THE
EDINBURGH REVIEW. OCTOBER, 1827.
Wo. XCIle
Art. I.—The Epistolary Correspondence of the Right Honourable Epmunp Burke and Dr Frencnu Laurence. Published from the Original Manuscripts. 8vo. pp. 332. London, Rivingtons. 1827.
E Letters contained in this volume are extremely interest-
ing, as connected both with the literary and the political history of the last century. They were written in the unre- strained freedom of intimate friendship, without the most dis- tant view of publication, by two men, both highly gifted with natural parts, almost equally distinguished among their most learned contemporaries for extraordinary acquirements; both actively engaged in the great scene of letters and of affairs which the close of the century presented; and if not both per- sons of the highest celebrity, yet one of them ranking among the greatest names in the philosophy and the history of the country, and the other his approved associate and familiar friend. The subjects upon which we are here presented with their most unreserved thoughts, are the passing events of a pe- riod, when every succeeding month was big with changes, each equal in importance to those that formerly used to distinguish one age from another. And those topics are here handled, not merely by near observers, but by actors in the scene, or by those, who, having just ceased to act, continue to counsel and guide their former associates. Great, however, as, on all these accounts, our desire naturally is to begin at once upon the important matter thus laid before us with no common attractions, we must pause for a while to say something more in detail of both the eminent
VOL. XLVI. NO. 92. T
Mr Burke. Oct.
men, whose epistolary intercourse we are going to examine. The matter is difficult; but it is also high, and it is useful. One of the individuals is much less known and esteemed than he de. serves; the other presents, after all that has been spoken of him, a rich field of observation ; and his opinions having been by one class of men too much decried, and by a more nume- rous and powerful body far too highly estimated, not a little re- mains still to be done in ascertaining the exact value at which his merits are likely to pass current in after times.
Dr Laurence was one of the most singularly endowed men, in some respects, that ever appeared in public life. He united in himself the indefatigable labour of a Dutch Commentator, with the alternate playfulness and sharpness of a Parisian Wit. His general information was boundless; his powers of master- ing a given subject, were not to be resisted by any degree of dryness or complication in its details; and his fancy was lively enough to shed light upon the darkest, and to strew flowers round the most barren tracks of inquiry, had it been suffered to play easily and vent itself freely. But, unfortunately, he had only the conception of the Wit, with the execution of the Com- mentator ; it was not Scarron or Voltaire speaking in society, or Mirabeau in public, from the stores of Erasmus or of Bayle; but it was Hemsterhuysius emerging into polished life, with the dust of many libraries upon him, to make the circle gay ; it was Grevius entering the Senate with somewhere from one-half to two-thirds of his forthcoming folio at his fingers’ ends, to awa- ken the flagging attention, and strike animation into the lazy de- bate. He might have spoken with the wit of Voltaire and the humour of Scarron united; none of it could pierce through the lumber of his solid matter ; and any spark that by chance found its way, was stifled by the still more uncouth manner. As an author, he had no such defects; his profuse stores of knowledge, his business-like habit of applying them to the point; his taste, generally speaking correct, because originally formed on the models of antiquity, and only relaxed by his admiration of Mr Burke’s less severe beauties; all gave him a facility of wri- ting, both copiously and nervously, upon serious subjects ; while his wit could display itself upon lighter ones unincumbered by pedantry, and unobstructed by the very worst delivery ever witnessed,—a delivery calculated to alienate the mind of the hearer, to beguile him of his attention, but by stealing it away from the speaker, and almost to prevent him from comprehend- ing what was so spoken. It was in reference to this unvarying effect of Doctor Laurence’s delivery, that Mr Fox once said, a man should attend, if possible, to a speech of his, and then speak
1827. Dr Laurence. 271
it over again himself: it must, he conceived, succeed infallibly, for it was sure to be admirable in itself, and as certain of being new to the audience. But in this saying there was considerably more wit than truth. The Doctor’s speech was sure to contain materials not for one, but for half a dozen speeches; and a person might with great advantage listen to it, in order to use those materials, in part, after wards, as indeed many did both in Parliament and at the Bar where he practised, make an effort to attend to him, how difficult soever, in order to hear all that could be said upon every part of the question. But whoever did so, was sure to hear a vast deal that was useless, and could serve no purpose but to perplex and fatigue ; and he was equally sure to hear the immaterial points treated with as much vehemence, and as mi- nutely dwelt upon, as the great and commanding features of the subject. In short, the Comment: itor was here again displayed, who never can perceive the different value of different matters ; who gives no relief to his work, and exhausts all the stores of his lee arning, and spends the whole power of his ingenuity, as eagerly in dethroning one particle which has usurped another’s place, as in overthrowing the interpolated verse in St John, or the spurious chapter in Josephus, upon which may depend the foundations of a religion, or the articles of its faith.
It is hardly necessary toadd, that they who saw Dr Laurence only in debate, saw him to the greatest disadv antage, and had no means of forming anything like a fair estimate of his merits. In the lighter intercourse of society, too, unless in conversation wholl unrestrained by the desire of distinction, he appeared to little advantage ; his mirth, though perfectly inoffensive and good-na- tured, was elaborate; his wit or drollery wanted concentration and polish; it was unwieldy and clumsy ; it was the gamboling of the elephant, in which, if strength was seen, weight was felt still more ; nor was it Milton’s elephant, recreating our first pa- rents; and who, * to make them play, ae wrceathe his lithe
‘ proboscis ;~~but the elephant capered bodily, and in a lum- bering fashion, after the manner of his tribe. Yet set the same man down to write, and whose compositions are marked by more pe rtect pr opr lety, more conciseness, more point, more rapidity ¢ ? His wit sparkles and illuminates, without more effort than is requisite for throwing it off. It is varied, too, and each kind is excellent. It is a learned wit, very frequently, and then Wears an elaborate air; but not stiff or pedantic, not forced or strained, unless we deem Swift’s wit, when it assumes this garb, unnatural or heavy y—a sentence w hich would condemn some of his most famous pieces, and sweep away almost all Arbuthnot’s together.
272 Mr Burke. Oct.
In his profession, Dr Laurence filled the highest place. Prac. tising in courts where a single judge decides, and where the whole matter of each cause is thoroughly sifted and prepared for discussion out of court, he experienced no ill effect from the tedious style and unattractive manner which a jury could not have borne, and feit not the want of that presence of mind, and readiness of execution, which enable a Nisi Prius advocate to decide and to act at the moment, according to circumstances suddenly arising and impossible to foresee. He had all the qua- lities which his branch of the forensic art requires; profound learning, various and accurate information upon ordinary affairs as well as the contents of books, and a love of labour, not to be satiated by any prolixity and minuteness of detail into which the most complicated cause could run—a memory which let no- thing escape that it had once grasped, whether large in size or imperceptibly small—an abundant subtlety in the invention of topics to meet an adversary’s arguments, and a penetration that never left one point of his own case unexplored. These qualities might very possibly have been modified and blended with the greater terseness and dexterity of the common lawyer, had his lot been cast in Westminster Hall ; but in the precincts of St Paul’s, they were more than sufficient to place him at the head of his brethren, and to obtain for him the largest share of practice which any Civilian of the time could enjoy without office.
The same fulness of information and facility of invention, which were so invaluable to his clients, proved most important resources to his political associates, during the thirteen or four- teen years that he sat in Parliament; and they were almost equally useful to the great party he was connected with, for many years before that period. It was a common remark, that no- thing could equal the richness of his stores, except the liberality with which he made them accessible to all. Little as he for some time before his death had taken part in debates, and scantily as he had been attended to when he did, his loss might be plainly perceived, for a long time, in the want generally felt of that kind of information which had flowed so copiously through all the channels of private intercourse, and been obtained so easily, that its importance was not felt until its sources were closed for ever. It was then that men inquired ‘ where Laurence was,’ as often as a difficulty arose which called for more than common ingenuity to meet it; or a subject presented itself so large and shapeless, and dry and thorny, that few men’s fortitude could face, and no one’s patience could grapple with it; or an emergency occurred, demanding, on the sudden, access to stores of learning, the col-
1827. Dr Laurence. 273
lection of many long years, but arranged so as to be available to the most ignorant at the shortest notice. Men lamented the great loss they had experienced, and their regrets were mingled with wonder when they reflected that the same blow had de- prived them of qualities the most rarely found in company with such acquirements ; for, unwilling as the jealousy of human vanity is to admit various excellence in a single individual, (mos hominum ut nolint eundem pluribus rebus excellere,) it was in vain to deny that the same person, who exceeded all others in powers of hard working upon the dullest subjects, and who had, by his life of labour, become as a Dictionary to his friends, had also pro- duced a larger share than any one contributor, to the epigrams, the burlesques, the grave ironies and the broad jokes, whether in verse or in prose, of the Rolliad.
The highest of the praises which Dr Laurence had a right to challenge, remains. He was a man of scrupulous integrity and unsullied honour ; faithful in all trusts ; disinterested to a weak- ness. Constant, but rather let it be said, ardent and enthusias- tic in his friendships; abandoning his whole faculties with a self-dereliction that knew no bounds, either to the cause of his friend, or his party, or the common-weal—he commanded the unceasing respect of all with whom he came in contact, or even in conflict ; for when most offended with his zeal, they were for- ced to admit, that what bore the semblance of intolerance was the fruit of an honest anxiety for a friend or a principle, and never was pointed towards himself. To the praise of correct judgment he was not so well entitled. His naturally warm temperament, and his habit of entering into whatever he took up with his whole faculties, as well as all his feelings, kindled in him the two great passions which chequered the latter part of Mr Burke’s life; he spent some years upon Mr Hastings’s Impeachment, and some upon the French Revolution, so ab- sorbed in those subjects that their impression could not be worn out; and he ever after appeared to see one or other of them, and not unfrequently both together, on whatever ground he might cast his eyes. This almost morbid affection he shared with his protector and friend, of whom we are now to speak.
How much soever men may differ as to the soundness of Mr Burke’s doctrine, or the purity of his public conduct, there can be no hesitation in according to him a station among the most extraordinary men that have ever appeared ; and we think there is now but little diversity of opinion as to the kind of place which it is fit to assign him. He was a writer of the first class, and excelled in almost every kind of prose composition. Pos- sessed of most extensive knowledge, and of the most various de-
274 Mr Burke. Oct.
scription; acquainted alike with what different classes of men knew, each in his own province, and with much that hardly any one ever thought of learning; he could either bring his masses of information to bear directly upon the subjects to which they severally belonged—or he could avail himself of them generally to strengthen his faculties and enlarge his views—or he could turn any portion of them to account for the purpose of illustra- ting his theme, or enriching his diction. Hence, when he is handling any one matter, we perceive that we are conversing with a reasoner or a teacher, to whom almost every other branch of knowledge is familiar: His views range over all the cog- nate subjects; his reasonings are derived from principles ap- plicable to other theories as well as the one in hand: Argu- ments pour in from all sides, as well as those which start up under our feet, the natural growth of the path he is leading us over ; while to throw light round our steps, and either explore its darker places, or serve for our recreation, illustrations are fetch- ed from a thousand quarters; and an imagination marvellously quick to descry unthought of resemblances, points to our use the stores, which a lore yet more marvellous has gathered from all ages, and nations, and arts, and tongues. We are, in respect of the argument, reminded of Bacon’s multifarious knowledge, and the exuberance of his learned fancy; while the many-letter- ed diction recalls to mind the first of English poets, and his im- mortal verse, rich with the spoils of all sciences and all times. The kinds of composition are various, and he excels in them all, with the exception of two, the very highest, given but to few, and when given, almost always possessed alone,—fierce, nervous, overwhelming declamation, and close, rapid argument. Every other he uses easily, abundantly, and successfully. He produ- ced but one philosophical treatise; but no man lays down ab- stract principles more soundly, or better traces their application. All his works, indeed, even his controversial, are so informed with general reflection, so variegated with speculative discussion, that they wear the air of the Lyceum as well as the Academy. His narrative is excellent; and it is impossible more luminously to expose the details of a complicated subject, to give them more animation and interest, if dry in themselves, or to make them bear, by the mere power of statement, more powerfully upon the argument. In description he can hardly be surpassed, at least for effect ; he has all the qualities that conduce to it—ardour of pur- pose, sometimes rising into violence—vivid, but too luxuriant fancy,—bold, frequently extravagant, conception—the faculty of shedding over mere inanimate scenery the light imparted by mo- ral associations, He indulges in bitter invective, mingled with
1827. Dr Laurence. 275
ignant wit, but descending often to abuse and even scurrility ; i is apt moreover to carry an attack too far, as well as strain the application of a principle; to slay the slain, or turn the reader’s contempt into pity.
As in the various kinds of writing, so in the different styles, he had an almost universal excellence, one only being deficient, the plain and unadorned. Not but that he could, in unfolding a doctrine or pursuing a narrative, write for a little with admi- rable simplicity and propriety; only he could not sustain this self-denial ; his brilliant imagination and well-stored memory soon broke through the restraint. But in all other styles, pass- ages without end occur of the highest order—epigram—pathos —metaphor in profusion, chequered with more didactic and sober diction. Nor are his purely figurative passages the finest even as figured writing; he is best when the metaphor is sub- dued, mixed as it were with plainer matter to flavour it, and used not by itself, and for its own sake, but giving point to a more useful instrument, made of more ordinary material ; or at the most, flung off by the heat of composition, like sparks from a working engine, not fire-works for mere display. Speaking of the authors of the Declaration of Right, he calls them ‘ those whose ‘ penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances and in our ‘ hearts, the words and spirit of that immortal law.’—( Reflections on the French Revolution). So discoursing of the imitations of natural magnitude by artifice and skill—* A true artist should put ‘a generous deceit on the spectators, and effect the noblest de- ‘signs by easy methods.’— (Sublime and Beautiful, Part II. §. 10.) ‘ When pleasure is over we relapse into indifference, or rather ‘ we fall into a soft tranquillity, which is tinged with the agree- ‘able colour of the former sensation.’—(Jbid. Part. I. §. 3.) ‘Every age has its own manners, and its politics dependent ‘on them; and the same attempts will not be made against a ‘ constitution fully formed and matured, that were used to de- ‘ stroy it in the cradle, or resist its growth during its infancy.’ (Thoughts on the Causes of the present Discontents.) ‘ Faction ‘ will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole ‘were in an uproar.’—(Jbid.) In works of a serious nature, upon the affairs of real life, as political discourses and orations, figurative style should hardly ever go beyond this. But a strict and close metaphor or simile may be allowed, provided it be most sparingly used, and never deviate from the subject matter, so as to make it disappear in the ornament. ‘The judgment is for ‘the greater part employed in throwing stumbling blocks in ‘the way of the imagination, (says Mr Burke,) in dissipating ‘the scenes of its enchantment, and in tying us down to the
276 Mr Burke. Oct.
‘ disagreeable yoke of our reason.’—( Discourses on Taste.) He has here at once expressed figuratively the principle we are laying down, and illustrated our remark by the temperance of his metaphors, which, though mixed, do not offend, because they come so near mere figurative language that they may be regard- ed, like the last set of examples, rather as forms of expression than tropes. ‘ A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyran- ‘ny is worn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion.’— ( Thoughts on the Discontents.) A most apt illustration of his im- portant position, that we ought to be as jealous of little encroach- ments, now the chief sources of danger, as our ancestors were of Ship Money and the Forest Laws. ‘ A species of men, (speak- ‘ ing of one constant and baneful effect of grievances,) to whom ‘a state of order would become a sentence of obscurity, are ‘ nourished into a dangerous magnitude by the heat of intestine ‘ disturbances; and it is no wonder that, by a sort of sinister ‘ piety, they cherish, in return, those disorders which are the ‘ parents of all their consequence.’—(Jbid.) ‘ We have not, ‘ (says he of the English Church establishment,) relegated re- ‘ ligion to obscure municipalities or rustic villages—No! we ‘ will have her to exalt her mitred front in courts and parlia- * ments.’—( Reflections on the French Revolution.) But if these should seem so temperate as hardly to be separate figures, the celebrated comparison of the Queen of France, though going to the verge of chaste style, hardly passes it. ‘ And surely, never ‘ lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more ‘ delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating ‘ and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in— ‘ glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, ‘ and joy. —( Ibid.)
All his writings, but especially his later ones, abound in exam- ples of the abuse of this style, in which, unlike those we have been dwelling upon with unmixed admiration, the subject is lost sight of, and the figure usurps its place, almost as much as in Homer’s longer similes, and is oftentimes pursued, not merely with ex- travagance and violence, but into details that offend by their coarseness, as well as their strained connexion with the matter in question. The comparison of a noble adversary to the whale, in which the grantee of the crown is altogether forgotten, and the fish alone remains; of one Republican ruler to a cannibal in his den, where he paints him as having actually devoured a king and suffering from indigestion; of another, to a retailer of dresses, in which character the nature of constitutions is for- gotten in that of millinery,—are instances too well known to be further dwelt upon; and they were the produce, not of the * audacity of youth,’ but of the last year of his life. It must,
1827. Dr Laurence. 277
however, be confessed, that he was at all times somewhat tainted with what Johnson imputes to Swift, a proneness to ‘ revolve ‘ideas from which other minds shrink with disgust.’ At least he must be allowed to have often mistaken violence and grossness for vigour. ‘ The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus ‘ drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, ‘and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to ‘ administer the opiate potion of animosity, powdered with all the ‘ingredients of scorn and contempt,’ &c.—( Reflections on the French Revolution.) ‘ They are not repelled through a fasti- ‘dious delicacy at the stench of their arrogance and presump- ‘tion, from a medicinal attention to their mental blotches and ‘running sores. —(Jbid.) ‘Those bodies, which, when full ‘of life and beauty, lay in their arms, and were their joy ‘and comfort, when dead and putrid, became but the more ‘loathsome from remembrance of former endearments.’— (Thoughts.) * The vital powers, wasted in an unequal strug- ‘gle, are pushed back upon themselves, and fester to gan- ‘grene, to death; and instead of what was but just now the ‘delight of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of ‘the sun, a bloated, putrid, noisome carcase, full of stench and ‘poison, an offence, a horror, a lesson to the world.’ (Speech on the Nabob’s Debts.) Some passages are not fit to be cited, and could not now be tolerated in either house of Parliament, for the indecency of their allusions—as in the Regency debates, and the attack upon lawyers on the Impeachment continuation. But the finest of his speeches, which we have just quoted from, though it does not go so far from propriety, falls not much within its bounds. Of Mr Dundas he says—‘ With six great chop- ‘ping bastards, (Reports of Secret Committee,) each as lusty ‘as an infant Hercules, this delicate creature blushes at the ‘sight of his new bridegroom, assumes a virgin delicacy; or, to ‘use a more fit, as well as a more poetical comparison, the person ‘so squeamish, so timid, so trembling, lest the winds of heaven ‘should visit too roughly, is expanded to broad sunshine, ex- ‘ posed like the sow of imperial augury, lying in the mud with ‘all the prodigies of her fertility about her, as evidence of her ‘delicate amour.’—( Ibid.)
It is another characteristic of this great writer, that the un- limited abundance of his stores makes him profuse in their ex- penditure: Never content with one view of a subject, or one manner of handling it, he for the most part lavishes his whole resources upon the discussion of each point. In controversy this is emphatically the case. Indeed, nothing is more remark- able than the variety of ways in which he makes his approaches
278 Mr Burke. Oct.
to any position he would master. After reconnoitring it with skill and boldness, if not with perfect accuracy, he manceuvres with infinite address, and arrays a most imposing force of general principles mustered from all parts, and pointed, sometimes vio- lently enough, in one direction. He now moves on with the composed air, the even, dignified pace of the historian; and un- folds his facts in a narrative so easy, and yet so correct, that you plainly perceive he wanted only the dismissal of other pur- suits to have rivalled Livy or Hume. But soon this advance is interrupted, and he stops to display his powers of description— when the boldness of his design is only matched by the brillianey of his colouring. He then skirmishes for a space, and puts in motion all the lighter arms of wit—sometimes not unmingled with drollery—sometimes bordering upon farce. His main bat- tery is now opened, and a tempest bursts forth, of every weapon of attack—invective—abuse—irony—sarcasm—simile, drawn out to allegory—allusion—quotation—fable—parable—anathe- ma. The heavy artillery of powerful declamation, and the conflict of close argument alone are wanting; but of this the garrison is not always aware; his noise is oftentimes mistaken for the thunder of true eloquence; the number of his move- ments distracts, and the variety of his missiles annoys the ad- versary; a panic spreads, and he carries his point, as if he had actually made a practicable breach ; nor is it discovered till after the smoke and confusion is over, that the citadel remains un- touched.
Every one of Mr Burke’s works that is of any importance, presents, though in different degrees, these features to the view —from the most chaste and temperate, his Thoughts on the Discontents, to the least faultless and severe—his richer and more ornate, as well as vehement tracts upon revolutionary po- litics—his letters on the Regicide Peace, and Defence of his Pen- sion. His speeches differ not at all from his pamphlets ; these are written speeches, or those are spoken dissertations, accord- ing as any one is over studious of method and closeness in a book, or of ease and nature in an oration. The principal de- fects which we have hinted at are a serious derogation from merit of the highest order in both kinds of composition. But in his spoken eloquence, the failure which it is known attended him for a great part of his Parliamentary life, is not to be explained by the mere absence of what alone he wanted to equal the great- est of orators.
In fact, he was deficient in judgment; he regarded not the degree of interest felt by his audience in the topics which deep- ly occupied himself ; and seldom knew when he had said enough
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1827. Dr Laurence. 279
on those which affected them as well as him. He was admira- ble in exposition ; in truth, he delighted to give instruction both when speaking and conversing, and in this he was unrivalled. ‘ Quis in sententiis argutior ? in docendo edisserendoque subtilior ? Mr Fox might well avow, without a compliment, that he had learnt more from him alone than from all other men and authors. But if any one thing is proved by unvarying experience of po- pular assemblies, it is, that an excellent dissertation makes a very bad speech. The speaker is not the only person actively engaged while a great oration is pronouncing ; the audience have their share; they must be excited, and for this purpose con- stantly appealed to as recognised persons of the drama. The didactic orator (if, as has been said of the poet, it be not a con- tradiction in terms) has it all to himself; the hearer is merely passive ; and the consequence is, he soon ceases to be a listener, and if he can, even to be a spectator. Mr Burke was essential- ly didactic, except when the violence of his invective carried him away, and then he offended the correct taste of the House of Commons, by going beyond the occasion, and by descending to coarseness.* When he argued, it was by unfolding large views, and seizing upon analogies too remote, and drawing dis- tinctions ‘ too fine for hearers,’ or, at the best, by a body of statements, lucid, certainly, and diversified with flower and fruit, and lighted up with pleasantry, but almost always in ex- cess, and overdone in these qualities as well as in its own sub- stance. He had little power of hard stringent reasoning, as we have more than once remarked; and his declamation was ad- dressed to the head, as from the head it proceeded, learned, fan- ciful, ingenious, but not impassioned. Of him, as a combatant, we may say what Aristotle did of the old philosophers, when he compared them to unskilful boxers, who hit round about, and
* The charge of coarseness, or rather of vulgarity of language, has, to the astonishment of all who knew him, and understood pure idiom- atic English, been made against Mr Windham, but only by persons unacquainted with both. ‘To him might nearly be applied the beauti- ful sketch of Crassus by M. Tullius—* Quo,’ says he, ‘ nihil statuo ‘fieri potuisse perfectius. rat summa gravitas, erat cum gravitate *junctus, facetiarum et urbanitatis oratorius, non scurrilis lepos. La- ‘tine loquendi accurata, et sine molestia diligens elegantia—in disse- ‘rendo mira explicatio ; cum de jure civili, cum de equo et bono dis- * putaretur argumentorum et similitudinum copia.’ Let not the reader reject even the latter features, those certainly of an advocate ; at least let him first read Mr W.'s Speech on the Law of Evidence, in the Duke of York's case.
280 Mr Burke. Oct.
not straight forward, and fight with little effect, though they may by chance sometimes deal a hard blow.— Ovo ev taig uayax “OL QUYUAVELGOL TOLOUTL, MAL YAP EMEVOL TECIPEPOYMEVOL TUTTOUTL ToAAAKK marag Wanyas* GAN ovT exewor am’ emisnunc.—( Metaphys.)*
Cicero has somewhere called Eloquence copiose loquens sapien. tia. This may be true of written, but of spoken eloquence it is a defective definition, and will, at the best, only comprehend the Demonstrative (or Epideictic) kind, which is banished, for want of an audience, from all modern assemblies of a secular description. Thus, though it well characterises Mr Burke, yet the defects which we have pointed out, were fatal to his success. Accordingly the test of eloquence, which the same master has in so picturesque a manner given, from his own con- stant experience, here entirely failed.—‘ Volo hoc oratori con- ‘ tingat, ut cum auditum sit eum esse dicturum, locus in sub- ‘ selliis occupetur, compleatur tribunal, gratiosi scribe sint in ‘dando et cedendo locum, corona multiplex, judex erectus; ‘ cum surgit is, qui dicturus sit, significetur a corona silentium, ‘ deinde crebrz assensiones, multe admirationes: risus, cum ‘ velit; cum velit, fletus; ut, qui hee procul videat, etiamsi ‘ quid agatur nesciat, at placere tamen, et in scena Roscium in- ‘ telligat.’ For many years, that is, between the latter part of the American war, and the speeches which he made, neither many, nor long, nor in a very usual or regular style, on the French Revolution, the very reverse of all this was to be seen and la- mented, as often as Mr Burke spoke. The spectator saw no signs of Roscius being in action, but rather of the eminent Civilian we have already spoken of. ‘ Videt’ (as the same critic has, in another passage, almost to the letter described it) ‘ oscitantem ‘ judicem, loquentem cum altero, nonnunquam etiam circulan- ‘ tem, mittentem ad horas; quesitorem, ut dimittat, rogantem;t
* The Attic reader will be here reminded of the First Philippic, in which a very remarkable passage, and in part too applicable to our subject, seems to have been suggested by the passage in the text ; and its great felicity both of apt comparison and of wit, should, with a thou- sand other passages, have made critics pause before they denied those qualities to the chief of orators. omg ds ‘os BagBagos ruxrevovery, ovtw worsyeats Diriwra. nat yar ivav o wAnytis ae Tis wAnyns exeTas. may eregwrs marakn Tis, execs eLcuY “cos xwrets. meoBarrAscbas O°, n Baswesy svavTior, ovt oidey, ovr sécax, Which he proceeds to illustrate by the conduct held respecting the Chersonese, and Thermopyle.
+ This desire in the English senate is irregularly signified, by the cries of ‘ Question, there not being a proper quarter to appeal to, as l! the Roman courts.
~~ i i ee ten ee ae
1827. Dr Laurence. 281
‘intelligit, oratorem in ea causa non adesse, qui possit animis ‘judicum admovere orationem, tanquam fidibus manum.’
But it may justly be said, with the second of Attic orators, that sense is always more important than eloquence; and no one can doubt that enlightened men in all ages will hang over the works of Mr Burke, and dwell with delight even upon the speeches that failed to command the attention of those to whom they were addressed. Nor is it by their rhetorical beauties that they interest us. The extraordinary depth of his detached views, the penetrating sagacity which he occasionally applies to the af- fairs of men and their motives, and the curious felicity of ex- pression with which he unfolds principles, and traces resem- blances and relations, are separately the gift of few, and in their union probably without any example. This must be admitted on all hands; it is possibly the last of our observations which will obtain universal assent, as it is the last we have to offer before coming upon disputed ground, where the fierce conten- tions of politicians cross the more quiet path of the critic.
Not content with the praise of his philosophic acuteness, which all are ready to allow, the less temperate admirers of this great writer, have ascribed to him a gift of genius approaching to the power of divination, and have recognised him as in pos- session of a judgment so acute and so calm withal, that its deci- sions might claim the authority of infallible decrees. His opi- nions have been viewed as always resulting from general prin- ciples deliberately applied to each emergency; and they have been looked upon as forming a connected system of doctrines, by which his own sentiments and conduct were regulated, and _ which after times may derive the lessons of practical wis-
om.
A consideration which at once occurs, as casting suspicion upon the soundness, if not also upon the sincerity, of these en- comiums, is, that they never were dreamt of until the questions arose concerning the French Revolution ; and yet, if well found- ed, they were due to the former principles and conduct of their object ; for it is wholly inconsistent with their tenor to admit that the doctrines so extolled were the rank and sudden growth of the heats which the changes of 1789 had generated. Their title to so much admiration and to our implicit confidence, must depend upon their being the slowly matured fruit of a profound philosophy, which had investigated and compared ; pursuing the analogies of things, and tracing events to their remote origin in the principles of human nature. Yet it is certain that these reasoners, (if reasoning can indeed be deemed their vo- cation,) never discovered a single merit in Mr Burke’s opi- hions, or anything to praise, or even to endure, in his conduct,
282 Mr Burke. Oct.
from his entrance into public life in 1765, to the period of that stormy confusion of all parties and all political attachments, which took place in 1791, a short time before he quitted it. They are therefore placed in a dilemma, from which it would puzzle subtler dialecticians to escape. Either they or their idol have changed ; either they have received a new light, or he is a change- ling god. They are either converts to a faith, which, for so ma- ny years, and during so many vicissitudes, they had, in their preaching and in their lives, held to be damnable; or they are believers in a heresy, lightly taken up by its author, and pro- mulgated to suit the wholly secular purposes of some particular season.
We believe a very little examination of the facts will suffice to show, that the believers have been more consistent than their oracle; and that they escape from the charge of fickleness, at the expense of the authority due to the faith last proclaimed from his altar. It would, indeed, be difficult to select one lead- ing principle or prevailing sentiment in Mr Burke’s latest writings, to which something extremely adverse may not be found in his former, we can hardly say his early works ;—ex- cepting only the subject of Parliamentary Reform, to which, with all the friends of Lord Rockingham, he was from the be- ginning adverse; and in favour of which he found so very he- sitating and lukewarm a feeling among Mr Fox’s supporters, as hardly amounted to a difference, certainly offered no induce- ments to compromise the opinions of his own party. Searching after the monuments of altered principles, we will not resort to his first works—in one of which he terms Damien ¢ a late un- ‘ fortunate regicide,’ looking only at his punishment, and dis- regarding his offence ; neither shall we look into his speeches, exceeding, as they did, the bounds which all other men, even in the heat of debate, prescribe to themselves, in speaking now of the first magistrate of the country, while labouring under a calamitous visitation of Providence—now of kings generally. But we may fairly take as the standard of his opinions, best weighed and most deliberately pronounced, the calmest of all his productions, and the most fully considered,—given to the world when he had long passed the middle age of life, had filled a high station, and been for years eminent in parlia- mentary history.* Although, in compositions of this kind, more depends upon the general tone of a work, than on parti-
* The Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents was pub- lished in 1770—when Mr B. was above 44) years old,
1827. Dr Laurence. 283
cular passages, because the temper of mind on certain points may be better gathered from that, than from any expressly stated propositions, yet we have but to open the book to see that his Zhoughts in 1770, were very different from those which breathe through every page of his Anti-Jacobin wri- tings. And first of the Corinthian Capital of 1790. * I am ‘no friend’ (says he in 1770) * to aristocracy, in the sense ‘at least in which that word is usually understood. If it were ‘not a bad habit to moot cases on the supposed ruin of the ‘constitution, I should be free to declare, that if it must perish, ‘I would rather by far see it resolved into any other form, ‘than lost in that austere and insolent domination.’ (Works, II. 246.) His comfort is derived from the consideration ‘ that ‘the generality of peers are but too apt to fall into an oblivion ‘of their proper dignity, and run headlong into an abject ser- ‘vitude.’ Next of * the Swinish Multitude-—* When popu- ‘lar discontents have been very prevalent, it may well be af- ‘firmed and supported, that there has been generally something ‘found amiss in the constitution, or in the conduct of govern- ‘ment. The people have no interest in disorder. When they ‘do wrong, it is their error, not their crime. But with the ‘governing part of the state it is far otherwise,’—and he quotes the saying of Sully—* Pour la populace ce n’est jamais par ‘envie d’attaquer qu’elle se souleve, mais par impatience de ‘soufirir.’ (Ib. 224.) Again, of the people as ‘ having nothing to ‘do with the laws but to obey them’—‘I see no other way ‘for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in ‘the representatives, but the interposition of the body of the peo- ‘ ple itself,* whenever it shall appear by some flagrant and ‘notorious act,—by some capital innovation—that these repre- ‘sentatives are going to overleap the fences of the law, and to ‘introduce an arbitrary power. This interposition is a most ‘unpleasant remedy. But if it be a legal remedy, it is intend- ‘ed on some occasion to be used—to be used then only ‘when it is evident that nothing else can hold the constitution ‘to its true principles. It is not in Parliament alone that the ‘remedy for parliamentary disorders can be completed; hard- ‘ly indeed can it begin there. Until a confidence in govern- ‘ment is re-established, the people ought to be excited to a ‘more strict and detailed attention to the conduct of their re- ‘ presentatives. Standards for judging more systematically up- ‘on their conduct ought to be settled in the meetings of coun- ‘ties and corporations. Frequent and correct lists of the voters
LS
* Ital. in orig.
284 Mr Burke. Oct.
‘ in all important questions ought to be procured.’ (Ib. $24.) The reasons which call for popular interposition, and made him preach it at a season of unprecedented popular excitement, are stated to be ‘ the immense revenue, enormous debt, and mighty ‘ establishments ;’ and he requires the House of Commons ‘ to ‘bear some stamp of the actual disposition of the people at ‘ large ;’ adding, that ‘ it would be a more natural and toler. ‘ able evil, that the House should be infected with every epide- ‘ mical frenzy of the people, as this would indicate some con- ‘ sanguinity, some sympathy of nature with their constituents, ‘ than that they should in all cases be wholly untouched by the ‘ opinions and feelings of the people out of doors.’ Now let us step aside for a moment to remark, that the ‘ immense re- © venue’ was under 10 millions; the ‘* enormous debt,’ 130; and the ‘ mighty establishments,’ cost about 6 millions a-year. The statesman who, on this account, recommended popular interfe- rence in 1770, lived to see the revenue 24 millions; the debt, 350; the establishment, 30; and the ruling principle of his lat- ter days, operating with the vehemence of a passion, was the all-sufficiency of Parliament and the Crown, and the fatal con- sequence of according to the people any the slightest share of di- rect power in the state.
His theoretical view of the constitution in those days, was as different from the high monarchical tone of his latter writings. The King was then ‘ the representative of the people,’—* so, (he adds) ‘ are the Lords—so are the Judges ; they are all trus- ‘ tees for the people, as well as the Commons, because no power ‘ is given for the sole sake of the holder; and although govern- ‘ment certainly is an institution of divine authority, yet its ‘ forms, and the persons who administer it, all originate from ‘the people.’ And then comes that immortal passage so often cited, and which ought to be blazoned in letters of fire over the porch of the Commons House; illustrating the doctrine it sets out with, that ‘ their representatives are a control for the peo- ‘ ple, and not upon the people; and that the virtue, spirit, and ‘ essence of a House of Commons consists in its being the ex- ‘ press image of the feelings of the nation.’ (Jbid. 288.)* It
* ¢ A vigilant and jealous w over executory and judicial magis-
‘ tracy; an anxious care of public money; an openness approaching ‘ towards facility, to public complaint ; these seem to be the true cha-
‘ racteristics of a House of Commons. But an addressing House of
‘ Commons and a petitioning nation ; a House of Commons full of conf-
‘ dence, when the nation is plunged in despair ; in the utmost harmony
‘ with ministers whom the people regard with the utmost abhorrence; 6
—
-itimwitineat nad mnh eo oe 2 ane ee ee ~ —- aeewm =r 2
on aa A ae bee
1827. Dr Laurence. 285
may be superfluous to add, that one so deeply imbued with the soundest principles of a free constitution, must always have re- garded the Bourbon rulers with singular dislike, while he saw im the English government the natural ally of Liberty, where- soever she was struggling with her chains. Accordingly, in the same famous work, he exclaims, ‘ Such was the conquest ‘of Corsica, by the professed enemies of the freedom of man- ‘kind, in defiance of these who were formerly its professed de- ‘fenders.’ (Zbid. 272.)
Although it cannot be denied that a considerable portion of the deference which Mr Burke’s later and more celebrated opinions are entitled to command, is thus taken away, and, as it were, shared by the conflicting authority of his earlier sentiments, his disciples may, nevertheless, be willing to rest his claims to a re- verent, if not an implicit observance, upon the last, as the maturest efforts of his genius. Now, it appears to us, that in this extra- ordinary person the usual progress of the faculties in growth and decline, was in some measure reversed; his fancy became more vivid,—it burnt, as it were, brighter before its extinction ; while age, which had only increased that light, lessened the power of profiting from it, by weakening the judgment as the ima- gination gained luxuriance and strength. Thus, his old age re- sembled that of other men in one particular only ; he was more haunted by fears, and more easily became the dupe of impos- ture as well as alarm.
It is, we apprehend, quite vain now to deny, that the unfa- vourable decision which those feelings led him to form of the French Revolution, was, in the main, incorrect and exaggera- ted. That he was right in expecting much confusion and mis- chief from the passions of a whole nation let loose, and influen- ced only by the various mobs of its capital, literary and political, in the assemblies, the club-rooms, the theatre, and the streets, no one can doubt; nor was he at all singular in the apprehensions
he felt. But beyond this very scanty and not very difficult
‘who vote thanks, when the public opinion calls upon them for im- ‘peachments; who are eager to grant, when the general voice de- ‘mands account ; who, in all disputes between the people and the ad- ‘ministration, pronounce against the people; who punish their disor- ‘ders, but refuse even to inquire into the provocations to them; this ‘is an unnatural, a monstrous state of things in the constitution. Such ‘an assembly may be a great, wise, awful senate ; but it is not to any ‘popular purpose a House of Commons.’ (Jb. 289.) VOL, XLVI, NO. 92. U
286 Ur Burke. Oct,
portion of his predictions, it would be hard to show any signal instance of their fulfilment. Except in lamenting the excesses of the times of terror, and in admitting them to form a large de. duction from the estimate of the benefits of the Revolution, it would be no easy matter to point out a single opinion of his which any rational and moderate man of the present day will avow. Those who claim for Mr Burke’s doctrines in 1790, the praise of a sagacity and foresight hardly human, would do well to recollect his speech on the Army Estimates of that year. It is published by himself, corrected,* and its drift is to show the uselessness of a large force, because ‘ France must now he * considered as expunged out of the system of Europe;’ it ex- presses much doubt if she can ever resume her station ‘asa * leading power ;’ anticipates ‘the language of the rising genera- * tion—Gallos quoque in bellis floruisse audivimus ;’ and decides, that at all events her restoration to anything like a substantive existence, must, under a republic, be the work of * much time,’ Scarce two years elapsed before this same France, without any change whatever in her situation, except the increase of the anar- chy that had expunged her from the map, declared war on Aus- tria, and in a few months more carried her conquests so much further than Louis XIV. had done, when the firmness and judg- ment of King William opposed him, that Mr Burke now said a universal league was necessary to avert her universal dominion, and that it was a question whether she would suffer any one throne to stand in Europe. The same eulogists of Mr Burke’s sa- gacity would also do well to recollect those yearly predictions of the complete internal ruin which for so long a period alternated with alarms at the foreign aggrandisement of the Republic ; they all originated in his famous work—though it contains some pro- phecies too extravagant to be borrowed by his most servile imi- tators. Thus he contends that the population of France is irre- parably diminished by the revolution, and actually adopts a cal- culation which makes the distress of Paris require above two millions sterling for its yearly relief; a sum sufficient to pay each family above seventeen pounds, or to defray its whole ex- penditure in that country. Surely one so easily led away by his prejudices, can in no sense be reckoned a safe guide, or be extolled for more than ordinary sagacity.
But on these grounds a further allowance is made, and a new deduction introduced, from the sum total of the deference paid
* Works. Vel. V. pl
a eee a ek Oe
oe fn ee & Ss hee «ef Ce
1827. Dr Laurence. 287
to his authority. It is said that the sagacity and penetration which we are bid to reverence, were never at fault, unlesson points where strong feelings interfered. The proposition must be ad- mitted, and without any qualification. But it leads not to au abatement merely—it operates a release of the whole debt of de- ference and respect. For one clever man’s opinion is just as good as another’s, if both are equally uninfluenced by passions and feelings of every kind. Nor was it only on the French Revolution that Mr Burke’s prejudices warped his judgment. Whatever subject interested him strongly, he regarded generally in false colours and distorted shape ; always in exaggerated dimensions. The fate of society, for many years, hung upon Hastings’s Im- peachment; during that period he exhausted as much vitupera- tion upon the East Indians in this country, as he afterwards did on the Jacobins; and he was not more ready to quarrel with Mr Fox on a difference of opinion about France, than he had been a year before to attack Mr Erskine with every weapon of personal and professional abuse, upon a slighter difference about the Abating of the Impeachment. Nay, after the Hastings ques- tion might have been supposed forgotten, or merged in the more recent controversy on French affairs, he deliberately enu- merates, among the causes of alarm at French principles, the prevalence of the East India interest in England; ranks ‘ Na- ‘bobs’ with the diplomatic body all over Europe, as naturally and incurably Jacobin; and warns this country loudly and so- lemnly against suffering itself to be overthrown by a ‘ Bengal ‘junto.’
The like infirmity of a judgment weakened, no doubt, by his temper, pursues him through the whole details of every ques- tion that excites him, that is, of every question that engages his attention. But it is most conspicuous, of course, in all that re- lates to France, because France was the master topic. He is blinded to the impressions on his very senses, not by the ¢ light ‘shining inward,’ but by the heat of his passions. He sees uot what all other men behold, but what he wishes to see, or what his prejudices and fantasies suggest; and having once pronounced a dogma, the most astounding contradictions that events can give him, assail his mind, and even his senses, in vain. Early in 1790 he pronounced France extinguished, as regarded her external force. But at the end of 1793, when the second attempt to invade her had ended in the utter discomfi- ture of the assailants, when she was rioting in the successes of an offensive war, and had armed her whole people to threaten the liberties of Europe, he still sees in her situation nothing but
288 Mr Burke. Oct,
‘complete ruin, without the chance of resurrection,’ and still reckons, that when she recovers her nominal existence by a re- storation of the monarchy, ‘ it will be as much as all her neigh- ‘bours can do, by a steady guarantee, to keep her upon her ‘basis.’ * (Works, VII. 185.) That he should confound all persons, as well as things, in his extravagant speculations, sur- prises less than such delusions as this. We are little atonish- ed at finding him repeatedly class the humane and chivalrous La Fayette with the monster Robespierre; but when we find him pursuing his theory, that all Atheists are Jacobins, so far as to charge Hume with being a leveller, and pressing the converse of the proposition, so far as to insinuate that Priestley was an Atheist, we pause incredulous, over the sad devastation which a disordered fancy can make in the finest understanding.—(VIL 58.)
That the warlike policy which he recommended against France, was more consistent than the course pursued by the ministry, may be admitted. The weak and ruinous plan of lea- ving the enemy to conquer all Europe, while we wasted our treasure and our blood in taking sugar islands, te increase the African Slave Trade, and mow down whole armies by pesti- Jence, has been oftentimes painted in strong colours, never stronger than the truth ; and our arms only were successful when this wretched system was abandoned. But if Mr Burke faintly and darkly arraigned this plan of operations, it was on grounds so purely fanciful, and he dashed the truth with such a mixture of manifest error, that he unavoidably both prevented his coun- ceils from being respected, and subjected his own policy to im- putations full as serious as those he brought against the Go- vernment. He highly approved of the emigration, because France was no longer in but out of France; he insisted on an invasion, for the avowed purpose of restoring monarchy and punishing its enemies; he required the advanced-guard of the attacking army to be composed of the bands of French gentlemen, emigrants, and to be accompanied by the exiled priests; and, in order to make the movement more popular, they were to be preceded by the proclamation of solemn leagues among the allies, never to treat with a republic that had slain its king, and formal announce- ments that they entered the country to punish and to restore.
Mr Burke lived not to see the power of the revolutionary g0-
* She had at that time 750,000 men under arms, without calling out the second conscription.
1827. Dr Laurenee. 289
vernment extend itself resistless in the direction he had pro- nounced impossible, or prove harmless in the only way he deem- ed it formidable. The downfall of that government he lived not to see thrice accomplished, without one of his plans being followed. Yet let us not doubt his opinions upon the restoration of his favourite dynasty, had he survived its exile. With all his bright genius and solid learning, his venerable name would have been found at the head, or rather say in advanee, of the most universally and most justly contemned faction in the world: The ‘ Ultras’ would have owned him for their leader, and would have admitted that he went beyond them in the uncompromising consistency of his extravagant dogmas. He who had deemed the kind of punishments that should be me- ted out, the most important point to settle previously, and had thought it necessary, in many a long and laboured page, to discuss this when the prospects of the Bourbons were des- ets (VII. 187,) and to guard them by all arguments against istening to plans of amnesty, would have objected vehement- ly to every one act of the restored government; regarded the charter as an act of abdication; the security of property as robbery and sacrilege; the impunity of the Jacobins, as making the monarch an accessary after the fact to his brother’s murder ; and what all men of sound minds regarded as a state of great improvement, blessing the country with much happiness, freeing it from many abuses, and giving it precious hopes of liberty, he would have pronounced the height of misery and degradation. If such had not proved to be his views, living in our times, he must have changed all the opinions which he professed up to the hour of his death.
Upon one subject alone could he have been found ranged with the Liberal party of the present day; he always, from a very early period, and before sound principles were disseminated on questions of political economy, held the most enlightened opinions on all subjects of mercantile policy. Here his mind seemed warped by no bias, and his profound understanding and habits of observation led him right. His works abound with just and original reflections upon these matters, and they form a striking contrast to the narrow views which, in his latter years, he was prone to take of all that touched the inte- rests and the improvement of mankind. For his whole habits of thinking seemed perverted by the dread of change ; and he never reflected, except in the single case of the Irish Catholics, that the surest way of bringing about a violent revolution, is to resist a peaceful reform.
290 Mr Burke. Oct.
As he dreaded all plans of amendment which sought to work by perceivable agency, and within a moderate compass of time, so he distrusted all who patronized them—asserting their con. duct to be wild and visionary enthusiasm at the best, but gene- rally imputing their zeal to some sinister motives of personal interest. Most unjustly—most unphilosophically—most un- thinkingly—it is the natural tendency of men connected with the upper ranks of society, and separated from the mass of the community, to undervalue things which only affect the rights or the interests of the people. Against this leaning to which he had yielded, it becomes them to struggle, and their honest devotion to the cause of peaceable improvement, their virtuous labours bestowed in advancing the dignity and happiness of their fellow-creatures, their perils and their losses encountered in defence of the rights of oppressed men, are the most glorious titles to the veneration of the good and the wise—but they are titles which he would have scornfully rejected, or covered with the tide of his indignant sarcasm, whom Providence had en- dowed with such rare parts, and originally imbued with such love of liberty, that he seemed especially raised up as an in- strument for instructing and mending his kind.
In the imperfect estimate of this great man’s character and genius which we have now concluded, let it not be thought that we have made any very large exceptions to the praise unquestion- ably his due. We have only abated claims preferred by his un- heeding worshippers to more than mortal endowments. Enough will remain to command our admiration, after it shall be admit- ted that he who possessed the finest fancy, and the rarest know- ledge, did not equally excel other men in sound and calm judg- ment; enough to excite our wonder at the degree in which he was gifted with most parts of genius, though our credulity be not staggered by the assertion of a miraculous union of them all. We have been contemplating a great marvel certainly, not gazing on a supernatural sight ; and we retire from it with the belief, that, if acuteness, learning, imagination so unmeasu- red, were never before combined, yet have there been occasion- ally witnessed, in eminent men, greater powers of close rea- soning and fervid declamation, oftentimes a more correct taste, for the most part a safer judgment.
The correspondence before us is prefaced by a short account of Dr Laurence; a curious letter from a Clergyman relating the conversion from Deism to Christianity of Mr French, his ma- ternal grandfather ; and two poems, one written while at Win-
1827. Dr Laurence. 991
chester School, on the Fairies and Witches of Shakspeare, giving great promise of poetical excellence, the other on his Father’s death, a piece of inferior merit.* The first three letters are du- ring the Westminster Contest of 1788, when he took a very ac- tive part for Lord John Townsend, as a zealous Foxite. One follows upon matters connected with the Impeachment in 1789, and the rest, which, after the ninth, are all in 1792 and the fol- lowing years, but mostly after the death of Mr Burke’s son in 1794, relate to the great political topics of the day, the Revo- lution and the War chiefly, then the Affairs of Ireland, and in- cidentally the Impeachment. Of the whole collection, 110 in number, the greater portion are written by Dr Laurence; but there are many by Mr Burke also; and two are from the late Duke of Portland. The editor, except in the prefatory biographi- cal sketch, has done nothing towards the reader’s information or convenience. He has often suppressed names, and thus render- ed the context hardly intelligible; in many instances, this sup- pression might be prudent, as the parties are still living ; but it would have been a natural compensation to afford some refer- ences for the reader’s guidance where things are only darkly al- luded to, and we are left to guess the subjects, or occasions, to which the observations relate. There is not a single note of this explanatory kind.
The first letter of Mr Burke’s that appears in this collection, is a short and most affecting one in August 1794, while his son was on his death-bed.
‘ My peAREsT LAURENCE, Cromwell's Lodge, (1794.)
‘ Things are bad enough—but the Doctors bid me not think them desperate. His stomach is continually on the turn—nothing rests on it, owing to the irritation caused by the inflammation of the trachea to- wards the bottom. The fever continues much as it was—He sleeps in a very uneasy way from time to time—but his strength decays vi- sibly, and his voice is in a manner gone. But God is all sufficient— and surely his goodness and his mother’s prayers may do much. As to me, I feel dried up. Don’t talk too much of the matter—only to
* There is a valuable note containing a list of his contributions to the Rolliad and Probationary Odes. We extract it: ‘ The Advertise- ‘ments and Dedication of the Rolliad—In the first part of that work, * Numbers III. VI. VII. VIII. XII. XI1V.—In the second part, the ‘concluding number VII. only—In the Probationary Odes, numbers ‘XVI. and XXf—And of the Political Eclogues the first only, en- ‘ titled * Rose ; or the Complaint.’ Whoever reads these things, es- pecially Part I. No. XIV., will admit the jastice of our remarks upon this singularly endowed individual.
292 Mr Burke. Oct.
the Chancellor—and merely in civility to him. Whether I am to have any objects, depends on his recovery.
The long endurance of these feelings is well known. They frequently come across the correspondence before us, but espe- cially in two letters, one without a date; but from the allusion to Lord Fitzwilliam’s recall, evidently in summer 1795, the other in July 1796.
‘ My prar Laurence, Thursday,
‘Tam truly happy with the turn this business has taken. I sup. pose nothing, as yet, is to be said about it. Very few of the objeets which my dear Richard had on his mind in dying, are, thank God, left wholly unaccomplished—the deliverance of Ireland from the hands of the Job ascendancy excepted—that was nearly done too—but Provi- dence, for reasons above our wisdom, has suffered that great affair to be snatched out of the hands that alone seemed made for it. However he was saved that pang, worse than any he could have felt in the part- ing of that fairest of all souls from a frail human body. Here we are, and with thankfulness we acknowledge it, returned to that house, in which we had. many such moments as we never can see more. Qur thankfulness, very sincere, I hope, did not hinder us from feeling that we were come to a place in which there was none to rejoice in reeei- ving us ; none in whom we could rejoice by being received ! But that is over—all over, all our domestic comforts, the only comforts, are all at an end; and if we look abroad—what a dreadful horizon !
‘ What you say of Jack Nugent's family is worthy of your good- ness of heart. Great advantages to it will be derived from your ge- nerous protection, I have no doubt; and we receive your intentions nwst thankfully, knowing as we do that the very line, in which we wished you tocome in, must, for a long time at least, be a barrier against all your hopes for yourself or for anybody else: and we trust that you do net think that when your late friend, and myself, his unworthy aud misplaced representative, wished you that seat, that anything of the sort ever entered into our heads, much or little. Adieu till Saturday. Our cordial love to Woodford and Nagle, and to our friends on the south-side of Thames.
‘ Ever mest affectionately yours, ‘ Epmunp Burke.
The following letter displays the acuteness of Mr Burke’s feeling upon a public loss—the fate of the Impeachment.
¢ My Dear LavureENce, Bath, July 28, 1796. ‘1 thank you for employing the short moment you were able to snatch from being useful, in being kind and compassionate. Here I am in the last retreat of hunted infirmity. I am indeed aua abois: But, as through the whole of a various and long life I have been more indebted than thankful to Providence, so I am now singularly so, in being dismissed, as hitherto I appear to be, so gently from life, and
ae ll le ee eed oe me aes ee ee. ae
Dr Laurence. 293
sent to follow those who in course ought to have followed me, whom, I trust, I shall yet, in some inconceivable manner, see and know ; and by whom I shall be seen and known. But enough of this.
‘ However, as it is possible that my stay on this side of the grave, may yet be shorter than I compute it, let me now beg to call to your recollection, the solemn charge and trust I gave you on my departure from the public stage. I fancy I must make you the sole operator, in a work in which, even if I were enabled to undertake it, you must have been ever the assistance on which alone I could rely. Let not this cruel, daring, unexampled act of public corruption, guilt, and meanness, go down to a posterity, perhaps as careless as the present race, without its due animadversion, which will be best found in its own acts and monuments. Let my endeavours to save the Nation from that shame and guilt, be my monument; The only one I ever will have. Let everything I have done, said, or written, be forgot- ten, but this. I have struggled with the great and the little on this point during the greater part of my active life ; and I wish after death, to have my defiance of the judgments of those who consider the do- minion of the glorious Empire given by an incomprehensible dispen- sation of the Divine Providence into our hands, as nothing more than an opportunity of gratifying, for the lowest of their purposes, the lowest of their passions—and that for such poor rewards, and for the most part, indirect and silly bribes, as indicate even more the folly than the corruption of these infamous and contemptible wretches. I blame myself exceedingly for not having employed the last year in this oak and beg forgiveness of God for such a neglect. I had strength enough for it, if I had not wasted some of it in compromi- sing grief with drowsiness and forgetfulness ; and employing some of the moments in which I have been roused to mental exertion, in feeble endeavours to rescue this dull and thoughtless people from the punish- ments which their neglect and stupidity will bring upon them for their systematic iniquity and oppression: But you are made to con- tinue all that is good of me; and to augment it with the various re- sources of a mind fertile in virtues, and cultivated with every sort of talent, and of knowledge. Above all make out the eruelty of this pre- tended acquittal, but in reality this barbarous and inhuman condemna- tion of whole tribes and nations, and of all the classes they contain. If ever Europe recovers its civilization, that work will be useful. Remember! Remember! Remember!
‘It is not that I want you to sacrifice yourself blindly and unfruit- fully, at this instant. But there will be a season for the appearance of sucha record; and it ought to be in store for that season. Get every- thing that Troward has.
‘Your kindness will make you wish to hear more particulars of me: To compare my state with that of the three first days after my arrival, I feel on the whole less uneasiness—But my flesh is wasted ina manner which in so short a time no one could imagine. My limbs look about to find the rags that cover them. My strength is declined in the full proportion; and at my time of life new flesh is
294 Mr Burke. Oet,
never supplied ; and lost strength is never recovered. If God has any. thing to do for me here, here he will keep me. If not, I am tolerably resigned to his divine pleasure. I have not been yet more than a day in condition to drink the waters—but they seem rather to compose than to disorder my stomach. My illness has not suffered Mrs Burke to profit as she ought of this situation. But she will bathe to-night. Give Woodford a thousand kind remembrances. Please God, I shall write to him to-morrow. Adieu. ¢ Your ever true friend, ‘ Epmunp Burke.’
There is nothing more striking in the whole of this corre- spondence than the serious, and even desponding, views taken of Irish affairs by both the eminent men, whose inmost thoughts are here laid open to the view. Whatever aspect forcign events may wear, and whether at home our condition appears pros- perous or adverse, they never for a moment lose sight of Ire- land as the point of danger and weakness, the work of our mis- government. This conviction must have been strong indeed, when it could induce Mr Burke to desire a change of ministers there, and even in England, at the risk of the men obtaining office, whom, on French affairs, he most differed with, and could even make him open his mind to receive a moderate Parlia- mentary reformation in the sister kingdom. The following let- ter is from Dr Laurence; but there is no reason for thinking that it speaks his sentiments alone.
‘ You know my opinions. They remain the same. They are even strengthened in one point, as to the distress of the common enemy; since the French have abandoned their high pretensions of suffering no mediation, asserted in their answer to the Danish Minister on our first application for Lord Malmesbury’s passport, have allowed a con- gress which they before refused on our original proposition, and by both these acts in the midst of their successes have evinced some lit- tle disposition to moderation, which in them can only be the effect of necessity. On our side, bullion has been literally pouring into the country, and I think some new indications of the prosperity of the country have lately come out. The number of enclosure bills passed last year was greater than ever was known, and more than double the ave- rage of the period from the American peace up to the last year. I should therefore be stouter than ever were it not for the internal state of the British Empire. Ministers will not open their eyes with regard to Ireland ; and they have lost the time of gaining the Catholics, in my estimation, while in the meantime the opposition party in that coun- try have gone farther than sober men can approve and in all respects support, as they would wish. They have entangled themselves inex- tricably, I fear, with what is called Parliamentary Reform. I have every serious alarm for Ireland, if the Foreign war should continue. What must be the primary defence of that country? Our navy. to
—[——<— state
ie il fae
1827. Dr Laurence.
prevent a junction between the French and Irish Jacobin armies. And what is the state of our navy? I some time since intimated my rehensions of the consequences which might arise from the weak and undignified manner in which Government gave way to a just claim of the seamen, improperly, illegally, and dangerously asserted. It is said to-day, that a fresh mutiny has broken out, in which blood has been shed,—I believe, on both sides. With a mutinous navy and a rebellion in Ireland, (which I think will certainly be if the war con- tinues, and Ministers remain obstinate as to Ireland,) it would require very different abilities for the conduct of war from those which have been manifested by the present Government, to make me expect any benefit from suffering war under them rather than treat in a congress. The armistice of four months (in which it is said we may be included if we please), may give time for our credit to recover itself, as it is now in fact very nearly recovered; and for suppressing the first pos- sible movements in the North of Ireland. The congress, in which | presume the Emperor of Russia, as our ally, may take part, may pro- duce some impression unfavourable to the French, both in the mind of Paul the First as well as of Frederic William, who, I have reason to think, now that he has weakened the House of Austria by his neutrality, begins to be uneasy at his new neighbours and friends. Neither am I wholly without hopes from some late publications of the official style in the Morning Chronicle, and what I have privately heard and ob- served, that Fox may take the opportunity of putting himself on something more like constitutional grounds against French ambition.
‘The true cure of our internal evils, I conceive, would be the at- tachment, the warm and zealous attachment, of the Irish Catholics, and a vigorous and united attack with our whole force on those parts of the French coast, where we might yet best expect to reanimate the Royal cause. But this is too great for the present Ministers, who are little. I shall take seme occasion to express these sentiments ; but I shall less commit myself with such a Government and for such a Government. Lord F. will be in town this week, I shall talk to him seriously about it.’
At the misrule of that unhappy country, and not only at the blind impolicy of continuing the laws to promote religious ani- mosity and civil war, but at the systematic oppression and mal- versation so long permitted to deface the practice of the Govern- ment, Mr Burke’s indignation is frank, unqualified, and vehe- ment, at all times and in every posture of affairs. We should hesitate to use the expressions in which he often vents the feelings excited in his mind, by ‘ that art and policy which ‘has driven the Catholic body, contrary to its nature, into Ja- ‘cobinism, in order to forma pretext to multiply the jobs, and ‘to increase the power of that foolish and profligate junto to ‘which Ireland is delivered over as a farm.’ (p. 78.)
‘What you say about the Pope is very striking, but he and his Troy will be burned to ashes, and [I assure all good Protestants that
296 Mr Burke. Oct.
whatever they may think of it, the thread of their life is close twisted into that of their great enemy. It is perfectly ridiculous, in the midst of our melancholy situation, to see us forswearing this same Pope lustily in every part of these dominions, and making absolute war upon him in Ireland at the hazard of everything that is dear to us, whilst the enemy from whom we have most to fear, is doing the same thing with more effect and less hazard to themselves. For we are cutting our own throats in order to be revenged of this said old Pope, It is very singular, that the power which menaces the world should produce in us no other marks of terror than by a display of meanness, and that this poor old bugbear, who frightens nobody else, and who is affrighted by everybody and everything, is to us the great object of terror, of precaution, and of vigorous attack—You remember the fable of the Hare and the Frogs. On this point, I verily begin to believe that Mr Pitt is stark mad; but that he is in the cold fit of this phrenetick fever. I agree with you, and it was long the opinion of our dear departed friend, that Mr Pitt, keeping an underhand and di- rect influence in Ireland to screen himself from all responsibility, does resolve on the actual dissolution of the empire ; and having settled for himself, as he thinks, a faction there, puts everything into the hands of that faction, and leaves the Monarchy and the superintendency of Great Britain to shift for themselves as they may.’
This is the exaggeration proceeding from bitterness of spirit, and great personal dislike of Mr Pitt, whom he always charged with having betrayed the cause of civil order and national in- dependence by his mismanagement of the war. But the follow- ing letter contains a sound view of the Irish Question. Mr Burke’s is the name, and his the authority, which our Ultras the most affect to venerate; let them then consult their oracle upon the Catholic Claims. They may find possibly some of the sybil’s fury; but if they will not allow the inspiration, at least they must admit the response to be anything rather than ambi guous.
‘ You know that the far greater and the most oppressive part of those laws has been repealed. The only remaining grievance which the Catholics suffer from the Jaw, consists in certain incapacities rela- tive to franchises. The ill will of the governing powers is their great grievance, who do not suffer them to have the benefit of those capa- cities to which they are restored, nominally, by the law. The fran- chises which they desire are to remove the stigma from them which is not branded on any description whatever of dissenters in Ireland, who take no test and are subject to no incapacity ; though they [are] of the old long-established religion of the country, and who cannot be accused of perverseness or any factious purpose in their opinions, since they remain only where they have always been, and are, the far greater majority of the inhabitants. They give as good proofs of their loyalty and affection to Government, at least as any other peo- ple. Tests have been contrived for them, to purge them from any
1827. Dr Laurence. 297
suspicious political principles, supposed to have some connexion with their religion. These tests they take; whereas the persons, called Protestants, which protestantism, as things stand, is no description of a religion at all, or of any principle, religious, moral, or political, but ‘is a mere negation, take no tests at all. So that here is a persecution, as far as it goes, of the only people in Ireland, who make any positive profession of the Christian faith ; for even the clergy of the established church do not sign the thirty-nine articles. The heavy load that lies upon them is, that they are treated like enemies, and as long as they are under any incapacities, their persecutors are furnished with a legal pretence of scourging them upon all occasions, and they never fail to make use of it. If this stigma were taken off, and that, like their other fellow citizens, they were to be judged by their conduct, it would a great way in giving quiet to the country. The fear that, if they ad capacities to sit in Parliament, they might become the majority, and persecute in their turn, is a most impudent and flagitious pretence, which those, who make use of it, know to be false. They could not at this day get three members out of the three hundred, and never can have the least probability from circumstances of becoming the tenth part of the representatives, even though the boroughs made in the time of James I. for the destruction of the then natural interests of the country should be reformed upon any plan which has as yet been proposed, Seman the natural interests have been varied and the pro- perty changed since the time of King James the First. At present the chief oppression consists in the abuse which is made by the powers
of executive government, which may more effectually harass an ob-
noxious people, than even adverse laws themselves. I do not know
whether you are apprised of all the proceedings in the county of Ar-
magh, particularly of the massacres that have been rac eager on the 1
Catholic inhabitants of that county, with no punishment and hardly any discountenance of Government. All this, however, is a matter of very nice handling in a British Parliament, on account of the jealous independence of that county. Neither the Court nor the Opposition party I am afraid would relish it, especially, as they pretend, or may — that the subject is to become a matter of their own inquiry.
have written my mind fully upon this subject to Lord Fitzwilliam, but I have had yet no answer, nor, indeed, hardly could. The Jaco- bin Opposition take this up to promote sedition in Ireland; and the Jacobin Ministry will make use of it to countenance tyranny in the same place.’
But one of the most important letters on this subject is writ- ten the month before his death, and relates the substance of a conference he had held with a much venerated friend upon Irish affairs. We can only afford room for a single passage, as the whole occupies five pages.
‘ ##** sees this Parliamentary Reform thus pushed in concert by the Opposition in both kingdoms exactly in the same light which you
and I do, and yet without regard to the dreadful consequences which ; 10
298 Mr Burke. Oct.
he foresees from this measure, and without regard to the total, at least temporary, alienation of those people (the Irish Opposition, Messrs Grattan, Ponsonby, &c.) from his confidence, his connexion, and his principles. I plainly perceive that if he was consulted, he would ad. vise to throw everything into their own hands. If I am asked what I would myself advise in such a case, J should certainly advise the same, but with this temperament and express previous condition, that they renewed their confidence in * * * *, whom I hold to be the only person to settle Ireland ; and that they give him some assurance as a man, a gentleman, and a friend, that they will be practicable about their schemes of changing the constitution of the House of Commons ; and that they will desist from the scheme of an absentee tax, which in its principle goes more to the disconnexion of the two kingdoms than anything which is proposed by the United Irishmen. As to Mr Grat- tan’s other project, of laying new taxes upon English commodities, and the principle upon which he proposes it,—namely, that England is a foreign and a hostile kingdom, and adverse in interest, (it) is, I think, a measure he would hardly persevere in. I think the difficulty of the case is extreme, when you consider the military government established on the one hand, and the wild democratic representation proposed as its cure (on) the other.’
We have marked his dislike of Mr Pitt; it was grounded both on what he terms ‘an incurable suspicion of his sincerity,’ which he ascribes to others, insinuating that he partook of it; and on a contempt for his views of government.
‘ The declaration, though it has not astonished me, has not given me great defection of spirits. There is a sort of staggering and irre; solution in the cowardice of others, but there is a sort of unconquera- ble firmness, a kind of boldness, in the pusillanimity of Mr Pitt. His madness is of the moping kind, but it is not the less phrenzy for being fixed in lowness and dejection. He is actually taking every means to divest this country of any alliance, or possibility of alliance ; and he is determined that no spirit shall arise within this country, not knowing what course that spirit might take.’
And what is the ground of so much vituperation ? Simply Mr Pitt’s attempting to avoid the miseries and the dangers of war, by negotiating for peace. We shall not be charged with too great admiration of that minister’s policy in conducting the war ; but this might have been forgiven by Mr Burke, had he only done nothing to escape from its dreadful calamities. He sees the minister’s proceedings, however, always in the same light, whether at home or abroad. The mutiny in the Fleet draws forth the following remark, in the last letter he wrote be- fore his death :—* As to the state of this kingdom, it does not ‘ appear to me to be a great deal better than that of Ireland. * Perhaps in some points of view it is worse. To see the ‘ Thames itself beldly blocked up by a rebellious British Fleet,
a am ah Gh Ghee ioe OO. SO Se
1827. Dr Laurence. 299
¢js such a thing as in the worst of our dreams we could scarce- ‘ly have imagined. The lenitive electuary of Mr Pitt’s bill is ‘ perfectly of the old woman’s dispensatory. The only thing ‘which he spoke of, and which has any degree of common ‘sense,’ &c.—Nor had his friend and correspondent failed to imbibe the same sentiments. He thus expresses himself in one letter to Lord Fitzwilliam, stating his principles on all the great questions of the day, previous to coming into Parliament under the patronage of that truly venerable and patriot statesman.
‘ With the power of Mr Pitt, I never wish to have any connexion. So far from it, my Lord, that I some little time since voluntarily re- solved (and signified my resolution) to forego my claims to the first rank in my profession, should a vacancy happen. My motives, not material here, were in part private, in part public. I should endeavour to maintain him in power, merely from a conviction, that in conse- quence of the ground taken by Opposition, and the distemper of the times, the cause of Government in the abstract, and our excellent Con- stitution in particular, cannot be supported but by supporting the ac- tual Minister. Happy, I believe, would it have been for Europe, if the breaking out of the French Revolution had found Mr Fox in the situation of Mr Pitt !’
Of Mr Fox, Mr Burke’s language also is always respectful ; nor is it deficient in kindness, unless when he has been irritated by a personal attack.
‘ The speeches in the House of Lords in Ireland were in the same strain; and in the House of Commons, the Ministers put forward a wretched brawler, one Duigenan of your profession, to attack Mr Fox, though they knew, that as a British Member of Parliament, he was by them invulnerable ; but their great object was, to get him to rail at the whole body of Catholics and Dissenters in Ireland, in the most foul and unmeasured language. This brought on, as they might well have expected from Mr Grattan, one of the most animated phi- lippics which he ever yet delivered, against their Government and Par- liament.
‘It was a speech the best calculated that could be conceived further to inflame the irritation which the Castle-brawler’s long harangue must necessarily have produced. As to Mr Fox, he had all the honour of the day, because the invective against him was stupid, and from a man of no authority or weight whatsoever ; and the panegyric which was opposed to it was full of eloquence, and from a great name. The At- torney-General, in wishing the motion withdrawn, as I understand, did by no means discountenance the principle upon which it was made, nor disown the attack, which was made in a manner upon the whole people of Ireland. The Solicitor-General went the full length of sup- porting it. Instead of endeavouring to widen the narrow bottom upon which they stand, they make it their policy to render it every day more narrow,’
il
300 Mr Burke. Oct.
We cannot resist the temptation of adding to these extracts a singular testimony in favour of Law Reform, and from a quarter the least liable to the suspicion of desiring reckless innovation, or underrating our ancient institutions. They who have heard Mr Burke so often cited as the solemn and eloquent panegyrist of the existing system of our laws, must be amused when they contrast with his speculative declamations on their perfection, the following groans uttered by him in his capacity of a suitor, suffering under their practical effects.
‘ But no wonder that such villains as Owen should proceed as they do, when our courts of justice seem by their proceedings to be in league with every kind of fraud and injustice. They proceed as if they had an intricate settlement of 10,000/. a-year to discuss in an af- fair that might as well be decided in three weeks as in three hundred years. They let people die while they are looking for redress, and then all the proceedings are to begin over again by those who may think they have an interest in them. While one suit is pending, they give knaves an opportunity of repeating their offences, and of laugh- ing at them and their justice, as well they may. I wish heartily that, if the lawyers are of opinion that they may spin out this modest a year or two longer, I may not vex my dying hours in fruitless chi- cane, but let the villany, which their maxims countenance, take its course. As to any relief in the other courts, I have been in them, and would not trust the fame and fortune of any human creature to them, if I could possibly help it. I have tried their justice in two cases of my own, and in one, in which I was concerned with others in a public eae, where they suffered the House of Commons in effect to
ve the tables turned on them, and under colour of a defendant to be criminated for a malicious prosecution. I know them of old, and am only sorry at my present departure, that I have not had an opportunity of painting them in their proper colours. Why should not the Court of Chancery be able to know, whether an author gives an imperfect cop to a printer to be published whether he will or no, and has not ich himself master of his own thoughts and reflections ? This is the very case made by the wretch himself, but a court can’t decide in years whether this thing ought to be done or not. In the meantime he en- joys the profits of his villany, and defies them by villanies of the same kind and to the same person. But I allow that it is better that even this kind of justice should exist in the country, than none at all.’
It gives us sincere pleasure to adduce a testimony against West India Slavery, from a quarter as little likely to be charged with fanaticism, as the last authority was open to the suspicion of restless discontent.
‘ On Mr Ellis’s late motion, (Dr Laurence writes,) Windham paid your name some very just and handsome compliments, very honourable both to the subject and the panegyrist. The planters will not take the essential ee of your regulations in the colonies; the connexion of the slave with the soil; his consequent right to the spot, once assigned
827. Dr Laurence. 301
him, around his hut ; and his right to purchase his freedom at a certain fixed price, with the fruits of his own industry. Their pretences are weak, as I heard them privately discussed; but that last point, which is most important for the gradual abolition of slavery as well as the slave trade, will I trust hereafter follow.’
In these letters appear two painful circumstances: the dread- ful, nay, almost diseased irritation of his mind, not merely upon the subject of his severe affliction, but on all matters that interested him ; and the pressure of pecuniary embarrassment. Such expressions, as the following portion of a letter from Dr Laurence to the Duke of Portland contains, are only to be ex- plained by supposing, that the writer felt an uncommon anxiety about his friend’s mental health, and considered his mind as more affected by the subjects of discussion than it ought to have been.
‘My pear Lorn, Beaconsfield, Oct. 20th, 1794.
‘ When your Grace did me the honour of a long and confidential conversation on Saturday evening, I mentioned to you the anxiety, agi- tation, dismay, and horror, which afflicted the mind of our unhappy friend here on the subject of publick affairs. On my return yester- day, I did not find him more tranquil; neither did anything which I thought myself at liberty to communicate, give him much relief. It is true, he felt a considerable degree of pleasure in finding your Grace's sentiments so fully agree with his as to the principle and mode of opposing the Jobbing of the College, by taking up the person, who alone is regularly qualified under the statutes, and who seems desig- nated for the Provostship by his present situation: He was also gra- tified to be told of your firmness in resisting the improper disposal of the late Mr Hutchinson’s other office ; and above all he conceived some little hope from learning, that the great mischief which he dread- ed has not yet actually taken place. Yet his mind is still overwhelm- ed by the contemplation of the terrible prospect before us; at this moment too, immediately before the meeting of Parliament, when they, who alone feel no terror of French principles in this country, are perplexed and confounded, but will derive new hopes and therefore new activity from the destruction of a Ministry formed for the very purpose of eradicating those principles ; when abroad, all the old Go- vernments of Europe are shaken to their very centre, and are every day more and more showing their own internal debility and the insuf- ficiency and indecision of their rulers; when they can only be con- firmed and strengthened by the unanimity of all good men in this country, if even that will effect it, and consequently must be a lost, if there be an appearance of weakness and distraction here. Still, terrible as this prospect truly is, he would not sacrifice the honour and characters of yourself and Lord Fitzwilliam to a false appearance of unanimity ; because your country and all Europe have an interest in your honour and characters. Were you deprived of them, every reasonable hope of the permanent security of this country, and through
VOL. XLVI. NO. 92, X
802 Mr Burke. Oct.
this country, of all Europe, would just in that proportion be lessened and impaired.’
The passages which follow relate evidently to difficulties of another kind, the first apparently to his expected pension.
‘ My pear LAURENCE, 22d May, 1795,
‘ It was indeed a very considerable time since we heard from you: But we considered your silence as a proof that you had remembered us, not that you had forgot us. You know that we are not stout enough for bad news ; and there was nothing good to be told. You visited us, however, with the lark and the first peep of day. God knows it is a poor crepusculum—a small advantage, very dearly bought, and not promising, I think, the consequences which some accounts led us to expect. But we must take what God gives. As to me, I be. lieve my affair is out of the question. He has delayed it so long, that he is partly ashamed, partly afraid, and partly unwilling to bring it on, —But in that, too, submission is my duty and my policy. It signifies little how these last days are spent—and on my death—I think they will pay my debts. The best is, that we are soon to see you and the Kings. Adieu, God Almighty bless you!
‘ Your unhappy friend, ‘ E. Burke.’
‘ But it signifies nothing: what I wrote was to discharge a debt I thought to my own and my Son’s memory, and to those who ought not to be considered as guilty of prodigality in giving me what is be yond my merits, but not beyond my debts, as you know. The public —I won't dispute longer about it—has overpaid me—I wish I could overpay my creditors. They eat deep on what was designed to main tain me.’
It is possible, that men in their sympathy for the fate of ge- nius, as they will phrase it, may lament over the sight of a man like Mr Burke thus feeling the ordinary inconvenience of strait- ened circumstances. We do not allow of any feelings of this caste, unless they be the very same which the spectacle of imprudence and its result excites towards other men. Genius, so far from having any claim to favour when it neglects the ordinary pre- cautions or exertions for securing independence, is in truth doubly inexcusable, and far less deserving of pity than of blame. Mr Burke ought to have earned his income in an honest calling. Every man of right feeling will prefer this to the degrading ob- ligations of private friendship, or the precarious supplies, to vir- tue so perilous, of public munificence. It is certain that he chose rather to eat the bitter* bread of both these bakings, than
* Tu proverai siccome sa di sale Lo pane altrui e com’ e duro calle Lo Scender’ e salir altrui scale. DANTE.
4A =e Fe ee
a= 6s weer oem bee 45 385 (bee Oe tlt ee
1827. Dr Laurence. ‘303
to taste the comely—the sweet—the exquisite fruit, however hard to pluck, of regular industry. He was a politician by trade; a professional statesman. There is no such craft recognised in this state ; all our institutions are ignorant of it—all our habits averse to it; nor is there one of a British statesman’s functions which may not be conjoined with the cares of an industrious life.
We have said that this Collection contains two letters from the late Duke of Portland. One of them is extremely interest- ing, and does infinite honour to that distinguished person. It is an answer apparently (for here, as usual, the editor renders us no help) to the letter afterwards published by Mr Burke, when a surreptitious copy had got abroad, and entitled Observa- tions on the Conduct of the Minority. The letter was sent to his Grace with those Observations ; they reflected severely on Mr Fox and his friends; they extolled the Duke, and his family, and party, to the skies ; their burden was an accusation brought against Mr Fox and his friends, of ill behaviour towards the Duke and his party, and, in particular, his relations; yet, let the reader mark and admire the high-minded candour, the truly generous spirit, with which that noble person gently, and yet firmly, rebukes his partizan’s forward zeal, and avows his love and respect for the man whom he no longer could act with, but had never seen cause to distrust.
‘In conformity with the principles I have ever professed, in this great cause, and indeed in all its appendages, my support, such as it may be, will be given completely and, unreservedly to those, be they who they may, who appear to conduct it to the best of their abilities. Farther than this I cannot go—and so far seems to me to be advancing no farther than I have done, and should consider it my duty to do, in any occasion of peril or importance to my country. In this I may be mistaken, as I may have been in other instances. But I must acknowledge that where I have been in‘ long habits of intimacy and friendship, where I have observed many and striking instances of very superior talents and judgment, the most incorrupti- ble integrity, the most perfect disinterestedness, I am much disincli- ned to impute to bad motives a conduct, however different and oppo- site it may be to that which I feel myself obliged to hold. This may be a great weakness, but it is a weakness I am not ashamed of con- fessing, and less so to you than to any friend I have.’
Let it be recollected that this was a private letter, written during the utmost heat of those political contentions, and that it never was meant to see the light, nor in fact has for the third of acentury afterwards been disclosed, when all the persons con- cerned have long slept in their graves.
304 State of German Literature. Oct.
Art. II.—1. Die Poesie und Eeredsamkeit der Deutschen, von Luthers eit bis zur Gegenwart. Dargestellt von Franz Horn, (The Poetry and Oratory of the Germans, from Luther's Time to the Present. Exhibited by Franz Horn). Berlin, 1822—23—24. 3 vols. 8vo.
2. Umrisse zur Geschichte und Kritik der schinen Litteratur Deutschlands wihrend der Jahre \790—1818. (Outlines for the History and Criticism of Polite Literature in Germany, during the Years 1790—1818). By Franz Horn. Berlin, 1819. 8vo.
yy unex two books, notwithstanding their diversity of title, are properly parts of one and the same; the ‘ Outlines,’ though of prior date in regard to publication, having now as- sumed the character of sequel and conclusion to the larger work,—of fourth volume to the other three. It is designed, of course, for the home market; yet the foreign student also will find in it a safe and valuable help, and, in spite of its imperfee- tions, should receive it with thankfulness and good-will. Doubt- less we might have wished for a keener discriminative and de- scriptive talent, and perhaps for a somewhat more Catholic spi- rit, in the writer of such a history ; but in their absence we have still much to praise. Horn’s literary creed would, on the whole, we believe, be acknowledged by his countrymen as the true one; and this, though it is chiefly from one immovable station that he can survey his subject, he seems heartily anxious to apply with candour and tolerance. Another improvement might have been a deeper principle of arrangement, a firmer grouping into periods and schools; for, as it stands, the work is more a critical sketch of German Poets, than a history of German Poetry. Let us not quarrel, however, with our author: his merits asa literary historian are plain, and by no means inconsiderable. Without rivalling the almost frightful laboriousness of Bouter- wek or Eichhorn, he gives creditable proofs of research and ge- neral information, and possesses a lightness in composition, to which neither of these erudite persons can well pretend. Un- doubtedly he has a flowing pen, and is at home in this province; not only a speaker of the word, indeed, but a doer of the work; having written, besides his great variety of tracts and treatises biographical, philosophical, and critical, several very deserving works of a poetic sort. He is not, it must be owned, a very strong man, but he is nimble and orderly, and goes through his work with a certain gaiety of heart; nay, at times, with a fro- licsome alacrity which might even require to be pardoned. His
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character seems full of susceptibility ; perhaps too much so for its natural vigour. His Novels, accordingly, to judge from the few we have read of them, verge towards the sentimental. In the present Work, in like manner, he has adopted nearly all the best ideas of his contemporaries, but with something of an un- due vehemence ; and he advocates the cause of religion, integrity, and true poetic taste, with great heartiness and vivacity, were it not that too often his zeal outruns his prudence and insight. Thus, for instance, he declares repeatedly, in so many words, that no mortal can be a poet unless he is a Christian. The meaning here is very meat but why this phraseology? Is it not inviting the simple-minded (not to speak of scoffers, whom Horn very justly contemns) to ask, when Homer subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles? or whether Sadi and Hafiz were really of the Bishop of Peterborough’s opinion? Again, he talks too often of ‘ representing the Infinite in the Finite,’ of express- ing the unspeakable, and such high matters. In fact, Horn’s style, though extremely readable, has one great fault: it is, to speak it in a single word, an affected style. His stream of meaning, uniformly clear and wholesome in itself, will not flow quietly along its channel; but is ever and anon spurting up into epigram and antithetic jets. Playful he is, and kindly, and we do believe, honest-hearted; but there is a certain snap- pishness in him, a frisking abruptness ; and then his sport is more a perpetual giggle, than any dignified smile, or even any sufficient laugh with gravity succeeding it. This sentence is among the best we recollect of him, and will partly illustrate what we mean. We submit it, for the sake of its import like- wise, to all superfine speculators on the Reformation, in their future contrasts of Luther and Erasmus. ‘ Erasmus,’ says Horn, ‘ belongs to that species of writers who have all the de- ‘ sire in the world to build God Almighty a magnificent church, ‘—at the same time, however, not giving the Devil any of- ‘fence; to whom, accordingly, they set up a neat little chapel ‘close by, where you can offer him some touch of sacrifice at ‘a time, and practise a quiet household devotion for him with- ‘out disturbance.’ In this style of ‘ witty and conceited mirth,’ considerable part of the book is written.
But our chief business at present is not with Franz Horn, or his book; of whom, accordingly, recommending his labours to all inquisitive students of German, and himself to good estima- tion with all good men, we must here take leave. We have a word or two to say on that strange literature itself; concerning which, our readers probably feel more curious to learn what it is, than with what skill it has been judged of.
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Above a century ago, the Pére Bouhours propounded to him- self the pregnant question: Si un Allemand peut avoir de l’ésprit? Had the Pére Bouhours bethought him of what country Kepler and Leibnitz were, or who it was that gave to mankind the three great elements of modern civilization, Gunpowder, Print- ing, and the Protestant Religion, it might have thrown light on his inquiry. Had he known the Niebelungen Lied; and where Reinecke Fuchs, and Faust, and the Ship of Fools, and four-fifths of all the popular mythology, humour, and romance, to be found in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took its rise; had he read a page or two of Ulrich Hutten, Opitz, Paul Flemming, Logau, or even Lohenstein and Hoffmannswaldau, all of whom had already lived and written in his day; had the Pére Bouhours taken this trouble.—who knows but he might have found, with whatever amazement, that a German could actually have a little ésprit, or perhaps even something better? No such trouble was requisite for the Pére Bouhours. Motion in vacuo is well known to be speedier and surer than through a re- sisting medium, especially to imponderous bodies; and so the light Jesuit, unimpeded by facts or principles of any kind, failed not to reach his conclusion ; and in a comfortable frame of mind, to decide, negatively, that a German could not have any literary talent.
Thus did the Pére Bouhours evince that he had ‘ a pleasant wit;’ but in the end he has paid dear for it. The French, themselves, have long since begun to know something of the Germans, and something also of their critical Daniel; and now it is by this one untimely joke that the hapless Jesuit is doom- éd to live; for the blessing of full oblivion is denied him, and so he hangs, suspended in his own noose, over the dusky pool which he struggles toward, but for a great while will not reach. Might his fate but serve as a warning to kindred men of wit, in regard to this and so many other subjects! For surely the “anny of despising, at all times and in itself a dangerous
uxury, is much safer after the toil of examining than before it.
We differ from the Pére Bouhours in this matter, and must endeavour to discuss it differently. There is, in fact, much in the present aspect of German Literature not only deserving no- tice, but deep consideration from all thinking men, and far too complex for being handled in the way of epigram. It is always advantageous to think justly of our neighbours, nay, in mere com- mon honesty, it is a duty; and, like every other duty, brings its own reward. Perhaps at the present era this duty is more essential than ever; an era of such promise and such threaten- ing,—when so many elements of good and evil are everywhere in
1827. State of German Literature. 307
conflict, and human society is, as it were, struggling to body it- self forth anew, and so many coloured rays are springing up in this quarter and in that, which only by their union can produce pure light. Happily too, though still a difficult, it is no longer an impossible duty; for the commerce in material things has paved roads for commerce in things spiritual, and a true thought, or a noble creation, passes lightly to us from the remotest coun- tries, provided only our minds be open to receive it. This, in- deed, is a rigorous proviso, and a great obstacle lies in it; one which to many must be insurmountable, yet which it is the chief glory of social culture to surmount. For, if a man, who mistakes his own contracted individuality for the type of human nature, and deals with whatever contradicts him as if it contra- dicted this, is but a pedant, and without true wisdom, be he furnished with partial equipments as he may,—what better shall we think of a nation that, in like manner, isolates itself from foreign influence, regards its own modes as so many laws of nature, and rejects all that is different as unworthy even of examination ?
Of this narrow and perverted condition the French, down al- most to our own times, have afforded a remarkable and instruc- tive example ; as indeed of late they have been often enough up- braidingly reminded, and are now themselves, in a manilier spirit, beginning to admit. That our countrymen have at any time err- ed much in this point, cannot, we think, truly be alleged against them. Neither shall we say, with some passionate admirers of Germany, that to the Germans in particular they have been un- just. It is true, the literature and character of that country, which, within the last half century, have been more worthy perhaps than any other of our study and regard, are still very generally unknown to us, or what is worse, misknown: but for this there are not wanting less offensive reasons, That the false and tawdry ware, which was in all hands, should reach us before the chaste and truly excellent, which it re- quired some excellence to recognise; that Kotzebue’s insanity should have spread faster, by sbme fifty years, than Lessing’s wisdom ; that Kant’s Philosophy should stand in the background as a dreary and abortive dream, and Gall’s Craniology be held out to us from every booth as a reality ;—all this lay in the na~ ture of the case. That many readers should draw conclusions from imperfect premises, and by the imports judge too hastily of the stock imported from, was likewise natural. No unfair bias, no unwise indisposition, that we are aware of, has ever been at work in the matter; perhaps, at worst, a degree of in»
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dolence, a blameable incuriosity to all products of foreign ge. nius: for what more do we know of recent Spanish or Italian literature than of German; of Grossi and Manzoni, of Campo- manes or Jovellanos, than of Tieck and Richter? Wherever German art, in those forms of it which need no interpreter, has addressed us immediately, our recognition of it has been prompt and hearty; from Diirer to Mengs, from Hindel to Weber and Beethoven, we have welcomed the painters and musicians of Germany, not only to our praise, but to our affections and be- neficence. Nor, if in their literature we have been more back- ward, is the literature itself without share in the blame. Two centuries ago, translations from the German were comparative. ly frequent in England: Luther’s Table-Talk is still a venera- ble classic in our language ; nay Jacob Bohme has found a place among us, and this not as a dead letter, but as a living apostle to a still living sect of our religionists. In the next century, indeed, translation ceased; but then it was in a great measure because there was little worth translating. The horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, followed by the conquests and conflagrations of Louis Fourteenth, had desolated the country; French influ- ence, extending from the courts of princes to the closets of the learned, lay like a baleful incubus over the far nobler mind of Germany ; and all true nationality vanished from its literature, or was heard only in faint tones, which lived in the hearts of the
people, but could not reach with any effect to the ears of fo- reigners.* And now that the genius of the country has awaked
* Not that the Germans were idle; or altogether engaged, as we too loosely suppose, in the work of commentary and lexicography. On the contrary, they rhymed and romanced with due vigour as to quantity ; only the quality was bad. Two facts on this head may de- serve mention: In the year 1749, there were found in the library of one virtuoso no fewer than 300 volumes of devotional poetry, contain- ing, says Horn, “a treasure of 33,712 German hymns ;” and much about the same period, one of Goitsched’s scholars had amassed as many as 1500 German novels, all of the 17th century. The hymns we understand to be much better than the novels, or rather, perhaps, the novels to be much worse than the hymns. Neither was critical study neglected, nor indeed honest endeavour on all hands to attain improvement : witness the strange books from time to time put forth, and the still stranger institutions established for this purpose. Among the former, we have the “ Poetical Funnel” (Poetische Trichter), ma- nufactured at Niirnberg in 1650, and professing, within six hours, to pour in the whole essence of this difficult art into the most unfurnish- ed head. Niirnberg also was the chief seat of the famous Meister-
—- a.m th mm amma on eG tom
1927. State of German Literature. 309
in its old strength, our attention to it has certainly awakened also: and if we yet know little or nothing of the Germans, it js not because we wilfully do them wrong, but in good part be- cause they are somewhat difficult to know.
In fact, prepossessions of all sorts naturally enough find their place here. A country which has no national literature, or a li- terature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be, to its neighbours, at least in every important spiritual re- spect, an unknown and misestimated country. Its towns may figure on our maps; its revenues, population, manufactures, po- litical connexions, may be recorded in statistical books: but the character of the people has no symbol and no voice; we cannot know them by speech and discourse, but only by mere sight and outward observation of their manners and procedure. Now, if both sight and speech, if both travellers and native literature, are found but ineffectual in this respect, how incalculably more so the former alone! To seize a character, even that of one man, in its life and secret mechanism, requires a philosopher; to deli- neate it with truth and impressiveness, is work for a poet. How then shall one or two sleek clerical tutors, with here and there a tedium-stricken esquire, or speculative half-pay captain, give us views on such a subject? How shall a man, to whom all cha-
singer and their Sdngerziinfte, or Singer-guilds, in which poetry was taught and practised, like any other handicraft, and this by sober and well-meaning men, chiefly artisans, who could not understand why labour, which manufactured so many things, should not also manufac- tureanother. Of these tuneful guild-brethren, Hans Sachs, by trade a shoemaker, is greatly the most noted and most notable. His father was a tailor; he himself learned the mystery of song under one Nun- nebeck, a weaver. He was an adherent of his great contemporary Luther, who has even deigned to acknowledge his services in the cause of the Reformation: how diligent a labourer Sachs must have been, will appear from the fact, that in his 74th year (1568), on exa- mining his stock for publication, he found that he had written 6048 poetical pieces, among which were 208 tragedies and comedies; and this besides having all along kept house, like an honest Niirnberg burgher, by assiduous and sufficient shoe-making! Hans is not with- out genius, and a shrewd irony; and above all, the most gay, child- like, yet devout and solid character. A man neither to be despised hor patronised, but left standing on his own basis, as a singular pro- duct, and a still legible symbol, and clear mirror, of the time and coun- try where he lived. His best piece known to us, and many are well worth perusing, is the Fastnachtsspiel (Shrovetide Farce) of the Nar- renschneiden, where a Doctor cures a bloated and lethargic patient by cutting out half a dozen Jools from his interior !
310 Stale of German Literature. Oct.
racters of individual men are like sealed books, of which he seeg only the title and the covers, decipher, from his four-wheeled vehicle, and depict to us, the character of a nation? He coura- geously depicts his own optical delusions; notes this to be in. comprehensible, that other to be insignificant ; much to be good, much to be bad, and most of all indifferent ; and so, with a few flowing strokes, completes a picture which, though it may not even resemble any possible object, his countrymen are to take for a national portrait. Nor is the fraud so readily detected : for the character of a people has such complexity of aspect, that even the honest observer knows not always, not perhaps after long inspection, what to determine regarding it. From his, only accidental, point of view, the figure stands before him like the tracings on veined marble,—a mass of mere random lines, and tints, and entangled strokes, out of which a lively fancy may shape almost any image. But the image he brings along with him is always the readiest; this is tried, it answers as well as another; and a second voucher now testifies its correctness, Thus each, in confident tones, though it may be with a secret misgiving, repeats his precursor; the hundred times repeated comes in the end to be believed; the foreign nation is now once for all understood, decided on, and registered accordingly ; and dunce the thousandth writes of it like dunce the first.
With the aid of literary and intellectual intercourse, much of this falsehood may, no doubt, be corrected: yet even here, sound judgment is far from easy; and most national characters are still, as Hume long ago complained, the product rather of popular prejudice than of philosophic insight. That the Ger- mans, in particular, have by no means escaped such misrepre- sentation, nay perhaps have had more than the common share of it, cannot, in their circumstances, surprise us. From the times of Opitz and Flemming, to those of Klopstock and Les- sing,—that is, from the early part of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century,—they had scarcely any lite- rature known abroad, or deserving to be known: their political condition, during this same period, was oppressive and every way unfortunate externally; and at home, the nation, split in- to so many factions and petty states, had lost all feeling of itself as of a nation; and its energies in arts as in arms were mati- fested only in detail, too often in collision, and always under foreign influence. The French, at once their plunderers and their scoffers, described them to the rest of Europe as a sem!- barbarous people; which comfortable fact the rest of Europe was willing enough to take on their word. During the greater part of last century, the Germans, in our intellectual survey of
1827. State of German Literature. 311
the world, were quietly omitted; a vague contemptuous igno- rance prevailed respecting them; it was a Cimmerian land, where, if a few sparks did glimmer, it was but so as to testify their own existence, too feebly to enlighten ws.* The Germans passed for apprentices in all provinces of art; and many foreign craftsmen scarcely allowed them so much.
Madame de Stael’s book has done away with this: all Eu- rope is now aware that the Germans are something ; something independent, and apart from others; nay, something deep, im-
ing, and if not admirable, wonderful. What that something is, indeed, is still undecided; for this gifted lady’s Allemagne, in doing much to excite curiosity, has still done little to satisfy or even direct it. We can no longer make ignorance a boast, but we are yet far from having acquired right knowledge; and cavillers, excluded from contemptuous negation, have found a resource in almost as contemptuous assertion. Translators are the same faithless and stolid race that they have ever been: the particle of gold they bring us over is hidden from all but the most patient eye, among shiploads of yellow sand and sul- = Gentle Dulness too, in this as in all other things, still oves her joke. The Germans, though much more attended to, are perhaps not less mistaken than before.
Doubtless, however, there is in this increased attention a progress towards the truth; which it is only investigation and discussion that can help us to find. The study of German li- terature has already taken such firm root among us, and is spreading so visibly, that by and by, as we believe, the true cha- racter of it must and will become known. A result, which is to bring us into closer and friendlier union with forty mil- lions of civilized men, cannot surely be otherwise than desi- rable. If they have precious truth to impart, we shall receive
* So late as the year 1811, we find, from Pinkerton’s Geography, the sole representative of German literature to be Gottshed (with his name wrong spelt), ‘ who first introduced a more refined style.— Gottsched has been dead the greater part of a century ; and for the last
years, ranks among the Germans, somewhat as Prynne or Alex- ander Ross does among ourselves. A man of a cold, rigid, perseve- rant character, who mistook himself for a poet and the perfection of critics, and had skill to pass current during the greater part of his literary life for such. On the strength of his Boileau and Batteux, he long reigned supreme; but it was like Night, in rayless majesty, and over a slumbering people. They awoke, before his death, and hurled him, perhaps too indignantly, into his native Abyss.
$12 State of German Literature. Oct,
it as the highest of all gifts; if error, we shall not only reject it, but explain it and trace out its origin, and so help our bre. thren also to reject it. In either point of view, and for all
rofitable purposes of national intercourse, correct knowledge is the first and indispensable preliminary.
Meanwhile errors of all sorts prevail on this subject: even among men of sense and liberality we have found so much hal- lucination, so many groundless or half-grounded objections to German literature, that the tone in which a multitude of other men speak of it, cannot appear extraordinary. To much of this even a slight knowledge of the Germans would furnish a suffi- cient answer. But we have thought, it might be useful were the chief of these objections marshalled in distinct order, and exami- ned with what degree of light and fairness is at our disposal. In attempting this, we are vain enough, for reasons already stated, to fancy ourselves discharging what is in some sort a national duty. It is unworthy of one great people to think falsely of another ; it is unjust, and therefore unworthy. Of the injury it does to ourselves we do not speak, for that is an inferior consi- deration : yet surely if the grand principle of free intercourse is so profitable in material commerce, much more must it be in the commerce of the mind, the products of which are thereby not so much transported out of one country into another, as multiplied over all, for the benefit of all, and without loss to any. If that man is a benefactor to the world who causes two ears of corn to grow where only one grew before, much more is he a benefactor who causes two truths to grow up together in harmony and mutual confirmation, where before only one s solitary, and, on that side at least, intolerant and hostile.
In dealing with the host of objections which front us on this subject, we think it may be convenient to range them under two principal heads. The first, as respects chiefly unsoundness or imperfection of sentiment; an error which may in general be denominated Bad Taste. The second, as respects chiefly a wrong condition of intellect ; an error which may be designated by the general title of Mysticism. Both of these, no doubt, are partly connected ; and each, in some degree, springs from and returns into the other: yet, for present purposes, the division may be precise enough.
First, then, of the first : It is objected that the Germans have a radically bad taste. This is a deep-rooted objection, which assumes many forms, and extends through many ramifications Among men of less acquaintance with the subject of German taste, or of taste in general, the spirit of the accusation seems (
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be somewhat as follows: That the Germans, with much natu- ral susceptibility, are still in a rather coarse and uncultivated state of mind ; displaying, with the energy and other virtues of
a rude people, many of their vices also ; in particular, a certain
wild and headlong temper, which seizes on all things too hastily
and impetuously ; weeps, storms, loves, hates, too fiercely and
yociferously ; delighting in coarse excitements, such as flaring
contrasts, vulgar horrors, and all sorts of showy exaggeration.
Their literature, in particular, is thought to dwell with peculiar
complacency among wizards and ruined towers, with mailed
knights, secret tribunals, monks, spectres, and banditti: on the
ether hand, there is an undue love of moonlight, and mossy fountains, and the moral sublime : then we have descriptions of things which should not be described ; a general want of tact ;
nay, often a hollowness, and want of sense. In short, the Ger- man Muse comports herself, it is said, like a passionate, and ra~
ther fascinating, but tumultuous, uninstructed, and but half- civilized Muse. A belle sauvage at best, we can only love her with a sort of supercilious tolerance; often she tears a passion
to rags ; and in her tumid vehemence, struts without meaning,
and to the offence of all literary decorum.
Now, in all this there is a certain degree of truth. If any man will insistupon taking Heinse’s Ardinghello, and Miller’s Siegwart, and the works of Veit Weber the younger, and above all, the ever- lasting Kotzebue, as his specimens of German literature, he may establish many things. Black Forests, and the glories of Lub- berland ; sensuality and horror, the spectre nun, and the charm- ed moonshine, shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws, also, with huge whiskers, and the most cat-o’-mountain aspect ; tear- stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts, and the like suspicious characters, will be found in abundance. We are little read in this bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one time rather diligently culti- vated; though at present it seems to be mostly relinquished as unproductive. Other forms of Unreason have taken its place ; which in their turn must yield to still other forms; for it is the nature of this goddess to descend in frequent avatars among men. Perhaps not less than five hundred volumes of such stuff could still be collected from the book-stalls of Germany. By which truly we may learn that there is in that country a class of unwise men and unwise women; that many readers there la- bour under a degree of ignorance and mental vacancy, and read not actively but passively, not to learn but to be amused, But is this fact so very new to us? Or what should we think of a
314 State of German Literature. Oct.
German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from the Castle Spectre, Mr Lewis’s Monk, or even the Mysteries of Udolpho, and Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus? Or would he judge rightly of our dramatic taste, if he took his ex. tracts from Mr Egan’s Tom and Jerry ; and told his readers, ag he might truly do, that no play had ever enjoyed such currency on the English stage as this most classic performance? We think, not. In like manner, till some author of acknowledged merit shall so write among the Germans, and be approved of b critics of acknowledged merit among them, or at least secure for himself some permanency of favour among the million, we can prove nothing by such instances. That there is so perverse an author, or so blind a critic, in the whole compass of German literature, we have no hesitation in denying.
But farther, among men of deeper views, and with regard to works of really standard character, we find, though not the same, a similar objection repeated. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, it is said, and Faust, are full of bad taste also. With respect to the taste in which they are written, we shall have occasion to say somewhat hereafter: meanwhile, we may be permitted to remark that the objection would have more force, did it seem to originate from a more mature consideration of the subject. We have heard few English criticisms of such works, in which the first condition of an approach to accuracy was complied with;— a transposition of the critic into the author’s point of vision, a survey of the author’s means and objects as they lay before him- self, and a just trial of these by rules of universal application. Faust, for instance, passes with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art-magic: But it would scarcely be more unwise to consider Hamlet as depending for its main interest on the ghost that walks in it, than to regard Faust as a production of this sort. For the present, therefore, this objection may be set aside; or at least may be considered not as an assertion, but an inquiry, the answer to which may turn out rather that the Ger- man taste is different from ours, than that it is worse. Nay, with regard even to difference, we should scarcely reckon it to be of great moment. Two nations that agree in estimating Shak- speare as the highest of all poets, can differ in no essential prin- ciple, if they understood one another, that relates to poetry.
Nevertheless, this opinion of our opponents has attained a certain degree of consistency with itself; one thing is thought to throw light on another; nay, a quiet little theory has been propounded to explain the whole phenomenon. The cause of this bad taste, we are assured, lies in the condition of the Ger-
. ut aff “mle ott efi eet af aa oct. ae ae
1827. State of German Literature. 315
man authors. These, it seems, are generally very poor; the ceremonial law of the country excludes them from all society with the great ; they cannot acquire the polish of drawing-rooms, but must live in mean houses, and therefore write and think in a mean style.
Apart from the truth of these assumptions, and in respect of the theory itself, we confess there is something in the face of it that afflicts us. Is it then so certain that taste and riches are indissolubly connected? that truth of feeling must ever be pre- ceded by weight of purse, and the eyes be dim for universal and eternal Beauty, till they have long rested on gilt walls and costly furniture ? To the great body of mankind this were heavy news; for of the thousand, scarcely one is rich, or connected with the rich; nine hundred and ninety-nine have always been poor, and must always be so. We take the liberty of question- ing the whole postulate. We think that, for acquiring true poetic taste, riches, or association with the rich, are distinctly among the minor requisites; that in fact they have little or no concern with the matter. This we shall now endeavour to make probable.
Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness ; a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, good- ness, Wheresoever or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and just- ness of vision ; above all, kindled into love and generous admi- ration. Is culture of this sort found exclusively among the higher ranks? We believe, it proceeds less from without than within, in every rank. The charms of Nature, the majesty of Man, the infinite loveliness of Truth and Virtue, are not hidden from the eye of the poor; but from the eye of the vain, the cor- rupted, and self-seeking, be he poor or rich. In old ages, the humble Minstrel, a mendicant, and lord of nothing but his harp and his own free soul, had intimations of those glories, while to the proud Baron in his barbaric halls they were unknown. Nor is there still any aristocratic monopoly of judgment more than of genius: And as to that Science of Negation which is taught peculiarly by men of professed elegance, we confess we hold it rather cheap. It is a necessary, but decidedly a subor- dinate accomplishment; nay, if it be rated as the highest, it be- comes a ruinous vice. This is an old truth; yet, ever needing new application and enforcement. Let us know what to love, and
we shall know also what to reject; what to affirm, and we shall 4
316 State of German Literature. Oct.
know also what to deny: but it is dangerous to begin with de. nial,—and fatal to end with it. To deny is easy; nothing ig sooner learnt or more generally practised: as matters go, we need no man of polish to teach it; but rather, if possible, a hundred men of wisdom to show us its limits, and teach us its reverse.
Such is our hypothesis of the case: But how stands it with the facts? Are the fineness and truth of sense manifested by the artist found, in most instances, to be proportionate to his wealth and elevation of acquaintance? Are they found to have any per- ceptible relation either with the one or the other? We imagine, not, Whose tastein painting, for instance, is truer and finer than Claude Lorraine’s? And was not he a poor colour-grinder ; outwardly, the meanest of menials ? Where again, we might ask, lay Shak. speare’s rent-roll ; and what generous peer took him by the hand and unfolded to him the ‘ open secret’ of the Universe; teach- ing him that this was beautiful, and that not so? Was he not a peasant by birth, and by fortune something lower; and was it not thought much, even in the height of his reputation, that Southampton allowed him equal patronage with the zanies, jug- glers, and bearwards of the time? Yet compare his taste, even as it respects the negative side of things; for, in regard to the positive, and far higher side, it admits no comparison with any other mortal’s,—compare it, for instance, with the taste of Beau- mont and Fletcher, his contemporaries, men of rank and educa- tion, and of fine genius like himself. Tried even by the nice, fas- tidious, and in great part false, and artificial delicacy of modern times, how stands it with the two parties; with the gay trium- phant men of fashion, and the poor vagrant link-boy ? Does the Jatter sin against, we shall not say taste, but etiquette, as the former do? For one line, for one word, which some Chester- field might wish blotted from the first, are there not in the others whole pages and scenes which, with palpitating heart, he would hurry into deepest night ? This too, observe, respects not their genius, but their culture; hot their appropriation of beauties, but their rejection of deformities, by supposition, the grand and peculiar result of high breeding! Surely, in such instances, even that humble supposition is ill borne out.
The truth of the matter seems to be, that with the culture of a genuine poet, thinker, or other aspirant to fame, the influence of rank has no exclusive or even special concern. For men of action, for senators, public speakers, political writers, the case may be different; but of such we speak not at present. Neither do we speak of imitators, and the crowd of mediocre men, to
2
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1827. State of German Literature. 317
whom fashionable life sometimes gives an external inoffensive- ness, often compensated by a frigid malignity of character. We
k of men who, from amid the perplexed and conflicting paolo of their every-day existence, are to form themselves into harmony and wisdom, and show forth the same wisdom to others that exist along with them. To such a man, high life, as it is called, will be a province of human life certainly, but no- thing more. He will study to deal with it as he deals with all forms of mortal being ; to do it justice, and to draw instruction from it : but his light will come from a loftier region, or he wan- ders for ever in darkness; dwindles into a man of vers de societé, or attains at best to be a Walpole or a Caylus. Still less can we think that he is to be viewed as a hireling ; that his excellence will be regulated by his pay. ‘ Sufficiently provided for from within, the has need of little from without :’ food and raiment, and an unviolated home, will be given him in the rudest land ; and with these, while the kind earth is round him, and the everlasting heaven is over him, the world has little more that it can give. Is he poor ? So also were Homer and Socrates ; so was Samuel Johnson ; so was John Milton. Shall we reproach him with his poverty, and infer, that because he is poor, he must likewise be worthless ? God forbid that the time should ever come when he too shall esteem riches the synonyme of good! The spirit of Mam- mon has a wide empire ; but it cannot, and must not, be worship- ped in the Holy of Holies. Nay, does not the heart of every genuine disciple of literature, however mean his sphere, instinc- tively deny this principle, as applicable either to himself or an- other? Is it not rather true, as D’Alembert has said, that for every man of letters, who deserves that name, the motto and the watchword will be FreEpom, Trutu, and even this same Po- verty? and that if he fear the last, the two first can never be made sure to him ?
We have stated these things, to bring the question somewhat nearer its real basis; not for the sake of the Germans, who no- wise need the admission of them. The German authors are not poor ; neither are they excluded from association with the weal- thy and well-born. On the contrary, we scruple not to say, that, m both these respects, they are considerably better situated than our own. Their booksellers, it is true, cannot pay as ours do; yet, there as here, a man lives by his writings ; and, to compare Jorden with Johnson and D’ Israeli, somewhat better there than here. No case like our own noble Otway’s has met us in their biographies; Boyces and Chattertons are much rarer in Ger-
man than in English literary history. But farther, and what is VOL. XLVI. NO, 92. Y
Ji8 State of German Literature. Oct.
fay more important: From the number of universities, libra. ries, collections of art, museums, and other literary or scientific institutions of a public or private nature, we question whether the chance, which a meritorious man of letters has before him, of ob. taining some permanent appointment, some independent civic existence, is not a hundred to one in favour of the German, compared with the Englishman. This is a weighty item, and indeed the weightiest of all; for it will be granted, that for the votary of literature, the relation of entire dependence on the merchants of literature, is at best, and however liberal the terms, a highly questionable one. It tempts him daily and hourly to sink from an artist into a manufacturer; nay, 80 precarious, fluctuating, and every way unsatisfactory must his civic and economic concerns become, that too many of his class cannot even attain the praise of common honesty as manufac. turers. There is no doubt a spirit of martyrdom, as we have asserted, which can sustain this too: but few indeed have the spirit of martyrs; and that state of matters is the safest which requires it least. The German authors, moreover, to their credit be it spoken, seem to set less store by wealth than many of ours. There have been prudent, quiet men among them, who actually appeared not to want more wealth—whom wealth could not tempt, either to this hand or to that, from their pre- appointed aims. Neither must we think so hardly of the Ger- man nobility as to believe them insensible to genius, or of opis nion that a patent from the Lion King is so superior to ‘a pa- ‘tent direct from Almighty God.’ A fair proportion of the Ger- man authors are themselves men of rank : we mention only, as of our own time, and notable in other respects, the two Stoll- bergs and Novalis. Let us not be unjust to this class of per- sons. It is a poor error to figure them as wrapt up in ceremonial stateliness, avoiding the most gifted man of a lower station; and for their own supercilious triviality, themselves avoided by all truly gifted men. On the whole, we should change our notion of the German nobleman: that ancient, thirsty, thick-headed, sixteen-quartered Baron, who still hovers in our minds, never did exist in such perfection, and is now as extinct, as our own Squire Western. His descendant is a man of other culture, other aims, and other habits. We question whether there is an aristo- eracy in Europe, which, taken as a whole, both in a public and private capacity, more honours art and literature, and does more both in public and private to encourage them. Excluded from society ! What, we would ask, was Wiecland’s, Schiller’s, Herder’s, Johannes Miiller’s society ? Has not Goethe, by birth
1927. State of German Literature. 319
a Frankfort burgher, been since his twenty-sixth year the com-
nion, not of nobles but of princes, and for half ‘his life a mi- nister of State ? And is not this man, unrivalled in so many far deeper qualities, known also and felt to be unrivalled in noble- ness of breeding and bearing; fit not to learn of princes, in this respect, but by the example of his daily life to teach them?
We hear much of the munificent spirit displayed among the better classes in England; their high estimation of the ‘arts, and generous patronage of the artist. We rejoice to hear it; we hope it is true, and will become truer and truer. We hope that a great change has taken place among these classes, since the time when Bishop Burnet could write of them—‘ They are for the most part the worst instructed, and the least knowing of any of their rank I ever went among ! Nevertheless, let us arrogate to ourselves no exclusive praise in this particular. Other nations can appreciate the arts, and cherish their cultiva- tors as well as we. Nay, while learning from us in many other matters, we suspect the Germans might even teach us some- what in regard to this. At all events, the pity which certain of our authors express for the civil condition of their brethren in that country, is, from such a quarter, a superfluous feeling. Nowhere, let us rest assured, is genius more devoutly honoured than there, by all ranks of men, from peasants and burghers up to legislators and kings. It was but last year that the Diet of the Empire passed an Act in favour of one individual poet : the final edition of Goethe’s works was guaranteed to be pro- tected against commercial injury in every state of Germany ; and special assurances to that effect were sent him, in the kind- est terms, from all the Authorities there assembled, some of them the highest in his country or in Europe. Nay, even while we write, are not the newspapers recording a visit ‘from the So- vereign of Bavaria in person, to the same veherable man; a mere ceremony, perhaps, but one which almost recalls to us the ere of the antique Sages and the Grecian Kings ?
This hypothesis, therefore, it would seem, is not supported by facts, and so returns to its original elements. The causes it alleges are impossible: but what is still more fatal, the effeet it proposes to account for has, in reality, no existence. We venture to deny that the Germans are defective in taste; even a a nation, as a public, taking one thing with another, we imagine, they may stand comparison with any of their neigh- hours ; as writers, as critics, they may decidedly court it. True, there is a mass of dulness, awkwardness, and false rr Sao lity in the lower regions of their literature: but is not bad tast
320 State of German Literature. Oct.
endemical in such regions of every literature under the sun? Pure Stupidity, indeed, is of a quiet nature, and content to be merel stupid, But seldom do we find it pure; seldom unadulterated with some tincture of ambition, which drives it into new and strange metamorphoses. Here it has assumed a contemptuous trenchant air, intended to represent superior tact, and a sort of all-wisdom ; there a truculent atrabilious scowl, which is to stand for passionate strength: now we have an outpouring of tumid fervour; now a fruitless, asthmatie hunting after wit and hu- mour. Grave or gay, enthusiastic or derisive, admiring or de- spising, the dull man would be something which he is not and cannot be. Shall we confess that, of these two common ex- tremes, we reckon the German error considerably the more harmless, and, in our day, by far the more curable? Of unwise admiration much may be hoped, for much good is really in it: but unwise contempt is itself a negation ; nothing comes of it, for it is nothing.
To judge of a national taste, however, we must raise our view from its transitory modes to its perennial models; from the mass of vulgar writers, who blaze out and are extinguished with the popular delusion which they flatter, to those few who are admitted te shine with a pure and lasting lustre; to whom, by common consent, the eyes of the people are turned, as to its loadstars and celestial luminaries. Among German writers of this stamp, we would ask any candid reader of them, let him be of what country or creed he might, whether bad taste struck him as a prevailing characteristic? Was Wieland’s taste uncultivated? Taste, we should say, and taste of the very species which a disciple of the Negative School would call the highest, formed the great object of his life; the perfection he unweariedly endeavoured after, and, more than any other per fection, has attained. The most fastidious Frenchman might read. him, with admiration of his merely Freneh qualities. And is not Klopstock, with his clear enthusiasm, his azure purity, and heavenly, if still somewhat cold and lunar light, a man of taste? His Messias reminds us oftener of no other poets than of Virgil and Racine. But it is to Lessing that an Englishman would turn with readiest affection. We cannot but wonder that more of this man is not known among us; or that the know- ledge of him has-not done more to remove such misconceptions. Among all the writers of the eighteenth century, we will not except even Diderot and David Hume, there is not one of a more compact and rigid intellectual structure ; who more dis- tinctly knows what he is aiming at, or with more gracefulness, vigour, and precision, sets it forth to his readers, He thinks
1827. State of German Literature. 321
with the clearness and piercing sharpness of the most expert logician ; but a genial fire pervades him, a wit, a heartiness, a general richness and fineness of nature, to whieh most logicians are strangers. He is a sceptic in many things, but the noblest of sceptics; a mild, manly, half-careless enthusiasm struggles through his indignant unbelief: he stands before us like a toil- worn, but unwearied and heroic champion, earning not the con- quest but the battle; as indeed himself admits to us, that ‘it is ‘not the finding ef truth, but the honest search for it that ‘ profits.’ We confess, we should be entirely at a loss for the literary creed of that man who reckoned Lessing other than a thoroughly cultivated writer ; nay, entitled to rank, in this par- ticular, with the most distinguished writers of any existing na- tion. As a poet, as a critic, philosopher, or controversialist, his style will be found precisely such as we of England are ac- customed to admire most: brief, nervous, vivid; yet quiet, without glitter or antithesis; idiomatic, pure without purism, transparent, yet full of character and reflex hues of meaning. ‘ Every sentence,’ says Horn, and justly, ‘is like a phalanx ;’ not a word wrong placed, not a word that could be spared; and it forms itself so calmly and lightly, and stands in its complete- hess, 80 gay, yet so impregnable! Asa poet he contemptuously denied himself all merit; but his readers have not taken him at his word: here too a similar felicity of style attends him; his plays, his Minna von Barnhelm, his Emilie Galotti, his Nathan der Weise, have a genuine and graceful poetic life; yet no works known to us in any language are purer from exaggeration, or any appearance of falsehood. They are pictures, we might say, — not in colours, but in crayons; yet a strange attraction ies in them; for the figures are grouped into the finest atti- tudes, and true and spirit-speaking in every line. It is with his style chiefly that we have to do here; yet we must add, that the matter of his works is not less meritorious. His Criticism and philosophic or religious Scepticism were of a higher mood than had yet been heard in Europe, still more in Germany : his Dramaturgie first exploded the pretensions of the French theatre, and, with irresistible conviction, made Shakspeare known to his countrymen; preparing the way for a brighter era in their li- terature, the chief men of which still thankfully look back to Lessing as their patriarch. His Laocoon, with its deep glances into the philosophy of Art, his Dialogues of Free-masons, a work of far higher import than its title indicates, may yet teach many things to most of us, which we know not, and ought to know. With Lessing and Klopstock might be joined, in this respect, nearly every one, we do not say of their distinguished, but even
State of German Literature. Oct.
of their tolerated contemporaries. The two Jacobis, known more or less in all countries, are little known here, if they are accused of wanting literary taste. These are men, whether as thinkers or poets, to be regarded and admired for their mild and lofty wisdom, the devoutness, the benignity and calm grandeur of their philosophical views. In such, it were strange if among so many high merits, this lower one of a just and elegant style, which is indeed their natural and even necessary product, had been wanting. We recommend the elder Jacobi no less for his clearness than for his depth; of the younger, it may be enough in this point of view to say, that the chief praisers of his earlier poetry were the French. Neither are Hamann and Mendel. sohn, who could meditate deep thoughts, defective in the power of uttering them with propriety. The Phedon of the latter, in its chaste precision and simplicity of style, may almost remind us of Xenophon: Socrates, to our mind, has spoken in no mo- dern language so like Socrates, as here, by the lips of this wise and cultivated Jew. *
Among the poets and more popular writers of the time, the case is the same: Utz, Gellert, Cramer, Ramler, Kleist, Hage- dorn, Rabener, Gleim, and a multitude of lesser men, whatever excellencies they might want, certainly are not chargeable with had taste. Nay, perhaps of all writers, they are the least charge- able with it: a certain clear, light, unaffected elegance, of a higher nature than French elegance, it might be, yet to the ex-
* The history of Mendelsohn is interesting in itself, and full of en- couragement to all lovers of self-improvement. At thirteen he was a wandering Jewish beggar, without health, without home, almost with- out a language, for the jargon of broken Hebrew and provincial Ger- man which he spoke could scarcely be called one. At middle age, he could write this Phedon ; was a man of wealth and breeding, and rank- ed among the teachers of his age. Like Pope, he abode by his origi- nal creed, though often solicited to change it: indeed, the grand prob- lem of his life was to better the inward and outward condition of his own ill-fated people ; for whom he actually accomplished much benefit. He was a mild, shrewd, and worthy man; and might well love Phadon and Socrates, for his own character was Socratic. He was a friend of Lessing’s: indeed, a pupil; for Lessing having accidentally met him at chess, recognised the spirit that lay struggling under such incum- brances, and generously undertook to help him. By teaching the poor Jew a little Greek, he disenchanted him from the Talmud and the Rabbins. The two were afterwards co-labourers in Nicclai’s Deutsche Bibliothek, the first German Review of any character ; which, however, in the hands of Nicolai himself, it subsequently lost. Mendelsohn’s Works have mostly been translated into French.
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1827. State of German Literature. 323
clusion of all very deep or genial qualities, was the excellence they strove after, and for the most part in a fair measure attained. They resemble English writers of the same, or perhaps an earlier riod, more than any other foreigners : apart from Pope, whose influence is visible enough, Beattie, Logan, Wilkie, Glover, un- known perhaps to any of them, might otherwise have almost seemed their models. Goldsmith also would rank among them ; perhaps in regard to true poetic genius, at their head, for none of them has left us a Vicar of Wakefield; though, in regard to judgment, knowledge, general talent, his place would scarcely be so high.
The same thing holds, in general, and with fewer drawbacks, of the somewhat later and more energetic race, denominated thie Géttingen School, in contradistinction from the Saxon, to which Rabener, Cramer, and Gellert, directly belonged, and most of those others indirectly. Hoélty, Birger, the two Stollbergs, are men whom Bossu might measure with his scale and compasses a strictly as he pleased. Of Herder, Schiller, Goethe, we coi not here: they are men of another stature and form of movement, whom Bossu’s scale and compasses could not measure without difficulty, or rather not at all. To say that such men wrote with taste of this sort, were saying little; for this forms not the apex, but the basis, in their conception of style; a quality not to be paraded as an excellence, but to be understood as indispensable, as there by necessity, and like a thing of course.
In truth, for it must be spoken out, our opponents are so widely astray in this matter, that their views of it are not only dim and perplexed, but altogether ime iginary and delusive. It is proposed to school the Germans in the Alphabet of taste; and the Germans are already busied with their Accidence! Fai from being behind other nations in the practice or science oi Criticism, | it is a fact, for which we fearlessly refer to all com- petent judges, that they are distinctly, and even considerably in advance. We state what is already known to a great part of Europe to be true. Criticism has assumed a new form in Ger- many ; it proceeds on other principles, and proposes to itself a higher aim. The grand question is not now a question concern- ing the qualities of diction, the coherence of metaphors, the fit- ness of sentiments, the general logical truth, in a work of art, as it was some half century ago among most critics : Neither is it a question mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry, as is usual with the best of our own crities at pre-
sent; but it is, not indeed exclusively, but inclusively of those two other questions, properly and ultimately a ijuestion on the es-
324 State of German Literature. Oct.
sence and peculiar life of the poetry itself. The first of these ques. tions, as we sec it answered, for instance, in the criticisms of John- son and Kames, relates, strictly speaking, to the garment of poe- try; the second, indeed, to its body and material existence, a much higher point; but only the last to its soul and spiritual exist- ence, by which alone can the body, in its movements and phases, be informed with significance and rational life. The problem is not now to determine by what mechanism Addison composed sentences, and struck out similitudes, but by what far finer and more mysterious mechanism Shakspeare organized his dramas, and gave life and individuality to his Ariel and his Hamlet. Wherein lies that life; how have they attained that shape and individuality ? Whence comes that empyrean fire, which irradi- ates their whole being, and pierces, at least in starry gleams, like a diviner thing, into all hearts? Are these dramas of his not verisimilar only, but true; nay, truer than reality itself, since the essence of unmixed reality is bodied forth in them un- der more expressive symbols ? What is this unity of theirs; and can our deeper inspection discern it to be indivisible, and exist- ing by necessity, because each work springs, as it were, from the general elements of all Thought, and grows up therefrom, into form and expansion, by its own growth ? Not only who was the poet, and how did he compose; but what and how was the poem, and why was it a poem and not rhymed eloquence, creation and not figured passion? These are the questions for the critic. Criticism stands like an interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired ; between the prophet and those who hear the melo- dy of his words, and catch some glimpse of their material mean- ing, but understand not their deeper import. She pretends to open for us this deeper import; to clear our sense that it may discern the pure brightness of this eternal Beauty, and recognise it as heavenly, under all forms where it looks forth, and reject, as of the earth earthy, all forms, be their material splendour what it may, where no gleaming of that other shines through. This is the task of Criticism, as the Germans understand it. And how do they accomplish this task ? By a vague declamation clothed in gorgeous mystic phraseology ? By vehement tumul- tuous anthems to the poet and his poetry; by epithets and laud- atory similitudes drawn from Tartarus and Elysium, and all in- termediate terrors and glories; whereby, in truth, it is rendered clear both that the poet is an extremely great poet, and also that the critic’s allotment of understanding, overflowed by these Py- thian raptures, has unhappily melted into deliquium? Nowise in this manner do the Germans proceed: but by rigorous scientific inquiry; by appeal to principles which, whether cor-
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1827. State of German Literature. 325
rect or not, have been deduced patiently and by long investiga- tion from the highest and calmest regions of Philosophy. For this finer portion of their Criticism is now also embodied in sys- tems; and standing, so far as these reach, coherent, distinct, and methodical, no less than, on their much shallower founda- tion, the systems of Boileau and Blair. That this new Criticism is a complete, much more a certain science, we are far from mean- ing to affirm: the esthetic theories of Kant, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Richter, vary in external aspect, according to the va- ried habits of the individual ; and can at best only be regarded as approximations to the truth, or modifications of it; each cri- tic representing it, as it harmonizes more or less perfectly with the other intellectual persuasions of his own mind, and of differ- ent classes of minds that resemble his. Nor can we here un- dertake to inquire what degree of such approximation to the truth there is in each or all of these writers ; or in Tieck and the two Schlegels, who, especially the latter, have laboured so me- ritoriously in reconciling these various opinions; and so suc- cessfully in impressing and diffusing the best spirit of them, first in their own country, and now also in several others. Thus much, however, we will say: That we reckon the mere circumstance of such a science being in existence, a ground of the highest consideration, and worthy the best attention of all in- quiring men. For we should err widely if we thought that this new tendency of critical science pertains to Germany alone. It is a European tendency, and springs from the general condi- tion of intellect in Europe. We ourselves have all, for the last thirty years, more or less distinctly felt the necessity of such a science: witness the neglect into which our Blairs and Bos- sus have silently fallen; our increased and increasing admira- tion, not only of Shakspeare, but of all his contemporaries, and of all who breathe any portion of his spirit; our controversy whether Pope was a poet; andso much vague effort on the part of our best critics, everywhere, to express some still unexpress- ed idea concerning the nature of true poetry; as if they felt in their hearts that a purer glory, nay, a divineness, belonged to it, for which they had as yet no name, and no intellectual form. But in Italy ‘too, in France itself, the same thing is visible. Their grand controversy, so hotly urged between the Classicists and the Romanticists, in which the Schlegels are assumed, much too loosely, on all hands, as the patrons and generalissimoes of the latter, shows us sufficiently what spirit is at work in that long stagnant literature. Doubtless this turbid fermentation of the elements will at length settle into clearness, both there, and here, as in Germany it has already in a great measure
326 State of German Literature. Oct.
done ; and perhaps a more serene and genial poetic day is every. where to be expected with some confidence. How much the example of the Germans may have to teach us in this particular, needs no farther exposition.
The authors and first promulgators of this new critical doe. trine, were at one time contemptuously named the New School; nor was it till after a war of all the few good heads in the na. tion, with all the many bad ones, had ended as such wars must ever do,* that these critical principles were generally adopted ; and their assertors found to be no School, or new he- retical Sect, but the ancient primitive Catholic Communion, of which all sects that had any living light in them were but members and subordinate modes. It is, indeed, the most sacred article of this creed to preach and practise universal tolerance, Every literature of the world has been cultivated by the Ger- mans; and to every literature they have studied to give due honour. Shakspeare and Homer, no doubt occupy alone the loftiest station in the poetical Olympus; but there is space in it for all true Singers, out of every age and clime. Ferdusi and the primeval Mythologists of Hindostan, live in brotherly union with the Troubadours and ancient Story-tellers of the West. The wayward mystic gloom of Calderon, the lurid fire of Dante, the auroral light of Tasso, the clear icy glitter of Racine, all are ac- knowledged and reverenced; nay, in the celestial fore-court an abode has been appointed for the Gressets and Delilles, that no spark of inspiration, no tone of mental music, might remain w- recognised. The Germans study foreign nations in a spirit which deserves to be oftener imitated. It is their honest en- deavour to understand each, with its own peculiarities, in its own special manner of existing; not that they may praise it, or censure it, or attempt to alter it, but simply that they may know it; that they may see this manner of existing as the na-
* It began in Schiller’s Musenalmanach for 1793. The Xenien, C series of philosophic epigrams jointly by Schiller and Goethe,) escended there unexpectedly, like a flood of ethereal fire, on the Ger- man literary world ; quickening all that was noble into new life, but visiting the ancient empire of Dulness with astonishment and unknown pangs. The agitation was extreme; scarcely since the age of Lu- ther, has there been such stir and strife in the intellect of Germany; indeed, scarcely since that age, has there been a controversy, if we consider its ultimate bearings on the best and noblest interests of ma-
kind, so important as this, which, for the time, seemed only to turn 0%
metaphysical subtleties, and matters of mere elegance. Its farther 4)- plications became apparent by degreés
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1827. State of German Literature. 327
tion itself sees it, and so participate in whatever worth or beauty it has brought into being. Of all literatures, accordingly, the German has the best as well as the most translations; men like Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Schlegel, Tieck, have not dis- dained this task. Of Shakspeare there are three entire ver- sions admitted to be good; and we know not how many partial, or considered as bad. In their criticisms of him we ourselves have long ago admitted, that no such clear judgment or hearty appreciation of his merits, had ever been exhibited by any critic of our own.
To attempt stating in separate aphorisms the doctrines of this new poetical system, would, in such space as is now allowed us, be to insure them of misapprehension. The science of Criticism, as the Germans practise it, is no study of an hour; for it springs from the depths of thought, and remotely or immediately con- nects itself with the subtlest problems of all philosophy. One characteristic of it we may state, the obvious parent of many others. Poetic beauty, in its pure essence, is not, by this theory, as by all our theories, from Hume’s to Alison’s, derived from anything external, or of merely intellectual origin; not from association, or any reflex or reminiscence of mere sensations ; nor from natural love, either of imitation, of similarity in dis- similarity, of excitement by contrast, or of seeing difficulties overcome. On the contrary, it is assumed as underived; not borrowing its existence from such sources, but as lending to most of these their significance and principal charm for the mind. It dwells, and is born in the inmost Spirit of Man, united to all love of Virtue, to all true belief in God; or rather, it is one with this love and this belief, another phase of the same highest principle in the mysterious infinitude of the hu- man Soul. ‘To apprehend this beauty of poetry, in its full and purest brightness, is not easy, but difficult; thousands on thou- sands eagerly read poems, and attain not the smallest taste of it; yet to all uncorrupted hearts, some effulgences of this hea- venly glory are here and there revealed; and to apprehend it clear- ly and wholly, to acquire and maintain a sense and heart that sees and worships it, is the last perfection of all humane culture. With mere readers for amusement, therefore, this Criticism has, and can have nothing to do; these find their amusement—in less or greater measure, and the nature of Poetry remains for ever hid- den from them in the deepest concealment. On all hands, there is no truce given to the hypothesis, that the ultimate object of the poet is to please. Sensation, even of the finest and most rap- turous sort, is not the end but the means. Art is to be loved, uot because of its fects, but because of itself; not because it is
328 State of German Literature. Oct,
useful for spiritual pleasure, or even for moral culture, but be. cause it is Art, and the highest in man, and the soul of aj Beauty. To inquire after its'wility, would be like inquiring af. ter the utility of a God, or what to the Germans would sound stranger than it does to us, the wéility of Virtue and Religion— On these particulars, the authenticity of which we might verify, not so much by citation of individual passages, as by reference to the scope and spirit of whole treatises, we must for the pre- sent leave our readers to their own reflections. Might we ad. vise them, it would be to inquire farther, and, if possible, ‘to see the matter with their own eyes.
Meanwhile, that all this must tend, among the Germans, to raise the general standard of Art, and of what an Artist ought to be in his own esteem and that of others, will be readily infer. red. The character of a Poet does, accordingly, stand higher with the Germans than with most nations. That he is a man of in. tegrity as a man; of zeal and honest diligence in his art, and of true manly feeling towards all men, is of course presupposed, Of persons that are not so, but employ their gift, in rhyme or otherwise, for brutish or malignant purposes, it is understood that such lie without the limits of Criticism, being subjects not for the judge of Art, but for the judge of Police. But even with regard to the fair tradesman, who offers his talent in open mar- ket, to do work of a harmless and acceptable sort for hire,—with regard to this person also, their opinion is very low. The ‘ Bread-artist,’ as they call him, can gain no reverence for hin- self from these men. ‘ Unhappy mortal!’ says the mild but lofty-minded Schiller, ‘ Unhappy mortal! that, with Science ‘ and Art, the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attempt- ‘est nothing more than the day-drudge with the meanest; that ‘in the domain of perfect Freedom, bearest about in thee the ‘ spirit of a Slave!’ Nay, to the genuine Poet, they deny even the privilege of regarding what so many cherish, under the title of their ‘ fame,’ as the best and highest of all. Hear Schiller
in:
‘ The Artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favourite ! Let some beneficent divinity snatch him, when a suckling, from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time, that he may ripen to his full statare beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century ; not, however, to delight it by his presence, but dreadful, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present, but their form he will derive from a nobler time ; nay, from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his own nature. Here, from the pure wther of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations,
nminmeemeea @ Ge
1827. State of German Literature. 329
which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it. His mat- ter Caprice can dishonour, as she has ennobled it ; but the chaste form is withdrawn from her mutations. The Roman of the first century had long bent the knee before his Cesars, when the statues of Rome were stil] standing erect ; the temples continued holy to the eye, when their gods had long been a laughing-stock ; and the abominations of a Nero and a Commodus were silently rebuked by the style of the edifice, which lent them its concealment. Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it, and preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original wilt be restored.
‘ But how is the Artist to guard himself from the corruptions of his time, which on every side assail him? By despising its decisions. Let him look upwards to his dignity and the law, not downwards to his happiness and his wants. Free alike from the vain activity that longs to impress its traces on the fleeting instant, and from the que- rulous spirit of enthusiasm that measures by the scale of perfection the meagre product of reality, let him leave to mere Understanding, which is here at home, the province of the actual; while fe strives, by uniting the possible with the necessary, to produce the ideal. This let him imprint and express in fiction and truth; imprint it in the
rt of his imagination and the earnest of his actions ; imprint it in 2 seasible and spiritual forms, and cast it silently into everlasting time.’*
Still higher are Fichte’s notions on this subject ; or rather éxpressed in higher terms, for the central principle is the same both in the philosopher and the poet. According to Fichte, there is a ‘ Divine Idea’ pervading the visible Universe ; which visible Universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifes- tation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence in- dependent of it. ‘Fo the mass of men this Divine Idea of the world lies hidden : yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, free- dom ; and the end therefore of all spiritual effort in every age. Literary Men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God’s everlasting wisdom, to show it and embody it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own par- ticular times require it in. For each age, by the law of its na- ture, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of this Divine Idea, the essence of which is the same in all ; so that the literary man of one century is — by mediation and re-interpretation applicable to the wants of an- other. But in every century, every man who labours, be it
_* Ueber die ZEsthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Hésthe- tic Education of Man).
330 State of German Literature. Oct.
in what province he may, to teach others, must first have pos. sessed himself of this Divine Idea, or, at least, be with his whole heart and his whole soul striving after it. If without possessing it or striving after it, he abide diligently by some material practical department of knowledge, he may indeed still be (says Fichte, in his usual rugged way) a ‘ useful hod. ‘man ;’ but should he attempt to deal with the Whole, and to become an architect, he is in strictness of language, ¢ No. ‘ thing ;’—‘ he is an ambiguous mongrel between the possessor ‘of the Idea, and the man who feels himself solidly supported ‘and carried on by the common Reality of things ; in his fruit. ‘less endeavour after the Idea, he has neglected to acquire the ‘craft of taking part in this Reality ; and so hovers between ‘two worlds, without pertaining to either. Elsewhere he adds :
‘ There is still, from another point of view, another division in our notion of the Literary Man, and one to us of immediate application, Namely, either the Literary Man has already laid hold of the whole Divine Idea, in so far as it can be comprehended by man, or perhaps of a special portion of this its comprehensible part,—which truly is not possible without at least a clear oversight of the whole,—he has already laid hold of it, penetrated, and made it entirely clear to him. self, so that it has become a possession recallable at all times in the same shape to his view, and a component part of his personality: in that case he is a completed and equipt Literary Man, a man who has studied. Or else, he is still struggling and striving to make the Idea in general, or that particular portion and point of it, from which on- wards he for his part means to penetrate the whole,—entirely clear to himself ; detached sparkles of light already spring forth on him from all sides, and disclose a higher world before him ; but they do not yet unite themselves into an indivisible whole ; they vanish from his view as capriciously as they came, he cannot yet bring them un- der obedience to his freedom: in that case he is a progressing and self-unfolding literary man, a Student. That it be actually the Idea, which is possessed or striven after, is common to both. Should the striving aim merely at the outward form, and the letter of learned cul- ture, there is then produced, when the circle is gone round, the comple- ted, when it is not gone round, the progressing, Bungler (.Stiimper). The latter is more tolerable than the former ; for there is still room to hope that in continuing his travel, he may at some future point be seized by the Idea ; but of the first all hope is over.’*
From this bold and lofty principle the duties of the Literary Man are deduced with scientific precision ; and stated, in all
* Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten (On the Nature of the Literary Man); a Course of Lectures delivered at Jena, in 1805.
1827. State of German Literature. 331
their sacredness and grandeur, with an austere brevity more impressive than any rhetoric. Fichte’s metaphysical theory may be called in question, and readily enough misapprehend- ed; but the sublime stoicism of his sentiments will find some response in many a heart. We must add the conclusion of his first Discourse, as a farther illustration of his manner :
‘ In disquisitions of the sort like ours of to-day, which all the rest, too, must resemble, the generzlity are wont to censure: First, their severity ; very often on the good-natured supposition that the speaker is not aware how much his rigour must displease us ; that we have but frankly to let him know this, and then doubtless he will reconsider himself, and soften his statements. Thus, we said above, that a man who after literary culture had not arrived at knowledge of the Divine Idea, or did not strive towards it, was in strict speech Nothing ; and farther down, we said that he was a Bungler. This is in the style of those unmerciful expressions, by which philosophers give such offence——Now looking away from the present case, that we may front the maxim in its general shape, I remind you that this species of character, without decisive force to renounce all respect for Truth, seeks merely to bargain and cheapen something out of her, whereby itself on easier terms may attain to some consideration. But Truth, which once for all is as she is, and cannot alter aught of her nature, goes on her way ; and there remains for her, in regard to those who desire her not simply because she is true, nothing else, but to leave them standing as if they had never addressed her.
‘Then farther, discourses of this sort are wont to be censured as
unintelligible. Thus I figure to myself,—nowise you, Gentlemen,
but some completed Literary Man of the second species, whose eye the
— here entered upon chanced to meet, as coming forward, l
doubting this way and that, and at last reflectively exclaiming : ‘The Idea, the Divine Idea, that which lies at the bottom of Ap- oe what pray may this mean?’ Of sucha questioner I would nquire in turn: ‘ What pray may this question mean ?’—Investigate it strictly, it means in most cases nothing more than this, ‘ Under what other names, and in what other formulas do I already know this same thing, which thou expressest by so strange and to me so unknown a symbol ?? And to this again in most cases the only suitable reply were, ¢ Thou knowest this thing not at all, neither under this, nor under any other name ; and wouldst thou arrive at the knowledge of it, thou must even now begin at the beginning to make study there- of;~and then, most fitly, under that name by which it is first pre- sented to thee !’’
With such a notion of the Artist, it were a strange incon- sistency did Criticism show itself unscientific or lax in estima- ting the products of his Art. For light on this point, we might refer to the writings of almost any individual among the Ger- man critics : take, for instance, the Charakteristiken of the two Schlegels, a work too of their younger years ; and say whether
332 State of German Literature. Oct,
in depth, clearness, minute and patientfidelity, these Characters have often been surpassed, or the import and poetic worth of se many poets and poems more vividly and accurately brought to view. As an instance of a much higher kind, we might re. fer to Goethe’s criticism of Hamlet in his Wilhelm Meister, This truly is what may be called the poetry of criticism ; for it is in some sort also a creative art; aiming, at least, to re- produce under a different shape the existing product of the a: painting to the intellect what already lay painted to the
eart and the imagination. Nor is it over Poetry alone that criticism watches with such loving strictness: the mimic, the
ictorial, the musical arts, all modes of representing or address- ing the highest nature of man, are acknowledged as younger sis- ters of Poetry, and fostered with like care, Winkelmann’s His. tory of Plastic Artis known by repute to all readers : and of those who know it by inspection, many may have wondered why sucha work has not been added to our own literature, to instruct our own statuaries and painters. On this subject of the plastic arts, we cannot withhold the following little sketch of Goethe’s, asa specimen of pictorial criticism in what we consider a superior style. It is of an imaginary landscape-painter, and his views of Swiss scenery; it will bear to be studied minutely, for there is no word without its meaning:
‘ He succeeds in representing the cheerful repose of lake prospects, where houses in friendly approximation, imaging themselves in the clear wave, seem as if bathing in its depths; shores encircled with green hills, behind which rise forest mountains, and icy peaks of glaciers. The tone of colouring in such scenes is gay, ee clear ; the distances as if overflowed with softening vapour, whic from watered hollows and river valleys mounts up grayer and mistier, and indicates their windings. No less is the master’s art to be praised in views from valleys tying nearer the high Alpine ranges, where de- clivities slope down, luxuriantly overgrown, and fresh streams roll has- tily along by the foot of rocks..
‘ With exquisite skill, in the deep shady trees of the foréground, he gives the distinctive character of the several species ; satisfying us in the form of the whole, as in the structure of the branches, and the details of the leaves ; no less so, in the fresh green with its manifold shadings, where soft airs appear as if fanning us with benignant breath, and the lights as if thereby put in motion.
‘ In the middle-ground, his lively green tone grows fainter by de- grees; and at last, on the more distant mountain-tops, passing into weak violet, weds itself with the blue of the sky. But our artist is above all happy in his paintings of high Alpine regions ; in seizing the simple greatness and stillness of their character ; the wide pastures on the slopes, where dark solitary firs stand forth from the grassy carpet ; and from high cliffs, foaming brooks rush down. Whether he relieve his
9
mee Be eroes =
— og” ee,
—_
1927. State of German Literature. 333
pasturages with grazing cattle, or the narrow winding rocky path with mules and laden pack-horses, he paints all with equal truth and rich- ness ; still, introduced in the proper place, and not in too great copious- ness, they decorate and enliven these scenes, without interrupting, without lessening their peaceful solitude. The execution testifies a master’s hand ; easy, with a few sure strokes, and yet complete. In his later ‘eam he employed glittering English permanent-colours on paper: these pictures, accordingly, are of pre-eminently blooming tone ; cheerful, yet at the same time, strong and sated.
‘ His views of deep mountain-chasms, where round and round no- thing fronts us but dead rock, where, in the abyss, overspanned by its bold arch, the wild stream rages, are, indeed, of less attraction than the former: yet their truth excites us; we admire the great effect of the whole, produced at so little cost, by a few expressive strokes, and masses of local colours.
‘ With no less accuracy of character can he represent the regions of the topmost Alpine ranges, where neither tree nor shrub any more appears ; but only amid the rocky teeth and snow summits, a few sunny spots clothe themselves with a soft sward. Beautiful, and balmy and inviting as he colours these spots, he has here wisely for- borne to introduce grazing herds ; for these regions give food only to the chamois, and a perilous employment to the wild-hay-men.’*
We have extracted this passage from Wilhelm Meisters Wan- derjahre, Goethe’s last Novel. The perusal of his whole Works would show, among many other more important facts, that Cri- ticism also is a science of which he is master; that if ever any man had studied Art in all its branches and bearings, from its origin in the depths of the creative spirit, to its minutest finish on the canvass of the painter, on the lips of the poet, or under the finger of the musician, he was that man. A nation which appreciates such studies, nay, requires and rewards them, can- not, wherever its defects may lie, be defective in judgment of the arts.
But a weightier question still remains. What has been the fruit of this its high and just judgment on these matters? What has Criticism profited it, to the bringing forth of good works? How do its poems and its poets correspond with so lofty a standard? We answer, that on this point also, Germany may rather court investigation than fear it. There are poets in that country who belong to a nobler class than most nations
* The poor wild-hay-man of the Rigiberg, Whose trade is, on the brow of the abyss, To mow the common grass from nooks and shelves, To which the cattle dare not climb. ScnmiEr’s Wilhelm Tell. VOL. XLYI. NO. 92 Z
334 State of German Literature. Oct,
have to show in these days; a class entirely unknown to some nations; and for the last two centuries, rare in all. We have no hesitation in stating, that we see in certain of the best Ger- man poets, and those too of our own time, something which as- sociates them, remotely or nearly we say not, but which does associate them with the Masters of Art, the Saints of Poetry, long since departed, and, as we thought, without successors, from the earth; but canonized in the hearts of all generations, and yet living to all by the memory of what they did and were, Glances we do seem to find of that ethereal glory, which looks on us in its full brightness from the Transfiguration of Rafaelle, from the Tempest of Shakspeare ; and in broken, but purest and still heart-piercing beams, struggling through the gloom of long ages, from the tragedies of Sophocles and the weather-worn sculptures of the Parthenon. This is that heavenly spirit, which, best seen in the aerial embodyment of poetry, but spreading likewise over all the thoughts and actions of an age, has given us Surreys, Sydneys, Raleighs in court and camp, Cecils in policy, Hookers in divinity, Bacons in philosophy, and Shak- speares and Spensers in song. All hearts that know this, know it to be the highest ; and that, in poetry or elsewhere, it alone is true and imperishable. In affirming that any vestige, however feeble, of this divine spirit, is discernible in German poetry, we are aware that we place it above the existing poetry of any other nation.
To prove this bold assertion, logical arguments were at all times unavailing ; and, in the present circumstances of the case, more than usually so. Neither will any extract or specimen help us; for it is not in parts, but in whole poems, that the spirit of a true poet is tobe seen. We can, therefore, only name such men as Tieck, Richter, Herder, Schiller, and, above all, Goethe; and ask any reader who has learned to admire wisely our own literature of Queen Elizabeth’s age, to peruse these writers also; to study them till he feels that he has understood them, and justly estimated both their light and darkness; and then to pro- nounce whether it is not, in some degree, as we have said? Are there not tones here of that old melody? Are there not glimpses of that serene soul, that calm harmonious strength, that smi- ling earnestness, that Love and Faith and Humanity of nature? Do these foreign contemporaries of ours still exhibit in their cha- racters as men something of that sterling nobleness, that union of majesty with meekness, which we must ever venerate in those our spiritual fathers? And do their works, in the new form of this century, show forth that old nobleness, not consistent only, with the science, the precision, the scepticism of these days, but
1827. State of German Literature. 335
wedded to them, incorporated with them, and shining through them like their life and soul? Might it in truth almost seem to us, in reading the prose of Goethe, as if we were reading that of Milton; and of Milton writing with the culture of this time; combining French clearness with old English depth? And of his poetry may it indeed be said that it is poetry, and yet the poetry of our own generation ; an ideal world, and yet the world we even now live in?—These questions we must leave candid and studious inquirers to answer for themselves; premising only, that the secret is not to be found on the surface; that the first reply is likely to be in the negative, but with inquirers of this sort, by no means likely to be the final one.
To ourselves, we confess, it has long so appeared. The poetry of Goethe, for instance, we reckon to be Poetry, some- times in the very highest sense of that word; yet it is no re- miniscence, but something actually present and before us; no looking back into an antique Fairy-land, divided by impassable abysses from the real world as it lies about us and within us; but a looking round upon that real world itself, now rendered holier to our eyes, and once more become a solemn temple, where the spirit of Beauty still dwells, and, under new emblems, to be worshipped as of old. With Goethe, the mythologies of bygone days pass only for what they are: we have no witch- craft or magic in the common acceptation; and spirits no longer bring with them airs from heaven or blasts from hell; for Pan- demonium and the steadfast Empyrean have faded away, since the opinions which they symbolized no longer are. Neither does he bring his heroes from remote Oriental climates, or pe- tiods of Chivalry, or any section either of Atlantis or the Age of Gold; feeling that the reflex of these things is cold and faint, and only hangs like a cloud-picture in the distance, beautiful but delusive, and which even the simplest know to be delusion. The end of Poetry is higher: she must dwell in Reality, and be- come manifest to men in the forms among which they live and move. And this is what we prize in Goethe, and more or less in Schiller and the rest; all of whom, each in his own way, are writers of a similar aim. The coldest sceptic, the most callous worldling, sees not the actual aspects of life more sharply than they are here delineated: the nineteenth century stands before us, in all its contradiction and perplexity; barren, mean, and baleful, as we have all known it; yet here no longer mean or barren, but enamelled into beauty in the poet’s spirit; for its secret significance is laid open, and thus, as it were, the life- giving fire that slumbers in it is called forth, and flowers and foliage, as of old, are springing on its bleakest wildernesses,
336 State.of German Literature. Oct.
and overmantling its sternest cliffs. For these men have not only the clear eye, but the loving heart. They have penetrated into the mystery of Nature; after long trial they have been ini- tiated: and to unwearied endeavour, Art has at last yielded her secret; and thus can the Spirit of our Age, embodied in fair imaginations, look forth on us, earnest and full of meaning, from their works. As the first and indispensable condition of good poets, they are wise and good men: much they have seen and suffered, and they have conquered all this, and made it all their own; they have known life in its heights and depths, and mastered it in both, and can teach others what it is, and how to lead it rightly. Their minds are as a mirror to us, where the perplexed image of our own being is reflected back in soft and clear interpretation. Here mirth and gravity are blended together ; wit rests on deep devout wisdom, as the greensward with its flowers must rest on the rock, whose foundations reach downward to the centre. In a word, they are Believers; but their faith is no sallow plant of darkness: it is green and flowery, for it grows in the sunlight. And this faith is the doctrine they have to teach us, the sense which, under every noble and graceful form, it is their endeavour to set forth:
As all Nature’s thousand changes
But one changeless God proclaim,
So in Art’s wide kingdoms ranges
One sole meaning, still the same:
This is Truth, eternal Reason,
Which from Beauty takes its dress,
And, serene through time and season,
Stands for aye in loveliness. Such indeed is the end of Poetry at all times; yet in no recent literature known to us, except the German, has it been so far attained ; nay, perhaps so much as consciously and steadfastly attempted.
The reader feels that if this our opinion be in any measure true, it is atruth of no ordinary moment. It concerns not this writer or that; but it opens to us new views on the fortune of spiritual culture with ourselves and all nations. Have we not heard gifted men complaining that Poetry had passed away with- out return; that creative imagination consorted not with vigour of intellect, and that in the cold light of science there was no longer room for faith in things unseen? The old simplicity of heart was gone; earnest emotions must no longer be expressed in earnest symbols; beauty must recede into elegance, devoul- ness of character be replaced by clearness of thought, and grave wisdom by shrewdness and persiflage. Such things we have
1827. State of German Literature. 337
heard, but hesitated to believe them. If the poetry of the Ger- mans, and this not by theory but by example, have proved, or even begun to prove, the contrary, it will deserve far higher en- comiums than any we have passed upon it.
In fact, the past and present aspect of German literature il- Justrates the literature of England in more than one way. Its history keeps pace with that of ours; for so closely are all Eu- ropean communities connected, that the phases of mind in any one country, so far as these represent its general circumstances and intellectual position, are but modified repetitions of its phases in every other. We hinted above, that the Saxon School corresponded with what might be called the Scotch: Cramer was not unlike our Blair; von Cronegk might be compared with Michael Bruce; and Rabener and Gellert with Beattie and Logan. To this mild and cultivated period, there succeed- ed, as with us, a partial abandonment of poetry, in favour of political and philosophical Illumination. Then was the time when hot war was declared against Prejudice of all sorts; Uti- lity was set up for the universal measure of mental as well as material value; poetry, except of an economical and precepto- rial character, was found to be the product of a rude age; and religious enthusiasm was but derangement in the biliary organs. Then did the Prices and Condorcets of Germany indulge in day-dreams of perfectibility ; a new social order was to bring back the Saturnian era to the world; and philosophers sat on their sunny Pisgah, looking back over dark savage deserts, and forward into a land flowing with milk and honey.
This period also passed away, with its good and its evil; of which chiefly the latter seems to be remembered ; for we scarce- ly ever find the affair alluded to, except in terms of contempt, by the title Aufkidrerey (Illuminationism); and its partisans, in subsequent satirical controversies, received the nickname of Philistern (Philistines), which the few scattered remnants of them still bear, both in writing and speech. Poetry arose again, and in a new and singular shape. The Sorrows of Werter, Godtz von Berlichingen, and The Robbers, may stand as patriarchs and representatives of three separate classes, which, commingled in various proportions, or separately coexisting, now with the pre- ponderance of this, now of that, occupied the whole popular li- terature of Germany, till near the end of last century. These were the Sentimentalists, the Chivalry-play-writers, and other gorgeous and outrageous persons ; as a whole, now pleasantly de- nominated the Krafimdnner, literally, Power-men. They dealt in sceptical lamentation, mysterious enthusiasm, frenzy and sui- cide: they recurred with fondness to the Feudal Ages, delinea-
338 State of German Literature. Oct,
ting many a battlemented keep, and swart buff-belted man-at- arms; for in reflection as in action, they studied to be strong, vehement, rapidly effective ; of battle-tumult, love-madness, he- roism, and despair, there was no end. This literary period is called the Sturm-und-Drang-2eit, the Storm-and-Stress Period; for great indeed was the woe and fury of these Power-men, Beauty to their mind seemed synonymous with Strength. All passion was poetical, so it were but fierce enough. Their head moral virtue was Pride: their beau idéal of manhood was some transcript of Milton’s Devil. Often they inverted Bolingbroke’s plan, and instead of ‘ patronizing Providence,’ did directly the opposite ; raging with extreme animation against Fate in gene- ral, because it enthralled free virtue; and with clenched hands, or sounding shields, hurling defiance towards the vault of hea- ven.
These Power-men are gone too; and with few exceptions, save the three originals above named, their works have already followed them. ‘The application of all this to our own litera- ture is too obvious to require much exposition. Have we not also had our Power-men? And will not, as in Germany, to us likewise a milder, a clearer, and a truer time come round ? Our Byron was, in his youth, but what Schiller and Goethe had been in theirs: yet the author of Werter wrote Iphigenie and Torquato Tasso; and he who began with The Robbers ended with Wilhelm Tell. With longer life, all things were to have been hoped for from Byron: for he loved truth in his inmost heart, and would have discovered at last that his Corsairs and Harolds were not true. It was otherwise appointed: but with one man, all hope does not die. If this way is the right one, sve too shall find it. The poetry of Germany, meanwhile, we cannot but regard as well deserving to be studied, in this as in other points of view: it is distinctly an advance beyond any other known to us; whether on the right path or not, may be still uncertain; but a path selected by Schillers and Gocthes, and vindicated by Schlegels and Tiecks, is surely worth serious ex- amination. For the rest, need we add that it is study for self- instruction, nowise for purposes of imitation, that we recom- mend ? Among the deadliest of poetical sins is imitation ; for if every man must have his own way of thought, and his own way of expressing it, much more every nation. But of danger on that side, in the country of Shakspeare and Milton, there scems little to be feared.
We come now to the second grand objection against German literature, its mysticism. In treating of a subject itself se
1827. State of German Literature. 339.
vague and dim, it were well if we tried, in the first place, to set- tle with more accuracy, what each of the two contending par- ties really means to say or to contradict regarding it. Mysti- cism is a word in the mouths of all: yet of the hundred, per- haps not one has ever asked himself what this opprobrious epi- thet properly signified in his mind; or where the boundary be- tween true Science and this Land of Chimeras was to be laid down. Examined strictly, mystical, in most cases, will turn out to be merely synonymous with not understood. Yet surely there may be haste and oversight here; for it is well known, that to the understanding of anything, two conditions are equally re- quired ; intelligibility in the thing itself being no whit more in- dispensable than infelligence in the examiner of it. ‘I am ‘bound to find you in reasons, Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘ but not ‘in brains ;’ a speech of the most shocking unpoliteness, yet truly enough expressing the state of the case.
It may throw some light on this question, if we remind our readers of the following fact. In the field of human investiga- tion, there are objects of two sorts: First, the visible, including not only such as are material, and may be seen by the bodily eye; but all such, likewise, as may be represented in a shape, before the mind’s eye, or in any way pictured there: And se- condly, the invisible, or such as are not only unseen by human eyes, but as cannot be seen by any eye; not objects of sense at all; not capable, in short, of being pictured or imaged in the mind, or in any way represented by a shape either without the mind or within it. If any man shall here turn upon us, and assert that there are no such invisible objects; that whatever cannot be so pictured or imagined (meaning imaged) is nothing, and the science that relates to it nothing; we shall regret the circumstance. We shall request him, however, to consider se- riously and deeply within himself what he means simply b these two words, Gop and his own Sout; and whether he finds that visible shape and true existence are here also.one and the same? If he still persist in denial, we have nothing for it, but to wish him good speed on his own separate path of inquiry ; and he and we will agree to differ on this subject of mysticism, as On SO Many more important ones.
Now, whoever has a material and visible object to treat, be it of natural Science, Political Philosophy, or any such externally and sensibly existing department, may represent it to his own mind, and convey it to the minds of others, as it were, by a di- rect diagram, more complex indeed than a geometrical diagram, but still with the same sort of precision; and provided his dia- gram be complete, and the same both to himself and his reader, he
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may reason of it, and discuss it, with the clearness, and, in some sort, the certainty of geometry itself. If he do not so reason of it, this must be for want of comprehension to image out the whole of it, or of distinetness to convey the same whole to his reader: the diagrams of the two are different; the conclusions of the one diverge from those of the other, and the obscurity here, pro- vided the reader be a man of sound judgment and due attentive- ness, results from incapacity on the part of the writer. In such a ease, the latter is justly regarded as a man of imperfect in- tellect ; he grasps more than he can carry; he confuses what, with ordinary faculty, might be rendered clear; he is not a mystic, but what is much worse, a dunce. Another matter it is, however, when the object to be treated of belongs to the invisible and immaterial class; cannot be pictured out even b the writer himself, much less, in ordinary symbols, set before the reader. In this case, it is evident, the difficulties of com- prehension are increased an hundredfold. Here it will require long, patient, and skilful effort, both from the writer and the reader, before the two can so much as speak together; before the former can make known to the latter, not how the matter stands, but even what the matter is, which they have to inves- tigate in concert. He must devise new means of explanation, describe conditions of mind in which this invisible idea arises, the false persuasions that eclipse it, the false shows that may be mistaken for it, the glimpses of it that appear elsewhere; in short, strive by a thousand well-devised methods, to guide his reader up to the perception of it; in all which, moreover, the reader must faithfully and toilsomely co-operate with him, if any fruit is to come of their mutual endeavour. Should the latter take up his ground too early, and affirm to himself that now he has seized what he still has not seized; that this and nothing else is the thing aimed at by his teacher, the conse- quences are plain enough: disunion, darkness, and contradic- tion between the two; the writer has written for another man, and this reader, after long provocation, quarrels with him finally, and quits him as a mystic.
Nevertheless, after all these limitations, we shall not hesitate to admit, that there is in the German mind a tendency to mys- ticism, properly so called ; as perhaps there is, unless carefully guarded against, in all minds tempered like theirs. It is a fault; but one hardly separable from the excellencies we admire most in them. <A simple, tender, and devout nature, seized by some touch of divine Truth, and of this perhaps under some rude enough symbol, is rapt with it into a whirlwind of unutterable thoughts ; wild gleams of splendour dart to and froin the eye
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of the seer, but the vision will not abide with him, and yet he feels that its light is light from heaven, and precious to him beyond all price. A simple nature, a George Fox, or a Jacob Bohme, ignorant of all the ways of men, of the dialect in which they speak, or the forms by which they think, is labouring with a poetic, a religious idea, which, like all such ideas, must ex- wress itself by word and act, or consume the heart it dwells in. Vet how shall he speak, how shall he pour forth into other souls, that of which his own soul is full even to bursting? He cannot speak to us; he knows not our state, and cannot make known to us his own. His words are an inexplicable rhap- sody, a speech in an unknown tongue. Whether there is mean- ing in it to the speaker himself, and how much or how true, we shall never ascertain ; for it is not in the language of men, but of one man who had not learned the language of men; and, with himself, the key to its full interpretation was lost from amongst us. These are mystics; men who either know not clearly their own meaning, or at least cannot put it forth in formulas of thought, whereby others, with whatever difficulty, may ap- prehend it. Was their meaning clear to themselves, gleams of it will yet shine through, how ignorantly and unconsciously soever it may have been delivered ; was it still wavering and obscure, no science could have delivered it wisely. In either case, much more in the last, they merit and obtain the name of mystics. To scoffers they are a ready and cheap prey; but sober persons understand that pure evil is as unknown in this lower Universe as pure good ; and that even in mystics, of an honest and deep- feeling heart, there may be much to reverence, and of the rest more to pity than to mock.
But it is not to apologize for Bohme, or Novalis, or the school of Theosophus and Flood, that we have here undertaken. Nei- ther is it on such persons that the charge of mysticism brought against the Germans mainly rests. Béhme is little known among us; Novalis, much as he deserves knowing, not at all; nor is it understood, that, in their own country, these men rank higher than they do, or might do, with ourselves. The chief mystics in Germany, it would appear, are the Transcendental Philosophers, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling! With these is the chosen seat of mysticism, these are its ‘ tenebrific constella- ‘tion,’ from which it ¢ doth ray out darkness’ over the earth. Among a certain class of thinkers, does a frantic exaggeration in sentiment, a crude fever-dream in opinion, anywhere break forth, it is directly labelled as Kantism; and the moon-struck speculator is, for the time, silenced and put to shame by this epithet. For often in such circles, Kant’s Philosophy is not only
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an absurdity, but a wickedness and a horror; the pious and peaceful sage of Kénigsberg passes for a sort of Necromancer and Blackartist in Metaphysics; his doctrine is a region of boundless baleful gloom, too cunningly broken here and there by splendours of unholy fire ; spectres and tempting demons people it; and hovering over fathomless abysses, hang gay and gor. geous air-castles, into which the hapless traveller is seduced to enter, and so sinks to rise ro more.
If anything in the history of Philosophy could surprise us, it might well be this. Perhaps among all the metaphysical wri- ters of the eighteenth century, including Hume and Hartley themselves, there is not one that so ill meets the conditions of a mystic as this same Immanuel Kant. A quiet, vigilant, clear- sighted man, who had become distinguished to the world in mathematics before he attempted philosophy ; who, in his wri- tings generally, on this and other subjects, is perhaps charae- terised by no quality so much as precisely by the distinctness of his conceptions, and the sequence and iron strictness with which he reasons. To our own minds, in the little that we know of him, he has more than once recalled Father Boscovich in Natural Philosophy; so piercing, yet so sure; so concise, 80 still, so simple; with such clearness and composure does he mould the complicacy of his subject; and so firm, sharp, and definite are the results he evolves from it.* Right or wrong as his hypo- thesis may be, no one that knows him will suspect that he him- self had not seen it, and seen over it; had not meditated it with calmness and deep thought, and studied throughout to ex- pound it with scientific rigour. Neither, as we often hear, is there any superhuman faculty required to follow him. We venture to assure such of our readers as are in any measure used to metaphysical study, that the Kritik der reinen Vernunft is by no means the hardest task they have tried. It is true, there is an unknown and forbidding terminology to be master- ed; but is not this the case also with Chemistry, and Astrono- my, and all other sciences that deserve the name of science? It is true, a careless or unprepared reader will find Kant’s writing a riddle; but will a reader of this sort make much of Newton’s Principia, or D’Alembert’s Calculus of Variations? He will make nothing of them; perhaps less than nothing; for if he
* We have heard, that the Latin Translation of his works is unin- telligible, the Translator himself not having understood it; also that Villiers is no safe guide in the study of him. Neither Villiers, nor those Latin works are known to us.
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trust to his own judgment, he will pronounce them madness. Yet, if the Philosophy of Mind is any philosophy at all, Phy- sics and Mathematics must be plain subjects compared with it. But these latter are happy, not only in the fixedness and sim- plicity of their methods, but also in the universal acknowledg- ment of their claim to that prior and continual intensity of application, without which all progress in any science is impos- sible; though more than one may be attempted without it; and blamed, because without it they will yield no result.
The truth is, German Philosophy differs not more widely from ours in the substance of its doctrines, than in its manner of communicating them. The class of disquisitions, named Cam- in-Philosophie (Parlour-fire Philosophy) in Germany, is there held in little estimation. No right treatise on anything, it is be- lieved, least of all on the nature of the human mind, can be pro- fitably read, unless the reader himself co-operates: the blessing of half-sleep in such cases is denied him; he must be alert, and strain every faculty, or it profits nothing. Philosophy, with these men, pretends to be a Science, nay, the living principle and soul of all Sciences, and must be treated and studied scien- tifically, or not studied and treated at all. Its doctrines should be present with every cultivated writer; its spirit should per- vade every piece of composition, how slight or popular soever : but to treat itself popularly would be a degradation and an im- possibility. Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine: her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not; whoso would behold her, must climb with long and laborious effort; nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of ad- mission into the interior solemnities.