Chapter XXI: Preface: It is observed by Mr. Pope, that (11)

I confess, Sir, the Round Table did not take; ‘it was _Caveare_ to the multitude,’ but the reason, I think, was not that the abuse in it was undeserved, but that I have there spoken the truth of too many persons and things. In writing it, I preferred the true to the agreeable, which I find to be an unpardonable fault. Yet I am not aware of any sentiment in the work which ought to give offence to an honest and inquiring mind, for I think there is none that does not evidently proceed from a conviction of its truth and a bias to what is right. My object in writing it was to set down such observations as had occurred to me from time to time on different subjects, and as appeared to be any ways worth preserving. I wished to make a sort of _Liber Veritatis_, a set of studies from human life. As my object was not to flatter, neither was it to offend or contradict others, but to state my own feelings or opinions such as they really were, but more particularly of course when this had not been done before, and where I thought I could throw any new light upon a subject. In doing so, I endeavoured to fix my attention only on the thing I was writing about, and which had struck me in some particular manner, which I wished to point out to others, with the best reasons or explanations I could give. I was not the slave of prejudices; nor do I think I was the dupe of my own vanity. To repeat what has been said a thousand times is common-place: to contradict it because it has been so said, is not originality. A truth is, however, not the worse but the better for being new. I did not try to think with the multitude nor to differ with them, but to think for myself; and the having done this with some boldness and some effect is the height of my offending. I wrote to the public with the same sincerity and want of disguise as if I had been making a register of my private thoughts; and this has been construed by some into a breach of decorum. The affectation I have been accused of was merely my sometimes stating a thing in an extreme point of view for fear of not being understood; and my love of paradox may, I think, be accounted for from the necessity of counteracting the obstinacy of prejudice. If I have been led to carry a remark too far, it was because others would not allow it to have any force at all. My object was to shew the latent operation of some unsuspected principle, and I therefore took only some one view of that particular subject. I was chiefly anxious that the germ of thought should be true and original; that I should put others in possession of what I meant, and then left it to find its level in the operation of common sense, and to have its excesses corrected by other causes. The principle will be found true, even where the application is extravagant or partial. I have not been wedded to my particular speculations with the spirit of a partisan. I wrote for instance an Essay on Pedantry, to qualify the extreme contempt into which it has fallen, and to shew the necessary advantages of an absorption of the whole mind in some favourite study, and I wrote an Essay on the Ignorance of the Learned to lessen the undue admiration of Learning, and to shew that it is not everything. I gained very few converts to either of these opinions. You reproach me with the cynical turn of many of my Essays, which are in fact prose-satires; but when you say I hate every thing but washerwomen, you forget what you had before said that I was a great imitator of Addison, and wrote much about ‘poetry and painting, and music and _gusto_.’ You make no mention of my character of Rousseau, or of the paper on Actors and Acting. You also forget my praise of John Buncle! As to my style, I thought little about it. I only used the word which seemed to me to signify the idea I wanted to convey, and I did not rest till I had got it. In seeking for truth, I sometimes found beauty. As to the facility of which you, Sir, and others accuse me, it has not been acquired at once nor without pains. I was eight years in writing eight pages, under circumstances of inconceivable and ridiculous discouragement. As to my figurative and gaudy phraseology, you reproach me with it because you never heard of what I had written in my first dry manner. I afterwards found a popular mode of writing necessary to convey subtle and difficult trains of reasoning, and something more than your meagre vapid style, to force attention to original observations, which did not restrict themselves to making a parade of the discovery of a worm-eaten date, or the repetition of an obsolete prejudice. You say that it is impossible to remember what I write after reading it:—One remembers to have read what you write—_before_! In that you have the advantage of me, to be sure. You in vain endeavour to account for the popularity of some of my writings, from the trick of arranging words in a variety of forms without any correspondent ideas, like the newly-invented optical toy. You have not hit upon the secret, nor will you be able to avail yourself of it when I tell you. It is the old story—_that I think what I please, and say what I think_. This accounts, Sir, for the difference between you and me in so many respects. I think only of the argument I am defending; you are only thinking whether you write grammar. My opinions are founded on reasons which I try to give; yours are governed by motives which you keep to yourself. It has been my business all my life to get at the truth as well as I could, merely to satisfy my own mind: it has been yours to suppress the evidence of your senses and the dictates of your understanding, if you ever found them at variance with your convenience or the caprices of others. I do not suppose you ever in your life took an interest in any abstract question for its own sake, or have a conception of the possibility of any one else doing so. If you had, you would hardly insist on my changing characters with you. Yet you make this the condition of my receiving any favour or lenity at your hands. It is no matter, Sir: I will try to do without it.

It appears by your own account, that all the other offences of the Round Table would hardly have roused your resentment, had it not been that I have spoken of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Burke, not in the hackneyed terms of a treasury underling. It was this that filled up the measure of my iniquity, and the storm burst on my devoted head. After quoting one or two half sentences from the character of Mr. Pitt,[82] in which I ascribe the influence of his oratory almost entirely to a felicitous and imposing arrangement of words, and the whole of a short note on Mr. Burke’s political apostacy, which I had fancifully ascribed to his jealousy of Rousseau, you add with great sincerity:—‘We are far from intending to write a single word in answer to this loathsome trash’—(it would have been well if you had made and kept the same resolution in other cases,) ‘but we confess that these passages chiefly excited us to take the trouble of noticing the work. The author might have described washerwomen for ever; complimented himself unceasingly on his own “chivalrous eloquence”; prosed interminably about Chaucer; written, if possible, in a more affected, silly, confused, ungrammatical style, and believed, as he now believes, that he was surpassing Addison, we should not have meddled with him; but if the creature, in his endeavours to crawl into the light, must take his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his track, it is right to point him out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel’ p. 159. And this, Sir, from you who wrote or procured to be inserted in the Quarterly Review, that nefarious attack on the character of Mr. Fox, which was distinguished and is still remembered among the slime and filth which has marked its track into day, over the characters and feelings of the living and the dead. If I, Sir, had written that ‘foul and vulgar invective’ against an individual whom you did not choose to let ‘rest in his grave,’ if I had been ‘such a thing’ as the writer of that article, I might, (as you say,) have described washerwomen for ever, and have fancied myself a better writer than ‘the courtly Addison,’ and you, Sir, would have encouraged me in the delusion, for I should have been a court-tool, _your_ tool. But you state the thing clearly and unanswerably. I was not a court-tool, your tool, and therefore I was to be made your victim. There is a difference of political opinion between you and me; therefore you undertake not only to condemn that opinion, but to proscribe the writer. Do you do this on your own authority, or on Mr. Croker’s, or on whose? As I did not consider it as sacrilege to criticise the style and the opinions of the two great men who have contributed to make this country what it is, a fief held by a junto, of which men like you are the organs, in trust and for the benefit of the common cause of despotism throughout Europe, I, and every other writer like me, professing or maintaining anything like independence of spirit or consistency of opinion, is ‘to be flung back into his original obscurity, and stifled in the filth and slime’ of the Quarterly Review, or its drain, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. You began the experiment upon the Round Table; you have tried it twice since, and for the last time.

If any doubts could ever have been entertained on the subject of your motives and views, you have taken care to remove them. Thus you conclude your account of the characters of Shakespear’s plays with saying, that you should not have condescended to notice the senseless and wicked sophistry of the work at all, but that ‘you conceived it might not be unprofitable to shew how small a portion of talent and literature is necessary to carry on the trade of sedition.’ I should think it requires as much talent and literature to carry on my trade as yours. This acknowledgment of yours is ‘remarkable for its truth and _naiveté_.’ It is a pledge from your own mouth of your impartiality and candour. With this object in view, ‘you have selected a few specimens of my ethics and criticism,’ (they are very few, and of course you would select no others,) just sufficient, (with your garbling and additions,) to prove ‘that my knowledge of Shakespear and the English language is exactly on a par with the purity of my morals, and the depth of my understanding.’ But did it not occur to you in making this officious declaration, or would it not occur to any one else in reading it, that this undertaking of yours might be no less ‘profitable’ and acceptable, even supposing the portion of talent displayed by the author not to be small but great? Would it not be more necessary in this case to do away the scandal that there was any talent or literature on the side of ‘sedition’? The greater the shock given to the complacency of servility and corruption, by an opinion getting abroad that there was any knowledge of Shakespear or the English language except on the minister’s side of the question, would it not be the more absolutely incumbent on you as the head of the literary police, to arrest such an opinion in the outset, to crush it before it gathered strength, and to produce the article in question as your warrant? Why, what a disgrace to literature and to loyalty, if owing to the neglect and supineness of the editor of the Quarterly Review, a work written without an atom of cant or hypocrisy, and of course with a very small portion of talent and literature, should, in the space of three months get into a second edition, and be fast advancing to a third, be noticed in the Edinburgh Review, and be talked of by persons who never looked into the Examiner; and how necessary without loss of time, to counteract the mischievous inference from all this, restore the taste of the public to its legitimate tone, and satisfy the courteous reader, who ‘was well affected to the constitution in church and state as now established,’ that in future he must look for a knowledge of Shakespear only in the editor of Ben Jonson, of the English language in the private tutor of Lord Grosvenor, for purity of morals in the translator of Juvenal, and for depth of understanding in the notes to the Baviad and Mæviad! Your employers, Mr. Gifford, do not pay their hirelings for nothing—for condescending to notice weak and wicked sophistry; for pointing out to contempt what excites no admiration; for cautiously selecting a few specimens of bad taste and bad grammar, where nothing else is to be found. They want your invincible pertness, your mercenary malice, your impenetrable dulness, your barefaced impudence, your pragmatical self-sufficiency, your hypocritical zeal, your pious frauds to stand in the gap of their prejudices and pretensions, to fly-blow and taint public opinion, to defeat independent efforts, to apply not the sting of the scorpion but the touch of the torpedo to youthful hopes, to crawl and leave the slimy track of sophistry and lies over every work that does not ‘dedicate its sweet leaves’ to some luminary of the Treasury Bench, or is not fostered in the hot-bed of corruption. This is your office; ‘this is what is looked for at your hands, and this you do not baulk’—to sacrifice what little honesty, and prostitute what little intellect you possess to any dirty job you are commissioned to execute. ‘They keep you as an ape does an apple, in the corner of his jaw, first mouthed to be last swallowed.’ You are, by appointment, literary toad-eater to greatness, and taster to the court. You have a natural aversion to whatever differs from your own pretensions, and an acquired one for what gives offence to your superiors. Your vanity panders to your interest, and your malice truckles only to your love of power. If your instinctive or premeditated abuse of your enviable trust were found wanting in a single instance; if you were to make a single slip in getting up your select Committee of Inquiry and Green Bag Report of the State of Letters, your occupation would be gone. You would never after obtain a squeeze of the hand from a great man, or a smile from a punk of quality. The great and powerful (whom you call the wise and good) do not like to have the privacy of their self-love startled by the obtrusive and unmanageable claims of literature and philosophy, except through the intervention of persons like you, whom, if they have common penetration, they soon find out to be without any superiority of intellect; or, if they do not, whom they can despise for their meanness of soul. You ‘have the office opposite to St. Peter.’ You ‘keep a corner in the public mind, for foul prejudice and corrupt power to knot and gender in’; you volunteer your services to people of quality to ease scruples of mind and qualms of conscience; you ‘lay the flattering unction’ of venal prose and laurelled verse to their souls. You persuade them that there is neither purity of morals, nor depth of understanding, except in themselves and their hangers-on; and would prevent the unhallowed names of liberty and humanity from being ever whispered in ears polite! You, Sir, do you not do all this? I cry you mercy then: I took you for the Editor of the Quarterly Review!

In general, you wisely avoid committing yourself upon any question, farther than to hint a difference of opinion, and to assume an air of self-importance upon it. Thus you say, after quoting some remarks of mine, not very respectful to Henry VIII. ‘We need not answer this gabble,’ as if you were offended at its absurdity, not at its truth; and were yourself ready to assert (were it worth while) that Henry VIII. was an estimable character, or that he had not his minions and creatures about him in his life-time, who were proud to hail him as the best of kings. If so, you have the authority of Mr. Burke against you, who indulges himself in a very Jacobinical strain of invective against this bloated pattern of royalty, and brute-image of the Divinity. Do you mean to say, that the circumstances of external pomp and unbridled power, which I have pointed out in ‘the gabble you will not answer’ as determining the character of kings, do not make them what for the most part they are, feared in their life-time and scorned by after-ages? If so, you must think Quevedo a libeller and incendiary, who makes his guide to the infernal regions, on being asked ‘if there were no more kings,’ answer emphatically—‘Here are all that ever lived!’ You say that ‘the mention of a court or of a king always throws me into a fit of raving.’ Do you then really admire those plague spots of history, and scourges of human nature, Richard II., Richard III., King John, and Henry VIII.? Do you with Mr. Coleridge, in his late Lectures, contend that not to fall down in prostration of soul before the abstract majesty of kings as it is seen in the diminished perspective of centuries, argues an inherent littleness of mind? Or do you extend the moral of your maxim—‘Speak not of the imputed weaknesses of the Great’—beyond the living to the dead, thus passing an attainder on history, and proving ‘truth to be a liar’ from the beginning? ‘Speak out, Grildrig!’

You do well to confine yourself to the hypocrite; for you have too little talent for the sophist. Yet in two instances you have attempted an answer to an opinion I had expressed; and in both you have shewn how little you can understand the commonest question. The first is as follows:—‘In his remarks upon Coriolanus, which contain the concentrated venom of his malignity, he has libelled our great poet as a friend of arbitrary power, in order that he may introduce an invective against human nature. “Shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble.”’

How do you prove that he did not? By shewing with a little delicate insinuation how he would have done just what I say he did.—‘Shall we not be dishonouring the gentle Shakspeare by answering such calumny, when every page of his works supplies its refutation?’[83]—‘Who has painted with more cordial feelings the tranquil innocence of humble life?’ [True.] ‘Who has furnished more instructive lessons to the great upon “the insolence of office”—“the oppressor’s wrong”—or the abuses of brief authority’—[which you would hallow through all time]—‘or who has more severely stigmatised those “who crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning?”’ [Granted, none better.] ‘It is true he was not actuated by an envious hatred of greatness’—[so that to stigmatise servility and corruption does not always proceed from envy and a love of mischief]—‘he was not at all likely, had he lived in our time, to be an orator in Spa-fields or the editor of a seditious Sunday newspaper’—[To have delivered Mr. Coleridge’s _Conciones ad Populum_, or to have written Mr. Southey’s Wat Tyler]—‘he knew what discord would follow if degree were taken away’—[As it did in France from the taking away the degree between the tyrant and the slave, and those little convenient steps and props of it, the Bastile, Lettres de Cachet, and Louis XV.‘s _Palais aux cerfs_]—‘And _therefore_, with the wise and good of every age, he pointed out the injuries that must arise to society from a turbulent rabble instigated to mischief by men not much more enlightened, and infinitely more worthless than themselves.’

So that it would appear by your own account that Shakspeare had a discreet leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, and, had he lived in our time, would probably have been a writer in the Courier, or a contributor to the Quarterly Review! It is difficult to know which to admire most in this, the weakness or the cunning. I have said that Shakspeare has described both sides of the question, and you ask me very wisely, ‘Did he confine himself to one?’ No, I say that he did not: but I suspect that he had a leaning to one side, and has given it more quarter than it deserved. My words are: ‘_Coriolanus_ is a storehouse of political common-places. The arguments for and against aristocracy and democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher. Shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin, and to have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble. _What he says of them is very true: what he says of their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it._’

I then proceed to account for this by shewing how it is that ‘the cause of the people is but little calculated for a subject for poetry; or that the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.’ I affirm, Sir, that poetry, that the imagination, generally speaking, delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good, in right, whereas, pure reason and the moral sense approve only of the true and good. I proceed to shew that this general love or tendency to immediate excitement or theatrical effect, no matter how produced, gives a bias to the imagination often inconsistent with the greatest good, that in poetry it triumphs over principle, and bribes the passions to make a sacrifice of common humanity. You say that it does not, that there is no such original sin in poetry, that it makes no such sacrifice or unworthy compromise between poetical effect and the still small voice of reason. And how do you prove that there is no such principle giving a bias to the imagination, and a false colouring to poetry? Why by asking in reply to the instances where this principle operates, and where no other can, with much modesty and simplicity—‘But are these the only topics that afford delight in poetry, etc.’ No; but these objects do afford delight in poetry, and they afford it in proportion to their strong and often tragical effect, and not in proportion to the good produced, or their desirableness in a moral point of view. ‘Do we read with more pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey, than of the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountain?’ No; but we do read with pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey, and we do so on the principle I have stated, namely, from the sense of power abstracted from the sense of good; and it is the same principle that makes us read with admiration and reconciles us in fact to the triumphant progress of the conquerors and mighty hunters of mankind, who come to stop the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountains, and sweep away his listening flock. Do you mean to deny that there is anything imposing to the imagination in power, in grandeur, in outward shew, in the accumulation of individual wealth and luxury, at the expense of equal justice and the common weal? Do you deny that there is anything in ‘the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, that makes ambition virtue,’ in the eyes of admiring multitudes? Is this a new theory of the Pleasures of the Imagination, which says that the pleasures of the imagination do not take rise solely in the calculations of the understanding? Is it a paradox of my making, that ‘one murder makes a villain, millions a hero!’ Or is it not true that here, as in other cases, the enormity of the evil overpowers and makes a convert of the imagination by its very magnitude? You contradict my reasoning, because you know nothing of the question, and you think that no one has a right to understand what you do not. My offence against purity in the passage alluded to, ‘which contains the concentrated venom of my malignity,’ is, that I have admitted that there are tyrants and slaves abroad in the world; and you would hush the matter up, and pretend that there is no such thing, in order that there may be nothing else. Farther, I have explained the cause, the subtle sophistry of the human mind, that tolerates and pampers the evil, in order to guard against its approaches; you would conceal the cause in order to prevent the cure, and to leave the proud flesh about the heart to harden and ossify into one impenetrable mass of selfishness and hypocrisy, that we may not ‘sympathise in the distresses of suffering virtue’ in any case, in which they come in competition with the factitious wants and ‘imputed weaknesses of the great.’ You ask ‘are we gratified by the cruelties of Domitian or Nero?’ No, not we—they were too petty and cowardly to strike the imagination at a distance; but the Roman Senate tolerated them, addressed their perpetrators, exalted them into Gods, the Fathers of their people; they had pimps and scribblers of all sorts in their pay, their Senecas, etc. till a turbulent rabble thinking that there were no injuries to society greater than the endurance of unlimited and wanton oppression, put an end to the farce, and abated the nuisance as well as they could. Had you and I lived in those times, we should have been what we are now, I ‘a sour mal-content,’ and you ‘a sweet courtier.’ Your reasoning is ill put together; it wants sincerity, it wants ingenuity. To prove that I am wrong in saying that the love of power and heartless submission to it extend beyond the tragic stage to real life, to prove that there has been nothing heard but the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountain, and that the still sad music of humanity has never filled up the pauses to the thoughtful ear, you bring in illustration the cruelties of Domitian and Nero, whom you suppose to have been without flatterers, train-bearers, or executioners, and ‘the crimes of revolutionary France of a still blacker die,’ (a sentence which alone would have entitled you to a post of honour and secrecy under Sejanus,) which you suppose to have been without aiders or abettors. You speak of the horrors of Robespierre’s reign; (there you tread on velvet;) do you mean that these atrocities excited nothing but horror in revolutionary France, in undelivered France, in Paris, the centre and focus of anarchy and crime; or that the enthusiasm and madness with which they were acted and applauded, was owing to nothing but a long-deferred desire for truth and justice, and the collected vengeance of the human race? You do not mean this, for you never mean anything that has even an approximation to unfashionable truth in it. You add, ‘We cannot recollect, however, that these crimes were heard of with much satisfaction in this country.’ Then you have forgotten the years 1793 and 94, you have forgotten the addresses against republicans and levellers, you have forgotten Mr. Burke and his 80,000 incorrigible Jacobins.—‘Nor had we the misfortune to know any individual, (though we will not take upon us to deny that Mr. Hazlitt may have been of that description,)’ (I will take upon me to deny that) ‘who cried havoc, and enjoyed the atrocities of Robespierre and Carnot.’ Then at that time, Sir, you had not the good fortune to know Mr. Southey.[84]

To return, you find fault with my toleration of those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey, and Master Froth, in Measure for Measure, and with my use of the word ‘natural morality.’ And yet, ‘the word is a good word, being whereby a man may be accommodated.’ If Pompey was a common bawd, you, Sir, are a court pimp. That is artificial morality. ‘Go to, a feather turns the scale of your avoir-du-pois.’ I have also, it seems, erred in using the term _moral_ in a way not familiar to you, as opposed to _physical_; and in that sense have applied it to the description of the mole on Imogen’s neck, ‘cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops i’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’ I have stated that there is more than a physical—there is a moral beauty in this image, and I think so still, though you may not comprehend how.

You assert roundly that there is no such person as the black prince Morocchius,[85] in the Merchant of Venice. ‘He, (Mr. Hazlitt,) objects entirely to a personage of whom we never heard before, the black Prince Marocchius. With this piece of blundering ignorance, _which, with_ a thousand similar instances of his intimate acquaintance with the poet, clearly _prove_ that his enthusiasm for Shakespear is all affected, we conclude what we have to say of his folly; it remains to say a few words of his mischief.’ Vol. xxxiv. p. 463. I could not at first, Sir, comprehend your drift in this passage, and I can scarcely believe it yet. But I perceive that in Chalmers’s edition, the tawny suitor of Portia, who is called Morocchius in my common edition, goes by the style and title of Morocco. This important discovery proves, according to you, that my admiration of Shakespear is all affected, and that I can know nothing of the poet or his characters. So that the only title to admiration in Shakespear, not only in the Merchant of Venice, but in his other plays, all knowledge of his beauties, or proof of an intimate acquaintance with his genius, is confined to the alteration which Mr. Chalmers has adopted in the termination of the two last syllables of the name of this blackamoor, and his reading Morocco for Morocchius. Admirable grammarian, excellent critic! I do not wonder you think nothing of my Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, when I see what it is that you really admire and think worth the study in them. No, no, Mr. Gifford, you shall not persuade me by your broken English and ‘red-lattice phrases,’ that the only thing in Shakespear worth knowing, was the baptismal name of this Prince of Morocco, or that no one can admire the author’s plays out of Mr Chalmers’s edition, or find anything to admire even there, except the new nomenclature of the _dramatis personæ_. If this is not your meaning in the passage here quoted, I do not know what it is; if it is not, I have done you great injustice in supposing that it is, for I am sure it cannot mean anything else so foolish and contemptible. You had begun this curious paragraph by saying, that ‘I had run through my set of phrases, and was completely at a stand’; and you bring as a damning proof of this, a repetition of two phrases. Do you believe that I had filled 300 pages with the repetition of two phrases? ‘Go, go, you’re a censorious ill man.’

The deliberate hypocrisy of Regan and Gonerill, of which I spoke, I had explained in the sentence before by a periphrasis to mean their ‘hypocritical pretensions to virtue.’ If I had no right to use the word hastily in this absolute sense, you had still less to confound the meaning of a whole passage. Edmund is indeed ‘a hypocrite to his father; he is a hypocrite to his brother, and to Regan and Gonerill’; but he is not a hypocrite to himself. This is that consummation of hypocrisy of which I spoke, and of which you ought to know something.

I have commenced my observations on Lear, you say, with ‘an acknowledgment remarkable for its _naiveté_ and its truth’; the import of which remarkable acknowledgment is, that I find myself incompetent to do justice to this tragedy, by any criticism upon it. This you construe into a ‘determination on my part to write nonsense’; you seem, Sir, to have sat down with a determination to write something worse than nonsense. As a proof of my having fulfilled the promise, (which I had _not_ made,) you cite these words, ‘It is then the best of all Shakespear’s plays, for it is the one in which he was _most in earnest_‘; and add significantly, ‘Macbeth and Othello were mere _jeux d’esprit_, we presume.’ You may presume so, but not from what I have said. You only aim at being a word-catcher, and fail even in that. In like manner, you say, ‘If this means that we sympathise so much with the feelings and sentiments of Hamlet, that we identify ourselves with the character, we have to accuse Mr. Hazlitt of strangely misleading us a few pages back. “The moral of _Othello_ comes directly home to the business and bosoms of men; the interest in _Hamlet_ is more _remote_ and reflex.” And yet it is we who are Hamlet.’—Yes, because we sympathise with Hamlet, in the way I have explained, and which you ought to have endeavoured at least to understand, as reflecting and moralising on the general distresses of human life, and not as particularly affected by those which come home to himself, as we see in Othello. You accuse me of stringing words together without meaning, and it is you who cannot connect two ideas together.

You call me ‘a poor cankered creature,’ ‘a trader in sedition,’ ‘a wicked sophist,’ and yet you would have it believed that I am ‘principally distinguished by an _indestructible_ love of flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds and bright skies, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.’[86] I do not understand how you reconcile such ‘welcome and unwelcome things,’ but anything will do to feed your spleen at another’s expence, when it is the person and not the thing you dislike. Thus you complain of my style, that it is at times figurative, at times poetical, at times familiar, not always the same flat dull thing that you would have it. You point out the omission of a line in a quotation from a well-known passage in Shakespear. You do not however think the detection of this omission is a sufficient proof of your sagacity, but you proceed to assign as a motive for it, ‘That I do it to improve the metre,’ which is ridiculous. You say I conjure up objections to Shakespear which nobody ever thought of, in order to answer them. The objection to Romeo and Juliet, which I have answered, was made by the late Mr. Curran, as well as the objection to the want of interest and action in Paradise Lost, which I have answered in another place.—‘Thus he endeavours to convince one class of critics, that the poet’s genius was not confined to the production of stage effect by supernatural means. In another place he expresses his astonishment that Shakespear should be considered as a gloomy writer, who painted nothing but gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire.’ One of these classes of critics which, you say, ‘are phantoms of my own creating,’ comprehends the whole French nation, and the other the greatest part of the English with Dr. Johnson at their head, who in his Preface, ‘one of the most perfect pieces of criticism since the days of Quintilian’ (and which might have been written in the days of Quintilian just as well as in ours) has neglected to expatiate on Shakespear’s ‘_indestructible_ love of flowers and odours, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.’ You know nothing of Shakespear, nor of what is thought about him: you mind only the text of the commentators. With respect to Mr. Wordsworth’s Ode, which I have dragged into my account of Romeo and Juliet, I did not quarrel with the poetical conceit, but with the metaphysical doctrine founded upon it by his school. There is a difference between ‘ends of verse and sayings of philosophers.’ If Shakespear had been a great German transcendental philosopher (either at the first or second hand) his talking of the music of the spheres might have rendered him suspected. You compare my account of Hamlet to the dashing style of a showman: I think the showman’s speech is proper to a show, and mine to Hamlet. You, Sir, have no sympathy in common with Hamlet; nothing to make him seem ever ‘present to your mind’s eye’; no feeling to produce such an hallucination in your mind, nor to make you tolerate it in others. You are an Ultra-Crepidarian critic.

You laugh at my theory, that ‘Filch’s picking of pockets has ceased to be so good a jest as formerly,’ from the degeneracy of the age, that is, from the diminution of the practice, as at variance with the Police Report. Shortly after I had hazarded this piece of conjectural criticism, the Beggar’s Opera was hooted off the stage in America—because they have no Police Report there. I may have been premature in applying this conclusion from a highly advanced state of civilization, or from the degeneracy of the age we live in, to our own country.

What you say of my remarks on the use which Shakespear makes of the principal analogy in Cymbeline, and of contrast in Macbeth is beneath an answer. You should confine yourself to mere matters of verbal criticism. Thus you object to my use of the term ‘logical diagrams’ as unprecedented and barbarous: yet we talk of syllogising in mode and figure, and besides, the word has been made pretty malleable by Mr. Burke. What do you say to his talking of ‘the geometricians and chemists of France, bringing the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions worse than indifferent to common feelings and habitudes.’ Would you call this ‘slip-slop absurdity’? But to talk of _the dry bones of diagrams_, and escape with impunity from the censure of small critics, a man must assert that the king of this country ‘holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the people.’

I am obliged to you for informing me of the real name of the person who wrote the ingenious parallel between Richard the Third and Macbeth.

The article in the last Review on my Lectures on English Poetry, requires a very short notice.—You would gladly retract what you have said, but you dare not. You are a coward to public opinion and to your own. You begin by observing, ‘Mr. Hazlitt seems to have bound himself like Hannibal to wage everlasting war, not indeed against Rome, but against accurate reasoning, just observation, and precise, or even intelligible language.’ This might be true, if the opinion of the Quarterly Review were synonymous with accurate reasoning, just observation, and knowledge of language. ‘We have traced him in his two former predatory excursions on taste and common sense. Had he written on any other subject, we should scarcely have thought of watching his movements.’ You were ‘principally excited to notice’ the Round Table by some political heresies which had crept into it: you ‘condescended to notice’ the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, ‘to shew how small a portion of talent and literature was necessary to carry on the trade of sedition.’ You have been tempted to watch my movements in the present work to shew how little talent and literature is necessary to write a popular work on poetry. ‘But though his book is dull, his theme is pleasing, and interests in spite of the author. As we read, we forget Mr. Hazlitt, to think of those concerning whom he writes.’ Do you think, Sir, that a higher compliment could come from you?

It would neither be for my credit nor your own, that I should follow you in detail through your abortive attempts to deny me exactly those qualifications which you feel conscious that I possess, or afraid that others will ascribe to me. You are already bankrupt of your word, nor can I be admitted as an evidence in my own case. You say that I am utterly without originality, without a power of illustration, or language to make myself understood!—I shall leave it to the public to judge between us. There is one objection however which you make to me which is singular enough: viz. that I quote Shakespear. I can only answer, that ‘I would not change that vice for your best virtue.’ ‘If a trifling thing is to be told, he will not mention it in common language: he must give it, if possible, in words which the Bard of Avon has _somewhere_ used. Were _the beauty of the applications conspicuous_, we might forget or at least forgive, _the deformity_ produced _by the constant stitching in of these patches_‘—[_i.e._ by the beauty of the applications]. ‘Unfortunately, however, the phrases thus obtruded upon us _seem_ to be selected, not on account of _any intrinsic beauty_, but merely because they are _fantastic and unlike what would naturally occur to an ordinary writer_.’ Certainly, Sir, your style is very different from Shakespear’s. I observe in your notes to the Baviad and Mæviad, you diversify your matter by frequently quoting Greek.—Now it appears to me that these quotations of your’s add to the wit only by varying the type. If these learned patches ‘plagued the Cruscas and Lauras,’ my quotations have given other people ‘the horrors’!

You quote my definition of poetry, and say that it is not a definition of anything, because it is completely unintelligible. To prove this, you take one word which occurs in it, and is no way important, the word _sympathy_, which you tell us has two significations, one anatomical, and the other moral; and poetry, according to you, ‘has no skill in surgery or ethics.’ I do not think this shews a want of clearness in my definition, but a want of good faith or understanding in you.

You say that I get at a number of extravagant conclusions ‘by means sufficiently simple and common. He employs the term poetry in three distinct meanings, and his legerdemain consists in substituting one of these for the other. Sometimes it is the general appellation of a certain class of compositions, as when he says that poetry is graver than history. Secondly, it denotes the talent by which these compositions are produced; and it is in this sense that he calls poetry that fine particle within us, which produces in our being rarefaction, expansion, elevation and purification.’ [This is Mr. Gifford’s academic style, not mine.] ‘Thirdly, it denotes the subjects of which these compositions treat. It is in this meaning that he uses the term, when he says that all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it; that fear is poetry, that hope is poetry, that love is poetry; and in the very same sense he might assert that fear is sculpture and painting and music; that the crimes of Verres are the eloquence of Cicero, and the poetry of Milton the criticism of Mr. Hazlitt.’ It is true I have used the word poetry in the three senses above imputed to me, and I have done so, because the word has these three _distinct_ meanings in the English language, that is, it signifies the composition produced, the state of mind or faculty producing it, and, in certain cases, the subject-matter proper to call forth that state of mind. Your objection amounts to this, that in reasoning on a difficult question I write common English, and this is the whole secret of my extravagance and obscurity.—Do you mean that the distinguishing between the compositions of poetry, the talent for poetry, or the subject-matter of poetry, would have told us what _poetry_ is? This is what you would say, or you have no meaning at all. I have expressly treated the subject according to this very division, and I have endeavoured to define that common something which belongs to these several views of it, and determines us in the application of the same common name, viz. an unusual vividness in external objects or in our immediate impressions, exciting a movement of imagination in the mind, and leading by natural association or _sympathy_ to harmony of sound and the modulation of verse in expressing it. This is what you, Sir, cannot understand. I could not ‘assert in the same sense that fear is sculpture and painting, etc.’ because this would be an abuse of the English language: we talk of the _poetry of painting_, etc. which could not be, if poetry was confined to the technical sense of ‘lines in ten syllables.’ The crimes of Verres, I also grant, were not the same thing as the eloquence of Cicero, though I suspect you confound the crimes of revolutionary France with Mr. Pitt’s speeches; and as to Milton’s poetry and my criticisms, there is almost as much difference between them as between Milton’s poetry and your verses. You say, ‘the principal subjects of which poetry treats, are the passions and affections of mankind; we are all under the influence of our passions and affections, that is, in Mr. Hazlitt’s new language, we all act on the principles of poetry, and are in truth all poets. We all exert our muscles and limbs, therefore we are anatomists and surgeons; we have teeth which we employ in chewing, therefore we are dentists,’ etc. Not at all; we are all poets, inasmuch as we are under the influence of the passions and imagination, that is, as we have certain common feelings, and undergo the same process of mind with the poet, who only expresses in a particular manner what he and all feel alike; but in exerting our muscles, we do not dissect them; in chewing with our teeth, we do not perform the part of dentists, etc. There is nothing parallel in the two cases. ‘You anticipate,’ you say, ‘these brilliant conclusions for me’; and do not perceive the difference between the extension of a logical principle, and an abuse of common language.—You proceed, ‘As another specimen of his definitions, we may take the following. “Poetry does not define the limits of sense, nor analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling.” Poetry was at the beginning of the book asserted to be _an impression_; it is now _the excess of the imagination beyond an impression_; what this excess is we cannot tell, but at least it must be something very unlike an impression.’ Poetry at the beginning of the book was asserted to be not simply an impression, ‘but an impression _by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of the imagination_: now, you say it is _the excess of the imagination beyond an impression_; and you bring this as a proof of a contradiction in terms. An impression, by its vividness exciting a movement of the imagination, you discover, must be something very unlike an impression, and as to the imagination itself, you cannot tell what it is; it is an unknown power in your poetical creed. What is most extraordinary is, that you had quoted the very passage which you here represent as a total contradiction to the latter, only two pages before. What, Sir, do you think of your readers? What must they think of you!—‘Though the _total want of meaning_,’ you add, ‘is the weightiest objection to such writing, yet _the abuse_ which it involves of _particular words and phrases_’ (in addition to a total want of meaning) ‘is very remarkable,’ (it must be so,) ‘and will not be overlooked by those who are aware of the inseparable connexion between justness of thought and precision of language.’ (You are not aware that there is no precise measure of thought or expression.) ‘What, in strict reasoning, can be meant by the impression of a feeling?’ (The impression which it makes on the mind, as distinct from some other to which it gives birth, is what I meant.) ‘How can _actual_ and _ordinary_ be used as synonymous?’ (They are not.) ‘Every impression must be an actual impression’; (there is then no such thing as an imaginary impression;) ‘and the use of that epithet annihilates the limitations which Mr. Hazlitt meant’ (in the total want of all meaning,) ‘to guard his proposition.’ _We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us._ You say, ‘you have not the faintest conception of what I mean by the heavenly bodies returning on the squares of the distances or on Dr. Chalmers’s Discourses.’ Nor will I tell you what I meant. _A knavish speech sleeps in a fool’s ear._ ‘As to the assertion that there can never be another Jacob’s dream, we see no reason why dreams should be scientific.’ Shakespear says, that dreams ‘_denote a foregone conclusion_.’ You quote what I say of Swift, and misrepresent it. ‘Mr. Hazlitt’s doctrine, therefore, is, that the inability to become mad, is very likely to drive a man mad.’ My doctrine is, that the inability to get rid of a favourite idea, when constantly thwarted, or of the impression of any object, however painful, merely because it is true, is likely to drive a man mad. It is this tenaciousness on a particular point that almost always destroys the general coherence of the understanding. I do not say that the inability to get rid of the distinction between right and wrong continued in Swift’s mind after he was mad—I say it contributed to drive him mad. I mean that a sense of great injustice often produces madness in individual cases, and that a strong sense of general injustice, and an abstracted view of human nature such as it is, compared with what it ought to be, is likely to produce the same effect in a mind like that of the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Do you understand yet? You do not go into my general character of Swift, which might have drawn you into something of a wider field of speculation; and you pick out a straggling sentence or two to cavil at in my account of Pope, of Chaucer, of Milton, and Shakespear, on which you are glad to discharge the gall that has been accumulating in your mind for several pages. If you think by this means, to put me or the public out of conceit with my writings, you have mistaken the matter entirely. You can only put down my arguments by meeting them fairly, or my style, by writing better than you do.