I have been sometimes accused of a fondness for paradoxes, but I cannot
in my own mind plead guilty to the charge. I do not indeed swear by
an opinion because it is old; but neither do I fall in love with every
extravagance at first sight because it is new. I conceive that a
thing may have been repeated a thousand times without being a bit more
reasonable than it was the first time: and I also conceive that an
argument or an observation may be very just, though it may so happen
that it was never stated before: but I do not take it for granted that
every prejudice is ill-founded; nor that every paradox is self-evident,
merely because it contradicts the vulgar opinion. Sheridan once said of
some speech in his acute, sarcastic way, that 'it contained a great deal
both of what was new and what was true: but that unfortunately what was
new was not true, and what was true was not new.' This appears to me
to express the whole sense of the question. I do not see much use in
dwelling on a common-place, however fashionable or well established:
nor am I very ambitious of starting the most specious novelty, unless
I imagine I have reason on my side. Originality implies independence of
opinion; but differs as widely from mere singularity as from the tritest
truism. It consists in seeing and thinking for one's-self: whereas
singularity is only the affectation of saying something to contradict
other people, without having any real opinion of one's own upon the
matter. Mr. Burke was an original, though an extravagant writer: Mr.
Windham was a regular manufacturer of paradoxes.
The greatest number of minds seem utterly incapable of fixing on any
conclusion, except from the pressure of custom and authority: opposed to
these there is another class less numerous but pretty formidable, who
in all their opinions are equally under the influence of novelty and
restless vanity. The prejudices of the one are counterbalanced by the
paradoxes of the other; and folly, 'putting in one scale a weight of
ignorance, in that of pride,' might be said to 'smile delighted with the
eternal poise.' A sincere and manly spirit of inquiry is neither blinded
by example nor dazzled by sudden flashes of light. Nature is always the
same, the storehouse of lasting truth, and teeming with inexhaustible
variety; and he who looks at her with steady and well-practised eyes
will find enough to employ all his sagacity, whether it has or has not
been seen by others before him. Strange as it may seem, to learn what an
object is, the true philosopher looks at the object itself, instead of
turning to others to know what they think or say or have heard of it,
or instead of consulting the dictates of his vanity, petulance, and
ingenuity to see what can be said against their opinion, and to prove
himself wiser than all the rest of the world. For want of this the real
powers and resources of the mind are lost and dissipated in a conflict
of opinions and passions, of obstinacy against levity, of bigotry
against self-conceit, of notorious abuses against rash innovations, of
dull, plodding, old-fashioned stupidity against new-fangled folly,
of worldly interest against headstrong egotism, of the incorrigible
prejudices of the old and the unmanageable humours of the young; while
truth lies in the middle, and is overlooked by both parties. Or as
Luther complained long ago, 'human reason is like a drunken man
on horseback: set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the
other.'--With one sort, example, authority, fashion, ease, interest,
rule all: with the other, singularity, the love of distinction, mere
whim, the throwing off all restraint and showing an heroic disregard
of consequences, an impatient and unsettled turn of mind, the want
of sudden and strong excitement, of some new play-thing for the
imagination, are equally 'lords of the ascendant,' and are at every step
getting the start of reason, truth, nature, common sense, and feeling.
With one party, whatever is, is right: with their antagonists, whatever
is, is wrong. These swallow every antiquated absurdity: those catch
at every new, unfledged project--and are alike enchanted with
the velocipedes or the French Revolution. One set, wrapped up in
impenetrable forms and technical traditions, are deaf to everything that
has not been dinned in their ears, and in those of their forefathers,
from time immemorial: their hearing is _thick_ with the same old saws,
the same unmeaning form of words, everlastingly repeated: the others
pique themselves on a jargon of their own, a Babylonish dialect, crude,
unconcocted, harsh, discordant, to which it is impossible for any one
else to attach either meaning or respect. These last turn away at
the mention of all usages, creeds, institutions of more than a day's
standing as a mass of bigotry, superstition, and barbarous ignorance,
whose leaden touch would petrify and benumb their quick, mercurial,
'apprehensive, forgetive' faculties. The opinion of to-day supersedes
that of yesterday: that of to-morrow supersedes, by anticipation, that
of to-day. The wisdom of the ancients, the doctrines of the learned, the
laws of nations, the common sentiments of morality, are to them like a
bundle of old almanacs. As the modern politician always asks for this
day's paper, the modern sciolist always inquires after the latest
paradox. With him instinct is a dotard, nature a changeling, and common
sense a discarded by-word. As with the man of the world, what everybody
says must be true, the citizen of the world has quite a different notion
of the matter. With the one, the majority; 'the powers that be' have
always been in the right in all ages and places, though they have been
cutting one another's throats and turning the world upside down with
their quarrels and disputes from the beginning of time: with the other,
what any two people have ever agreed in is an error on the face of
it. The credulous bigot shudders at the idea of altering anything in
'time-hallowed' institutions; and under this cant phrase can bring
himself to tolerate any knavery or any folly, the Inquisition, Holy Oil,
the Right Divine, etc.;--the more refined sceptic will laugh in your
face at the idea of retaining anything which has the damning stamp of
custom upon it, and is for abating all former precedents, 'all trivial,
fond records,' the whole frame and fabric of society as a nuisance in
the lump. Is not this a pair of wiseacres well matched? The one stickles
through thick and thin for his own religion and government: the other
scouts all religions and all governments with a smile of ineffable
disdain. The one will not move for any consideration out of the broad
and beaten path: the other is continually turning off at right
angles, and losing himself in the labyrinths of his own ignorance and
presumption. The one will not go along with any party: the other
always joins the strongest side. The one will not conform to any common
practice: the other will subscribe to any thriving system. The one is
the slave of habit: the other is the sport of caprice. The first is like
a man obstinately bed-rid: the last is troubled with St. Vitus's dance.
He cannot stand still, he cannot rest upon any conclusion. 'He never
is--but always to be _right.'_
The author of the Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance
of the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a
maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the
philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced. As
is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a
slenderness of constitutional stamina, which renders the flesh no match
for the spirit. His bending, flexible form appears to take no strong
hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but slides
from it like a river--
And in its liquid texture mortal wound
Receives no more than can the fluid air.
The shock of accident, the weight of authority make no impression on his
opinions, which retire like a feather, or rise from the encounter
unhurt through their own buoyancy. He is clogged by no dull system of
realities, no earth-bound feelings, no rooted prejudices, by nothing
that belongs to the mighty trunk and hard husk of nature and habit, but
is drawn up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation
and fancy, to the sphere of air and fire, where his delighted spirit
floats in 'seas of pearl and clouds of amber.' There is no _caput
mortuum_ of worn-out, threadbare experience to serve as ballast to his
mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses
to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with anything solid or
anything lasting. Bubbles are to him the only realities:--touch them,
and they vanish. Curiosity is the only proper category of his mind,
and though a man in knowledge, he is a child in feeling. Hence he puts
everything into a metaphysical crucible to judge of it himself and
exhibit it to others as a subject of interesting experiment, without
first making it over to the ordeal of his common sense or trying it on
his heart. This faculty of speculating at random on all questions may
in its overgrown and uninformed state do much mischief without intending
it, like an overgrown child with the power of a man. Mr. Shelley has
been accused of vanity--I think he is chargeable with extreme levity;
but this levity is so great that I do not believe he is sensible of its
consequences. He strives to overturn all established creeds and systems;
but this is in him an effect of constitution. He runs before the most
extravagant opinions; but this is because he is held back by none of
the merely mechanical checks of sympathy and habit. He tampers with all
sorts of obnoxious subjects; but it is less because he is gratified
with the rankness of the taint than captivated with the intellectual
phosphoric light they emit. It would seem that he wished not so much
to convince or inform as to shock the public by the tenor of his
productions; but I suspect he is more intent upon startling himself with
his electrical experiments in morals and philosophy; and though they
may scorch other people, they are to him harmless amusements, the
coruscations of an Aurora Borealis, that 'play round the head, but do
not reach the heart.' Still I could wish that he would put a stop to
the incessant, alarming whirl of his voltaic battery. With his zeal, his
talent, and his fancy, he would do more good and less harm if he were
to give, up his wilder theories, and if he took less pleasure in feeling
his heart flutter in unison with the panic-struck apprehensions of his
readers. Persons of this class, instead of consolidating useful and
acknowledged truths, and thus advancing the cause of science and virtue,
are never easy but in raising doubtful and disagreeable questions, which
bring the former into disgrace and discredit. They are not contented to
lead the minds of men to an eminence overlooking the prospect of social
amelioration, unless, by forcing them up slippery paths and to the
utmost verge of possibility, they can dash them down the precipice the
instant they reach the promised Pisgah. They think it nothing to hang up
a beacon to guide or warn, if they do not at the same time frighten the
community like a comet. They do not mind making their principles odious,
provided they can make themselves notorious. To win over the public
opinion by fair means is to them an insipid, common-place mode of
popularity: they would either force it by harsh methods, or seduce it
by intoxicating potions. Egotism, petulance, licentiousness, levity of
principle (whatever be the source) is a bad thing in any one, and most
of all in a philosophical reformer. Their humanity, their wisdom,
is always 'at the horizon.' Anything new, anything remote, anything
questionable, comes to them in a shape that is sure of a cordial
welcome--a welcome cordial in proportion as the object is new, as it
is apparently impracticable, as it is a doubt whether it is at all
desirable. Just after the final failure, the completion of the last act
of the French Revolution, when the legitimate wits were crying out, 'The
farce is over, now let us go to supper,' these provoking reasoners got
up a lively hypothesis about introducing the domestic government of the
Nayrs into this country as a feasible set-off against the success of the
Borough-mongers. The practical is with them always the antipodes of the
ideal; and like other visionaries of a different stamp, they date the
Millennium or New Order of Things from the Restoration of the Bourbons.
'Fine words butter no parsnips,' says the proverb. 'While you are
talking of marrying, I am thinking of hanging,' says Captain Macheath.
Of all people the most tormenting are those who bid you hope in the
midst of despair, who, by never caring about anything but their own
sanguine, hair-brained Utopian schemes, have at no time any particular
cause for embarrassment and despondency because they have never the
least chance of success, and who by including whatever does not hit
their idle fancy, kings, priests, religion, government, public abuses or
private morals, in the same sweeping clause of ban and anathema, do all
they can to combine all parties in a common cause against them, and to
prevent every one else from advancing one step farther in the career of
practical improvement than they do in that of imaginary and unattainable
perfection.
Besides, all this untoward heat and precocity often argues rottenness
and a falling-off. I myself remember several instances of this sort of
unrestrained license of opinion and violent effervescence of sentiment
in the first period of the French Revolution. Extremes meet: and the
most furious anarchists have since become the most barefaced apostates.
Among the foremost of these I might mention the present poet-laureate
and some of his friends. The prose-writers on that side of the
question--Mr. Godwin, Mr. Bentham, etc.--have not turned round in this
extraordinary manner: they seem to have felt their ground (however
mistaken in some points), and have in general adhered to their first
principles. But 'poets (as it has been said) have _such seething
brains,_ that they are disposed to meddle with everything, and mar all.
They make bad philosophers and worse politicians.(1) They live, for the
most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would perhaps be
as well if they were confined to it. Their flights and fancies are
delightful to themselves and to everybody else: but they make strange
work with matter of fact; and if they were allowed to act in public
affairs, would soon turn the world the wrong side out. They indulge only
their own flattering dreams or superstitious prejudices, and make idols
or bugbears of whatever they please, caring as little for history or
particular facts as for general reasoning. They are dangerous leaders
and treacherous followers. Their inordinate vanity runs them into all
sorts of extravagances; and their habitual effeminacy gets them out of
them at any price. Always pampering their own appetite for excitement,
and wishing to astonish others, their whole aim is to produce a dramatic
effect, one way or other--to shock or delight the observers; and they
are apparently as indifferent to the consequences of what they write as
if the world were merely a stage for them to play their fantastic
tricks on, and to make their admirers weep. Not less romantic in their
servility than their independence, and equally importunate candidates
for fame or infamy, they require only to be distinguished, and are
not scrupulous as to the means of distinction. Jacobins or
Anti-Jacobins--outrageous advocates for anarchy and licentiousness, or
flaming apostles of political persecution--always violent and vulgar in
their opinions, they oscillate, with a giddy and sickening motion,
from one absurdity to another, and expiate the follies of youth by the
heartless vices of advancing age. None so ready as they to carry every
paradox to its most revolting and ridiculous excess--none so sure
to caricature, in their own persons, every feature of the prevailing
philosophy! In their days of blissful innovation, indeed, the
philosophers crept at their heels like hounds, while they darted on
their distant quarry like hawks; stooping always to the lowest game;
eagerly snuffing up the most tainted and rankest scents; feeding their
vanity with a notion of the strength of their digestion of poisons, and
most ostentatiously avowing whatever would most effectually startle
the prejudices of others.(2) Preposterously seeking for the stimulus
of novelty in abstract truth, and the eclat of theatrical exhibition in
pure reason, it is no wonder that these persons at last became disgusted
with their own pursuits, and that, in consequence of the violence of the
change, the most inveterate prejudices and uncharitable sentiments have
rushed in to fill up the void produced by the previous annihilation of
common sense, wisdom, and humanity!'
I have so far been a little hard on poets and reformers. Lest I should
be thought to have taken a particular spite to them, I will try to make
them the _amende honorable_ by turning to a passage in the writings of
one who neither is nor ever pretended to be a poet or a reformer, but
the antithesis of both, an accomplished man of the world, a courtier,
and a wit, and who has endeavoured to move the previous question on all
schemes of fanciful improvement, and all plans of practical reform, by
the following declaration. It is in itself a finished _common-place;_
and may serve as a test whether that sort of smooth, verbal reasoning
which passes current because it excites no one idea in the mind, is much
freer from inherent absurdity than the wildest paradox.
'My lot,' says Mr. Canning in the conclusion of his Liverpool speech,
'is cast under the British Monarchy. Under that I have lived; under that
I have seen my country flourish;(3) under that I have seen it enjoy as
great a share of prosperity, of happiness, and of glory as I believe any
modification of human society to be capable of bestowing; and I am not
prepared to sacrifice or to hazard the fruit of centuries of experience,
of centuries of struggles, and of more than one century of liberty,
as perfect as ever blessed any country upon the earth, for visionary
schemes of ideal perfectibility, for doubtful experiments even of
possible improvement.'(4)
Such is Mr. Canning's common-place; and in giving the following answer
to it, I do not think I can be accused of falling into that extravagant
and unmitigated strain of paradoxical reasoning with which I have
already found so much fault.
The passage, then, which the gentleman here throws down as an effectual
bar to all change, to all innovation, to all improvement, contains at
every step a refutation of his favourite creed. He is not 'prepared
to sacrifice or to hazard the fruit of centuries of experience, of
centuries of struggles, and of one century of liberty, for visionary
schemes of ideal perfectibility.' So here are centuries of experience
and centuries of struggles to arrive at one century of liberty; and
yet, according to Mr. Canning's general advice, we are never to make any
experiments or to engage in any struggles either with a view to future
improvement, or to recover benefits which we have lost. Man (they repeat
in our cars, line upon line, precept upon precept) is always to turn his
back upon the future, and his face to the past. He is to believe that
nothing is possible or desirable but what he finds already established
to his hands in time-worn institutions or inveterate abuses. His unde
to be made into a political automaton, a go-cart of superstition and
prejudice, never stirring hand or foot but as he is pulled by the
wires and strings of the state-conjurers, the legitimate managers and
proprietors of the show. His powers of will, of thought, and action
are to be paralysed in him, and he is to be told and to believe that
whatever is, must be. Perhaps Mr. Canning will say that men were to make
experiments and to resolve upon struggles formerly, but that now they
are to surrender their understandings and their rights into his keeping.
But at what period of the world was the system of political wisdom
_stereotyped,_ like Mr. Cobbett's _Gold against Paper,_ so as to admit
of no farther alterations or improvements, or correction of errors
of the press? When did the experience of mankind become stationary or
retrograde, so that we must act from the obsolete inferences of past
periods, not from the living impulse of existing circumstances, and the
consolidated force of the knowledge and reflection of ages up to the
present instant, naturally projecting us forward into the future, and
not driving us back upon the past? Did Mr. Canning never hear, did he
never think, of Lord Bacon's axiom, 'That those times are the ancient
times in which we live, and not those which, counting backwards from
ourselves, _ordine retrogrado,_ we call ancient'? The latest periods
must necessarily have the advantage of the sum-total of the experience
that has gone before them, and of the sum-total of human reason exerted
upon that experience, or upon the solid foundation of nature and
history, moving on in its majestic course, not fluttering in the empty
air of fanciful speculation, nor leaving a gap of centuries between us
and the long-mouldered grounds on which we are to think and act. Mr.
Canning cannot plead with Mr. Burke that no discoveries, no improvements
have been made in political science and institutions; for he says we
have arrived through centuries of experience and of struggles at one
century of liberty. Is the world, then, at a stand? Mr. Canning knows
well enough that it is in ceaseless progress and everlasting change, but
he would have it to be the change from liberty to slavery, the progress
of corruption, not of regeneration and reform. Why, no longer ago than
the present year, the two epochs of November and January last presented
(he tells us in this very speech) as great a contrast in the state of
the country as any two periods of its history the most opposite or most
remote. Well then, are our experience and our struggles at an end?
No, he says, 'the crisis is at hand for every man to take part for or
against the institutions of the British Monarchy.' His part is taken:
'but of this be sure, to do aught good will never be his task!' He will
guard carefully against all possible improvements, and maintain all
possible abuses sacred, impassive, immortal. He will not give up the
fruit of centuries of experience, of struggles, and of one century
at least of liberty, since the Revolution of 1688, for any doubtful
experiments whatever. We are arrived at the end of our experience, our
struggles, and our liberty--and are to anchor through time and eternity
in the harbour of passive obedience and non-resistance. We (the
people of England) will tell Mr. Canning frankly what we think of his
magnanimous and ulterior resolution. It is our own; and it has been the
resolution of mankind in all ages of the world. No people, no age,
ever threw away the fruits of past wisdom, or the enjoyment of present
blessings, for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is the
knowledge of the past, the actual infliction of the present, that has
produced all changes, all innovations, and all improvements--not (as is
pretended) the chimerical anticipation of possible advantages, but the
intolerable pressure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, and
growing abuses. It was the experience of the enormous and disgusting
abuses and corruptions of the Papal power that produced the Reformation.
It was the experience of the vexations and oppressions of the feudal
system that produced its abolition after centuries of sufferings and
of struggles. It was the experience of the caprice and tyranny of the
Monarch that extorted _Magna Charta_ at Runnymede. It was the experience
of the arbitrary and insolent abuse of the prerogative in the reigns of
the Tudors and the first Stuarts that produced the resistance to it in
the reign of Charles I. and the Grand Rebellion. It was the experience
of the incorrigible attachment of the same Stuarts to Popery and
Slavery, with their many acts of cruelty, treachery, and bigotry, that
produced the Revolution, and set the House of Brunswick on the Throne.
It was the conviction of the incurable nature of the abuse, increasing
with time and patience, and overcoming the obstinate attachment to old
habits and prejudices,--an attachment not to be rooted out by fancy
or theory, but only by repeated, lasting, and incontrovertible
proofs,--that has abated every nuisance that ever was abated, and
introduced every innovation and every example of revolution and reform.
It was the experience of the abuses, licentiousness, and innumerable
oppressions of the old Government in France that produced the French
Revolution. It was the experience of the determination of the British
Ministry to harass, insult, and plunder them, that produced the
Revolution of the United States. Away then with this miserable cant
against fanciful theories, and appeal to acknowledged experience! Men
never act against their prejudices but from the spur of their feelings,
the necessity of their situations--their theories are adapted to their
practical convictions and their varying circumstances. Nature has
ordered it so, and Mr. Canning, by showing off his rhetorical paces, by
his 'ambling and lisping and nicknaming God's creatures,' cannot invert
that order, efface the history of the past, or arrest the progress of
the future.--Public opinion is the result of public events and public
feelings; and government must be moulded by that opinion, or maintain
itself in opposition to it by the sword. Mr. Canning indeed will not
consent that the social machine should in any case receive a different
direction from what it has had, 'lest it should be hurried over the
precipice and dashed to pieces.' These warnings of national ruin and
terrific accounts of political precipices put one in mind of Edgar's
exaggerations to Gloster; they make one's hair stand on end in the
perusal but the poor old man, like poor old England, could fall no lower
than he was. Mr. Montgomery, the ingenious and amiable poet, after
he had been shut up in solitary confinement for a year and a half for
printing the Duke of Richmond's Letter on Reform, when he first walked
out into the narrow path of the adjoining field, was seized with an
apprehension that he should fall over it, as if he had trod on the brink
of an abrupt declivity. The author of the loyal Speech at the Liverpool
Dinner has been so long kept in the solitary confinement of his
prejudices, and the dark cells of his interest and vanity, that he is
afraid of being dashed to pieces if he makes a single false step, to the
right or the left, from his dangerous and crooked policy. As to himself,
his ears are no doubt closed to any advice that might here be offered
him; and as to his country, he seems bent on its destruction. If,
however, an example of the futility of all his projects and all his
reasonings on a broader scale, 'to warn and scare, be wanting,' let him
look at Spain, and take leisure to recover from his incredulity and
his surprise. Spain, as Ferdinand, as the Monarchy, has fallen from its
pernicious height, never to rise again: Spain, as Spain, as the Spanish
people, has risen from the tomb of liberty, never (it is to be hoped) to
sink again under the yoke of the bigot and the oppressor!