It is sometimes thought, and very often said, that political writing,
after its special day is done, becomes more dead than any other kind
of literature, or even journalism. I do not know whether my own
judgment is perverted by the fact of a special devotion to the
business, but it certainly seems to me that both the thought and the
saying are mistakes. Indeed, a rough-and-ready refutation of them is
supplied by the fact that, in no few cases, political pieces have
entered into the generally admitted stock of the best literary things.
If they are little read, can we honestly say that other things in the
same rank are read much more? And is there not the further plea, by no
means contradictory, nor even merely alternative, that the best
examples of them are, as a rule, merged in huge collected 'Works,' or,
in the case of authors who have not attained to that dignity, simply
inaccessible to the general? At any rate my publishers have consented
to let me try the experiment of gathering certain famous things of the
sort in this volume, and the public must decide.
I do not begin very early, partly because examples of the Elizabethan
political pamphlet, or what supplied its place, will be given in
another volume of the series exclusively devoted to the pamphlet
literature of the reigns of Eliza and our James, partly for a still
better reason presently to be explained. On the other hand, though
another special volume is devoted to Defoe, the immortal _Shortest Way
with the Dissenters_ is separated from the rest of his work, and given
here. Most of the contents, however, represent authors not otherwise
represented in the series, and though very well known indeed by name,
less read than quoted. The suitableness of the political pamphlet,
both by size and self-containedness, for such a volume as this, needs
no justification except that which it, like everything else, must
receive, by being put to the proof of reading.
There is no difficulty in showing, with at least sufficient critical
exactness, why it is not possible or not desirable to select examples
from very early periods even of strictly modern history. The causes
are in part the same as those which delayed the production of really
capital political verse (which has been treated in another volume),
but they are not wholly the same. The Martin Marprelate pamphlets are
strictly political; so are many things earlier, later, and
contemporary with them, by hands known and unknown, great and small,
skilled and unskilled; so are some even in the work of so great a man
as Bacon. But very many things were wanting to secure the conditions
necessary to the perfect pamphlet. There was not the political
freedom; there was not the public; there was not the immediate object;
there was not, last and most of all, the style. Political utterances
under a more or less despotic, or, as the modern euphemism goes,
'personal' government, were almost necessarily those of a retained
advocate, who expected his immediate reward, on the one hand; or of a
rebel, who stood to make his account with office if he succeeded, or
with savage punishment if he failed, on the other. A distant prospect
of impeachment, of the loss of ears, hands, or life if the tide turns,
is a stimulant to violence rather than to vigour. I do not think,
however, that this is the most important factor in the problem.
Parliamentary government, with a limited franchise of tolerably
intelligent voters, a party system, and newspapers comparatively
undeveloped, may not suit an ideally perfect _politeia_, but it is
the very hotbed in which to nourish the pamphlet. There is also a
style, as there is a time, for all things; and no style could be so
well suited for the pamphlet as the balanced, measured, pointed, and
polished style which Dryden and Tillotson and Temple brought in during
the third quarter of the seventeenth century, and which did not go out
of fashion till the second quarter of the nineteenth. We have indeed
seen pamphlets proper exercising considerable influence in quite
recent times; but in no instance that I can remember has this been due
to any literary merits, and I doubt whether even the bare fact will be
soon or often renewed in our days. The written word--the written word
of condensed, strengthened, spirited literature--has lost much, if not
all, of its force with an enormously increased electorate, and a
bewildering multiplicity of print and speech of all kinds.
Whatever justice these reasonings may have or may lack, the facts
speak for themselves, as facts intelligently regarded have a habit of
doing. The first pamphlets proper of great literary merit and great
political influence are those of Halifax in the first movement of real
party struggle during the reign of Charles the Second; the last which
unite the same requisites are those of Scott on the eve of the first
Reform Bill. The leaflet and circular war of the anti-Corn Law League
must be ruled out as much as Mr. Gladstone's _Bulgarian Horrors_.
This leaves us a period of almost exactly a hundred and fifty years,
during which the kind, whether in good or bad examples, was of
constant influence; while its best instances enriched literature with
permanent masterpieces in little. I do not think that any moderately
instructed person will find much difficulty in comprehending the
specimens here given. I am sure that no moderately intelligent one
will fail, with a very little trouble, to take delight in them. I do
not know whether an artful generaliser could get anything out of the
circumstances in which the best of them grew; I should say myself that
nothing more than the system of government, the conditions of the
electorate and the legislature, and the existence from time to time of
a superheated state in political feeling, can or need be collected. In
some respects, to my own taste, the first of these examples is also
the best. To Halifax full justice has never been done, for we have had
no capable historian of the late seventeenth century but Macaulay, and
Halifax's defect of fervour as a Jacobite was more than made up to
Macaulay by his defect of fervour as a Williamite. As for the moderns,
I have myself more than once failed to induce editors of 'series' to
give Halifax a place. Yet Macaulay himself has been fairer to the
great Trimmer than to most persons with whom he was not in full
sympathy. The weakness of Halifax's position is indeed obvious. When
you run first to one side of the boat and then to the other, you have
ten chances of sinking to one of trimming her. To hold fast to one
party only, and to keep that from extremes, is the only secret, and it
is no great disgrace to Halifax, that in the very infancy of the party
and parliamentary system, he did not perceive it. But this hardly
interferes at all with the excellence of his pamphlets. The polished
style, the admirable sense, the subdued and yet ever present wit, the
avoidance of excessive cleverness (the one thing that the average
Briton will not stand), the constant eye on the object, are
unmistakable. They are nearly as forcible as Dryden's political and
controversial prefaces, which are pamphlets themselves in their way,
and they excel them in knowledge of affairs, in urbanity, in
adaptation to the special purpose. In all these points they resemble
more than anything else the pamphlets of Paul Louis Courier, and
there can be no higher praise than this.
No age in English history was more fertile in pamphlets than the
reigns of William and of Anne. Some men of real distinction
occasionally contributed to them, and others (such as Ferguson and
Maynwaring) obtained such literary notoriety as they possess by their
means. The total volume of the kind produced during the quarter of a
century between the Revolution and the accession of George the First
would probably fill a considerable library. But the examples which
really deserve exhumation are very few, and I doubt whether any can
pretend to vie with the masterpieces of Defoe and Swift. Both these
great writers were accomplished practitioners in the art, and the
characteristics of both lent themselves with peculiar yet strangely
different readiness to the work. They addressed, indeed, different
sections of what was even then the electorate. Defoe's unpolished
realism and his exact adaptation of tone, thought, taste, and fancy to
the measure of the common Englishman were what chiefly gave him a
hearing. Swift aimed and flew higher, but also did not miss the lower
mark. No one has ever doubted that Johnson's depreciation of _The
Conduct of the Allies_ was half special perversity (for he was always
unjust to Swift), half mere humorous paradox. For there was much more
of this in the doctor's utterances than his admirers, either in his
own day or since, have always recognised, or have sometimes been
qualified by Providence to recognise. As for the _Drapier's Letters_ I
can never myself admire them enough, and they seem to me to have been
on the whole under-rather than over-valued by posterity.
The 'Great Walpolian Battle' and the attacks on Bute and other
favourite ministers were very fertile in the pamphlet, but already
there were certain signs of alteration in its character. Pulteney and
Walpole's other adversaries had already glimmerings of the newspaper
proper, that is to say, of the continual dropping fire rather than the
single heavy broadside; to adopt a better metaphor still, of a
regimental and professional soldiery rather than of single volunteer
champions. The _Letters of Junius_, which for some time past have been
gradually dropping from their former somewhat undue pride of place
(gained and kept as much by the factitious mystery of their origin as
by anything else) to a station more justly warranted, are no doubt
themselves pamphlets of a kind; but they are separated from pamphlets
proper not less by their contents than by their form and continuity.
The real difference is this, that the pamphlet, though often if not
always personal enough, should always and generally does affect at
least to discuss a general question of principle or policy, whereas
Junius is always personal first, and very generally last also. On the
other hand, Burke, whether his productions be called Speeches or
Letters, Thoughts or Reflections, is always a pamphleteer in heart and
soul, in form and matter. If the resemblance of his pamphlets to
speeches gives the force and fire, it is certain that the resemblance
of his speeches to pamphlets accounts for that 'dinner-bell' effect of
his which has puzzled some people and shocked others. Burke always
argued the point, if he only argued one side of it, and it is the
special as it is the saving grace of the pamphlet that it must, or at
least should, be an argument, and not merely an invective or an
innuendo, a sermon or a lampoon.
Sydney Smith belonged both to the old school and the new. He was both
pamphleteer and journalist; but he kept the form and even to some
extent the style of his pamphlets and his articles well apart. I may
seem likely to have some difficulty in admitting the claim of Cobbett
after disallowing that of Junius under the definition just given, but
I have no very great fear of being unable to making it good. Much as
Cobbett disliked persons, and crotchety as he was in his dislikes,
they were always dislikes of principle in the bottom. The singular
Tory-Radicalism which Cobbett exhibited, and which has made some rank
him unduly low, was no doubt partly due to accidents of birth and
education, and to narrowness of intellectual form. But boroughmongering
after all was a Whig rather than a Tory institution, and Cobbett's
hatred of it, as well as that desire for the maintenance of a kind of
manufacturing yeomanry (not wholly different from the later ideal of
Mr. William Morris,) which was his other guiding principle throughout,
was by no means alien from pure Toryism. His work in relation to Reform,
moreover, is unmistakable--as unmistakable as is that of Sydney Smith,
who precedes him here, with regard to Catholic Emancipation. I should
have voted and written against both these things had I lived then; but
this does not make me enjoy Cobbett or Sydney any the less.
As for the latest example I have selected, it is a crucial one. The
_Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_ come from a man who is not often
rated high as a political thinker, even by those who sympathise with
his political views. But here as elsewhere the politician, no less
than the poet, the critic, the historian, bears the penalty of the
pre-eminent greatness of the novelist. Nothing is more uncritical than
to regard Scott as a mere sentimentalist in politics, and I cannot
think that any competent judge can do so after reading _Malagrowther_,
even after reading Scott's own Diary and letters on the subject. As he
there explains, he was not greatly carried, as a rule, to interest
himself in the details of politics. As both Lockhart and he admit, he
might not have been so interested even at this juncture had it not
been for the chagrin at his own misfortunes, which, nobly and
stoically repressed as it was, required some issue. But his general
principle on this occasion was clear; it can be thoroughly apprehended
and appreciated even by an Englishman of Englishmen. It was thoroughly
justified by the event, and, I may perhaps be permitted to observe,
ran exactly contrary to a sentiment rather widely adopted of late. No
man, whether in public writings or private conduct, could be more set
than Scott was against a spurious Scotch particularism. He even earned
from silly Scots maledictions for the chivalrous justice he dealt to
England in _The Lord of the Isles_, and the common-sense justice he
dealt to her in the mouth of Bailie Jarvie. But he was not more
staunch for the political Union than he was for the preservation of
minor institutions, manners, and character; and the proposed
interference with Scotch banking seemed to him to be one of the things
tending to make good Scotchmen, as he bluntly told Croker, 'damned
mischievous Englishmen.' Therefore he arose and spoke, and though he
averted the immediate attempt, yet the prophecies which he uttered
were amply fulfilled in other ways after the Reform Bill.
These, then, are the principles on which I have selected the pieces
that follow (some minor reasons for the particular choices being given
in the special introductions):--That they should be pamphlets proper
(_Malachi_ appeared first in a newspaper, but that was a sign of the
time chiefly, and the numbers of Cobbett's _Register_ were practically
independent pieces); that they should deal with special subjects of
burning political, and not merely personal, interest; and that they
should either directly or in the long-run have exercised an actual
determining influence on the course of politics and history. This last
point is undoubted in the case of the examples from Halifax, Swift,
Burke (who more than any one man pointed and steeled the resistance
of England to Jacobin tyranny), and Scott; it was less immediate, but
scarcely more dubious in those of Defoe, Cobbett, and Sydney Smith.
And so in all humility I make my bow as introducer once more to the
English public of these Seven Masters of English political writing.