wilderness, who delight in the commission of cruelty; but nearly all,
throughout the earth, are censurable for the admission. When we see a
blow struck, we go on and think no more about it: yet every blow aimed
at the most distant of our fellow-creatures, is sure to come back,
some time or other, to our families and descendants. He who lights a
fire in one quarter is ignorant to what other the winds may carry it,
and whether what is kindled in the wood may not break out again in the
cornfield.
_Franklin._ If we could restrain but one generation from deeds of
violence, the foundation for a new and a more graceful edifice of
society would not only have been laid, but would have been
consolidated.
_Shipley._ We already are horrified at the bare mention of religious
wars; we should then be horrified at the mention of political. Why
should they who, when they are affronted or offended, abstain from
inflicting blows, some from a sense of decorousness and others from a
sense of religion, be forward to instigate the infliction of ten
thousand, all irremediable, all murderous? Every chief magistrate
should be arbitrator and umpire in all differences between any two,
forbidding war. Much would be added to the dignity of the most
powerful king by rendering him an efficient member of such a grand
Amphictyonic council. Unhappily they are persuaded in childhood that a
reign is made glorious by a successful war. What schoolmaster ever
taught a boy to question it? or indeed any point of political
morality, or any incredible thing in history? Caesar and Alexander are
uniformly clement: Themistocles died by a draught of bull's blood:
Portia by swallowing red-hot pieces of charcoal.
_Franklin._ Certainly no woman or man could perform either of these
feats. In my opinion it lies beyond a doubt that Portia suffocated
herself by the fumes of charcoal; and that the Athenian, whose stomach
must have been formed on the model of other stomachs, and must
therefore have rejected a much less quantity of blood than would have
poisoned him, died by some chemical preparation, of which a bull's
blood might, or might not, have been part. Schoolmasters who thus
betray their trust, ought to be scourged by their scholars, like him
of their profession who underwent the just indignation of the Roman
Consul. You shut up those who are infected with the plague; why do you
lay no coercion on those who are incurably possessed by the legion
devil of carnage? When a creature is of intellect so perverted that he
can discern no difference between a review and a battle, between the
animating bugle and the dying groan, it were expedient to remove him,
as quietly as may be, from his devastation of God's earth and his
usurpation of God's authority. Compassion points out the cell for him
at the bottom of the hospital, and listens to hear the key turned in
the ward: until then the house is insecure.
_Shipley._ God grant our rulers wisdom, and our brethren peace!
_Franklin._ Here are but indifferent specimens and tokens. Those
fellows throw stones pretty well: if they practise much longer, they
will hit us: let me entreat you, my lord, to leave me here. So long as
the good people were contented with hooting and shouting at us, no
great harm was either done or apprehended: but now they are beginning
to throw stones, perhaps they may prove themselves more dexterous in
action than their rulers have done latterly in council.
_Shipley._ Take care, Doctor Franklin! _That_ was very near being the
philosopher's stone.
_Franklin._ Let me pick it up, then, and send it to London by the
diligence. But I am afraid your ministers, and the nation at large,
are as little in the way of wealth as of wisdom, in the experiment
they are making.
_Shipley._ While I was attending to you, William had started. Look! he
has reached them: they are listening to him. Believe me, he has all
the courage of an Englishman and of a Christian; and, if the stoutest
of them force him to throw off his new black coat, the blusterer would
soon think it better to have listened to less polemical doctrine.
_Franklin._ Meantime a few of the town boys are come nearer, and begin
to grow troublesome. I am sorry to requite your hospitality with such
hard fare.
_Shipley._ True, these young bakers make their bread very gritty, but
we must partake of it together so long as you are with us.
_Franklin._ Be pleased, my lord, to give us grace; our repast is over;
this is my boat.
_Shipley._ We will accompany you as far as to the ship. Thank God! we
are now upon the water, and all safe. Give me your hand, my good
Doctor Franklin! and although you have failed in the object of your
mission, yet the intention will authorize me to say, in the holy words
of our Divine Redeemer, Blessed are the peacemakers!
_Franklin._ My dear lord! if God ever blessed a man at the
intercession of another, I may reasonably and confidently hope in such
a benediction. Never did one arise from a warmer, a tenderer, or a
purer heart.
_Shipley._ Infatuation! that England should sacrifice to her king so
many thousands of her bravest men, and ruin so many thousands of her
most industrious, in a vain attempt to destroy the very principles on
which her strength and her glory are founded! The weakest prince that
ever sat upon a throne, and the most needy and sordid Parliament that
ever pandered to distempered power, are thrusting our blindfold nation
from the pinnacle of prosperity.
_Franklin._ I believe _your_ king (from this moment it is permitted me
to call him _ours_ no longer) to be as honest and as wise a man as any
of those about him: but unhappily he can see no difference between a
review and a battle. Such are the optics of most kings and rulers. His
Parliament, in both Houses, acts upon calculation. There is hardly a
family, in either, that does not anticipate the clear profit of
several thousands a year, to itself and its connexions. Appointments
to regiments and frigates raise the price of papers; and forfeited
estates fly confusedly about, and darken the air from the Thames to
the Atlantic.
_Shipley._ It is lamentable to think that war, bringing with it every
species of human misery, should become a commercial speculation. Bad
enough when it arises from revenge; another word for honour.
_Franklin._ A strange one indeed! but not more strange than fifty
others that come under the same title. Wherever there is nothing of
religion, nothing of reason, nothing of truth, we come at once to
honour; and here we draw the sword, dispense with what little of
civilization we ever pretended to, and murder or get murdered, as may
happen. But these ceremonials both begin and end with an appeal to
God, who, before we appealed to Him, plainly told us we should do no
such thing, and that He would punish us most severely if we did. And
yet, my lord, even the gentlemen upon your bench turn a deaf ear to
Him on these occasions: nay, they go further; they pray to Him for
success in that which He has forbidden so strictly, and when they have
broken His commandment, thank Him. Upon seeing these mockeries and
impieties age after age repeated, I have asked myself whether the
depositaries and expounders of religion have really any whatever of
their own; or rather, like the lawyers, whether they do not defend
professionally a cause that otherwise does not interest them in the
least. Surely, if these holy men really believed in a just retributive
God, they would never dare to utter the word _war_, without horror and
deprecation.
_Shipley._ Let us attribute to infirmity what we must else attribute
to wickedness.
_Franklin._ Willingly would I: but children are whipped severely for
inobservance of things less evident, for disobedience of commands less
audible and less awful. I am loath to attribute cruelty to your order:
men so entirely at their ease have seldom any. Certain I am that
several of the bishops would not have patted Cain upon the back while
he was about to kill Abel; and my wonder is that the very same holy
men encourage their brothers in England to kill their brothers in
America; not one, not two nor three, but thousands, many thousands.
_Shipley._ I am grieved at the blindness with which God has afflicted
us for our sins. These unhappy men are little aware what combustibles
they are storing under the Church, and how soon they may explode. Even
the wisest do not reflect on the most important and the most certain
of things; which is, that every act of inhumanity and injustice goes
far beyond what is apparent at the time of its commission; that these,
and all other things, have their consequences; and that the
consequences are infinite and eternal. If this one truth alone could
be deeply impressed upon the hearts of men, it would regenerate the
whole human race.
_Franklin._ In regard to politics, I am not quite certain whether a
politician may not be too far-sighted: but I am quite certain that, if
it be a fault, it is one into which few have fallen. The policy of the
Romans in the time of the republic, seems to have been prospective.
Some of the Dutch also, and of the Venetians, used the telescope. But
in monarchies the prince, not the people, is consulted by the minister
of the day; and what pleases the weakest supersedes what is approved
by the wisest.
_Shipley._ We have had great statesmen: Burleigh, Cromwell,
Marlborough, Somers: and whatever may have been in the eyes of a
moralist the vices of Walpole, none ever understood more perfectly, or
pursued more steadily, the direct and palpable interests of the
country. Since his administration, our affairs have never been managed
by men of business; and it was more than could have been expected
that, in our war against the French in Canada, the appointment fell on
an able commander.
_Franklin._ Such an anomaly is unlikely to recur. You have in the
English Parliament (I speak of both Houses) only two great men; only
two considerate and clear-sighted politicians; Chatham and Burke.
Three or four can say clever things; several have sonorous voices;
many vibrate sharp comminations from the embrasures of portentously
slit sleeves; and there are those to be found who deliver their
oracles out of wigs as worshipful as the curls of Jupiter, however
they may be grumbled at by the flour-mills they have laid under such
heavy contribution; yet nearly all of all parties want alike the
sagacity to discover that in striking America you shake Europe; that
kings will come out of the war either to be victims or to be despots;
and that within a quarter of a century they will be hunted down like
vermin by the most servile nations, or slain in their palaces by their
own courtiers. In a peace of twenty years you might have paid off the
greater part of your National Debt, indeed as much of it as it would
be expedient to discharge, and you would have left your old enemy
France labouring and writhing under the intolerable and increasing
weight of hers. This is the only way in which you can ever quite
subdue her; and in this you subdue her without a blow, without a
menace, and without a wrong. As matters now stand, you are calling her
from attending to the corruptions of her court, and inviting her from
bankruptcy to glory.
_Shipley._ I see not how bankruptcy can be averted by the expenditure
of war.
_Franklin._ It cannot. But war and glory are the same thing to France,
and she sings as shrilly and as gaily after a beating as before. With
a subsidy to a less amount than she has lately been accustomed to
squander in six weeks, and with no more troops than would garrison a
single fortress, she will enable us to set you at defiance, and to do
you a heavier injury in two campaigns than she has been able to do in
two centuries, although your king was in her pay against you. She will
instantly be our ally, and soon our scholar. Afterward she will sell
her crown jewels and her church jewels, which cover the whole kingdom,
and will derive unnatural strength from her vices and her profligacy.
You ought to have conciliated us as your ally, and to have had no
other, excepting Holland and Denmark. England could never have, unless
by her own folly, more than one enemy. Only one is near enough to
strike her; and that one is down. All her wars for six hundred years
have not done this; and the first trumpet will untrance her. You leave
your house open to incendiaries while you are running after a
refractory child. Had you laid down the rod, the child would have come
back. And because he runs away from the rod, you take up the poker.
Seriously, what means do you possess of enforcing your unjust claims
and insolent authority? Never since the Norman Conquest had you an
army so utterly inefficient, or generals so notoriously unskilful: no,
not even in the reign of that venal traitor, that French stipendiary,
the second Charles. Those were yet living who had fought bravely for
his father, and those also who had vanquished him: and Victory still
hovered over the mast that had borne the banners of our Commonwealth:
_ours_, _ours_, my lord! the word is the right word here.
_Shipley._ I am depressed in spirit, and can sympathize but little in
your exultation. All the crimes of Nero and Caligula are less
afflicting to humanity, and consequently we may suppose will bring
down on the offenders a less severe retribution, than an unnecessary
and unjust war. And yet the authors and abettors of this most grievous
among our earthly calamities, the enactors and applauders (on how vast
a theatre!) of the first and greatest crime committed upon earth, are
quiet complacent creatures, jovial at dinner, hearty at breakfast, and
refreshed with sleep! Nay, the prime movers in it are called most
religious and most gracious; and the hand that signs in cold blood the
death-warrant of nations, is kissed by the kind-hearted, and confers
distinction upon the brave! The prolongation of a life that shortens
so many others, is prayed for by the conscientious and the pious!
Learning is inquisitive in the research of phrases to celebrate him
who has conferred such blessings, and the eagle of genius holds the
thunderbolt by his throne! Philosophy, O my friend, has hitherto done
little for the social state; and Religion has nearly all her work to
do! She too hath but recently washed her hands from blood, and stands
neutrally by, yes, worse than neutrally, while others shed it. I am
convinced that no day of my life will be so censured by my own
clergy, as this, the day on which the last hopes of peace have
abandoned us, and the only true minister of it is pelted from our
shores. Farewell, until better times! may the next generation be
wiser! and wiser it surely will be, for the lessons of Calamity are
far more impressive than those which repudiated Wisdom would have
taught.
_Franklin._ Folly hath often the same results as Wisdom: but Wisdom
would not engage in her schoolroom so expensive an assistant as
Calamity. There are, however, some noisy and unruly children whom she
alone has the method of rendering tame and tractable: perhaps it may
be by setting them to their tasks both sore and supperless. The ship
is getting under weigh. Adieu once more, my most reverend and noble
friend! Before me in imagination do I see America, beautiful as Leda
in her infant smiles, when her father Jove first raised her from the
earth; and behind me I leave England, hollow, unsubstantial, and
broken, as the shell she burst from.
_Shipley._ O worst of miseries, when it is impiety to pray that our
country may be successful. Farewell! may every good attend you! with
as little of evil to endure or to inflict, as national sins can expect
from the Almighty.
SOUTHEY AND LANDOR
_Southey._ Of all the beautiful scenery round King's Weston the view
from this terrace, and especially from this sundial, is the
pleasantest.
_Landor._ The last time I ever walked hither in company (which, unless
with ladies, I rarely have done anywhere) was with a just, a valiant,
and a memorable man, Admiral Nichols, who usually spent his summer
months at the village of Shirehampton, just below us. There, whether
in the morning or evening, it was seldom I found him otherwise engaged
than in cultivating his flowers.
_Southey._ I never had the same dislike to company in my walks and
rambles as you profess to have, but of which I perceived no sign
whatever when I visited you, first at Llanthony Abbey and afterward
on the Lake of Como. Well do I remember our long conversations in the
silent and solitary church of Sant' Abondio (surely the coolest spot
in Italy), and how often I turned back my head toward the open door,
fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some more distant one in the
wood above, pursuing the pathway that leads to the tower of Luitprand,
should hear the roof echo with your laughter, at the stories you had
collected about the brotherhood and sisterhood of the place.
_Landor._ I have forgotten most of them, and nearly all: but I have
not forgotten how we speculated on the possibility that Milton might
once have been sitting on the very bench we then occupied, although we
do not hear of his having visited that part of the country. Presently
we discoursed on his poetry; as we propose to do again this morning.
_Southey._ In that case, it seems we must continue to be seated on the
turf.
_Landor._ Why so?
_Southey._ Because you do not like to walk in company: it might
disturb and discompose you: and we never lose our temper without
losing at the same time many of our thoughts, which are loath to come
forward without it.
_Landor._ From my earliest days I have avoided society as much as I
could decorously, for I received more pleasure in the cultivation and
improvement of my own thoughts than in walking up and down among the
thoughts of others. Yet, as you know, I never have avoided the
intercourse of men distinguished by virtue and genius; of genius,
because it warmed and invigorated me by my trying to keep pace with
it; of virtue, that if I had any of my own it might be called forth by
such vicinity. Among all men elevated in station who have made a noise
in the world (admirable old expression!) I never saw any in whose
presence I felt inferiority, excepting Kosciusco. But how many in the
lower paths of life have exerted both virtues and abilities which I
never exerted, and never possessed! what strength and courage and
perseverance in some, in others what endurance and forbearance! At the
very moment when most, beside yourself, catching up half my words,
would call and employ against me in its ordinary signification what
ought to convey the most honorific, the term _self-sufficiency_, I bow
my head before the humble, with greatly more than their humiliation.
You are better tempered than I am, and are readier to converse. There
are half-hours when, although in good humour and good spirits, I
would, not be disturbed by the necessity of talking, to be the
possessor of all the rich marshes we see yonder. In this interval
there is neither storm nor sunshine of the mind, but calm and (as the
farmer would call it) _growing_ weather, in which the blades of
thought spring up and dilate insensibly. Whatever I do, I must do in
the open air, or in the silence of night: either is sufficient: but I
prefer the hours of exercise, or, what is next to exercise, of
field-repose. Did you happen to know the admiral?
_Southey._ Not personally: but I believe the terms you have applied to
him are well merited. After some experience, he contended that public
men, public women, and the public press, may be all designated by one
and the same trisyllable. He is reported to have been a strict
disciplinarian. In the mutiny at the Nore he was seized by his crew,
and summarily condemned by them to be hanged. Many taunting questions
were asked him, to which he made no reply. When the rope was fastened
round his neck, the ringleader cried, 'Answer this one thing, however,
before you go, sir! What would you do with any of us, if we were in
your power as you are now in ours?' The admiral, then captain, looked
sternly and contemptuously, and replied, 'Hang you, by God!' Enraged
at this answer, the mutineer tugged at the rope: but another on the
instant rushed forward, exclaiming, 'No, captain!' (for thus he called
the fellow) 'he has been cruel to us, flogging here and flogging
there, but before so brave a man is hanged like a dog, you heave me
overboard.' Others among the most violent now interceded: and an old
seaman, not saying a single word, came forward with his knife in his
hand, and cut the noose asunder. Nichols did not thank him, nor notice
him, nor speak: but, looking round at the other ships, in which there
was the like insubordination, he went toward his cabin slow and
silent. Finding it locked, he called to a midshipman: 'Tell that man
with a knife to come down and open the door.' After a pause of a few
minutes, it was done: but he was confined below until the quelling of
the mutiny.
_Landor._ His conduct as Controller of the Navy was no less
magnanimous and decisive. In this office he presided at the trial of
Lord Melville. His lordship was guilty, we know, of all the charges
brought against him; but, having more patronage than ever minister had
before, he refused to answer the questions which (to repeat his own
expression) might incriminate him. And his refusal was given with a
smile of indifference, a consciousness of security. In those days, as
indeed in most others, the main use of power was promotion and
protection: and _honest man_ was never in any age among the titles of
nobility, and has always been the appellation used toward the feeble
and inferior by the prosperous. Nichols said on the present occasion,
'If this man is permitted to skulk away under such pretences, trial is
here a mockery.' Finding no support, he threw up his office as
Controller of the Navy, and never afterward entered the House of
Commons. Such a person, it appears to me, leads us aptly and
becomingly to that steadfast patriot on whose writings you promised me
your opinion; not incidentally, as before, but turning page after
page. It would ill beseem us to treat Milton with generalities.
Radishes and salt are the picnic quota of slim spruce reviewers: let
us hope to find somewhat more solid and of better taste. Desirous to
be a listener and a learner when you discourse on his poetry, I have
been more occupied of late in examining the prose.
_Southey._ Do you retain your high opinion of it?
_Landor._ Experience makes us more sensible of faults than of
beauties. Milton is more correct than Addison, but less correct than
Hooker, whom I wish he had been contented to receive as a model in
style, rather than authors who wrote in another and a poorer language;
such, I think, you are ready to acknowledge is the Latin.
_Southey._ This was always my opinion.
_Landor._ However, I do not complain that in oratory and history his
diction is sometimes poetical.
_Southey._ Little do I approve of it in prose on any subject.
Demosthenes and Aeschines, Lisias and Isaeus, and finally Cicero,
avoided it.
_Landor._ They did: but Chatham and Burke and Grattan did not; nor
indeed the graver and greater Pericles; of whom the most memorable
sentence on record is pure poetry. On the fall of the young Athenians
in the field of battle, he said, 'The year hath lost its spring.' But
how little are these men, even Pericles himself, if you compare them
as men of genius with Livy! In Livy, as in Milton, there are bursts of
passion which cannot by the nature of things be other than poetical,
nor (being so) come forth in other language. If Milton had executed
his design of writing a history of England, it would probably have
abounded in such diction, especially in the more turbulent scenes and
in the darker ages.
_Southey._ There are quiet hours and places in which a taper may be
carried steadily, and show the way along the ground; but you must
stand a-tiptoe and raise a blazing torch above your head, if you would
bring to our vision the obscure and time-worn figures depicted on the
lofty vaults of antiquity. The philosopher shows everything in one
clear light; the historian loves strong reflections and deep shadows,
but, above all, prominent and moving characters. We are little pleased
with the man who disenchants us: but whoever can make us wonder, must
himself (we think) be wonderful, and deserve our admiration.