Book: The Spirit of the Age

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----"Action is momentary,
The motion of a muscle this way or that;
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite!"

Perhaps for want of light and shade, and the unshackled spirit of the
drama, this performance was never brought forward. Our critic has a
great dislike to Gray, and a fondness for Thomson and Collins. It is
mortifying to hear him speak of Pope and Dryden, whom, because they have
been supposed to have all the possible excellences of poetry, he will
allow to have none. Nothing, however, can be fairer, or more amusing,
than the way in which he sometimes exposes the unmeaning verbiage of
modern poetry. Thus, in the beginning of Dr. Johnson's _Vanity of Human
Wishes_--

"Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru"--

he says there is a total want of imagination accompanying the words,
the same idea is repeated three times under the disguise of a different
phraseology: it comes to this--"let _observation_, with extensive
_observation, observe_ mankind;" or take away the first line, and the
second,

"Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

literally conveys the whole. Mr. Wordsworth is, we must say, a perfect
Drawcansir as to prose writers. He complains of the dry reasoners and
matter-of-fact people for their want of _passion_; and he is jealous of
the rhetorical declaimers and rhapsodists as trenching on the province
of poetry. He condemns all French writers (as well of poetry as prose)
in the lump. His list in this way is indeed small. He approves of
Walton's Angler, Paley, and some other writers of an inoffensive modesty
of pretension. He also likes books of voyages and travels, and Robinson
Crusoe. In art, he greatly esteems Bewick's wood-cuts, and Waterloo's
sylvan etchings. But he sometimes takes a higher tone, and gives his
mind fair play. We have known him enlarge with a noble intelligence and
enthusiasm on Nicolas Poussin's fine landscape-compositions, pointing
out the unity of design that pervades them, the superintending mind,
the imaginative principle that brings all to bear on the same end;
and declaring he would not give a rush for any landscape that did not
express the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was
meant to illustrate, or had not this character of _wholeness_ in it. His
eye also does justice to Rembrandt's fine and masterly effects. In the
way in which that artist works something out of nothing, and transforms
the stump of a tree, a common figure into an _ideal_ object, by the
gorgeous light and shade thrown upon it, he perceives an analogy to his
own mode of investing the minute details of nature with an atmosphere
of sentiment; and in pronouncing Rembrandt to be a man of genius, feels
that he strengthens his own claim to the title. It has been said of
Mr. Wordsworth, that "he hates conchology, that he hates the Venus of
Medicis." But these, we hope, are mere epigrams and _jeux-d'esprit_, as
far from truth as they are free from malice; a sort of running satire or
critical clenches--

"Where one for sense and one for rhyme
Is quite sufficient at one time."

We think, however, that if Mr. Wordsworth had been a more liberal and
candid critic, he would have been a more sterling writer. If a greater
number of sources of pleasure had been open to him, he would have
communicated pleasure to the world more frequently. Had he been less
fastidious in pronouncing sentence on the works of others, his own would
have been received more favourably, and treated more leniently.
The current of his feelings is deep, but narrow; the range of his
understanding is lofty and aspiring rather than discursive. The force,
the originality, the absolute truth and identity with which he feels
some things, makes him indifferent to so many others. The simplicity and
enthusiasm of his feelings, with respect to nature, renders him bigotted
and intolerant in his judgments of men and things. But it happens to
him, as to others, that his strength lies in his weakness; and perhaps
we have no right to complain. We might get rid of the cynic and the
egotist, and find in his stead a common-place man. We should "take the
good the Gods provide us:" a fine and original vein of poetry is not
one of their most contemptible gifts, and the rest is scarcely worth
thinking of, except as it may be a mortification to those who expect
perfection from human nature; or who have been idle enough at some
period of their lives, to deify men of genius as possessing claims above
it. But this is a chord that jars, and we shall not dwell upon it.

Lord Byron we have called, according to the old proverb, "the spoiled
child of fortune:" Mr. Wordsworth might plead, in mitigation of some
peculiarities, that he is "the spoiled child of disappointment." We are
convinced, if he had been early a popular poet, he would have borne his
honours meekly, and would have been a person of great _bonhommie_ and
frankness of disposition. But the sense of injustice and of undeserved
ridicule sours the temper and narrows the views. To have produced works
of genius, and to find them neglected or treated with scorn, is one of
the heaviest trials of human patience. We exaggerate our own merits when
they are denied by others, and are apt to grudge and cavil at every
particle of praise bestowed on those to whom we feel a conscious
superiority. In mere self-defence we turn against the world, when it
turns against us; brood over the undeserved slights we receive; and thus
the genial current of the soul is stopped, or vents itself in effusions
of petulance and self-conceit. Mr. Wordsworth has thought too much of
contemporary critics and criticism; and less than he ought of the award
of posterity, and of the opinion, we do not say of private friends, but
of those who were made so by their admiration of his genius. He did not
court popularity by a conformity to established models, and he ought
not to have been surprised that his originality was not understood as a
matter of course. He has _gnawed too much on the bridle_; and has often
thrown out crusts to the critics, in mere defiance or as a point of
honour when he was challenged, which otherwise his own good sense would
have withheld. We suspect that Mr. Wordsworth's feelings are a little
morbid in this respect, or that he resents censure more than he is
gratified by praise. Otherwise, the tide has turned much in his favour
of late years--he has a large body of determined partisans--and is at
present sufficiently in request with the public to save or relieve him
from the last necessity to which a man of genius can be reduced--that
of becoming the God of his own idolatry!





* * * * *





MR. MALTHUS.



Mr. Malthus may be considered as one of those rare and fortunate writers
who have attained a _scientific_ reputation in questions of moral and
political philosophy. His name undoubtedly stands very high in the
present age, and will in all probability go down to posterity with more
or less of renown or obloquy. It was said by a person well qualified
to judge both from strength and candour of mind, that "it would take
a thousand years at least to answer his work on Population." He has
certainly thrown a new light on that question, and changed the aspect of
political economy in a decided and material point of view--whether he
has not also endeavoured to spread a gloom over the hopes and more
sanguine speculations of man, and to cast a slur upon the face of
nature, is another question. There is this to be said for Mr. Malthus,
that in speaking of him, one knows what one is talking about. He is
something beyond a mere name--one has not to _beat the bush_ about his
talents, his attainments, his vast reputation, and leave off without
knowing what it all amounts to--he is not one of those great men, who
set themselves off and strut and fret an hour upon the stage, during a
day-dream of popularity, with the ornaments and jewels borrowed from the
common stock, to which nothing but their vanity and presumption gives
them the least individual claim--he has dug into the mine of truth, and
brought up ore mixed with dross! In weighing his merits we come at once
to the question of what he has done or failed to do. It is a specific
claim that he sets up. When we speak of Mr. Malthus, we mean the _Essay
on Population_; and when we mention the Essay on Population, we mean
a distinct leading proposition, that stands out intelligibly from all
trashy pretence, and is a ground on which to fix the levers that may
move the world, backwards or forwards. He has not left opinion where
he found it; he has advanced or given it a wrong bias, or thrown a
stumbling-block in its way. In a word, his name is not stuck, like so
many others, in the firmament of reputation, nobody knows why, inscribed
in great letters, and with a transparency of TALENTS, GENIUS, LEARNING
blazing round it--it is tantamount to an idea, it is identified with
a principle, it means that _the population cannot go on perpetually
increasing without pressing on the limits of the means of subsistence,
and that a check of some kind or other must, sooner or later, be opposed
to it_. This is the essence of the doctrine which Mr. Malthus has been
the first to bring into general notice, and as we think, to establish
beyond the fear of contradiction. Admitting then as we do the prominence
and the value of his claims to public attention, it yet remains a
question, how far those claims are (as to the talent displayed in them)
strictly original; how far (as to the logical accuracy with which he has
treated the subject) he has introduced foreign and doubtful matter
into it; and how far (as to the spirit in which he has conducted his
inquiries, and applied a general principle to particular objects) he has
only drawn fair and inevitable conclusions from it, or endeavoured to
tamper with and wrest it to sinister and servile purposes. A writer who
shrinks from following up a well-founded principle into its untoward
consequences from timidity or false delicacy, is not worthy of the
name of a philosopher: a writer who assumes the garb of candour and an
inflexible love of truth to garble and pervert it, to crouch to power
and pander to prejudice, deserves a worse title than that of a sophist!

Mr. Malthus's first octavo volume on this subject (published in the year
1798) was intended as an answer to Mr. Godwin's _Enquiry concerning
Political Justice_. It was well got up for the purpose, and had an
immediate effect. It was what in the language of the ring is called _a
facer_. It made Mr. Godwin and the other advocates of Modern Philosophy
look about them. It may be almost doubted whether Mr. Malthus was in the
first instance serious in many things that he threw out, or whether he
did not hazard the whole as an amusing and extreme paradox, which might
puzzle the reader as it had done himself in an idle moment, but to which
no practical consequence whatever could attach. This state of mind would
probably continue till the irritation of enemies and the encouragement
of friends convinced him that what he had at first exhibited as an idle
fancy was in fact a very valuable discovery, or "like the toad ugly and
venomous, had yet a precious jewel in its head." Such a supposition
would at least account for some things in the original Essay, which
scarcely any writer would venture upon, except as professed exercises of
ingenuity, and which have been since in part retracted. But a wrong
bias was thus given, and the author's theory was thus rendered warped,
disjointed, and sophistical from the very outset.

Nothing could in fact be more illogical (not to say absurd) than the
whole of Mr. Malthus's reasoning applied as an answer (_par excellence_)
to Mr. Godwin's book, or to the theories of other Utopian philosophers.
Mr. Godwin was not singular, but was kept in countenance by many
authorities, both ancient and modern, in supposing a state of society
possible in which the passions and wills of individuals would be
conformed to the general good, in which the knowledge of the best means
of promoting human welfare and the desire of contributing to it
would banish vice and misery from the world, and in which, the
stumbling-blocks of ignorance, of selfishness, and the indulgence of
gross appetite being removed, all things would move on by the mere
impulse of wisdom and virtue, to still higher and higher degrees of
perfection and happiness. Compared with the lamentable and gross
deficiencies of existing institutions, such a view of futurity as barely
possible could not fail to allure the gaze and tempt the aspiring
thoughts of the philanthropist and the philosopher: the hopes and the
imaginations of speculative men could not but rush forward into this
ideal world as into a _vacuum_ of good; and from "the mighty stream of
tendency" (as Mr. Wordsworth in the cant of the day calls it,) there was
danger that the proud monuments of time-hallowed institutions, that the
strong-holds of power and corruption, that "the Corinthian capitals of
polished society," with the base and pediments, might be overthrown
and swept away as by a hurricane. There were not wanting persons whose
ignorance, whose fears, whose pride, or whose prejudices contemplated
such an alternative with horror; and who would naturally feel no small
obligation to the man who should relieve their apprehensions from the
stunning roar of this mighty change of opinion that thundered at a
distance, and should be able, by some logical apparatus or unexpected
turn of the argument, to prevent the vessel of the state from being
hurried forward with the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces
down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr.
Malthus forward with the geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his
hands, and holds them out to his affrighted contemporaries as the only
means of salvation. "For" (so argued the author of the Essay) "let the
principles of Mr. Godwin's Enquiry and of other similar works be carried
literally and completely into effect; let every corruption and abuse of
power be entirely got rid of; let virtue, knowledge, and civilization
be advanced to the greatest height that these visionary reformers would
suppose; let the passions and appetites be subjected to the utmost
control of reason and influence of public opinion: grant them, in
a word, all that they ask, and the more completely their views are
realized, the sooner will they be overthrown again, and the more
inevitable and fatal will be the catastrophe. For the principle of
population will still prevail, and from the comfort, ease, and plenty
that will abound, will receive an increasing force and _impetus_; the
number of mouths to be fed will have no limit, but the food that is to
supply them cannot keep pace with the demand for it; we must come to a
stop somewhere, even though each square yard, by extreme improvements in
cultivation, could maintain its man: in this state of things there
will be no remedy, the wholesome checks of vice and misery (which have
hitherto kept this principle within bounds) will have been done away;
the voice of reason will be unheard; the passions only will bear
sway; famine, distress, havoc, and dismay will spread around; hatred,
violence, war, and bloodshed will be the infallible consequence, and
from the pinnacle of happiness, peace, refinement, and social advantage,
we shall be hurled once more into a profounder abyss of misery, want,
and barbarism than ever, by the sole operation of the principle of
population!"--Such is a brief abstract of the argument of the Essay.
Can any thing be less conclusive, a more complete fallacy and _petitio
principii_? Mr. Malthus concedes, he assumes a state of perfectibility,
such as his opponents imagined, in which the general good is to obtain
the entire mastery of individual interests, and reason of gross
appetites and passions; and then he argues that such a perfect structure
of society will fall by its own weight, or rather be undermined by the
principle of population, because in the highest possible state of the
subjugation of the passions to reason, they will be absolutely lawless
and unchecked, and because as men become enlightened, quick sighted
and public-spirited, they will shew themselves utterly blind to the
consequences of their actions, utterly indifferent to their own
well-being and that of all succeeding generations, whose fate is placed
in their hands. This we conceive to be the boldest paralogism that ever
was offered to the world, or palmed upon willing credulity. Against
whatever other scheme of reform this objection might be valid, the
one it was brought expressly to overturn was impregnable against it,
invulnerable to its slightest graze. Say that the Utopian reasoners are
visionaries, unfounded; that the state of virtue and knowledge they
suppose, in which reason shall have become all-in-all, can never take
place, that it is inconsistent with the nature of man and with all
experience, well and good--but to say that society will have attained
this high and "palmy state," that reason will have become the master-
key to all our motives, and that when arrived at its greatest power it
will cease to act at all, but will fall down dead, inert, and senseless
before the principle of population, is an opinion which one would
think few people would choose to advance or assent to, without strong
inducements for maintaining or believing it.

The fact, however, is, that Mr. Malthus found this argument entire (the
principle and the application of it) in an obscure and almost forgotten
work published about the middle of the last century, entitled _Various
Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence_, by a Scotch gentleman
of the name of Wallace. The chapter in this work on the Principle
of Population, considered as a bar to all ultimate views of human
improvement, was probably written to amuse an idle hour, or read as a
paper to exercise the wits of some literary society in the Northern
capital, and no farther responsibility or importance annexed to it. Mr.
Malthus, by adopting and setting his name to it, has given it sufficient
currency and effect. It sometimes happens that one writer is the first
to discover a certain principle or lay down a given observation, and
that another makes an application of, or draws a remote or an immediate
inference from it, totally unforeseen by the first, and from which, in
all probability, he might have widely dissented. But this is not so
in the present instance. Mr. Malthus has borrowed (perhaps without
consciousness, at any rate without acknowledgment) both the preliminary
statement, that the increase in the supply of food "from a limited
earth and a limited fertility" must have an end, while the tendency to
increase in the principle of population has none, without some external
and forcible restraint on it, and the subsequent use made of this
statement as an insuperable bar to all schemes of Utopian or progressive
improvement--both these he has borrowed (whole) from Wallace, with all
their imperfections on their heads, and has added more and greater
ones to them out of his own store. In order to produce something of a
startling and dramatic effect, he has strained a point or two. In order
to quell and frighten away the bugbear of Modern Philosophy, he was
obliged to make a sort of monster of the principle of population, which
was brought into the field against it, and which was to swallow it up
quick. No half-measures, no middle course of reasoning would do. With a
view to meet the highest possible power of reason in the new order of
things, Mr. Malthus saw the necessity of giving the greatest possible
physical weight to the antagonist principle, and he accordingly lays
it down that its operation is mechanical and irresistible. He premises
these two propositions as the basis of all his reasoning, 1. _That food
is necessary to man_; 2. _That the desire to propagate the species is an
equally indispensable law of our existence_:--thus making it appear
that these two wants or impulses are equal and coordinate principles
of action. If this double statement had been true, the whole scope and
structure of his reasoning (as hostile to human hopes and sanguine
speculations) would have been irrefragable; but as it is not true, the
whole (in that view) falls to the ground. According to Mr. Malthus's
octavo edition, the sexual passion is as necessary to be gratified as
the appetite of hunger, and a man can no more exist without propagating
his species than he can live without eating. Were it so, neither of
these passions would admit of any excuses, any delay, any restraint from
reason or foresight; and the only checks to the principle of population
must be vice and misery. The argument would be triumphant and complete.
But there is no analogy, no parity in the two cases, such as our author
here assumes. No man can live for any length of time without food; many
persons live all their lives without gratifying the other sense.
The longer the craving after food is unsatisfied, the more violent,
imperious, and uncontroulable the desire becomes; whereas the longer the
gratification of the sexual passion is resisted, the greater force does
habit and resolution acquire over it; and, generally speaking, it is
a well-known fact, attested by all observation and history, that this
latter passion is subject more or less to controul from personal
feelings and character, from public opinions and the institutions of
society, so as to lead either to a lawful and regulated indulgence, or
to partial or total abstinence, according to the dictates of _moral
restraint_, which latter check to the inordinate excesses and unheard-of
consequences of the principle of population, our author, having no
longer an extreme case to make out, admits and is willing to patronize
in addition to the two former and exclusive ones of _vice and misery_,
in the second and remaining editions of his work. Mr. Malthus has shewn
some awkwardness or even reluctance in softening down the harshness of
his first peremptory decision. He sometimes grants his grand exception
cordially, proceeds to argue stoutly, and to try conclusions upon it;
at other times he seems disposed to cavil about or retract it:--"the
influence of moral restraint is very inconsiderable, or none at all." It
is indeed difficult (more particularly for so formal and nice a reasoner
as Mr. Malthus) to piece such contradictions plausibly or gracefully
together. We wonder how _he_ manages it--how _any one_ should attempt
it! The whole question, the _gist_ of the argument of his early volume
turned upon this, "Whether vice and misery were the _only_ actual or
possible checks to the principle of population?" He then said they were,
and farewell to building castles in the air: he now says that _moral
restraint_ is to be coupled with these, and that its influence depends
greatly on the state of laws and manners--and Utopia stands where
it did, a great way off indeed, but not turned _topsy-turvy_ by our
magician's wand! Should we ever arrive there, that is, attain to a state
of _perfect moral restraint_, we shall not be driven headlong back into
Epicurus's stye for want of the only possible checks to population,
_vice and misery_; and in proportion as we advance that way, that is, as
the influence of moral restraint is extended, the necessity for vice and
misery will be diminished, instead of being increased according to the
first alarm given by the Essay. Again, the advance of civilization and
of population in consequence with the same degree of moral restraint (as
there exists in England at this present time, for instance) is a good,
and not an evil--but this does not appear from the Essay. The Essay
shews that population is not (as had been sometimes taken for granted)
an abstract and unqualified good; but it led many persons to suppose
that it was an abstract and unqualified evil, to be checked only by vice
and misery, and producing, according to its encouragement a greater
quantity of vice and misery; and this error the author has not been
at sufficient pains to do away. Another thing, in which Mr. Malthus
attempted to _clench_ Wallace's argument, was in giving to the
disproportionate power of increase in the principle of population
and the supply of food a mathematical form, or reducing it to the
arithmetical and geometrical ratios, in which we believe Mr. Malthus is
now generally admitted, even by his friends and admirers, to have been
wrong. There is evidently no inherent difference in the principle of
increase in food or population; since a grain of corn, for example, will
propagate and multiply itself much faster even than the human species.
A bushel of wheat will sow a field; that field will furnish seed for
twenty others. So that the limit to the means of subsistence is only the
want of room to raise it in, or, as Wallace expresses it, "a limited
fertility and a limited earth." Up to the point where the earth or any
given country is fully occupied or cultivated, the means of subsistence
naturally increase in a geometrical ratio, and will more than keep pace
with the natural and unrestrained progress of population; and beyond
that point, they do not go on increasing even in Mr. Malthus's
arithmetical ratio, but are stationary or nearly so. So far, then, is
this proportion from being universally and mathematically true, that
in no part of the world or state of society does it hold good. But our
theorist, by laying down this double ratio as a law of nature, gains
this advantage, that at all times it seems as if, whether in new or
old-peopled countries, in fertile or barren soils, the population was
pressing hard on the means of subsistence; and again, it seems as if the
evil increased with the progress of improvement and civilization; for if
you cast your eye at the scale which is supposed to be calculated upon
true and infallible _data_, you find that when the population is at
8, the means of subsistence are at 4; so that here there is only a
_deficit_ of one half; but when it is at 32, they have only got to 6, so
that here there is a difference of 26 in 32, and so on in proportion;
the farther we proceed, the more enormous is the mass of vice and
misery we must undergo, as a consequence of the natural excess of the
population over the means of subsistence and as a salutary check to its
farther desolating progress. The mathematical Table, placed at the front
of the Essay, therefore leads to a secret suspicion or a bare-faced
assumption, that we ought in mere kindness and compassion to give every
sort of indirect and under-hand encouragement (to say the least) to the
providential checks of vice and misery; as the sooner we arrest this
formidable and paramount evil in its course, the less opportunity we
leave it of doing incalculable mischief. Accordingly, whenever there is
the least talk of colonizing new countries, of extending the population,
or adding to social comforts and improvements, Mr. Malthus conjures up
his double ratios, and insists on the alarming results of advancing
them a single step forward in the series. By the same rule, it would
be better to return at once to a state of barbarism; and to take the
benefit of acorns and scuttle-fish, as a security against the luxuries
and wants of civilized life. But it is not our ingenious author's wish
to hint at or recommend any alterations in existing institutions; and he
is therefore silent on that unpalatable part of the subject and natural
inference from his principles.

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