THE PERIOD OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
I. BURKE
Edmund Burke (1729-97), the writer who used most completely the oratorical style in English prose, was a Dublin Irishman, born of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, and educated as a Protestant at Trinity College. He came to London and entered the Middle Temple in 1750, but was never called to the Bar. His first tentative excursions into literature were an ironical answer to Bolingbroke in A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and an essay in aesthetics after Addison in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). They are not important, though we get from them intimations of Burke's personal convictions. Throughout his life, feeling, and not reason, was the power that moved him.
Burke's public career began in 1759 when he became editor of The Annual Register and secretary to William Gerard Hamilton—"Single Speech Hamilton"—Chief Secretary for Ireland. In 1765 he entered the House of Commons and became Secretary to Lord Rockingham, then in power. Suring the short life of Rockingham's first ministry and the sixteen years of opposition that followed, Burke was the animating spirit of the Rockingham Whigs. He fought for the freedom of the House of Commons against the subsidized interests of the "King's Friends", and the freedom of the American colonies against the claims of the King's friends to tax them directly. The writings in which his views are most fully preserved are Observations on a late publication entitled "The Present State of the Nation" (1769), Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), the speech On American Taxation (1774), that On moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (1775) and A Letter . . . to . . . [the] Sheriffs of . . . Bristol (1777). As the American war drew to an end, Ireland and India became Burke's chief concern. By his support of Irish trade, he lost in 1780 the representation of Bristol, which his opposition to the American war had gained for him in 1774; and Two Letters . . . to Gentlemen in the City of Bristol (1778), with the Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol, previous to the Late Election (1780), are the noble record of his courage, independence and wisdom in the hour of defeat. Burke had hiven much time to a study of Indian affairs, and in 1785 he entered the campaign against Hasting which was to occupy him for ten years. To 1785 also belongs the famous Speech on the . . . Nabob of Arcot's Private Debts. His last crusade was that against the new government in France. A crescendo of indignation swells through a rapid succession of publications: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Letter . . . to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), and Letters . . . on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (1795-7). Burke died in 1797 with his last hopes for justice to Irish catholics shattered, and believing that England was about to make dishonorable peace with the enemy across the Channel.
Of the tracts named above, the first in which Burke's principles are stated with the eloquence that gives him a place in literature is that known as Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The policy of the King and the "King's Friends" towards the Middlesex election and towards the American colonies seemed to Burke highly dangerous. There was, he felt, no safer method of government than the openly debated "pro" and "con" of party. The attempted reassertion of royal prerogative took us back to the fatal days of Charles I. No modern student of history bases any convictions about the American struggle on the mere taxation question. The great point at issue was the right way of securing the loyalty of any overseas dominion to the home government. In Burke's view, acts of state should be guided by three main principles which can be indicated in three questions: Is this expedient or worth while? Is this good for the persons most affected? Is this justified by experience? He alone seems to have understood the problem of governing and maintaining the empire which Chatham's successful wars had called into existence. Of his American speeches, the greatest, as it is the most elaborate, is the second, On Conciliation; but the first, On American Taxation, combines in a wonderful manner simplicity and directness of reasoning with ardour and splendour of eloquence.
The obstinate stupidity which Burke deplored in the policy of George III and his ministers towards America he found undiminished in their policy towards Ireland. His Irish tracts are among the least read of his pieces, but they deserve attention, both for the excellence of their matter and for the temperateness of their utterance. In the letters To a Peer in Ireland on the Penal Laws (1782), To Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) and the earlier Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol (1780) the theme is simply this: stupidity has lost us America, stupidity will lose us Ireland. Events have justified the indictment.
Burke felt strongly that India should be govverned for the good of its inhabitants, and not for the profit of the East India Company and its servants. Warren Hastings was to him the type of misrule, and against that unhappy man he directed all his power of invective. But Hastings, whatever his faults may have been, was a great ruler, and we cannot help feeling, when we read the ferocious denunciation, that Burke was engaged, not in prosecution but in persecution.
Burke's violent opposition to the French Revolution of 1789 seems unnatural, but it is not inexplicable. The eloquent champion of the American farmer and the Indian ryot appeared to have nothing to say for the French peasant. All his eloquence was reserved for the oppressors. The cause of his antagonism was twofold and was deeply inherent in his nature. He could no more believe in "the rights of man" than he could believe in the rights of kings; further, he was sure that any assertion of such rights savoured of atheism. Burke's instinct was true. The Revolution was a challenge, not only to kingship, but to all establishments. A change was coming in the way of human thought. He felt it, he feared it, he opposed it. With the Reflections should be read An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), published anonymously and written in the third person. These two pamphlets form the most complete statement of Burke's anti-revolutionary philosophy. Unsound as he seems in his veneration of mere prescription, Burke was thoroughly sound in his suspicion of "Reason" enthroned as the sovereign power. Burke's revolt against the Revolution is almost exactly parallel to Wordsworth's revolt against Godwinism. From "political justice" Wordsworth turned to the emotions and the prejudices of the peasant, and found himself a poet again. It is easy to dislike Burke on the Revolution; but it is not difficult to be warned by him against the perpetual menace of the doctrinaire. He died before any final issue was even in sight, and there is no evidence that he foresaw the shape and course of events.
Two productions of Burke stand a part from his great crusades; they are the speech on Economical Reform (1780) and the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). The first is the most quietly persuasive and genial of his writings; the second is a formidable piece of controversy. Burke had been granted a pension, and none had better deserved it. The grant was bitterly attacked, especially by the Duke of Bedford, who appeared to consider that any grants, pensions or places should be reserved for those who did not need them, did not deserve them, and did not come from obscure families. Burke's Letter is not merely a great example of invective, it is a great example of a very rare thing, invective that is creative.
Burke's eloquence belonged to a past age. The splendour of his imagery and the sonorousness of his periods link his prose with that of the great sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. He brought into politics the faults as well as the genius of a major prophet. He is at times unrestrained, unjust, unwise; nevertheless the greatness of his mind ourweighs his faults, and he remains the only orator whose speeches have secured a permanent place in English literature.
II. POLITICAL WRITERS AND SPEAKERS
In 1784 the King once more triumphed over the Whigs, and young Pitt became master of Parliament. The devotees of Fox formed the Esto Perpetua Club and began to harry the enemy. Someone hit on the happy idea of a mock review of a mock epic, and in The Morning Herald appeared a series of "Criticisms of The Rolliad". The Rolliad was a mythical epic named from John Rolle, M.P., a stolid Tory who had tried to cough down Burke. He was provided with an ancestor, the Norman Duke Rollo, whose imaginary adventures supplied matter for a burlesque of the Aeneid. The new style of skit proved very popular, and the authors did not carry it on too long. It was succeeded by another kind of burlesque, Political Eclogues, in which Pitt and his friends appeared as Virgilian shepherds. This, in its turn, was followed by a series of Probationary Odes for the laureateship, then vacant by the death of Whitehead in 1785. The poetical level of all these pieces was not very high, but at least they were more civilized than the political satires of Churchill. The only one of the authors worth mention is George Ellis, the scholar.
One outstanding figure among the verse satirists on the Whig side is "Peter Pindar", the pseudonym adopted by John Wolcot (1738-1819) at first a doctor and afterwards a clergyman,. He discovered the genius of Opie the painter, ran him as a speculation, and quarrelled with him. He imitated The Rolliad in The Lousiad (1785) and in 1787 produced another skit, Ode upon Ode, which attained great popularity. The absurdities of the yearly official odes to the King invited reprisals, and Wolcot, hampered by few convictions and fewer scruples, found a ready market among indignant Whigs for his small scandal. He is, perhaps, the best of English caricaturists in verse. Bozzy and Piozzi (1786), the title of which explains itself, is another excellent piece of caricature.
When Pitt boldly faced the aggressiveness of French republicanism abroad and of its partisans at home, he found a lively and trenchant ally in The Anti-Jacobin (1707-8), founded by George Canning. It remains the best thing of its kind. The deadly conviction of its attack was made more effective by its witty manner. Among the writers were the many-sided, brilliant Canning, George Ellis, by this time a fervent Tory and repentant of The Rolliad, and John Hookham Frere, country gentleman, diplomatist, traveller, translator of Aristophanes, and the first to imitate in English the satiric Italian epic. The editor was William Gifford (1756-1896), whose literary brutalities have blackened a character admirable in many ways. He was one of those luckless persons born with the instincts of scholarship in penurious circumstances that denied him a scholar's education. After a miserable boyhood he was sent to Oxford, and was able to make something of a name by his satires, The Baviad (1795) and The Maeviad (1795), directed against the ridiculous "Della Cruscan" school of poets and the small dramatic fry of the day. When The Anti-Jacobin was set on foot, his sledge-hammer style nad industry made him a suitable editor; but he was mainly concerned with its prose. He did this task well, and in 1809 became first editor of The Quarterly Review and held his post for fifteen years. He seemed to find relief for the bitterness engendered by his menial years in savage attacks upon all suspected of Liberalism. The shameful onslaught in the Quarterly upon Keats can be neither forgotten nor forgiven. The verse of The Anti-Jacobin "guys" very gaily the early revolutionary bleatings of Southey and his friends. The "Knife-Grinder" sapphics in imitation of Southey are immortal.
One of the butts of the Anti-Jacobin was "Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe"—in real life William Godwin (1756-1836), a political philosopher and novelist, to whom harsh justice was measured in life, and to whom true justice will never now be done, because he is not quite important enough to pay for resuscitation. He is remembered as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and the father-in-law of Shelley; he ought to be remembered as a sincere thinker in whose character there was not a trace of self-seeking or self-display. Much conscientious, ephemeral work was done by him in history and literature; but he was brought into sudden prominence by a book of startling opinions, Political Justice, published in 1793. The influence of his book was great among the younger generation. Godwin was a born system-maker; philosophy and politics were, for him, indistinguishable, and of his views on both he was an eager advocate in public and private. So we find him writing proselytizing novels, Caleb Williams and St. Leon, which he hoped would insinuate his views in the general mind. During these years, he met and married another writer of innovating beliefs. Mary Wolltonecraft, to use her maiden name, is a far more attractive person than her placid husband. After beginning as a teacher she passed several years as a publisher's hack, till her Vindication of the Rights of Woman made her name known in 1792. It was the first blast of the trumpet in the battle for woman's freedom. Unfortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft was too consistent. She entered upon a conscientious "no-marriage" with a far from conscientious American, Gilbert Imlay, who left her with a daughter, known as Fanny Imlay, to support. Mary failed in an attempt at suicide. Soon after, she and Godwin formed an attachment, which, in accordance with their principles, was free; but they married in 1797 in order to safeguard the interest of their children. Before the end of that year, the birth of a child, the future wife of Shelley, was fatal to the mother. She had been a generous, impulsive woman, always affectionate and kind. Godwin's second choice of a wife was less fortunate and conduced to the unhappy experiences of his latter days. Always in difficulties of one kind or another, he lived out a courageous philosophical life of eighty years. William Godwin and Mary Wolltonecraft were gallant rebels of immense courage; but they were unfortunate advertisements of a new social order. They committed the crime of failure. Tragedy was bound up in the texture of their lives. Mary died just as hope and happiness seemed dawning for her. Shelley's passion for her daughter, mary, led to the suicide of his first wife. Poor Fanny Imlay committed suicide at twenty-two because she refused to be a burden upon Godwin. Claire Clairmont, daughter of the second Mrs Godwin and step-sister of the second Mary, played a dubious part in the lives of Shelley and Byron, the latter being the father of her daugher, Allegra. To exclaim with Matthew Arnold "What a set!" is tempting, but unjust. Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft rank high, and deserve to rank high, among those who have tried to solve the eternal problem "How ought man to live?" That their way was not Matthew Arnold's way does not prove they were wrong. And it was a throny path they trod.
In one respect Mary's way was quite wrong. Whether marriage is, or is not, a kind of servitude is a debating-society topic; but whether a girl is, or is not, a kind of boy is a practical question. Mary was a complete educational rebel. She wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and the whole point of her argument is that a woman should be educated on equal terms with a man. This was taken to mean that a woman should have a man's education. A century and a half later, people were beginning to re-discover that a woman ought to have a woman's education, and that a good girl's school was not necessarily an exact imitation of a good boys' school. Her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a brave piece of pioneer work, and its influence upon later reformers was powerful and creative. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is a footnote to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and should be read with that work. Mary Wollstonecraft's letters are attractive and moving.
Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was a Bible to young revolutionaries like Wordsworth in the days when he could write:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,Some of the blissful youths of that dawn, in Hazlitt's ironical sentence, lost their way in Utopia and found it in Old Sarum. But with massive placidity Godwin continued to believe in man. The weakness—and it is the fatal weakness of al the "planners") is that he believed mankind had only to be given good reasons for a better life and Utopia would follow. His faith was boundless. All that was necesasary for the success of his system was a perfect world inhabited by perfect beings. Godwin's Political Justice must not be judged by the criticisms of those who found it profitable to apostatize. Even Coleridge repented of the harshness he had dealt out to a book he once had loved. Hazlitt remained faithful, and his sketch of Godwin is still excellent. Godwin's style deserved some success. He was always clear and forcible; his sentences convey his exact meaning without effort, and display a kind of composed oratorical effect. He gained a larger audience for his novels, but the only one that can be said to survive is The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, published in 1794. Another, St. Leon, is memorable for its portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. H. L. Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (1913) is the bes introduction to their work.
But to be young was very heaven.
From Godwin, who, in his worst days, kept round him a tattered cloak of magnanimity, it is an abrupt change to his fellow-revolutionary, the coarse-grained, shrewd Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Yet Paine's public spirit led him to disregard all profit from his widely sold political works. He was a born pamphleteer, never happy unless he was divulging his opinions for the welfare of the human race as he conceived it. He spent all his earlier years in the struggle to make a decent livelihood, and at last emigrated to Philadelphia. In 1776 he became famous by his pamphlet, Common-Sense, which consolidated American opinion in favour of war. Peace brought him moderate rewards an a retirement which he could not endure. He returned to England and soon became involved again in politics. The French Revolution provided a new turning-point in his career. In 1791-2 he attacked Burke in the two parts of The Rights of Man. To escape arrest he fled to France, where he became a member of the Convention, and, barely escaping the guillotine because of his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI, founded the new sect of Theophilanthropists. In 1803 he went once more to America, only to find that his Age of Reason, published in 1794-5, had lost him nearly all his friends. Paine was a prince of pamphleteers, and his work rarely rises above the pamphleteering level. He was shallow, but he was shrewd; his style was always clear, and though it had no charm, it had sincerity. He was not, like Godwin, a social philosopher: nevertheless, he expounded a radical constructive policy, including parliamentary reform, old age pensions and a progressive income tax.
The heir to the pamphleteering eminence of Paine was a much more original and memorable person. The father of William Cobbett (1762-1835) was a small farmer and innkeeper in Hampshire, and William educated himself with indomitable pluck while serving as a soldier. He went to France, learnt the language, emigrated (like Paine) to Philadelphia, and took up the pamphlet-writing trade. Under the apt pseudonym of Peter Porcupine he conducted a pro-British and anti-French campaign, until he was ruined by libel cases and obliged to return to England in 1800. He was welcomed in Government circles, and started work as a Tory free-lance. His first venture, The Porcupine, failed; but his second, Cobbett's Political Register, a weekly newspaper which he began in 1802, gained the public ear. At first Tory, then Independent, at last strongly Radical, he maintained till his death an influence of which no persecution and no folly could deprive him. Besides other publishing ventures, including Parliamentary Debates, later undertaken by Hansard, and State Trials, he combined business and pleasure as a model farmer. All went well until, in 1810, he received a sentence of two years' imprisonment on account of an invective against military flogging. Throughout the reign of George IV he was a leader of political opinion. He knew the marketable value of books combining instruction and exhortation with a strong flavour of personality, and his Advice to a Young Man (1829) and even his English Grammar (1817) are still thoroughly readable. By 1830 his fortunes were re-established; the Reform Act opened the doors of Parliament to him, and he sat in the Commons till his death in 1835.
Cobbett's enormous personal vanity must not lessen the esteem due to his outspoken criticism of public life. He was essentially a farmer and hated large towns, especially the "Great Wen" (London) and the stock-jobbing and paper-money upon which the towns throve. He not only loved the country, he knew it, and he was a master of a style in which to express his knowledge. The Rural Rides (1830), which depict the England of his day, have an assured permanence. Others might paint rural scenery; Cobbett scans the looks and manners of the labourers and considers whether they have enough to make life bearable. The autobiography he intended to write under the title The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament was compiled from his writings by William Reitzel, published under that title in 1933, and reissued as The Autobiography of William Cobbett in 1947. his Register was the model and inspiration of later Radical popular journals such as Richard Carlile's Republican, Henry Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian and John Cleave's Gazette. Paine and Cobbett together were the main inspiration behind the lives recorded in such autobiographies as Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1844), The Autobiography of a Working Man (1848) by Alexander Somerville of the Scots Greys, the Autobiography (1872) of the Chartist poet Thomas Cooper, The Life and Struggle of William Lovett (1876) by the cabinetmaker who assisted Francis Place—"The Radical tailor of Charing Cross"—to draft the people's Charter in 1838, and largely responsible for the abolition of the newspaper tax in 1855. The struggles of Cobbett and his successors against this and other government measures are recorded in Collet Dobson Collet's History of the Taxes on Knowledge (1899).
The great tradition of parliamentary oratory was maintained by Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Canning and Grattan; but their speeches are not now read either for enjoyment or enlightenment. Like the great actor, the great orator survives as a memory. Burke stands apart, for he did not succeed as an orator; he spoke his written compositions, and his auditors hurried out to dine.
—oOo—
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario
Se aceptan opiniones alternativas, e incluso coincidentes: