Theological Essays and Other Papers v2

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Theological Essays and Other Papers v2

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Accordingly, as one of the means most clamorously invoked by our social
position for averting some dreadful convulsion constantly brooding
over England, he insists upon a closer approximation between our highest
classes and our lowest. Especially he seems to think that the peasantry
needed to be conciliated by more familiar intercourse, or more open
expressions of interest in their concerns, and by domiciliary visits
not offered in too oppressive a spirit of condescension. But the close
observer of our social condition will differ with Dr. Arnold at
starting, as to the facts. The ancient territorial nobility are not
those who offend by _hauteur_. On the contrary, a spirit of parental
kindness marks the intercourse of the old authentic aristocracy with
their dependants, and especially with the two classes of peasants on
their own estates, and their domestic servants. [Footnote 2] Those who
_really_ offend on this point, are the _nouveaux riches_--the
_parvenus_. And yet it would be great injustice to say that even these
offend habitually. No laws of classification are so false as those
which originate in human scurrility. Aldermen, until very lately, were
by an old traditional scurrility so proverbially classed as gluttons
and cormorants, hovering over dinner-tables, with no other
characteristics whatever, or openings to any redeeming qualities, that
men became as seriously perplexed in our days at meeting an eloquent,
enlightened, and accomplished alderman, as they would have been by an
introduction to a benevolent cut-throat, or a patriotic incendiary.
The same thing happened in ancient days. Quite as obstinate as any
modern prejudice against a London alderman was the old Attic prejudice
against the natives of Boeotia. Originally it had grown up under two
causes--first, the animosities incident to neighborhood too close;
secondly, the difference of bodily constitution consequent upon a
radically different descent. The blood was different; and by a wider
difference, perhaps, than that between Celtic and Teutonic. The
garrulous Athenian despised the hesitating (but for that reason more
reflecting) Boeotian; and this feeling was carried so far, that at
last it provoked satire itself to turn round with scorn upon the very
prejudice which the spirit of satire had originally kindled. Disgusted
with this arrogant assumption of disgust, the Roman satirist reminded
the scorners that men not inferior to the greatest of their own had
been bred, or might be bred, amongst those whom they scorned:--

'Summos posse viros, et magna exempla daturos,
Vervecum in patria, crassoque sub are nasci.'

Now, if there is any similar alienation between our lowest classes and
our highest, such as Doctor Arnold imagined to exist in England, at
least it does not assume any such character of disgust, nor clothe
itself in similar expressions of scorn. Practical jealousy, so far as
it exists at all, lies between classes much less widely separated. The
master manufacturer is sometimes jealous of those amongst his
ministerial agents who tread too nearly upon his own traces; he is
jealous sometimes of their advances in domestic refinement, he is
jealous of their aspirations after a higher education. And on _their_
part, the workmen are apt to regard their masters as having an ultimate
interest violently conflicting with their own. In these _strata_ of
society there really _are_ symptoms of mutual distrust and hostility.
Capital and the aristocracy of wealth is a standing object of suspicion,
of fear, and therefore of angry irritation to the working-classes. But
as to the aristocracy of rank and high birth, either it is little known
to those classes, as happens in the most populous hives of our
manufacturing industry, and is regarded, therefore, with no positive
feeling of any kind, or else, as in the more exclusively agricultural
and pastoral districts, is looked up to by the peasantry with blind
feelings of reverence as amongst the immemorial monuments of the past--
involved in one common mist of antiquity with the rivers and the hills
of the district, with the cathedrals and their own ancestors. A
half-religious sentiment of reverence for an old time-out-of-mind
family associated with some antique residence, hall, or abbey, or
castle, is a well-known affection of the rural mind in England; and
if in one half it points to an infirmity not far off from legendary
superstition, in the other half it wears the grace of chivalry and
legendary romance. Any malignant scoff, therefore, against the peerage
of England, such as calling the House of Lords a Hospital of Incurables,
has always been a town-bred scurrility, not only never adopted by the
simple rural laborer, but not even known to him, or distinctly
intelligible supposing it were.

If, therefore, there are great convulsions lying in wait for the
framework of our English society; if, and more in sorrow than in hope,
some vast attempt may be anticipated for recasting the whole of our
social organization; and if it is probable that this attempt will
commence in the blind wrath of maddened or despairing labor--still
there is no ground for thinking, with Dr. Arnold, that this wrath,
however blind (unless treacherously misled), would apply itself
primarily to the destruction of our old landed aristocracy. It would
often find itself grievously in error and self-baffled, even when
following its first headlong impulses of revenge; but these are the
impulses that it would follow, and none of these would primarily point
in that direction. Suppose, however, that the probabilities were
different, and that a policy of conciliation were become peculiarly
needful to the aristocracy--which is what Dr. Arnold does suppose--in
that case might not the course indicated by Lord Carlisle, viz.,
advancing upon a new line of _intellectual_ communication with the
laboring classes, be the surest mode of retrieving their affections,
as most likely to flatter their self-esteem in its noblest aspirations?

One swallow, it is true, cannot make a summer; and others of the
aristocracy must repeat the experiment of Lord Carlisle before any
ground can be won for the interest of the order. Even in Lord Carlisle,
it might be added, the experiment, if it were not followed up, would
not count for more than a caprice. But, on the other hand, think as
we may of the probable results, in reference to the _purposes_ of its
author, we ought to regard it as a sufficient justification that _thus_
the ice has been broken, that _thus_ a beginning has been made, and
_thus_ a sanction established under which no man, if otherwise free
to enter upon such a path, needs ever again to find an obstacle in
rank the highest or in blood the most ancient. He is authorized by a
Howard; and though doubts must still linger about the propriety of
such a course, when estimated as a means to a specific end, yet for
itself, in reference to the prudery of social decorum, we may now
pronounce that to lecture without fee or reward before any audience
whatever is henceforth privileged by authentic precedent; and, unless
adulterating with political partisanship, is consecrated by its own
noble purposes.

Still, if it be urged that these noble purposes are not ratified and
sealed by a solitary experiment, I should answer that undoubtedly Lord
Carlisle has placed himself under a silent obligation to renew his
generous effort; or, in the event of his failing to do so, will have
made himself a debtor to public censure, as one who has planned what
he has not been strong enough to accomplish, and has founded a staircase
or a portico to a temple yet in the clouds. _Had_ he the ulterior
purposes assumed? Then, by deserting or neglecting them, he puts on
record the instability of his own will. Had he _no_ these ulterior
purposes? Then, and in that confession, vanishes into vapor the whole
dignity of his bold pretensions, as the navigator who first doubled
the Cape of Storms [Footnote 3] into an untried sea.

But against a man dealing presumably with a noble purpose we should
reckon nobly. Mean jealousies have no place in circumstances where,
as yet, no meanness has been exhibited. The exaction would be too
severe upon Lord Carlisle, if, by one act of kindness, he had pledged
himself to a thousand; and if, because once his graciousness had been
conspicuous, he were held bound over, in all time coming, to the
unintermitting energies of a missionary amongst pagans. The laboring
men of Yorkshire have not the clamorous necessities of pagans; and
_therefore_ Lord Carlisle has not assumed the duties of a working
missionary. When, by personally coming forward to lecture, he
inaugurated a new era of intellectual prospects for the sons of toil,
implicitly he promised that he would himself, from time to time, come
forward to co-operate with a movement that had owed its birth to his
own summons and impulse. But if he cannot honorably release himself
from engagements voluntarily assumed, on the other hand he cannot
justly be loaded with the responsibility of a continued participation
in the Details of the work which he has set in motion. By sympathy
with the liberal purposes of an intellectual movement, he gives to
that movement its initial impulse. Henceforward it suffices if at
intervals he continues to it such expressions of the same sympathy as
may sustain its original activity, or at least may sustain the credit
of his own consistency. It cannot be expected that any person in the
circumstances of Lord Carlisle should continue even intermittingly to
lecture. It is enough if, by any other modes of encouragement, or by
inciting others to follow the precedent which he has set, he continues
to express an unabated interest in the great cause of intellectual
progress amongst poor men.

A doubt may be raised, meantime, whether literature is the proper
channel into which the intellectual energies of the poor should be
directed. For the affirmative it may be urged, that the interest in
literature is universal, whilst the interest in science is exceedingly
limited. On the other hand, it may truly be retorted that the scientific
interest may be artificially extended by culture; and that these two
great advantages would in that case arise: 1. That the apparatus of
means and instruments is much smaller in the one case than the other;
2. That science opens into a progression of growing interest; whereas
literature, having no determined order of advance, and offering no
regular succession of stages to the student, does not with the same
certainty secure a self-maintaining growth of pleasureable excitement.
Some remedy, however, will be applied to this last evil, if a regular
plan of _study_ should ever be devised for literature, and perhaps
that may be found not impossible.

But now, coming to the second question, namely, this question, _If any
lecture at all, why upon Pope?_ We may see reason to think that Lord
Carlisle was in error. To make a choice which is not altogether the
best, will not of necessity argue an error; because much must be allowed
to constitutional differences of judgment or of sensibility, which may
be all equally right as against any philosophic attempts to prove any
one of them wrong. And a lecturer who is possibly aware of not having
made the choice which was absolutely best, may defend himself upon the
ground that accidental advantages of a personal kind, such as previous
familiarity with the subject, or preconformity of taste to the
characteristic qualities of the author selected, may have qualified
him to lecture on that theme with more effect and with more benefit,
than upon a theme confessedly higher but less tractable for himself
with his own peculiar preparations. Here, however, the case is
different. What might be no error _per se_, becomes one if the special
circumstances of the situation show it to have rested upon a deep
misconception. Given the audience which Lord Carlisle had before him,
the audience which he anticipated, and which he proposed to himself
as the modulating law for the quality and style of his lecture, that
same choice becomes a profound error which, for a different audience,
more refined or more miscellaneous, would have been no error at all.
I do not fear that I shall offend Lord Carlisle, so upright as he has
always shown himself, so manly, and so faithful to his own views of
truth, by repeating firmly that such a choice in such a situation
argues a deep misconception of the true intellectual agencies by which
Pope acts as a power in literature, and of the moral relations to
general human sensibilities or _universal_ nature which such agencies
involve. My belief is, that, if a prize had been offered for a bad and
malappropriate subject, none worse could have been suggested; unless,
perhaps, it had been the Letters of Madame de Sevigne, or the Fables
of La Fontaine; in both of which cases the delicacies and subtle
felicities of treatment are even more microscopic, more shy, and more
inapprehensible without a special training and culture, than in Pope,
And in this point they all agree, with no great difference amongst the
three, that the sort of culture which forms the previous condition for
enjoying them (a _conditio sine qua non_) is not of a kind to be won
from study. Even of _that_ a mechanic artisan, whose daily bread depends
upon his labor, cannot have had much. But the dedication of a life to
books would here avail but litttle. What is needed must be the sort
of culture won from complex social intercourse; and of, this the
laboring artisan can have had none at all. Even the higher ranks,
during those stages of society when social meetings are difficult, are
rare, and consequently have their whole intellectual opportunities
exhausted in forms and elaborate ceremonials, are not able to develope
what may be called the social sense, that living, trembling sensibility
to the expressions and the electric changes of human thought and
feeling, so infinite as they are potentially, and as they will show
themselves to be when the intercourse is free, is sudden, is
spontaneous, and therefore has not leisure to be false, amongst all
varieties of combination as to sex, age, rank, position, and personal
accomplishments. Up to the time of James the First, society amongst
ourselves wore a picturesque and even a scenical exterior: but the
inner life and its pulsations had not then been revealed. Great passions
were required to stir the freezing waters; so that certain kinds of
comedy, in which such passions are inappropriate, could not then exist.
And partly to this case it was amongst the early Romans, united with
the almost Asiatic seclusion from social meetings of female influence
or in any virtual sense even of female presence, that we must ascribe
the meagreness of the true social interest, and of the dialogue
exhibited by Plautus. Two separate frosts, during a century otherwise
so full of movement as the sixteenth in England, repressed and killed
all germinations of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst
ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened
by concurring with a national temperament--not phlegmatic (as is so
falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if
there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this
reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the
difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish
stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. Our social
meetings of this period, even for purposes of pleasure, were true
_solemnities_. With usage of politeness that laid a weight of silence
and delay upon every movement of a social company, rapid motion of
thought or fancy became in a literal sense _physically_ impossible.
Not until, first, our _capital_ city had prodigiously expanded; not
until, secondly, our representative system had so unfolded its
tendencies as to bring _politics_ within the lawful privilege of
ordinary conversation; not until, thirdly, the expansions of _commerce_
had forced us into the continual necessity of talking with strangers;
fourthly, not until all these changes, gradually breaking up the
repulsion which separated our ungarrulous nation, had been ratified
by continual improvements applied to the construction of _roads_ and
the arts of _locomotion_, could it be said that such a state of social
intercourse existed as would naturalty prompt the mind to seek food
for its own intellectual activity in contemplating the phenomena of
that intercourse. The primary aspects and the rapid changes of such
an object could not arise until the object itself arose. Satire, which
follows social intercourse as a shadow follows a body, was chained up
till then. In Marston and in Donne (a man yet unappreciated) satire
first began to respire freely, but applying itself too much, as in the
great dramatists contemporary with Shakspeare, to the exterior play
of society. Under Charles II. in the hands of Dryden, and under Anne
in those of Pope, the larger and more intellectual sweep of satire
showed that social activities were now appreaching to their culmination.
Now, at length, it became evident that a new mode of pleasure had been
ripened, and that a great instinct of the intellect had opened for
itself an appropriate channel. No longer were social parties the old
heraldic solemnities [Footnote 4] enjoined by red letters in the
almanac, in which the chief objects were to discharge some arrear of
ceremonious debt, or to ventilate old velvets, or to _apricate_ and
refresh old gouty systems and old traditions of feudal ostentation,
which both alike suffered and grew smoke-dried under too rigorous a
seclusion. By a great transmigration, festal assemblages had assumed
their proper station, and had unfolded their capacities, as true
auxiliaries to the same general functions of intellect--otherwise
expressing themselves and feeding themselves through literature, through
the fine arts, and through scenic representations. A new world of
pleasures had opened itself, offering new subjects of activity to the
intellect, but also presupposing a new discipline and experience for
enjoying them.

Precisely at this point starts off what I presume to think the great
error of Lord Carlisle. He postulates as if it were a mere gift of
inevitable instinct, what too certainly is the gift, and the tardy
gift, of training; which training, again, is not to be won from efforts
of study, but is in the nature of a slow deposition--or sediment, as
it were--from a constant, perhaps at the moment, an unconscious,
experience. Apparently the error is twofold: first, an oversight, in
which it is probable that, without altogether overlooking the truth,
Lord Carlisle allowed to it a very insufficient emphasis; but, secondly,
a positive misconception of a broad character. The oversight is probably
his own, and originating in a general habit of too large and liberal
concession; but the misconception, I suspect, that he owes to another.

First, concerning the first. It is evidently assumed, in the adoption
of Pope for his subject, that mechanic artists, as a body, are capable
of appreciating Pope. I deny it; and in this I offer them no affront.
If they cannot enjoy, or if often they cannot so much as understand
Pope, on the other hand they can both enjoy and understand a far greater
poet. It is no insult; but, on the contrary, it is often a secret
compliment to the simplicity and the _breadth_ of a man's intellectual
nature that he cannot enter into the artificial, the tortuous, the
conventional. Many a rude mind has comprehended to the full, both
Milton in his elementary grandeur and Shakspeare in his impassioned
depths, that could not have even dimly guessed at the meaning of a
situation in comedy where the comic rested upon arbitrary rules and
conventional proprieties. In all satiric sketches of society, even
where the direct object may happen to have a catholic intelligibility,
there is much amongst the allusions that surround and invest it which
no man will ever understand that has not personally mixed in society,
or understand without very disproportional commentaries; and even in
that case he will not enjoy it. This is true of such compositions as
a class; but Pope, in reference to this difficulty, is disadvantageously
distinguished even amongst his order. Dryden, for instance, is far
larger and more capacious in his satire, and in all the genial parts
would approach the level of universal sympathies; whereas Pope, besides
that the basis of his ridicule is continually too narrow, local, and
casual, is rank to utter corruption with a disease far deeper than
false refinement or conventionalism. Pardon me, reader, if I use a
coarse word and a malignant word, which I should abhor to use unless
where, as in this case, I seek to rouse the vigilance of the inattentive
by the apparent intemperance of the language. Pope, in too many
instances, for the sake of some momentary and farcical effect,
deliberately assumes the license of a _liar_. Not only he adopts the
language of moral indignation where we know that it could not possibly
have existed, seeing that the story to which this pretended indignation
is attached was to Pope's knowledge a pure fabrication, but he also
cites, as weighty evidences in the _forum_ of morality, anecdotes which
he had gravely transplanted from a jest-book. [Footnote 5] Upon this,
however, the most painful feature amongst Pope's literary habits, I
will not dwell, as I shall immediately have occasion to notice it
again. I notice it at all only for its too certain effect in limiting
the sympathy with Pope's satiric and moral writings. Absolute truth
and simplicity are demanded by all of us as preconditions to any
sympathy with moral expressions of anger or intolerance. In all
conventionalism there is a philosophic falsehood; and _that_ would be
more than sufficient to repel all general sympathy with Pope from the
mind of the laboring man, apart from the effect of direct falsification
applied to facts, or of fantastic extravagance applied to opinions.
Of this bar to the popularity of Pope, it cannot be supposed that Lord
Carlisle was unaware. Doubtless he knew it, but did not allow it the
weight which in practice it would be found to deserve. Yet why? Suppose
that the unpopular tendency in Pope's writings were of a nature to be
surmounted--upon a sufficient motive arising, suppose it not absolutely
impossible to bring Pope within the toleration of working-men, upon
whom, however, all that is bad would tell fearfully, and most of Pope's
peculiar brilliancy would absolutely go for nothing--this
notwithstanding, suppose the point established that by huge efforts,
by pulling and hauling, by coaxing and flattering, and _invita Minerva_,
the working-man might at length be _converted_ to Pope; yet, finally,
when all was over, what object, what commensurate end, could be alleged
in justification of so much preternatural effort? You have got your
man into harness, that is true, and in a sullen fashion he pulls at
his burden. But, after all, why not have yoked him according to his
own original inclinations, and suffered him to pull where he would
pull cheerfully? You have quelled a natural resistance, but clearly
with so much loss of power to all parties as was spent uponthe
resistance; and with what final gain to any party?

The answer to this lies in the second of the errors which I have imputed
to Lord Carlisle. The first error was, perhaps, no more than an
undervaluation of the truth. The second, if I divine it rightly, rests
upon a total misconception, viz., the attribution to Pope of some
special authority as a moral teacher. And this, if it were really so,
would go far to justify Lord Carlisle in his attempt to fix the
attention of literary students amongst the working-classes upon the
writings of Pope. Rightly he would judge, that some leading classic
must furnish the central object for the general studies. Each man would
have his own separate favorites; but it would be well that the whole
community of students should also have some _common_ point of interest
and discussion. Pope, for such a purpose, has some real advantages.
He is far enough from our own times to stand aloof from the corroding
controversies of the age--he is near enough to speak in a diction but
slightly differing from our own. He is sparkling with wit and brilliant
good sense, and his poems are all separately short. But if Lord Carlisle
count it for his main advantage that he is by distinction a _moral_
poet, and this I must suppose in order to find any solution whatever
for the eagerness to press him upon the attention of our most numerous
classes, when is it that this idea has originated? I suspect that it
is derived originally from a distinguished man of genius in the last
generation, viz., Lord Byron. Amongst the guardians of Lord Byron, one
was the late Lord Carlisle; and Lord Byron was, besides, connected by
blood with the House of Howard: so that there were natural reasons why
a man of such extraordinary intellectual power should early obtain a
profound influence over the present Earl of Carlisle. And the prejudice,
which I suppose to have been first planted by Lord Byron, would very
easily strengthen itself by the general cast of Pope's topics and
pretensions. He writes with a showy air of disparaging riches, of doing
homage to private worth, of honoring patriotism, and so on, through
all the commonplaces of creditable morality. But in the midst of this
surface display, and in defiance of his ostentatious pretensions, Pope
is _not_ in any deep or sincere sense a moral thinker; and in his own
heart there was a misgiving, not to be silenced, that he was not. Yet
this is strange. Surely, Lord Carlisle, a man of ability and experience,
might have credit given him for power to form a right judgment on such
a question as that--_power_ undoubtedly, if he had ever been led to
use his power, that is, to make up his opinion in _resistance_ to the
popular impression. But to this very probably he never had any motive;
and the reason why I presume to set up my individual opinion in this
case against that of the multitude is, because I know experimentally
that, until a man has a sincere interest in such a question, and sets
himself diligently to examine and collate the facts, he will pretty
certainly have no title to give any verdict on the case.

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