Part 18

The natural check in a free country upon this corrupt system, into which every constitutional monarchy has so strong a tendency to run, is found in the vigorous opposition and incessant watchfulness of the people. It is this which has been so powerful a restraint upon the abuses of government during the last half century; and which has now become so strong, that the common complaint is, that, in all important appointments at least, the Tory ministry are forgetful of their friends, and select the persons to be appointed from the ranks of their enemies. But this salutary check upon bad government did not exist during the first half of the eighteenth century; or rather, it existed only to fan and augment the inclination, already sufficiently strong, to corrupt administration on the part of the Whig oligarchy, who had got possession of the helm. The popular party were now in power; their leaders had the disposal of every thing, and therefore not a whisper escaped their lips, as to the degrading system which was so fast spreading in the country. The Tories, who were in opposition, were a discredited and defeated party. They had got into ugly company--they had the axe impending over them. The unsuccessful result of the rebellions of 1715 and 1745, had, as is always the case, not only greatly augmented the strength of the ruling government, but it had rendered the Tories, who were in great part, and probably justly, suspected of a leaning to the rebels, to the last degree obnoxious to a large majority of the English people. Religious feeling combined with political antipathy and personal terror to produce this emotion. The Tories were associated, in the popular mind, with Jacobites and rebels; with Popish mummery and national antipathy; with the fires of Smithfield and the defeat of Prestonpans; with Scotch ascendency and revenge for the blood shed at Carlisle; with breechless Highlanders and Protestant confiscation. Thus the Tories, as a popular party, capable of exercising any effective control on the vices and corruptions of administration, were practically extinct. Meanwhile, the popular party in England, steeped in corruption, and gorged with the spoils of the state, which the expensive system of government, introduced with the Revolution, had done so much to augment, was effectually gagged, and was enjoying its lucrative abuses in silence. This is the true explanation and real cause of the prodigious corruptions which pervaded every department of the state, and--what was worse--every class in the country during the seventy years which followed the Revolution, and which had wellnigh proved fatal to all patriotic spirit, or public virtue in England. The two powers, that of the government and the people, usually opposing each other, had come to draw in the same direction, and they raised between them a spring-tide of corruption, which wellnigh submerged the state.

There can be no question, that if this degrading system of government--the necessary and never-failing result of successful revolution--had continued for a generation longer, it would have proved altogether fatal to Great Britain. But, fortunately for the country, George III. and his advisers, from the very first moment of his accession to the throne, set his face against the party which had introduced and matured this system of government; and their efforts, though after a severe struggle, were successful. This was the turning-point of English history; upon the success of that attempt, the future character of the government and of the people mainly depended. It, for the first time since the Revolution, restored the government to its proper position--it rested it, in its ultimate effects, on property, and put numbers in opposition. This is the only proper basis of good government--for without property ruling, there can be no stability in administration; and without numbers watching, there is no security against the multiplication of abuses. The corrupt system of Sir R. Walpole, and the preceding administrations, had arisen from the popular party--that is, numbers--having become the ruling power, and of course appropriated to themselves the whole spoils of the state. Instantly their watching became equal to nothing, and every abuse was perpetrated without either exposure or complaint. There were no Wilkeses nor Juniuses, to lash the vices of administration, from 1688 to 1761, when the Whigs were in power; though that was beyond all question the most corrupt period of English history. But they appeared fast enough, and did infinite good, as soon as the Tories got possession of the public treasury. This is the true secret of the unbounded corruption of the government of the Convention and Directory in France--of the rapid return to a corrupt system during the ten years of Whig power which succeeded the downfall of the Tories in 1830, and of the establishment of Louis Philippe's dynasty, now, on the basis of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand offices, which Tocqueville tells us are at the disposal of the ruling power at the Tuileries. It is not that the popular leaders are worse men, or by nature more inclined to evil, than their Conservative opponents, but that, when they are elevated into power by the result of a revolution or social convulsion, the controlling has become the ruling power; its leaders and followers alike profit by corruption and mal-administration; and therefore there is no longer any possible restraint on abuse. It is not that the Conservative leaders are by nature better men, or more inclined to eschew evil and do good than their popular opponents: but that, as the basis of their government is property, which necessarily is vested in comparatively few hands, they are of course opposed and narrowly watched by numbers; and thus they are deterred from doing evil, from the dread of its consequences recoiling upon themselves. And this observation explains the cause of the remark by Montesquieu, which the experience of all ages has proved to be well founded, "that the most degrading despotisms recorded in history have been those which have immediately followed a successful revolution."

The clearest proof of how strongly, and all but indelibly, corruption and abuses had become engrained, as it were, on the practice of the English constitution, is to be found in their long continuance and pernicious effects after the popular party had been thrown back to their proper duty of watching and checking the abuses of government, and despite the prodigious efforts which were made, and the vast talent which was exerted, to expose and decry it. Walpole tells us enough of the corrupt means by which Lord Bute's authority was maintained, and of the discreditable intrigues by which succeeding administrations were raised up and cast down. Wilkes and Junius exposed, in cutting libels, and with caustic severity, their real or supposed continuance in a subsequent part of the reign of George III.; Burke and Fox declaimed in a voice of thunder against the vices of Lord North's administration; and the disasters of that untoward period demonstrate but too clearly, that the radical vice of parliamentary influence had almost banished talent and ability from the public service. Every one knows that commissions in the army and navy were bestowed on children, as the mere price of support to government; and that, when the little hirelings of corruption were sent forth into the public service, they were utterly ignorant, for the most part, of even the most elementary parts of their duty. The same system continued during the early years of the Revolutionary war: and we all know with what disastrous effects it was then attended. But the Whig orators and patriots, with all their acuteness and zeal, forgot to tell us one thing, which, however, it most behoved them to have told--and that is, that it was themselves who had formed and habituated the nation to this degrading system. They have forgot to tell us that they had the framing of the constitution in church and state, after the Revolution of 1688; that their power was, for above a century, entirely paramount; and that, if the system of government had come, during that time, to rest on corrupt influences, it was they, and they alone, who are responsible for the practical moulding of the constitution into such a form.

No man who knows the human heart, or has had any experience, either of public characters in his own, or historic shades in any former age, will suppose that the Conservative party are more inclined in their hearts to pure and virtuous administration than their popular opponents; but, nevertheless, there can be no question that their government, generally speaking, is much more pure, and its effects far more beneficial. Decisive proof of this exists in English history during the nineteenth century. It took nearly forty years of incessant effort on the part of the Whigs to eradicate the harvest of corruption which sprang up since 1761, from the seeds so profusely sown by their predecessors during the seventy years before that period; and unless they had been aided by the disasters of the American, and the perilous chances of the Revolutionary contest, it is probable all their efforts would have been unsuccessful. But when, by the firmness of George III., and the talent of Mr Pitt, the contest for political supremacy was at an end, and government was rested on its true basis--that of property being the ruling, and numbers the controlling power--when the Tory party, freed from the influence of their old Jacobite recollections, had rallied with sincere loyalty round the throne, and the Whigs, having lost the glittering prospect of a return to power and corruption, had been driven to seek for support in the passions of the people, what a marvellous display of public virtue and strength did the empire afford! Search the annals of the world, you will find nothing superior, few things equal, to the patriotism, public spirit, and generous devotion of the latter period of the Revolutionary war. Its unequalled triumphs prove this; the biographies of its great men, which are daily issuing from the press, show from what a noble and elevated spirit these triumphs had sprung. They conquered because they were worthy to conquer. The burning patriotism of Nelson; the prophetic courage of Pitt; the spotless heart of Collingwood; the stern resolves of St Vincent; the steady judgment of Eldon; the moral firmness of Castlereagh; the unconquerable resolution of Wellington, shine forth as the most conspicuous ornaments of this brilliant period. But these men, great as they were, did not stand alone. They were in prominent situations, and have thence acquired immortal fame; but they were followed and supported by hundreds and thousands, animated with the same spirit, and possessing, if called forth, the same abilities. England at that period seemed to have reached that epoch in national life, "brief and speedily to perish," as Tacitus says, when the firmness of aristocracy had given invincible resolution, and the energy of democracy inexhaustible vigour to the state; when we had the tenacity of nobles without their pride, and the vehemence of the people without their licentiousness--"Si monumentum quæris, circumspice."

The Emperor Nicholas, therefore, judged too hastily when he condemned all free countries and constitutional monarchies as necessarily the seats of corruption. It is no wonder he thought so from the experience he had of them, and that which the greater part of such governments, in his time, had afforded. If we had judged of constitutional monarchy and the cause of freedom from the history of England from 1688 to 1793, we should have said the same. But the subsequent history of the British empire has revealed the real cause of these general and wide-spread abuses. It has shown that they arose not necessarily from the triumph of freedom, but accidentally from government, in consequence of that triumph, having for a long period been established on a wrong basis. The contending powers, whose opposition produces equilibrium, had been brought to draw in the same direction, and thence the spring-tide of corruption. A constitutional monarchy is not necessarily based on patronage; it is so only when the popular party are in power. That party, having, as a whole, little or no interest in the property of the state, can be retained in obedience, and hindered from urging on the revolutionary movement, only by being well supplied with offices. It is like a beast of prey, which must be constantly gorged to be kept quiet. But the holders of property need no such degrading motive to keep them steady to the cause of order. They are retained there by their own private interest; by their deep stake in the maintenance of tranquillity; by their desire to transmit their estates unimpaired to their descendants. They are as certain, in the general case, of supporting the cause of order, and its guardians at the helm of a state, as the passengers in a ship are of standing by the pilot and crew who are to save them from the waves. The true, the legitimate, the honourable support of a Conservative government, is to be found in that numerous class of men who have no favours to ask, who would disdain to accept any gratification, who adhere to the cause of order, because it is that of peace, of religion, of themselves, and of their children. It is a sense of the strength of these bonds, a knowledge of the independent and disinterested support which they are certain of receiving, which enables a Conservative administration so often to neglect its supporters in the distribution of the public patronage, and seek for merit and worth in the ranks of its opponents. A democratic government can never do this, because the passions and interests of the great bulk of its supporters are adverse to the preservation of property; and therefore they can be kept to their colours, and hindered from clamouring for those measures which its leaders feel to be destructive, only by the exclusive enjoyment and entire monopoly of all the patronage of the state.

Without undervaluing, then, the effects of the Revolution of 1688; without discrediting the motives of many of the patriots who combined to shake off the oppressive tyranny and Romish bigotry of James II., it may safely be affirmed, that it was George III., Lord Bute, and Mr Pitt, who put the British constitution upon its right, and the only durable and beneficial, basis, and worked out the Revolution itself to its appropriate and beneficent effects. This is the great and important moral of English history during the eighteenth century; this is the conclusion forced on the mind by the perusal of _Walpole's Memoirs_, and his vehement abuse of Lord Bute and George III. for their dismissal of the Whigs from power. Doubtless, they acted from selfish motives in doing so. The king wanted to regain his prerogative, the minister to secure his power; but still it was, on the part of both, a step in the right direction. But for the resolute stand which they made against the Whig oligarchy--but for their wisdom in throwing themselves on the property of the nation to withstand its debasement, a domineering party would have become omnipotent, the people would have been irrecoverably plunged in the slough of corruption, and the liberties of England lost for ever, according to all former experience, in the firmly established despotism consequent on a successful revolution. George III. said, on the first decisive parliamentary division which gave a majority to the Tories in 1761--"At length, then, we have a king on the throne in England." Posterity will add--at length the foundations of a free constitution were laid on a durable and practicable basis.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

NO. II.

DRYDEN AND POPE.

Specimens of the British Critics are unavoidably an irregular history of Criticism in this island; and such a history of our Criticism is unavoidably one, too, of our Poetry. The first name in our series is DRYDEN. See what we have written, and you find half of our paper is on Shakspeare. POPE is our next worthy; and of three or four pillars on which his name as a critic rests, one is his character of the Protagonist. Thus, for this earlier part of a new Age, the Presidents of Criticism are the two Kings of Verse.

When the poet is a critic, how shall we sever in him the two Arts? If his prose is explicit, his verse is implicit criticism; and there was thus a reason for speaking somewhat especially of Dryden's character as a tragedian in drawing his character as a critic. But indeed the man, the critic, and the poet, are one, and must be characterized as a whole; only you may choose which aspect shall be principal. In studying his works you are struck, throughout, with a mind loosely disciplined in its great intellectual powers. In his critical writings, principles hastily proposed from partial consideration, are set up and forgotten. He intends largely, but a thousand causes restrain and lame the execution. Milton, in unsettled times, maintained his inward tranquillity of soul--and "dwelt apart." Dryden, in times oscillating indeed and various, yet quieter and safer, discloses private disturbance. His own bark appears to be borne on continually on a restless, violent, whirling, and tossing stream. It never sleeps in brightness on its own calm and bright shadow. An unhappy biography weaves itself into the history of the inly dwelling Genius.

His treatment of "The Tempest" shows that he wanted intelligence of highest passion and imagination. One powerful mind must have discernment of another; and he speaks best of Shakspeare when most generally. Then we might believe that he understood him in all the greatness of his might; but our belief cannot support itself among the many outrages offered by him to nature, in a blind or wanton desecration of her holiest revealments to her inspired priest. In the sense stated above, his transformation of "The Tempest," is an implicit criticism of "The Tempest." And, assuredly, there is no great rashness of theorizing in him who finds in this barbarous murder, evidence to a lack of apprehension in Dryden, for some part of the beauty which he swept away. It would be unjustifiable towards the man to believe that, for the lowest legitimate end of a playwright--money--or for the lower, because illegitimate end, the popular breath of a day amongst a public of a day--he voluntarily ruined one of the most delicate amongst the beautiful creations with which the divine muse, his own patroness, had enlarged and adorned the bright world of mind--ruined it down to the depraved, the degraded, the debased, the grovelling, the vulgar taste of a corrupt court and town. "The Inchanted Island" is a dolorous document ungainsayable, to the appreciation, in particulars, by that Dryden who could, in generals, laud Shakspeare so well--of that Shakspeare. And if, by Dryden, then by the age which he eminently led, and for which he created, and for which he--destroyed.

"The Inchanted Island," and "The State of Innocence" come under no criticism. They are literary FACINORA. No rational account--no theory of them can be given. There they are--melancholy, but instructive facts. They express the revolution of the national spirit, on the upper degrees of the social scale. That which thirty, twenty, ten years before was impossible, happens. The hewing in pieces of Shakspeare, to throw him into the magical caldron, to reproduce him, not in youth but in dotage, shows a death, but not yet the consequent life. Stupendous and sweet Nature whom we possessed, has vanished--fled heavenward--resolved into a dew--gone, into the country. At least, she is no longer in town! It may safely be averred, that no straining of the human intellect can compute the interval overleaped betwixt those originals, and these transcriptions. It is no translation, paraphrase, metaphrase. It is as if we should catch a confused and misapprehending glimpse of something that is going on in Jupiter. It is a transference from one order of beings to another; who have some intellectual processes in common, but are allied by no sympathy. The sublime is gone! The beautiful is gone! The rational is gone! The loving is gone! The divine is not here! Nor the angelical! Nor the human! Alas! not even the diabolical! All is corrupted! banished! obliterated!

We have seen Dryden complaining of Shakspeare's language and style--of the language as antiquated from the understanding of an audience in his own day--of the whole style as being "so pestered with the figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure." And we were aware of the modest self-attribution, "_I have refined the language_," in Drydenising Troilus and Cressida, "which before was _obsolete_." And Samuel Johnson corroborates and enlarges the self-praise. "Dryden was the first who _refined the language of poetry_."

At this day, such expressions fill the younger votary--creative or critical--of our vernacular muse with astonishment and perplexity, and set an older one upon thinking. Such assertions, it must be said, are "_unintelligible_" now, because a nobler unfolding of time, a happy return of our educated mind to the old and to the natural, has "_antiquated_" the literary sentiment, which Dryden and Johnson shared, and which they so confidently proposed to fitly-prepared readers.

Shakspeare obsolete! There is not a writer of to-day--whose WORDS are _nearer to our hearts_. OUR OWN _are hardly as intimate there, as_ HIS _are_--

"You are my true and honourable wife, _As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart_,"

says the troubled Brutus to Portia, who has expressed a misdoubting of his true and clear affection for her.

Is this "_antiquated_" English, and thence "_unintelligible_?"

"_Viola._--My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, WERE I A WOMAN, I should your lordship.

_Duke._--_And what's her history?_

_Viola._--_A blank, my lord. She never told her love._

* * * * *

_Duke._--But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

_Viola._--I am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers, too."

"_Miranda._--I am a fool To weep at what I am glad of.

_Ferdinand._--Where should this music be? I' th' air?--or th' earth? It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the king my father's wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air. Thence have I follow'd it, Or it hath drawn me, rather. But 'tis gone-- No! it begins again.

* * * * *

The ditty does remember my drown'd father. This is no mortal business, nor no sound That the earth owes.--I hear it now above me."

Here we have an "_antiquated_" touch or two of what would have distressed Dryden. "PASSION" is used in the old strong general sense of powerful, possessing emotion--in this example, filial sorrow; and lower down, we have the obsolete "OWES" for the modern "OWNS," which two vitiating reliques of antiquity, along with that "pestering," "affected," and "obscure" figure, "_crept by me_ upon the waters," would explain, without doubt, the impossibility which the reader feels himself under, of deriving any pleasure from the passage, and, to speak strictly, of discovering any signification in it!!