every social problem, with every affair of State. No author has left in his works so complete an autobiography. We are told by him in the Register and his earlier publications so much about himself that it might be supposed no character could have been drawn more distinctly. No character, on the contrary, is more bewildering. The bluff plain English yeoman is continually being transformed under our very eyes into a shrewd, wily Yankee. Beneath the Radical peep forth infinite possibilities of Tory prejudice. Whatever may have been the real Cobbett, the actual Cobbett impressed himself in all his various phases very deeply on the shifting scenes of the first five-and-thirty years of the nineteenth century. His influence had its evil side. A popular leader of whose character rancour, inconsistency, forgetfulness of kindnesses, prejudice, and incapacity for recognising that there may be good motives for mischievous acts, are essential constituents, is not one to bridge over social chasms and pacify class feuds. The faintest spark of envy and jealousy which Cobbett detected in the relations of Englishmen he fanned into a flame. Yet any one who has studied the administration of England during the great French war and the period which was its sequel, will pause before condemning the influence of Cobbett, or perhaps the man himself, too absolutely. It was a period of pretences, subterfuges, and hypocrisies. The rulers ruling under one title exercised powers that title was never meant to cover. The Political Register had its birth in a period when they who were supposed to represent the British people represented either Downing Street, or a score of boroughmongering peers, or a heavy balance at their bank. Wages were a species of poor rate, and the poor rate a form of wages. The criminal law was a lottery in which the least guilty might draw the penalty of the most atrocious outrage. Finance was reduced to mere juggling; and Lord Castlereagh appeared to be plotting to acclimatise the principles of foreign despotism on English soil. Cobbett, though he had blinding prejudices of his own, could see through the prejudices and sophisms of others. He chose both his weapons and their mark often wrongly; but even his perversity compelled politicians to render account of their constitutional faith. When Chancellors of the Exchequer were still in darkness, he saw the grotesque absurdity of borrowing to maintain the Sinking Fund. He saw the fallacy of bounties on corn. He saw the superiority of leases to yearly tenancies. He saw that a large currency does not make a nation richer than a small currency; that the one virtue of a national currency is that it should continue to represent equivalent values when a debt is contracted and when it has to be paid. In his highest flights of extravagance-when he railed at Protestantism, as though he were not a rampant political Protestant himself, when he extolled the old poor law, when he raged against potatoes, "hog potatoes," "the suitable companions of misery and filth," a thing which can be "raked half ripe out of the ground with the paws,' "and without the help of any utensils, except, perhaps, a stick to rake it from the fire, can be conveyed into the stomach in the space of an hour," when he reviled all Liberals who scrupled to unroof the house of politics before they had got the inmates out-his impulse was often right. The abuses he assailed were generally flagrant, though the personal antipathies he founded on them usually were grotesque, and though the remedies he proposed might be as bad as the disease. A more temperate politician might not have stirred farmers and mechanics to educate themselves in politics. Without the proportion of earthiness in his intellectual composition there would have been slender sympathy between himself and the ill-used and uneducated classes which he taught to feel their wrongs, if not their rights, as Englishmen. The power he had won he believed was only a beginning. The echoes his burning appeals had woke in deadened souls he heard reverberating through the ages. "All the celebrity," he boasted, "which my writings have obtained, they will preserve long and long after Lords Liverpool, and Sidmouth, and Castlereagh are rotten and forgotten." Liverpool, and Sidmouth, and Castlereagh may be forgotten; but neither are the writings of Cobbett remembered. The many volumes of the Political Register, Sermons on the rights of the poor and the extortion of the clergy, parodies of the Protestant Reformation, and Legacies to labourers, to Peel, and to parsons, did their work, and are at rest. The student of politics must be a student of Cobbett if he would understand the rudiments out of which existing tendencies have been developed. The statesman who does not know the Register forfeits a master key to the passions of his countrymen. Yet thousands of Englishmen go through what they suppose to be a complete course of English literature, without a suspicion that Cobbett should be read as well as Burke. We cannot wish for Cobbett a place among English classics. Insolence and spite are the spirit he breathes. He speaks in the accents of an age as much one of civil war as if the weapons had not been bitter thoughts, but more innocent swords and muskets. Of such literature the life is necessarily brief; and it is useless to deprecate a fate for his writings which was inevitable. Not the less lamentable is it that a style so piquant, such power of marrying argument to declamation, such spontaneous transitions from wrath against the oppressor to pity for the oppressed, with such sudden gleams of illustration by biting apologue of pots and pans, or tender reminiscence of "my dear old grandmother and her rushlights, should be mixed up inextricably with withering sarcasms upon the sins, which no longer arouse indignation, of statesmen whose names no longer evoke memories. Recollections of nature-printed bits of English scenery, taken with the dew and the sunlight glistening upon them, plead for a reprieve from oblivion of one book of Cobbett's, if no other. English literature may be searched in vain for such another miniature of southern England as the 'Rural Rides.' It is an ambulatory history of Selborne, with the parish of Selborne expanded into a dozen counties. But the smoke from the monster "Wen" poisons the air even on the breezy Surrey downs. In great leafy western woods the diarist scents, as it were, the carcase of a "fundlord " beneath the violets. The eye is lingering fondly on some sweep of fruitful valleys and green hills, when the foot stumbles on the brink of a forsaken mine of rustic happiness, exhausted and desolated by commercial or official greediness. Guidebook makers have always quarried in the 'Rural Rides.' Those transcripts of scenery never grow obsolete. But the volume itself gathers dust; few and far between are its new editions. Cobbett chose his lot, and it is too late to dream of mending it. His Register stung vindictively a hundred political reputations, and his own fame is dead of his revenge. |