Corporate bodies have no soul.
Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals,
because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to
disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor
goodwill. The principle of private or natural conscience is extinguished
in each individual (we have no moral sense in the breasts of others),
and nothing is considered but how the united efforts of the whole
(released from idle scruples) may be best directed to the obtaining of
political advantages and privileges to be shared as common spoil. Each
member reaps the benefit, and lays the blame, if there is any, upon
the rest. The _esprit de corps_ becomes the ruling passion of every
corporate body, compared with which the motives of delicacy or decorum
towards others are looked upon as being both impertinent and improper.
If any person sets up a plea of this sort in opposition to the rest, he
is overruled, he gets ill-blood, and does no good: he is regarded as
an interloper, a _black sheep_ in the flock, and is either _sent to
Coventry_ or obliged to acquiesce in the notions and wishes of those
he associates and is expected to co-operate with. The refinements of
private judgment are referred to and negatived in a committee of the
whole body, while the projects and interests of the Corporation meet
with a secret but powerful support in the self-love of the different
members. Remonstrance, opposition, is fruitless, troublesome, invidious;
it answers no one end; and a conformity to the sense of the company is
found to be no less necessary to a reputation for good-fellowship than
to a quiet life. Self-love and social here look like the same; and in
consulting the interests of a particular class, which are also your
own, there is even a show of public virtue. He who is a captious,
impracticable, dissatisfied member of his little club or _coterie_ is
immediately set down as a bad member of the community in general, as no
friend to regularity and order, as 'a pestilent fellow,' and one who
is incapable of sympathy, attachment, or cordial co-operation in any
department or undertaking. Thus the most refractory novice in such
matters becomes weaned from his obligations to the larger society, which
only breed him inconvenience without any adequate recompense, and wedded
to a nearer and dearer one, where he finds every kind of comfort and
consolation. He contracts the vague and unmeaning character of Man
into the more emphatic title of Freeman and Alderman. The claims of an
undefined humanity sit looser and looser upon him, at the same time that
he draws the bands of his new engagements closer and tighter about him.
He loses sight, by degrees, of all common sense and feeling in the petty
squabbles, intrigues, feuds, and airs of affected importance to which he
has made himself an accessory. He is quite an altered man. 'Really
the society were under considerable obligations to him in that last
business'; that is to say, in some paltry job or underhand attempt
to encroach upon the rights or dictate to the understandings of the
neighbourhood. In the meantime they eat, drink, and carouse together.
They wash down all minor animosities and unavoidable differences of
opinion in pint bumpers; and the complaints of the multitude are lost
in the clatter of plates and the roaring of loyal catches at every
quarter's meeting or mayor's feast. The town-hall reels with an unwieldy
sense of self-importance; 'the very stones prate' of processions; the
common pump creaks in concert with the uncorking of bottles and tapping
of beer-barrels: the market-cross looks big with authority. Everything
has an ambiguous, upstart, repulsive air. Circle within circle is
formed, an _imperium in imperio_: and the business is to exclude from
the first circle all the notions, opinions, ideas, interests, and
pretensions of the second. Hence there arises not only an antipathy
to common sense and decency in those things where there is a real
opposition of interest or clashing of prejudice, but it becomes a habit
and a favourite amusement in those who are 'dressed in a little brief
authority,' to thwart, annoy, insult, and harass others on all occasions
where the least opportunity or pretext for it occurs. Spite, bickerings,
back-biting, insinuations, lies, jealousies, nicknames are the order of
the day, and nobody knows what it's all about. One would think that the
mayor, aldermen, and liverymen were a higher and more select species of
animals than their townsmen; though there is no difference whatever but
in their gowns and staff of office! This is the essence of the _esprit
de corps_. It is certainly not a very delectable source of contemplation
or subject to treat of.
Public bodies are so far worse than the individuals composing them,
because the _official_ takes place of the _moral sense._ The nerves that
in themselves were soft and pliable enough, and responded naturally
to the touch of pity, when fastened into a machine of that sort become
callous and rigid, and throw off every extraneous application that can
be made to them with perfect apathy. An appeal is made to the ties of
individual friendship: the body in general know nothing of them. A case
has occurred which strongly called forth the compassion of the person
who was witness of it; but the body (or any special deputation of
them) were not present when it happened. These little weaknesses and
'compunctious visitings of nature' are effectually guarded against,
indeed, by the very rules and regulations of the society, as well as by
its spirit. The individual is the creature of his feelings of all sorts,
the sport of his vices and his virtues--like the fool in Shakespear,
'motley's his proper wear':--corporate bodies are dressed in a moral
uniform; mixed motives do not operate there, frailty is made into a
system, 'diseases are turned into commodities.' Only so much of any
one's natural or genuine impulses can influence him in his artificial
capacity as formally comes home to the aggregate conscience of those
with whom he acts, or bears upon the interests (real or pretended), the
importance, respectability, and professed objects of the society. Beyond
that point the nerve is bound up, the conscience is seared, and the
torpedo-touch of so much inert matter operates to deaden the best
feelings and harden the heart. Laughter and tears are said to be the
characteristic signs of humanity. Laughter is common enough in such
places as a set-off to the mock-gravity; but who ever saw a public body
in tears? Nothing but a job or some knavery can keep them serious for
ten minutes together.(1)
Such are the qualifications and the apprenticeship necessary to make a
man tolerated, to enable him to pass as a cypher, or be admitted as a
mere numerical unit, in any corporate body: to be a leader and dictator
he must be diplomatic in impertinence, and officious in every dirty
work. He must not merely conform to established prejudices; he must
flatter them. He must not merely be insensible to the demands of
moderation and equity; he must be loud against them. He must not simply
fall in with all sorts of contemptible cabals and intrigues; he must be
indefatigable in fomenting them, and setting everybody together by the
ears. He must not only repeat, but invent lies. He must make speeches
and write handbills; he must be devoted to the wishes and objects of
the society, its creature, its jackal, its busybody, its mouthpiece,
its prompter; he must deal in law cases, in demurrers, in charters, in
traditions, in common-places, in logic and rhetoric--in everything but
common sense and honesty. He must (in Mr. Burke's phrase) 'disembowel
himself of his natural entrails, and be stuffed with paltry, blurred
sheets of parchment about the rights' of the privileged few. He must
be a concentrated essence, a varnished, powdered representative of the
vices, absurdities, hypocrisy, jealousy, pride, and pragmaticalness of
his party. Such a one, by bustle and self-importance and puffing, by
flattering one to his face and abusing another behind his back, by
lending himself to the weaknesses of some, and pampering the mischievous
propensities of others, will pass for a great man in a little society.
Age does not improve the morality of public bodies. They grow more and
more tenacious of their idle privileges and senseless self-consequence.
They get weak and obstinate at the same time. Those who belong to them
have all the upstart pride and pettifogging spirit of their present
character ingrafted on the venerableness and superstitious sanctity
of ancient institutions. They are naturally at issue, first with their
neighbours, and next with their contemporaries, on all matters of common
propriety and judgment. They become more attached to forms, the more
obsolete they are; and the defence of every absurd and invidious
distinction is a debt which (by implication) they owe to the dead as
well as the living. What might once have been of serious practical
utility they turn to farce, by retaining the letter when the spirit is
gone: and they do this the more, the more glaring the inconsistency and
want of sound reasoning; for they think they thus give proof of
their zeal and attachment to the abstract principle on which old
establishments exist, the ground of prescription and authority. _The
greater the wrong, the greater the right,_ in all such cases. The
_esprit de corps_ does not take much merit to itself for upholding what
is justifiable in any system, or the proceedings of any party, but for
adhering to what is palpably injurious. You may exact the first from an
enemy: the last is the province of a friend. It has been made a subject
of complaint, that the champions of the Church, for example, who are
advanced to dignities and honours, are hardly ever those who defend the
common principles of Christianity, but those who volunteer to man the
out-works, and set up ingenious excuses for the questionable points, the
ticklish places in the established form of worship, that is, for those
which are attacked from without, and are supposed in danger of being
undermined by stratagem, or carried by assault!
The great resorts and seats of learning often outlive in this way the
intention of the founders as the world outgrows them. They may be said
to resemble antiquated coquettes of the last age, who think everything
ridiculous and intolerable but what was in fashion when they were young,
and yet are standing proofs of the progress of taste and the vanity
of human pretensions. Our universities are, in a great measure, become
cisterns to hold, not conduits to disperse knowledge. The age has the
start of them; that is, other sources of knowledge have been opened
since their formation, to which the world have had access, and have
drunk plentifully at those living fountains, but from which they are
debarred by the tenor of their charter, and as a matter of dignity
and privilege. They have grown poor, like the old grandees in some
countries, by subsisting on the inheritance of learning, while the
people have grown rich by trade. They are too much in the nature of
_fixtures_ in intellect: they stop the way in the road to truth; or
at any rate (for they do not themselves advance) they can only be
of service as a check-weight on the too hasty and rapid career of
innovation. All that has been invented or thought in the last two
hundred years they take no cognizance of, or as little as possible; they
are above it; they stand upon the ancient landmarks, and will not budge;
whatever was not known when they were first endowed, they are still in
profound and lofty ignorance of. Yet in that period how much has been
done in literature, arts, and science, of which (with the exception
of mathematical knowledge, the hardest to gainsay or subject to the
trammels of prejudice and barbarous _ipse dixits_) scarce any trace is
to be found in the authentic modes of study and legitimate inquiry
which prevail at either of our Universities! The unavoidable aim of
all corporate bodies of learning is not to grow wise, or teach others
wisdom, but to prevent any one else from being or seeming wiser than
themselves; in other words, their infallible tendency is in the end to
suppress inquiry and darken knowledge, by setting limits to the mind of
man, and saying to his proud spirit, _Hitherto shalt thou come, and no
farther!_ It would not be an unedifying experiment to make a collection
of the titles of works published in the course of the year by Members
of the Universities. If any attempt is to be made to patch up an idle
system in policy or legislation, or church government, it is by a member
of the University: if any hashed-up speculation on an old exploded
argument is to be brought forward 'in spite of _shame,_ in erring
reason's spite,' it is by a Member of the University: if a paltry
project is ushered into the world for combining ancient prejudices with
modern time-serving, it is by a Member of the University. Thus we get at
a stated supply of the annual Defences of the Sinking Fund, Thoughts on
the Evils of Education, Treatises on Predestination, and Eulogies on Mr.
Malthus, all from the same source, and through the same vent. If they
came from any other quarter nobody would look at them; but they have
an _Imprimatur_ from dulness and authority: we know that there is no
offence in them; and they are stuck in the shop windows, and read (in
the intervals of Lord Byron's works, or the Scotch novels) in cathedral
towns and close boroughs!
It is, I understand and believe, pretty much the same in more modern
institutions for the encouragement of the Fine Arts. The end is lost in
the means: rules take place of nature and genius; cabal and bustle, and
struggle for rank and precedence, supersede the study and the love
of art. A Royal Academy is a kind of hospital and infirmary for the
obliquities of taste and ingenuity--a receptacle where enthusiasm and
originality stop and stagnate, and spread their influence no farther,
instead of being a school founded for genius, or a temple built to fame.
The generality of those who wriggle, or fawn, or beg their way to a
seat there, live on their certificate of merit to a good old age, and
are seldom heard of afterwards. If a man of sterling capacity gets among
them, and minds his own business he is nobody; he makes no figure in
council, in voting, in resolutions or speeches. If he comes forward with
plans and views for the good of the Academy and the advancement of
art, he is immediately set upon as a visionary, a fanatic, with notions
hostile to the interest and credit of the existing members of the
society. If he directs the ambition of the scholars to the study of
History, this strikes at once at the emoluments of the profession, who
are most of them (by God's will) portrait painters. If he eulogises
the Antique, and speaks highly of the Old Masters, he is supposed to
be actuated by envy to living painters and native talent. If, again, he
insists on a knowledge of anatomy as essential to correct drawing, this
would seem to imply a want of it in our most eminent designers. Every
plan, suggestion, argument, that has the general purposes and principles
of art for its object, is thwarted, scouted, ridiculed, slandered, as
having a malignant aspect towards the profits and pretensions of the
great mass of flourishing and respectable artists in the country. This
leads to irritation and ill-will on all sides. The obstinacy of the
constituted authorities keeps pace with the violence and extravagance
opposed to it; and they lay all the blame on the folly and mistakes they
have themselves occasioned or increased. It is considered as a personal
quarrel, not a public question; by which means the dignity of the body
is implicated in resenting the slips and inadvertencies of its members,
not in promoting their common and declared objects. In this sort of
wretched _tracasserie_ the Barrys and H----s stand no chance with the
Catons, the Tubbs, and F----s. Sir Joshua even was obliged to hold
himself aloof from them, and Fuseli passes as a kind of nondescript, or
one of his own grotesques. The air of an academy, in short, is not
the air of genius and immortality; it is too close and heated, and
impregnated with the notions of the common sort. A man steeped in a
corrupt atmosphere of this description is no longer open to the genial
impulses of nature and truth, nor sees visions of ideal beauty, nor
dreams of antique grace and grandeur, nor has the finest works of art
continually hovering and floating through his uplifted fancy; but the
images that haunt it are rules of the academy, charters, inaugural
speeches, resolutions passed or rescinded, cards of invitation to a
council-meeting, or the annual dinner, prize medals, and the king's
diploma, constituting him a gentleman and esquire. He 'wipes out all
trivial, fond records'; all romantic aspirations; 'the Raphael grace,
the Guido air'; and the commands of the academy alone 'must live within
the book and volume of his brain, unmixed with baser matter.' It may be
doubted whether any work of lasting reputation and universal interest
can spring up in this soil, or ever has done in that of any academy. The
last question is a matter of fact and history, not of mere opinion or
prejudice; and may be ascertained as such accordingly. The mighty names
of former times rose before the existence of academies; and the
three greatest painters, undoubtedly, that this country has produced,
Reynolds, Wilson, and Hogarth, were not 'dandled and swaddled' into
artists in any institution for the fine arts. I do not apprehend that
the names of Chantrey or Wilkie (great as one, and considerable as the
other of them is) can be made use of in any way to impugn the jet of
this argument. We may find a considerable improvement in some of our
artists, when they get out of the vortex for a time. Sir Thomas Lawrence
is all the better for having been abstracted for a year or two from
Somerset House; and Mr. Dawe, they say, has been doing wonders in the
North. When will he return, and once more 'bid Britannia rival Greece'?
Mr. Canning somewhere lays it down as a rule, that corporate bodies are
necessarily correct and pure in their conduct, from the knowledge which
the individuals composing them have of one another, and the jealous
vigilance they exercise over each other's motives and characters;
whereas people collected into mobs are disorderly and unprincipled from
being utterly unknown and unaccountable to each other. This is a curious
_pass_ of wit. I differ with him in both parts of the dilemma. To begin
with the first, and to handle it somewhat cavalierly, according to the
model before us; we know, for instance, there is said to be honour among
thieves, but very little honesty towards others. Their honour consists
in the division of the booty, not in the mode of acquiring it: they
do not (often) betray one another, but they will waylay a stranger, or
knock out a traveller's brains: they may be depended on in giving the
alarm when any of their posts are in danger of being surprised; and they
will stand together for their ill-gotten gains to the last drop of their
blood. Yet they form a distinct society, and are strictly responsible
for their behaviour to one another and to their leader. They are not a
mob, but a _gang,_ completely in one another's power and secrets. Their
familiarity, however, with the proceedings of the _corps_ does not
lead them to expect or to exact from it a very high standard of moral
honesty; that is out of the question; but they are sure to gain the good
opinion of their fellows by committing all sorts of depredations,
fraud, and violence against the community at large. So (not to speak it
profanely) some of Mr. Croker's friends may be very respectable people
in their way--'all honourable men'--but their respectability is confined
within party limits; every one does not sympathise in the integrity of
their views; the understanding between them and the public is not
well defined or reciprocal. Or, suppose a gang of pickpockets hustle
a passenger in the street, and the mob set upon them, and proceed to
execute summary justice upon such as they can lay hands on, am I to
conclude that the rogues are in the right, because theirs is a system
of well-organised knavery, which they settled in the morning, with their
eyes one upon the other, and which they regularly review at night, with
a due estimate of each other's motives, character, and conduct in the
business; and that the honest men are in the wrong, because they are a
casual collection of unprejudiced, disinterested individuals, taken at
a venture from the mass of the people, acting without concert or
responsibility, on the spur of the occasion, and giving way to their
instantaneous impulses and honest anger? Mobs, in fact, then, are almost
always right in their feelings, and often in their judgments, on this
very account--that being utterly unknown to and disconnected with each
other, they have no point of union or principle of co-operation between
them, but the natural sense of justice recognised by all persons in
common. They appeal, at the first meeting, not to certain symbols and
watchwords privately agreed upon, like Freemasons, but to the maxims and
instincts proper to all the world. They have no other clue to guide them
to their object but either the dictates of the heart or the universally
understood sentiments of society, neither of which are likely to be in
the wrong. The flame which bursts out and blazes from popular sympathy
is made of honest but homely materials. It is not kindled by sparks of
wit or sophistry, nor damped by the cold calculations of self-interest.
The multitude may be wantonly set on by others, as is too often the
case, or be carried too far in the impulse of rage and disappointment;
but their resentment, when they are left to themselves, is almost
uniformly, in the first instance, excited by some evident abuse and
wrong; and the excesses into which they run arise from that very want
of foresight and regular system which is a pledge of the uprightness and
heartiness of their intentions. In short, the only class of persons to
sinister and corrupt motives is not applicable is that body of
individuals which usually goes by the name of the _People!_