Essayists From England

"The novelty of any time enables people to pretend that they are existing in the state of society that in fact they have superseded. (It is an old political expedient to pretend to be what you have destroyed.) They will pretend that their abuses are old abuses and that only their reforms are new."

"Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse."

"Great Britain is certainly suspect to Americans. They cannot make head or tail of her. She is a stuck-up old girl who owes a lot of money - an odd thing for such a highly respectable old lady to do. She is rather flighty, which is alarming in one so old - she never seems quite serious, that is - goes into giggles all of a sudden, or smiles enigmatically, if politely. She seems to the average American slightly phoney. Let us face up to that. She has many habits which baffle and put one on one's guard - the curious way she has of speaking English with a foreign accent, for instance. Then she must be the most quarrelsome old dame which ever stepped: always - umbrella in hand - getting into scraps with her neighbours, and spitting at them over the garden wall."

"Wherever there is objective truth there is satire."

"Certainly Mr Eliot in the twenties was responsible for a great vogue for verse-satire. An ideal formula of ironic, gently "satiric", self-expression was provided by that master for the undergraduate underworld, tired and thirsty for poetic fame in a small way. The results of Mr Eliot are not Mr Eliot himself: but satire with him has been the painted smile of the clown. Habits of expression ensuing from mannerism are, as a fact, remote from the central function of satire. In its essence the purpose of satire — whether verse or prose — is aggression. (When whimsical, sentimental, or "poetic" it is a sort of bastard humour.) Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory."

"Being born in a stable does not make you a horse. But living in a studio produces in some persons a feeling that they should dabble and daub a little."

"The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe."

"The second cause (and this applies to a much smaller number of such people — only indeed, to the very cream and élite of them) is that some (born with a happy or unhappy knack not possessed by their less talented fellows) produce a little art themselves — more than the inconsequent daubing and dabbing we have noticed, but less than the 'real thing'. And with this class you come to the Ape of God proper. For with these unwanted and unnecessary labours, and the amour-propre associated with their results, envy steps in. The complication of their malevolence that ensues is curious to watch. But it redoubles, in the natural course of things, the fervour of their caprice or ill-will to the 'professional' activities of the effective artist — that rare man born for an exacting intellectual task, and devoting his life unsparingly to it."

"The prime essential in the solution of the "Jewish problem" is to eradicate entirely from our minds all prejudice and superstition about the Jew."

"Is it with us a compensatory fact that, being more stupid in the mass, we shoot up higher, when we do shoot up, in dazzling concentrations of intellectual power and so produce what we describe as "genius"? For "genius" is with us an individual thing. Whereas all Jews are little geniuses."

"By adopting the life of the artist the rich have not learnt more about art, and they respect it less. With their more irresponsible 'bohemian' life they have left behind their 'responsibilities' — a little culture among the rest. Indeed they are almost as crudely ignorant as is the traditional painter. Besides — living in cafés, studios and 'artistic' flats — they are all 'artists' in a sense themselves. They have made the great discovery that every one wielding a brush or pen is not a 'genius', any more than they are. But they have absorbed a good deal of the envy of those who are not 'geniuses' for those who are (having in a sense placed themselves upon the same level) — and the contempt of those who are, for those who are not. The result is that they abominate good art as much as bad artists do, and have as much contempt for bad art as have good artists! There is more indifference to and often hatred of every form of art in these pseudo-artistic circles — in the studios, in short, now mostly occupied by them — than in all the rest of the world put together."

"1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph. 2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously. 3. Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind. 4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion. 5. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away. 6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight. 7. Laughter is the female of Tragedy. 8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies. 9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist. 10. Laughter is the mind sneezing. 11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic. 12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable."

"I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo."

"You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism."

"The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact."

"It could perhaps be asserted, even, that the greatest Satire cannot be moralistic at all: if for no other reason, because no mind of the first order has ever itself been taken in, nor consented to take in others, by the crude injunctions of any purely moral code."

"I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn't be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, that once afloat belonged to the air and any attempt to grab at it would only destroy it."

"My relationship with scientists has changed. Now, they consider me more of a peer than a guinea pig, and I'm part of the scientific discussion."

"When someone asks me, "Do you speak Breton or Inuktitut?" I say, "Not yet.""

"My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers — to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response — for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead."

"A plebeian by instinct and by sympathy, his intellect rarely broke through the boundaries of middle-class reform. It was not until 1834, shortly before his death, after the establishment of the new Poor Law, that William Cobbett began to suspect the existence of a millocracy as hostile to the mass of the people, as landlords, banklords, public creditors, and the clergymen of the Established Church. If William Cobbett was thus, on one hand, an anticipated modern Chartist, he was, on the other hand, and much more, an inveterate John Bull. He was at once the most conservative and the most destructive man of Great Britain — the purest incarnation of Old England and the most audacious initiator of Young England. He dated the decline of England from the period of the Reformation, and the ulterior prostration of the English people from the so-called glorious Revolution of 1688. With him, therefore, revolution was not innovation, but restoration; not the creation of a new age, but the rehabilitation of the “good old times.” ... As a writer he has not been surpassed."

"While we were there, a grand display of English games, especially of single-stick and wrestling, took place under Mr. Cobbett's auspices... [T]his exhibition...she termed barbarous, was the cause of his quarrel with...Mrs. Blamire. In my life I never saw two people in a greater passion. Each was thoroughly persuaded of being in the right, either would have gone to the stake upon it, and of course the longer they argued the more determined became their conviction. They said all manner of uncivil things; they called each other very unpretty names; she got very near to saying, “Sir, you're a savage;” he did say, “Ma'am, you're a fine lady;” they talked, both at once, until they could talk no longer, and I have always considered it as one of the greatest pieces of Christian forgiveness that I ever met with, when Mr. Cobbett, after they had both rather cooled down a little, invited Mrs. Blamire to dine at his house the next day. She, less charitable, declined the invitation, and we parted."

"Cobbett's kind of Radicalism was the reverse of what it became later in the nineteenth century – a synonym for the ‘Progressive’ who was to detach himself completely from both rural and traditional roots... Though often in conflict and very differently placed in station and conditions of living, all three [labourer, farmer and squire], so far as they fulfil their service to the land, do throughout their history share a common point of view. In his simple forthright English, Cobbett spoke it. In fact, he embodied it... The rural attitude of life, in which the whole English tradition is rooted, sprang to articulate life in Cobbett at the very moment when it was beginning to crumble and give way to alien forces. And it is through him that we not only understand what it was in his time but has always been."

"[He was] the Peasant Articulate... His central idea was that England was happier as an agricultural country."

"He praised the old rural life of England. He fought against the first beginnings of Manchesterism. He felt loyalty, absolute and exclusive, to one's own country to be the one primary and inviolable duty of citizenship. He reverenced the old domestic ties. He saw the sexes separate and complementary in their functions, and if the wife whom he greatly trusted and tenderly loved had asked for a vote, he would have been very angry. He praised beer. He respected the Monarchy. He hated the Jews. These are the things which appear to Mr. Melville and other critics of like outlook inconsistent with his position as a strenuous democrat. But they are especially the points upon which the democracy of England emphatically agreed with him then, and emphatically agree with him still"

"What distinguished Cobbett was that he saw more vividly than anybody else what was happening in England: how the England in which he had been born, where he had played on his father's farm, was changing all its features; how the old ways, the old faces, the old charities of life were disappearing; how the new England which was springing up was an England unkind and inhospitable to the poor... In everything that he did and wrote he set himself, by every means that could bring him into touch with the imagination of the people, to arrest the impoverishment of a race and to dethrone the fatal doctrine that the rich could be trusted to act for the poor."

"[T]he most powerful tribune that the English poor have ever known."

"One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers…He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English."

"Cobbett will more and more appear what he really was—a great English patriot. The paramount object of his life was the well-being of England. To that end he devoted all he possessed; to it he sacrificed his own interests, and the interests of those who were dearest to him... When the waves of time have passed again and again over the records of this century, obliterating much that now fills the minds of men, the memory of William Cobbett and his endless struggles will appear in their true significance, and his countrymen will assuredly enrol his name among their worthies as one who lived and fought and died in the service of England."

"It is especially his bad language that is always good. It is precisely the passages that have always been recognized as good style that would now be regarded as bad form. And it is precisely these violent passages that especially bring out not only the best capacities of Cobbett but also the best capacities of English."

"Not the least interesting of those who idealized the Middle Ages was William Cobbett. Although the supposed virtues of mediaeval barons and monks were certainly useful to hold up in comparison with the failings of later possessors of the soil—the Establishment and the squirearchy—his sincerity in this matter cannot be questioned. It would be a work of supererogation to elaborate on Cobbett's mediaevalism. His books are crowded with appeals to the good old days and denunciations of the new-rich of the Napoleonic wars. What have the people gained, he asks, by the fall of the feudal system? "Talk of vassals! Talk of villains! Talk of serfs! Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who, in the ‘enlightened’ north, are compelled to work fourteen hours in a day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees; and who are liable to punishment for looking out at a window of the factory!""

"His Rural Rides contain some of the best, most vivid and vigorous writing that has ever appeared in the English language."

"William Cobbett is the noblest English example of the noble calling of the agitator."

"[H]e is always a hearty Englishman. He may vary in his opinions as to doctrines and as to men, but he is ever for making England great, powerful, and prosperous—her people healthy, brave, and free. He never falls into the error of mistaking political economy for the whole of political science. He does not say, “Be wealthy, make money, and care about nothing else.” He advocates rural pursuits as invigorating to a population, although less profitable than manufacturing. He desires to see Englishmen fit for war as well as for peace. There is none of that puling primness about him which marks the philosophers who would have a great nation, like a good boy at a private school, fit for nothing but obedience and books. To use a slang phrase, there was “a go” about him which, despite all his charlatanism, all his eccentricities, kept up the national spirit, and exhibited in this one of the highest merits of political writing. The immense number of all his publications that sold immediately on their appearance, sufficiently proves the wonderful popularity of his style; and it is but just to admit that many of his writings were as useful as popular."

"Born and bred in a rural district, and never wavering in his preference for a farmer's life, he naturally excelled in depicting country scenes. Posterity has recognised this, and out of all his writings the Rural Rides alone are familiar to the public to-day. Even at an earlier time the more keen-sighted of his contemporaries felt that though his political reputation might pass away, his pictures of rustic England could hardly be forgotten."

"A print by Bartollotzi, executed in 1801, conveys a correct outline of his person. His eyes are small and pleasingly good-natured. To the French gentleman he was attentive; with his sons familiar; to his servants easy; but to all, in his tone and manner resolute and determined. He feels no hesitation in praising himself, and evidently believes that he is eventually destined to be the Atlas of the British nation. His faculty of relating anecdotes is amusing.—Instances when we meet. My impressions of Mr. Cobbett are, that those who know him would like him, if they can be content to submit unconditionally to his dictation. “Obey me, and I will treat you kindly; if you do not, I will trample on you,” seemed visible in every word and feature. He appears to feel, in its fullest force, the sentiment, “I have no brother, am like no brother, I am myself alone.”"

"The pattern John Bull of his century, strong as the rhinoceros, and with singular humanities and genialities shining through his thick skin."

"Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body."

"I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects.... Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that [my children] should be bred up in it too."

"A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace."

"William Cobbett, a man of genius in the use of his pen but gifted too in his knowledge of the new phenomenon of popular politics."

"At this time [1815–16] the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible. He directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings—misgovernment; and to its proper corrective—parliamentary reform. Riots soon become scarce, and from that time they have never obtained their ancient vogue with the labourers of this country."

"I saw Cobbett twice [in 1817]. His upright figure indicated the drill of a soldier, his ruddy complexion and homely accent the subsequent character of a farmer as well as his original condition. Neither countenance nor conversation (at least at this time) were at all of a piece with the sprightliness of his style, the shrewdness of his remarks, or the closeness of his reasoning in written compositions. His objects were, the co-operation of the Whigs in public meetings for a change of Ministry, and their protection and countenance if he wrote in their favour. In such objects I told him Whigs could not but concur, but I avoided all appearance of any closer connection. He was alarmed at the threatened suspension of the Habeas Corpus. He very unaffectedly acknowledged his distrust of his own nerves, and a dread of behaving meanly and basely if arrested; he, therefore, hinted at an intention, which he afterwards executed, of retiring to America. He earnestly asseverated that he never had, and never would, belong to any political Opposition whatever."

"I have a rooted hatred to this police establishment; that I hate it, because it is of foreign growth, and because it is French; that I hate it because it really tears up the government; that good-natured government, that gentle, that confiding, that neighbourly and friendly government, under which I was born, and under which my forefathers lived."

"Now, this free Government of America...imposed a duty of fifty per cent on foreign wool; and not a word of complaint was heard from any party against that protecting duty. Why, therefore, was all this outcry about the duties which were enforced in this country for the protection of the land, and which, after all, was no protection at all? ...the landlord and farmer had nothing whatever to do with the increase in the price of bread. If the petitioners were rational persons, they would not have asked for cheap bread; they would have asked for a reduction of those taxes that caused the bread to be so high...He did not know but he ought to vote for the repeal of the Corn-laws, upon account of their foolishness, their utter absurdity, and inefficiency. He explained all these things to his constituents, who were just as fond of a cheap loaf as the people of Liverpool, or any other place. He said to them, "Don't go to the landlords to ask for cheap bread, because they cannot give it you. Go to the Government, and tell them to take off the taxes, that the baker may be enabled to give you cheap bread." This was the language he addressed to his constituents. He recollected perfectly well when this Corn Bill was first brought forward he gave it his most strenuous opposition, not because he objected to the principle of the Bill, but solely because he conceived it would be wholly inoperative"

"[I]f you maintain that the poor have no right, no legal right, to relief, you loosen all the ligaments of property; and begin that career, which must end in a contest for property between the poor and the rich: you loosen all the bonds of allegiance; you get rid of all its duties; you proclaim that might, and not right, is to prevail; and, in short, you do all in your power to break up the social compact; to produce confusion; and to leave to chance a settlement anew."

"I...had strong feelings excited in my mind against Scotland generally (always expressly making great exceptions) by observing that the scoundrelly “feelosofers”, who preached up a doctrine, tending to cause the people of England to be treated like cattle."

"I am no citizen of the world. It is quite enough for me to think about what is best for England, Ireland and Scotland. I do not like those whose philanthropy is so enlarged as to look, as Rousseau said, to Tartary for objects of affection and commiseration, while their own countrymen are starving, or existing on sea-weed and nettles. I do not approve of any efforts to urge our Government to interfere at all in the affairs even of Poland: it is too distant, too out of the way of our affairs, that we should take one single meal from a weaver or a ploughman for the sake of doing good to the Poles."

"I set out as a sort of self-dependent politician. My opinions were my own. I dashed at all prejudices. I scorned to follow anybody in matter of opinion.... All were, therefore, offended at my presumption, as they deemed it."

"[T]he duty of allegiance implies the reciprocal duty of protection; and we have now seen, that it is the duty of a state to give protection to all the citizens, or persons, living under it, and owing it allegiance. Not only protection against violences committed against the property, or the person, of a man: not only protection against assaults, arsons, and robberies; but against hunger, nakedness, and all those things which expose life and limb to danger. This protection is a condition inseparable from the duty of allegiance; and, if the condition be not observed, the bond in this, as in all other cases, is forfeited."