Chapter VI: Preface (5)

There is another point, on which, though our doubts are by no means strong or lasting, we do not at all times feel the same absolute confidence—the continuance of the present order of things in France. The principles adhered to in the determination of some of the preceding arrangements, and the permanent views which shall appear to actuate the other powers of Europe, may have no inconsiderable influence on this great question. Whatever tends to allay the ferment in men’s minds, and to take away just causes of recrimination and complaint, must, of course, lessen the pretexts for change. We should not, however, be more disposed to augur such a change from the remaining attachment of individuals, or of the army, to Bonaparte, than from the general versatility and restlessness of the French character, and their total want of settled opinion, which might oppose a check to military enthusiasm. Even their present unqualified zeal, in the cause of the Bourbons, is ominous. How long this sudden fit of gratitude, for deliverance from evils certainly brought upon them by their slowness to admit the remedy, may continue, it is impossible to say. A want of _keeping_ is the distinguishing quality of the French character. A people of this sort cannot be depended on for a moment. They are blown about like a weathercock, with every breath of caprice or accident, and would cry _vive l’empereur_ to-morrow, with as much vivacity and as little feeling, as they do _vive le roi_ to-day. They have no fixed principle of action. They are alike indifferent to every thing: their self-complacency supplies the place of all other advantages—of virtue, liberty, honour, and even of outward appearances. They are the only people who are vain of being cuckolded and being conquered.—A people who, after trampling over the face of Europe so long, fell down before their assailants without striking a blow, and who boast of their submission as a fine thing, are not a nation of men, but of women. The spirit of liberty, at the Revolution, gave them an impulse common to humanity; the genius of Bonaparte gave them the spirit of military ambition. Both of these gave an energy and consistency to their character, by concentrating their natural volatility on one great object. But when both of these causes failed, the Allies found that France consisted of nothing but ladies’ toilettes. The army are the muscular part of the state; mere patriotism is a pasteboard visor, which opposes no resistance to the sword. Whatever they determine will be done; an effeminate public is a non-entity. They will not relish the Bourbons long, if they remain at peace; and if they go to war, they will want a monarch who is also a general.

THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, CARMEN NUPTIALE, _by Robert Southey, Esq.,
Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal
Spanish Academy of History_.—London, Longmans, 1816.

_Examiner_, _July 7, 1816_.

The dog which his friend Launce brought as a present to Madam Silvia in lieu of a lap-dog, was something like ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ which Mr. Southey has here offered to the Princess Charlotte for a Nuptial Song. It is ‘a very currish performance, and deserves none but currish thanks.’ Launce thought his own dog, Crab, better than any other; and Mr. Southey thinks his own praises the fittest compliment for a lady’s ear. His Lay is ten times as long, and he thinks it is therefore ten times better than an Ode of Mr. Pye’s.

Mr. Southey in this poem takes a tone which was never heard before in a drawing-room. It is the first time that ever a Reformist was made a Poet-laureate. Mr. Croker was wrong in introducing his old friend, the author of ‘Joan of Arc,’ at Carlton-House. He might have known how it would be. If we had doubted the good old adage before, ‘Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin,’ since reading ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ we are sure of it. A Jacobin is one who would have his single opinion govern the world, and overturn every thing in it. Such a one is Mr. Southey. Whether he is a Republican or a Royalist,—whether he hurls up the red cap of liberty, or wears the lily, stained with the blood of all his old acquaintance, at his breast,—whether he glories in Robespierre or the Duke of Wellington—whether he pays a visit to Old Sarum, or makes a pilgrimage to Waterloo,—whether he is praised by _The Courier_, or parodied by Mr. Canning,—whether he thinks a King the best or the worst man in his dominions,—whether he is a Theophilanthropist or a Methodist of the church of England,—whether he is a friend of Universal Suffrage and Catholic Emancipation, or a Quarterly Reviewer,—whether he insists on an equal division of lands, or of knowledge,—whether he is for converting infidels to Christianity, or Christians to infidelity,—whether he is for pulling down the kings of the East or those of the West,—whether he sharply sets his face against all establishments, or maintains that whatever is, is right,—whether he prefers what is old to what is new, or what is new to what is old,—whether he believes that all human evil is remediable by human means, or makes it out to himself that a Reformer is worse than a housebreaker,—whether he is in the right or the wrong, poet or prose-writer, courtier or patriot,—he is still the same pragmatical person—every sentiment or feeling that he has is nothing but the effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion. He not only thinks whatever opinion he may hold for the time infallible, but that no other is even to be tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools can differ with him. ‘The friendship of the good and wise is his.’ If any one is so unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself formerly did, this but aggravates the offence by irritating the jealousy of his self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of his spleen. Such is the constitutional slenderness of his understanding, its ‘glassy essence,’ that the slightest collision of sentiment gives an irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and makes no difference between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He thinks a rival poet a bad man, and would suspect the principles, moral, political, and religious, of any one who did not spell the word _laureate_ with an _e_ at the end of it.—If Mr. Southey were a bigot, it would be well; but he has only the intolerance of bigotry. His violence is not the effect of attachment to any principles, prejudices, or paradoxes of his own, but of antipathy to those of others. It is an impatience of contradiction, an unwillingness to share his opinions with others, a captious monopoly of wisdom, candour, and common sense. He is not an enthusiast in religion, but he is an enemy to philosophers; he does not respect old establishments, but he hates new ones; he has no objection to regicides, but he is inexorable against usurpers; he will tell you that ‘the re-risen cause of evil’ in France yielded to ‘the Red Cross and Britain’s arm of might,’ and shortly after he denounces this Red Cross as the scarlet whore of Babylon, and warns Britain against her eternal malice and poisoned cup; he calls on the Princess Charlotte in the name of the souls of ten thousand little children, who are without knowledge in _this age of light_, ‘SAVE OR WE PERISH,’ and yet sooner than they should be saved by Joseph Fox or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them damned; he would go himself into Egypt and pull down ‘the barbarous kings’ of the East, and yet his having gone there on this very errand is not among the least of Bonaparte’s crimes; he would ‘abate the malice’ of the Pope and the Inquisition, and yet he cannot contain the fulness of his satisfaction at the fall of the only person who had both the will and the power to do this. Mr. Southey began with a decent hatred of kings and priests, but it yielded to his greater hatred of the man who trampled them in the dust. He does not feel much affection to those who are born to thrones, but that any one should gain a throne as he has gained the laureate-wreath, by superior merit alone, was the unpardonable sin against Mr. Southey’s levelling Muse!

The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism; it has all sorts of obvious common-place defects, without any beauties either obvious or recondite. It is the Namby-Pamby of the Tabernacle; a Methodist sermon turned into doggrel verse. It is a gossipping confession of Mr. Southey’s political faith—the ‘Practice of Piety’ or the ‘Whole Duty of Man’ mixed up with the discordant slang of the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth century. Not only do his sentiments every where betray the old Jacobinical leaven, the same unimpaired desperate unprincipled spirit of partisanship, regardless of time, place, and circumstance, and of every thing but its own headstrong will; there is a gipsey jargon in the expression of his sentiments which is equally indecorous. Does our Laureate think it according to court-etiquette that he should be as old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his clothes?—On the present occasion, when one might expect a truce with impertinence, he addresses the Princess neither with the fancy of the poet, the courtier’s grace, nor the manners of a gentleman, but with the air of an inquisitor or father-confessor. Geo. Fox, the Quaker, did not wag his tongue more saucily against the Lord’s Anointed in the person of Charles II., than our Laureate here assures the daughter of his Prince, that so shall she prosper in this world and the next, as she minds what he says to her. Would it be believed (yet so it is) that, in the excess of his unauthorized zeal, Mr. Southey in one place advises the Princess conditionally to rebel against her father? Here is the passage. The Angel of the English church thus addresses the Royal Bride:-

‘Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,
Who from a wreck this fabric edified;
And HER who to a nation’s voice resigned,
When Rome in hope its wiliest engines plied,
_By her own heart and righteous Heaven approved,
Stood up against the Father whom she loved_.’

This is going a good way. Is it meant, that if the Prince Regent, ‘to a nation’s voice resigned,’ should grant Catholic Emancipation in defiance of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Mr. Southey would encourage the Princess in standing up against her father, in imitation of the pious and patriotic daughter of James II.?

This quaint effusion of poetical fanaticism is divided into four parts, the Proem, the Dream, the Epilogue, and L’Envoy. The Proem opens thus:—

‘There was a time when all my youthful thought
Was of the Muse; and of the Poet’s fame,
How fair it flourisheth and fadeth not, ...
Alone enduring, when the Monarch’s name
Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror’s bust
Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.’

This may be very true, but not so proper to be spoken in this place. Mr. Southey may think himself a greater man than the Prince Regent, but he need not go to Carlton-House to tell him so. He endeavours to prove that the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington (put together) are greater than Bonaparte, but then he is by his own rule greater than all three of them. We have here perhaps the true secret of Mr. Southey’s excessive anger at the late Usurper. If all his youthful thought was of his own inborn superiority to conquerors or kings, we can conceive that Bonaparte’s fame must have appeared a very great injustice done to his pretensions; it is not impossible that the uneasiness with which he formerly heard the names of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, of Wagram, of Friedland, and of Borodino, may account for the industrious self-complacency with which he harps upon those of Busaco, Vimiera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Thoulouse, and Waterloo; and that the Iron Crown of Italy must have pressed upon his (Mr. Southey’s) brows, with a weight most happily relieved by the light laureate-wreath! We are justified in supposing Mr. Southey capable of envying others, for he supposes others capable of envying him. Thus he sings of himself and his office:—

‘Yea in this now, while malice frets her hour,
Is foretaste given me of that meed divine;
Here undisturbed in this sequestered bower,
The friendship of the good and wise is mine;
And that green wreath which decks the Bard when dead,
That laureate garland crowns my living head.
That wreath which in Eliza’s golden days
My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,
That which rewarded Drayton’s learned lays,
Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel[17] bore ...
Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!
In honour it was given, with honour it is worn!’

Now we do assure Mr. Southey, that we do not envy him this honour. Many people laugh at him, some may blush for him, but nobody envies him. As to Spenser, whom he puts in the list of great men who have preceded him in his office, his laureateship has been bestowed on him by Mr. Southey; it did not ‘crown his living head.’ We all remember his being refused the hundred pounds for his ‘Fairy Queen.’ Poets were not wanted in those days to celebrate the triumphs of princes over the people. But why does he not bring his list down nearer to his own time—to Pye and Whitehead and Colley Cibber? Does Mr. Southey disdain to be considered as the successor even of Dryden? That green wreath which decks our author’s living head, is so far from being, as he would insinuate, an anticipation of immortality, that it is no credit to any body, and least of all to Mr. Southey. He might well have declined the reward of exertions in a cause which throws a stigma of folly or something worse on the best part of his life. Mr. Southey ought not to have received what would not have been offered to the author of ‘Joan of Arc.’

Mr. Southey himself maintains that his song has still been ‘to Truth and Freedom true’; that he has never changed his opinions; that it is the cause of French liberty that has left him, not he the cause. That may be so. But there is one person in the kingdom who has, we take it, been at least as consistent in his conduct and sentiments as Mr. Southey, and that person is the King. Thus the Laureate emphatically advises the Princess:—

‘Look to thy Sire, and _in his steady way,
As in his Father’s he_, learn thou to tread.’

Now the question is, whether Mr. Southey agreed with his Majesty on the subject of the French Revolution when he published ‘Joan of Arc.’ Though Mr. Southey ‘as beseems him well’ congratulates the successes of the son, we do not recollect that he condoled with the disappointments of the father in the same cause. The King has not changed, therefore Mr. Southey has. The sun does not turn to the sun-flower; but the sun-flower follows the sun. Our poet has thoughtlessly committed himself in the above lines. He may be right in applauding that one sole purpose of his Majesty’s reign which he formerly condemned: that he can be consistent in applauding what he formerly condemned, is impossible. That his majesty King George III. should make a convert of Mr. Southey rather than Mr. Southey of George III. is probable for many reasons. The King by siding with the cause of the people could not, like King William, have gained a crown: Mr. Southey, by deserting it, has got a hundred pounds a-year. A certain English ambassador, who had a long time resided at the court of Rome, was on his return introduced at the levee of Queen Caroline. This lady, who was almost as great a prig as Mr. Southey, asked him why in his absence he did not try to make a convert of the Pope to the Protestant religion. He answered, ‘Madam, the reason was that I had nothing better to offer his Holiness than what he already has in his possession.’ The Pope would no doubt have been of the same way of thinking. This is the reason why kings, from sire to son, pursue ‘their steady way,’ and are less changeable than canting cosmopolites.

THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, CARMEN NUPTIALE, _by Robert Southey, Esq.
Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal
Spanish Academy of History_.—London: Longmans, 1816.

(CONCLUDED.)

‘_Queen._ Hamlet, thou hast thy Father much offended.

‘_Hamlet._ Madam, you have my Father much offended.’

_July 14, 1816._

Though we do not think Mr. Southey has been quite consistent, we do not think him a hypocrite. This poem proves it. How should he maintain the same opinion all his life, when he cannot maintain it for two stanzas together? The weakness of his reasoning shews that he is the dupe of it. He has not the faculty of perceiving contradictions. He is not accountable for his mistakes. There is not a single sentiment advanced in any part of the _Lay_, which is not flatly denied in some other part of it. Let us see:—

‘Proudly I raised the high thanksgiving strain
Of victory in a rightful cause achieved:
For which _I long had looked and not in vain,
As one who with firm faith and undeceived,
In history and the heart of man could find
Sure presage of deliverance for mankind_.’

Mr. Southey does not inform us in what year he began to look for this deliverance, but if he had looked for it long, he must have looked for it long in vain. Does our poet then find no presage of deliverance for ‘conquered France’ in the same principles that he found it for ‘injured Germany’? But he has no principles; or he does not himself know what they are. He praises Providence in this particular instance for having conformed to his hopes; and afterwards thus gives us the general results of his reading in history and the human heart. In the Dream he says, speaking of Charissa and Speranza—

‘This lovely pair unrolled before the throne
“Earth’s melancholy map,” whereon to sight
Two broad divisions at a glance were shown,
The empires these of darkness and of light.
Well might the thoughtful bosom sigh to mark
How wide a portion of the map was dark.
Behold, Charissa cried, how large a space
Of earth lies unredeemed! Oh grief to think
That countless myriads of immortal race
In error born, in ignorance must sink,
Trained up in customs which corrupt the heart
And following miserably the evil part!
Regard the expanded Orient from the shores
Of scorched Arabia and the Persian sea,
To where the inhospitable Ocean roars
Against the rocks of frozen Tartary;
Look next at those Australian isles which lie
Thick as the stars which stud the wintry sky.
Then let thy mind contemplative survey
That spacious region where in elder time
Earth’s unremembered conquerors held the sway
And Science trusting in her skill sublime,
With lore abstruse the sculptured walls o’erspread,
Its import now forgotten with the dead.
From Nile and Congo’s undiscovered springs
To the four seas which gird the unhappy land,
Behold it left a prey to barbarous Kings,
The Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand;
Sinning and suffering, everywhere unblest,
Behold her wretched sons, oppressing and opprest!’

This is ‘a pretty picture’ to be drawn by one who finds in the past history of the world the sure presage of deliverance for mankind. We grant indeed that Mr. Southey was right in one thing, viz. in expecting from it that sort of ‘deliverance of mankind,’ bound hand and foot, into the power of Kings and Priests, which has actually come to pass, and which he has celebrated with so much becoming pomp, both here and elsewhere. The doctrine of ‘millions made for one’ has to be sure got a tolerable footing in the East. It has attained a very venerable old age there—it is mature even to rottenness, but without decay. ‘Old, old, Master Shallow,’ but eternal. It is transmitted down in unimpaired succession from sire to son. Snug’s the word. Legitimacy is not there militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of _The Times_ would wish. It is long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey them, or any laws to obey but the will of their taskmasters. This is the necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one another’s throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it. They have no French Revolutions there, no rights of man to terrify barbarous kings, no republicans or levellers, no weathercock deliverers and re-deliverers of mankind, no Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In this they are happy. Things there are perfectly settled, in the state in which they should be,—still as death, and likely to remain so. Mr. Southey’s exquisite reason for supposing that a crusade to pull down divine right would succeed in the East, is that a crusade to prop it up has just succeeded in the West. That will never do. Besides, what security can he give, if he goes on improving in wisdom for the next five and twenty years as he has done for the last, that he would not in the end be as glad to see these ‘barbarous kings’ restored to their rightful thrones, as he is now anxious to see them tumbled from them? The doctrine of ‘divine right’ is of longer standing and more firmly established in the East than in the West, because the Eastern world is older than ours. We might say of it,

‘The wars it well remembers of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’

It is fixed on the altar and the throne, safe, quite safe against Mr. Southey’s enthusiasm in its second spring, his Missionary Societies, and his Schools for All. It overlays that vast continent, like an ugly incubus, sucking the blood and stopping up the breath of man’s life. That detestable doctrine, which in England first tottered and fell headless to the ground with the martyred Charles; which we kicked out with his son James, and kicked twice back with two Pretenders, to make room for ‘Brunswick’s fated line,’ a line of our own chusing, and for that reason worth all Mr. Southey’s lines put together; that detestable doctrine, which the French, in 1793, ousted from their soil, thenceforward sacred in the eyes of humanity, which they ousted from it again in 1815, making it doubly sacred; and which (oh grief, oh shame) was borne into it once more on English shoulders, and thrust down their throats with English bayonets; this detestable doctrine, which would, of right and with all the sanctions of religion and morality, sacrifice the blood of millions to the least of its prejudices; which would make the rights, the happiness, and liberty of nations, from the beginning to the end of time, dependent on the caprice of some of the lowest and vilest of the species; which rears its bloated hideous form to brave the will of a whole people; that claims mankind as its property, and allows human nature to exist only upon sufferance; that haunts the understanding like a frightful spectre, and oppresses the very air with a weight that is not to be borne; this doctrine meets with no rubs, no reverses, no ups and downs, in the East. It is there fixed, immutable. The Jaggernaut there passes on with its ‘satiate’ scythe over the bleeding bodies of its victims, who are all as loyal, as pious, and as thankful as Mr. Southey. It meets with no opposition from any ‘re-risen cause of evil’ or of good. Mankind have there been delivered once for all!

In the passage above quoted, Mr. Southey founds his hope of the emancipation of the Eastern world from ‘the Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand’ on our growing empire in India. This is a conclusion which nobody would venture upon but himself. His last appeal is to scripture, and still he is unfortunate:—

‘Speed thou the work, Redeemer of the World!
_That the long miseries of mankind may cease!_
Where’er the Red Cross banner is unfurled,
There let it carry truth, and light, and peace!
_Did not the Angels who announced thy birth,
Proclaim it with the sound of Peace on Earth?_’

From the length of time that this prediction has remained unfulfilled, Mr. Southey thinks its accomplishment must be near. His Odes will not hasten the event.

Again, we do not understand the use which Mr. Southey makes of Red Cross in this poem. For speaking of himself he says,

‘And when that last and most momentous hour
Beheld the re-risen cause of evil yield
To the Red Cross and England’s arm of power,
I sung of Waterloo’s unrivalled field,
Paying the tribute of a soul embued
With deepest joy, devout and awful gratitude.’

This passage occurs in the Proem. In the Dream the Angel of the English Church is made to warn the Princess—

‘Think not that lapse of ages shall abate
The inveterate malice of that Harlot old;
Fallen tho’ thou deemest her from her high estate,
She proffers still the envenomed cup of gold,
And her fierce Beast, whose names are blasphemy,
The same that was, is still, and still must be.’

It is extraordinary that both these passages relate to one and the same thing, namely, Popery, which our author in the first identifies with the Christian religion, thus invoking to his aid every pure feeling or pious prejudice in the minds of his readers, and in the last denounces as that Harlot old, ‘whose names are blasphemy,’ with all the fury of plenary inspiration. This is a great effort of want of logic. Mr. Southey will hardly sing or say that it was to establish Protestantism in France that England’s arm of power was extended on this occasion. Nor was it simply to establish Popery. That existed there already. It was to establish ‘the inveterate malice of that Harlot old,’ her ‘envenomed cup,’ to give her back her daggers and her fires, her mummeries, her holy oil, her power over the bodies and the minds of men, to restore her ‘the same that she was, is still, and still must be,’ that that celebrated fight was fought. The massacres of Nismes followed hard upon the triumph of Mr. Southey’s Red Cross. The blood of French Protestants began to flow almost before the wounds of the dying and the dead in that memorable carnage had done festering. This was the most crying injustice, the most outrageous violation of principle, that ever was submitted to. What! has John Bull nothing better to do now-a-days than to turn bottle-holder to the Pope of Rome, to whet his daggers for him, to light his fires, and fill his poisoned bowl; and yet, out of pure complaisance (a quality John has learnt from his new friends the Bourbons) not venture a syllable to say that we did not mean him to use them? It seems Mr. Southey did not think this a fit occasion for the interference of his Red Cross Muse. Could he not trump up a speech either for ‘divine Speranza,’ or ‘Charissa dear,’ to lay at the foot of the throne? Was the Angel of the English Church dumb too—‘quite chopfallen?’ Yet though our Laureate cannot muster resolution enough to advise the Prince to protect Protestants in France, he plucks up spirit enough to urge him to persecute Catholics in this country, and pretty broadly threatens him with the consequences, if he does not. “’Tis much,” as Christopher Sly says.

There is another subject on which Mr. Southey’s silence is still more inexcusable. It was understood to be for his exertions in the cause of Spanish liberty that he was made Poet-Laureate. It is then high time for him to resign. Why has he not written a single ode to a single Spanish patriot who has been hanged, banished, imprisoned, sent to the galleys, assassinated, tortured? It must be pleasant to those who are suffering under the thumb-screw to read Mr. Southey’s thoughts upon that ingenious little instrument of royal gratitude. Has he discovered that the air of a Court does not very well agree with remonstrances against acts of oppression and tyranny, when exercised by those who are born for no other purpose? Is his patriotism only a false cover, a Carlton-House convenience? His silence on this subject is not equivocal. Whenever Mr. Southey shews the sincerity of his former professions of zeal in behalf of Spanish liberty, by writing an elegy on the death of Porlier, or a review of the conduct of Ferdinand VII. (he is a subject worthy of Mr. Southey’s prose style), or by making the lame tailor of Madrid (we forget his name) the subject of an epic poem, we will retract all that we have said in disparagement of his consistency—_But not till then_.

We meant to have quoted several other passages, such as that in which old Praxis, that is, Experience, recommends it to the Princess to maintain the laws by keeping all that is old, and adding all that is new to them—that in which he regrets the piety and learning of former times, and then promises us a release from barbarism and brutishness by the modern invention of Sunday Schools—that in which he speaks of his own virtues and the wisdom of his friends—that in which he undertakes to write a martyrology.—But we are very tired of the subject, and the verses are not worth quoting. There is a passage in Racine which is; and with that, we take our leave of the Laureate, to whom it may convey some useful hints in explanation of his ardent desire for the gibbeting of Bonaparte and the burning of Paris:—

_Nabal._—Que peut vous inspirer une haine si forte?
Est-ce que de Baal le zèle vous transporte?
Pour moi, vous le savez, descendu d’Ismaël,
Je ne sers ni Baal ni le Dieu d’Israel.

_Mathan._—Ami, peux-tu penser que d’un zèle frivole
Je me laisse aveugler pour une vaine idole!
Né ministre du Dieu qu’en ce temple on adore,
Peut-être que Mathan le serviroit encore,
Si l’amour des grandeurs, la soif de commander,
Avec son joug étroit pouvoient s’accommoder.
Qu’est-il besoin, Nabal, qu’à tes yeux je rappelle
De Joad et de moi la fameuse querelle?
Vaincu par lui j’entrai dans une autre carrière,
Et mon âme à la cour s’attacha tout entière.
J’approchai par degrés l’oreille des rois;
Et bientôt en oracle on érigea ma voix.
J’étudiai leur cœur, je flattai leurs caprices,
Je leur semai de fleurs le bord des précipices:
Près de leurs passions rien ne me fut sacré;
De mesure et de poids je changeois à leur gré,
Autant que de Joad l’inflexible rudesse
De leur superbe oreille offensoit la mollesse;
Autant je les charmois par ma dextérité,
Dérobant à leurs yeux la triste vérité,
Prêtant à leur fureur des couleurs favorables,
Et prodigue surtout du sang des misérables.[18]
* * * * *

Déserteur de leur loi, j’approuvai l’entreprise,
Et par là de Baal méritai la prêtrise;
Par là je me rendis terrible à mon rival,
Je ceignis la tiare, et marchai son égal.
Toutefois, je l’avoue, en ce comble de gloire,
De Dieu que j’ai quitté l’importune mémoire
Jette encore en mon âme un reste de terreur;
Et c’est ce qui redouble et nourrit ma fureur.
Heureux, si sur son temple achevant ma vengeance,
Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d’impuissance,
Et parmi les débris, les ravages, et les morts,
A force d’attentats perdre tous mes remords.[19]

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER

Sir,—I hope you will not omit to notice two passages in Mr. Southey’s poem, in which, to try his talent at natural description, he gives an account of two of ‘the fearfullest wild-fowl living’—a British Lion and a Saxon one. Both are striking likenesses, and would do to hang on the outside of Exeter-‘Change to invite the curious. The former (presumed not to be indigenous) is described to be in excellent case, well-fed, getting in years and corpulent, with a high collar buried in the fat of the neck, false mane, large haunches (for which this breed is remarkable), paws like a shin of beef, large rolling eyes, a lazy, lounging animal, sleeping all day and roaring all night, a great devourer of carcases and breaker of bones, pleased after a full meal, and his keepers not then afraid of him. Inclined to be uxorious. Visited by all persons of distinction, from the highest characters abroad down to the lowest at home.—The other portrait of the Saxon Lion is a contrast to this. It is a poor lean starved beast, lord neither of men nor lands, galled with its chain, which it has broken, but has not got off from its neck. This portrait is, we understand, to be dedicated to Lord Castlereagh.—Your constant reader,

NE QUID NIMIS.

‘A NEW VIEW OF SOCIETY; or, _Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice_.’ Murray, 1816.—‘AN ADDRESS TO THE INHABITANTS OF NEW LANARK, _on opening an Institution for the Formation of Character.’ By_ Robert Owen, _one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the County of Lanark_.’—Hatchard, 1816.

[‘Dedicated to those who have no Private Ends to accomplish, who are
honestly in search of Truth, for the purpose of ameliorating the
Condition of Society, and who have the firmness to follow the
Truth wherever it may lead, without being turned aside from the
Pursuit by the Prepossessions or Prejudices of any part of
Mankind;—to Mr. Wilberforce, the Prince Regent,’ &c.]

_August 4, 1816._

‘A _New_ View of Society’—No, Mr. Owen, that we deny. It may be true, but it is not new. It is not coeval, whatever the author and proprietor may think, with the New Lanark mills, but it is as old as the royal borough of Lanark, or as the county of Lanark itself. It is as old as the ‘Political Justice’ of Mr. Godwin, as the ‘Oceana’ of Harrington, as the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More, as the ‘Republic’ of Plato; it is as old as society itself, and as the attempts to reform it by shewing what it ought to be, or by teaching that the good of the whole is the good of the individual—an opinion by which fools and honest men have been sometimes deceived, but which has never yet taken in the knaves and knowing ones. The doctrine of Universal Benevolence, the belief in the Omnipotence of Truth, and in the Perfectibility of Human Nature, are not new, but ‘Old, old,’ Master Robert Owen;—why then do you say that they are new? They are not only old, they are superannuated, they are dead and buried, they are reduced to mummy, they are put into the catacombs at Paris, they are sealed up in patent coffins, they have been dug up again and anatomised, they have been drawn, quartered and gibbetted, they have become black, dry, parched in the sun, loose, and rotten, and are dispersed to all the winds of Heaven! The chain in which they hung up the murdered corse of human Liberty is all that remains of it, and my Lord Shallow keeps the key of it! If Mr. Owen will get it out of his hands, with the aid of Mr. Wilberforce and the recommendation of _The Courier_, we will ‘applaud him to the very echo, which shall applaud again.’ Till then, we must content ourselves with ‘chaunting remnants of old lauds’ in the manner of Ophelia:—

‘No, no, he is gone, and we cast away moan,
And will he not come again,
And will he not come again?’

Perhaps, one of these days, he may ... ‘like a cloud over the Caspian’: then if ever, and never till then, human nature will hold up its head again, and the holy and Triple Alliance will be dissolved. But as to this bald spectre of Liberty and Necessity conjured up by Mr. Owen from the falls of the Clyde, with a primer in one hand, and a spinning-jenny in the other, coming down from the Highlands in a Scotch mist, and discoverable only by second-sight, we may fairly say to it—

‘Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,
Which thou dost glare with.’

Why does Mr. Owen put the word ‘New,’ in black-letter at the head of the advertisements of his plan of reform? In what does the New Lanark differ from the old Utopia? Is Scotland, after all, the true Lubber-land? Or must the whole world be converted into a cotton-factory? Does not Mr. Owen know that the same scheme, the same principles, the same philosophy of motives and actions, of causes and consequences, of knowledge and virtue, of virtue and happiness, were rife in the year 1793, were noised abroad then, were spoken on the house-tops, were whispered in secret, were published in quarto and duodecimo, in political treatises, in plays, poems, songs, and romances—made their way to the bar, crept into the church, ascended the rostrum, thinned the classes of the universities, and robbed ‘Durham’s golden stalls’ of their hoped-for ornaments, by sending our aspiring youth up to town to learn philosophy of the new teachers of philosophy; that these ‘New Views of Society’ got into the hearts of poets and the brains of metaphysicians, took possession of the fancies of boys and women, and turned the heads of almost the whole kingdom: but that there was one head which they never got possession of, that turned the heads of the whole kingdom round again, stopped the progress of philosophy and necessity by wondrous fortitude, and that ‘thus repelled, _philosophy_ fell into a sadness, then into a fast, thence to a watching, then into a weakness, thence to a lightness, and by this declension, to the lamentable state wherein it now lies,’ hooted by the boys, laughed at by the women, spit at by fools, trod upon by knaves, damned by poet-laureates, whined over by maudlin metaphysicians, rhymed upon by mincing ballad-makers, ridiculed in romances, belied in histories and travels, pelted by the mob, sneered at by the court, driven from the country, kicked out of society, and forced to take refuge and to lie snug for twenty years in the New Lanark mills, with the connivance of the worthy proprietor, among the tow and spindles; from whence he lets us understand that it is coming up again to Whitehall-stairs, like a spring-tide with the full of the moon, and floating on the blood that has flowed for the restoration of the Bourbons, under the patronage of the nobility, the gentry, Mr. Wilberforce, and the Prince Regent, and all those who are governed, like these great personages, by no other principle than truth, and no other wish than the good of mankind! This puff will not take with us: we are old birds, not to be caught with chaff: we shall not purchase in this new lottery, where there are all prizes and no blanks! We are inclined to throw Mr. Owen’s ‘New View,’ behind the fire-place, as we believe most people do the letter they receive from the proprietors of the lucky lottery-office, informing them that their ticket was drawn a blank the first day, and in the postscript soliciting their future favours!

Mr. Owen may think that we have all this while been jesting, when we have been in sad and serious earnest. Well, then, we will give him the reason why we differ with him, out of ‘an old saw,’ as good as most ‘modern instances.’ It is contained in this sentence:—‘If to do were as easy as to teach others what were good to be done, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’ Our author has discovered no new theory; he has advanced no new reasons. The former reasons were never answered, but the plan did not succeed. Why then does he think _his_ must? All that he has done has been to leave out the reasons for his paradoxes, and to give his conclusions in capitals. This may take for a time with Mr. Wilberforce and the Methodists, who like hieroglyphics, but it cannot last. Here is a plan, strange as it may seem, ‘a new View of Society,’ published by two of our most loyal booksellers, and what is still more extraordinary, puffed in _The Courier_ as an extremely practical, practicable, solid, useful, and good sort of work, which proposes no less than to govern the world without religion and without law, by the force of reason alone! This project is in one of its branches dedicated to the Prince Regent, by which (if carried into effect) he would be stuck up in his life-time as ‘a useless piece of antiquity’; and in another part is dedicated to Mr. Wilberforce, though it would by the same rule convert that little vital member of the community into ‘a monkey preacher,’ crying in the wilderness with no one to hear him, and sneaking about between his character and his conscience, in a state of ludicrous perplexity, as indeed he always appears to be at present! What is most remarkable is, that Mr. Owen is the first philosopher we ever heard of, who recommended himself to the great by telling them disagreeable truths. A man that comes all the way from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile force that renders him irresistible. He has access, we understand, to the men in office, to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen. He comes to ‘pull an old house about their ears,’ to batter down all their establishments, new or old, in church or in state, civil, political, and military, and he quietly walks into their houses with his credentials in his pocket, and reconciles them to the prospect of the innumerable Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their present sinecures, by assuring them of the certainty of his principles and the infallibility of his practice, in building up and pulling down. His predecessors were clumsy fellows; but he is an engineer, who will be sure to do their business for them. He is not the man to set the Thames on fire, but he will move the world, and New Lanark is the place he has fixed his lever upon for this purpose. To shew that he goes roundly to work with great people in developing his formidable system of the formation of character, he asks, p. 7 of the second Essay,—

‘How much longer shall we continue to allow generation after generation to be taught crime from their infancy, and when so taught, hunt them like beasts of the forest, until they are entangled beyond escape in the toils and nets of the law? When, if the circumstances from youth of these poor unpitied sufferers had been reversed with those who are even surrounded with the pomp and dignity of justice, these latter would have been at the bar of the culprit, and the former would have been in the judgment-seat.

‘Had the present Judges of these realms, whose conduct compels the admiration of surrounding states, been born and educated in St. Giles’s, or some similar situation, is it not reasonable to conclude, as they possess native energies and abilities, that ere this they would have been at the head of their _then_ profession, and in consequence of that superiority and proficiency, have already suffered imprisonment, transportation, or death? Or can we for a moment hesitate to decide, that if some of those men whom our laws, dispensed by the present Judges, have doomed to suffer capital punishment, had been born, trained, and surrounded as these Judges were born, trained, and surrounded; that some of those so imprisoned, transported, or hanged, would have been the identical individuals who would have passed the same awful sentences _on our present highly esteemed dignitaries of the law_?’

This is a delicate passage. So then according to the author of the ‘New View of Society,’ the Prince Regent of these realms, instead of being at the head of the allied sovereigns of Europe, might, in other circumstances, have been at the head of a gang of bravoes and assassins; Lord Castlereagh, on the same principle, and by parity of reasoning, without any alteration in his nature or understanding, but by the mere difference of situation, might have been a second _Count Fathom_; Mr. Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, might, if he had turned his hand that way in time, have succeeded on _the snaffling lay_, or as a pickpocket; Lord Wellington might have entered houses, instead of entering kingdoms, by force; the Lord-chancellor might have been a Jew-broker; the Marquis of —— or Lord —— a bawd, and their sons, tapsters and bullies at bagnios; the Queen (God bless her) might have been an old washer-woman, taking her snuff and gin among her gossips, and her daughters, if they had not been princesses, might have turned out no better than they should be! Here’s a levelling rogue for you! The world turned inside out, with a witness!—Such are Mr. Owen’s general principles, to which we have nothing to say, and such his mode of illustrating them in his prefaces and dedications, which we do not think the most flattering to persons in power. We do not, however, wish him to alter his tone: he goes swimmingly on at present, ‘with cheerful and confident thoughts.’ His schemes thus far are tolerated, because they are remote, visionary, inapplicable. Neither the great world nor the world in general care any thing about New Lanark, nor trouble themselves whether the workmen there go to bed drunk or sober, or whether the wenches are got with child before or after the marriage ceremony. Lanark is distant, Lanark is insignificant. Our statesmen are not afraid of the perfect system of reform he talks of, and, in the meantime, his cant against reform in parliament, and about Bonaparte, serves as a practical diversion in their favour. But let the good which Mr. Owen says he has done in one poor village be in danger of becoming general,—let his plan for governing men by reason, without the assistance of the dignitaries of the church and the dignitaries of the law, but once get wind and be likely to be put in practice, and his dreams of elevated patronage will vanish. Long before he has done as much to overturn bigotry and superstition in this country, as he says Bonaparte did on the continent, (though he thinks the restoration of what was thus overturned also a great blessing) Mr. Wilberforce will have cut his connection. When we see Mr. Owen brought up for judgment before Lord Ellenborough, or standing in the pillory, we shall begin to think there is something in this _New Lanark Scheme_ of his. On the other hand, if he confines himself to general principles, steering clear of practice, the result will be the same, if ever his principles become sufficiently known and admired. Let his ‘New View of Society’ but make as many disciples as the ‘Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ and we shall soon see how the tide will turn about. There will be a fine hue and cry raised by all _the good and wise_, by all ‘those acute minds’ who, Mr. Owen tells us, have not been able to find a flaw in his reasonings, but who will soon discover a flaw in his reputation. Dr. Parr will preach a Spital sermon against him; lectures will be delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, to prove that a perfect man is such another chimera as a golden mountain; Mr. Malthus will set up his two checks of vice and misery as insuperable bars against him; Mr. Southey will put him into the ‘Quarterly Review’; his name will be up in the newspapers, _The Times_, _The Courier_, and _The Morning Post_; the three estates will set their faces against him; he will be marked as a Jacobin, a leveller, an incendiary, in all parts of the three kingdoms; he will be avoided by his friends, and become a bye-word to his enemies; his brother magistrates of the county of Lanark will refuse to sit on the bench with him; the spindles of his spinning-jennies will no longer turn on their soft axles; he will have gone out for wool, and will go home shorn; and he will find that it is not so easy or safe a task as he imagined to make fools wise, and knaves honest; in short, to make mankind understand their own interests, or those who govern them care for any interest but their own. Otherwise, all this matter would have been settled long ago. As it is, things will most probably go on as they have done, till some comet comes with its tail; and on the eve of some grand and radical reform, puts an end to the question.

THE SPEECH OF CHARLES C. WESTERN, Esq. M.P. _on the Distressed State of the Agriculture of the Country, delivered in the House of Commons, March 7, 1816_.

THE SPEECH OF HENRY BROUGHAM, Esq. M.P. _on the same subject, delivered
in the same place, April 9, 1816_.

This is a sore subject; and it is here handled with much tenderness and delicacy. It puts one in mind of the traveller’s nose, and the nuns of Strasburgh, in the tale of Slaukenbergius. ‘I will touch it, said one; I dare not touch it, said another; I wish I had touched it, said a third; let me touch it, said a fourth.’ While the gentlewomen were debating the point, the traveller with the great nose rode on. It would be no ungracious task to treat of the distresses of the country, if all were distressed alike; but that is not the case; nor is it possible to trace the necessities of one part of the community to their source, or to hint at a remedy, without glancing invidiously at the superfluities of others. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, that makes calamity of so long life.’ The speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady’s face, or a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to oppose something that might be done, and propose something that cannot be done; to direct attention to the subject, and divert it from it; to do something and nothing; and to come to this potent conclusion, that while nothing _is done_, nothing _can be done_. ‘But have you then any remedy to propose instead?’ What sort of a remedy do you mean? ‘Oh, one equally safe and efficacious, that shall set every thing to rights, and leave every thing just as it is, that does not touch either the tythes or the national debt, nor places and pensions, nor property of any kind, except the poor’s fund; _that_ you may take from them to make them independent of the rich, as you leave Lord Camden in possession of thirty thousand a year to make him independent of the poor.’—Why, then, what if the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were to play a game at push-pin on the top of St. Paul’s; or if Mr. Brougham and Mr. Horner were to play at cat’s-cradle on the top of the Monument; or if the little garden between the Speaker’s house and the river-side were to be sown with pearls and cockle-shells? Or if——Pshaw! Patience, and shuffle the cards.

The great problem of our great problem-finders appears to be, _to take nothing from the rich, and give it to the poor_. That will never do. We find them and their schemes of diversion well described in Rabelais, book v. chap. xxii.

‘_How Queen Whim’s Officers were employed, and how the said Lady
retained us among her Abstractors._

‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made
blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with
the bottom of a pannier.

‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy
shore, and did not lose their seed.

‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.

‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good
while in a mortar, and changed their substance.

‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.

‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.

‘Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much
they got by it.

‘Others washed asses’ heads, without losing their soap.

‘Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.

‘Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in
them.

‘Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things
return to nothing.

‘Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market;
which seemed to me a very good piece of work.