Biographia Literaria
the present day, whatever I have written in THE MORNING POST, or (after
that paper was transferred to other proprietors) in THE COURIER, has
been in defence or furtherance of the measures of Government.
Things of this nature scarce survive that night
That gives them birth; they perish in the sight;
Cast by so far from after-life, that there
Can scarcely aught be said, but that they were!
Yet in these labours I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends
wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they
added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. The industry of the week
supplied the necessities of the week. From government or the friends of
government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it;
but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression
of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of
regret. I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a
violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox’s assertion that the late war
(I trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced
by the Morning Post; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on
my tomb. As little do I regard the circumstance, that I was a specified
object of Buonaparte’s resentment during my residence in Italy in
consequence of those essays in the Morning Post during the peace of
Amiens. Of this I was warned, directly, by Baron Von Humboldt, the
Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at that time was the minister of the
Prussian court at Rome; and indirectly, through his secretary,
by Cardinal Fesch himself. Nor do I lay any greater weight on the
confirming fact, that an order for my arrest was sent from Paris, from
which danger I was rescued by the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and
the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope. For the
late tyrant’s vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on
a Duc d’Enghien [41], and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. Like a
true vulture [42], Napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a
taste equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling
heights to pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field
mouse amid the grass. But I do derive a gratification from the
knowledge, that my essays contributed to introduce the practice of
placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view;
in giving a dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or
impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the
application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke’s writings
indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found. But I
dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined
and analyzed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the
Jacobin from the republican, the democrat, and the mere demagogue, I
both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on
their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against
Jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts
of that system may be legitimately deduced. That these are not
necessary practical results of such principles, we owe to that fortunate
inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the
errors of the understanding. The detailed examination of the consular
Government and its pretended constitution, and the proof given by me,
that it was a consummate despotism in masquerade, extorted a recantation
even from the Morning Chronicle, which had previously extolled this
constitution as the perfection of a wise and regulated liberty. On every
great occurrence I endeavoured to discover in past history the event,
that most nearly resembled it. I procured, wherever it was possible,
the contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers. Then fairly
subtracting the points of difference from those of likeness, as the
balance favoured the former or the latter, I conjectured that the result
would be the same or different. In the series of essays entitled “A
comparison of France under Napoleon with Rome under the first Caesars,”
and in those which followed “On the probable final restoration of the
Bourbons,” I feel myself authorized to affirm, by the effect produced on
many intelligent men, that, were the dates wanting, it might have
been suspected that the essays had been written within the last twelve
months. The same plan I pursued at the commencement of the Spanish
revolution, and with the same success, taking the war of the United
Provinces with Philip II as the ground work of the comparison. I have
mentioned this from no motives of vanity, nor even from motives of self
defence, which would justify a certain degree of egotism, especially
if it be considered, how often and grossly I have been attacked for
sentiments, which I have exerted my best powers to confute and expose,
and how grievously these charges acted to my disadvantage while I was
in Malta. Or rather they would have done so, if my own feelings had not
precluded the wish of a settled establishment in that island. But I
have mentioned it from the full persuasion that, armed with the two-fold
knowledge of history and the human mind, a man will scarcely err in his
judgment concerning the sum total of any future national event, if he
have been able to procure the original documents of the past, together
with authentic accounts of the present, and if he have a philosophic
tact for what is truly important in facts, and in most instances
therefore for such facts as the dignity of history has excluded from
the volumes of our modern compilers, by the courtesy of the age entitled
historians.
To have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man, and
especially so to him who has made literature his profession. I should
therefore rather condole than be angry with the mind, which could
attribute to no worthier feelings than those of vanity or self-love,
the satisfaction which I acknowledged myself to have enjoyed from the
republication of my political essays (either whole or as extracts) not
only in many of our own provincial papers, but in the federal journals
throughout America. I regarded it as some proof of my not having
laboured altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me
shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with
America, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the
very language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers.
But no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have impelled me
to a statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings, had not my character
been repeatedly attacked, by an unjustifiable intrusion on private life,
as of a man incorrigibly idle, and who intrusted not only with ample
talents, but favoured with unusual opportunities of improving them, had
nevertheless suffered them to rust away without any efficient exertion,
either for his own good or that of his fellow creatures. Even if the
compositions, which I have made public, and that too in a form the most
certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to an
author’s self-love, had been published in books, they would have
filled a respectable number of volumes, though every passage of merely
temporary interest were omitted. My prose writings have been charged
with a disproportionate demand on the attention; with an excess of
refinement in the mode of arriving at truths; with beating the ground
for that which might have been run down by the eye; with the length and
laborious construction of my periods; in short with obscurity and the
love of paradox. But my severest critics have not pretended to have
found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that shrunk
from the toil of thinking. No one has charged me with tricking out in
other words the thoughts of others, or with hashing up anew the cramben
jam decies coctam of English literature or philosophy. Seldom have I
written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not
cost me the previous labour of a month.
But are books the only channel through which the stream of intellectual
usefulness can flow? Is the diffusion of truth to be estimated by
publications; or publications by the truth, which they diffuse or at
least contain? I speak it in the excusable warmth of a mind stung by an
accusation, which has not only been advanced in reviews of the widest
circulation, not only registered in the bulkiest works of periodical
literature, but by frequency of repetition has become an admitted fact
in private literary circles, and thoughtlessly repeated by too many who
call themselves my friends, and whose own recollections ought to have
suggested a contrary testimony. Would that the criterion of a scholar’s
utility were the number and moral value of the truths, which he has been
the means of throwing into the general circulation; or the number and
value of the minds, whom by his conversation or letters, he has excited
into activity, and supplied with the germs of their after-growth!
A distinguished rank might not indeed, even then, be awarded to
my exertions; but I should dare look forward with confidence to
an honourable acquittal. I should dare appeal to the numerous and
respectable audiences, which at different times and in different places
honoured my lecture rooms with their attendance, whether the points
of view from which the subjects treated of were surveyed,--whether the
grounds of my reasoning were such, as they had heard or read elsewhere,
or have since found in previous publications. I can conscientiously
declare, that the complete success of the REMORSE on the first night of
its representation did not give me as great or as heart-felt a pleasure,
as the observation that the pit and boxes were crowded with faces
familiar to me, though of individuals whose names I did not know, and
of whom I knew nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my
courses of lectures. It is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar
proverb, that there are cases where a man may be as well “in for a pound
as for a penny.” To those, who from ignorance of the serious injury
I have received from this rumour of having dreamed away my life to no
purpose, injuries which I unwillingly remember at all, much less am
disposed to record in a sketch of my literary life; or to those, who
from their own feelings, or the gratification they derive from thinking
contemptuously of others, would like job’s comforters attribute these
complaints, extorted from me by the sense of wrong, to self conceit or
presumptuous vanity, I have already furnished such ample materials, that
I shall gain nothing by withholding the remainder. I will not
therefore hesitate to ask the consciences of those, who from their long
acquaintance with me and with the circumstances are best qualified to
decide or be my judges, whether the restitution of the suum cuique would
increase or detract from my literary reputation. In this exculpation
I hope to be understood as speaking of myself comparatively, and in
proportion to the claims, which others are entitled to make on my time
or my talents. By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow
men; what I could have done, is a question for my own conscience. On
my own account I may perhaps have had sufficient reason to lament my
deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of concentering my powers
to the realization of some permanent work. But to verse rather than to
prose, if to either, belongs the voice of mourning for
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
And fears self-willed that shunned the eye of hope;
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;