Libels, however, may be accredited and published where there is no particle of enmity or of sudden irritation. Such were the libels of Plutarch and Dr. Johnson. They are libels prompted by no hostile feelings at all, but adopted by mere blind spirit of credulity. In this world of ours, so far as we are acquainted with its doings, there are precisely four series--four aggregate bodies--of _Lives_, and no more, which you can call celebrated; which _have_ had, and are likely to have, an extensive influence--each after its own kind. Which be they? To arrange them in point of time, first stand Plutarch"s lives of eminent Greeks and Romans; next, the long succession of the French Memoirs, beginning with Philippe de Commines, in the time of Louis XI. or our Edward IV., and ending, let us say, with the slight record of himself (but not without interest) of Louis XVIII.; thirdly, the _Acta Sanctorum_ of the Bollandists; fourthly, Dr. Johnson"s "Lives of the Poets." The third is a biographical record of the Romish saints, following the order of the martyrology as it is digested through the Roman calendar of the year; and, as our own "Biographia Britannica" has only moved forwards in seventy years to the letter "H," or thereabouts (which may be owing to the dissenting blight of Dr. Kippis), _pari pa.s.su_, the _Acta Sanctorum_ will be found not much farther advanced than the month of May--a pleasant month certainly, but (as the _Spectator_ often insinuates) perilous to saintship. Laying this work out of consideration, as being chiefly employed in eulogy such as _could_ not be extravagant when applied to the glorious army of martyrs (although here also, we doubt not, are many libels against men concerning whom it matters little whether they were libelled or not), all the rest of the great biographical works are absolutely saturated with libels. Plutarch may be thought to balance his extravagant slanders by his impossible eulogies. He sees nothing wonderful in actions that were far beyond the level of any motives existing under pagan moralities; and, on the other hand, he traduces great men like Caesar, whose natures were beyond his scale of measurement, by tracing their policy to petty purposes entirely Plutarchian. But he was a Greekling in a degenerate age of Grecians. As to the French Memoirs, which are often so exceedingly amusing, they purchase their liveliness by one eternal sacrifice of plain truth. Their repartees, felicitous _propos_, and pointed anecdotes are but one rolling fire of falsehoods. And, generally, it may be laid down as a rule, that all collectors of happy retorts and striking anecdotes are careless of truth. Louis XIV. _does_ seem to have had a natural gift of making brilliant compliments and happy impromptus; and yet the very best of his reputed _mots_ were spurious. Some may be traced to Cicero, Hierocles, Diogenes; and some to his modern predecessors. That witty remark ascribed to him about the disposition of Fortune, as being a lady, to withdraw her favours from old men like himself and the Marechal Boufflers, was really uttered nearly two centuries before by the Emperor Charles V., who probably stole it from some Spanish collection of jests. And so of fifty in every hundred beside. And the French are not only apt beyond other nations to abuse the license of stealing from our predecessor _quod licuit semperque licebit_, but also, in a degree peculiar to themselves, they have a false de-naturalized taste in the humorous, and as to the limits of the extravagant. We have formerly ill.u.s.trated this point, and especially we noticed it as a case impossible to any nation _but_ the French to have tolerated the pretended "absences" of La Fontaine--as, for instance, his affecting to converse with his own son as an entire stranger, and asking the lady who had presented him what might be the name of that amiable young man. The _incredulus odi_ faces one in every page of a French memoir; veracity is an unknown virtue, and, wherever that is the taste, look for libels by wholesale. Too often even the unnatural and the monstrous is courted, rather than miss the object of arresting and startling. Now, Dr. Johnson"s calumnies or romances were not of that order. He had a healthy spirit of reverence for truth; but he was credulous to excess, and he was plagued by an infirmity not uncommon amongst literary men who have no families of young people growing up around their hearth--the hankering after gossip. He was curious about the domestic habits of his celebrated countrymen; inquisitive in a morbid degree about their pecuniary affairs: "What have you got in that pocket which bulges out so prominently?" "What did your father do with that hundred guineas which he received on Monday from Jacob Jonson?" And, as his "swallow" was enormous--as the Doctor would believe more fables in an hour than an able-bodied liar would invent in a week--naturally there was no limit to the slanders with which his "Lives of the Poets" are overrun.
Of the four great biographical works which we have mentioned, we hold Dr. Johnson"s to be by far the best in point of composition. Even Plutarch, though pardonably overrated in consequence of the great subjects which he treats (which again are "great" by benefit of distance and the vast abstracting process executed by time upon the petty and the familiar), is loose and rambling in the principles of his _nexus_; and there lies the great effort for a biographer, there is the strain, and that is the task--viz., to weld the disconnected facts into one substance, and by interfusing natural reflections to create for the motions of his narrative a higher impulse than one merely chronologic.
In this respect, the best of Dr. Johnson"s "Lives" are undoubtedly the very best which exist. They are the most highly finished amongst all masterpieces of the biographic art, and, as respects the Doctor personally, they are, beyond comparison, his best work. It is a great thing in any one art or function, even though it were not a great one, to have excelled all the literature of all languages. And if the reader fancies that there lurks anywhere a collection of lives, or even one life (though it were the "Agricola" of Tacitus), which as a work of refined art and execution can be thought equal to the best of Dr.
Johnson"s, we should be grateful to him if he would a.s.sign it in a letter to Mr. Blackwood:
"And though the night be raw, We"ll see it too, the first we ever saw."
We say nothing of the Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann"s "Streifereien") that their "Dschangariade" is the finest of all epic poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr.
Johnson"s efforts as a biographer. Consequently, we cannot be taxed with any insensibility to his merit. And as to the critical part of his Lives, if no thoughtful reader can be expected to abide by his haughty decisions, yet, on the other hand, every man reads his opinions with pleasure, from the intellectual activity and the separate justice of the thoughts which they display. But as to his libellous propensity, that rests upon independent principles; for all his ability and all his logic could not elevate his mind above the region of gossip.
Take his "Life of Savage." This was the original nest-egg, upon which, as a basis, and perhaps as the occasional suggestion of such an enterprise, all the rest--allow us a pompous word--supervened. It was admirably written, because written _con amore_, and also because written _con odio_; and under either impulse is it possible to imagine grosser delusions? Johnson persuaded himself that Savage was a fine gentleman (a _role_ not difficult to support in that age, when ceremony and a gorgeous _costume_ were amongst the auxiliary distinctions of a gentleman), and also that he was a man of genius. The first claim was necessarily taken upon trust by the Doctor"s readers; the other might have been examined; but after a few painful efforts to read "The Wanderer" and other insipid trifles, succeeding generations have resolved to take _that_ upon trust also; for in very truth Savage"s writings are of that order which "do not let themselves be read." Why, then, had publishers bought them? Publishers in those days were mere tradesmen, without access to liberal society. Even Richardson, though a man of great genius, in his publisher"s character was an obsequious, nay, servile, admirer of the fine gentleman who wore a sword, embroidered clothes, and Mechlin ruffles about his wrists; above all things, he glorified and adored a Lovelace, with a fine person, who sang gaily to show his carelessness of low people, never came abroad except in a sedan-chair, and liberally distributed his curses to the right and the left in all respectable men"s shops. This temper, with her usual sagacity, Lady M. Wortley Montagu could detect in Richardson, and for this she despised him. But this it was, and some little vision of possible patronage from Lord Tyrconnel, which had obtained any prices at all for Savage from such knowing publishers as were then arising; but generally Savage had relied upon subscriptions, which were still common, and, in his case, as a man supposed unfortunate, were given purely as charity. With what astonishment does a literary foreigner of any judgment find a Savage placed amongst the cla.s.sics of England! and from the scale of his life reasonably he must infer that he is ranked amongst the leaders, whilst the extent in which his works are multiplied would throw him back upon the truth--that he is utterly unknown to his countrymen. These, however, were the delusions of good nature. But what are we to think of Dr. Johnson"s abetting that monstrous libel against Lady Macclesfield? She, unhappily, as a woman banished without hope from all good society by her early misconduct as a wife (but, let it not be forgotten, a neglected wife), had n.o.body to speak a word on her behalf: all evil was believed of one who had violated her marriage vows. But had the affair occurred in our days, the public journals would have righted her. They would have shown the folly of believing a vain, conceited man like Savage and his nurse, with no vouchers whatever, upon a point where they had the deepest interest at stake; whilst on the opposite side, supposing their story true, spoke for them the strongest of all natural instincts--the pleading of the maternal heart, combated by no self-interest whatever. Surely if Lady Macclesfield had not been supported by indignation against an imposture, merely for her own ease and comfort, she would have pensioned Savage, or have procured him some place under Government--not difficult in those days for a person with her connections (however sunk as respected _female_ society) to have obtained for an only son. In the sternness of her resistance to all attempts upon her purse we read her sense of the fraud. And, on the other hand, was the conduct of Savage that of a son? He had no legal claims upon her, consequently no pretence for molesting her in her dwelling-house. And would a real son--a great lubberly fellow, well able to work as a porter or a footman--however wounded at her obstinate rejection, have been likely, in pursuit of no legal rights, to have alarmed her by threatening letters and intrusions, for no purpose but one _confessedly_ of pecuniary extortion? From the very mode of pursuing his claim it is plain that Savage felt it to be a false one. It seems, also, to be forgotten by most readers, that at this day real sons--not denied to be such--are continually banished, nay, ejected forcibly by policemen, from the paternal roof in requital of just such profligate conduct as Savage displayed; so that, grant his improbable story, still he was a disorderly reprobate, who in these days would have been consigned to the treadmill. But the whole was a hoax.
Savage, however, is but a single case, in relation to which Dr. Johnson stood in a special position, that diseased his judgment. But look at Pope"s life, at Swift"s, at Young"s--at all the lives of men contemporary with himself: they are overrun with defamatory stories, or traits of that order which would most have stung them, had they returned to life. But it was an accident most beneficial to Dr. Johnson that nearly all these men left no near relatives behind to call him to account. The public were amused, as they always are by exhibitions of infirmity or folly in one whom otherwise they were compelled to admire; that was a sort of revenge for them to set off against a painful perpetuity of homage. Thus far the libels served only as jests, and, fortunately for Dr. Johnson, there arose no after-reckoning. One period, in fact, of thirty years had intervened between the last of these men and the publication of the Lives; it was amongst the latest works of Dr.
Johnson: thus, and because most of them left no descendants, he escaped.
Had the ordinary proportion of these men been married, the result would have been different; and whatever might have been thought of any individual case amongst the complaints, most undoubtedly, from the great number to which the Doctor had exposed himself, amongst which many were not of a nature to be evaded by any vouchers whatsoever, a fatal effect would have settled on the Doctor"s moral reputation. He would have been pa.s.sed down to posterity as a dealer in wholesale scandal, who cared nothing for the wounded feelings of relatives. It is a trifle after that to add that he would frequently have been cudgelled.
This public judgment upon Dr. Johnson and these cudgellings would have been too severe a chastis.e.m.e.nt for the offences, which, after all, argued no heavier delinquency than a levity in examining his chance authorities, and a const.i.tutional credulity. Dr. Johnson"s easiness of faith for the supernatural, the grossness of his superst.i.tion in relation to such miserable impostures as the c.o.c.k Lane ghost, and its scratchings on the wall, flowed from the same source; and his conversation furnishes many proofs that he had no principle of resistance in his mind, no reasonable scepticism, when any disparaging anecdote was told about his nearest friends. Who but he would have believed the monstrous tale: that Garrick, so used to addressing large audiences _extempore_, so quick and lively in his apprehensions, had absolutely been dismissed from a court of justice as an idiot--as a man incapable of giving the court information even upon a question of his own profession? As to his credulity with respect to the somewhat harmless forgeries of Psalmanazer, and with respect to the villainous imposture of Lander, we imagine that other causes co-operated to those errors beyond mere facility of a.s.senting. In the latter case we fear that jealousy of Milton as a scholar, a feeling from which he never cleansed himself, had been the chief cause of his so readily delivering himself a dupe to allegations _not_ specious, backed by forgeries that were anything but ingenious. Dr. Johnson had a narrow escape on that occasion. Had Dr. Douglas fastened upon him as the collusive abettor of Lander, as the man whose sanction had ever won even a momentary credit for the obscure libeller, and as the one beyond all others of the age whose critical occupation ought most to have secured him against such a delusion, the character of Johnson would have suffered seriously.
Luckily, Dr. Douglas spared him; and Johnson, seeing the infamy of the hoax, and the precipice near which he stood, hastened to separate himself from Lander, and to offer such reparation as he could, by dictating that unhappy letter of recantation. Lander must have consented to this step from hopes of patronage; and perhaps the obscure place of slave-driver in the West Indies, in which he died (after recanting his recantation), might be the unsatisfactory bait of his needy ambition.
But a.s.suredly Lander could have made out a better case for himself than that which, under his name, the Doctor addressed to the Bishop; it was a dark spot in Dr. Johnson"s life. A Scotsman, said he, must be a strange one who would not tell a falsehood in a case where Scotland was concerned; and we fear that any fable of defamation must have been gross indeed which Dr. Johnson would not have countenanced against Milton. His "Life of Milton," as it now stands, contains some of the grossest calumnies against that mighty poet which have ever been hazarded; and some of the deepest misrepresentations are coloured, to the unsuspecting reader, by an affectation of merriment. But in his "heart of hearts" Dr.
Johnson detested Milton. Gray, even though, as being little of a meddler with politics, he furnished no handle to the Doctor for wrath so unrelenting, was a subject of deep jealousy from his reputed scholarship. Never did the spite of the Doctor more emblazon itself than in his review of Gray"s lyrical compositions; the very affectation of prefacing his review by calling the two chief odes "the wonderful wonder of wonders" betrays a female spite; and never did the arrogance of Dr. Johnson"s nature flame out so conspicuously as in some of the phrases used on this occasion. Perhaps it is an instance of self-inflation absolutely unique where he says, "My kindness for a man of letters"; this, it seems, caused him to feel pain at seeing Gray descending to what he, the Doctor (as a one-sided opinion of his own), held to be a fantastic foppery. The question we point at is not this supposed foppery--was it such or not? Milton"s having cherished that "foppery" was a sufficient argument for detesting it. What we fix the reader"s eye upon is, the unparalleled arrogance of applying to Gray this extreme language of condescending patronage. He really had "a kindness" for the little man, and was not ashamed, as some people would be, to own it; so that it shocked him more than else it would have done, to see the man disgracing himself in this way.
However, it is probable that all the misstatements of Dr. Johnson, the invidious impressions, and the ludicrous or injurious anecdotes fastened _ad libitum_ upon men previously open to particular attacks, never will be exposed; and for this, amongst other reasons, that sometimes the facts of the case are irrecoverable, though falsehood may be apparent; and still more because few men will be disposed to degrade themselves by a.s.suming a secondary and ministerial office in hanging upon the errors of any man. Pope was a great favourite with Dr. Johnson, both as an unreflecting Tory, who travelled the whole road to Jacobitism--thus far resembling the Doctor himself; secondly, as one who complimented himself whilst yet a young man, and even whilst wearing a masque--complimented him under circ.u.mstances which make compliments doubly useful, and make them trebly sincere. If any man, therefore, he would have treated indulgently Pope: yet his life it is which has mainly fixed upon Pope that false impression which predominates at this day--that doubtless intellectually he was a very brilliant little man; but morally a spiteful, peevish, waspish, narrow-hearted cynic. Whereas no imputation can be more unfounded. Pope, unless in cases when he had been maddened by lampoons, was a most benignant creature; and, with the slightest acknowledgment of his own merit, there never lived a literary man who was so generously eager to a.s.sociate others in his own honours--those even who had no adequate pretensions. If you, reader, should, like ourselves, have had occasion to investigate Pope"s life, under an intention of recording it more accurately or more comprehensively than has yet been done, you will feel the truth of what we are saying. And especially we would recommend to every man, who wishes to think justly of Pope in this respect, that he should compare his conduct towards literary compet.i.tors with that of Addison. Dr.
Johnson, having partially examined the lives of both, must have been so far qualified to do justice between them. But justice he has _not_ done; and to him chiefly we repeat that at this day are owing the false impressions of Pope"s selfish, ungenial, or misanthropic nature; and the humiliating a.s.sociations connected with Pope"s petty manoeuvring in trivial domestic affairs, chiefly through Dr. Johnson"s means, will never be obliterated. Let us turn, however, from Dr. Johnson, whom, with our general respect for his upright nature, it is painful to follow through circ.u.mstances where either jealousy (as sometimes) or credulity and the love of gossip (as very often) has misled him into gratifying the taste of the envious at a great sacrifice of dignity to the main upholders of our literature. These men ought not to have been "shown up"
for a comic or malicious effect. A nation who value their literature as we have reason to value ours ought to show their sense of this value by forgetting the _degrading_ infirmities (not the venial and human infirmities) of those to whose admirable endowments they owe its excellence.
Turning away, therefore, from those modes of biography which have hitherto pursued any vicious extreme, let us now briefly explain our own ideal of a happier, sounder, and more enn.o.bling biographical art, having the same general objects as heretofore, but with a more express view to the benefit of the reader. Looking even at those memoirs which, like Hayley"s of Cowper, have been checked by pathetic circ.u.mstances from fixing any slur or irreverential scandal upon their subject, we still see a great fault in the ma.s.s of biographic records; and what _is_ it?
It is--that, even where no disposition is manifested to copy either the _eloge_ or the libellous pasquinade, too generally the author appears _ex officio_ as the constant "patronus" or legal advocate for the person recorded. And so he ought, if we understand that sort of advocacy which in English courts the judge was formerly presumed to exercise on behalf of the defendant in criminal trials. Before that remarkable change by which a prisoner was invested with the privilege of employing separate counsel, the judge was his counsel. The judge took care that no wrong was done to him; that no false impression was left with the jury; that the witnesses against him should not be suffered to run on without a sufficient rigour of cross-examination. But certainly the judge thought it no part of his duty to make "the worse appear the better reason"; to throw dust into the eyes of the jury; or to labour any point of equivocation for the sake of giving the prisoner an extra chance of escaping. And, if it is really right that the prisoner, when obviously guilty, should be aided in evading his probable conviction, then certainly in past times he had less than justice. For most undoubtedly no judge would have attempted what we all saw an advocate attempting about a year ago, that, when every person in court was satisfied of the prisoner"s guilt, from the proof suddenly brought to light of his having clandestinely left the plate of his murdered victim in a particular party"s safe keeping, at that moment the advocate (though secretly prostrated by this overwhelming discovery) struggled vainly to fix upon the honourable witness a foul stigma of self-contradiction and perjury for the single purpose of turning loose a savage murderer upon society.
If this were not more than justice, then a.s.suredly in all times past the prisoner had far less. Now, precisely the difference between the advocacy of the judge, and the advocacy of a special counsel retained by the prisoner, expresses the difference which we contemplate between the biographer as he has. .h.i.therto protected his hero and that biographer whom we would subst.i.tute. Is he not to show a partiality for his subject? Doubtless; but hitherto, in those lives which have been farthest from _eloges_, the author has thought it his duty to uphold the general system, polity, or principles upon which his subject has acted.
Thus Middleton and all other biographers of Cicero, whilst never meditating any panegyrical account of that statesman, and oftentimes regretting his vanity, for instance, have quite as little thought it allowable to condemn the main political views, theories, and consequently actions, of Cicero. But why not? Why should a biographer be fettered in his choice of subjects by any imaginary duty of adopting the views held by him whose life he records? To make war upon the man, to quarrel with him in every page, _that_ is quite as little in accordance with our notions; and we have already explained above our sense of its hatefulness. For then the question recurs for ever: What necessity forced you upon a subject whose conduct you thoroughly disapprove? But let him show the tenderness which is due to a great man even when he errs. Let him expose the _total_ aberrations of the man, and make this exposure salutary to the pathetic wisdom of his readers, not alimentary to their self-conceit, by keeping constantly before their eyes the excellence and splendour of the man"s powers in contrast with his continued failures. Let him show such patronage to the hero of his memoir as the English judge showed to the poor prisoner at his bar, taking care that he should suffer no shadow of injustice from the witnesses; that the prisoner"s own self-defence should in no part be defeated of its effect by want of proper words or want of proper skill in pressing the forcible points on the attention of the jury; but otherwise leaving him to his own real merits in the facts of his case, and allowing him no relief from the pressure of the hostile evidence but such as he could find either in counter-evidence or in the intrinsic weight of his own general character. On the scheme of biography there would be few persons in any department of life who would be accompanied to the close by a bowing and obsequious reporter; there would be far less of uniform approbation presumable in memoirs; but, on the other hand, there would be exhibited pretty generally a tender spirit of dealing with human infirmities; a large application of human errors to the benefit of succeeding generations; and, lastly, there would be an opening made for the free examination of many lives which are now in a manner closed against criticism; whilst to each separate life there would be an access and an invitation laid bare for minds. .h.i.therto feeling themselves excluded from approaching the subject by imperfect sympathy with the principles and doctrines which those lives were supposed to ill.u.s.trate.
But our reformed view of biography would be better explained by a sketch applied to Cicero"s life or to Milton"s. In either case we might easily show, consistently with the exposure of enormous errors, that each was the wisest man of his own day. And with regard to Cicero in particular, out of his own letters to Atticus, we might show that every capital opinion which he held on the politics of Rome in his own day was false, groundless, contradictory. Yet for all that, we would engage to leave the reader in a state of far deeper admiration for the man than the hollow and hypocritical Middleton ever felt himself, or could therefore have communicated to his readers.
EDITOR"S NOTE.--The reference on p. 122 is to the famous case of Courvoisier, in 1840, and this fixes 1841 as the date of the essay.
Courvoisier was a valet who murdered and robbed his master, putting the plate into the care of an old woman, and making it appear a burglary. He was defended by a barrister named Philips, who received from the prisoner a confession of his guilt, and afterwards, in court, took Heaven to witness that he believed him innocent, though the woman, by accident almost, had been found, and given evidence. Philips was disbarred.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] In Mrs. Hannah More"s drawing-room at Barley Wood, amongst the few pictures which adorned it, hung a kit-kat portrait of John Henderson.
This, and our private knowledge that Mrs. H. M. had personally known and admired Henderson, led us to converse with that lady about him. What we gleaned from her in addition to the notices of Aguttar and of some amongst Johnson"s biographers may yet see the light.
_XIV. GREAT FORGERS: CHATTERTON AND WALPOLE, AND "JUNIUS."_
I have ever been disposed to regard as the most venial of deceptions such impositions as Chatterton had practised on the public credulity.
Whom did he deceive? n.o.body but those who well deserved to be deceived, viz., shallow antiquaries, who pretended to a sort of knowledge which they had not so much as tasted. And it always struck me as a judicial infatuation in Horace Walpole, that he, who had so brutally p.r.o.nounced the death of this marvellous boy to be a matter of little consequence, since otherwise he would have come to be hanged for forgery, should himself, not as a boy under eighteen (and I think under seventeen at the first issuing of the Rowley fraud), slaving for a few guineas that he might procure the simplest food for himself, and then buy presents for the dear mother and sister whom he had left in Bristol, but as an elderly man, with a clear six thousand per annum,[18] commit a far more deliberate and audacious forgery than that imputed (if even accurately imputed) to Chatterton. I know of no published doc.u.ment, or none published under Chatterton"s sanction, in which he formally _declared_ the Rowley poems to have been the compositions of a priest living in the days of Henry IV., viz., in or about the year 1400. Undoubtedly he suffered people to understand that he had found MSS. of that period in the tower of St. Mary Redcliff at Bristol, which he really _had_ done; and whether he simply tolerated them in running off with the idea that these particular poems, written on _discoloured_ parchments by way of colouring the hoax, were amongst the St. Mary treasures, or positively _said so_, in either view, considering the circ.u.mstances of the case, no man of kind feelings will much condemn him.
But Horace Walpole roundly and audaciously affirmed in the first sentence of his preface to the poor romance of "Otranto," that it had been translated from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, and that the MS.
was still preserved in the library of an English Catholic family; circ.u.mstantiating his needless falsehood by other most superfluous details. _Needless_, I say, because a book with the Walpole name on the t.i.tle-page was as sure of selling as one with Chatterton"s obscure name was at that time sure of _not_ selling. Possibly Horace Walpole did not care about selling, but wished to measure his own intrinsic power as a novelist, for which purpose it was a better course to preserve his _incognito_. But this he might have preserved without telling a circ.u.mstantial falsehood. Whereas Chatterton knew that his only chance of emerging from the obscure station of a grave-digger"s son, and carrying into comfort the dear female relatives that had half-starved themselves for _him_ (I speak of things which have since come to my knowledge thirty-five years after Chatterton and his woes had been buried in a pauper"s coffin), lay in bribing public attention by some _extrinsic_ attraction. Macpherson had recently engaged the public gaze by his "Ossian"--an abortion fathered upon the fourth century after Christ. What so natural as to attempt other abortions--ideas and refinements of the eighteenth century--referring themselves to the fifteenth? Had this harmless hoax succeeded, he would have delivered those from poverty who delivered _him_ from ignorance; he would have raised those from the dust who raised _him_ to an aerial height--yes, to a height from which (but it was after his death), like _Ate_ or _Eris_, come to cause another Trojan war, he threw down an apple of discord amongst the leading scholars of England, and seemed to say: "There, Dean of Exeter! there, Laureate! there, Tyrwhitt, my man! Me you have murdered amongst you. Now fight to death for the boy that living you would not have hired as a s...o...b..ack. My blood be upon you!" Rise up, martyred blood! rise to heaven for a testimony against these men and this generation, or else burrow in the earth, and from that spring up like the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha into harvests of feud, into armies of self-exterminating foes. Poor child! immortal child!
Slight were thy trespa.s.ses on this earth, heavy was thy punishment, and it is to be hoped, nay, it is certain, that this disproportion did not escape the eye which, in the algebra of human actions, estimates _both_ sides of the equation.
Lord Byron was of opinion that people abused Horace Walpole for several sinister reasons, of which the first is represented to be that he was a gentleman. Now, I, on the contrary, am of opinion that he was _not_ always a gentleman, as particularly seen in his correspondence with Chatterton. On the other hand, it is but just to recollect that in retaining Chatterton"s MSS. (otherwise an unfeeling act, yet chiefly imputable to indolence), the worst aggravation of the case under the poor boy"s construction, viz., that if Walpole had not known his low rank "he would not have dared to treat him in that way," though a very natural feeling, was really an unfounded one. Horace Walpole (I call him so, because he was not _then_ Lord Orford) certainly had not been aware that Chatterton was other than a gentleman by birth and station. The natural dignity of the boy, which had not condescended to any degrading applications, misled this practised man of the world. But recurring to Lord Byron"s insinuations as to a systematic design of running Lord Orford down, I beg to say that I am no party to any such design. It is not likely that a furious Conservative like myself, who have the misfortune also to be the most bigoted of Tories, would be so. I disclaim all partic.i.p.ation in any clamour against Lord Orford which may have arisen on democratic feeling. Feeling the profoundest pity for the "marvellous boy" of Bristol, and even love, if it be possible to feel love for one who was in his unhonoured grave before I was born, I resent the conduct of Lord Orford, in this one instance, as universally the English public has resented it. But generally, as a writer, I admire Lord Orford in a very high degree. As a letter-writer, and as a brilliant sketcher of social aspects and situations, he is far superior to any French author who could possibly be named as a compet.i.tor. And as a writer of personal or anecdotic history, let the reader turn to Voltaire"s "Siecle de Louis Quatorze," in order to appreciate his extraordinary merit.
Next will occur to the reader the forgery of "Junius." Who did _that_?
Oh, villains that have ever doubted since ""Junius" Identified"! Oh, scamps--oh, pitiful scamps! You, reader, perhaps belong to this wretched corps. But, if so, understand that you belong to it under false information. I have heard myriads talk upon this subject. One man said to me, "My dear friend, I sympathize with your fury. You are right.
Righter a man cannot be. Rightest of all men you are." I was right--righter--rightest! That had happened to few men. But again this flattering man went on, "Yes, my excellent friend, right you are, and evidently Sir Philip Francis was the man. His backer proved it. The day after his book appeared, if any man had offered me exactly two thousand to one in guineas, that Sir Philip was _not_ the man, by Jupiter! I would have declined the bet. So divine, so exquisite, so Grecian in its perfection, was the demonstration, the _apodeixis_ (or what do you call it in Greek?), that this brilliant Sir Philip--who, by the way, wore _his_ order of the Bath as universally as ever he taxed Sir William Draper with doing--had been the author of "Junius." But here lay the perplexity of the matter. At the least five-and-twenty excellent men proved by posthumous friends that they, every mother"s son of them, had also perpetrated "Junius."" "Then they were liars," I answered. "Oh no, my right friend," he interrupted, "not liars at all; amiable men, some of whom confessed on their death-beds (three to my certain knowledge) that, alas! they had erred against the law of charity. "_But how?_" said the clergyman. "Why, by that infernal magazine of sneers and all uncharitableness, the "Letters of Junius."" "Let me understand you,"
said the clergyman: "you wrote "Junius"?" "Alas! I did," replied A. Two years after another clergyman said to another penitent, "And so you wrote "Junius"?" "Too true, my dear sir. Alas! I did," replied B. One year later a third penitent was going off, and upon the clergyman saying, "Bless me, is it possible? Did _you_ write "Junius"?" he replied, "Ah, worshipful sir, you touch a painful chord in my remembrances--I now wish I had not. Alas! reverend sir, I did." Now, you see," went on my friend, "so many men at the New Drop, as you may say, having with tears and groans taxed themselves with "Junius" as the climax of their offences, one begins to think that perhaps _all_ men wrote "Junius."" Well, so far there was reason. But when my friend contended also that the proofs arrayed in pamphlets proved the whole alphabet to have written "Junius," I could not stand his absurdities.
Death-bed confessions, I admitted, were strong. But as to these wretched pamphlets, some time or other I will muster them all for a field-day; I will brigade them, as if the general of the district were coming to review them; and then, if I do not mow them down to the last man by opening a treacherous battery of grape-shot, may all my household die under a fiercer Junius! The true reasons why any man fancies that "Junius" is an open question must be these three:
First, that they have never read the proofs arrayed against Sir Philip Francis; this is the general case.
Secondly, that, according to Sancho"s proverb, they want better bread than is made of wheat. They are not content with proofs or absolute demonstrations. They require you, like the witch of Endor, to raise Sir Philip from the grave, that they may cross-examine him.
Thirdly (and this is the fault of the able writer who unmasked Sir Philip), there happened to be the strongest argument that ever picked a Bramah-lock against the unknown writer of "Junius"; apply this, and if it fits the wards, oh, Gemini! my dear friend, but you are right--righter--rightest; you have caught "Junius" in a rabbit-snare.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] "Six thousand per annum," viz., on the authority of his own confession to Pinkerton.
EDITOR"S NOTE.--De Quincey is guilty of a slight lapse of memory in reference to "The Castle of Otranto" and Onuphrio Muralto. It was not in the first sentence of the preface, but on the t.i.tle-page, that Walpole so plainly attributed the work to another. The _original_ t.i.tle-page, which, of course, was dropped out when it became known to all the world that Walpole was the author, read thus: "The Castle of Otranto: a Story. Translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas, at Otranto. London: printed for Thomas Lownds, in Fleet Street. 1765."
_XV. DANIEL O"CONNELL._
With a single view to the _intellectual_ pretensions of Mr. O"Connell, let us turn to his latest General Epistle, dated from "Conciliation Hall," on the last day of October. This is no random, or (to use a pedantic term) _perfunctory_ doc.u.ment; not a doc.u.ment is this to which indulgence is due. By its subject, not less than by its address, it stands forth audaciously as a deliberate, as a solemn, as a national state paper; for its subject is the future political condition of Ireland under the a.s.sumption of Repeal; for its address is, "To the People of Ireland." So placing himself, a writer has it not within his choice to play the fool; it is not within his competence to tumble or "come aloft" or play antics as a mountebank; his theme binds him to decency, his audience to gravity. Speaking, though it be but by the windiest of fictions, to a nation, is not a man pledged to respectful language? speaking, though it is but by a chimera as wild as Repeal to a question of national welfare, a man is pledged to sincerity. Had he seven devils of mockery and banter within him, for that hour he must silence them all. The foul fiend must be rebuked, though it were Mahu and Bohu who should prompt him to buffoonery, when standing at the bar of nations.
This is the law, this the condition, under which Mr. O"Connell was speaking when he issued that recent address. Given such a case, similar circ.u.mstances presupposed, he could not evade the obligations which they impose. From such obligations there is no dispensation to be bought--no, not at Rome; from the obligations observe, and those obligations, we repeat, are--sincerity in the first place, and respectful or deferential language in the second. Such were the duties; now let us look to the performance. And that we may judge of _that_ with more advantage for searching and appraising the qualities of this doc.u.ment, permit us to suggest three separate questions, the first being this: What was the occasion of the Address? Secondly, what was its ostensible object?
Thirdly, what are the arguments by which, as its means, the paper travels towards that object?
First, as to the _occasion_ of the Address. We have said that the date, viz., the 31st of October, is falsified. It was _not_ dated on the 31st of October, but on or about the seventh day of November. Even that falsehood, though at first sight trivial, is enough for suspicion. If X, a known liar, utters a lie at starting, it is not for him to plead in mitigation the apparent uselessness of the lie, it is for us to presume out of the fact a use, where the fact exists. A leader in the French Revolution protested often against bloodshed and other atrocities--not as being too bad, but, on the contrary, as being too good, too precious to be wasted upon ordinary occasions. And, on the same principle, we may be sure that any habitual liar, who has long found the benefit of falsehoods at his utmost need, will have formed too profound a reverence for this powerful resource in a moment of perplexity ever to throw away a falsehood, or to squander upon a caprice of the moment that lie which, being seasonably employed, might have saved him from confusion. The artist in lying is not the man to lie gratuitously. From the first, therefore, satisfied ourselves that there was a lurking motive--the key to this falsification of date--we paused to search it out. In that we found little difficulty. For what was the professed object of this Address? It was to meet and to overthrow two notions here represented as great popular errors. But why at this time? Wherefore all this heat at the present moment? Grant that the propositions denounced as erroneous _were_ so in very deed, why should criminals standing under the shadow of public vengeance ready to descend, so childishly misuse the interval, mercifully allowed for their own defence, in reading lectures upon abstract political speculations, confessedly bearing no relation to any militant interest now in question? Quite as impertinent it would be, when called upon for the answer upon "Guilty or not Guilty?" to read a section from the Council of Trent, or a rescript from Cardinal Bellarmine. Yet the more extravagant was the logic of this proceeding, the more urgent became the presumption of a covert motive, and that motive we soon saw to be this. Let the reader weigh it, and the good sense of the man who at such a moment could suffer such a motive to prevail. Thus it is: when Clontarf was intercepted, and implicitly, though not formally, all similar meetings were by that one act for ever prohibited, the first days of terror were naturally occupied with the panic of the conspirators, and in providing for their personal terrors.
But when the dust of this great uproar began to settle, and objects again became distinguishable in natural daylight, the first consequence which struck the affrighted men of the conspiracy was the chilling effect of the Government policy upon the O"Connell rent; not the weekly rent, applied n.o.body knows how, but the annual rent applied to Mr.
O"Connell"s _private_ benefit. This was in jeopardy, and on the following argument: Originally this rent had been levied as a compensation to Mr. O"Connell in his character of Irish barrister--not for services rendered or _to be_ rendered, but for current services continually being rendered in Parliament from session to session, for expenses incident to that kind of duty, and also as an indemnification for the consequent loss of fees at the Irish Bar. Yet now, in 1843, having ceased to attend his duty in Parliament, Mr. O"Connell could no longer claim in that senatorial character. Such a pretension would be too gross for the understanding even of a Connaught peasant. And in _that_ there was a great loss. For the allegation of a Parliamentary warfare, under the vague idea of pushing forward good bills for Ireland, or r.e.t.a.r.ding bad ones, had been a pleasant and easy labour to the parish priests. It was not necessary to horsewhip[19] their flocks too severely. If all was not clear to "my children"s" understanding, at least my children had no mutinous demur in a positive shape ready for service. Recusants there were, and st.u.r.dy ones, but they could put no face on their guilt, and their sin was not contagious. Unhappily, from this indefinite condition of merit Mr. O"Connell himself had translated his claim to a very distinct one founded upon a clear, known, absolute attempt to coerce the Government into pa.s.sive collusion with prospective treason. This attempt, said the peasantry, will the Government stand, or will it not? "Why, then," replied the Government, on the 17th of October, "we will _not_."
The aristocracy of Ireland may not have done their duty as regards the Repeal; it is too certain that they have not, because they have done nothing at all. But it is also certain that their very uttermost would have been unavailing for one princ.i.p.al object concerned. Other great objects, however, might have been attained. Foreign nations might have been disabused of their silly delusions on the Irish relations to England, although the Irish peasantry could _not_. The monstrous impression also upon many English and Scotch parties, that a general unity of sentiment prevailed in Ireland as to the desirableness of an independent Parliament--this, this, we say loudly, would have been dissipated, had every Irish county met by its gentry disavowing and abominating all sentiments tending towards a purpose so guilty as political disunion. Yet, in palliation of this most grievous failure, we, in the spirit of perfect candour, will remind our readers of the depressing effect too often attending one flagrant wound in any system of power or means. Let a man lose by a sudden blow--by fire, by shipwreck, or by commercial failure--a sum of twenty thousand pounds, that being four-fifths of his entire property, how often it is found that mere dejection of mind will incapacitate him from looking cheerfully after the remaining fifth! And this though it is now become far more essential to his welfare; and, secondly, upon a motion tending upwards and not downwards, he would have regarded five thousand pounds as a precious treasure worthy of his efforts, whether for protection or for improvement. Something a.n.a.logous to this weighs down the hearty exertions of the Irish gentry. Met at the very threshold, affronted at starting, by this insufferable tyranny of priestly interference--humiliated and stung to the heart by the consciousness that those natural influences which everywhere else settle indefeasibly upon property, are in Ireland intercepted, filched, violently robbed and pocketed by a body of professional nuisances sprung almost universally from paupers--thus disinherited of their primary rights, thus pillaged, thus shorn like Samson of those natural ornaments in which resided their natural strength, feeling themselves (like that same Samson in the language of Milton) turned out to the scorn of their countrymen as "tame wethers" ridiculously fleeced and mutilated--they droop, they languish as to all public spirit; and whilst by temperament, by natural endowment, by continual intercourse with the n.o.ble aristocracy of Britain (from whom also they are chiefly descended), they _should_ be amongst the leading chivalries of Europe, in very fact they are, for political or social purposes, the most powerless gentry in existence. Acting in a corporate capacity, they can do nothing. The malignant planet of this low-born priesthood comes between them and the peasantry, eclipsing oftentimes the sunshine of their comprehensive beneficence, and _always_ destroying their power to discountenance[20] evil-doers. Here is the sad excuse. But, for all that, we must affirm that, if the Irish landed gentry do not yet come forward to retrieve the ground which they have forfeited by inertia, history will record them as pa.s.sive colluders with the Dublin repealers. The evil is so operatively deep, looking backward or forward, that we have purposely brought it forward in a second aspect, viz., as contrasted with the London press. For the one, as we have been showing, there is a strong plea in palliation; for the other there is none.
Let us be frank. This is what we affirm, that it was, it is, it will be hereafter, within the powers of the London press to have extinguished the Repeal or any similar agitation; they could have done this, and this they have _not_ done. But let us also not be misunderstood. Do we say this in a spirit of disrespect? Are we amongst the parties who (when characterizing the American press) infamously say, "Let us, however, look homewards to our own press, and be silent for very shame"? Are we the people to join the vicious correspondent of an evening paper whom but a week ago we saw denouncing the editor of the _Examiner_ newspaper as a public nuisance, and recommending him as a fit subject of some degrading punishment, for no better reason than that he had exercised his undoubted right of exposing delinquencies or follies in a garrulous lord? Far be such vilenesses from us. We honour the press of this country. We know its const.i.tution, and we know the mere impossibility (were it only from the great capital required) that any but men of honour and sensibilities and conspicuous talent, and men brilliantly accomplished in point of education, should become writers or editors of a _leading_ journal, or indeed of any daily journal. Here and there may float _in gurgite vasto_ some atrocious paper lending itself upon system to the villainies of private slander. But such a paper is sure to be an inconsiderable one in the mere sense of property, and therefore, by a logical consequence in our frame of society, _every_ way inconsiderable--rising without effort, sinking without notice. In fact, the whole staff and establishment of newspapers have risen in social consideration within our own generation; and at this moment not merely proprietors and editors, but reporters and other ministerial agents to these vast engines of civility, have all ascended in their superior orders to the highest levels of authentic responsibility.
We make these acknowledgments in the mere spirit of equity, and because we disdain to be confounded with those rash persons who talk glibly of a "licentious press" through their own licentious ignorance. Than ignorance nothing is so licentious for rash saying or for obstinate denying. The British press is _not_ licentious; neither in London nor in Edinburgh is it ever licentious; and there is much need that it should be otherwise, having at this time so unlimited a power over the public mind. But the very uprightness of the leading journalists, and all the other elements of their power, do but const.i.tute the evil, do but aggravate the mischief, where they happen to go astray; yes, in every case where these journalists miss the narrow path of thoughtful prudence. They _do_ miss it occasionally; they must miss it; and we contend that they _have_ missed it at present. What they have done that they ought _not_ to have done. Currency, buoyancy, they ought _not_ to have impressed upon sedition, upon conspiracy, upon treason. Currency, buoyancy, they _have_ impressed upon sedition, upon conspiracy, upon treason.