WILLIAM COBBETT.

BY G. K. CHESTERTON, F.R.S.L.

[Read April 26th, 1922.]

THE Chairman has very truly said that in taking "William Cobbett " as the title of these few and rather rambling remarks, I have chosen a neglected name; I should say myself a scandalously neglected name. I believe, however, that it is much less neglected now than it was in the immediate past, and is much more neglected now than it will be in the immediate future. Doubtless serious students of English letters, such as constitute this society, have never wholly lost touch with his tradition. Some things have always been realised in connection with him; and two things at any rate must be known to all. The two facts universally connected with Cobbett, I imagine, are, first, that he was a master of English, and, second, that he was especially a master of that particular sort of plain English which has been localised by the name of Billingsgate. Now to begin with, I am very much concerned to draw the attention of a body devoted to the preservation of our language and literature to the fact that the two things are not unconnected. Billingsgate can be very beautiful English; vigorous invective has about it something specially suited to the turn and tang of the English tongue. It is a language that excels in strong and strident consonants, in abrupt and

angular terminations, in all that sort of grotesque energy that permits us, if I may use the contradictory phrase, a sublimity of bathos. French and other foreign idioms have their own elements of stunning force and almost overpowering power; but they are inferior in this particular abrupt finality, which I know not how to illustrate better than by saying "What ho! she bumps! In French she never bumps. How fortunate is the condition of the Englishman who can kick people; and how relatively melancholy that of the Frenchman who can only give them a blow of the foot! If we say that two people fight like cat and dog, the very words seem to have in them a shindy of snaps and screams and scratches. If we say "comme le chat et le chien," we are depressed with the suggestion of comparative peace. Now nobody denies that Cobbett and his enemies did fight like cat and dog, but it is precisely his fighting passages that contain some of the finest examples of a style as English as the word "dog" or the word "cat." So far as this goes, the point has nothing to do with political or moral sympathies with Cobbett's cause. The beauty of his incessant abuse is a matter of art for art's sake. The pleasure which an educated taste received when Cobbett calls a duchess an old cat or a bishop a dirty dog is almost onomatopoeic, in its love of a melody all but detached from meaning. As I shall suggest in a moment, there are many much more serious reasons for a revival of interest in Cobbett than this merely artistic reason; but I put it first, partly because it concerns his supremacy in style, which is admitted even by those who least understand him, and partly because it

concerns a real question of the value of the English language, which ought to be submitted to the more authoritative guardians of English literature.

For there is a serious danger that this charm in English literature may be lost. The comparative absence of abuse in social and senatorial life may take away one of the beauties of our beautiful and historic speech. Words like "scamp" and " scoundrel," which have the unique strength of English in them, are likely to grow unfamiliar through lack of use, though certainly not through lack of opportunity for use. It is indeed strange that when public life presents so wide and promising a field for the use of these terms, they should be suffered to drop into desuetude. It seems singular that when the careers of our public men, the character of our social and commercial triumphs and the general culture and ethic of the modern world seem so specially to invite and, as it were, to cry aloud for the use of such language, the secret of such language should be in danger of being lost. But indeed the two facts are so far from being inconsistent that one is really the explanation of the other. There was less corruption in Cobbett's day precisely because there was more real denunciation like that of Cobbett; precisely because such men did call a spade a spade, and a scamp a scamp. Utterances of this kind have indeed been dismissed in more recent times as "personalities." I have never been able to understand how it is possible to be otherwise than personal in talking about persons. But we shall miss the whole meaning of a great man and a great revolution or transition, if we imagine for a moment that Cobbett's personalities consisted

in pointing out a pimple on somebody's nose or a patch on somebody's trousers. What Cobbett pointed out was not a pimple on the nose that could not be hidden, but a bribe in the pocket that was hidden; it was not the outer patching of poverty, but the inner padding of wealth. In short, it was something really personal, really private, in the sense that the man had every intention of keeping it private. In that sense certainly a man's pocket is his private affair; and a man's nose is a public monument by comparison. But though the bribe is something that is always private, it is something that always ought to be public; and scarcely a man since Cobbett's time has dared to publish a word about it.

Here again, however, we shall be underrating the man and the crisis if we suppose that he was personal, and nothing else. The truth is that few men have been more impersonal than Cobbett, in the sense of that impersonal imagination that can see beyond a country and an age to those huge human things that create what we call history. He was called both a Tory and a Radical, and he was both; but his mind was immeasurably wider than that of the Tories, who could only cling to the immediate past, or the Radicals, who could only trust to the immediate future. What he saw, as from the height of a hundred years hence or a thousand miles away, was the bird's-eye view of the whole course of modern England. He saw the peasants swallowed by the squires, the squires swallowed by the mercantile magnates, the countrysides swallowed by the manufacturing towns; agriculture dominated by industry, and industry in turn dominated by mere paper finance. He saw all these

things in the season of their youth and hope, when all reformers and pioneers believed in them, when only a few irrational reactionaries resisted them; when all this liberality and economic science really seemed like the promise of a world set right. And Cobbett cursed it all with one comprehensive curse, progressive and conservative, merchant and squire, present and future; he nailed his name to that curse, he tied his whole reputation to that renouncement and abjuration of all the world we know; was defeated, and went down in the dark.

In this aspect it is instructive to compare Cobbett with Carlyle. I cannot disguise the impression that the comparison is one between the genuine article and the false. I am very far from saying that Carlyle was merely a humbug. But I will venture to say that as a pessimist he was entirely a humbug. As a prophet denouncing woe he was really something like a court chaplain compared to Cobbett. So far from being in the social sense a pessimist, he was really a rather unscrupulous optimist; for he was optimistic about the benefits of being unscrupulous. He was optimistic about all those very tendencies of the time about which Cobbett had the courage to be a pessimist. He flattered those very forces of the future which Cobbett had the independence to defy. He flattered the pride of industrialism, the power of machinery, the individualism of the inventors. He flattered our notions of racial pride and imperial expansion, where Cobbett had a far clearer insight into the case for France or America or Ireland. He spoke respectfully about captains of industry, where Cobbett could speak fearlessly even to captains of