authoritative dogmas. No new creed can be propagated which avowedly rests upon uncertain bases. The dogmas of absolute equality and liberty might be erroneous, but they were dogmas. Their simplicity and their show of demonstration enabled the apostles of the new creed to preach as men having authority, not as vague pedants and theorists. And, in the next place, the time was ripe for the truths which they dimly foreshadowed. It was true that political institutions should be formed in accordance with reason and not in obedience to mere blind prejudice; it was true that sympathy with human suffering and impartial justice between men of the same species should guide the labours of legislators. The notions that obedience to reason involved the rejection of experience, and that justice meant not only the removal of arbitrary privilege, but the non-recognition of actual differences, were unfortunately plausible enough to escape detection. 66. How, indeed, could the revolutionary creed be effectually met by the Humes or even the Montesquieus? Doctrines about the judicious mixture of the three forms of government might be very plausible, but would not still the wrath of men writhing under a sense of oppression, or filled with jealousy of arbitrary privilege. The philosophers, with all their classical quotations and neat theories about checks and balances, were aware that their conclusions were at best provisional. They could appeal to no sentiment capable of meeting fierce popular discontent, and to no conclusions sufficiently well established to oppose to the popular dogmas. On one force, however, more reliance could be placed, and especially in England; where sheer stupidity, unreasoning prejudice, a vigorous grasp of realities, and a contempt, healthy within certain limits, for fluent theories, opposed a powerful barrier to the inroad of the new creed, even when its fallacies were not detected. The social order in England was not ripe for a revolution; but even had it been so, it is probable that the gospel according to Rousseau would have required some modification to fit it to English tastes. As it was, that gospel never became fairly acclimatised, and never won a proselyte capable, even in a faint degree, of rivalling the influence of the original teacher. Englishmen stuck doggedly to their old ways; they despised the new ideas as much because they were supposed to be French as because they could be shown to be demoralising. With that obstinate unreason which sometimes verges on the sublime, they worked on in their own slow blundering fashion. When discontented, they preferred the traditional twaddle about the various Palladia of British liberty to any newfangled outcries about the rights of man; and when at last the revolutionary spirit succeeded in obtaining some kind of foothold, it showed itself in a form characteristic of the nation. Bentham was nearly as hostile to the traditional beliefs and institutions as Rousseau; but he expressed his dislike in a very different dialect. But we must approach the study of the later development of English thought through some earlier performances. VI. THE FERMENTATION. 67. The political torpor had become most profound during the Pelham administration. It seemed as if the English people, so devoted to faction in their earlier days, were sinking into absolute indifference. The only event which occupied a session was the alteration of the calendar; and the nation. enjoyed a halcyon period, during which such strange creatures as Bubb Dodington and his like intrigued and disported themselves on the surface of politics for the edification of the universe. The symptoms of a change, however, were manifesting themselves; and the outbreak of the seven years' war had ominous meanings not as yet obvious to the world. In 1757 appeared Brown's Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times'—a book the popularity of which appeared to contemporaries to be a significant symptom.' It is a vigorous indictment against the English nation. Admitting that his countrymen have still some spirit of liberty, some humanity, and some equity, he argues that their chief characteristic is 'a vain, luxurious, and selfish effeminacy.'" At our The book went through seven editions in little more than a year; but it is said that the editions are probably factitious. See Burton's Life of Hume,' ii. 23. Frequent references in contemporary literature show in any case that the book made an impression. Brown is perhaps best remembered now by the line coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin,' which occurs in his Essay on Satire, published by Warburton in Pope's works. 2 Brown's Estimate,' i. 29. schools the pupils learn words not things; university professorships are sinecures; on the grand tour, our young men learn foreign vices without widening their minds; we go to dinner in chairs, not on horseback, and spend money on foreign cookery instead of plain English fare; conversation is trivial or vicious; for solid literature we read silly plays, novels, and periodicals, though, amidst this general decay of taste and learning,' one great writer, to wit Warburton, 'bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus;' 2 the fine arts are depraved; opera and pantomime have driven Shakespeare into the background; our principles are as bad as our manners; religion is universally ridiculed, and yet our irreligion is shallow; Bolingbroke is neglected, not because he is impious, but because he fills five quarto volumes, whilst Hume's flimsy essays may amuse a breakfast table; honour has gone with religion; we laugh at our vices as represented on the stage, and repeat them at home without a blush; public spirit has declined till a minister is regarded as a prodigy for simply doing his duty; and if the domestic affections are not extinct, we may doubt whether their survival is not another proof of our effeminacy. The professions are corrupt, with two exceptions; law and physic are still tolerably sound, because directly useful even to the most selfish and effeminate; but our politicians are mere jobbers, and our officers mere gamblers and bullies; whilst our clergy have become and deserved to become contemptible, because they neglect their duties in order to slumber in stalls, 'haunt levees, or follow the gainful trade of election jobbing.' 'Low spirits and nervous disorders' have notoriously increased, and made us incapable of self-defence. Our cowardice appeared in 1745, and was due not to a decay of spirit in the lower orders, but to the prevalence amongst their superiors of the sentiment which led a gentleman to say, 'If the French come, I'll pay, but devil take me if I fight.' Suicide is common, but it is the suicide of ruined gamblers, not of despairing patriots. The officers of the army divide their time in peace between milliners' shops and horse races; and the officers of the navy, even in time of war, attend chiefly to prize-money. The chain of self-interest, 5 1 Brown, i. 31. 2 Ib. i. 44. 3 now the only binding chain, extends from the lowest cobbler to the King's Prime Minister; but it is but a rope of sand, and the first shock will dissolve us into an 'infinity of factions.' Our colonies have outgone us in 'fashionable degeneracy,' and if the French take North America, we shall be confronted by a naval power equal to our own. Thus, by a gradual and unperceived decline, we seem gliding down from ruin to ruin; we laugh, we sing, we feast, we play,' and in blind security, though not in innocence, resemble Pope's lamb licking the hand just raised to shed his blood.? 68. Denunciations of this kind prove nothing less than the truth of statements on which they are professedly grounded. Brown's readers might console themselves with the reflection that similar lamentations have been raised ever since men discovered this world not to be Utopia. Events which soon belied part of his prophecies might justify the opinion that the whole represented a passing phase of ill temper rather than a deeply rooted discontent. 'The French,' he said, 'are now pursuing it—that is, a system of military conduct, founded on the assumption that hardy troops will beat luxurious troops'on the plains of America, and if we hold to our dastardly maxim, they will pursue it on the plains of Salisbury.' The French superiority and Brown's credit received a death-blow on the heights of Abram; and Englishmen, finding that they had not become cowards, forgot the alarm or remembered it only as a good jest. 3 69. Yet Brown was not a contemptible writer; his style is clear, and his reasoning often vigorous. If the indignation to which his view of social evils prompts him is faint and colourless beside the deep passion which breathes through Rousseau's writings, he may, in a certain sense, be regarded as another indication of the same current of feeling. Brown, doubtless, would have disavowed any such complicity with horror. He was a believer in the British Constitution and the balance of power; a quoter of Montesquieu, Machiavelli, and Sir W. Temple, and an adherent, though not one of the most abject adherents, of the sham giant Warburton. A sound utilitarian, he cared nothing for the rights of man; Brown, i. 112. 2 Ib. i. 144. 3 ? Ib. i. 201. and was much too willing to accept a good preferment to favour the absolute equality of mankind. He resembles Rousseau only so far as he endeavoured to express that vague feeling of unrest which was beginning to pervade all classes; and he gave pretty much the same theory as to its origin, though he would have shrunk from Rousseau's drastic remedy. The evils which afflicted society have taken many forms, and different names have come into fashion at different times. The cant of the day used the phrase 'luxury;' and luxury was admitted, on all hands, to consist in a departure from the simplicity of nature. Brown works out a pretty little theory, showing how commerce, necessary in the youth of a nation, and useful in its manhood, becomes in its old age the cause of avarice, luxury, and 'effeminate refinement.' It was now depopulating the country, as statistics were supposed to prove, as well as ruining our spirit. The remedy applied in France of forbidding the nobility to engage in trade was scarcely to be hoped for in England.3 Indeed, his proposals are of the vaguest. Some consolation might be found in the theory, in which Brown tells us that he had anticipated Montesquieu, that our liberty was the natural growth of a soil and climate which produce in us a certain 'spirit of chagrin ;' and it might seem that Britons would never be slaves as long as they had their fogs and their local spleen.' But the mode of applying this ill temper had to be left in judicious vagueness. He could not, like Rousseau, propose a summary return to a state of nature. Reform, he thought, must come from above; and it was precisely the governing classes who were most corrupt. They who should cure the evils are the very delinquents.' A foreign emigrant might startle us from repose, or, in some great emergency, the voice of an abused people' might rouse their rulers 'into fear.'s Not, however, that Brown contemplated, a revolution. The voice of the people was to find utterance through a great minister. A portrait of this ideal personage, the successor of Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King,' closes the second volume, or should close it, but that Brown adds a supplementary portrait of the ideal 4 7 Ib. ii. 246. |