We will never suffer the established domain of our church to be converted into a pension, so as to place it in dependence on the treasury. We have made our church as our king and our nobility, independent. We are shocked at your robbery-first, because it is an outrage upon property; next, because it is an attack against religion. We hold that there exists no society without belief, and we feel that, in exhausting the source, you dry up the whole stream. We have rejected as a poison the infidelity which defiled the beginning of our century and of yours, and we have purged ourselves of it, whilst you have been saturated. 'Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers?' 1 'We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal. 'Atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts. 'We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.' 2 We settle our establishment upon the sentiment of right, and the sentiment of right on the respect for God. In place of right and of God, what do you acknowledge as master? The sovereign people, that is, the arbitrary inconstancy of a counted majority. We deny that the majority has a right to re-create a constitution. 'The constitution of a country being once settled upon some compact, tacit or expressed, there is no power existing of force to alter it, without the breach of the covenant, or the consent of all the parties.'' We deny that the majority has the right to make a constitution; unanimity must first have conferred this right on the majority. We deny that brute force is a legitimate authority, and that a populace is a nation.* 4 ... 'A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state or separable from it. . . . When great multitudes act together under that discipline of nature, I recognise the people; . when you separate the common sort of men from their proper chieftains so as to form them into an adverse army, I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds. '5 We detest with all our power of hatred the right of tyranny which you give them over others, and we detest still more the right of insur 1 Burke's Works, v. 172; Reflections. 2 Ibid. 175. Ibid. vi. 201; Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. A government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions. As to the share of power, authority, direction, which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society.'-Burke's Works, v. 109; Reflections. ... Burke's Works, vi. 219; Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. rection which you give them against themselves. We believe that a constitution is a deposit transmitted to this generation by the past, to be handed down to the future, and that if a generation can dispose of it as its own, it ought also to respect it as belonging to others. We hold that, by this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies and fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.'1 We repudiate this meagre and coarse reason, which separates a man from his ties, and sees in him only the present, which separates a man from society, and counts him as only one head in a flock. We despise these 'metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics of an exciseman,' by which you cut up the state and man's rights according to square miles and numerical unities. We have a horror of that cynical coarseness by which all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off,' by which now a queen is but a woman, and a woman is but an animal,' which cuts down chivalric and religious spirit, the two crowns of humanity, to plunge them, together with learning, into the popular mire, to be 'trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.' 3 13 We have a horror of this systematic levelling which disorganises civil society. Burke continues thus: 'I am satisfied beyond a doubt that the project of turning a great empire into a vestry, or into a collection of vestries, and of governing it in the spirit of a parochial administration, is senseless and absurd, in any mode, or with any qualifications. I can never be convinced, that the scheme of placing the highest powers of the state in churchwardens and constables, and other such officers, guided by the prudence of litigious attornies, and Jew brokers, and set in action by shameless women of the lowest condition, by keepers of hotels, taverns and brothels, by pert apprentices, by clerks, shop-boys, hairdressers, fiddlers, and dancers on the stage (who, in such a commonwealth as yours, will in future overbear, as already they have overborne, the sober incapacity of dull uninstructed men, of useful but laborious occupations), can never be put into any shape that must not be both disgraceful and destructive.' 'If monarchy should ever obtain an entire ascendency in France, it will probably be . . . the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth. France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns formed of directors in assignats, . . . attornies, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people.'” This is what Burke wrote in 1790 to the dawn of the French Revolution. The year after the people of Birmingham destroyed the 1 Burke's Works, v. 181; Reflections. 2 Ibid. 151. ♦ Ibid. vi. 5; Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. Ibid. v. 349; Reflections. 3 Ibid. 154. 6 The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which houses of English Jacobins, and the miners of Wednesbury went out in a body from their pits to come to the succour of 'king and church.' Crusade against crusade; scared England was as fanatical as enthusiastic France. Pitt declared that they could not treat with a nation of atheists.' 1 Burke said that the war was not between people and people, but between property and brute force. The rage of execration, invective, and destruction mounted on both sides like a conflagration.2 It was not the collision of the two governments, but of the two civilisations and the two doctrines. The two vast machines, driven with all their momentum and velocity, met face to face, not by chance, but by fatality. A whole age of literature and philosophy had been necessary to amass the fuel which filled their sides, and laid down the rail which guided their course. In this thundering clash, amid these ebullitions of hissing and fiery vapour, in these red flames which grated around the boilers, and whirled with a rumbling noise upwards to the heavens, an attentive spectator may still discover the nature and the accumulation of the force which caused such an outburst, dislocated such iron plates, and strewed the ground with such ruins. may be soon turned into complaints. ... Strange chaos of levity and ferocity, monstrous tragi-comick scene. After I have read the list of the persons and descriptions elected into the Tiers-Etat, nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing. . . . Of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be found. The best were only men of theory. The majority was composed of practitioners in the law, . . . active chicaners, . . . obscure provincial advocates, stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, etc.' -Burke's Reflections, etc., v. 37 and 90. That which offends Burke, and even makes him very uneasy, was, that no representatives of the 'natural landed interests' were among the representatives of the Tiers-Etat. Let us give one quotation more, for really this political clairvoyance is akin to genius: Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.' 1 Pitt's Speeches, 3 vols. 1808, ii. p. 81, on negotiating for peace with France, Jan. 26, 1795. Pitt says, however, in the same speech: 'God forbid that we should look on the body of the people of France as atheists.'-TR. 2 Letters to a Noble Lord; Letters on a Regicide Peace. CHAPTER IV. Addison. I. Addison and Swift in their epoch-Wherein they are alike and unlike. ness. III. Gravity and rationality-Solid studies and exact observation-His knowledge of men and business habits-Nobility of his character and conduct -Elevation of his morality and religion-How his life and character have contributed to the pleasantness and usefulness of his writings. IV. The moralist-His essays are all moral-Against gross, sensual, or worldly life-This morality is practical, and yet commonplace and desultory— How it relies on reason and calculation-How it has for its end satisfaction in this world and happiness in the other-Speculative meanness of his religious conception-Practical excellence of his religious conception. V. The writer-Harmony of morality and elegance-The style that suits men of the world-Merits of this style-Inconveniences-Addison as a critic -His judgment of Paradise Lost-Agreement of his art and criticismLimits of classical criticism and art-What is lacking in the eloquence of Addison, of the Englishman and of the moralist. VI. Grave pleasantry-Humour-Serious and fertile imagination-Sir Roger de Coverley-The religious and the poetical sentiment-Vision of Mirza— How the Germanic element subsists under Latin culture. I. N this vast transformation of the minds which occupies the whole standing, two superior men appear in politics and morality, both accomplished writers-the most accomplished yet seen in England; both accredited mouthpieces of a party, masters in the art of persuasion and conviction; both limited in philosophy and art, incapable of considering sentiments in a disinterested fashion; always bent on seeing the motives of things, for approbation or blame; otherwise differing, and even in contrast with one another: one happy, kind, loved; the other hated, hating, and most unfortunate: the one a partisan of liberty and the noblest hopes of man; the other an advocate of a retrograde party, and an eager detractor of humanity: the one measured, delicate, furnishing a model of the most solid English qualities, perfected by continental culture; the other unbridled and formidable, showing an example of the harshest English instincts, luxuriating without limit or rule in every kind of devastation and amid every degree of despair. To penetrate to the interior of this civilisation and this people, there are no means better than to pause and dwell upon Swift and Addison. II. 1 'I have often reflected,' says Steele, 'after a night spent with him (Addison), apart from all the world, that I had had the pleasure of conversing with an intimate acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who had all their wit and nature heightened with humour, more exquisite and delightful than any other man ever possessed.' And Pope, a rival of Addison, and a bitter rival, adds: 'His conversation had something in it more charming than I have found in any other man.'' These sayings express the whole talent of Addison: his writings are conversations, masterpieces of English urbanity and reason; nearly all the details of his character and life have contributed to nourish this urbanity and this reasonableness. At the age of seventeen we find him at Oxford, studious and peaceful, loving solitary walks under the elm avenues, and amongst the beautiful meadows on the banks of the Cherwell. From the thorny brake of school education he chose the only flower-a withered one, doubtless, Latin verse-but one which, compared to the erudition, to the theology, to the logic of the time, is still a flower. He celebrates, in strophes or hexameters, the peace of Ryswick, or the system of Dr. Burnett; he composes little ingenious poems on a puppet-show, on the battle of the pigmies and cranes; he learns to praise and jest-in Latin, it is true-but with such success, that his verses recommend him for the rewards of the ministry, and even reach Boileau. At the same time he imbues himself with the Latin poets; he knows them by heart, even the most affected, Claudian and Prudentius; presently in Italy quotations will rain from his pen; from top to bottom, in all its nooks and under all its aspects, his memory is stuffed with Latin verses. We see that he loves them, scans them with delight, that a fine cæsura charms him, that every delicacy touches him, that no hue of art or emotion escapes him, that his literary tact is refined, and prepared to relish all the beauties of thought and expression. This inclination, too long retained, is a sign of a little mind, I allow; a man ought not to spend so much time in inventing cantos. Addison would have done better to enlarge his knowledge-to study Latin prose-writers, Greek literature, Christian antiquity, modern Italy, which he hardly knew. But this limited culture, leaving him weaker, made him more refined. He formed his art by studying only the monuments of Latin urbanity; he acquired a taste for the elegance and refinements, the triumphs and 1 Addison's Works, ed. Hurd, 6 vols., v. 151; Steele's Letter to Mr. Congreve. 2 Ibid. vi. 729. |