired by any drink, the most
suitable for Bacchanal enthusiasm was not hydro
mel or nectar, but the juice "Scotch bear can
mak' us," —

"Whether thro' wimplin' worma it jink.
Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink
In glorious iacin."

In Scotch manners there was much dignity,
grace, and warm humanity ; and Scotch piety does
not show itself as altogether uncomely in " The
Cotter's Saturday Night"

But the poetry of Burns is more than Scottish ;
it belongs to Europe ; it embodied in local forms
much of the prevailing sentiment of the age.
"The influences under which Burns was tutored
into song," writes one of his critics, " were as emi-
nently European in fact as they were singularly
provincial in appearance. , , . The intellectual
activity and turmoil which led to the Revolution
was a phenomenon to which he was no more of
a stranger in his bumble and straitened sphere
of life than to summer's heat or winter's cold.
■ . . Bums's poems and songs are a programme I
of social and political reform and progress, or at I
any rate aspiration, — as radical a programme as

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144 THE FBENCH KEVOLUTION

^ could well be framed. ... As far aa there is
any need to characterize his poetical lineage and

' development, this identifies Bums with the Rev-
olution." ' In Bums, then, beside the common
human element, realized with the utmost inten-
sity, which gives vitality to his best work, there
are present at once the Scottish and the wider
European influences conjoined, and each playing
into the other. He is the pupil of Allan Bam-
say, but how different is the tone of the younger
poet! What fire, what indignation, what a
spirit of revolt have entered into his verse ! Tlie
contrast is happily pointed by Professor Nichol
when he places side by side the " Gentle Shep-
herd" and the "Jolly Beggars": "The one is a
couiL^pastQral, like a minuet of the ladies of
Versailles on the sward of the Swis^ village near
the Trianon ; the other is like the march of the
Msenads with Th^roigne de Mericourt. . . , The
graceless crew are raised above the level of
gypsies, footpads, and rogues, and made, like
Titans, to launch their thunders of rebellion
against the world."

The influence of the French Kevolution was to
some extent a disturbing influence on the out-
ward life of Burns. An exciseman in the em-
1 Dr. Service in Ward's The Gngli»h Poote, vol. iii

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EARLY REVOLUriONAKY GHODP U5

ployment of the government liad giveo pledges to
law and order. When, in 1792, he purchased. the
guns of a condemned smuggler, which had gone
ashore on the sands of the Solway Firth, it was as
a gift for the French legislatiye.'bQdy, to which at
the same time he addressed a letter expressing his
admiration and esteem. Attention was directed
to his conduct, and, full of alarm for his wife and
weans, he wrote to Graham of Fintry a letter in
which he professes the most devoted attachment
to the British Constitution. At a dinner, when
Pitt's health was proposed, Bums rose and aaked
leave to drink to a greater and a better man, —
General Washington. '■' On another occasion the
toast was even more significant, — " The last
verse of the last chapter of the last Book of
Kings." ' ■ Once, according to the report of Charles
Kirkpatrick Sharpe, when at a dramatic perform-
ance at Dumfries "God Save the King" was
called for, and the audience stood up uncov-
ered, Burns eat still in the pit with his hat on
his head. And again he sought the protection of
Graham, with superabundant declarations of loy-
alty. " As to France," he says, " I was her en-
thusiastic votary at the beginning of the business.
When she came to show her oHaTidity for con-
quest in annexing Savoy, eta, to her dominions,

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146 THE FREJirCH BEVOLUTION

and invading the rights of Holland, I altered my
seutiments."

By virtue of his ardent and undisciplined tem-
perament, by his peasant origin and his experi-
ence of the Bufiferings of the poor, by that pride
of manhood and of gOiius which made him feel
himself an equal of prince or peer, by the zeal of
his humanitarian sympathies, by his seotimental
Jacobitism and his imaginative enthusiasm for
the traditions of Scottish independence, by the
tact that he belonged to the democratic Presby-
terian Church and sympathized with the party of
spiritual revolt. Burns was fitted to be a spokes-
man of the passions of the time. The passions
of the time, for doctrine and theory took little
hold on the mind of Bums until they were
caught into the kindling heat of passion. M.
Angellier, to whose admirable volumes on Burns
I gratefully acknowledge my debt, has remarked
that| so long as the Eevolution retained a philo-
sophic and doctrinaire aspect it left Bums almost
! untouched. "It is only," he writes, " when the
Revolution became violent, tragic, and essentially
a movement of popular masses, . . . when it
ceased to be a declaration of ahstracfc. principles,
and passed into a conflict of passions," that Burns
was deeply moved. ; Other writers of the time

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EARLY EBVOLUTIONAHY GKOUP 147

were philosophers or visionaries, who contem-
plated human affairs from their mounts of spec-
ulation. ' Burns has rather the aspect of a '
revolutioBary on the barricade, — " The general
idea disappears; the passion of the moment
breaks forth with something of the rage and fury
of the street." ■ The poet's Eevolutionary ardor
vented itself chiefly in hasty escapades of action
and e^er snatches of song ; for his nature was
essentially lyrical. When he sang, as a patriotic
North Briton, his chant "Does haughty Gaul
invasion threat," and declared bis adhes^pn to
the party of order, be bad still a word to say on
behalf of popular rights, —

" Who will not aing ' God save the King •
Shall hang as high 's the steeple ;
But while we sing ' God save the King,'
We 'Jl ne'er forget the People,"

/ It is especially as the poet of Equality — a
point justly insisted on by bis learned French
critic — that Bums belongs to the Revolution.
" The rank is but the guinea's stamp," — such is
his teaching, — "a man 's a man for a' that." He
had seen and felt early in life the hardships of

I BoberC Biim9,tome ii. p. SOS. Bams'a aathoTship of "The
Tree oC Libettj " (Chambers, vol. iii. pp. 97-99) is, however,
discredited. {

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148 THE FEEJfCH REVOLUTION

the toilers in the field. He had suffered in health
through the severity of labor imposed on him in
boyhood. He had witnessed the brave struggle
maintained by his father at Mount Olipbant, aad
had sung his song of the " Ruined Farmer," —
" The prosperoua man is asleep,
Nor hears how the whirlwinds sveepi
But Misery and I must watch
The surly tempest blow."

At times he expresses his sense of the worth
of manhood with dignity ; at times there breaks
from him a cry of bitter revolt He writes to
Mrs. Dunlop in 1789 : " When I must skulk into a
corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping
blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am
tempted to exclaim, ' What merits has he had, or
what demerits have I had, in some state of pre-
existence, that he is ushered into this state of
being with the sceptre of rule and the bey of
riches ia his puny fist, and I am kicked into the
world the sport of folly, or the victim of pride ? ' "
The Auld Brig of Ayr cannot restrain its indigna-
tion against " corky -headed, graceless gentry," —

" The herryment and ruin of the country j
Men, three-parts made by Tailors and by Barbers."

"A lord," Burns cries in one of the Heron Bal-
lads, may be " a gouk " and creepingly unclean,

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EARLY REVOLUTIONARY GROUP 149

"wi' ribbon, star, and a' that." The N<^wfound-
land Ctesar describes to tlie plebeian collie the
manner of life too common among those of high
degree ;^the innocent Luath had supposed that
gentlefolk went a-parliamenting in their coun-
try's service: —

" Haith, lad, ye little ken about it ;

For Britain's guid I guid faith 1 I doubt it.

Say rather, gaun aa Premiers lead him,

An' saying aye or no 'a they bid him;

At operas and plays parading.

Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading."

Abroad at "NAehna or Versailles the youth of
fashion squanders his paternal estate, or he
thrums guitars at Madrid, or swallows German
waters to make himself look fair and fat: —

" There 's some eiceptions, man and woman,
But this is gentry's life in common."

" Man," Bums wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, " is by no .
means a happy creature. I do not speak of the
selecte.d few, favored by partial Heaven, whose
souls are tuned to gladness amid riches, and hon-
ors, and prudence, and wisdom. I speak of the
neglected many, whose nerves, whose sinews,
whose days, are sold to the minions of fortune."
And in a like spirit were composed the tragic
stanzas, "Man was made to mourn": —

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150 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

"See yonder poor o'erlabor'd wight,

So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth

To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm

The poor petition epurn.
Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife

And helpless offspring mourn."

In atich poetry the note is sounded, aa M. An-
gellier expresses it, for the revolt of the prole-
tariat. It is a just observation of the critic that
the Revolution in France assisted Burns in puri-
fying his private passion from what was merely
egoistic, and in raising his innate feeling in favor
of equality to the dignity'of a geheral principle.

So Bums expresses the aggressive or destruc-
tive side of the doctrine of human Equality ; but
as often he expresses the positive side, — a leveller
still, but levelling up, by exhibiting the worth of
, humble life. And at such times he rect^nizes
that there is not only much worth but also much
happiness in the cottage. Honest Luath, the
collie, has a word to say of the compensations
that are found in a poor estate, — repose after
fatigue, — "a blink o' rest 's a sweet enjoyment,"
— the domestic joy of wife and children, —

" The prattling things are just their pride,
That sweetens a' their fireside," —

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EARLY REVOLUTIONARY GROUP 151

and social mirth and wit, heightened by " twal-

pennie- worth o' nappie." In the admirable

" Epistle to Davie " the sftme happier apirit is the

prevailing one. Bums confesses that

"It *s hardly in a body's pow'r

To keep, at times, frae being sour,

To see how things are ahar'd; "

bnt he will not dwell on this : he will rather keep
in view the delights and solaces of humble life,
— sunUglit of the conscience, wisdom of the heart,
the loyalty of a comrade, the blessedness of love.
The honest man, he elsewhere sings, though of
the poorest, may be a king of men : —

" What tho' on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden^ay, and a' tliat;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man 's a man for a' that."

" I recollect once Burns told me," wrote Dugald
Stewart, " when I was admiring a distant prospect
in one of our morning walks, that the sight of
so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his
mind which none could understand who had
not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and
the worth which they contained.",// Bums has
himself shown us the real nobility and beauty
of a rustic interior in his "Cotter's Saturday
Night." " Never," writes his French bic^rapher

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^

152 THE FRENCH BEVOLIITION

and critic, " has such dignity been shed over the
life of the poor. It is a consecration of natural
piety, of domestic love, of resignation, of manly
honesty, — all found under a lowly roof; a solemn
homage to modest virtues." And the ideal pre-
sented in the poem is not removed from reality ;
it is no false Arcadian pastoral, but a fragment
of genuine Scottish life and manners. Only, m
we read it, we should bear in mind that the
democratic sympathies of Bums did not exclude
another and a different side of humanity. Over
against a " Cotter's Saturday Night," if we would
comprehend the genius of its author, we should
set his picture of the ragged vagrants' revel by
the fireside in Poosie-Nansie's. It is like a pic-
ture of Teniera, wrought to higher verve and
more abundant animal exaltation than could
animate the veins or inspire the imagination of
the Flemish artist.

While Bums, the peasant-poet of Equality, was ■
interpreting the new passions of the age, in alter-
nating moods of indignation, love, and pity, the
same" European influences which affected his art
were at play among young and aspiring spirits
who were now about to pass from the learned
culture of the English universities to creative
work in the world of thought and imagination.

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EAKLY HEVOLUTIONARY GROUP 153

Of the three future friends, Wordsworth, Cole-
ridge, and Southey, although Wordsworth felt
the ConeuBaion of the Trench Eevolution more
profoundly, if not earlier, than either of the
others, it will be convenient to speak first of
Southey and Coleridge, who were, brought into
close relations, personal and literary, to each
other before Wordsworth became a member of
the group.

yiewed broadly, the result of. the great up-
heaval in France upon young men of genius who. ■
lay open to its influence may be said to have
been of a twofold kind : first, emotional, and,
secondly, intellectual. It infused a glow into
their feelings, and through their feelings into
their imagination ; and £^ain it set them upon
a courageous inquisition into first principles, —
first principles of politics, of morals, and of the
individual life as it is connected with the life of
society. They were ' lovers before they became
thinkers, but thought was fostered by love. The
object of their passion was not a single person,
but society itself : —

" Society became my glittering bride.
And airy hopes my children."

In this passion there was, no doubt, something
immature, something hectic, something turbid.

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154 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

much unwise heat, not a little of illusion. It
was not all illusion ; and indeed there aie illu-
sions which lead us towards the truth. In those
days, says Wordsworth, it was bliss to be alive ;
the bliss was composed of a boundless hope, an
unqualified faith, and a faith and hope which
seemed to be one with charity for all mankind.
This glow of spirit could not contract itself
within a defined area ; like flame, it leaped the
bounds of political affairs, and passed into every
mansion of the spirit, even into every habitation
of dreams. In its direct and immediate influ-
ence the genius of the Revolution did an injury 1
to art ; it tended to convert the poet into a
declaimer, a preacher, the missionary of an ill-
considered evangeL In its remoter effects the
gain was real and great. Audacities of the
imagination became easy and natural, which
twenty years previously had been impossible,
or, at best, would have resulted in strain and
spasm. Such a vast exploration of the individual
mind and of the life of society as Wordsworth
intended in his unfinished poem "The Recluse"
(of which " The Prelude " and " The Excursion "
are but fragments) might never have been con-
ceived were it not that the deep and generous
excitement of the tia? had aroused every faculty

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EARLY EEVOLUTIONARY GROUP 155

and helped to fuse all his powers into one glowing

masa,—

"Urania, T shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such
Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven I
For I must tread od shadowy ground, must eink
Deep — and aloft asceudiug breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil."

_3uch wide-orbing speculations, or shadows and
phantasms of speculation, as were set in motion
by Coleridge's braio derived their existence from
those passions which roused his intellect to seek
out general principles as the explanation and \/
justification of his hopes and fears. Snch bold
acquisition and skilful arrangement of masses of
material as are seen in Southey's series of narra-
tive poems, illustrating the religions of the world,
Mohammedan, Hindoo, Christian, came only in
part from his native alertness and energy of
mind ; that enei^y was in large part infused into
him by the emotional excitement of the time,
which entering his spirit passed from the sphere
of political interests to the region of the imagina-
tion. In times of ease we steer our way by a
little watchfulness and dexterity, a geotle shift-
ing of the helm to right or left ; but when the
storm is up, we have larger problems to consider.
With minds such as Southey's, minds which were

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156 THE FRENCH REVOLDTION

not endowed with any high gift of speculation,
the influence of the Revolution was in the main
an affair of tho heart, an afEair of aentiment.
l^^ With Wordsworth and Coleridge, who followed
ideas and created new combinations oE thdught
and feeling, the intellectual influence, if not
I primary, was of equal power with that which
/ aroused the passions. They could not feel
I strongly without seekiag to establish their feel-
I iugs upon a basis of thought. The principles
I of society, the laws of the individual mind, be-
I came with them the subjects of studious meiii-
tation. But because their whole nature was
aroused, they could not conduct their study of
first principles by the understanding alone; feel-
ings and imftgination must needs co-operate with '
the understanding. They were thinkers, but of
the emotional and imaginative, not of the ratio-
cinative, order. And their inquisition into first
principles extended beyond politics and morals,
to religion, to art, to literature. Such a research
for the foundations of belief and of opinion under-
lies much of Wordsworth's poetry ; it directed and
controlled all the later work of Coleridge.

Add to this another important influence on
literature proceeding from the great series of
events connected with the Revolution. This

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EABLY EEVOLUTIONAKY GEOUP 157

stupeDdous epic of history amved at a moment
when the Komantic revival was in full progress. -
In Germany, in France, in England, the Romantic
movement was characterized by an immense de-
velopment in literature of the persona!, the in-
dividual factor. It was in large measure a
translation of the principle of' individualism into
art. The literature of the classical period in
France, the literature of the age of Louis XIV.,
had been eminently social. It rested upon a
broad community of thought and of sentiment
existing between the writers of the time and
the audience which they addressed. Hence,
while it was distinguished in the region of
oratory, in the eloquence of public satire, the
eloquence of great preachers, the magnificent
rhetoric of the stage, there was almost a total
absence of the lyrical element, the cry of indi-
vidual passion. Even the majestic choruses of
" Athalie " are the expression, not of private, but
of public passion. Even the exquisite sentiment
of La Fontaine's Fables is a sentiment which
arises from a common bonhomie and an average
good sense. The same general statement is true I
of English literature of the age of Queen Anne. I
It was eminently social, and this social quality
is its highest characteristic. The poets and I

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158 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

I essayists endeavored to say what waa known to
all, what was felt by all, what would be at once
accepted by all, but what had never before beea
so happily expressed. And, accordingly, lyrical
poetry languished in what is called our Augustan
age. The EiMiantic movement, on the contrary,
was an assertion of the ego. The individual,
private passion of a Saint Preux, of a Werther,
claimed its rights, and declared that all men
must accept it, even in its excess, with sympa-
thetic interest. The closing years of the eigh-
teenth century and the opening years of the
nineteenth, with Burns and Blake, Coleridge and
Keats, Byron and Shelley, are pre-eminent for
the keenness and the intensity of the lyrical cry
in literature. A vast epic, however, of historical
struggle, of national aspiration and national
effort, was being unrolled before the eyes of men.
It did not stifle the lyrical cry of the Eomantic
poets, but it added a breadth and volume to their
passions. It.lifted Byron out of his egoism. It
made Shelley look from cloudland to the earth. .
Eminent poets Byron and Shelley must have
been in any age ; but in an age of tranquillity
their poetry would have lost half its motive
power. We might have had an " Epipsychidion,"
a " Sensitive Plant," a " Skylark," an " Elegy on

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EARLY EEVOLUTiONARY GROUP 159

Thyrza," or such a lyric romance as " When we
two parted ; " assuredly we should never have
~had a "Prometheus Unbound," an "Ode to
Liberty," a " Prophecy of Dante," or a " Childe
Harold,"

One of the chief interests of a critic in study-
ing the literature of this extraordinary epoch lies
in the effort which he is called on to make in
order to disentangle the various influences which
became formative in the work of each eminent
writer of the time. We have seen how the spirit /
of the Evangelical Revival, the new warmth of I
religious feelmg, was united in the poetry of j
Cowper with the philanthropic or humanitarian ;
sentiment of his age, and with the Revolutionary
tendency towards simplification. Through Burns
the old stream of Scottish song flowed into the
new enthusiasm of the Revolution with its as-
piration towards equality. Both Coleridge and
Southey belonged to the Romantic movement:.
the latter accepting it in its more obvious aspects,^
but allying romance with a noble, ethical feeling ; ;
the former refining romance through the rare
delicacy of his imagination. Both were affected
by the sentimentality of the second half of the
eighteenth century ; but Southey, in his early
years, in a far greater degree than Coleridge, partly

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160 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

because he was less interested in general ideas,
partly because he was less remote in the processes
of his imagination from real life, from the ways
and works of men, and had a more direct sym-
pathy with the sorrows of the outcast and the
, down-trodden. Coleridge, on the other hand, was
I influenced far more than Southey by the philo-
I sophical transcendentalism of the age, that new
I turn of speculation, accompanied by a correspond-
j ing movement of the feelings and the imagina-
I tion, which found a Divine Presence immanent in
all the operations of nature and in all the evolv-
ing changes of human society.

Southey's literary activity was much greater
than that of either Wordsworth, or Coleridge.
By the close of the century his published work
far exceeded in quantity that of either of his
friends. It was his merit to have his faculties
well in baud ; he did not brood and contemplf^te,
like Wordsworth ; he did not dream and loiter
N. like Coleridge. He was ambitious of achieve-
ment; be accumulated and arranged; he taxed
his nerve and his invention; ho was on the way
to become a skilled literary craftsman. His was
a high-strung nature, full of nervous energy,
alert and sensitive. I have elsewhere described
him — and the words are not inappropriate — as

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EARLY EETOLUTIONAEY GEOUP 161

an Arab steed doing tlie work of a pack-horse.
" How has this man," asked Carlyle, when he met
Soutbey in 1836, or a year later, " contrived, with
such a nervous system, to keep alive for near
sixty years ? Now blushing under his gray hairs,
rosy like a maiden of fifteen ; now slaty almost,
like a rattlesnake or fiery serpent ? How has he
not been torn to pieces long since, under such
furious pulling this way and that? He must
Have somewhere a great deal of methodic virtue
in him ; I suppose, too, his heart is thoroughly
honest, which helps considerably!" His heart
was, indeed, what Carlyle supposed it. And he
brought to literature something which controlled
his excessive sensibility, — a certain Stoicism, in-
creased by hia devotion to Epictetus, an ardent
admiration for heroic character in man and
woman, and a finely poised will. He toiled
among books ; the accumulated possessions of his
intellect balanced, and sometimes more than bal-
anced, hia inborn powers. Yet, in general, be-
fore the material which he had acquired left his
mind, it had received the peculiar impress of
his individuality.

The Revolution reached him early ; a sanguine
temperament predisposed him to accept its ra-
diant promises ; it announced new heroisms,

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162 THE FEESCH KEVOLCTIOlf

and his heart was high-mettled. He accepted
the political doctrine en Uoc. " I read and all
but worshipped Godwin," he aaya; yet he re-
mained essentially idealistic, and at no time
was attracted by the materialistic teaching of
French eighteenth-cen'tury philosophy, from
^ which Godwin had derived much. " In my
youth," he wrote, " when my stock of knowledge
consisted of such an acquaintance with Greek
Bud Roman history as is acquired in the course
of a regular scholastic education, when my heart
was full of poetry and romance, and Lucan and
Akenside were at my tongue's end, I fell into the
political opinions which the French Kevolntion
was then scattering throughout Europe ; and fol-
lowing those opinions with ardor wherever they
led, I soon perceived that jiueqnalities of rank
were a light evil compared to the inequalities
of property, and those more fearful distinctions
which the want of moral and intellectual culture
occasion between man and man. At that time,
and with those opinions, or rather feelings (for
their root was in the heart and not in the ander-
standing), I wrote ' Wat Tyler,' as one who was
impatient of 'all the oppressions that are done
under the sun.' "

"Wat Tyler" may serve to warn any young

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EARLY REVOLUTIONARY GROUP 163

poet of the dangers of making Lis art a direct [
vehicle for poljtical doctrine. It transfers to
dramatis personcB of the fourteenth century, in !
almost a crude form, the Revolutionary senti-
ments and Bevolutionary rhetoric of the writer's
own day. While hia daughter and her lover
dance gayly around the maypole, Tyler, the Dept-
ford blacksmith, looks on with a brow of gloom.
All his life he has been a staid, hard-working
man, —

" Up with the lark at labor — sober — honest —
Of an unblemish'd character."

It is bitterness to his soul to reflect that the
fruit of his toil amounts to the six groats which
are presently to be claimed by the tax-gatherer.
And for what? To massacre the French (as in
Southey's own day), to murder men he had never
seen 1 When Tyler has avenged the insult
offered to his child, and the mob assemble with
cries of " Liberty ! liberty ! no war ! " the task
awaits them of delivering from prison the vir-
tuous and benevolent priest, John Ball, whose
lessons to his flock have been learnt from Dr.
Priestley and Dr. Price, with occasional lectures
from William Godwin. The Archbishop of Can-
terbury, a melancholy contrast to the priest of
the people, urges that King Eichard should meet

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164 THE FHEHCH REVOLnTIOS

the rebels, concede all their demands, swearing in
their presence a solemn oath, from w)iich he shall
be afterwards duly absolved, while, at the mo-
ment, the royal troops gather around to capture
or to slay the ringleaders. Tyler ia stabbed from
behind as he pleads for the rights of the sove-
reign people. A mock trial is reserved for Ball,
who announces, in presence of the king and
I nobles, the evangel of equality, prophesies the
1 time when those truths for which he is about to
suffer shall be confessed by all men, and calmed
by his vision of the future receives from Sir John
Tresiliau's lips the seuteuce that he shall suffer
the utmost penalties of the law. Southey'e dra-
matic sketch was a hasty product of his twentieth
year; there is nothing in it to dishonor his
heart, and at twenty it is no disgrace to be
neither a thinker nor a dramatic craftsman.

Southey's sympathies went with the Girondist
party. Their successors in power he looked on
as wretches who only masked their criminal in-
stincts under the name of Eepublican. He re-
mained for a time true to his democratic faitli,
but he began to despair of the Kevolution. In
the tenth book of " The Prelude " Wordsworth
has told of the transport that seized him, the deep
gratitude he rendered to eternal Justice, when ou

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EARLY EEVOL0TIONAEY GROUP 165

a siimmet day of 1794 id crossing the Ulverston
Sands the words suddenly reached him, " Rohe-
epierre is dead ! " The tragic imydenta of that
event were hastily thrown into a miniature
drama, almost as the newspapers had arrived, hy
Southey and Coleridge. On its pnhlicatioa at
Cambridge the name of Coleridge alone, who con-
tributed the first act, was connected with it.
" The Fall of Robespierre," with one moment of
relief where Adelaide sings her song of domestic
peace to Tallien, the Mark Antony of the plot, is
a tumult of conflicting parties and leaders, in
which the action is heavily draped in voluminous ■ ■
and turbid rhetoric. Contemporary passions and
events will not pass into art by the short and
easy method of transposing the journals into
blank verse. Poetry must be truer than history
or it has no right to exist

" Wat Tyler " and "The Fall of Robespierre"
were mere adventures or escapades. Southey's
" Joan of Arc " was an achievement of strenuous
ambition. Crude and feeble as many of its pages
are, the poem has in it the glow and ardor of the
time. A period of great public events had roused
the young writer's imagination, and had given
breadth and energy to its movement In the late
summer and early autumn of 1793 Southey's epic

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166 THE FBENCH EEVOLUTION

was written with enthusiasm, aod with the speed
that enthusiasm begets. Towards the close of
the following year it wag announced for publica-
tion by Joseph Cottle, the young publisher of
Bristol, who was almost as ardent and quite as
inexperienced as Southey himself. While the
printing proceeded, the poem was recast and re-
composed, and a considerable contribution for the
second book was received from Coleridge. At a
later date Southoy, who had a certain regard for
his first important contribution to literature, re-
handled his text; to know the spirit in which he
or^inally wrote, to make acquaintance with the
work which Lamb, in his callow days of criticism,
declared sufficient to redeem the character of the
age from the imputation of degenerating in poetry,
we must read the epic in the original quarto of
1796, as issued from a Bristol press.

" Joan of Arc " is romantic ; it is sentimental ;
i it is revolutionary. Three streams of contempo-
I rary influence met in its turbid tide. The poem
1 attempts to revive the pomp and splendor of
mediteval court and camp and consistory ; the
besieged fortress, the cathedral, rich with many-
colored lights, rise as the new stage-properties of
the imagination ; the king, the warrior, the priest,
pass across the scene. The supernatural effects

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EARLY KEVOLDTIONARY GEOUP 167

are duly introduced ; by strange and miraculous
attestations the mission of the Maid is confirmed ;
in awful vision she is led through scenes of horroi
which to Taylor of Norwich seemed to rival those
of Dante's " Inferno." ^ The poem is also in the
vein of eighteenth-century sentiment. ' When in
1814 Coleridge turned back to its pages, in which
was embedded a portion of his own early work,
he was astonished at " the transmogrification of
the fanatic virago into a modem novel-pawing
proselyte of the Age of Beason, a Tom Faine in
petticoate, but so lovely ! and in love so dear I "
It had been nearer the mark if instead of a Tom
Paine in petticoats Coleridge had said a Mary .
Wollstouecraft in armor. At the call of her
country the Maid of Orleans, an amorous shep-
herdess, abandons love, or rather exalts it into a
lofty, protective friendship. Her lover, Theodore,
dies, but his spirit watches and assists her from the
heights of heaven. There are frequent outbreaks
of emotion, which it would be unjust to charac-
terize as sentimental, over the wrongs and griefs
of rural France, the daughter weeping for her
father, the maiden bewailing her betrothed, the
starving peasant, the desolated homestead, — ill
fruits of a war of ambition. The epic,in t^e third
place, is revolutionary. The heroine is an offspring

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168 THE FBENCH KEVOLUnON

of the peopla The monarch, for whose cause she
abandoDS peace and love, is a luxurious wautou,
who can be roused from his sloth and shame only
through the spiritual influence and anthority of
this virgin child of nature. The courtiers at
Paris are given over to lordly riot. The doctors
of theol<^y are slaves of bigotry and superstition,
as cruel as ignorant Before them stands Joan, —
her cheek suETused with the loveliest blush, her
dark hair waving in the wind, hei figure bending
lightly like a snowdrop in the waste. Interro-
gated by the stern ecclesiastics as to her faith in
Holy Church, she answers as a docile pupil of
' Bousseau's Savoyard Vicar, —

" T waa Nature taught my early youth
Beligiou. . . . Nature bade me see the God
Confest iu all that liv^ and moves, and ia.

It is not Nature Ihat can teach to sin :
Nature is ail Benevolence — all Love,
All Beauty."

. In the somewhat appalling all^ory of the
ninth book (" the finest in the volume," according
to Lamb, in the manner he conceived of Dante
or Ariosto, writers still unknown to him), the
spirit of Theodore describes the primitive age of
love and happiness, before gold was known or
private property existed, — such a blissful atata

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EAKLY EEVOLUnONAET OBODP 169

83 the young Fastisocrats had hoped to revive on
the banks of the Susquehanna ; from which
retrospect the seer rises to a prophecy of the
coming era of universal happiness and freedom,
when

" Oppression shall be chained, and Poverty
Die, and, with her, the Brood of MiserieB ;
And Virtue and Equality preserve
The reign of Love, and Earth sliall once l^lun
Be Paradise, whilst Wisdom shall secure
The state of bliss which Ignorance betrayed."

Southey's epic closes with the coronation of^ ,
Charles at Bheims, accompanied by admonish-
ment from the peasant Maid, to whom he owes
his crown, that he should be no common tyrant,
but the tme Father of his People.

Southey's volume of minor Poems, published
in 1797, and a second volume which appeared
two years later, were written in the humanitarian.
spirit of the time ; many of the pieces are rillets
of Eevolutionary sensibility. The principal
poem, "The Triumph of Woman," is dedicated
to Mary Wollstonecraft. Several sonnets deal
with various aspects of Slavery ; an ode is
addressed to the Genius of Africa; a ballad
records the dying confession of crime uttered
by a sailor who had aided in the iniquities of the

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170 THE FRENCH KEVOLDTION

slave-trade. In the earlier of the volumes things
aa they are in so-called civilized society are
studied in a series of Eclogues, of which the
' scene is the convict settlement at Bota,nj Bay,
Elinor has heen the victim of brutal passions;
exhausted with famine, she had heen guilty of
some petty theft; now she is an outcast from
humanity. William had been a happy rustic in
a home of innocence and peace, until he dared to
direct his gun against the squire's game that
devoured the seed of his fields. Humphrey had
been tempted by the red-coats to forsake his
plough, and when turned adrift Jiad sunk to
misery and crime. John had been seized by a
pressing, and, lustily resisting, was wounded,
and, wounded, was driven to disgrace by want.
If each warred with the world, had not the
world first unjustly warred with'wicht "Why
do the poor complain ? " asks the rich man in
another poem; the poet replies by leading him
through the frozen streets, where the aged men-
dicant wanders forlorn, and the child seeks bread
for a dying father, and the soldier's wife is b^-
ging her way back to her parish, and the flaunt-
ing girl resorts to the most wretched relief from
her distress. Some unrhymed dactylic stanzas
(in which Coleridge assisted) describe a woe-

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EARLY BEVOLUnONART GEOHP 171

'begone mother, whose hush&nd has perished in
the wars; some sapphics tell of a wretched
night- wanderer on the heath, who appeals vainly
for pity to the occupants of a passing chariot,
and who is found cold and dead when morning
breaks. Of a series of Inscriptions, one for a cen-
otaph at Ermenonville does honor to Eousseau ;
one for a monument in the ^ew Forest tells of
the cruelties of the first Anglo-Korman King;
one for a column at Kewbury laments the deaths
of the patriots Falkland and Hampden ; one writ-
ten for an apartment in Chepstow Castle recalls
its glory and shame as the place of a Begicide'a
imprisonment, —

" Dost thou ask his crime?
He had rebelled against the Kiog, and aat
In jndgment on him ; for his ardent mind
Shaped goodliest plana of happiness on earth,
And peace and liberty. Wild dreams t But such
As Plato lored ; such as with holy zeal
Our Milton worshipped. Blessed hopes 1 awhile
From man withheld, even to the latter days
When Christ shall come, and all things be fulfilled."

It is obvious that Southey's revolutionary
ardor, as he himself said, was more of the heart
than of the understanding. He did his cause
some wrong by seeming to push the trade of
poetical pity too importunately. Yet his indlct-

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172 THE FHKNCH KEVOLOTION

ment of society was not without a warrant in
facts ; he did not stay to theorize ; he derived
sufficient impulsea for song from his keen sen-
sibility to human sufTering, from the stoicism
wliich waa the counterpoise to his sensibility,
and from tlwse imaginative hopes which pointed
to a better, purer, and happier condition of
society as the result of some momentous change
in the established order of things.
— ' Coleridge from the first contemplated the
French Eevolution more as a thinker, and,
though he embraced some of Godwin's opinions
and among them the determinism of Godwin, as
a religious thinker. The idea of God possessed
him ; he seemed to feel the Divine Presence as a
breeze, plastic and vast, which plays over and
through the whole of animated nature like the
wind amid the chords of an jeolian harp. True
freedom was to be found in communion and
co-operancy with this universal Deity ; to chain
down one's thoughts in false philosophy to the
gross and visible sphere, — that indeed was
slavery. Through the fierce strife between the
powers of chaos and the powers of order which
fills the world there is yet discernible to the eye
of faith an eternal process of good. In this
religious optimism, this belief of a divine evo-

i,,Goo^[c i

.A

EA.HLT BEVOLPTIONARY GROUP ■ 173

lution of society, unhastiDg,. unresting, lay in
embryo the future conservatiBin of Coleridge. |
Hia contribution to " Joan of Arc," afterwards
enlarged by the writer and printed among his
own poems under the title "The Destiny of
Nations," closes with an address to .the Father
of Earth and Heaven, —

" All-conaciouB Presence of the Universe I
Nature's vast ever-acting Energy I " —

which operates alike through the prophet's lonely
voice and the frenzy of the people. Godwin, an
optimist of the Ileason, viewed with indignant
scorn the superstitions of the past as deadliest
foes to human progress. To Coleridge they
appeared to be a fragment of the eternal process
of the truth, —

" Wild phantasies ! yet wise.
On the victorious goodness of high God
Teaching reliance, and medicinal hope,
Till froni Betbabra northward, heavenly Trath
With gradual steps, winning her difficult way.
Transfer their rude Faith perfected and pure."

"Eeligious Musings," which as a completed
poem its author antedated when he stated that it
was written on the Christmas Eve of 1794, is
another vision of the destiny of nations ; it might
not unaptly be called Coleridge's " Queen Mab;"

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174 THE FRENCH EEVOLUTION

but while Shelley's early poem is certainly not
theistic, in the ordinary sense of that word,
Coleridge's philosophy of history discovers God
everywhere immanent and active. In the to-
tality of nature lives one omnipresent Mind,
whose holiest name is Love. Hence all things
must work together for good, and those dread
ministers that shower down vengeance on these
latter days have yet filled their vials with salu-
tary wrath. To annihilate self in the exclusive
cunsciousneas of God is to become one with the
highest order and the purest freedom; to lose
the sense of God is to lose our centre, it is to
throw ourselves out of the moral cohesion of the
world, and to pass into a spiritual anarchy. Be-
fore the final victory of God and his Christ,
offences must needs come ; and the' capital offence
of his own day Coleridge found in the war of
banded despots against the French Bepnblio. He
looks back to the primeval age of innocence —
the favorite Eevolutionary fiction — and traces
the commencement of property as a source both
of evil and of good. Coleridge does not declare
himself against civilization, as such, nor gainst
the arts of civilization. As in " Joan " he main-
tains that superstitions lead towards truth, so
here he urges that wealth and luxury, demand-

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EAltLY EEVOLCTIONABY GEOUP 175

ing new forms of beauty id music, painting,
archibectuie, decoiative design, tend at last by
sensual wants to tmsensualize the mind, which
finds the best delight of art, not in lethargy or
mere possessions, but in its own activity, —

■* From AvaricB thus, from Luxury and War,
SpTODg heavenly Science, and from Scieoce Freedom.'*

He dwells on all the oppressions that are done
nnder the sun ; he remembers the tears of such
as are afflicted and have no comforter; he anti-
cipates the day of retribution as at hand. Even
now the storm begins; but through evil God
works out a glorious gain. Love is omnipresent,
and is omnific. Life, with all its errors, is "a
vision, shadowy of Truth." He foresees the
blessed future, when the wondrous plan of love
shall be achieved, and all God's coadjutors —
MOton and Newton, Hartley, the " wisest of
mortal kind," and Priestley, "patriot, saint, and
sage" — shall have a part in the fulfilment of
that for which they thought and hoped and
toiled. "Religious Musings" impresses us now
somewhat as one of the sermons, eloquent, co-
pious, sanguine, preached by Coleridge from a
Unitarian pulpit. To Lamb the poem seemed
to be more than worthy of Milton.

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176 THE FRENCH EEVOLOTIOS

In the Bristol addresses, delivered by Coleridge
while he waa still almost a youth, he describea
the several types of erring or imperfect patriots,
— those who are without principles, and vary in
their opinions with every wind of rumor from
France; those who drink in the inflammatory
harangues of some enthusiast, taking poison for
food and rage for liberty ; those who would pull
down but care not to build up. He proceeds to
contrast with these the thoughtful and disinter^
ested patriot,- — him with whom the sympathetic
passions have become irresistible habits, render-
ing duty a necessity and a part of genuine self-
interest. Such a lover of human welfare has
come to regard all the affairs of men as a process;
he never hurries and never pauses ; he advances
in no dim twilight of pohtical knowledge, but
steadfastly presses forward on an opening scene,
beholding in clear illumination a vast and varied
landscape of existence. At a later date Coleridge
declared that, ardent as had been his Eepublican
faith, deep as had been his indignation against
those two massive pillars of Oppression, as he
styles them, monarchy and aristocracy, he had
never been a convert to Jacobinism in politics.
But what is Jacobinism ? A system of thought,
Coleridge answers, which denies all rightful

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EABLT KEVOLHTIONABY GROUP 177

origin to government except so far as it is de-
rivable from principles contained in human rea-
son, and at the same time denies all truth and
distinct meaning to the words ri^ht and duty by
affirming that the human mind consists of noth-
ing but manifold modifications of passive sen-
sation. Coleridge's faith in a Divine energy-
working in and thrMigh mundane affairs pre-
disposed him to seek and to find a certain latent
truth in all wide-spread institutions and long-
established customs. Yet no one desired more
ardently than he, iu the days of Aspheterism and
Pantisocracy, a remodelling of social life under
more favorable conditions than were possible in
old civilizations which rest upon the basis of
private property. No one in after years could
better understand the errors of generous youth
or early manhood, enamoured of a system which
seems to combine " at onee the austere beauty of
science with all the lights and colors of imagina-
tion, and with all the warmth of wide religions
charity," while in fact it may be no other than
the disguised emissary of moral auarchy and
political despotism.

■^'hat reiBAined with Southey, what with Cole-
ridge from- their early Revolutionary faith and
fervor? Both parsed over to the opposite camp,

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178 THE PKEJfCH EEVOLHTION

to tlie party of coDservatiQn. It wae common in
their own day to represent tliem as apostates
from their creed, as faint-hearted or self-inter-
ested alarmists, who had forsaken their first love.
But it almost always happens that a convert
carries much of his former temper and habits of
mind into any new faith which he may accept.

If we look beneath the surface to essentials, we

•
shall find that aay breach of continuity in the

course of their thought was less violent and less

complete than it has been often represented.

Neither Soutliey nor Coleridge was conscious of

a betrayal of principle ; neither would admit that

he had hastily fied from the position which he

, originally occupied.

The Revolutionary zeal of Southey was chiefly

; distinguished by its humanitarian complexion.

He looked upon the Eevolution as the armed

, champion of the suffering, the weak, the poor,
the injured, the downtrodden. The progress of
events led him to the conclusion that the Kev-
olution, as conducted by its leaders, did not
make for human happiness. He came to believe
that under the existing constitution of England
the rights of the people might be better safe-
guarded than they could be if all that had grown
up and waa established were to be flung into

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EA^LY KEVOLUTIONAKY GEOUP 179

the crucible, i He came to regard the English
Church as a great organizatiou which held a trust
for the good of the nation. But he still ardently-
desired the improvement of the world; "there
is no opinion from which I should so hardly he
driven and bo reluctantly part," he wrote in
1829, "as the belief that the world will continue ..
to improve, even as it has hitherto been continu-
ally improving." He still saw abundant need
for reform and amendment; he still devoted a
lai^e portion of his tidie and thought to the
cause of reformation. The ghostly Sir Thomas
More of Southey's " Colloquies " fears that his
interlocutor is still in Utopia, because he viewed
with 80 much favor the industrial schemes of
Eobert Owen of Lanark. Southey cannot be
called an original thinker in any eminent sense
of that word. The hiatorical feeling was strong
within him. It was natural for him, constituted
as he was (and perhaps it was wiee as well as
natural), to accept the framework of things as it
had been slowly built up by history ; but he held
that without shaking that framework much
might be done to render life better for England
of the nineteenth century. He pleaded for na-
tional education as the first and greatest need of
the people ; and he maintained that the Church

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180 THE FRENCH EETOLUTION

of England was so organized that with quickened
and well-directed energy it might become the
chief Bi.genp in national education. He anticipated
a time when landed property might be held, not
'in the hands of a few great territorial owners,
but by those who themselves ploughed the field
and gathered the harvest. He urged the need
and duty of the diffusion of good and cheap
literature. 'He desired some well-organized sys-
tem of colonization, as a gain both to those who
fared abroad and those who remained in their
native land. Among other reforms advocated
by the Tory Quarterly Reviewer were a whole-
some training for the children of misery and vice
in great cities; the establishment of Protestant
sisters of charity and a better order of hospital
nurses; the establishment of savings' banks in
all small towns ; the abolition of flo^ng in the
army and navy, except in extreme cases ; im-
provements in the poor laws ; alterations in the
game laws ; alterations in the criminal laws, with
a view to restricting the punishment of death
to great offences ; the execution of criminals
within prison walls ; alterations in the factory
system for the benefit of the operative, and
especially as to the employment of children ;
national works to be underBken in times of dia-

b, Google

EARLY REVOLtrnONART GROUP 181

tress ; the employment of paupers in reclaiming
waste lands; the cessation of interments in
crowded cities ; the commutation of tithes ; an
increased number of clergymen, of colleges, and
of courts of law that a speedier administration
of justice m%ht be secured.^ Many of these
proposals of the Reformer Southey have since
been carried into effect.

The work of Coleridge was different^ it was the
work of a thinker, and in a certain sense of a Rev- j
olutionary thinker. He, like Southey, accepted
the existing framework of society, but, with that ;
ardent spirit of research for first principles, de- ■
rived in lai^e measure from the passionate inter-
est which he took in politics and morals, when '(
he planned his Pantisocracy, he bent his mind to '■
ascertain the idea of each existing institution and
established form of thought, — the idea, which
had been overlaid and obscured by the accretion
of circumstance ; and thus he endeavored to
effect a new interpretation of accepted things. ■
This, indeed, was to aim at a revolution in some '
respects more profound and more far-reaching in
its consequences than any merely external dis-

1 In the aboTe I recite, as in my Life of Soathey (" EnglUh
Men of Letten"), pp. IM, 15S, from a list drawa np by

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182 THE FRENCH BETOLUnON

turbance of the airangemeDts of society. He
cannot be said to have propounded a complete
and coherent system of philoBophy, but he led
men to inquire into the meaning of what they
professed to believe, with a resnlt which was
alarming to many, and to others was like' the awak-
ening from dreams to reality. In metaphysical
speculation, in ethics, in politics, in theology, in
Biblical criticism, in the criticism of Uteratnre, he
suggested a new exposition of received formulas.
He quickened the sense of religion by reducing
or attempting to reduce dc^ma, imposed from
without, to facts of the spiritual consciousness
and their inner significance. ' He would preserve
the national Church, but he conceived the national
Church not as the mere Anglican ecclesiastical
system ; he conceived it somewhat in the manner
of the great seventeenth-century revolutionist,
Milton, as the clerisy, the intellectual and spirit- .
ual incorporation of the whole people. He
honored the Bible as highly as they did who
regarded every sentence of Holy Scripture as
written by the finger of God ; but for him it was
no hewn cistern of dogma and of law ; it became a
living fountain of wisdom and of love. lu like
manner he did not attempt to displace the old
conceptions in politics and morals, but he desired

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EARLY EEVOLDTIOKARY GBODP 183

I to discovfir the vital centre of each conception,
' and to deliver this from the incrustations of
custom and unilluminated tradition. If he criti-
cised literature, he did not seek to shift the ancient
landmarks or to establish any novel standard
of valuation ; he penetrated to the living soul of
each work of art, and gave a new meaning to the
old admirations. In this eflbrt towards a new
rendering of things Coleridge was engaged in a
work of revolution, but a revolution which should
conserve by renewing rather than merely effect
a clearance by the method of destruction. In
his remarkable essay on Coleridge, Mr. Mill, writ-
ing as a radical, shows how incomplete, from his
own radical standpoint, appeared the iRevolution-
ary work of Bentham. What was lacking to
Bentham and the school of Bentham was supplied,
as he held, by Coleridge and by what he terms
the GermanO'^leridgian school. The Conserva- -
tive party, he supposed, as far as it deserves the
contemptuous title of "the stupid party," was
little likely to be pleased with Coleridge's later
ideas. " Most of all," he declares, " ought an
enlightened Badical or Liberal to rejoice over*""
such a conservative as Coleridge." The white-
haired philosopher of Kighgate, if a different
person from the young Pantisocrat of 1794, was

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184 THE FSGlfCH BEVOLUtlOy

at least a Uneal desceadaat of that enthusiastic
insurgent

While the elder representatives of the Revo-
lution and those of the party of Order met in
combat, bulky pamphlet being hurled against
pamphlet, the younger Bevolutionaiy spirits were
assailed by younger partisans of the opposing
force, — a light-armed troop, whose weapons were
darts, effectively barbed, of ridicula From 1799
- to 1801, Canning, then under-secretary of state
for foreign affairs, was connected with the " Anti-
Jacobin;" among the contributors were George
Ellis, Hookbam Frere.Lord Morpeth, Baron Mac-
donald, and others. Canning had been brought
up among the Whig chiefs ; by Fox and Sheri-
dan he had been introduced to Devonshire
House. "But the French Revolution," as Mr,
Eebbel has said, "exercised the same influence
on Canning as it did on many older men, hitherto
the most distinguished ornaments of the Whig
party, — Burke, Windham, Spencer, Lord Fitz-
wQliam, — and brought them over in a body to
the Tory camp." The " Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly
Examiner " was designed to meet the newspaper
propaganda of the sympathizers with Revolution.
Gifford was appomted editor, and the first num-
ber appeared in November, 1797. At the out-

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EARLY REVOLDTIQNARY GROUP 185

set it was intended to open what the writers of
Hookham Frere's Memoirs describe as heavy--
batteries of fact and ai^ument against the enemy.
"Authentic news was to be supplied, the mis-
representations of the opposition press were to
be refuted under a regiilarly classified gradation
of ' Mistakes,' ' Misstatements,' and ' Lies ; ' and
a considerable space was to be devoted to formal
essays on historical and constitutional ques-
tions." In the Valedictory Address of the last
number, an amusing calculation is made, in
which the number of falsehoods detected is mul-
tiplied by the number of readers, taken at fifty
thousand, with the result that a grand total of
twenty-five millions represents the aggregate of
falsehoods despatched to limbo by the "Anti-
Jacobin." It was soon found that the heavy
batteries of argument were not needed in 1797
as they might have been in 1792, The Revolu-
tion had deployed its horrors ; it had led to wars
of conqnest which England endeavored to re-
strain or to repel. A light-armed guerilla attack
of satire, parody, epigram, it was believed, would
prove more effective than grave discussion ; and
verse was used to wing to its mark the arrowy
ridicule. The poetry, which indeed was a feat-
ure of the Review from the first number, was in-

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186 THE FEENCH EEVOLUTIOK

troduced to the readers by Canning in a preface.
The " Review," we are told, desired to amuse as
well as to instruct the public ; but, whatever
may have been the cause, not one good and tnie
poet of sound principles and sober practice could
be found. It was necessary to go for verse to
the only market where it could be procured, that
of the Jacobins, and humbly to imitate the wood-
notes wild of the bards of freedom : " The poet in
all ages has despised riches and grandeur. The
Jacobin poet improves this sentiment into a
hatred of the rich and the great. The poet of
other times has been an enthusiast in the love
of his native soil The Jacobin poet rejects all
restriction on hia feelings. Sis love is enlai^ed
and expanded so as to comprehend all human
kind." The old poet sang the actions of the
warrior heroes of his country in strains that
made ambition virtua The Jacobin poet is
ready to celebrate the glory of French Eepubli-
cans shouting victory over fallen despots ; but let
his own country triumph, we are then presented
with "nothing but contusions and amputations,
plundered peasants and deserted looms. Our
poet points the thunder of his blank verse at the
head of the recruiting-sergeant, or roars in dithy-
rambics gainst the lieutenants of press^angs."

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EARLY REVOLUnONABY GROUP 187

The use of such satire as that of the "Anti-
Jacobin " is not to raise a laugh against the op-
posite party ; its use is to make men reflect, to
question their own passions, to scrutinize their
own enthusiasms, and to reject them if they be
without warrant, or maintain them if they be
well founded in spite of ridicule. Something
within us checks our full sympathy with a group
of young men of rank and fashion who devoted
their talents to mocking all that seemed gener-
ous in feeling to men of a more sanguine temper.
"Your young men," declares the prophet Joel,
"shall see visions;" and even if the visions be
too bright with promise, they often lead through
illusions to the truth. The brilliant young
Tories of the " Anti-Jacobii " were assuredly
no visionary sons of the prophets. On the
other hand, the dangers arising to England from
ill-considered zeal were grave; and there is a
gallantry in defensive sallies as well as in the
onset of attack. If Burke had been accused of
sentimentalities, the retort was natural; there
were in the opposite party spurious sentiment,
hectic excitements, unreal rhetoric, extravagant
'dreams. Connected with these there was a loos-
ening of the bonds of morality and a tendency to
Bubstitutc sophisticated feelings for the old plain

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188 THE FRENCH KEVOLTTTIOS

laws of human duty. Against these it was well
to aim the shafts of ridicule ; laughter clears
the air; there is much virtue in good sense,
and what is genuine will survive a peal of laugh-
ter. No one can regret that the first object of
attack waa Southey; hia heart was essentially-
sound ; his morals were pure and manly ; but it
is true that some of the errors of generous and
inexperienced youth were his. The Friend of
Humanity who will see the needy knife-grinder
damned before he gives his sixpence, is no unfair
satire on the theoretic philanthropist whose eyes
are in the ends of the earth. The Soldier's
Friend who greets the drummer-boy in Southeyan
dactylics, offering liim "nice clever books by
Tom Paine," and handbills, and half-crowns to
raise a barrack mutiny, is a legitimate caricature
of the missionaries of sedition. There was a
sufficient efBux of nonsense horn the friends of
the Revolution to make the mocking chorus seem
something less than a parody, —

" Reaaon, philosophy, fiddleduiu diddlednm,
Peace and fraternity, higgledy pi^ledy,
Higgledy piggledy, flddledum diddledum."

What was honorable and of permanent value
in the movement of change could not suffer by
exposure of the insincerity of its dishonest nd-

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EARLY REVOLDTtONAHY GROUP 189

Yocates or the tolly of indiscreet enthusiasts;
it might be trusted to prove in the end that all
was not "fiddledutu diddled um." Godwin and
others had assailed the institution of marriage.
The Anti-Jacobins hardly intensified the outcry,
when, in their parody of Payne Knight's " Prog-
ress of Civil Society," they mourn over that two-
headed monster formed by unnatural law, — man
and wife, — and comment on the cruelty which,
while the gamester in whist and cribbage may
change his partner and continue his sport, com-
pels a husband to play the long rubber of con-
nubial failure or success with "one unceasing
wife."

Sheridan, a prominent figure of the Whig party
and a brilliant writer for the stage, had assisted
in the translation of Kotzebue's play, " The
Stranger." Many other dramas of Kotzebue,
at once sentimental and revolutionary, were pop-
ular. Goethe's "Stella," with its questionable-.
morality on the relation of the sexes, had ap-
peared in an Enghsh garb. Replying to a letter
of "Mucins" in the "Anti-Jacobin," Cato com-
ments on the growing profligacy of manners in
the Revolutionary days, " evidenced by the most
frequent, flagrant, shameless, and aggravated vio-
lations of the nuptial tie." The evil was a real

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190 THE FRENCH EEVOLCTION

and present evil Coleridge, in hie " Satyrane'a
Letters," defined the whole Bjstejn of such
dramas as those of Eotzebue as "a moral and
iatellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous
kind;" the secret of their popularity lay in
"the confusion and subversion of the natural
order of things, their causes and their effects;
ia the excitement of surprise by representing the
qualities of liberality, refined feeling, aud a nice
sense of honor in persons and in classes of life
where experience teaches us least to expect
them ; aud in rewarding with all the sympathies
that are the dues of virtue those criminals whom
law, reason, and religion have excommunicated
from our esteem." The words of a critic or a
moralist might have had inattentive hearers; but
laughter became an irresistible moralist, when
the imagined Mr. Higgins of the "Anti-Jacobin "
united the plots of "Stella" and "The Stranger"
in his romantic historical drama " The Kovers,"
" If the play has a proper run," wrote the ex-
traordinary and indefatigable Higgins, " it will, I
tbinlc, do much to unhinge the present notions
of men with regard to the obligations of civil
society, and to substitute, in lieu of a sober con-
tentment, and regular discharge of the duties
incident to each man's particular situation, a wild

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EABLY REVOLDTIONASY GROUP 191

desire of imdefinable latitude and extravagance
... it will do much to set men about doing what
they like, where they like, when they like, aud how
they hke." The heroiDe of " The Eovere," Ma-
tilda Fottingen, had beeu first seen by her lover
Casimire — a lover already wedded — in a peas-
ant's cabin, employed, like the Lotte of Werther,
in " spreading bread and butter for the chUdreo,
in a light-blue riding-habit." Among the dra-
matis personw are Pantalowsky and Britchinda,
children of Matilda by Casimire ; Joachim, Jabel,
and Amarantha, children of Matilda by Gogero;
the children of Casimire and Cecilia, with their re-
spective nurses; and "several children, — fathers
and mothers unknown." Eogero, the hero, lan-
guishes in a dungeon, the victim of ecclesiastical
tyranny; the English nobles, Beefington and
Puddingfield, are imigris, who have fled from the
oppression of their country ; a Knight Templar
has forsaken his dignities and embraced the
position of a waiter ; an Austrian and a Prussian
grenadier have abjured their national enmity,
and have sworn to fight henceforth in the cause
of freedom. "The Eovers" is a brilliant amal-
gam of absurdities, in which not only the
Eevolutionary passion of the time, but also its
overwrought sentimentality and its taste for ro-

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192 THE FRENCH BKVOLDTION

mantic horrore are eatirized, CDd mutually aid in
heighteoing tlie effect of the nhola.

For the final number of their periodical. Canning
and hia friends reserved the heaviest blow. The
poem " New Morality " is written in the form
BO well adapted for epigrammatic satire, the
rhymed decasyllabic couplet. The several pow-
ers of Revolutionary thought and feeling are
personified in the manner of the eighteenth-
century imagination, and pass in review. First,
Philanthropy, not the philanthropy that dries the
orphan's tears and consoles the weeping widow,
but French philanthropy, which glows with the
general love of all mankind, and makes its votary
a friend of every country except his own. Next,
Sensibility, the child of sickly Fancy, borne by
Bousseau from France to Alpine solitudes : —

" Taught by nice sotJe to mete her feelings strong.
False by degrees, and exquisitely wrong:
For the crush'd beetle _^rsf, — the widow'd dove.
And all the warbled Borrows of the grove ;
Next for poor sufPring Ouilt ; and la»t of all,
For parents, friends, a king and country's fall."

Then, Justice; not she who tediously dangles
the balance in British courts of law, but Justice
holding a blood-stained hook, inscribed with one
sole decree of freedom for the people; —

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EAKLY REVOLUTIONAKY GROUP 193

"Free 1 by what means? — by folly, madness, guilt,
By boundlesH rapines, blood in oceaoa spilt ;
By conflscatioD, in whose sweeping toils
The poor man's pittance with the rich man's spoila,
Mix'd in one common mass are swept away,
To gint the short-liT'd tyrant of the day."

Last, Candor; who will not condemn or praise
by wholesale, bat loves to see-saw between right
and wrong, —

" Convinced that all men's motives are the same ;
And finds, with keen discriminating sight,
Black 's not so black ; — nor white lo very white."

The moral of the whole is plain, — let the men
of England guard their own hearts; let them
hold by the ancient manners and ancient morals.
So, and so alone, may the storm be braved ; so,
perhaps, in some happier hour may England
become the refuge of Europe.

Such is the spirit of the " Anti-Jacobin." The
writers could justly assert that it had served
their purpose. It has been said that the publi-
cation was discontinned at the direct instance of
Pitt, who apprehended that satire might in the
end prove an unruly ally of the party.

:,q,z.<ib, Google

:,q,-z.-dbvGoOglt'

EECOVEEY AND EEAOTION : WOEDS-
WOETH AND HIS FEIENDS

:,q,z.-3b,.Google

iv,Goog[c

RECOVEKT AKD KEACTION

No one among his contemporaries was more
deeply moved than was Wordsworth by the
great events in France. The character of his
mind fitted him in a peculiar degree for receiv- j
ing the full influence of the French Revolution ; .
the circumstances of his early life brought him
near the vortex of the maelstrom ; and that
truth to his highest self, which it was a part
of his very existence to retain, — that natural
piety which bound his days each to each, — made
it impossible that he should ever fling away from
him as a worthless illusion the hopes and aspira-
tions of his youth. Some readers of Wordsworth
are misled in their judgment of the poet by the
vulgar error that he was before all else tranquil,
mild, gentle, an amiable pastoral spirit. He sang
of the daisy and the celandine, the linnet and
the lamb; and therefore he must have been
always a serene, tender, benign contemplator of
things that make for peace. There can be no

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198 THE FRENCH EEVOLDTION

greater mistake ; at the heart of his peace was
passioa ; his benignity was like the greensward
upon a rocky hillside. As a boy, Wordsworth
was violent and moody ; in his early manhood
he was stern, bold, worn by exhausting ardors.
De Quincey observed that " the secret fire of a
temperament too fervid" caused him to look i
older than his years. Above all, he was strong ; I
and what disguises this fact from careless eyes /
is that Wordsworth's strength did not lie in a
singte part or province of his nature, that he
brought his several powers into harmonious
action, and that each power served to balance
the others. Senses, intellect, emotions, imagina-
tion, conscience, will, were all of unusual vigor;
but each helped the other, each controlled the
other, each was to the other an impulse and a
law. And thus an equilibrium was gained, re-
sulting from a massive harmony of powers too
commonly found among men of genius arrayed
against one another in dangercnis conflict. His
senses were of unusual keenness ; his eye lived
on forms and colors, on light and shadow; his
ear caught the finest differences of all homeless,
wandering sounds ; but the senses did not war
against the spirit; they were auxiliar to higher
powers, serying as scouts and intelligeucers of the

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BECOVEBY AND KEACTION 199

aoiil. His passions were of ample volume and of
persistent force ; indignation, wrath, stem joy,
i deep fears, boundless hopes, possessed him ; but
these were brought into the bondage of con-
science, and became the ministers of love. His
imaginative fervor again and again exhausted
bis physical strength ; but the creative mood
was balanced by a mood of wise passiveness ; it
was not the way with his imagination to start
forth, as Shelley's imagination did, to create a
world of its own upon some swift suggestion of
beauty or delight ; it rested on reality, brooded
/upcnt reality, coalesced with it, interpreted it.
/ His visions and his desires were captured by his
Vintellect, and were made substantial by a moral
wisdom infused into them. Kia intellect did
not operate singly and apart, but was vitalized
by his passions. If he loved freedom with alt
the aidoT of his soul, he loved order as well. Ifl
he hoped for the future with an indefatigable
hope, he also reverenced the past. His will
applied itself consciously and deliberately to the
task of oi^anizing his various faculties and sup-
porting them in their allotted task during all the
years of his self-dedication to the life poetic.
Each power of his nature lived in and through
every other power, and in the massive equilibrium

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200 THK FRENCH REVOLUTION

which waa the result, strength was masked by
strength. Aod thus, having first effected aa
inward coDciliatioa of the jarring elements of our
humanity, he was enabled to become a reconciler
for his &gs.

u The Bevolution captured Wordsworth slowly

I and by degrees. The year 1789, which inflamed
so many hearts and imaginations in England,
left him almost untouched. The awakening in
France seemed to him only like any other process
of nature, — a renovation, indeed, but one which
/ might be accepted without a shock. The doc-
trine, the passions, the rhetoric of Revolution

1 were borne past him like voices on the wind ; he
heard them without fear, but they did not sink

} deep into his heart. He was occupied with his
studious research into the poetical appearances of
external nature ; and the affairs of men. held, a
"■ secondary place in his thoughts. It was not
until his residence in France, from November,
1791, to December, 1792, that he came into veri-
table contact with the Eevolution, and even then
not during the earlier weeks of his stay at Orleans.
At first be consorted with military men of the
Royalist party. As yet, Wordsworth understood
little of the condition of society or of the course
of events which led up to the Revolution ; but the

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EECOVEKY AKD REACTION 201

aristocratic prejudice^ of his companions quick-
ened the Republican spirit within him. When,
a little later, he gained the friendship of the
patriot-soldier, Michel Beaupuy, the democratic
faiths and hopes and charities which dwelt half
unawares in his heart were brought into the
light of consciousness, and for the first time he
-Jwcame an ardent champion of the new cause.
Beanpuy was fifteen years older than his young
English friend; he was of most engaging person,
a thinker as well as a soldier, a man of the purest
morals, one who had something of antique virtue
united with a modern enthusiasm, one to whom
the humanitarian beliefs had the force of a
religion. Wordsworth's early love-making with
nature was succeeded by a love-making with so-
ciety. His conversion was not the effect merely
of theory, or of dejlamation, or of sentimental
musings on the sorrows of mankind; it was the
fruit of an experience, and it tended not towards
rhetoric, but towards action. When, in October,
1792, he visited Paris, the massacres of Septem-
ber were recent ; he felt the ground^cking with
earthquake beneath his feet ; and bjo the oppor-
tunity occurred, he was prepared to risk his life
for the future bopfis ot France. Happily, circum-
stances recalled him to England; happily, he did

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202 THE FRENCH BETOLUnON

not forfeit his true missioQ by becoming ao orator
of the ConveDtion ; but there was a moment when
he supposed it possible that he might have de-
voted his life to the political service of the
country throi^h whose conduct, amid appalling
dangers, he believed that the destiny of mankind
was put to stake.

In 1793 he wrote his prose apolf^ for the
French Kevolution, a long letter addressed to
Watson, Bishop of LlandafT, and evidently
designed for publication as a pamphlet. It is
remarkable for its sternness and the fervor
of its faith. Wordsworth justifies the execution ""
of Louis XVI., and would reserve the passion of
pity for worthier objects than a fallen king.
He acknowledges the sanguinary violence of the
Revolution, but pleads that a time of revolu-
tion cannot be the season of true liberty. He
rejoices in the confiscation of ecclesiastical prop-
erty. He maintains the superiority of the Repub-
lican to other forms of government, on the ground
that it identifies the interests of the governors
with thosoaf the governed. He ai^es on behalf
of the redtrction of the inequalities among citi-
zens to those inevitable inequalities ^hich gov-
ernment by representation involves, b He points
out the uigent need of Parliamentary reform in

IV, Google

RECOVERY AND EEACtlON 203

England. When, iq the same year, 'war between
France an^d England was declared, Wordsworth's
nature underwent the most violent strain that it,
had ever experienced. He loved his native land ;
yet be could wish for nothing but disaster to her
arms. His feelings were, as he says, " soured and
corrnpted." As the days passed, he found it
more and more difficult to sustain his faith in
the Revolution ; first, he abandoned belief in the
leaders, but he still trusted in the people ; then
the people seemed to have grown insane with
the intoxication of blood. France attacked her
neighbors in a^ressive wars ; she had become
Europe's chief offender, Wordsworth was driven
back from his defence of the Revolution, in its
historical development, to a bare faith in the
abstract idea. He clung to theories ; the free
and joyous movement of his sympathies ceased ;
opinions stifled the spontaneous life of the spirit ;
these opinions were tested and re-tested by the
intellect, till, in the end, exhausted by inward (
debate, he yielded np moral questions in despair.

It was no sudden collapse of a rash enthusi- i
asm. The strands of a cable which seemed to
hold him at anchorage were severed painfully
and one by one. The alteration ultimately ef-
fected in his mind went far deeper than the

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204 THE FRENCH EETOLUTION

region of political opinioDs. In his effort to
maintain his faith in the doctrine of the Eevo-
lution by the sole aid of the reason, Wordsworth
was acting in opposition to what was deepest in
his nature. Doubtless at this time Godwin was
the master of his mind ; but by processes of the
understanding alone Wordsworth could attain no
vital body of truth. Kather he felt that things
of far more worth than political opinions — nat-
ural instincts, sympathies, passions, intuitions —
were being disintegrated or denaturalized. The
tragedy of " The Borderers," if it possesses no
high dramatic value, is of much autobiographic
' importance, as indicating the moment when
Wordsworth began to suspect the analytic in-
tellect as a source of moral wisdom. The young
leader of the band of borderers is generous and
high-minded ; the tempter Oswald is an elder
man and a man of more powerful understanding ;
by the play of a sceptical intelligence, by sophis-
tries of the understanding, by the promise of
spiritual emancipation, he darkens the natural
conscience of his victim and leads him into piti-
less and irreparable crime. For young Marma-
duke nothing more remains in life except a wild
and desolate search for expiation.

" Wordsworth," as I have elsewhere written.

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BECOVEEY AND REACTION 205

" recovered, aa a sick man recovers, not through \
logical processes, but by secret operations of na- |
ture, and a gradual tecuperative tendency." He
turned away from mere speculation ; he permitted
himself once again to feeL By the healing influ-
ences of nature, by the gentle admonitions and
quickening sympathies of his sister Dorothy, a
comniunioa between his intellect, his affections,
and bis imagination was re-established. In place
of humanitaTian dreams came a deep interest in
the joys and sorrows of individual men and wo-
men; through his interest in these he was led
back to a study of the mind of man and those
laws which connect the work of the creative
imagination with the play of the passions. He
had begun again to think nobly of the world and
of humao life. And at this moment Wordsworth
found a friend, who like himself had hoped, like
himself had been disappointed, and who now had
found a solution for the problems which had
vexed him in a conception of the world and of
life at once philosophical and religious. In ex- (
temal nature and in the evolution of human
society Coleridge recognized a Divine Presence
and a Divine process. Such a conception seemed ^
the true interpretation of the phenomena of '
Wordsworth's own mind; it was confirmed by

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206 THE rSENCS REVOLDTIOK

his highest mooda and clearest moments of in-
sight and of rapture. The optimism of Coleridge
met the need of Wordsworth's aature. Not
through searchinga of the aualytio intellect had
be made his discoveries of truth, but through pas-
sionate contemplation and through joj. For him
wisdom lived before all else in happiness, which
was, indeed, another name for inward harmony,
the sane co-operation of all those powers that
work for wisdom. Discontent, cynicism, gloom,
might be the self-indulgence of less strenuous
minds. For his own part he resolved to resist
every invasion of sadness as a lethargy of the
soul, or to convert sadness to some glorious gain.
Joy became to him more than a desire ; it became
a duty.*

What remained to Wordsworth from his early
' Sevolutionary faith ? The Eevolution spoke of
: nature, of simplification, of humanity, of new
hopes (or the race, of reason, of equality, of fra-
ternity (I omit for the present moment the word
" liberty "). Wordsworth retained his faith in the
beneficence of nature ; he sings of the wedding
of man's mind " to this goodly universe, in love

> WhU ia heM Mid with the utant breritj will b« found
stated at luge in H. Cmile LegoiA kdmiraile stodj, " La
JeunesM de William Wordsworth." ^

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RECOVERY AND REACTION 207

and holy passion." He does not attempt to deny
the facte of evil and of pain. " He can atand,"
writes one of hia entice, " in the shadow of death
and pain, ruin and failure, with a sympathy that
is almost painful in its quiet intensity ; yet the
sense 'of something far more deeply interfused '
which ' makes our noisy years seem moments in
the being of the eternal silence,' the faith in the '
omnipotence ' of love and man's unconquerable
mind,' is never destroyed or even weakened in him.
The contemplation of evil and pain always ends
with him, by an inevitable recoil, in an inspired
expression of his faith in the good which trans-
mutes and transfigurea it, as clouds are changed ,
into manifestations of the sunlight they strive to ,
hide,"' He retained his desire to simplify life,]'
and he proved its genuineness by that " plain :
living" which preserved him from mean anxieties |
and degrading shifts, and rendered possible the \
"high thinking" of a poet's calling. He lost i
none of his sense of the dignity of man as man ;
he believed in a high destiny for the human raca „/—
He thought lees, indeed, than formerly of man in [
an abstract way and of the rights of man ; but he
entered far more deeply into the joys and sorrows

I Edward Cfurd, Ewajs on IdterBtore and Philosnph}', vol. i. /
pp. 1S8, 1B9. '

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/

\

208 THE FSENCH BEVOLDTION

of iudividual raea, honoring before all else thoae
strong, permanent, and universal passions which
are found in the cottage as well as in the palace,
or which, as he believed, may be found with
groater purity and undivided strength in the
cottage. He ceased to speak of frat«xiiity and-.
eqiiahty ; but this was because he perceived a
certain effeminacy in levelling down the truth
to general notions and ambitious words, and
ascertained that a truer sense of human fellow-
ship arose from close and sympathetic contact
with his fellows. Still he paid homage to the
" universal heart " of man ; still he believed in
one great society on earth of " the noble living
and the noble dead." If he wrote of a Michael
or a Margaret, a Pedler or a Leech-gatherer, it
was without a single touch of condescension or
of patronage ; even their manner of speech, he
maintained, includes everything that is needful
and everything that is best for the uses of poetry.
He honored reason in the mastery which man
had obtained over matter, in the scientific ad-
vance and mechanical prepress of the age. But
he also honored the a£fections, the imagination,
the moral sense, the spiritual insight of men ;
and he feared lest, reason, operating apart from
these, should darken the light that is in us, and

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EBCOVEKY AND KKA.CT10N 209

lest the rage for wealth stimulated by mechanical
inventions should create a new serfdom for the
toiler. Who at the close of the nineteenth cen-
tury will assert that hifi fears were without a
certain warrant?

I reserved that great watchword of the Kevolu-
tion, — Lab^j^ There was nnquestionably a
danger that in his study of the individual man
Wordsworth might in some measure have lost
his interest in national life and the larger con-
cerns of a people. With Coleridge for a time
there was a like danger. When the Swiss Can-
tons were attacked by the French Republic, he
wrote his magnificent ode " France," which origi-
nally appeared under the title of " The Kecanta-
tion." And a recantation indeed it is; a poem
of disillusion regarding the hopes for society
which he had formed in connection with the
French Eevolution. " The Sensual and the Dark,"
he cries, " rebel in vain, slaves by their own com-
pulsion."/ Liberty, as he had conceived it, he now
sorrowfully admits, cannot be realized by society,
under any form of human government ; " it be-
longs," as Coleridge's argument prefixed to the
ode declares, " to the individual man, so far as he
is pure, and inflamed with the love and adoration
of God in Nature." Such a doctrine approaches

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210 THE PHEKCH EEVOLUTIOS

hazardously near to political despair. Southey's
early enthusiasm had also declined ; there was a
considerable risk that he might narrow liis sym-
pathies to those which coucenied his personal
friends and his fireside, or might lose some of his
laige-heartedness in the mere accumulation and
rearrangement of knowledge. "How does time
mellow down our opinions," he wrote. ". . . I
have contracted my sphere of action within the
little circle of my own friends, and even my
wishes seldom stray beyond it . . . I want a little
room to arrange my books in, and some Lares of
my own." And again : " I Wave declared war
gainst metaphysics, and would push my ai^u-
ments, as William Pitt would his successes, even
to the exterminatioa of the enemy, ' Blessed be
the hour I 'scapei^ the wrangling crew,' " There
are symptoms here of the sinking of a Same
into ashes. Southey was indeed well qualified to
sing his " Hymn to the Penates ; " but his heart
was also made to extend its generous warmth
beyond his home, and in his imagination there
was something of an epic quality which could
enter into the action of an entire people. Was
moral exhaustion, in the apening years of the
nineteenth century, to follow the excesses of
sentimentalism and the excesses of anarchy ?

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EECOVEKY AUD EEACTION 211

Was the story to be a sorry story of disillusion
for this group of yonng poets, whose hopes had
beea so high, whose spirit had been bo generous
and ardent ? Were they to exclaim with Brutus,
" Liberty, I worshipped thee, and I fin(i thee but a
Shade " ? Or were they to be content each with
the liberty of the individual man, preserved for
each in the citadel of his owa soul ?

A second springtime of enthusiasm was happily
in store for them. The war proclaimed against
the French Republie had shocked their moral
sense, and caused an inward disruption, the filial
love of England still living in their hearts, while
indignation against the action of England divided
them from their country. But when the Repub-
lic was transformed into a military despotism,
when it entered upon wars of conquest, when the
vast tyranny of one ruler, with.hia satraps and
underlords, was established over Europe, when
England stood alone again st the -jgorfd-nn de-
fence of freedom, in defence of humanity, the
public spirit of these young men was again
aroused ; they found themselves restoted to their
native land ; and hopes and. fears, indignation,
pride, and patriotiajBrTvere fused into one glowing
mass. And so a second springtime arrived. A
great epic of battle, heroism, agony, death, and

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212 THE FRENCH HEVOLUTIOK

victory seemed to evolve itself before men's eyes ;
moJK thaD this, — EngUsbmea tbemselves were
among the combatants ; and all the epic passions
were aroused.

"Five years of life," cries De Quincey, "it was
worth paying down for the privilege of an outside
place on a mail-coach when carrying through the
country the news of a victory." " Horses ! " he ex-
claims, in his inspiriting description of the start
from Lombard Street,"' can these be horses that
bound off with the action and gesture of leopards ?
What stir 1 — what sea-like ferment I what a
thundering of wheels I what a trampling of hoofs !
what a sonnding of trumpets 1 what farewell
cheers I what redoubling peals of brotherly con-
gratulation, connecting the name of the particu-
lar mail — ' Liverpool forever ! ' — with the name
of a particular victory 'Badajos forever!' or
' Salamanca forever ! ' The half-slumbering con-
sciousness that all night long and all the next
day — perhaps for even a longer period — many
of these mails, like fire racing along a train of
gunpowder, will be kindling at every Instant new
Buecessio ns o fjuiming joy, has an obscure effect
of__B»ri'^Iying We victory itself, by multiplying
to the imagination into infinity the stages of its
progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be

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EECOVERT A.ND REACTION 213

let loose, which from that moment is destined to
travel, without intemiission, westwards for three
hundred miles — northwards for six hundred —
and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends
at parting is exalted a hundred fold by a sort
of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering
sympathies which in so vast a succession we are
going to awake."

Such was the temper of the time, and some of
its breadth of interests and depth of passion
passed into De Quincey's opium-dreams : " ' Deeper
than ever plummet sounded' I lay inactive.
Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some
greater interest was at stake, some m^htier cause
than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet
had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms ;
hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable
fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause
or 'the bad ; darkness and lights ; tempest and
human faces ; and at last, with the sense that all
was lost, female forms, and the features that weie
all the world to me." It is a dream of epic pro-
portions, into which are woven the passions in-
spired by a great national struggle.

The noblest products in the field of pure litera-
ture which the Napoleonic wars have left us are
Wordsworth's political sonnets, his poem "The

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214 THE FBENCH BEVOLUTION

1 Happy Warrior," and his pamphlet on the " Con-
vention of Cintra." The sonnets are records of

t the moet impassioned moments in the history of
Wordsworth's im^nation, as it dealt with public
events from 1802 to the battle of Waterloo.
Many of them are concerned, like his prose
pamphlet, with affairs in Spain. The cumulative
force of the great drama that was unrolling itself
was not felt until the struggle in the Peninsula
had become a ceatral point of interest Until
then the patriotic temper was, as Wordsworth de-
scribes it, a temper of fortitude, a "sedate and
stem melancholy, which had no sunshine, and
was exhilarated only by the lightnings of indig-
nation.** But with the rising of the Spanish ,<!
people there came a mighty change : " We were J/;
instantaneously animated, and from that moment ;' '
the contest assumed the dignity which it is not i/
in the power of anything but hope to bestow; Ij.-
and, if I may dare to transfer language, prompted
by a revelation of the state of being that admitst''
not of decay or change, to the concerns and in/
terests of our transitory planet, from that momem
'this corruptible put on incorruption, and tms
mortal put on immortality.' " Wordsworth has
hardly overstated the truth. From the date of
the Spanish rising. Napoleon could no. longer

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1

BKCOTEEY AND EEACTION 215

stand forth as the xepreaentative of democratic
ideas ; the principle of nationality was mani-
festly on the side of his adversaries ; its inBuence
was sensible in Germany as well as in the Pyre-
nean Peninsula ; the moral force of Europe was
arrayed against the material might of its con-
queror. " This is not a quarrel of governments,"
Coleridge wrote, in his " Letters on the Spaniards,"
published in the "Courier." "... If the Peace of
Amiens made the nation unaaimous in its dread
of French ambition, it was the noble efforts of
Spanish patriotism that first restored us, without
distinction of party, to our characteristic enthu-
siasm tor l^rty, and . . . enabled us once more
to utter the names of our Hampdens, Sidneys,
and Russells,without hazard of alarming the quiet
subject, or of offending the zealous loyalist"

Now it was that Wordsworth many a time
would start after midnight from Allan Bank
to the Eaise Gap to meet at two o'clock in the
morning the carrier bringing the newspaper from
Keswick. ' "It would not be easy," he said, "to
conceive with what a depth of feeling I entered
into the 'struggle carried on by the Spaniards for
their deliverance from the usurped power of the
French." The passion of the time was experi-
. enced hardly less deeply by others. On the

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216 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

declaration of Westmiaster on the subject of tlie
Spanish war, Walter Scott wrote to his friend
Ellis: "Tell Mr. Canning that the old women
of Scotiand will defend the country with their
distaffs rather than that troops enough be not
sent to make good ao noble a plei^e." " The
news from Spain," Scott writes, a month later,
"gave me auch a mingled feeling, that I never
suffered ao much in my whole life from the dis-
order of spirits occasioned by affecting intelli-
gence. ... I love a drum and a soldier as heartily
as ever Uncle Toby did ; and between the pride
arising from our gallant bearing and the deep
r^et that so much bravery should run to waste,
I spent a most disordered and ^itated night, never
closing my eyea but what I was harassed with
visions of broken ranks, bleeding soldiers, dying
horses, and 'all the currents of a heady fight'"
On his journeys never did Scott omit to take
with him the largest map of the seat of war that
he could procure. Upon this, Lockhart tells us,
he was perpetually poring, tracing by means of
black and white pins the movements of the con-
tending forces. When in 1811 a London com-
mittee was formed to collect subscriptions for the
relief of the Portuguese, Scott begged to be per-
mitted to contribute to the fund such profits as

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KEOOVEEY AND REACTION 217

might be gained by a poem written on a subject
connected with the patriotic struggle. ' As soon
as leisure could be snatched, he set to work upon
his " Vision of Don Iloderick," a poem not in his
happiest manner ; the Gothic vestibule, as Jeffrey
put it, being hardly in keeping with the modem
structure to which it conducts; yet one which
will always remain interesting as an evidence of
the deep commotion caused in the writer's spirit
by the events in Spain.

" It was a time unparalleled in history," Soutbey
wrote, " and a more glorious one never has and
never ean be exhibited to the world." Southey's
friend, Landor, who had in him something of the
paladin of romance, at this moment put his poetry
into the form of action. He would equip a troop
and lead them into battle on Spanish soil as the
first English volunteer. On reaching Corunna be
made over ten thousand reals to the governor for
the relief of tlie inliabitants of Venturada, whose
houses had been burnt to the ground by the
French, and announced that he was ready to pay
the expenses of any volunteers to the number of a
thousand who were willing to join him: " I shall
travel with them on foot, and fight along with
them, glorying to serve under the command of
any brave Spaniard who has taken up arms in

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213 THE FKENCH KEVOLUTION

the defence of rel^ou and liberty." Lander's
wisdom in the conduct of life was not equal to
bis chivalry. He quarrelled witb the Englisb
envoy ; his military feats were no more than
petty skirmisbea ; be wag devoured with impa-
tience for a larger field of action. "What the
alleged affront of the envoy had b^im," writes
his biographer, Forster, " the affair of Cintra and
its disasters completed : bis troop dispersed or
melted away ; and he came back to England in
as great a hurry as he bad left it." The ill-con-
sidered expedition to the Peninsula at least served
to give local color to Lander's noble dramatic
poem, " Count Julian ; " and if things were justly
weighed, perhaps the error of his impetuous out-
break against Stuart might be balanced by the
generous aid he rendered on one occasion to an
exhausted Spanish woman, whose chUd he car-
ried on bis shoulders for six or seven miles.
Quixotry has its follies, but a temper more dis-
creet has not always its ready gallantries.

Colerii^, when contrasting Shakespeare's po-
litical wisdom with the h^fh-flying Toryism of
Beaumont and Fletcher and the aristocratic
Whiggism of Massinger, has spoken of our great-
est poet as embodying in his historical plays the
permanent politics of human nature. It is a hard

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RECOVERY AND EEACTION 219

Baying to understand or to expound. The per-
manent politics of human nature, — what are ll
they ? Of Wordsworth'a " Poems dedicated to a
National Independence and Liberty " we may 'j
assert that if they do not express such " perma- I
nent politics," they have assuredly a purport
passing beyond the occasions which suggested or
inspired them. The passions to which they give
utterance, the principles which they announce,
are of no less worth and validity for our day than
they were for the opening days of the century.
They deal not so much with events that pass
away as with abiding forces of the heart of ntan -
and abiding truths ot our corporate life. In ex-
ternal events he s^isfan inward moral signifi-
cance, presses after this, and cannot rest satisfied
until he finds it. If we may speak of any single
thought as the ceiTtral thought around which this
remarkable group of poems ia organized, it is this,
— that the true life of a nation resides not in f
external institutions, not in visible prosperity, i
not in force of arms, not even in the splendors of (
individual genius, but in the spiritual energy of ■
the people, in the vitality of that which animates ;
all else, the nation's soul.

In August, 1802, during the short interval of
calm which followed the Peace of Amiens, Words-

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220 THE FRENCH BEVOLUTION

worth and his sister visited France, Gazing
westward at evening from the seacoast, he
watehed the evening-star as It hung over England,
and his heart turned to the land of his birth with
a fond and tender pride. Napoleon was elected
First Consul for life at the moment of Words-
worth's arrival at Calais; but there seemed to be
no genuine joy in the event, as far as a foreign
observer could discern, and the prostrate homage
that was paid to power impressed Wordsworth as
something far other than the seemly reverence
which is a gradual growth from roots deep-planted
in the heart. Great indeed was the alteration of
the public temper since, in the fervid early days
of the Eevolution, when the very " senselessness
of joy " was sublime, he had landed with bis col-
lege companion at the same spot. August 15th
was Bonaparte's birthday ; but Calais was not gay,
nor was the heart of Wordsworth. He thought
of all the wrongs from which Europe, and more
than Europe, suffered. He mourned over the
servitude of Venice, the maiden city, mated to the
sea, now dishonored and decayed. He thought
of the reduction of Saint Domingo, and of the
negro chieftain, Toussaint L'Ouverture, now lan-
guishing in some dungeon of France ; yet he
sustained a lofty hope that the cause of liberty

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BECOVEEY AND REACTION 221

had still its untamable auxiliaries in the powers
of nature and in the passions of man, —
" Thou haat left behind
Powers that will work for thee: air, earth, and skies;
There 'e not a breathing of the common wind
That will foi^et thee ; thou hast great allies ;
Thj fnends are exultations, agonies.
And love, and nuin's unconquerable mind."

On his voy^ back to Dover he observed an-
other example of the capricious tyranny of the
ruler of France, — a white-robed negress sat on
deck, oae of the afflicted race which had been ex-
pelled by a decree of the government, downcast,
languid, lifeless, except for the tropic fire that still
burned in her eyes. It was a happiness to tread
the grass of England once again, and to hear the
waves breaking on the chalky shore. He felt the
mightiness for good of the silver streak of sea ;
and yet he knew that the strength and safety of
his country could not lie in this narrow span of
waters ; in itself this was nothing; it became a
bulwark of freedom only when brave hearts made
it indeed a barrier flood, — " by the soul only, the
Nations shall be great and free." And at this
time Wordsworth was not without fears that the
soul of England might be unequal to its trials.
He trembled lest ease and luxury should have
sapped her native hardihood and strength, —

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222 THE PBEKCH BETOLUTIOK

"Plain litiDg and high thiokiDg are no more ;
The homelj beautj of the good old cause
la gone ; our peace, our fearful innocence.
And pore religion breathing household laws."

At ooe moment he looked back to the heroic
days of the old Eepublic, and aighed tor the retam
of Milton's spirit, to restore to his countrymen
virtue, power, and freedom ; be recalled to mind
Yane and Sidney, Harrington and MarvelL But
again he grew ashamed of such unfilial fears ; his
feeling towards England was that of a lover or a
child ; her glorious past seemed to insure a future
no less heroic, —

- " In onr balk is hang
Armory of the invincible knights of old :
We mnat be free or die who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals bold
That Milton held."

He felt that to hope is a paramount duty laid
by Heaven upon the suffering heart of man ; that,
while worldlings may tremble for possessions
which an accident can cause to was or wane, the
perpetual breath of hope breathes upon every gift
of noble origin. When, in October, 1803, the in-
vasion of England was threatened, although, in
presence of the enormous despotism of one man,
Wordsworth was almost tempted to a doubt of
Providence, agtiinst his doubt sprang up a stiongei

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SECOVERT AND KEACTION 223

faith, and with it an indomitable courage. One
thing there is which cannot be forced to yield
before the discipline of the sword, — one thing,
the united soul of a nation. The poet, rising to
the prophet, dared to anticipate a memorable vic-
tory over the invader, and in the sternness of his
enthusiasm could think of the very worst — the
prospect of his brethren slain — with an exultant
joy.

But it was the patriotic struggle in Spain^
which called forth Wordsworth's highest ardor.
It seemed to him to be a great outbreak of nature
in the heart of a people on behalf of freedom ;
and when in bis pamphlet suggested by the Con-
vention of Cintra he weighed " the hopes and
fears of suffering Spain," he felt that the finest
promptings, the truest oracles of political wis-
dom, came to him in presence of the free powers
of nature, — among the mountain winds or where
the torrents leap down their rocky courses.
From learned Germany, instructed in the lessons
of the schools, less was to be hoped than from
the Iberian peasants. The pride of intellect and
thought might come to a composition with tyr-
anny ; but the native energy of the soul, embodied
in a few strong instincts and a few plain rules,
was a bulwark for freedom kindred to the moun-

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224 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

tains and the floods. Wordsworth waa not so
carried away by his enthusiaam as to be un-
aware that in all the mechanic part of warfare
the advaatt^e lay heavily on the side of the
French brigades ; the promise of victory for Por-
tugal and Spain lay in what waa invisible, in
their moral power, in the righteousness of their
cause. " Unbounded," he exclaims, " is the
might of martyrdom and fortitude and right," —

" The power of Annies b a visible thing,
Fonna], and circumscribed in time and space ;
Bnt who the limits of that power can trace
Which a brave People into light can bring
Or hide, at will, — for freedom combating
By just revenge inflamed ? No foot may chase,
No eye can follow, to a fatal place
That power, that spirit, whether on the wing
Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind
Within its awful caves,"

And as Wordsworth in his feeling for external
nature found through all its influencings a
spiritual Presence communing with his own
spirit, so in the sacred passions of a People
sacrificing themselves for freedom, for home, for
religion, for the hopes of their infanta, for the
memories of their dead, he seemed to become
conscious of an energy not merely human but
Divine. It is, indeed, a weakness to seek from

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BECOVEBT AND BEA.CTION 225

miraculoas interpositions, from the saints above,
ot the spells of herb and stone, that virtue which
has its lesidence in the heart of man ; but in the
instincts of human nature, in hope, in fortitude,
in martyrdom, lives and moves the supreme
Power of the universe ; through these He builds
" the towers of righteousness " as a refuge from
the worst disaster ; all that to us seems violent
or ghastly form but " links in the chain of His
tranquillity." At length the great drama reached
its triumphant catastrophe at Waterloo ; in Jan-
uary, 1816, a day of general thanksgiving was
appointed, and Wordsworth poured forth the
solemn hymn which closes his " Poems dedicated
to National Independence and Liberty." He
ascribes the victory, not to the sword, but to the
magnanimity that wielded the sword with
irresistible might; and that magnanimity was
but a form of His energy who lifteth up and lay-
eth low. And so on the bright January morn-
ing, with sunshine sleeping on the snow-clad
hills, he sang his song of devout rejoicing, —
" Oh, enter now His Temple gate ! "

The pamphlet occasioned by the Convention of
Cintra was conceived and written in the spirit
of the political sonnets. It forms indeed an nn-
deaigned commentary on the poems of the same

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226 THE FRENCH EEVOLUTIOK

period. The forces under Junot's commaDd had
been defeated by Wellealey at Vimiero. Sir
Hew Dalrymple, instead of pressing home the
victory, concluded the convention by which the
French agreed to evacuate Portugal, and were to be
conveyed with their b^gage and arms in British
ships to France. Wordsworth considers the affair
less from a military or a political point of view
than from that of a patriotic citizen who studies
primarily its moral significance, its effect upon the
spirit and temper of the people of the Peninsula.
" In the moral qualities," he writes, " and pas-
sions which belong to a people must the ultimate
salvation of a people be sought for." The na-
tional feeling demanded that the defeated French
should be compelled to surrender at discretion,
or should be exterminated. It was folly to think
of supporting the cause of Portugal and Spain
by physical strength ; while, through a faltering
policy, the moral energies of the people were
being sapped. The Convention was a com-
promise of supposed expediency ; but in such a
case there is one supreme expediency, namely,
justice ; this alone can satisfy the spirit of an
indignant nation : " When wickedness acknowl-
edges no limit but the extent of her power . . ■
the only wortliy or adequate opposition is that of

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BECOVBRT AND REACTION 227

virtue Bubmitting to no circumscription of her
endeavors save that of her rights, and aspiring
from the impulse of her own ethereal zeal," " It
was not," he asserts, " for the soil or for the
cities and torts that Portugal was valued, but for
the human feeling which was there. . . . We
combated for victory in the empire of reason, for
strongholds in the imagination." To a certaui
order of practical statesmen such utterances as
these may appear visionary ; but it was Napo-
leon himself, and his calculations were little
likely to err on the side of fantastic generosity,
who estimated the worth of moral force in war-
fare as equivalent to three times that of physical
force. The lofty enthusiasm which animates
Wordsworth's pamphlet cannot be conveyed in
a few words ; only the reader of its best pages
can feel its weight and mass of passion and the
inward glow of its argument. What he wrote
was, however, ill qualified for producing a popular
impression ; the sentences move with the sweep
of a broad-winged bird, and a pamphlet for im-
mediate effect should pounce, not soar; the mode
of dealing with events as. moral causes rather
than as material effects was suited only to excep-
tional minds which had some kinship with that
of Wordsworth. Delays in publication occurred,

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228 THK FKENCH BEVOLUTtOK

and, in the rapid pn^ress of affairs ia Spain, wben
the pamphlet was issued it was already ont of
date.

A T^orous aeriea of Letters on the Spaniards
was contributed by Coleridge to the "Courier;"
he would be proud, he said, to consider these as
an appendix to Wordsworth's pamphlet. Their
epirit is, indeed, in perfect accord with that of
his friend's political criticism. The letters aimed
at an investigation of the grounds ol hope and
fear which the hifitory of past ages sn^ssts in
the case of wu* between a people and organized
armies, and drew a parallel between the struggle
in the Peninsula against the French and that of
former times in tiie Belgic provinces against
Philip II. Coleric^'s historical study is illu-
minated and supported by characteristic pas-
sages of reflection, and by a constant reference
to what he held to be the first principles of
political visdom. Like Wordsworth, he dis-
covers in the energies of the Spanish patriots "a
power which mocks the calculations of ordinary
statecraft, too subtle to be weighed against mere
brute outward force ; " a power which he com-
pares to electricity, as in&nite in its affinities and
infinite in its modes of action; a power which
is no other than tJie insulted free-will of a whole

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BECOVERT AND EEACTION 229

people, steadied by an approving conscience, and
Teactdng against iniq^uitous compulsion for the
common rights of human nature. Against such
a power Coleridge a^ued, like Wordsworth, that
the machinery of armies, however perfect that
machineiy may be, muet in the end prove help-
leas. Those whose fears for Spain were founded
on what they termed the facts of the situation,
forgot the one dominant though invisible fact, —
the presence of the spirit which overthrows op-
pressors. "It is a painful truth," Coleridge
writes in a passage which deserves to be re-
membered, "that those men who appeal most to
facts and pretend to take them for their exclu-
sive guide are the very persons who most disre-
gard the light of experience, when it refers them
to the mightiness of their own inner nature, *in
opposition to those forces which they can see
with their eyes and reduce to figures upon a
slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the
greater and more useful part but a voice from
the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us
from their united experience that our spirits are
OS much strcnger than our bodies as they are
nobler and more permanent. The historic Muse
appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of
Hope." In the first war of the French Republic

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230 THE FKEHCH EEVOLDTION

agaiost her foreigD invaders, it was faith in ideas
which enabled the raw levies to oppose them-
selves sQCceesfnlly to disciplined battalions.
Now, this faith in the invisible rendered the
often defeated Spaniards finally invincible. The
armies of Napoleon's marshals were a formi-
dable machine of war ; but viewed inwardly,
they lacked unity and cohesion, they repre-
sented only a mass of conflicting self-interests.
The better spirit of the Revolution was fighting
against them ; and Wordsworth and Coleridge
felt that in their loyalty to the Spanish cause
they retained that which was most precious in
the enthusiasm of their earlier days.

The historic Muse, though the " Letters on
the Spaniards" invoke her aid, had less close
and less frequent communings with Coleridge
than with his brother poet, Southey. There was
something epical in Southey's imagination. He
' cared less for ideas than for heroic character
and action. His fancy was exhilarated by ad-
venture. He loved to follow the march of great
events. In the earlier years of the Napoleonic
struggle, whOe France achieved her unparalleled
conquests on land, England held her destined
position as mistress of the seas. Her supremacy
as a naval power was lai^ely due to the incom-

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EECOVEKT AHD EEACTION 231

parable genius for batUe and the high self-devo-
tion of Nelson. In his poem of 1806, the
" Character of the Happy Warrior," Wordsworth,
deriving something from the memory of his
brother John, who had gone down with his
vessel in the preceding year, connects with this
his conception of the character of Nelson, and
presents his ideal of the armed champion of his
country. In the mild concerns of ordinary life
he shows himself gracious rather than great.
But this gentle hero of days of tranquillity is
transfigured in the hour of danger. The happy
warrior is one who,

" if he be callecl apon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great isaoes, good or bad, for human kind,
Is happy OS a lover ; and attired
With sndden brightneae, like a man inspired ;
And through the heat of conflict keeps the law
In calmnesa made, and sees what he foresaw."

Southey's " Life of Nelson " may be described
as a miniature prose epic ; it is a simple narra-
tive of heroic action, unencumbered with reflec-
tions or lyrical outbreaks of feeling. The boot
was designed as a manual for young sailors, to
be carried about by them, until they bad treas-
ured in their memory and heart the example of
the chivalric hero, with his high sense of duty,

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232' THE FKENCQ SEVOLUTIOII

his patriotism, his hntnaiiity. " The best eulc^
of Nelson," wrote Southey, " is the faithful his-
tory of hia actions ; the best history, that which
shall relate them most perspicuously." A His
method is that of plain narrative ; be made him-
self master of such material as was then acces-
sible ; he disposed of it with admirable skill ;
and he allowed it to speak for itself/] His
ardent feelings are held in reserve; but it ia
they that give his story its steadfast power of
wing. Only at the close, and then as if inevi-
tably, comes an outbreak, not of sorrow, but of
just pride and exultation: "He cannot be said
to have fallen prematurely whose work was
done; nor ought he to be lamented, who died
full of honors, and at the height of human fame.
The most triumphant death is that of the taar-
tyr; the most awful, that of the martyred
patriot ; the moat splendid, that of the hero in
the hour of victory : and if the chariot and the
horses of fire had been voucbsafed for Nelson's
translation, he could scarcely have departed in
a brigliter blaze of glory. He has left us, not
indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name and
an example, which are at this hour inspiring
hundreds of the youth of England, — a name
which ia our pride, and an example which will

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BRCOVEBT AND KBACTION 233

coDtinue to be our shield and our streagth."
To fiad a parallel for words of such lofty cheer,
we have to turn to those of deeper and more
moving import in which Milton's Manoa sums
up the meaning of the death of the Israelitish
champion.

In his "History of the Peuiosular War,"
Southey'a method is the same, — that of objec-
tive narrative. It tells an epic story, illustrious
with heroic incident and character. From the
commencement of the contest, Southey had en-
tertained the hope and intention of recording its
events ; but he delayed in order to become pos-
sessed of the gradually accumulating material.
The hero of the epic is Wellington, and the title
to fame awarded to him by the historian is not
merely that he broke the spell of Napoleon's
supposed omnipotence, not that he defeated the
armies of France, not that his foresight and
enterprise were equalled by hia mihtary discre-
tion, not that as a commander he never gave an
opportunity and never lost one, but that by his
achievements he delivered two grievously op-
pressed nations; secured the safety, honor, and
welfare of England; preserved the general in-
terests of Europe and of the civilized world, and
accomplished his task in the spirit of beneficent

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234 THE FRENCH RSVOLTITIOS

humanity. The eulogy proceeds in words which
express the feeling ol the time, and which our
colder judgment may value at least, as a docu-
meat illustrating its exultant temper.

Many of the persons and incidents of the
Peninsular campaigns were commemorated by
Southey in a series of " Inscriptions." According
to a Welsh triad, the " three utilities " of poetry
are " the praise of virtue and goodness, the
memory of things remarkable, and to invigorate
the affections." To these ends Southey's "In-
scriptions " are dedicated, and iu this monu-
mental form of verse, for which he found his
model in Ghiabrera, he became a master. His
too fluent style was restrained by the imposed
limitation ; his feelings were concentrated, and
their expression was invigorated by restraint
Keaders of the present day, when Southey's
verse is little known and, weighted by its masses
of heavy mediocrity, has sunk below its deserts,
may account for Landor's admiration by the
enthusiasm of his friendship; and doubtless
some of his unbounded praise is to be ascribed
to that cause. But the rare union of marmoreal
strength and impulsive feeUng which charac-
terizes the best poetry of Landor may be found
iu one or two of these short pieces by Southey.

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RECOVERY AND REAOTION 235

That which commemorates the gallant death of
Thomas, ensign of the Buffs, has the excellence
of exact adequacy; it confers perpetuity on a
moment of heroic passion; it precisely hits the
mark.

From his early manhood, Southej had been
brought into closer relations with Portugal and
Spain, with the manners, life, and literature of
those countries, than any Englishman of letters
of his generation, Wordsworth had been more
deeply influenced by France than either of his
friends ; Coleridge, through his philosophic I
studies, had been the intimate of Germany ;
it was to the Spanish Peninsula that Southey's '
heart turned, if ever it left his native land. The |
recollection of Ciutra was present to him as a
living joy ; he toiled among the chroniclers and
the romancers with a love that made his labors
pleasures. The combined action, therefore, of
England and Spain in a great patriotic effort
aroused his deepest sympathies. Some of the
feeling called forth by the war against the
French enters into his " Roderick." When
the young champion Pelayo takes the vow of
devotion to his country and of sacred vengeance
gainst her oppressors, the poet did not thi^
only of the Moorish invaders. -The scene is an

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236 THE FREKGH REVOLUTION

impresaive one, under the blue firmament among
the SierraB of Spain. The disguised Boderick,
whose crime of passion had led to the entrance
of the infidel horde, administers in his religious
garb the vow ; in presence of the ancient monn-
taina, bis native streams, and earth and shy, the
noble youth, on whom rest the hopes of bis
people, swears for himself and his children's
children, never to cease from hereditary holy
war until the last invader be exterminated or
driven from the sacred soil, —

"Silently
The people knelt, and when thej rose, such awe
Held them in silence, that the eagle's cry,
Who far above them, at her highest flight
A speck scarce visible, gyred round and ronnd.
Was heard distinctly ; and the mountain stream.
Which from the distant glen sent forth its sooiLda
Wafted upon the wind, grew audible
In that deep hush of feeling, like the voice
Of waters in the atillness of the night."

"The Curse of Kehama" by its subject is
remote from European interests ;^ we are encir-
cled by monstrous gods of Hindoo mythology;
but even here the passions of the time effect an
entrance. The poem, begun at Lisbon in 1801,
was finished at Keswick in November, 1809.
The almighty Bajab, as the narrative proceeded.

iv,Goog[c

SECOYERT AKD BEACTION 237

identified himself in Soatbey's imaginatioD with
the ruler of Europe. Eehama, most implacable
of tyrants, by unholy prayers and sacrifices, has
made himself a rival to the supreme deities them-
selves ; he aspires to drink the cup of immortality,
and to assume the throne of Padalon. ButSeeva,
the god of righteous vei^ance, is still uncon-
c[ueTed; he opens upon the profane tyrant his
eye of anger; the wrath-beam falls; and the
Bajah, made immortal for punishment, not for
triumph, moves under the decree of divine power,
not to fill the throne, but to stand forever as one
of its tortured supporters. " O fool ! " exclaims
the poet, and his words were addressed in idea to
the Napoleon-Kehama of Europe, —

" O fool of drunken bope Etnd frantic vice I
Madman I to eeek for power beyond thy scope

Of knowledge, and to deem
Less than Omniscience could suffice
To wield Omnipotence I "

The conclusion of the poem was Southey's
protest against an error, which of all others, as
Coleridge declared in the " Courier," was the
special danger of the time, — the "inward pros-
tration of the soul before enormous power, and
a readiness to palliate and forget all iniquities to
which prosperity had wedded itself."

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238 THE FBENCH REVOLUTION

But Souther's most impassioned pleading
against Bonaparte is to be found in his " Ode
written during the Negotiations for Peace in
1814," a poem ol which the author of "Philip
van Artevelde " asserted that since Milton's
great sonnet on the massacre in Piedmont there
has been no occasional poem equal to it in
grandeur and power; "nor any," he adds, "equal
to it in art." It has certainly the distinction of
being the fiercest lyrical invective in our lan-
guage; and the invective is of a lofty kind,
inspired by public passion, by sacred indigna-
tion, by a deep loyalty to the human hopes and
natural charities which had been violated, by a
sense of the great human fraternity of the noble
living and the noble dead, by an eaf open to the
invocation of the spirits of just men to the ever-
lasting Judge of righteousness. " How long,
Lord ! Holy and Just, how long I "

The ideas of liberty and of the fraternity of
nations had been lost by France during the
Napoleonic wars. The idea of social equality
remained. Southey was too much swayed by
passion to recognize or interpret the complete
significance of the great events of his age. He
failed to perceive the beneficent part of that
work which Napoleon terribly accomplished.

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RECOVERY AND EEACTION 239

His de3p intereBt in social reforms saved Southey
from becoming obstructive or stationary ; but his
political creed ceased to have in it the elements
of progress. The passions which he had endured
were exhausting and now craved repose. He did
not in tbe years that followed alter the position
which he had taken up. Coleridge continued
hia task of renovating old ideas. Wordsworth
travelled onward to the heights of old age,
illuminated by a tranquil evening light.*

* Sonthej'B political idew are vertUed in the Second Part
of " ThB I'oet's FilgrimB^ to Waterloo ; " the First I'art,
describiDg his janmey to the scene of war, is picturesque and
sometimes impaauoned ; the allegorj which follows concerning
the false wisdom of the age and tbe trae hopes of man, cannot
be sajd to attain more thaa respectabie mediocrity. Unfor-
tnnatelj, the author imagiqed that he was a philosophical poet.

It is somewhat SDrpHsing that Scott should' have failed !a
the battle poetry of hia "Field of Waterloo." The war-ljrics
of the time which Barrive are few. Wolfe's " Burial of Sir
John Moore " was founded on a passage in Sonthey's contri-
bation to the "Edinborgh Annual liegister," 1808. Campbell,
an anient sympathizer with the French Bevolutioo, had himself
seen something of continental war in 1800. "Since the arrival
of the gallant Repnbllcans," he writes from Ratisbon. "we hare
many specimens of military eTOlntions eitreniely striking.
Snch flery countenances and rapid manrenvreB as these active
little fellows exhibit are only to be expected from the con-
querors of Lodi and Marengo. It would raise every spark
of enthusiasm in your heart to see them marching with stately
and measured steps to the war-song of Liberty." Tbe stanxas
of the "Battle of the Baltic" are happily described by one of
Campbell's criti<» as "salvoes of artillery."

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b, Google

RENEWED EEVOLUTIONAET ADVANCE:
MOOKE, LANDOE, BYEON, SHELLEY

:,q,z.-3b,.GoOg[c

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RENEWED REVOLUTIONAKY ADVANCE

Ih one of Moore's " Fables for the Holy Alliance,"
lie deacribes a dream which is meant for an alle-
gory of the European politics of the time- A
palace of ice rises before him in his dream like
that which the Empress Anne built in 1740, and,
like the Empress's palace, situated on the Neva.
In this icy structure the Emperor Alexander la
giving a ball, to entertain the monarchs and am-
bassadors of the Holy Alliance. The gathering
is stately, but sensible of the chill, — " shiver-
ing in grand illumination." The Czar waltzes
briskly ; for has not Madame Krudener assured
him that there is no danger, and that the frost
will last forever ? Suddenly, however, the massy
walls of the palace are seized with an ill-omened
dripping; the floors grow slippery beneath the
royal feet A fandango is loudly called for;
but scarcely has the whirl begun, scarcely Ijas
the strain been heard, than an angry beam of
morning sunlight flames through the chamherSi

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244 THE PHENCH REVOLUTION

and the cry goes up, " A thaw I a thaw ! " Why,
asks the dreamer, will monarchs caper thus in
palaces without foundation ? Instantly every-
thing is in a flow, — crowns, sceptres, fiddles,
decorations ; the royal arms carved in ice begin to
dissolve ; the double-headed eagles let the globes
slip from their claws ; poor old Louis' jleura-de-
lys are surely water-lilies. But worse follows, —
the kings and kaisers themselves are in a melting
mood ; just as the Czar is about to issue a sublime
ukase forbidding the admission of light, he
streams and sinks ; Louis, like the sugar-king of
a Twelfth-night cake in some urchin's mouth,
melts Into a shapeless mass. In a minute all ia
gone, the glittering dome of ice and those beneath
it, — kings, fiddlers, emperors. Only one thing
is seen and heard, — the bright livei rushing
forward,

" Happy Eis an enfranchis'd bird,
And prouder of that natural raj,
Sbiniog aloDg its chainless ynj, —
More prondlj happy thus to glide

In aimple grandeur to the sea.
Than when, in sparkling fetters tied,
'T was deck'd with alt that kingly pride
Could bring to light its slavery I "
Madame Erudener, the ahe-prophet, may make
what she pleases of the dream ; it is not the
dreamer's part to attempt an interpretation.

:,q,-z.-dbvGoOg[c

/

HENEWED EEVOLUTIONAEY ADVANCE 245

Wordsworth and Southey had exulted over the
fall of Kapoleon, and hailed the return of freedom
to Europe. A despot had indeed been over-
thrown ; an overwhelming danger had been
averted ; but the battle of Waterloo did uot bring
liberty to the nations of the Continent. A month
after Napoleon had sailed for his island of exile
and imprisonment, the Emperors of Bussia and
Austria, with King Frederick William, signed the
treaty on which the peace ot Europe was to rest
Lord Castlereagh, a little later, agreed on behalf
of England to an alliance which should secure
the future tranquillity of the emancipated peoples.
The alliance of September, 1815, was " Holy," be-
cause the contracting monarcbs declared that both
in the administration of their respective states and
in their political relations with every other gov-
ernment they would "take for their sole guide
the precepts of the holy religion of our Saviour,
— namely, the precepts of justice. Christian char-
ity, and peace." There followed immediately the
proscriptions and court-martials of the Bourbon
restoration. Marshal Ney was shot in the gar-
dens of the Luxembourg Palace, Murat, the ex-
king of Naples, was shot in front of the castle of
Pizzo, The White Terror spread over the south
of France. The so-called Law of Amnesty in

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246 THE FfiENCH BEVOLCnOX

Jauuary, 1816, drove into exile many of those
~#Iio had beeD conspicuous in war, in statecraft,
and in art. Liberty of the press was suspended,
and persona] liberty lay at the mercy of an uJtra-
royalist majority. In Spain the Inquisition was
re-established, and hundreds of Spanish patriots
were put to death. The map of Europe was re-
formed with an entire disr^ard to the principle
of nationality. Old free cities and old republics
disappeared. The Austrian ruled in Venice.
Belgium and Holland, notwithstanding the differ-
ences of language, religion, and popular feeling,
were united under one king. Norway was forced
into subjection to the crown of Sweden, A popu-
lation of two and a half millions was severed
from France. England, indeed, showed a rare -
moderation as regards territorial aggrandizement,
but she showed entire unconcern for popular lib-
erties, tor the security of which she had pledged
herself. A few statesmen sitting in congress
disposed at their pleasure of the loyalty of mil-
lions of European citizens. Moore was hardly
extravagant when he spoke of the royal saints
dipping the sponge in holy water to wipe out all
human rights, Eenbow was the name of a pub-
lisher who brought out infamous and irreligious
books. " I can't help thinking," cries Moore,

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EENEWED REVOLUTIONAKT ADVANCE 247

" (thongh to kings
I must, of course, like other men bow),
That when a Christian monarch brings
Religion's name to gloss such things —
Such blasphemy out-Beubows Benbow."

And again he has a parable for the occasion, —
that of a friar and a king who change their
cloaks, and who, each in his new disguise, behaves
80 vilely that Beligion has to be packed off to the
madhouse, while Royalty is dismissed to Bride-
well. The hopes of Wordsworth and Southey
after the battle of Waterloo were not fulfilled ;
indeed, they might seem almost as delusive as the
extravagant dreams which had flattered them in
the opening days of the French Eevolution,

The problem which layJaefore Europe was how
to unite order with freedom ; in the reaction the
monarcha and their representatives thought of
order first, and of freedom little, if at alL But
the people still thought of freedom ; they could
not foi^t the lessons, for good and for evil, of the
Eevolution, nor the recent lessons of the Napo-
leonic wars, which had so strongly called forth
throughout Germany and Spain the sentiment of
nationality. A series of Revolutionary move-
ments was the result In 1820 insurrectionary
disturbance broke out in Spain ai^d in Italy.
Ferdinand found himself compelled to accept a

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248 THE FRBMCH EETOLUTION

liberal conatitution. Convents were suppressed ;
the JeauitB were banished ; the Inquisition was
overthrown. The Carbonari promoted an insur-
rection at Naples ; there was revolt in Sicily ;
there was revolution in Porti^l; in Wallachia
and Moldavia the people rose ; the Greek patri-
otic flame was lit. In England the Beform move-
ment gathered strength; in Ireland a cry went
up for Catholic emancipation, llie order attained
by the politicians of Vienna and the crowned
heads of the Holy Alliance was not a stable
order. The thaw of Moore's fable had begun,
and the palace of ice was visibly dripping.

The time was one of dissonance. The chief
literary exponents in England of the Eevohition-
ary spirit in its earlier days had gone over to
the party of order, Wordsworth pleaded with
the freeholders of Westmoreland against the ac-
ceptance of such an agitator as Srougham for the
representation of the county ; or he occupied
himself in tracing in a series of sonnets tiie his-
tory of the English Church. Southey, while
advocating not a few wise reforms, engaged
vigorously as a Quarterly Reviewer in defending
the established order of things. Coleridge's in-
fluence was a liberalizing influence upon thought;
but it rather interpreted existing institutiona and

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BEHEWED BETOLUTIOKABT ADVANCE 249

ideas into new .and deeper meanings than aimed
at any reoiganizatiou of the social and political
framework. In the other camp Cobbett ut-
tered vigorous dennnciatioDS of taxation, rotten
boroughs, fund-holders, and stock-jobbers ; but
Cobbett's Eadicalism, as Fitzjames Stephen has
remarked, had in it a curious and almost a ro-
mantic strain of conservatism. Hazlitt unpacked
his heart with words ; lavished abuse on the rene-
gades who had deserted the objects of their early-
devotion ; lashed out at friend and foe ; sighed
for the happiness of the days before the great
Emperor's fall, and reconstructed in his imagina-
tion the Napoleonic legend. But Hazlitt's argu-
ments were httle more than the props of his
passions. Le^h Hunt had a certain bright chiv-
alry on behalf of whatever assumed to itself the
cherished name or the aspect of Liberty ; at times
he could present b gallant front to her foes. But
Hunt's shafts, if occasionally keen, were always
light-timbered, and rather annoyed the enemy
than achieved their ruin. He was framed less
for the rough tumble of English radical politics
than for " dance and Provemjal song and sun-
burnt mirth." At this time truth and justice
were painfully divided between the party of order
and the party of progress. There was no thinker,

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250 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

no man of action, who could bring tx^ether apd
co-ordinate the several fn^ments of truth. L It
was at home and abroad a period of much moral
confusionTf For many serious minds the ideas of
the Eevolntioa were discredited hy the anarchy
to which they had led, and hy the military despot-
ism which had taken that anarchy into itself and
enlarged its borders. For many young and pas-
sionate hearts the ideas of the party of order were
discredited by the new tyrannies, the cant of reli-
gion, the sale of peoples, the reckless indifference
to the hopes and desires of the multitude. It
was hard at such a time to find a faith, and the
danger was great that a mere assertion of egoism
and self-wiU might take the place of a faith.

In Continental politics the bouildiug lines be-
tween right and wrong were perhaps clearer than
in the politics of England, where the old institu-
tions of the country had borne a great strain well,
and the demand for change could be met by for-
cible ai^uments for conservation. Certainly, for
an Englishman exiled from his native land, the
traditions of the heart were fewer and less em-
barrassing ; he would naturally be caught into
the European movement, and cease to view things
from an insular standpoint. There was, however,
one portion of the United Kingdom where the

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RENEWED REVOLDTIONABT ADVANCE 251

traditions favored, not conservation, but change,
The memory of confiscations, of mined trade, of
religious disabilities, of outraged sentiment, still
lived in Ireland ; but Ireland possesses, or once
possessed, a happy art ot mingling smiles with
tears and laughter with indignation. It was in
the early days of the Bourbon restoration that
the interesting family of Mr. Phil Fudge visited
Paris. Old letters of travel are not always en-
tertaining, but those edited by " Thomas Brown
the younger" in 1818 deserve to be remembered,
and perhaps some persons will think that Fad-
ladeeo, Mokanna, Lalla Kookh, and a sentimental
Peri are hardly as good company as Mr, Philip,
his hopeful son Bob, the patriotic Mr. Phelim
Connor, and ttat romantic Irish maiden, Miss
Biddy, who communicates her tender passions
and her experiences of foreign travel so naively
to her correspondent of Clonakilty in Ireland,
The head of the house was one of those gentle-
men whose secret services in Ireland, under the
mild ministry of Lord Castlereagh, had been
gratefully remunerated, and, like his friend and
associate, Thomas Eeynolds the informer, he had
retired upon the reward of his honest industry ;
but still he is ready to report such information
as he may acquire to his revered patron. On

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252 THE FBEMCH EETOLCTIOtT

Lord Castlereagh'B suggestion, Mr. Fudge has
undertaken to ■write au account of his travels
in France, a good orthodox work of the kind
that was greatly needed, —
"To expound to the world the new — thingummie —

(it is Miss Biddy who describes the purport of
the boob, and her views on pohtics are some-
what vague), —

"Found out by the — what's its name? — Holy Alliance,
And prove to mankind that their rights are but folly.
Their freedom a joke (which it ii, jon know, Dolly).
' There 's none,' said hia Lordship, ' if / may be judge.
Half so fit for this great undertaking as Fudge I ' "

He is accompanied by that gilded youth. Bob,
who has come to study — at least the culinary
art of Paris ; no longer the sheepish Bob of rural
Ireland, —

" Lord ! he 's quite altered, they Ve made him a dandy ;
A thing, you know, whisker'd, great-coated, and lac'd.
Like an hourglass, exceedingly small in the waii^t."

Miss Biddy h^s gowns no less amazing than
Bob's great-coat, and a bonnet

" so beautiful I high up, and poking,
Like thinp that are put to keep chimneys from smoking."

She has a lively sense of existence ; enjoys the
twinkling feet of Fanny Bias in Flora, and the

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HEKKWED REVOLUTIONAET ADVANCE 253

dark dishevelled hair of the Biggotini aa Psyche,
vrith those pious plays — quite charming and
very religions — given at the theatre of St Mar-
tin. The fourth of the party is an earnest youth,
Phelim Connor, a third cousin, poor but hand-
some, with the Napoleonic nose and chin, who
for charity's sake has been nominated tutor to
the curled darling Mr.^Boh. Phelim is Irish and
Catholic to the backbone ; a dark and determined
enemy to all oppressors ; and one who can exhale
his wrath in eloquent words. By the happy
choice of persons for his little epistolary drama,
Moore was enabled to express his Irish gayety,
his Irish satirical vein, his Irish political passions
and aspirations. Mr. Fudge the elder's book, by
and by to be published, will prove

"that all the world, at present,

Is in a state extremely pleasant ;

That Europe — thanks to royal swords
And baf'nets, and the Duke's oommanding,

Enjoys a peace — which, like the Lord's,
Passeth aU human undorstanding.*'

And at the same moment when he makes his
pleasing report to Lord Castlereagh, poor Phelim
Connor is relieving his overburdened soul in
vengeful words, many of which — tor he is an
intemperate young man — have to be represented
hj asterisks. Never can he return to Ireland

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254 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

while the withering hand of bigot power lies
heavy on his country ; nay, wheresoever he flies
the scourge pursues him, —

"Turn where he will the wrptched wand'rer vtewa.
In the bright, broken hopes of all his race,
. Countless reflections ot the Oppreaaor'a face.

Everywhere gallant hearts, and apirits true,
Are serv'd up victims to the vile and few;
' While E — gl — d everywhere — the general foe
01 Truth and Freedom, wheresoe'er they glow —
Lt first, when tyraots strike, to aid the blow.

Worthy associate of that band of kings,

That royal rav'ning flock, whose vampire wings

O'er sleeping Eorope treacherously brood.

And fan her into dreams of promis'd good.

Of hope, of freedom — but to drain her blood 1 "

Through his young Irish patriot Moore ex-
presses his own detestation of " the grand con-
spiracy of kings," who had bartered and weighed,
as so much duat, the world of thinking souls.
He describes the joy that filled Europe at the
downfall of Napoleon ; the long sigh of the peo-
ples for justice, hberty, repose ; and then he
breaks forth against the Royal slave-mart, the
broken charters, the rapine of aristocrats, the
servitude of the press, the mockery of reason
in high places. Napoleon was perfidious, crimi-

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KENKWED REVOLDTIONAEY ADTAKCE 255

nal, a trampler on human freedom ; but at least
lie had a genius formed

" for nobler things
Than lie within the grasp of vulgar kings."

Whereupon Moore, in his happy way, saves
himself from the accusation of overloaded rhet-
oric, and lightens the spirit of his readers, by a
return to Gatti's rose-water and the delectable
ices at Tortoni's.

We care too well for Miss Biddy Fudge to
follow her to the days of her decline, when she
was Protestant aud Tory, when Exeter Hall took
the place of Tortoni's, and the flirt had retro-
graded to the saint Moore, in his own manner
of satire, gay yet bitter, was happier than when
be occupied himself in spreading the stage-gauze
of his Oriental scenes, or performed the feat, as
Hazlitt deacribea it, of converting the wild harp
of Erin into a musical sniiff-box. But there are
higher forms of literature than the letters of the
Fudge family. Among the English literary op-
ponents of the Beaction the most illustrious
names are three, — those of Landor, Byron, and
Shelley. Landor's position in politics has been
accurately defined by his bic^rapber, Mr. Sidney
Colvin. He stood midway between the party of
conservation and the party of revolt. He was

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256 THE FEEKCH ElVOLTJTION

not a democrat ; his sympathies were, indeed,
alive to the joys and Borrows of the people ; but
he was esseatially aD aristocrat of the intellect.
His admiration for the majesty of individual
character was unbounded ; and he held that a
"mob" was not "worth a man." His ideal of
government resembled that of 5iIiltoi^~a" republic
ruled by an oligarchy of virtue and of wisdom}
The philosophical dogmas of the Revolution had
no interest for one who regarded abstract spec-
nlatioQ with a lofty scorn. His indignation
against the new despotisms of Europe was deep ;
but in English politics, while he desired, like his
friend Southey, to correct many things, he would
change little. " His chief practical exhorta-
tions," writes Mr. Colvin, " were against wars of
conquest and annexation; against alliance with
the despotic powers for the suppression of in-
surgent nationalities; against the over-endow-
ment of ecclesiastical dignitaries ; in favor of
the removal of Catholic disabilities; in favor
of factory acts, of the mitigation of the penal
laws, and of ecclesiastical and agrarian laws for
the rehef of the Irish." Three Italian orations
of Landor agmnst the Holy Alliance seem to
have been rewritten in English, and were sent
for publication to London ; unhappily, no trace of

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RENEWED EEVOLDTIONART ADVANCE 257

these has been recovered. Their general spirit
may be inferred from certain of the " Imaginary
Conversations ; " we cannot doubt that they were
impetuous pleas against tyranny, or that their
impetuosity was moulded into stateliness of form.
The first volume of the " Imaginary Conversa-
tions " (1824) was dedicated to Major-General
Stopford, adjutant-general in the army of Co-
lombia. Landoi was deeply interested in the
success of the South American republics, — partly,
he says,' because he wished every nation under
heaven to be independent ; partly, because he
thought it would be advantageous to England
that some counterpoise against the power of the
United States should he found on the American
continent. Mourning over the feebleness of pub-
lic spirit in his own country and the rarity of
political abilities, he chose to place bis noble
volume of prose in the hands of an Englishman,
who seemed to him to have risen above the self-
ishness and frivolity of the time, and who had
aided one of the republics which sprang into
existence at the voice of Bolivar. The second
volume is inscribed to General Mina, the famous
chief of the Spanish guerillas ; and with Mina
the writer pleads on behalf of the young repnb-
lics of the West He desired to see in South
17

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258 THE FBBNCH EKVOLtJTION

America, not a loose and turbulent democracy,
but a confederacy against external tyranny,
f^ainst dependence and uaurpation, against " in-
stitutions not founded upon that equable, sound,
beneficent system, to which the best eneigies
of man, the sterner virtues, the milder charities,
the comforts and satisfactions of life, its regu-
lated and light affections, the useful arts, the
ennobling sciences, with whatever is innocent in
glory or useful in pleasure, owe their origin,
their protection, their prt^ress, and their ma-
turity." Landor's scorn for what may be called
the metaphysics of Eevolution preserved him
from the vacuous rhetoric and the bandying of
popular catchwords which are dear to the heart of
some prophets of democracy. He was in no sense
of the school of the prophets. His conception of
a tree, adult, proud, and cultivated nation has
a grandeur derived from the definite and positive
character of his imagination. In his private
life Landor was the prey of sudden and violent
passions ; all the more remarkable are the sanity
and virile strength of his political convictions.
Their tendency is eHlntially constructive ; if he
loved liberty like Milton, he loved it, like Milton
also, because he perceived that it is the condition
of noble vigor. No loftier word on the evil

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RENEWED SEVOLCnONAKY ADVANCE 259

influence of despotism in dwarfing the passions
and the deeds of men has been spoken than that
of Landoi's poem which iu some editions brings
his " Hellenics " to a close, —

" We are what suna and winds and waters make ua ;
The mouDtains are our aponsors, and the rilla
Paahiou and win their nuiBeling with their amiles.
But where the land is dim with tyranny,
There tiny pleasurea occupy the place
Of glories and of dnties; aa the feet
Of fabled faeries when the Bun goes down
Trip o'er the grass where wrestlers strove by day."

The heroic ideals of Lander's imagination,
derived in part from communion with the great
natural aristocrats of all time, helped to save his
verse and his prose from the violence and egoism
which often confused his life, and which often
cleared away as suddenly, like clouds before the
wind and sun. He toiled indeed at his art with
en intemperate rage that exhausted him ; but
it was to produce a form of marmoreal purity
and permanence, to discover the laws and the
lines of ideal majesty or ideal grace."

With Byron it was otherwise: he not only
lived in an age of dissonance ; there was disso-
nance in his own nature which helped to make
him a representative of the age. The old world
of feudal reverences and chivalries was out of

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260 THE FKENCH KETOLCTIOK

date ; the new world was not yet bom. Byton
could not satisfy his hunger for life with abstract
doctrines ; h* could not subsist on ideal hopes
and faith ; he had a great capacity tor pleasure,
a strong turn for reality, a certain coarseness of
fibre ; he devoured whatever the world offered
bim of enjoyment, both vulgar and lofty, and he
found it unsatisfying. No organized body of
belief guided his intellect; no system of social
duties controlled his heart. Society aft^r the
Revolution and during the Reaction lay around
him in seeming chaos; what was old had lost
authority ; what was new had not fully justified it-
self. At least one thing remained, — thejndivid-
nal will, and the power of that will to rise in
revolt and scorn against the surrounding society.
And so bis poetry is an assertion of the suprem-
acy of the individual will; it is the poetry of
revolt ; it expresses at least the negative side of
the Revolution with unequalled force. It is a
cry for freedom, — freedom from the tottering
tyrannies of the time, from the tottering creeds,
from discredited traditions, from the hvKicrisies
of vulgar respectability, from cant a^'d sham.
But if you were to ask Byron, "HowJJphen free-
dom has been won, is freedom to ballsed ? " be
would have no answer to give. The mere deploy-

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BENEWED EETOLUTIONARY ADVANCE 261

iag of the passions and the will flatters his im-
aginatioo with a sense of power ; he considers
little, if at ell, the true ends for which the will
should put forth its energies.

To acquire a r^bt feeling for Byron and his
poetry is a discipline in equity. It is easy to
yield to a sense of his power, to the force and
sweep of his genius ; it is easy to be repelled by
his superficial insincerity, his license, his cyni-
cism, his poverty of thought, his looseness of
construction, his carelessness in execution. To
know aright the evil and the good is difficult
It is difficult to feel jnstly towards this dethroned
idol (presently, perhaps, to be re-enthroned), an
idol in whose composition iron and clay are
mingled with fine gold.

But what interests us in Byron and in Byron's
work is precisely this mingling of noble and
ignoble, of gold and a base alloy. We do not
thank any one for extracting the gold and present-
ing it alone. We can get swifter and clearer
lyric poetry from Shelley, a truer and finer feel-
ing for nature from Wordsworth, more exquisite
satiric art from Pope, dramatic power incompar-
ably wider and deeper from Shakespeare. Seen
in elegant extracts, Byron is impoverished, oi
rather Byron ceases to be Byron. Matthew

i^

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262 THE TBEBCH SEVOLUTION

Arnold's volume of selections from Byron, com-
piled with such excellent intentions, proves at
least that his poetry is not of the kind that can
be piDDod in a epecimeti case, like preserved
butterflies. line upon line, here a little and
there a little, is the way in which such work as
his should not be read. We must take him or
leave him as he is, — the immortal spoilt by his
age, great and petty, weak and strong, exalted
and debased. A glorious wave that curls upon
' the sea-beach, though it leave sea-wrack and refuse
I' on the sands, is more stimulating, more health-
} giving, than a pitcher of such salt water in one's
dressing-room, even if it be free from every float-
ing weed.

In its mingled elements Byron's poetry rep-
resents at once the mind and character of the
writer and the temper of his age. He was an
aristocrat, and at the same time be was revolu-
tionary. He had the pride of ancestry, but noth-
ing of the hereditary dignity, the fine traditions of
civility, the trained mastery of men and events,
which belong to the best types of bis class. The
Eevolutiou and the Eeaction helped to spoil him
as an English nobleman. In a time of disorder and
disintegration he fell into the coarse ways of the
jeunesse dorSe of the period of the Regency. The

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RENEWED EEVOLUTIONARY ADVANCE 263

taiut of vulgar aristocracy helped to spoil him as
a RepublicaQ. He had a strong feeling for the
Revolutionary movemeat as a destructive force ;
he sympathized with its negative teadeocies ; he
CDJoyed the seuse of emancipatioa from the old
restraints ; he loved to demonstrate the boondless
freedom of the individual, in his passions, his self-
will, his audacities of belief or unbelief, his scorn
for things commonly regarded with veneration or
esteem. But he cared little for the principles or
tendencies of the Revolution which are positive,
constructive, social ; he had neither the power of
thought nor the patience which are needed by
one who would bnild up ; it was enough for him
if he could deliver a reeling blow at despotisms,
half-realized creeds, lifeless conventions, and dull
respectabilities, or could mock at them in their
state of infirmity. He had lost faith in what /
was old, and had not gained a new faith. He |
could do little more than plead for an emanci-
pation of egoism, and into his egoism ran that
sentiment of the infinite, that limitless desire,
which Rousseau's passionate heart, hia ardent
feeling for nature, and those boundless horizons
opened by the Revolution had made a common
possession of the time. He asserted with em-
phasis the prert^tive of man to do what he

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264 THE FRENCH EEVOLOTION

likes, where he likes, when he likes, how he
likeB ; and the privilege of woman to lay her
paBsioQ at the feet of auch a proud insurgent..
He idealized in his poetTy all revoltera against
the social order, a Gain, a Corsair, a Manfred, all
who seek for isolation, for solitude, or find the
end of their being in abandonment to personal
passion in disregard of social duty. His mockery
was a dissolvent of accepted conventions and
traditional manners and morals. He took part
in popular movements of political emancipation
less in the spirit of faith and hope than because
his imagination had been captivated by the new
force of the people, because it pleased him to
deploy his own energy, and because he hated and
despised the spent forces, or what seemed to be
such, on the side of conservation. To the last he
was haunted by the ghosts of traditional beliefs,
which had ceased to live within him as vital
powers. He was a democrat among aristocrats
and an aristocrat among democrats ; a sceptic
among believers and a believer among sceptics.
And yet his line of advance was not a via media,
nor was it determined by a spirit of moderation
or critical balance. He never attempted to effect
a conciliation between the powers that clashed
or jarred within him. A certain intellectual good

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EEHEWED BEVOLUTIOHAET ADVANCE 265

sense indeed he bad, but tbis was liable to
be overpowered by tbe turbulent rush of his
temper ; and when a reasonable mood re-emerged,
good sense would take the form of ironical
laughter at himself and at the world. To his
quick sense of humor more than to anything
else he owed the sanity which controls or modi-
fies his perturbations of mind. With a keen
perception of human folly, he could mock absurd-
ity, affectation, extravagance in other men ; it was
his merit that he could turn tbe light of laughter
upon himself, and chasten his own follies by
ridicule.

He passed in his earliest writings at once from
song to satire. In the title of his boyish volume,
" Hours of Idleness," there is a touch of an affecta-
tion which clung to him in after life ; the verses
are the recreation of a gentleman, not the work of
a professional scribbler. Let others, hke Southey,
toil for their daily bread by authorship ; he, for
his part, would condescend to letters only as a
dilettante. It is characteristic of Byron's two-
fold nature that his first appearance should be as
a lyrical poet, his second as a satirist ; but even
in his satire there is a large personal element, —
its mockery is not all righteous indignation, but
the recoil of pride and resentment. As a lyrical

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266 THE PRKMGH BEVOLUTION

poet he waa always fortanate or unfortunate as it
were by force of circumstances. He did uot
weave his lyric out of an impersonal theme made
his own 1^ occult processes of the imaginatioD.
He bad little of the shaping power of iniagiua-
L tioD which is seen in an eminent degree in the
best lyrics of Keats. He needed the impact of
events, — public events or events in his individ-
ual life. If he wrote with an insufficient im-
pulse from without, the product was often a base
kind of rhetoric, of which we may find frequent
examples in his shorter pieces, or in the shape-
less and sometimes tawdry lyrical passages of
" Heaven and Earth." If he was struck hard by
events, — events in the material or the ideal
sphere, — there came a resonant response ; his '
strangely discordant powers were for the moment
fused, and he uttered his feelings with incompar-
able enei^y and directness. Pride and passion,
love and hatred, grief and joy, flowed tt^ether
and flowed forth in one strong, abounding
stream.

In his " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers "
Byron showed small literary st^city, hut he
struck with force, and proved that he was virile as
a combatant. The blow, he said, " knocked me
down, but I got up ^ain. The efiect upon me

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RENEWED RETOLOTIONARY ADVANCE 267

was rage and resistance." He uses the metre of
Pope", but in Byron's hands it became more of a
cutlass than a stiletto. He lays about him with
little discrimination among the poets of the new
Bomantic and Naturalistic schools, — Scott, Cole-
ridge, Southey, Wordsworth, — and finds the
promise of our future literature in the authors
of the " Pleasures of Memory " and the " Pleas-
ures of Hope." Belonging himself essentially to
the Eomantic movement, he would dissociate him-
self from the party ; ant^onism was better than
absorption. His high esteem 'for Pope was cer-
tainly genuine; it lasted during his entire life,
and arose partly from the fact that what was
lacking to himself as an artist and as a man he
■ found in Pope. He sprang upon his object ; Pope
finessed with it He was careless and splashy ;
Pope strove to be exact and exquisite. He was
consumed with boundless ambition and desires ;
Pope preached what $& did not attain, — the wis-
dom of an equable temper, moderated wants and
wishes, submission to the rule of life, acceptance
of our place in the scale of being, good sense,
and, if possible, good sense with the added charm
of amiability.

In the first two cantos of "Childe Harold,"
which appeared in 1812, after his return from

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268 THE FRENCH REVOLnTION

Greece, Eyron abandons Pope and the eighteenth
century ; he goes with the current of the time ;
he is easentially modern, though, half through
hamor and half through a notion of romance (for
it vraa the season of romance), be wears a medi-
eval masquerade. We are not for a moment
deluded by the fantastic garb ; the " Childe " is
a young Englishman of the opening years of the
present century, who has the distinction of being
a prey to consuming ardors and is touched by the
melancholy which accompanies unsatisfied aspira-
tions. In an addition which he made to his
original preface Byron speaks with contempt of
" the monstrous mummeries of the middle ages ; "
yet he affects an archaic costume. To find ro-
mance Scott had gone to the past; Byron under-
took to show that the present ia full of the
elements of romance, — strangeness, picturesque-
ness, passion, adventures of love, adventures of
war. The instant popularity of his poem proves
how truly it was the offspring of the time. In
it the junction between the Romantic and the
Revolutionary movements, which gives much of
its character to his work, was effected. His hero,
as he tells us, was designed to be a kind of mod-
ern Timon ; he bad found satiety in excess of
pleasure, and with this nineteenth-century Timon

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KENEWBD EEVOLUTIONAEY ADVANCE 269

melancholy takes the place of rage. But as the
medievalism of the earlier cantos of "Childe
Harold" is only a transparent varnish, so the
misanthropy does not as yet go deep. It is in-
deed 'Byron's great capacity for enjoyment that
gives " Childe Harold " its real interest He has
a feeling for the majesty of landscape, for men
and manners, for the life of society, for historical
associations, for contemporary events, for the
glory of literature and art, for the genius of na-
tiotas and of individuals. The poem is a glorified
guide-book ; but it is something more, for in the
person of his hero Byron creates a type which
represents modem romance, modem melancholy
(when the Eevolutionary passions remained un-
satisfied and the Bevolutionary faiths were
obscured), and, with these, the capacities for
wide and varied pleasure proper to a time of
culture, of travel, of cosmopolitan sympathies
and interests.

It is sometimes forgotten, though it should
always he home in mind, that the third and
fourth cantos of " Childe Harold " belong to a
later period than the first half of the poem. The
third canto was written in 1816, after Byron bad
separated from hia wife and had quitted his own
country. Instead of the half-fantastic melancholy

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270 THE TBEHCH REVOLUTION

of the earlier cantos we have here the evidences
of real suflering. The poet's passion is deeper;
his reflections are less obvious and superficial ; his
power OS a poet is no longer adolescent, but ma-
tura Byron'a companionship with Shelley on
the Lake of Geneva helped to lift his spirit into
a higher and clearer atmosphere. His capacity
for delight is not diminished, and indeed his
sense of pleasure seems enhanced by a closer
acquaintance with pain. He snatches a joy more
eagerly. The fourth canto, which tells of Italy,
carries the poem to a triumphant close. The
hero is now frankly identified with the writer;
his misanthropy is Byron's own Weltschmerz ;
his rapture in nature, touched with a pantheistic
sentiment characteristic of the time, his joy in
man, and mingling with the joy his sense of the
pettiness of human life, are Byron's in their vol-
ume and their energy. The chief value of the
poem lies not in this or that celebrated morsel of
description, which can be exhibited in a book of
extracts, but in the writer's deep interest in the
works and ways of humanity united with a revolt
against the world, and a scorn, not wholly feigned,
for human existence. There are in it the ardor of
the Revolutionary epoch; and also the moral void
caused by a wori£ of destrnctioa which seemed

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RENEWED UITOLUTIONABT ADVANCE 271

to have failed, and hj the loss or the obacuration
of the new faith in days of political reaction.

The Eastern Tales annexed a new province to
Bomantic poetry. Southey, indeed, in " Thalaba "
aud "Kebama" had found his themes in the
Arabiau wilds, and among the temples, the giant
rivers, the inextricable forest-shades of India.
But Southey's poems were written in an ethical
spirit which was chBracterisrically his own ; they
are tales of heroic duty and heroic fortitude, of
vengeance that is just, and of the law of charity
that supersedes the law of vengeance. B^rgulft
are tales of passion. His heroes and heroines
are those of Revolutionary romance ; they are re-
volters against the social order, not like the
humble martyrs of Southey's " Botany Bay Ec-
logues," but sublime in mysterious loves end
hates, and da7.zling in beauty or in pride, — Cor-
sairs, Giaours, Pirates, a Lara, a Hugo, a Zuleika,
a Qulnare. They are a law unto themselves;
their noblest virtues are those found in connec-
tion with unrestrained abandonment to passion ;
they make an unqualified assertion of the rights
of the individual will ; their very love is a kind
of egoism, or at best an egoism doubled in the
person of another. Time, which cannot breathe
the breath of change upon the highest works of

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272 THE FBENCH fiEVOLUTIOH'

art, has dealt hardly with these poema. Are we
to think of them as no better than melodramaa
played by marioDettes, tarbaned and fierce of eye,
or shaped after those ideals of teminiiie perfection
which embellish some old Book of Beauty ? The
stage-properties are tarnished now; the vein of
sentiment has run dry. Bat the Turk and the
lady, the amorous pirate, the renegade, the rose
of the harem, and Uie entire stock company were
once as mnch alive as certain favorite heroes and
heroines of contemporary fiction are at the pres-
ent day. Perhaps Nora Helmer and Hedda
Gabler may by and by repose in the old mario-
nette box, and the wires by which their limbs are
convulsed may have grown rusty ; perhaps the
sawdust already escapes from a clerical ;garb
that was so fresh a few years since ; perhaps a
sprightly heroine of two or three seasons ago is
no longer so atrociously sprightly. Let us feel
towards Byron's Oriental figures with some ten-
derness, for they deserve it. It is worth while
to set them on the stage again, and to hear them
declaim their loves and hatreds, their rapture and
revenge. How much of it all is real and how
much ia theatrical ? and how has the manufac-
turer contrived to run together the false and the
true, the pinchbeck and the gold ? For all is not

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EENEWED BEVOLUTIONABY ADVANCE 273

unreal in these poems. Each was thrown off at
a heat, and the verse has often a fervid swiftness
of movement, like the stride of a racer; the
scenes are often strongly and vividly imagined;
true passion mingles with pseudo-passion ; the
characters resemhle one another, indeed, but they
exhibit a type which has an importance in the
history of European literature. Of the earlier
tales, perhaps the first in date presents the type
most powerfully. The darker and stronger
coloring of "The Giaour" certainly makes "The
Bride of Abydoa " look pale and faint beside it
In " The Prisoner of Gbillon " fraternal affec-
tion takes the place of the passion of man and
woman ; or if a heroine there be, she is named
Freedom, for whom the captive sighs with more
desire than mortal maiden could move in his af-
flicted heart. The other poem of captivity, " Ma-
zeppa," is a striking contrast ; for here, instead of
pacing the narrow dungeon, heavy with stagnant
air, the captive is in swiftest motion, bound to
the rushing steed, while forest and stream and
wilderness and the solitary skies reel past him,
as he is borne afar from the haunts of men.
Shall we moralize it into an allegory of oue bound
on the wild horse of passion and hurried into a
solitude of the soul ?

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274 THE FBEHCH BETOLUTION

Byron's resideace in Italy produced some re-
markable poems, other than dramatic, on Italian
themes. And in these the temper of the Eevolu-
tion may be easily dieceraed. The "Ode on
Venice" laments the decay of the city of the sea
under an alien tyranny, and hails the new world
of America as the home of freedom, which has
been banished from her ancient habitations by a
coalition of kings, —

" Tlie name of Commonwealth Is past and gone

O'er the three fractions of the groaning globe ;
Venice is crnsh'd, and Holland deigns to owo

A sceptre, and endnres the porpte robe ;
If the free Switzer jet bestrides alone
His chainless moantaios, 't b but for a. time,
For tyranny of late is cunning grown.
And in its own good season tramples down
The sparkles of our ashes."

In "The Prophecy of Dante" the poet, writing
in Dante's metre, tells of the glories and the
shame of Italy ; but his copious rhetoric has little
in common with the close-woven textnre and
austere beauty of the " Divine Comedy," Dante
in the " Prophecy " is, like Byron, an exile ; and
it was not of Dante only that the English singer
thought when he foretold the day on which the
poet's dust should be reclaimed by the Mother-
country that had cast him forth. The foreign

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RENEWED EEVOLCTIONARY ADVANCE 275

tyranny of Italy is aimouiiced, and the one re-
maining hope for freedom is indicated in Italian
unity, —

" What ia there wanting, then, to set thee free,
And show thy beant; in its fnllest light?
To make the Alpa impassable ; and we.
Her aons, may do this with one deed, — Unite."

If Dante in Byron'9 poem is one who endures
the grief of exile, the Tasso of his impassioned
monologue ia in yet more lamentable case, im-
prisoned as a madman in the hospital of Saint
Anna, severed from the princess whom in his
rashness he had loved, and — worst anguish —
aware that his genins is slowly decaying ia the
penury of joy and hope. To these three poems
three cities of captive Italy lent their inspira-
tion; they are the mourning chants of Venice,
Bavenna, Ferrara.

Byron's dramas are extraordinary tours cU
force of a writer whose genius was not, in any high
d^ee, dramatic Those which conform most
closely to the regular drama are the least excel-
lent. His strong, imaginative feeling for history,
and his acquaintance with Venetian character
and Venetian local color, do not suffice to make
" Marino Faliero" or "The Two Foscari" an emi-
nent historical play. To name them with Shake-

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276 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

speare'a tragedies is to reveal all their dramatic
poverty; they caDnot even compare with the
masterpiece of Otway. The Eastern drama "Sar-
danapalus" interests the reader at least in its
later acts, although the character of the monarch
suddenly ennobled from a voluptuary to a hero,
lacks depth and subtlety; there is spirit in the
scenes of battle, and grandiosity in the close,
when the defeated King of Nineveh and his
Ionian slave and lover, Myrrba, mount the
funeral pile in the vast abandoned palace. Those
dramatic poems which make no pretence to be
dramas in the strict sense of the word are more
in harmony with Byron's genius. " Heaven and*
Earth," which tells of the loves of the angelic
eons of God for the daughters of the race of
Cain, is disfigured by its shapeless pseudo-lyrics ;
but a pervading sense of doom gives majesty to
the poem, and the picture of the Deluge has
been well compared to the treatment of the
same subject in Fousain's impressive composi-
tion. "Cain" is a drama of intellectual and
moral revolt; it tells the story of the first
proud, insurgent spirit on earth, with his ar-
dent love, his aspiring will, his passion for
knowledge, his doubts and hopes and fears, his
uprising against tyranny, his sudden crime, hia

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RENEWED EETOLUTIONARY ADVANCE 277

condemnation, and his remorse. The poem ia
deGcient in material action, but its dialogue is
filled with what may be termed acta of the in-
tellect ; and in the flight of Lucifer and Cain
through space, past starry worlds, to the realm
of Hades, while daring doubts are ever proposed
and are ever met by daring sophistries, a sense
ia conveyed to us of the grandeur and immensity
of the universe, and at the same time a sense
of the mysteries which encircle and baffle the
human mind. " Heaven and Earth " and " Cain "
we may call, as Byron would have it, not regular
dramas, but " mysteries." " Manfred " is a " dra-
-matic poem." Once again the protagonist ia a
revolter against the laws of life. The shadow of
an inexpiable crime and a mori^l sorrow broods
over him. He has sought for light and help in
forbidden knowledge ; he has subjected to his
spells the elemental spirits ; but he has found
that those who know the most have the deepest
cause to monm over the fatal truth that the
Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life. Hu-
manity is here shown in antagonism with the
conditions of its existence. The greatness of
man is at strife with the inadequacy of the
moans to support that greatness. This discor-
dant, unintelligible being — man — is surrounded

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278 THE ?8ENCH BEVOLDTIOH

with immortal beauty and grandeur, which make
him only the more Beneible of the discordance
between hia aspirations and his attainments.
The glories of Alpine landscape, with au&rise
and sunset among the mountains, the eagle on
the wing, the avalanehe, the glacier, the rainbow-
enchanted torrent, form a splendid environment
for the melancholy figure of the feudal lord and
Magian, to whom love has brought only remorse,
and in whose spirit knowledge has engendered
only sorrow.

It is in ways which are indirect that the spirit
of the BevolutioQ, united with the genius of
Komance, appears to most advantage in the
poetry of Byron. "The Age of Bronze," written
at Genoa in 1823, deals immediately with poli-
tics, and the poem is not one of his happier
achievements. H'apoleon.now the caged eagle
squabbling for his rations, was once upon the
wing, a power of freedom in the world. "He
hurst," says Byron, "the chains of millions, and
for what ? To renew the fetters which he had
broken. And yet the spark of liberty is not ex-
tinct In the South American republics, in Spain,
in Greece, it lives and works. Byrou exults in ■
the thought of the uprising of the peoples ; he
derides the policy of the Holy Allianca Turning

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BKNEWED REVOLUTIONARY ADVAKCE 279

to Englaod, he seea the landed interest wholly
devoted to the raising of rents; the Church
weeping like Niobe over her offspring, — tithes;
Uie stock-jobbers on 'Change, the Jew speculators,
making their market out of the hopes and fears
of nations ; and for each the poet has some line
or some phrase of indignant rhetoric. He con-
cludes with an outburst of laughter at the ultra-
loyalty of the Highland kilts of the city-knight.
Sir William Curtis, — "Vich Ian Alderman," —
worn at Holyrood in the presence of King (Jeorge
IV. The satire which strives to be vigorous has
an air of exhaustion. Some of the bronze of the
^e described by Byron entered into his poem.

From Hookham Frere, and through his own
versification of Pulci'a " Morgante Maggiore,"
Byron had learnt the use of the ottava rima.
Its springing gait suited well with the gay super-
ciliousness, the light insolence of " The Vision
of Judgment." To explode with inextinguish-
able laughter such an arch-respectability as the
Poet Laureate had in it something inexpressibly
exliilarating. Never had Byron written with
greater animation ; tbe serious purpose under-
lying a superficial profanity suited his genius.
Beneath the burlesque handling of things sacred
appears tbe better spirit of the poet in the zeal

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I

280 THE FEESCH REVOLUTION

with which he pleads for what to him was io
truth sacred, — the cause of political freedom.
But it ia ia "Don Juan" that the whole of
Byron is deployed, — the evil and the good, the
spirit that sinks and the spirit that soars. Who-
ever named it the " Odyssey of Immorality " sug-
gests only half the truth. It is undoubtedly a
poem of moral rebellion, and well expresses the
temper of a time when old reverences were dis-
credited, and ancient landmarks had been re-
moved ; yet a certain fire of the ideal lives
throughout the poem. Licentious, cynical, ir-
reverent, shameless, — the accustomed counts of
accusation may all be admitted; yet it is also
inspired by not ignoble passion. Its morality,
if one desires to seek for this, may be found in
a scorn for base things of the world which ob-
struct generous effort and sap generous faith, and
with which Byron waxes indignant, partly be-
cause he has himself suffered from their rule or
influence. He cannot for more than an hour, or
perhaps a moment, believe in love, constancy,
patriotism, virtue ; yet he knows that these are
the life of life, and he turns with bitter mockery
to revenge himself on the society of worldlings
and of hypocrites which has helped to make him
a mocker and a sceptic It is a mistake to sup-

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SENEWBD REVOLUTIONARY ADVAKCE 281

pose that what is best in " Don Juan " can be

severed from what is worst, and be presented
apart. What is best lives in what is worst.
Byron's cynicism is his testimony to the truth
that man must live by faith ; his bitterness of
spirit means that to move sanely and joyously
in a moral void is impossible. At the last mo-
ment his nobler self revolted against the base-
ness not only around him but within him, and
it was the champion of Greek liberty who fell
asleep at Missolonghi. In his delirium he was
mounting a breach, — "Forwards, forwards, cour-
age, follow my example." When calm returned,
he was heard to murmur; "Poor Greece! , . .
I have given her my time, my means, my health

and now I give her my life! Wliat could I

do more ? " As the day drew towards sunset, he
spoke* "Now I shall go to sleep;" after which
no word was uttered.

" This should have been a noble creature : he
Hath all the energy which would have made
A goodly frame of glorious elements,
Had they been wisely mingled : as it is
It is an awful chaos — light and darkness.
And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts
Mix'd, and contending without end or order."

These lines from "Manfred" might serve for
Byron's epitaph.

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282 THE FBEKCH BEVOLUTION

Having told the story of Shelley's life in great
detail, and having summed up my general im-
pression of the man and his work in a brief
study,^ I shall not attempt to add anything to
what I have already written. The view which
presents Shelley as a leader of thought and that
which sees in him a mere visionary are assuredly
alike errODeous. To nineteenth-century thought
he did not contribute a single original idea of
I importance. A definite body of doctrine lies
behind the colors and melodies of his verse, but
this is derived from Godwin and the French
philosophers who prepared the way of Bevolution.
In essentials nothing is changed. Their errors
and their illusions were Shelley's. But it Inust
I be added that the truths of which their writings
f became the vehicles were also his. And as these
truths were important and have been powerfully
operative during a hundred years, a poet who
apprehended them and vitalized them by his
passions and his imagination cannot be rightly
considered a dreamer or a pliantast. Some, in-
deed, of Shelley's hopes for society were illusive.
The conception of the ideal man of a future
golden age as

I TnuiKriptfi and Studies, pp. 75-111: "Last Words on
SlieUey."

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RENEWED EETOLUTIONART ADVAMCE 283

" Equal, nnclassed, tribeless, aad nationleas,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree,"

13 a false conception. But some of his visions
were prophetic, and society is now visibly nearer
to their fulfilment than when he gave tliem
utterance. He did not anticipate a speedy at-
tainment of what the future holds in store. His
expectations were moderate. " The great thing,"
he wrote, " is to hold the balance between pop-
ular impatience and tyrannical obstinacy. . . . I I
am one of those whom nothiog will satisfy, but /
who are ready to be partially satisfied in all that 1
is practicable," He held that the progress of 1
society cannot but be slow and gradual ; and at
the same time he believed that it is well to have
before us ideals of what is very far off, both as
guiding lights, and as encouragements to effort
and to fortitude.

Progress, fraternity, equality, freedom, — these
high-sounding words have been as wind to in-
flate much soaring rhetoric ; but they are great
words, with most substantial meanings, if we
consider them aright. Some of their true sig-
nificance was interpreted by the poetry of Shelley.
" In the earlier years of our century " — I must
be my own plagiarist — " the democratic move-
ment concerned itself too exclusively with the

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284 THE FBEHCH EETOLUTIOff

individual and his rights, and regarded too little
his duties, affections, and privileges as a member
of society. It is greatly to the advantage of
Shelle/s work as a poet, and greatly to bis
credit as a man, that he assigns to love — that
which links us to onr fellows — some of the
power and authority which Godwin ascribes to
reason alone. The French Revolution had been
in a great measure a destruction of the ancient
order of society, and anch poetry as Byron's,
sympathizing with the Revolution, is too reckless
an assertion of individual freedom. Shelley was
deeply infected with the same errors. But it is
part .of the glory of his poetry that in some
d^ree he anticipated the sentiment of the second
half of our century, when we desire more to con-
struct or reconstruct than to destroy, ^elley's
ideas of a reconstruction of society are indeed
at times vague or visionary ; but there is always
present in his poetry the sentiment or feeling
which tends to reconstruction, the feeling of
genuine love for men and concern for their
higher interests. With him the word " frater-
nity " is at least as potent as the word " liberty."
In Byron we find an expression of the Revolu-
tion on its negative side, — not wholly, but in
the main; in Shelley we find this, but in the

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EENEWED REVOLUTIONARY ADVANCE 285

main an' expression of the Revolution on its
positive side. As the wave of revolution rolls
onward, driven forth from the vast volcanic
upheaval in France, and as it becomes a portion
of the literary movement of Great Britain, its
dark and hissing crest may be the poetry of
Byron ; but over the tumultuous wave hangs an
iris of beauty and promise, and that foam-bow
of hope, flashing and failing, and ever reappear-
ing as the wave sweeps on, is the ^oe^y of
Shelley." ^

So I wrote several years since. It v
perate estimate of the value of Shelle^ work.
If it fail to satisfy admirers who will accept no
reserves, and if it seem extravagant to those who
have no perception of the stronger and saner side
of his character and genius, perhaps it is not the
less likely on this account to be an approxima-
tion to the truth.

> Transcripts and Stmlies, pp. 96, 97.

er reappear
e T^^y

t ^H|[em
ille^ work

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