When Blake composed this unique work in the early 1790s, his city of London was teeming with religious mystics, astrologers, and sometimes bawdy freethinkers who were determined to challenge the Established Church's monopoly on spirituality and who were reviving the link, created in the seventeenth century, between enthusiasm in religion and political revolution. The work is also a response to the writings of the visionary Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, whom Blake had at first admired but then had come to recognize as a conventional Angel in the disguise of a radical Devil. In plate 3 the writings of Swedenborg are described as the winding clothes Blake discards as he is resurrected from the tomb of his past self, as a poet-prophet who heralds the apocalyptic promise of his age. Blake shared the expectations of a number of radical English writers, including the young poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, that the French Revolution was the violent stage that, as the biblical prophets foresaw, immediately preceded the millennium. The double role of The Marriage as both satire and revolutionary prophecy is made explicit in A Song of Liberty, which Blake etched in 1792 and added as a coda.
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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
PLATE 2
The Argument
Rintrah1 roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep. Once meek, and in a perilous path, The just man kept his course along
5 The vale of death. Roses are planted where thorns grow, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees.
Then the perilous path was planted,
10 And a river, and a spring, On every cliff and tomb; And on the bleached bones Red clay2 brought forth;
Till the villain left the paths of ease, 15 To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes.
Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility, And the just man rages in the wilds
20 Where lions roam.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
PLATE 3
As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg3 is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah xxxiv & XXXV Chap.4
1. Rintrah plays the role of the angry Old Testament prophet Elijah as well as of John the Baptist, the voice "crying in the wilderness" (Matthew 3), preparing the way for Christ the Messiah. It has been plausibly suggested that stanzas 2�5 summarize the course of biblical history to the present time. "Once" (line 3) refers to Old Testament history after the Fall; "Then" (line 9) is the time of the birth of Christ. "Till" (line 14) identifies the era when Christianity was perverted into an institutional religion. "Now" (line 17) is the time of the wrathful portent of the French Revolution. In this final era the hypocritical serpent represents the priest of the "angels" in the poem, while "the just man" is embodied in Blake, a raging poet and prophet in the guise of a devil. "Swag" (line 2): sag, hang down. 2. In Hebrew the literal meaning of "Adam," or created man. The probable reference is to the birth of the Redeemer, the new Adam.
3. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688�1772), Swedish scientist and religious philosopher, had predicted, on the basis of his visions, that the Last Judgment and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven would occur in 1757. This was precisely the year of Blake's birth. Now, in 1790, Blake is thirty-three, the age at which Christ had been resurrected from the tomb; correspondingly, Blake rises from the tomb of his past life in his new role as imaginative artist who will redeem his age. But, Blake ironically comments, the works he will engrave in his resurrection will constitute the Eternal Hell, the contrary brought into simultaneous being by Swedenborg s limited New Heaven. 4. Isaiah 34 prophesies "the day of the Lord's vengeance," a time of violent destruction and blood
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Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
PLATE 4
The Voice of the Devil
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles; Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True: 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight. PLATE 5
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restraind, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost,5 & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan, and his children are call'd Sin & Death.6
But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is call'd Satan.7
For this history has been adopted by both parties.
It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil's account is, that the Messi[pLATE 6]ah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss. This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on;8 the Jehovah of
shed; Isaiah 35 prophesies the redemption to follow, in which "the desert shall. . . blossom as the rose," "in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert," and "no lion shall be there," but "an highway shall be there . . . and it shall be called The way of holiness" (cf. "The Argument," lines 3�11, 20). Blake combines with these chapters Isaiah 63, in which "Edom" is the place from which comes the man whose garments are red with the blood he has spilled; for as he says, "the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come." Blake interprets this last phrase as predicting the time when Adam would regain his lost Paradise. Also relevant is Genesis 36.1, where the Edomites are identified as the descendants of the disinherited Esau, cheated out of his father's blessing by Jacob.
5. What follows, to the end of this section, is Blake's "diabolical" reading of Milton's Paradise Lost. For other Romantic comments on the magnificence of Milton's Satan see "The Satanic and Byronic Hero" at Norton Literature Online. 6. Satan's giving birth to Sin and then incestuously begetting Death upon her is described in Paradise Lost 2.745ff.; the war in heaven, referred to three lines below, in which the Messiah defeated Satan and drove him out of heaven, is described in 6.824ff. 7. In the Book of Job, Satan plays the role of Job's moral accuser and physical tormentor. 8. Possibly John 14.16�17, where Christ says he "will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter . . . Even the Spirit of truth."
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the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire. Know that after Christ's death, he became Jehovah. But in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio9 of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
A Memorable Fancy1
As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs; thinking that as the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.
When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock; with cor [PLATE 7]roding fires he wrote the following sentence2 now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth:
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?
Proverbs of Hell3
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
5 He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. Dip him in the river who loves water. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
10 Eternity is in love with the productions of time. The busy bee has no time for sorrow. The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can
measure. All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap. Bring out number, weight, & measure in a year of dearth.
15 No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. A dead body revenges not injuries. The most sublime act is to set another before you. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
9. The Latin ratio means both "reason" and "sum." 2. The "mighty Devil" is Blake, as he sees himself Blake applies the term to the 18th-century view, reflected in the shiny plate on which he is etching following the empiricist philosophy of John Locke, this very passage with "corroding fires," i.e., the that the content of the mind, on which the faculty acid used in the etching process. See also the third of reason operates, is limited to the sum of the from last sentence in plate 14. experience acquired by the five senses. 3. A "diabolic" version of the Book of Proverbs in 1. A parody of what Swedenborg called "memo-the Old Testament, which also incorporates sly rable relations" of his literal-minded visions of the allusions to 18th-century books of piety such as eternal world. Isaac Watts's Divine Songs.
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Folly is the cloke of knavery. Shame is Pride's cloke.
PLATE 8
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth. Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
The selfish smiling fool & the sullen frowning fool shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod. What is now proved was once only imagin'd. The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits. The cistern contains; the fountain overflows. One thought fills immensity. Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you. Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth. The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
PLATE 9
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night.
He who has sufferd you to impose on him knows you.
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. Listen to the fool's reproach! it is a kingly title! The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth. The weak in courage is strong in cunning. The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the
horse, how he shall take his prey. The thankful reciever bears a plentiful harvest. If others had not been foolish, we should be so. The soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd. When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head! As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest
lays his curse on the fairest joys.
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To create a little flower is the labour of ages. Damn braces; Bless relaxes. The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest. Prayers plow not! Praises reap not! Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!
PLATE 10
The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet
Proportion. As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible. The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl that every thing was white. Exuberance is Beauty. If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning. Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without
Improvement are roads of Genius. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. Where man is not, nature is barren. Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
Enough! or Too much.
PLATE 11
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood,
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
PLATE 12
A Memorable Fancy4
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote."
Then I asked: "Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?"
He replied: "All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm
4. Blake parodies Swedenborg's accounts, in his Memorable Relations, of his conversations with the inhabitants during his spiritual trips to heaven.
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perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing."
Then Ezekiel said: "The philosophy of the East taught the first principles of human perception. Some nations held one principle for the origin & some another; we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods [PL 13] would at last be proved to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius; it was this that our great poet, King David, desired so fervently & invokes so pathetically, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the Jews."
"This," said he, "like all firm perswasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the Jews' code and worship the Jews' god, and what greater subjection can be?"
I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own conviction. After dinner I ask'd Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works; he said none of equal value was lost. Ezekiel said the same of his.
I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? He answered, "the same that made our friend Diogenes,5 the Grecian."
I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side?6 He answered, "the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification?"
PLATE 14
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life;7 and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.8
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
5. Greek Cynic (4th century), whose extreme repudiation of civilized customs gave rise to anecdotes that he had renounced clothing. In Isaiah 20.2-3 the prophet, at the Lord's command, walked "naked and barefoot" for three years. 6. The Lord gave these instructions to the prophet Ezekiel (4.4-6).
7. In Genesis 3.24, when the Lord drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he had placed Cherubim and a flaming sword at the eastern end "to keep the way of the tree of life." 8. Seen. 2, p. 113.
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PLATE 15
A Memorable Fancy
I was in a Printing house9 in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation. In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave's mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave. In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold, silver, and precious stones.
In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air; he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite; around were numbers of Eagle-like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs.
In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire, raging around & melting the metals into living fluids. In the fifth chamber were Unnam'd forms, which cast the metals into the expanse. There they were receiv'd by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries.1
PLATE 16
The Giants2 who formed this world into its sensual existence, and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity; but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have power to resist energy; according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.
Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring; to the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so; he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.
But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights. Some will say, "Is not God alone the Prolific?" I answer, "God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men." These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries [PLATE 17] to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.
Note. Jesus Christ did not wish to unite but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats! & he says, "I came not to send Peace but a Sword."3 Messiah or Satan or Tempter was formerly thought to be one of the Antediluvians4 who are our Energies.
A Memorable Fancy
An Angel came to me and said: "O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career."
9. A covert pun runs through this section: work-2. In this section human creative energies, called ers, ink-blackened, who did the dirty work in the "the Prolific," in their relation to their indispenprinting houses of the period were humorously sable contrary, "the Devourer." known as "printer's devils." 3. Matthew 10.34. The parable of the sheep and I. In this "Memorable Fancy" Blake allegorizes his the goats is in Matthew 25.32-33 . procedure in designing, etching, printing, and 4. Those who lived before Noah's Flood. binding his works of imaginative genius.
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I said: "Perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot, & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable."
So he took me thro' a stable & thro' a church & down into the church vault at the end of which was a mill; thro' the mill we went, and came to a cave; down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way till a void boundless as a nether sky appeared beneath us, & we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity, but 1 said: "If you please, we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether Providence is here also, if you will not I will." But he answered: "Do not presume, O young man, but as we here remain, behold thy lot which will soon appear when the darkness passes away."5
So I remaind with him sitting in the twisted [PLATE 18] root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep.
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; & the air was full of them, & seemed composed of them; these are Devils, and are called Powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot? He said, "Between the black & white spiders."
But now, from between the black & white spiders a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro the deep, blackning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a sea & rolled with a terrible noise. Beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones' throw from us appeared and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent. At last to the east, distant about three degrees, appeared a fiery crest above the waves. Slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks till we discovered two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke. And now we saw it was the head of Leviathan;6 his forehead was divided into streaks of green & purple like those on a tyger's forehead; soon we saw his mouth & red gills hang just above the raging foam, tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward [PLATE 19] us with all the fury of a spiritual existence.
My friend the Angel climb'd up from his station into the mill. I remain'd alone, & then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light, hearing a harper who sung to the harp, & his theme was: "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind."
But I arose, and sought for the mill, & there I found my Angel, who surprised asked me how I escaped?
I answerd: "All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics: for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I shew you yours? He laughd at my proposal;
5. The "stable" is that where Jesus was born, which, allegorically, leads to the "church" founded in his name and to the "vault" where this institution effectually buried him. The "mill" in Blake is a symbol of mechanical and analytic philosophy; through this the pilgrims pass into the twisting cave of rationalistic theology and descend to an underworld that is an empty abyss. The point of this Blakean equivalent of a carnival funhouse is that only after you have thoroughly confused yourself by this tortuous approach, and only if you then (as in the next two paragraphs) stare at this topsyturvy emptiness long enough, will the void gradually assume the semblance of the comic horrors of the fantasized Hell of religious orthodoxy.
6. The biblical sea monster.
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but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms, & flew westerly thro' the night, til we were elevated above the earth's shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun. Here I clothed myself in white, & taking in my hand Swedenborg's volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to Saturn. Here I staid to rest & then leap'd into the void between Saturn & the fixed stars.7
"Here," said I, "is your lot, in this space, if space it may be calld." Soon we saw the stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open'd the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended, driving the Angel before me. Soon we saw seven houses of brick;8 one we enterd; in it were a [PLATE 20] number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species, chaind by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains. However, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devourd, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk. This, after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness, they devourd too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail. As the stench terribly annoyd us both, we went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle's Analytics.9
So the Angel said: "Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, & thou oughtest to be ashamed." I answerd: "We impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics."
Opposition is true Friendship.
PLATE 21
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho' it is only the Contents or Index of already publish'd books.
A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceiv'd himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, & himself the single [PLATE 22] one on earth that ever broke a net.
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.
And now hear the reason: He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils, who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro' his conceited notions.
Thus Swedenborg's writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.
7. In the Ptolemaic world picture, Saturn was in Blake now forces on the angel his own diabolic the outermost planetary sphere; beyond it was the view of angelic biblical exegesis, theological spec- sphere of the fixed stars. ulation and disputation, and Hell. 8. The "seven churches which are in Asia," to 9. Aristotle's treatises on logic. which John addresses the Book of Revelation 1.4.
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120 / WILLIAM BLAKE
Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen1 produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.
But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.
A Memorable Fancy
Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil utterd these words:
"The worship of God is, Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the [PLATE 23] greatest men best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God."
The Angel hearing this became almost blue; but mastering himself, he grew yellow, & at last white, pink, & smiling, and then replied:
"Thou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten commandments, and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings?"
The Devil answer'd; "Bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him.2 If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree. Now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath's God?3 murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery?4 steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate?5 covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them?6 I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from im[PLATE 24]pulse, not from rules."
When he had so spoken, I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.7
Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.
I have also The Bible of Hell,8 which the world shall have whether they will or no.
One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.
1790-93 1790-93
PLATE 25
1. Jakob Boehme (1575�1624), a German shoemaker who developed a theosophical system that has had persisting influence on both theological and metaphysical speculation. Paracelsus (1493� 1541), a Swiss physician and a pioneer in empirical medicine, was also a prominent theorist of the occult. 2. Proverbs 27.22: "Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him." "Bray": pound into small pieces. 3. Mark 2.27: "The sabbath was made for man." 4. Cf. John 8.2-11. 5. Cf. Matthew 27.13-14. 6. Matthew 10.14: "Whosoever shall not receive you . . . when ye depart. . . shake off the dust of your feet." 7. In 2 Kings 2.11 the prophet Elijah "went up by a whirlwind into heaven," borne by "a chariot of fire." 8. I.e., the poems and designs that Blake is working on.
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A SONG OF LIBERTY / 121
A Song of Liberty1
1. The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth. 2. Albion's coast is sick, silent; the American meadows faint! 3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon!2 4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome! 5. Cast thy keys, O Rome,3 into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling, 6. And weep.4 7. In her trembling hands she took the new born terror, howling. 8. On those infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the Atlantic sea,5 the new born fire stood before the starry king!6 9. Flag'd with grey brow'd snows and thunderous visages, the jealous wings wav'd over the deep. 10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and [PLATE 26] hurl'd the new born wonder thro' the starry night. 11. The fire, the fire, is falling! 12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine. O African! black African! (Go, winged thought, widen his forehead.) 13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea. 14. Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary element7 roaring fled away: 15. Down rushd, beating his wings in vain, the jealous king; his grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants; banners, castles, slings and rocks, 16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's dens; 17. All night beneath the ruins; then, their sullen flames faded, emerge round the gloomy king, 18. With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro' the waste wilderness [PLATE 27] he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay, 19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast, 1. Blake etched this poem in 1792 and sometimes bound it as an appendix to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It recounts the birth, manifested in the contemporary events in France, of the flaming Spirit of Revolution (whom Blake later called Ore), and describes his conflict with the tyrannical sky god (whom Blake later called Urizen). The poem ends with the portent of the Spirit of Revolution shattering the ten commandments, or prohibitions against political, religious, and moral liberty, and bringing in a free and joyous new world. "Albion's" (line 2): England's. 2. The political prison, the Bastille, was destroyed by the French revolutionaries in 1789. 3. The keys of Rome, a symbol of Papal power. 4. Echoing, among others, John 11.35 ("Jesus wept") and Revelation 18.11 (which states that at the fall of Babylon, "the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn for her"). 5. The legendary continent of Atlantis, sunk beneath the sea, which Blake uses to represent the condition before the Fall. 6. Blake often uses the stars, in their fixed courses, as a symbol of the law-governed Newtonian universe. 7. The sea, which to Blake represents a devouring chaos, such as had swallowed Atlantis.
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122 / WILLIAM BLAKE
20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law8 to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying: "Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease."9
Chorus
Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that
virginity, that wishes but acts not! For every thing that lives is Holy. 1792 1792 8. I.e., the Ten Commandments (verse 18), which the "finger of God" had written on "tables [tablets] of stone" (Exodus 31.18). 9. Cf. Isaiah's prophecy, 65.17�25, of "new heavens and a new earth," when " shall feed together, and the lthe bullock." The wolf and the lamb ion shall eat straw like
FROM BLAKE'S NOTEBOOK1
Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau
Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;2 Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain. You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again;
5 And every sand becomes a Gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine.
The Atoms of Democritus
10 And Newton's Particles of light3 Are sands upon the Red sea shore, Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
Never pain to tell thy love
Never pain to tell thy love Love that never told can be,
1. A commonplace book in which Blake drew 2. Blake regards both Voltaire and Rousseau, sketches and jotted down verses and memoranda French writers often hailed as the authors of between the late 1780s and 1810. It is known as the Revolution, as representing rationalism and the Rossetti manuscript because it later came into Deism. the possession of the poet and painter Dante 3. Newton in his Opticks hypothesized that light Gabriel Rossetti. These poems were first published consisted of minute material particles. Democritus in imperfect form in 1863, then transcribed from (460-362 b.c.E.) proposed that atoms were the the manuscript by Geoffrey Keynes in 1935. ultimate components of the universe.
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AND DID THOSE FEET / 123
For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly.
5 I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart, Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears� Ah, she doth depart.
Soon as she was gone from me
10 A traveller came by Silently, invisibly� O, was no deny.
I asked a thief
I asked a thief to steal me a peach, He turned up his eyes; I ask'd a lithe lady to lie her down, Holy & meek she cries.
5 As soon as I went An angel came. He wink'd at the thief And smild at the dame�
And without one word said
10 Had a peach from the tree And still as a maid Enjoy'd the lady.
And did those feet1
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?
5 And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among those dark Satanic Mills?2
1. These quatrains occur in the preface to Blake's apocalyptic desire is widely used as a hymn, prophetic poem Milton. There is an ancient belief national anthem, or school song by just those that Jesus came to England with Joseph of Ari-establishment figures whom Blake would call mathea, the merchant who is identified in the Gos-"angels." pels as making the arrangements for Christ's burial 2. There may be an allusion here to industrial following the crucifixion. Blake adapts the legend England, but the mill is also Blake's symbol for a to his own conception of a spiritual Israel, in which mechanistic and utilitarian worldview, according the significance of biblical events is as relevant to to which, as he said elsewhere, "the same dull England as to Palestine. By a particularly Blakean round, even of a universe" becomes "a mill with irony, this poem of mental war in the service of complicated wheels."
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12 4 / WILLIAM BLAKE
Bring me my Bow of burning gold,
10 Bring me my Arrows of desire,
Bring me my Spear; O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
15 Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant Land.
ca. 1804-10 ca. 1804-10
From A Vision of the Last Judgment1
For the Year 1810 Additions to Blake's Catalogue of Pictures &c
The Last Judgment [will be] when all those are Cast away who trouble Religion with Questions concerning Good & Evil or Eating of the Tree of those Knowledges or Reasonings which hinder the Vision of God turning all into a Consuming fire. When Imaginative Art & Science & all Intellectual Gifts, all the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, are lookd upon as of no use & only Contention remains to Man, then the Last Judgment begins, & its Vision is seen by the Imaginative Eye of Every one according to the situation he holds.
[PAGE 68] The Last Judgment is not Fable or Allegory but Vision. Fable or Allegory are a totally distinct & inferior kind of Poetry. Vision, or Imagination, is a Representation of what Eternally Exists, Really & Unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is Formd by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is Surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration, who in the aggregate are calld Jerusalem, [PAGE 69] Fable is Allegory, but what Critics call The Fable is Vision itself, [PAGE 68] The Hebrew Bible & the Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory, but Eternal Vision, or Imagination of All that Exists. Note here that Fable or Allegory is Seldom without some Vision. Pilgrim's Progress is full of it, the Greek Poets the same; but Allegory & Vision ought to be known as Two Distinct Things, & so calld for the Sake of Eternal Life. Plato has made Socrates say that Poets & Prophets do not know or Understand what they write or Utter; this is a most Pernicious Falshood. If they do not, pray is an inferior Kind to be calld Knowing? Plato confutes himself.2
The Last Judgment is one of these Stupendous Visions. I have represented it as I saw it. To different People it appears differently, as [PAGE 69] every thing else does; for tho on Earth things seem Permanent, they are less permanent than a Shadow, as we all know too well.
1. In this essay Blake describes and comments on intellectual power; to conventional and coercive his painting of the Last Judgment, now lost, which virtue; to what is seen by the "corporeal" eye; to is said to have measured seven by five feet and to the arts; and to the Last Judgment and the apochave included a thousand figures. The text has alyptic redemption of humanity and of the created been transcribed and rearranged, as the sequence world�an apocalypse that is to be achieved of the pages indicates, from the scattered frag-through the triumph over the bodily eye by human ments in Blake's Notebook. The opening and clos-imagination, as manifested in the creative artist. ing parts are reprinted here as Blake's fullest, 2. In Plato's dialogue Ion, in which Socrates traps although cryptic, statements of what he means by Ion into admitting that, because poets compose hv "vision." These sections deal with the relations of inspiration, they do so without knowing what they imaginative vision to allegory, Greek fable, and the are doing. biblical story; to uncurbed human passion and
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A VISION OF THE LAST JUDGMENT / 125
The Nature of Visionary Fancy, or Imagination, is very little Known, & the Eternal nature & permanence of its ever Existent Images is considered as less permanent than the things of Vegetative & Generative Nature; yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce, but Its Eternal Image & Individuality never dies, but renews by its seed. Just so the Imaginative Image returns by the seed of Contemplative Thought. The Writings of the Prophets illustrate these conceptions of the Visionary Fancy by their various sublime & Divine Images as seen in the Worlds of Vision. * * *
Let it here be Noted that the Greek Fables originated in Spiritual Mystery [PAGE 72] & Real Visions, Which are lost & clouded in Fable & Allegory, while the Hebrew Bible & the Greek Gospel are Genuine, Preservd by the Saviour's Mercy. The Nature of my Work is Visionary or Imaginative; it is an Endeavour to Restore what the Ancients calld the Golden Age.
[PAGE 69] This world of Imagination is the World of Eternity; it is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite & Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Temporal. There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.
All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine [PAGE 70] body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination, who appeard to Me as Coming to Judgment among his Saints & throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be Establishd. Around him were seen the Images of Existences according to a certain order suited to my Imaginative Eye. * * *
[PAGE 87] Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & governd their Passions, or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect from which All the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into Heaven, let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The price of Enterance into Heaven. Those who are cast out Are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People's by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds. Wo Wo Wo to you Hypocrites! Even Murder the Courts of Justice, more merciful than the Church, are compelld to allow, is not done in Passion but in Cool Blooded Design & Intention.
The Modern Church Crucifies Christ with the Head Downwards.
[PAGE 92] Many persons such as Paine & Voltaire,3 with some of the Ancient Greeks, say: "We will not converse concerning Good & Evil; we will live in Paradise & Liberty." You may do so in Spirit, but not in the Mortal Body as you pretend, till after the last Judgment; for in Paradise they have no Corporeal & Mortal Body�that originated with the Fall & was calld Death & cannot be removed but by a Last Judgment; while we are in the world of Mortality we Must Suffer. The Whole Creation Groans to be deliverd; there will always be as many Hypocrites born as Honest Men & they will always have superior Power in Mortal Things. You cannot have Liberty in this World without what you call Moral Virtue, & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the Slavery of that half of the Human Race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.
3, Blake represents Thomas Paine, author of The adise by political revolution. Such had been Blake's Rights of Man (1791), and Voltaire, the great own view in the early 1790s (see, e.g., The Mar- author of the French Enlightenment, as propo-riage of Heaven and Hell, p. 110). nents of the possibility of restoring an earthly par
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126 / WILLIAM BLAKE
� * a
Thinking as I do that the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being, & being a Worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: "The Son, O how unlike the Father!" First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.
The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is Calld Corporeal Nobody Knows of its dwelling Place; it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool? Some People flatter themselves that there will be No Last Judgment, & [PAGE 95] that Bad Art will be adopted & mixed with Good Art, That Error or Experiment will make a Part of Truth, & they Boast that it is its Foundation. These People flatter themselves; I will not Flatter them. Error is Created; Truth is Eternal. Error or Creation will be Burned Up, & then & not till then Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. "What," it will be Questioned, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?"4 O no no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying "Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty." I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight: I look thro it & not with it.
1810 1810
Two Letters on Sight and Vision1
To Dr. John Trusler (Aug. 23, 1799)
Rev"1 Sir
I really am sorry that you are falln out with the Spiritual World, Especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your Ideas & Mine on Moral Painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of Study. If I am wrong, I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended All Species of this Art, & Especially that you would not regret that Species which gives Existence to Every other, namely Visions of Eternity. You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato.
But as you have favored me with your remarks on my Design, permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is, That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause.2�Is not Merit in one a Cause of Envy in
4. A gold coin worth twenty-one shillings. sionate response to John Trusler (1735�1820), 1. Blake wrote these pronouncements about the clergyman and author, who had objected to some difference between "corporeal" sight and imagi-of Blake's visionary art. native vision at times when a friend, a patron, or 2. Blake had made a watercolor drawing (which the need for money was putting pressure on him has survived) illustrating Malevolence. He describto turn from his visionary art to more fashionable ed this design in an earlier letter: "A Father, taking modes of representation. The first letter is a pas-leave of his Wife & Child, Is watch'd by two Fiends
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Two LETTERS ON SIGHT AND VISION / 127
another, & Serenity & Happiness & Beauty a Cause of Malevolence? But Want of Money & the Distress of A Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thievery, for many honest people endure greater hardships with Fortitude. We must therefore seek the Cause elsewhere than in want of Money, for that is the Miser's passion, not the Thief's.
I have therefore proved your Beasonings 111 proportioned, which you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo, Bafael, & the Antique, & of the best living Models. I perceive that your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints,3 which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun, & Happiness is better than Mirth�I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Bidicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel Flatterd when I am told So. What is it sets Homer, Virgil, & Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Beason? Such is True Painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says, "Sense sends over to Imagination before Beason have judged, & Beason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted." See Advancem1 of Learning, Part 2,
P. 47 of first Edition. But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions, & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity. Some Children are Fools, & so are some Old Men. But There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation.
To Engrave after another Painter is infinitely more laborious than to Engrave one's own Inventions. And of the Size you require my price has been Thirty Guineas, & I cannot afford to do it for less. I had Twelve for the Head I sent you as a Specimen; but after my own designs, I could do at least Six times the quantity of labour in the same time, which will account for the difference of price, as also that Chalk Engraving is at least six times as laborious as Aqua tinta. I have no objection to Engraving after another Artist. Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to, & should never have attempted to live by any thing else, If orders had not come in for my Designs & Paintings, which I have the pleasure to tell you are Increasing Every Day.
incarnate, with intention that when his back is 3. Pictures of people with ludicrously exaggerated turned they will murder the mother & her infant." features.
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128 / WILLIAM BLAKE
Thus If I am a Painter, it is not to be attributed to Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting or Engraving. I am Rev*1 Sir Your very obedient servant, William Blake
To George Cumberland4 (Apr. 12, 1827)
Dear Cumberland
I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays. I thank you for the Pains you have taken with Poor Job.5 I know too well that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of The Indefinite, which they Measure by Newton's Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom,6 a Thing that does not Exist. These are Politicians & think that Republican Art7 is Inimical to their Atom. For a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance; a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s]; Strait or Crooked, It is Itself, & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else. Such is Job, but since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another; Certainly a happy state of Agreement, to which I for One do not Agree. God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too, The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus, from supposing Up & Down to be the same Thing, as all Experimentalists must suppose.
You are desirous, I know, to dispose of some of my Works & to make [them] Pleasing. I am obliged to you & to all who do so. But having none remaining of all that I had Printed, I cannot Print more Except at a great loss, for at the time I printed those things I had a whole House to range in; now I am shut up in a Corner, therefore am forced to ask a Price for them that I scarce expect to get from a Stranger. I am now Printing a Set of the Songs of Innocence & Experience for a Friend at Ten Guineas, which I cannot do under Six Months consistent with my other Work, so that I have little hope of doing any more of such things. The Last Work I produced is a Poem Entitled "Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion," but find that to Print it will Cost my Time the amount of Twenty Guineas. One I have Finishd; it contains 100 Plates but it is not likely that I shall get a Customer for it.8
As you wish me to send you a list with the Prices of these things they are as follows: . s d America 6. 6. 0 Europe 6. 6. 0 Visions &c 5. 5. 0 Thel 3. 3. 0 Songs of Inn. & Exp. 10. 10. 0 Urizen 6. 6. 0
4. A businessman who was an old and loyal friend of Blake and a buyer of his illuminated books. Blake wrote this letter only four months before he died on Aug. 4, 1827. 5. Cumberland was trying to interest his friends in buying a set of Blake's engravings, Illustrations of the Book of Job. 6. Isaac Newton's Method of Fluxions (1704) announced his discovery of the infinitesimal calculus. To Blake, Newton was the archrepresentative of materialist philosophy.
7. I.e., a free art, not subject to authoritarian control, and suited to the free citizens of a republic (rather than the subjects of a monarch). 8. This single colored copy of Blake's Jerusalem survives in the Mellon Collection.
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ROBERT BURNS / 129
The Little Card9 I will do as soon as Possible, but when you Consider that I have been reduced to a Skeleton, from which I am slowly recovering, you will I hope have Patience with me.
Flaxman1 is Gone & we must All soon follow, every one to his Own Eternal House, Leaving the Delusive Goddess Nature & her Laws to get into Freedom from all Law of the Members into The Mind, in which every one is King & Priest in his own House. God Send it so on Earth as it is in Heaven.
I am, Dear Sir, Yours Affectionately
WILLIAM BLAKE
9. A small illustrated name card that Blake exe- time and illustrator of Homer and Dante, had died cuted for Cumberland; it was his last engraving. the preceding December. 1. John Flaxman, a well-known sculptor of the ROBERT BURNS
1759-1796
When Robert Burns published his first volume of Poems in 1786, he was immediately hailed by the Edinburgh establishment as an instance of the natural genius, a "Heaven-taught ploughman" whose poems owed nothing to literary study, but instead represented the spontaneous overflow of his native feelings. Burns took care to call attention to those qualities in his verse�the undisciplined energy and rustic simplicity� that suited the temper of an age worried that modern refinement and propriety had undermined the vigor of poetry. But even though he cast himself (in the half- modest, half-defiant words of his Preface to Poems) as someone "unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by rule," Burns was in fact a widely read (although largely self-educated) man and a careful craftsman who turned to two earlier traditions for his poetic models. One of these was an oral tradition of folklore and folk song. The other was the highly developed literary tradition of poetry written in the Scots dialect of English.
His father�William Burnes, as he spelled his name�was a God-fearing and hardworking farmer of Ayrshire, a county in southwestern Scotland, who, unable to make a go of it in a period of hard times and high rents, died in 1784 broken in body and spirit. Robert, with his brother Gilbert, was forced to do the heavy work of a man while still a boy and began to show signs of the heart trouble of which he was to die when only thirty-seven. Although his father had the Scottish esteem for education and saw to it that his sons attended school whenever they could, Burns's education in literature, theology, politics, and philosophy came mainly from his own reading. At the age of fifteen, he fell in love and was inspired by that event to write his first song. "Thus," he said, "with me began Love and Poesy." After he reached maturity, he practiced at both. He began a series of love affairs, fathering in 1785 the first of a number of illegitimate children. He also extended greatly the range and quantity of his attempts at poetry. So rapid was his development that by the time he published the Kilmarnock edition, at the age of twenty-seven, he had written all but a few of his greatest long poems.
The Kilmarnock volume (so named from the town in which it was published) is one of the most remarkable first volumes by any British poet, and it had a great and immediate success. Burns was acclaimed "Caledonia's Bard" and championed by intellectuals and gentlefolk when he visited the city of Edinburgh soon after his book came out. The peasant-poet demonstrated that he could more than hold his own as an urbane conversationalist and debater. But he was also wise enough to realize that once the novelty wore off, his eminence in this society would not endure. He had a
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130 / ROBERT BURNS
fierce pride that was quick to resent any hint of contempt or condescension toward himself as a man of low degree. His sympathies were democratic, and even in 1793 and 1794, when partisans of parliamentary reform were being prosecuted for sedition in Edinburgh and Glasgow, he remained (like William Blake in London) an outspoken admirer of the republican revolutions in America and France. In religion, too, he was a radical. Against the strict Calvinism of the Presbyterian kirk (church) in which he had been raised, Burns was known to profess "the Beligion of Sentiment and Beason." A letter of December 1789, in which he seizes the chance to play a free-thinking Son "of Satan," merrily proclaims his intention to take up a theme that will, he says, be "pregnant with all the stores of Learning, from Moses & Confucius to [Benjamin] Franklin & [Joseph] Priestl[e]y�in short .. . I intend to write Baudy." Burns's satires on the kirk and taste for bawdy vulgarity could offend. Furthermore, his promiscuity gained him considerable notoriety, less because womanizing was out of the common order for the time than because he flaunted it. Many of the friendships that he made in high society fell apart, and Burns's later visits to Edinburgh were less successful than the first.
In 1788 Burns was given a commission as excise officer, or tax inspector, and he settled down with Jean Armour, a former lover, now his wife, at Ellisland, near Dumfries, combining his official duties with farming. This was the fourth farm on which Burns had worked; and when it, like the others, failed, he moved his family to the lively country town of Dumfries. Here he was fairly happy, despite recurrent illness and a chronic shortage of money. He performed his official duties efficiently and was respected by his fellow townspeople and esteemed by his superiors; he was a devoted family man and father; and he accumulated a circle of intimates to whom he could repair for conversation and conviviality. In 1787 James Johnson, an engraver, had enlisted Burns's aid in collecting Scottish folk songs for an anthology called The Scots Musical Museum. Burns soon became the real editor for several volumes of this work, devoting all of his free time to collecting, editing, restoring, and imitating traditional songs, and to writing verses of his own to traditional dance tunes. Almost all of his creative work during the last twelve years of his life went into the writing of songs for the Musical Museum and for George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. This was for Burns a devoted labor of love and patriotism, done anonymously, for which he refused to accept any pay, although badly in need of money; and he continued the work when he was literally on his deathbed.
Because of its use of Scots dialect, the language spoken by most eighteenth-century Scottish people (lower and upper class alike), and because, in addition, of its lyricism and engagement with folk culture, Burns's verse is often said to anticipate William Wordsworth's idea of a poetry founded on "a selection of language really used by men." This account is based primarily on his songs. By far the major portion of the poems that he published under his own name are concerned with men and manners and are written in the literary forms that had been favored by earlier eighteenth- century poets. They include brilliant satire in a variety of modes, a number of fine verse epistles to friends and fellow poets, and one masterpiece of mock-heroic (or at any rate seriocomic) narrative, "Tarn o' Shanter." It can be argued that, next to Pope, Burns is the greatest eighteenth-century master of these literary types. (Byron would later claim those forms for his own generation.) Yet Burns's writings in satire, epistle, and mock-heroic are remote from Pope's in their heartiness and verve, no less than in their dialect and intricate stanza forms. The reason for the difference is that Burns turned for his models not to Horace and the English neoclassic tradition but to the native tradition that had been established in the golden age of Scottish poetry by Bobert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and other Scottish Chaucerians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He knew this literature through his eighteenth-century Scottish predecessors, especially Allan Bamsay and Bobert Fergusson, who had collected some of the old poems and written new ones based on the old models. Burns improved greatly on these predecessors, but he derived from them much that is characteristic in his literary forms, subjects, diction, and stanzas.
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GREEN GROW THE RASHES / 131
Burns's songs, which number more than three hundred, have, however, in themselves been enough to sustain his poetic reputation. They made him, for a start, a central figure for his contemporaries' discussions of how music, valued by them for awakening sympathies that reason could not rouse, might serve as the foundation of a national identity. (William Wordsworth would explore this new notion of "national music"�of ethnically marked melody�in his 1805 poem "The Solitary Reaper.") But beyond being the bard of Scots nationalism, Burns is a songwriter for all English- speaking people. Evidence of that standing is supplied each New Year's Eve, when, moved once again to acknowledge their common bondage to time, men and women join hands and sing "Auld Lang Syne," to an old tune that Burns refitted with his new words.
The texts printed here are based on The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1968).
Green grow the rashes1
Chorus
Green grow the rashes,0 O; rushes Green grow the rashes, O; The sweetest hours that e'er I spend,
Are spent among the lasses, O.
i There's nought but care on ev'ry han', In ev'ry hour that passes, O: What signifies the life o' man, An' 'twere na for the lasses, O.
Chorus
The warly� race may riches chase, worldly An' riches still may fly them, O; An' tho' at last they catch them fast, Their hearts can ne'er enjoy them, O.
Chorus
3 But gie me a canny" hour at e'en, quiet My arms about my Dearie, O; An' warly cares, an' warly men, May a' gae tapsalteerie,0 O! topsy-turvy Chorus
4 For you sae douse,0 ye sneer at this, sober Ye're nought but senseless asses, O: The wisest Man2 the warl' saw, He dearly lov'd the lasses, O.
Chorus
1. Bums's revision of a song long current in a Online, number of versions, most of them bawdy . A record- 2. King Solomon, ing of this song may be found at Norton Literature
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132 / ROBERT BURNS
5 Auld Nature swears, the lovely Dears Her noblest work she classes, O: Her prentice0 han' she try'd on man, apprentice An' then she made the lasses, O.
Chorus
1784 1787
Holy Willie's Prayer1
And send the Godly in a pet to pray�
Pope
Argument
Holy Willie was a rather oldish batchelor Elder in the parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical chattering which ends in tippling Orthodoxy, and for that Spiritualized Bawdry which refines to Liquorish Devotion.� In a Sessional process with a gentleman in Mauchline, a Mr. Gavin Hamilton, Holy Willie, and his priest, Father Auld, after full hearing in the Presbytry of Ayr, came off but second best; owing partly to the oratorical powers of Mr. Robt. Aiken, Mr. Hamilton's Counsel; but chiefly to Mr. Ham- ilton's being one of the most irreproachable and truly respectable characters in the country.�On losing his Process, the Muse overheard him at his devotions as follows�
0 thou that in the heavens does dwell! Wha, as it pleases best thysel, Sends ane to heaven and ten to h-11,
A' for thy glory! 5 And no for ony gude or ill They've done before thee.2
1 bless and praise thy matchless might, When thousands thou has left in night, That I am here before thy sight,
10 For gifts and grace, A burning and a shining light To a' this place.
1. This satire, in the form of a dramatic stanza form known as the "standard Habbie" monologue, was inspired by William Fisher, a self-(named for "The Life and Death of Habbie Simp- righteous elder in the same Ayrshire parish that in son" a ballad in this form by Robert Sempill, a 1785 had forced Burns and Betty Paton to do pub-17th-century poet who, also hailing from the west lic penance in church for "fornication," and is of Scotland, was a countryman of Burns's). In each directed against a basic Calvinist tenet of the old sestet three lines of iambic tetrameter that rhyme Scottish kirk. Holy Willie assumes that he is one aaa are followed by a dimeter rhyming h, another of a small minority, God's "elect"�in other words line of tetrameter rhyming a, and a final dimeter that he has been predestined for grace, no matter rhyming h. Associated at its origins with the trouwhat deeds he does in this world. The sessional badour poetry of Europe, the form came to Scot- processes were court proceedings carried on under land during the Renaissance and had been revived the auspices of the Kirk. The epigraph is from The in the 18th century by Ramsay and Fergusson as Rape of the Lock. a distinctively national Scots measure. 2. Here as elsewhere Burns use the virtuosic
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HOLY WILLIE'S PRAYER / 133
What was I, or my generation, That I should get such exaltation? 15 I, wha deserv'd most just damnation, For broken laws Sax� thousand years ere my creation, six Thro' Adam's cause!
When from my mother's womb I fell, 20 Thou might hae plunged me deep in hell, To gnash my gooms, and weep, and wail,3 In burning lakes, Where damned devils roar and yell Chain'd to their stakes.
25 Yet I am here, a chosen sample, To shew thy grace is great and ample: I'm here, a pillar o' thy temple
Strong as a rock, A guide, a ruler and example 30 To a' thy flock.
O Lord thou kens what zeal I bear, When drinkers drink, and swearers swear, And singin' there, and dancin' here,
Wi' great an' sma'; 35 For I am keepet by thy fear, Free frae them a'.
But yet�O Lord-�confess I must� At times I'm fash'd0 wi' fleshly lust; troubled And sometimes too, in warldly trust
40 Vile Self gets in; But thou remembers we are dust, Defil'd wi' sin.
O Lord�yestreen0�thou kens��wi' Meg� yesterday / knoivest Thy pardon I sincerely beg! 45 O may't ne'er be a living plague, To my dishonor! And I'll ne'er lift a lawless leg Again upon her.
Besides, I farther maun0 avow, must 50 Wi' Leezie's lass, three times�I trow� believe But Lord, that Friday I was fou� drunk
When I cam near her; Or else, thou kens, thy servant true Wad never steer0 her. molest
3. An echo of Matthew 8.12, "the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
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13 4 / ROBER T BURN S 5560 Maybe thou lets this fleshly thorn Buffet thy servant e'en and morn,4 Lest he o'er proud and high should turn, That he's sae gifted; If sae, thy hand maun e'en be borne Untill thou lift it. Lord bless thy Chosen in this place, For here thou has a chosen race: 65But God, confound their stubborn face, And blast their name, Wha bring thy rulers to disgrace And open shame. Lord mind Gaun Hamilton's' deserts! 70He drinks, and swears, and plays at cartes,0Yet has sae mony taking arts Wi' Great and Sma', Frae God's ain priest the people's hearts He steals awa. cards 75And when we chasten'd him therefore, Thou kens how he bred sic a splore,0 And set the warld in a roar disturbance O' laughin at us: Curse thou his basket and his store, Kail� and potatoes. broth soLord hear my earnest cry and prayer Against that Presbytry of Ayr! Thy strong right hand, Lord, make it bare Upon their heads! Lord visit them, and dinna spare, For their misdeeds! 8590 O Lord my God, that glib-tongu'd Aiken! My very heart and flesh are quaking To think how I sat, sweating, shaking, And piss'd wi' dread, While Auld wi' hingin0 lip gaed sneaking And hid his head! hanging 95Lord, in thy day o'vengeance try him! Lord visit him that did employ him! And pass not in thy mercy by them, Nor hear their prayer; But for thy people's sake destroy them, And dinna spare!
4. An echo of 2 Corinthians 12.7, "there was given Willie had brought up on moral charges before the to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan Kirk Session of the Presbytery of Ayr. As Burns to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above mea-explains in the Argument, Hamilton was success- sure." fully defended by his counsel, Robert Aiken 5. Burns's friend Gavin Hamilton, whom Holy (referred to in line 85).
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To A MOUSE / 135
But Lord, remember me and mine Wi' mercies temporal and divine! That I for grace and gear0 may shine, wealth
Excell'd by nane! And a' the glory shall be thine! Amen! Amen!
1789 1789
To a Mouse
On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785'
Wee, sleeket,� cowran, tim'rous beastie, sleek O, what a panic's in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!2 5 I wad be laith� to rin an' chase thee loath Wi' murd'ring pattle!0 plowstaff
I'm truly sorry Man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion,
10 Which makes thee startle, At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An' fellow mortal!
I doubt na, whyles,� but thou may thieve; sometimes What then? poor beastie, thou maun" live! must A daimen-icker in a thrave3
'S a sma' request: I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,� remainder An' never miss't!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's� the win's are strewin! frail walls An' naething, now, to big� a new ane, build
O' foggage0 green! coarse grass An' bleak December's winds ensuin, Baith snell� an' keen! bitter
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, An' weary Winter comin fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel coulter0 past cutter blade Out thro' thy cell.
1. Burns's brother claimed that this poem was 2. With headlong scamper. composed while the poet was actually holding the 3. An occasional ear in twenty-four sheaves. plow.
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136 / ROBERT BURNS
That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble0 stubble Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But� house or hald,4 without To thole� the Winter's sleety dribble, endure An' cranreuch" cauld! hoarfrost
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,� not alone In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men
40 Gang aft agley,5 An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear! An' forward tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!
1785 1786
To a Louse
On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church
Ha! whare ye gaun, ye crowlan0 ferlie!0 crawling / wonder Your impudence protects you sairly:� sorely I canna say but ye strunt0 rarely, strut
Owre gawze and lace; 5 Tho' faith, I fear ye dine but sparely, On sic a place.
Ye ugly, creepan, blastet wonner,� wonder Detested, shunn'd, by saunt an' sinner, How daur ye set your fit� upon her, foot
10 Sae fine a Lady! Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner, On some poor body.
Swith,� in some beggar's haffet0 squattle;0 swift / locks /sprawl There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,0 struggle 15 Wi' ither kindred, jumping cattle, In shoals and nations; Whare horn nor bane1 ne'er daur unsettle, Your thick plantations.
Now haud you there, ye're out o' sight, 20 Below the fatt'rels,0 snug and tight, ribbon ends
4. Hold, holding (i.e., land). 1. I.e., fine-tooth comb made of horn or bone 5. Go oft awry. ("bane").
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AUL D LAN G SYN E / 13 7 Na faith ye yet!2 ye'll no be right, Till ye've got on it, The vera tapmost, towrin height O' Miss's bonnet. My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out, As plump an' gray as onie grozet:00 for some rank, mercurial rozet,� Or fell,� red smeddum,0I'd gie you sic a hearty dose o't, Wad dress your droddum!� gooseberry rosin sharp / powder buttocks 1 wad na been surpriz'd to spy
You on an auld wife's flainen toy,� flannel cap Or aiblins� some bit duddie0 boy, perhaps / ragged On's wylecoat;0 undershirt But Miss's fine Lunardi,3 fye! How daur ye do't?
O Jenny dinna toss your head, An' set your beauties a' abread!0 abroad Ye little ken what cursed speed
The blastie's0 makin! creature's Thae� winks and finger-ends, I dread, those Are notice takin!
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad Iea'e us, And ev'n Devotion!4
1785 1786
Auld Lang Syne1
Should auld acquaintance be forgot And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne!
Chorus
5 For auld lang syne, my jo, For auld lang syne, We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet For auld lang syne.
2. Confound you! flights in the mid-1780s. 3. A balloon-shaped bonnet, named after Vin-4. I.e., even pretended piety. cenzo Lunardi, who made a number of balloon 1. Long ago.
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138 / ROBERT BURNS
And surely ye'll be� your pint stowp!0 pay for / pint cup And surely I'll be mine! And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet, For auld lang syne,
Chorus
We twa hae run about the braes� slopes And pou'd� the gowans0 fine; pulled / daisies But we've wander'd many a weary fitt, Sin� auld lang syne.
Chorus
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn0 stream Frae morning sun till dine;� dinner, noon But seas between us braid0 hae roar'd, broad
Sin auld lang syne.
Chorus
And there's a hand, my trusty fiere!� friend And gie's a hand o' thine! And we'll tak a right gude-willie-waught,� cordial drink For auld lang syne.
Chorus
1788 1796
Afton Water1
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,� slopes Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise; My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
s Thou stock dove whose echo resounds thro' the glen, Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den, Thou green crested lapwing thy screaming forbear, I charge you disturb not my slumbering Fair.
How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,
io Far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills; There daily I wander as noon rises high, My flocks and my Mary's sweet Cot0 in my eye. cottage
How pleasant thy banks and green vallies below, Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow; 15 There oft as mild ev'ning weeps over the lea, The sweet scented birk0 shades my Mary and me. birch
Thy chrystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides, And winds by the cot where my Mary resides;
1. The Afton is a small river in Ayrshire.
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TAM O' SHANTER: A TALE / 139
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave, 20 As gathering sweet flowerets she stems thy clear wave.
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, Flow gently, sweet River, the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
1789 1792
Tam o' Shanter: A Tale1
Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this buke.
Gawin Douglas.
When chapman billies2 leave the street, And drouthy0 neebors neebors meet, thirsty As market-days are wearing late, An' folk begin to tak the gate;0 road
5 While we sit bousing at the nappy,0 strong ale And getting fou� and unco� happy, drunk / very We think na on the lang Scots miles, The mosses, waters, slaps,0 and styles, gaps (in walls) That lie between us and our hame,
10 Whare sits our sulky sullen dame, Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
This truth fand� honest Tam o' Shanter, found As he frae Ayr ae night did canter, 15 (Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses, For honest men and bonny lasses).
O Tam! hadst thou but been sae wise, As ta'en thy ain wife Kate's advice! She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum,0 good-for-nothing
20 A blethering,0 blustering, drunken blellum;0 chattering / babbler That frae November till October, Ae market-day thou was nae sober; That ilka� melder,3 wi' the miller, every
1. This poem, written to order for a book on Scottish antiquities, is based on a witch story told about Alloway Kirk, an old ruin near Burns's house in Ayr. As a mock-heroic rendering of folk material, "Tam o' Shanter" is comparable to The Nun's Priest's Tale of Chaucer. Burns recognized that the poem was his most sustained and finished artistic performance; it discovers "a spice of roguish waggery" but also shows "a force of genius and a finishing polish that I despair of ever excelling." The verve and seriocomic sympathy with which Burns manages this misadventure of a confirmed tippler won Wordsworth, a water drinker, to passionate advocacy against the moralists who objected to Burns's ribaldry: "Who, but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art, ever read without delight the picture which he has drawn of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer, Tam o' Shanter?" ("Letter to a Friend of Burns," 1816). The epigraph is from the prologue to book 6 of Gavin Douglas's 16th-century Scots translation of Virgil's Aeneid. In this book the epic hero Aeneas, soon to be the founder of Rome, descends into the world of the dead.
Scots can be easier to understand when heard than when read. For tips on pronunciation listen to the reading of "Tam o' Shanter" at Norton Literature Online.
2. Peddler fellows. 3. The amount of corn processed at a single grinding.
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14 0 / ROBER T BURN S Thou sat as lang as thou had siller;0 silver, money 25 That every naig� was ca'd� a shoe on, nag I driven The smith and thee gat roaring fou on; That at the Lord's house, even on Sunday, Thou drank wi' Kirkton Jean till Monday. She prophesied that late or soon, 30 Thou would be found deep drown'd in Doon; Or catch'd wi' warlocks in the mirk,� night By Alloway's auld haunted kirk. Ah, gentle dames! it gars� me greet0 makes / weep To think how mony counsels sweet, 35 How mony lengthen'd sage advices, The husband frae the wife despises! But to our tale: Ae market-night, Tam had got planted unco right; Fast by an ingle,0 bleezing0 finely, fireplace / blazing 40 Wi' reaming swats,0 that drank divinely; foaming new ale And at his elbow, Souter0 Johnny, shoemaker His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony; Tam lo'ed him like a vera brither; They had been fou for weeks thegither. 45 The night drave on wi' sangs and clatter; And ay the ale was growing better: The landlady and Tam grew gracious, Wi' favours secret, sweet, and precious: The Souter tauld his queerest stories; 50 The landlord's laugh was ready chorus: The storm without might rair� and rustle, Tam did na mind the storm a whistle. Care, mad to see a man sae happy, E'en drown'd himsel amang the nappy: 55 As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure, The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure: Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, O'er a' the ills o' life victorious! But pleasures are like poppies spread, 60 You seize the flower, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white�then melts for ever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; 65 Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.� Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tam maun� ride; must That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane, 70 That dreary hour, he mounts his beast in; And sic a night he taks the road in, As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in.
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TAM O' SHANTER: A TALE / 141
The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last; The rattling showers rose on the blast; The speedy gleams the darkness swallow'd; Loud, deep, and lang, the thunder bellow'd: That night, a child might understand, The Deil had business on his hand.
Weel mounted on his gray mare, Meg, A better never lifted leg,4 Tam skelpit0 on thro' dub� and mire, slapped / puddle Despising wind, and rain, and fire; Whiles holding fast his gude blue bonnet; Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet; Whiles glowring0 round wi' prudent cares, staring Lest bogles0 catch him unawares. Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whare ghaists0 and houlets0 nightly cry.� ghosts / owls
By this time he was cross the ford, Whare in the snaw, the chapman smoor'd;5 And past the birks� and meilde stane,� birches / big stone Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And thro' the whins, and by the cairn,6 Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Where Mungo's mither hang'd hersel.� Before him Doon pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars thro' the woods; The lightnings flash from pole to pole; Near and more near the thunders roll: When, glimmering thro' the groaning trees, Kirk-Alloway seemed in a bleeze;0 blaze Thro' ilka bore� the beams were glancing; hole And loud resounded mirth and dancing.�
Inspiring bold John Barleycorn! What dangers thou canst make us scorn! Wi' tippeny,7 we fear nae evil; Wi' usquabae,� we'll face the devil!� whisky The swats sae ream'd in Tammie's noddle, Fair play, he car'd na deils a boddle.8 But Maggie stood right sair astonish'd, Till, by the heel and hand admonish'd, She ventured forward on the light; And, vow! Tam saw an unco" sight! strange Warlocks and witches in a dance; Nae cotillion brent0 new frae France, brand
4. Compare this "lifted leg" to Willie's use of the 6. Stones heaped up as a memorial. "Whins": term about himself in line 47 of "Holy Willie's furze (an evergreen shrub). Prayer." Tarn's horse, Meg (also called Maggie), 7. Twopenny (usually of weak beer). occasions the poem's bawdiest wordplay. 8. I.e., he didn't care a farthing about devils (a 5. The peddler smothered. "boddle" is a very small copper coin).
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142 / ROBERT BURNS
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys,9 and reels, Put life and mettle in their heels. A winnock-bunker0 in the east, window seat There sat auld Nick, in shape o' beast; A touzie tyke,� black, grim, and large, shaggy dog To gie them music was his charge: He screw'd the pipes and gart� them skirl,0 made / screech Till roof and rafters a' did dirl.�� rattle Coffins stood round, like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantraip0 slight charm, trick Each in its cauld hand held a light.� By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly� table, holy A murderer's banes in gibbet airns;� irons Twa span-lang,1 wee, unchristened bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape,0 rope Wi' his last gasp his gab� did gape; mouth Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted; Five scymitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's throat had mangled, Whom his ain son o' life bereft, The grey hairs yet stack0 to the heft; stuck Wi' mair o' horrible and awefu', Which even to name wad be unlawfu'.
As Tammie glowr'd, amaz'd, and curious, The mirth and fun grew fast and furious: The piper loud and louder blew; The dancers quick and quicker flew; They reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit,0 joined hands Till ilka carlin0 swat and reekit, old woman And coost her duddies to the wark,2 And linket0 at it in her sark!3 tripped lightly
Now, Tam, O Tam! had thae been queans,0 girls A' plump and strapping in their teens, Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen,0 greasy flannel Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linnen!4 Thir� breeks o' mine, my only pair, these That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair, I wad hae gi'en them off my hurdies,� buttocks For ae blink o' the bonie burdies!0 bonny (pretty) girls
But wither'd beldams,0 auld and droll, hags
160 Rigwoodie0 hags wad spean0 a foal, bony / wean Lowping0 and flinging on a crummock,0 leaping / staff I wonder didna turn thy stomach.
9. Slow Highland dance. 3. Shirt (underclothes). 1. Two spans long (a span is the distance from 4. Very fine linen, woven on a loom with seven- outstretched thumb to little finger). teen hundred strips. 2. Cast off her clothes for the work.
.
TAM O' SHANTER:
But Tam kend what was what fu' brawlie,0 There was ae winsome wench and wawlie0
165 That night enlisted in the core," (Lang after kend on Carrick shore; For mony a beast to dead she shot, And perish'd mony a bony boat, And shook baith meikle corn and bear,0
170 And kept the country-side in fear:) Her cutty0 sark, o' Paisley harn,0 That while a lassie she had worn, In longitude tho' sorely scanty, It was her best, and she was vauntie.0�
175 Ah! little kend thy reverend grannie, That sark she coft� for her wee Nannie, Wi' twa pund Scots ('twas a' her riches), Wad ever grac'd a dance of witches!
But here my Muse her wing maun cour;�
180 Sic flights are far beyond her pow'r; To sing how Nannie lap and flang, (A souple jade� she was, and Strang), And how Tam stood, like ane bewitch'd, And thought his very een� enrich'd;
185 Even Satan glowr'd, and fidg'd fu' fain,5 And hotch'd0 and blew wi' might and main: Till first ae caper, syne0 anither, Tam tint0 his reason a' thegither, And roars out, 'Weel done, Cutty-sark!'
190 And in an instant all was dark: And scarcely had he Maggie rallied, When out the hellish legion sallied.
As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke,� When plundering herds0 assail their byke;�
195 As open0 pussie's mortal foes, When, pop! she starts before their nose; As eager runs the market-crowd, When 'Catch the thief!' resounds aloud; So Maggie runs the witches follow,
200 Wi' mony an eldritch0 skreech and hollow.
Ah, Tam! Ah, Tam! thou'll get thy fairin'!0 In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin! In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin! Kate soon will be a woefu' woman!
205 Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg, And win the key-stane of the brig;6 There at them thou thy tail may toss, A running stream they dare na cross.
A TALE / 143
finely strapping corps
barley
short / yarn
proud
bought
lower
disreputable woman
eyes
jerked then lost
fuss herdsmen / hive begin to bark
unearthly
deserts
5. Fidgeted with pleasure. the benighted traveler, that when he falls in with 6. It is a well known fact that witches, or any evil bogles, whatever danger may be in his going for- spirits, have no power to follow a poor wight any ward, there is much more hazard in turning back farther than the middle of the next running [Burns's note]. "Brig": bridge. stream.�It may be proper likewise to mention to
.
14 4 / ROBER T BURN S 210But ere the key-stane she could make, The fient a tail she had to shake! For Nannie, far before the rest, Hard upon noble Maggie prest, And flew at Tam wi' furious ettle;0 But little wist she Maggie's mettle� 215 Ae spring brought off her master hale,� But left behind her ain gray tail: The carlin claught� her by the rump, And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.7 intent whole clutched Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read, 220 Ilk man and mother's son, take heed: Whene'er to drink you are inclin'd, Or cutty-sarks run in your mind, Think, ye may buy the joys o'er dear, Remember Tam o' Shanter's mare. 1790 1791
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation
Fareweel to a' our Scotish fame, Fareweel our ancient glory; Fareweel even to the Scotish name, Sae fam'd in martial story! 5 Now Sark rins� o'er the Solway sands, runs And Tweed rins to the ocean, To mark whare England's province stands,. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
What force or guile could not subdue, 10 Thro' many warlike ages, Is wrought now by a coward few, For hireling traitors' wages. The English steel we could disdain, Secure in valor's station; 15 But English gold has been our bane, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
O would, or I had seen the day That treason thus could sell us, My auld grey head had lien in clay, 20 Wi' BRUCE and loyal WALLACE!' But pith and power,0 till my last hour, with all my strength I'll mak this declaration; We're bought and sold for English gold, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
1792
7. I.e., she had no tail left at all. 1. For Bruce and Wallace, see the notes to the next poem.
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A RED, RED ROSE / 145
Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn1
[SCOTS, WHA HAE]
Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace2 bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed,�
Or to victorie.�
5 Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour; See approach proud Edward's power,
Chains and Slaverie.�
Wha will be a traitor-knave? 10 Wha can fill a coward's grave? Wha sae base as be a Slave? �Let him turn and flie:�
Wha for Scotland's king and law, Freedom's sword will strongly draw, 15 Free-man stand, or Free-man fa', Let him follow me.�
By Oppression's woes and pains! By your Sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins,
20 But they shall be free!
Lay the proud Usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow!
Let us Do�or Die!!!
1793 1794,1815
A Red, Red Rose1
O my Luve's like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June; O my Luve's like the melodie That's sweetly played in tune.
5 As fair art thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I;
1. Burns's words are set to the old tune to which, the fact that songs like these, transmitted aurally, it was said, Robert Bruces Scottish army had were more likely than compositions in other modes marched when it went to battle against the English to slip past the scrutiny of a censorious govern- invaders in 1314. This marching song is at once a ment, historical reconstruction and an anthem for the 2. Sir William Wallace (ca. 1272-1305), the great Revolutionary 1790s. Burns's turn to songwriting Scottish warrior in the wars against the English. in these last few years of his life might, the critic 1. Like many of Burns's lyrics, this one incorpo- Marilyn Butler has suggested, have had to do with rates elements from several current folk songs.
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14 6 / ROBER T BURN S And I will love thee still, my Dear, Till a' the seas gang dry. 10Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun: O I will love thee still, my Dear, While the sands o' life shall run. 15And fare thee weel, my only Luve! And fare thee weel, a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho' it were ten thousand mile! 1794 1796
Song: For a' that and a' that1
Is there, for honest Poverty That hangs his head, and a' that; The coward-slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a' that! 5 For a' that, and a' that, Our toils obscure, and a' that, The rank is but the guinea's stamp,0 inscription on a coin The Man's the gowd� for a' that. gold
What though on hamely fare we dine, 10 Wear hodden grey,2 and a' that. Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A Man's a Man for a' that. For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that; 15 The honest man, though e'er sae poor, Is king o' men for a' that.
Ye see yon birkie0 ca'd a lord, fellow Wha struts, and stares, and a' that, Though hundreds worship at his word, 20 He's but a cooP for a' that. dolt For a' that, and a' that, His ribband, star and a' that, The man of independant mind, He looks and laughs at a' that.
25 A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon� his might, above Guid faith he mauna fa' that!3
1. This song was set to a dance tune, known as 2. A coarse cloth of undyed wool. Lady Macintosh's Reel, that Burns had drawn on 3. Must not claim that. for previous songs.
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SONG : FO R A ' THA T AND A ' THA T / 14 7 boFor a' that, and a' that, Their dignities, and a' that, The pith o' Sense, and pride o' Worth, Are higher rank than a' that. 3540Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a' that, That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth Shall bear the gree,� and a' that. For a' that, and a' that, It's coming yet for a' that, That Man to Man the warld o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that. win the prize 1795 1795
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e Revolution Controversy and tke
"Spirit o f tke A^e"
In a letter to Byron in 1816, Percy Shelley called the French Revolution "the master theme of the epoch in which we live"; and in various letters and essays, he declared that, as the result of the repercussions of the Revolution, the literature of England "has arisen as it were from a new birth," and that "the electric life that burns" within the great poets of the time expresses "less their spirit than the spirit of the age." (See, for example, the concluding paragraph of Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," page 849.) With these judgments many of Shelley's contemporaries concurred. Writers during Shelley's lifetime were obsessed with the possibility of a drastic and inclusive change in the human condition; and the works of the period cannot be understood historically without awareness of the extent to which their distinctive themes, plot forms, imagery, and modes of imagining and feeling were shaped first by the boundless promise, then by the tragedy, of the great events in neighboring France. And for a number of young poets in the early years (1789�93), the enthusiasm for the Revolution had the impetus and intensity of a religious awakening, because they interpreted the events in France in accordance with the apocalyptic prophecies in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures; that is, they viewed these events as fulfilling the promise, guaranteed by an infallible text, that a short period of retributive and cleansing violence would usher in an era of universal peace and felicity equivalent to a restored Paradise. (See "The French Revolution: Apocalyptic Expectations" at Norton Literature Online.) Even after what they considered the failure of the revolutionary promise�signaled by the execution of the king and queen, the massacres during the Reign of Terror under
Robespierre, and later the wars of imperial conquest under Napoleon�these poets did not surrender their hope for a radical transformation of the political and social world. Instead, they transferred the basis of that hope from violent political revolution to an inner revolution in the moral and imaginative nature of the human race.
The Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille and freeing of a handful of political prisoners by an angry mob of Parisians on July 14, 1789. A month later, the new French National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Six weeks after that (in early October), citizens marched to the royal palace at Versailles, southwest of the city, and arrested King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, confining them to the Tuileries palace in Paris. These happenings were quickly reported in the London newspapers. The British liberals applauded; the radicals were ecstatic; many ordinary people were confused by the events, which seemed to promise improvement of the common lot but at the cost of toppling long-standing traditions of royalty and aristocracy.
One reaction on the English side of the Channel was the so-called war of pamphlets, initiated by Richard Price's sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, which he delivered on November 4, 1789, a month after the imprisonment of the French king and queen. The controversy accelerated in the wake of Edmund Burke's response to Price a year later, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which itself drew more than fifty further responses, among which the two most famous are Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. The works of Burke and Wollstonecraft and part 1 of Paine's Rights appeared in a very short span, from November 1790 to March 1791.
148
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PRICE: ON THE LOVE OF OUR COUNTRY / 149
All four writers in this section are concerned with the same questions: justification of hereditary rule, ownership of property, interpretation of the English constitution, and the "rights of men"�and women�in things such as (in Price's words) "liberty of conscience in religious matters," the "right to resist power when abused," the "right to chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves." But the extracts have been chosen mainly to illustrate the tones of the debate: celebratory in Price, congratulating himself and his audience on having lived to see "Thirty Millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice"; blatantly sensationalist in Burke, depicting the rude treatment of the king and especially the queen, in her nightgown ("almost naked"), "forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcases"; forthrightly contemptuous in Wollstonecraft, who describes Burke's work as "many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb"; basically pointed and plain in Paine: "I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled and contracted for, by the . . . assumed authority of the dead."
RICHARD PRICE
Richard Price (1723� 1791) was a Unitarian minister in London and a writer on moral philosophy, population, and the national debt, among other topics. The full title of his sermon, which prompted Burke's Reflections and in turn the scores of responses to Burke, is A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, J 789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. The London Bevolution Society had been founded a year earlier to mark the hundredth anniversary of the "bloodless" Glorious Revolution of 1688, which ended the short reign of King James II and produced the Declaration of Right, establishing a limited monarchy and guaranteeing the civil rights of privileged classes. The first two-thirds of the extracts given here commemorate that Revolution; in the final third, beginning "What an eventful period is this!" Price greets with religious fervor "two other Revolutions, both glorious," the American and the French. The Discourse went through six editions in its first year of publication.
From. A Discourse on the Love of Our Country
We are met to thank God for that event in this country to which the name of TH E REVOLUTION has been given; and which, for more than a century, it has been usual for the friends of freedom, and more especially Protestant Dissenters, under the title of the REVOLUTION SOCIETY, to celebrate with expressions of joy and exultation. * * * By a bloodless victory, the fetters which despotism had been long preparing for us were broken; the rights of the people were asserted, a tyrant expelled, and a Sovereign of our own choice appointed in his room. Security was given to our property, and our consciences were emancipated. The bounds of free enquiry were enlarged; the volume in which are the words of eternal life, was laid more open to our examination; and that aera of light and liberty was introduced among us, by which we have been made an example to other kingdoms, and became the instructors of the world.
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15 0 / THE REVOLUTION CONTROVERSY
Had it not been for this deliverance, the probability is, that, instead of being thus distinguished, we should now have been a base people, groaning under the infamy and misery of popery and slavery. Let us, therefore, offer thanksgivings to God, the author of all our blessings. * * *
It is well known that King James was not far from gaining his purpose; and that probably he would have succeeded, had he been less in a hurry. But he was a fool as well as a bigot. He wanted courage as well as prudence; and, therefore, fled, and left us to settle quietly for ourselves that constitution of government which is now our boast. We have particular reason, as Protestant Dissenters, to rejoice on this occasion. It was at this time we were rescued from persecution, and obtained the liberty of worshipping God in the manner we think most acceptable to him. It was then our meeting houses were opened, our worship was taken under the protection of the law, and the principles of toleration gained a triumph. We have, therefore, on this occasion, peculiar reasons for thanksgiving.�But let us remember that we ought not to satisfy ourselves with thanksgivings. Our gratitude, if genuine, will be accompanied with endeavours to give stability to the deliverance our country has obtained, and to extend and improve the happiness with which the Revolution has blest us.�Let us, in particular, take care not to forget the principles of the Revolution. This Society has, very properly, in its Reports, held out these principles, as an instruction to the public. I will only take notice of the three following:
First: The right to liberty of conscience in religious matters.
Secondly: The right to resist power when abused. And,
Thirdly: The right to chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves.
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I would farther direct you to remember, that though the Revolution was a great work, it was by no means a perfect work; and that all was not then gained which was necessary to put the kingdom in the secure and complete possession of the blessings of liberty.�In particular, you should recollect, that the toleration then obtained was imperfect. It included only those who could declare their faith in the doctrinal articles of the church of England. It has, indeed, been since extended, but not sufficiently; for there still exist penal laws on account of religious opinions, which (were they carried into execution) would shut up many of our places of worship, and silence and imprison some of our ablest and best men.�The TEST LAWS are also still in force; and deprive of eligibility to civil and military offices, all who cannot conform to the established worship. It is with great pleasure I find that the body of Protestant Dissenters, though defeated in two late attempts to deliver their country from this disgrace to it, have determined to persevere. Should they at last succeed, they will have the satisfaction, not only of removing from themselves a proscription they do not deserve, but of contributing to lessen the number of public iniquities. For I cannot call by a gentler name, laws which convert an ordinance appointed by our Saviour to commemorate his death, into an instrument of oppressive policy, and a qualification of rakes and atheists for civil posts.�I have said, should they succeed�but perhaps I ought not to suggest a doubt about their success. And, indeed, when I consider that in Scotland the established church is defended by no such test�-that in Ireland it has been abolished�that in a great neighbouring country it has been declared to be an indefeasible right of all citizens to be equally eligible to public offices�that
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PRICE: ON THE LOVE OF OUR COUNTRY / 151
in the same kingdom a professed Dissenter from the established church holds the first office in the state�that in the Emperor's dominions Jews have been lately admitted to the enjoyment of equal privileges with other citizens�and that in this very country, a Dissenter, though excluded from the power of executing the laws, yet is allowed to be employed in making them.�When, I say, I consider such facts as these, I am disposed to think it impossible that the enemies of the repeal of the Test Laws should not soon become ashamed, and give up their opposition.
But the most important instance of the imperfect state in which the Revolution left our constitution, is the inequality of our representation. I think, indeed, this defect in our constitution so gross and so palpable, as to make it excellent chiefly in form and theory. You should remember that a representation in the legislature of a kingdom is the basis of constitutional liberty in it, and of all legitimate government; and that without it a government is nothing but an usurpation. When the representation is fair and equal, and at the same time vested with such powers as our House of Commons possesses, a kingdom may be said to govern itself, and consequently to possess true liberty. When the representation is partial, a kingdom possesses liberty only partially; and if extremely partial, it only gives a semblance of liberty; but if not only extremely partial, but corruptly chosen, and under corrupt influence after being chosen, it becomes a nuisance, and produces the worst of all forms of government�a government by corruption, a government carried on and supported by spreading venality and profligacy through a kingdom. May heaven preserve this kingdom from a calamity so dreadful! It is the point of depravity to which abuses under such a government as ours naturally tend, and the last stage of national unhappiness. We are, at present, I hope, at a great distance from it. But it cannot be pretended that there are no advances towards it, or that there is no reason for apprehension and alarm.
* * *
What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to it; and I could almost say, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation [Luke 2.29�30]. I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge, which has undermined superstition and error�I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever; and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it.�I have lived to see THIRTY MILLIONS of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects.�After sharing in the benefits of one Revolution, I have been spared to be a witness to two other Revolutions, both glorious. And now, methinks, I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.
Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defence! The times are auspicious. Your labours have not been in vain. Behold kingdoms, admonished by you, starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors! Behold, the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates Europe!
Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of
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slavish governments, and slavish hierarchies! Call no more (absurdly and wickedly) REFORMATION, innovation. You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.
1789
EDMUND BURKE
The great statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729�1797) read Price's Discourse in January 1790 and immediately began drafting his Reflections on the Revolution in France as a reply in the form of a letter (as the lengthy subtitle describes it) "Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris" (a Frenchman who had written to Burke soliciting the British parliamentarian's opinion of events in his country). The work was published at the beginning of November and was an instant best- seller: thirteen thousand copies were purchased in the first five weeks, and by the following September it had gone through eleven editions. Clearly, part of its appeal to contemporary readers lay in the highly wrought accounts of the mob's violent treatment of the French king and queen (who at the time Burke was writing were imprisoned in Paris and would be executed three years later, in January and October 1793). Reflections has become the classic, most eloquent statement of British conservatism favoring monarchy, aristocracy, property, hereditary succession, and the wisdom of the ages. Earlier in his career Burke had championed many liberal causes and sided with the Americans in their war for independence; opponents and allies alike were surprised at the strength of his conviction that the French Revolution was
a disaster and the revolutionists "a swinish multitude."
From Reflections on the Revolution in France
* * * All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.
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You will observe, that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right,1 it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our lib
1. The Magna Carta, the "great charter" of stone of the English constitution, was a product of English personal and political liberty, dates from the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 1215. The Declaration of Right, another corner
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BURKE: ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE / 153
erties, as an entailed inheritance2 derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.
This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain3 for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.
Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adher
2. An entail is a legal device that prescribes the decisions about that property. line of succession along which a piece of family 3. A legal term (literally, "dead hand") for the per- property must pass and that thereby prevents petual holding of lands by an ecclesiastical or other future generations of heirs from making their own corporation.
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ing to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters4 cannot produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.
* * &
Far am I from denying in theory; full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership, has as good a right to it, as he that has five hundred pound has to his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock; and as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention.
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* * * History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget, either those events, or the aera of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of mankind. History will record, that on the morning of the 6th of October 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, and troubled melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first startled by the voice of the centinel at her door, who cried out to her, to save herself by flight�that this was the last proof of fidelity
4. Persons reasoning with clever and fallacious arguments (from the name given to a sect of paid teachers of rhetoric and philosophy in ancient Athens).
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BURKE: ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE / 155
he could give�that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment.
This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcases. Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom. Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter, which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king's body guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publickly dragged to the block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were, under a guard, composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a Bastile5 for kings.
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I hear that the august person, who was the principal object of our preacher's triumph,6 though he supported himself, felt much on that shameful occasion. As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards of his person, that were massacred in cold blood about him; as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his civilized subjects, and to be more grieved for them, than solicitous for himself. It derogates little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to the honor of his humanity. I am very sorry to say it, very sorry indeed, that such personages are in a situation in which it is not unbecoming in us to praise the virtues of the great.
I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that day (one is interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well) and that she bears all the succeeding days, that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage;7 that like her she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the
5. The Bastille was France's political prison. arch surrendering himself to his subjects." "August 6. A reference to Price's exclamation, in the final person": King Louis XVI. selection printed above from A Discourse on the 7. Marie Antoinette was the daughter of Maria Love of Our Country, that he has lived to see the Theresa, empress of Austria. French "king led in triumph .. . an arbitrary mon
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dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace,8 and that if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness,9 at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,�glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.�But the age of chivalry is gone.�That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the antient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this, which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.
But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as
8. Like the women of classical Rome when they suffer the disgrace of rape. endured defeat, Marie Antoinette, Burke suggests, 9. I.e., wife of the dauphin, who was heir to the will kill herself to preserve her chastity rather than throne of France.
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necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex1 in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide; and if the people are by any chance, or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern, which each individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states. Now satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto.2 There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert antient institutions, has destroyed antient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty,3 which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honor, and the honor of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.
When antient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe undoubtedly, taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your Revolution was compleated. How much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume, that, on the whole, their
operation was beneficial. 1. Homage paid to women. 2. It is not enough for poems to have beauty; they must be sweet, tender, affecting (Latin; Horace's Ars3. PoeticaFidelity 99). of a vassal or feudal tenant to his lord.
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We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood; and paid it with usury,4 by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to antient manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles. With you, for the present at least, they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter?
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity in all the proceedings of the assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.
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4. Interest. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
The first of the many published replies to Burke's Reflections was by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), who appears elsewhere in this anthology as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the landmark work in the history of feminism, and Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Toward the end of 1790, when Burke's Reflections came out, she was working
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in London as a writer and translator for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Reading Burke, she was outraged at the weakness of his arguments and the exaggerated rhetoric with which he depicted the revolutionists as violators of royalty and womanhood. Always a rapid writer, she composed her reply, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a matter of days, and Johnson's printer set it in type as fast as the sheets of manuscript were turned in. It was published anonymously in November, less than a month after Burke's Reflections first appeared, and a second edition (this time with her name on the title page) was called for almost immediately.
From A Vindication of the Rights of Men
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Mr. Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution first engaged my attention as the transient topic of the day; and reading it more for amusement than information, my indignation was roused by the sophistical arguments, that every moment crossed me, in the questionable shape of natural feelings and common sense.
Many pages of the following letter were the effusions of the moment; but, swelling imperceptibly to a considerable size, the idea was suggested of publishing a short vindication of the Rights of Men.
Not having leisure or patience to follow this desultory writer through all the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh game, I have confined my strictures, in a great measure, to the grand principles at which he has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb.
A Letter to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke
Sir,
It is not necessary, with courtly insincerity, to apologize to you for thus intruding on your precious time, nor to profess that I think it an honor to discuss an important subject with a man whose literary abilities have raised him to notice in the state. I have not yet learned to twist my periods, nor, in the equivocal idiom of politeness, to disguise my sentiments, and imply what I should be afraid to utter: if, therefore, in the course of this epistle, I chance to express contempt, and even indignation, with some emphasis, I beseech you to believe that it is not a flight of fancy; for truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and, in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful. But I war not with an individual when I contend for the rights of men and the liberty of reason. You see I do not condescend to cull my words to avoid the invidious phrase, nor shall I be prevented from giving a manly definition of it, by the flimsy ridicule which a lively fancy has interwoven with the present acceptation of the term. Reverencing the rights of humanity, I shall dare to assert them; not intimidated by the horse laugh that you have raised, or waiting till time has wiped away the compassionate tears which you have elaborately labored to excite.
From the many just sentiments interspersed through the letter before me, and from the whole tendency of it, I should believe you to be a good, though a vain man, if some circumstances in your conduct did not render the inflexibility of your integrity doubtful; and for this vanity a knowledge of human nature enables me to discover such extenuating circumstances, in the very
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texture of your mind, that I am ready to call it amiable, and separate the public from the private character.
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Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, Sir, reason together; and, believe me, I should not have meddled with these troubled waters, in order to point out your inconsistencies, if your wit had not burnished up some rusty, baneful opinions, and swelled the shallow current of ridicule till it resembled the flow of reason, and presumed to be the test of truth.
I shall not attempt to follow you through "horse-way and foot-path;"1 but, attacking the foundation of your opinions, I shall leave the superstructure to find a center of gravity on which it may lean till some strong blast puffs it into the air; or your teeming fancy, which the ripening judgment of sixty years has not tamed, produces another Chinese erection,2 to stare, at every turn, the plain country people in the face, who bluntly call such an airy edifice�a folly.
The birthright of man, to give you, Sir, a short definition of this disputed right, is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact.
Liberty, in this simple, unsophisticated sense, I acknowledge, is a fair idea that has never yet received a form in the various governments that have been established on our beauteous globe; the demon of property has ever been at hand to encroach on the sacred rights of men, and to fence round with awful pomp laws that war with justice. But that it results from the eternal foundation of right�from immutable truth�who will presume to deny, that pretends to rationality�if reason has led them to build their morality3 and religion on an everlasting foundation�the attributes of God?
I glow with indignation when I attempt, methodically, to unravel your slavish paradoxes, in which I can find no fixed first principle to refute; I shall not, therefore, condescend to shew where you affirm in one page what you deny in another; and how frequently you draw conclusions without any previous premises:�it would be something like cowardice to fight with a man who had never exercised the weapons with which his opponent chose to combat, and irksome to refute sentence after sentence in which the latent spirit of tyranny appeared.
I perceive, from the whole tenor of your Reflections, that you have a mortal antipathy to reason; but, if there is any thing like argument, or first principles, in your wild declamation, behold the result:�that we are to reverence the rust of antiquity, and term the unnatural customs, which ignorance and mistaken self-interest have consolidated, the sage fruit of experience: nay, that, if we do discover some errors, our feelings should lead us to excuse, with blind love, or unprincipled filial affection, the venerable vestiges of ancient days. These are gothic4 notions of beauty�the ivy is beautiful, but, when it insidiously destroys the trunk from which it receives support, who would not grub it up?
Further, that we ought cautiously to remain for ever in frozen inactivity, because a thaw, whilst it nourishes the soil, spreads a temporary inundation; and the fear of risking any personal present convenience should prevent a
1. Shakespeare's King Lear 4.1.57. sive word generalizes; but as the charge of atheism 2. Chinese pagodas were popular ornaments in has been very freely banded about in the letter I late-18th-century British landscaping. am considering, I wish to guard against misrepre3. As religion is included in my idea of morality, I sentation [Wollstonecraft's note]. should not have mentioned the term without spec-4. Barbarous. ifying all the simple ideas which that comprehen
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struggle for the most estimable advantages. This is sound reasoning, I grant, in the mouth of the rich and short-sighted.
Yes, Sir, the strong gained riches, the few have sacrificed the many to their vices; and, to be able to pamper their appetites, and supinely exist without exercising mind or body, they have ceased to be men.�Lost to the relish of true pleasure, such beings would, indeed, deserve compassion, if injustice was not softened by the tyrant's plea�necessity; if prescription was not raised as an immortal boundary against innovation. Their minds, in fact, instead of being cultivated, have been so warped by education, that it may require some ages to bring them back to nature, and enable them to see their true interest, with that degree of conviction which is necessary to influence their conduct.
The civilization which has taken place in Europe has been very partial, and, like every custom that an arbitrary point of honour has established, refines the manners at the expence of morals, by making sentiments and opinions current in conversation that have no root in the heart, or weight in the cooler resolves of the mind.�And what has stopped its progress?�hereditary property� hereditary honors. The man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he was born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedo's5 touch;�or a being, with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.
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It is necessary emphatically to repeat, that there are rights which men inherit at their birth, as rational creatures, who were raised above the brute creation by their improvable faculties; and that, in receiving these, not from their forefathers but, from God, prescription can never undermine natural rights.
A father may dissipate his property without his child having any right to complain;�but should he attempt to sell him for a slave, or fetter him with laws contrary to reason; nature, in enabling him to discern good from evil, teaches him to break the ignoble chain, and not to believe that bread becomes flesh, and wine blood, because his parents swallowed the Eucharist with this blind persuasion.
There is no end to this implicit submission to authority-�some where it must stop, or we return to barbarism; and the capacity of improvement, which gives us a natural sceptre on earth, is a cheat, an ignis-fatuus,6 that leads us from inviting meadows into bogs and dung-hills. And if it be allowed that many of the precautions, with which any alteration was made, in our government, were prudent, it rather proves its weakness than substantiates an opinion of the soundness of the stamina, or the excellence of the constitution.
But on what principle Mr. Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive; for the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation. Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity, and prudent attention to self-interest, to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished; and, because our ignorant forefathers,
5. Stingray, a fish with a whiplike tail that gives an the wisp) that is said to appear in marshy land- electric shock to those it touches. scapes and lead travelers off the path of safety. 6. The phosphorescent light (also known as will o*
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not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured.�Security of property! Behold, in a few words, the definition of English liberty. And to this selfish principle every nobler one is sacrificed.�The Briton takes place of the man, and the image of God is lost in the citizen! But it is not that enthusiastic flame which in Greece and Rome consumed every sordid passion: no, self is the focus; and the disparting rays rise not above our foggy atmosphere. But softly�it is only the property of the rich that is secure; the man who lives by the sweat of his brow has no asylum from oppression; the strong man may enter�when was the castle of the poor sacred? and the base informer steal him from the family that depend on his industry for subsistence.
* # 3 But, among all your plausible arguments, and witty illustrations, your contempt for the poor always appears conspicuous, and rouses my indignation. The following paragraph in particular struck me, as breathing the most tyrannic spirit, and displaying the most factitious feelings. "Good order is the foundation of all good things. To be enabled to acquire, the people, without being servile, must be tractable and obedient. The magistrate must have his reverence, the laws their authority. The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labor to obtain what by labor can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice. Of this consolation, whoever deprives them, deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation. He that does this, is the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy, of the poor and wretched; at the same time that, by his wicked speculations, he exposes the fruits of successful industry, and the accumulations of fortune, (ah! there's the rub)7 to the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed, and the unprosperous."
This is contemptible hard-hearted sophistry, in the specious form of humility, and submission to the will of Heaven.-�It is, Sir, possible to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next. They have a right to more comfort than they at present enjoy; and more comfort might be afforded them, without encroaching on the pleasures of the rich: not now waiting to enquire whether the rich have any right to exclusive pleasures. What do I say?�encroaching! No; if an intercourse were established between them, it would impart the only true pleasure that can be snatched in this land of shadows, this hard school of moral discipline.
I know, indeed, that there is often something disgusting in the distresses of poverty, at which the imagination revolts, and starts back to exercise itself in the more attractive Arcadia of fiction. The rich man builds a house, art and taste give it the highest finish. His gardens are planted, and the trees grow to recreate the fancy of the planter, though the temperature of the climate may rather force him to avoid the dangerous damps they exhale, than seek the umbrageous retreat. Every thing on the estate is cherished but man;�yet, to
7. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 3.1.67. The "rub" is the flaw in the reasoning.
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contribute to the happiness of man, is the most sublime of all enjoyments. But if, instead of sweeping pleasure-grounds, obelisks, temples, and elegant cottages, 8 as objects for the eye, the heart was allowed to beat true to nature, decent farms would be scattered over the estate, and plenty smile around. Instead of the poor being subject to the griping hand of an avaricious steward, they would be watched over with fatherly solicitude, by the man whose duty and pleasure it was to guard their happiness, and shield from rapacity the beings who, by the sweat of their brow, exalted him above his fellows.
I could almost imagine I see a man thus gathering blessings as he mounted the hill of life; or consolation, in those days when the spirits lag, and the tired heart finds no pleasure in them. It is not by squandering alms that the poor can be relieved, or improved�it is the fostering sun of kindness, the wisdom that finds them employments calculated to give them habits of virtue, that meliorates their condition. Love is only the fruit of love; condescension and authority may produce the obedience you applaud; but he has lost his heart of flesh who can see a fellow-creature humbled before him, and trembling at the frown of a being, whose heart is supplied by the same vital current, and whose pride ought to be checked by a consciousness of having the same infirmities.
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8. A reference to the vogue for picturesque landscaping on aristocratic estates. THOMAS PAINE
Although he was born and lived his first thirty-seven years in England, Thomas Paine (1737�1809) enters the debate as a visitor from America, where by writing Common Sense (1776) and the sixteen Crisis pamphlets, beginning "These are the times that try men's souls" (1776�83), he had served as the most effective propagandist for American independence. His Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution, published in March 1791 with a dedication "To George Washington, President of the United States of America," has the full weight of the American revolutionary experience behind it and is the strongest statement against hereditary monarchy of any of the works replying to Burke in this "war of pamphlets." Paine published a second part of Rights of Man the following year and, when charged with treason by the British, fled to France, where he was made a citizen and a member of the Convention. With the fall of the more moderate Girondists, he was imprisoned by the Jacobins for a year in 1793�94, during which he wrote his last famous work, The Age of Reason (1794).
From Rights of Man
Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the people of France, nor the National Assembly, were
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troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and why Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy.
There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French nation and the National Assembly. Every thing which rancor, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, are poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr. Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.
Hitherto Mr. Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the opinions he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the ingenuity of his hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it furnishes him with new pretences to go on. There was a time when it was impossible to make Mr. Burke believe there would be any revolution in France. His opinion then was, that the French had neither spirit to undertake it, nor fortitude to support it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning it.
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There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controuling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.�Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to controul them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or controul those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered.
I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor for nor against any party here or elsewhere. That which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where then does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead; and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living. * * 4
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"We have seen," says Mr. Burke, "the French rebel against a mild and lawful Monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant."�This is one among a thousand other instances, in which Mr. Burke shews that he is ignorant of the springs and principles of the French revolution.
It was not against Louis the XVIth, but against the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted. These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the augean stable1 of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by any thing short of a complete and universal revolution. When it becomes necessary to do a thing, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it. That crisis was then arrived, and there remained no choice but to act with determined vigor, or not to act at all. The King was known to be the friend of the nation, and this circumstance was favorable to the enterprise. Perhaps no man bred up in the style of an absolute King, ever possessed a heart so little disposed to the exercise of that species of power as the present King of France. But the principles of the government itself still remained the same. The Monarch and the monarchy were distinct and separate things; and it was against the established despotism of the latter, and not against the person or principles of the former, that the revolt commenced, and the revolution has been carried.
Mr. Burke does not attend to the distinction between men and principles; and therefore, he does not see that a revolt may take place against the despotism of the latter, while there lies no charge of despotism against the former.
The natural moderation of Louis the XVIth contributed nothing to alter the hereditary despotism of the monarchy. All the tyrannies of former reigns, acted under that hereditary despotism, were still liable to be revived in the hands of a successor. It was not the respite of a reign that would satisfy France, enlightened as she was then become. A casual discontinuance of the practice of despotism, is not a discontinuance of its principles; the former depends on the virtue of the individual who is in immediate possession of power; the latter, on the virtue and fortitude of the nation. In the case of Charles I and James II of England, the revolt was against the personal despotism of the men;2 whereas in France, it was against the hereditary despotism of the established government. But men who can consign over the rights of posterity for ever on the authority of a moldy parchment, like Mr. Burke, are not qualified to judge of this revolution. It takes in a field too vast for their views to explore, and proceeds with a mightiness of reason they cannot keep pace with.
But there are many points of view in which this revolution may be considered. When despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not in the person of the King only that it resides. It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice, and in fact. It has its standard every where. Every office and department has its despotism founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille,3 and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the King, divides and subdivides itself into a thousand shapes and
1. King Augeas's stable, housing three thousand executed in 1649. His son, James II, was oxen and neglected for decades, was a classical dethroned in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. symbol of filth and corruption. Hercules cleaned it 3. France's political prison (where the French by changing the course of a river. Revolution began on July 14, 1789). 2. Charles I was overthrown by the Civil War and
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forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of duty, and tyrannises under the pretence of obeying.
When a man reflects on the condition which France was in from the nature of her government, he will see other causes for revolt than those which immediately- connect themselves with the person or character of Louis XVI. There were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France, which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. Between the monarchy, the parliament, and the church, there was a rivalshi-p of despotism; besides the feudal despotism operating locally, and the ministerial despotism operating every where. But Mr. Burke, by considering the King as the only possible object of a revolt, speaks as if France was a village, in which every thing that passed must be known to its commanding officer, and no oppression could be acted but what he could immediately control. Mr. Burke might have been in the Bastille his whole life, as well under Louis XVI as Louis XIV and neither the one nor the other have known that such a man as Mr. Burke existed. The despotic principles of the government were the same in both reigns, though the dispositions of the men were as remote as tyranny and benevolence.
What Mr. Burke considers as a reproach to the French Revolution (that of bringing it forward under a reign more mild than the preceding ones), is one of its highest honors. The revolutions that have taken place in other European countries, have been excited by personal hatred. The rage was against the man, and he became the victim. But, in the instance of France, we see a revolution generated in the rational contemplation of the rights of man, and distinguishing from the beginning between persons and principles.
But Mr. Burke appears to have no idea of principles, when he is contemplating governments. "Ten years ago," says he, "I could have felicitated France on her having a government, without enquiring what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered." Is this the language of a rational man? Is it the language of a heart feeling as it ought to feel for the rights and happiness of the human race? On this ground, Mr. Burke must compliment every government in the world, while the victims who suffer under them, whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence, are wholly forgotten. It is power, and not principles, that Mr. Burke venerates; and under this abominable depravity, he is disqualified to judge between them.�Thus much for his opinion as to the occasions of the French Revolution. * * *
$ * #
As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect. But Mr. Burke should recollect that he is writing History, and not Plays; and that his readers will expect truth, and not the spouting rant of high-toned exclamation.
When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed, that, "The age of chivalry is gone! that The glory of Europe is extin
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guishedfor ever! that The unbought grace of life (if any one knows what it is), the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enter-prize, is gone!" and all this because the Quixote age of chivalric nonsense is gone, What opinion can we form of his judgment, or what regard can we pay to his facts? In the rhapsody of his imagination, he has discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are, that there are no Quixotes to attack them. But if the age of aristocracy, like that of chivalry, should fall, and they had originally some connection, Mr. Burke, the trumpeter of the Order, may continue his parody to the end, and finish with exclaiming, "Othello's occupation's gone!"4
Notwithstanding Mr. Burke's horrid paintings, when the French Revolution is compared with that of other countries, the astonishment will be, that it is marked with so few sacrifices; but this astonishment will cease when we reflect that principles, and not persons, were the meditated objects of destruction. The mind of the nation was acted upon by a higher stimulus than what the consideration of persons could inspire, and sought a higher conquest than could be produced by the downfall of an enemy. * * *
1791 4. Shakespeare's Othello 3.3.362 (Othello's feel-referring to the hero of Cervantes's romance, who ing, when he thinks Desdemona has been unfaith-famously mistakes windmills for his foes the giants, ful, that his life is over). "Quixote" as an adjective, means "insanely idealistic."
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
1759-1797
Mary Wollstonecraft's father inherited a substantial fortune and set himself up as a gentleman farmer. He was, however, both extravagant and incompetent, and as one farm after another failed, he became moody and violent and sought solace in heavy bouts of drinking and in tyrannizing his submissive wife. Mary was the second of five children and the oldest daughter. She later told her husband, William Godwin, that she used to throw herself in front of her mother to protect her from her husband's blows, and that she sometimes slept outside the door of her parents' bedroom to intervene if her father should break out in a drunken rage. The solace of Mary's early life was her fervent attachment to Fanny Blood, an accomplished girl two years her senior; their friendship, which began when Mary was sixteen, endured and deepened until Fanny's death.
At the age of nineteen, Mary Wollstonecraft left home to take a position as companion to a well-to-do widow living in Bath, where for the first time she had the opportunity to observe�and scorn�the social life of the upper classes at the most fashionable of English resort cities. Having left her job in 1780 to nurse her dying mother through a long and harrowing illness, Wollstonecraft next went to live with the Bloods, where her work helped sustain the struggling family. Her sister Eliza meanwhile had married and, in 1784, after the birth of a daughter, suffered a nervous breakdown. Convinced that her sister's collapse was the result of her husband's cruelty and abuse, Wollstonecraft persuaded her to abandon husband and child and flee to London. Because a divorce at that time was not commonly available, and a fugitive wife could be forced to return to her husband, the two women hid in secret quarters while awaiting the grant of a legal separation. The infant, automatically given into the father's custody, died before she was a year old.
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168 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
The penniless women, together with Fanny Blood and Wollstonecraft's other sister, Everina, established a girls' school at Newington Green, near London. The project flourished at first, and at Newington, Wollstonecraft was befriended by the Reverend Richard Price, the radical author who was soon to play a leading role in the British debates about the Revolution in France, and whose kindly guidance helped shape her social and political opinions. Blood, although already ill with tuberculosis, went to Lisbon to marry her longtime suitor, Hugh Skeys, and quickly became pregnant. Wollstonecraft rushed to Lisbon to attend her friend's childbirth, only to have Fanny die in her arms; the infant died soon afterward. The loss threw Wollstonecraft (already subject to bouts of depression) into black despair, which was heightened when she found that the school at Newington was in bad financial straits and had to be closed. Tormented by creditors, she rallied her energies to write her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), a conventional and pious series of essays, and took up a position as governess for several daughters in the Anglo-Irish family of Viscount Kingsborough, a man of great wealth whose seat was in County Cork, Ireland.
The Kingsboroughs were well intentioned and did their best to introduce Wollstonecraft into the busy trivialities of their social life. But the ambiguity of her position as governess, halfway between a servant and a member of the family, was galling. An antagonism developed between Wollstonecraft and Lady Kingsborough, in part because the children feared their mother and adored their governess. Wollstonecraft was dismissed. She returned to London, where Joseph Johnson in 1788 published Mary, a Fiction, a novel, as Wollstonecraft described it, about "the mind of a woman who has thinking powers." Johnson also published her book for children, Original Stories from Real Life, a considerable success that was translated into German and quickly achieved a second English edition illustrated with engravings by William Blake. Wollstonecraft was befriended and subsidized by Johnson, the major publisher in England of radical and reformist books, and she took a prominent place among the writers (including notables such as Barbauld and Coleridge) whom he regularly entertained at his rooms in St. Paul's Churchyard. She published translations from French and German (she had taught herself both languages) and began reviewing books for Johnson's newly founded journal, the Analytical Review. Though still in straitened circumstances, she helped support her two sisters and her improvident and importunate father, and was also generous with funds�and with advice�to one of her brothers and to the indigent family of Fanny Blood.
In 1790 Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France�an eloquent and powerful attack on the French Revolution and its English sympathizers�quickly evoked Wollstonecraft's response, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. This was a formidable piece of argumentation; its most potent passages represent the disabilities and sufferings of the English lower classes and impugn the motives and sentiments of Burke. This work, the first book-length reply to Burke, scored an immediate success, although it was soon submerged in the flood of other replies, most notably Tom Paine's classic Rights of Man (1791�92). In 1792 Wollstonecraft focused her defense of the underprivileged on her own sex and wrote, in six weeks of intense effort, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Earlier writers in both France and England had proposed that, given equivalent educations, women would equal men in achievement. Wollstonecraft was particularly indebted to the historian Catharine Macaulay, whose Letters on Education (1790) she had reviewed enthusiastically. At the same time Wollstonecraft was contributing to a long-running discussion of human rights that in Britain dated back to John Locke's publication of the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690). Prefaced with a letter addressed to the French politician Bishop Talleyrand, the Vindication was in part her rejoinder to the inconsistent actions of France's National Assembly, which in 1791 had formally denied to all Frenchwomen the rights of citizens, even as, ironically enough, it set about celebrating the "universal rights of man."
Her book was also unprecedented in its firsthand observations of the disabilities
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and indignities suffered by women and in the articulateness and passion with which it exposed and decried this injustice. Wollstonecraft's views were conspicuously radical at a time when women had no political rights; were limited to a few lowly vocations as servants, nurses, governesses, and petty shopkeepers; and were legally nonpersons who lost their property to their husbands at marriage and were incapable of instituting an action in the courts of law. An impressive feature of her book, for all its vehemence, is the clear-sightedness and balance of her analysis of the social conditions of the time, as they affect men as well as women. She perceives that women constitute an oppressed class that cuts across the standard hierarchy of social classes; she shows that women, because they are denied their rights as human beings, have been forced to seek their ends by means of coquetry and cunning, the weapons of the weak; and, having demonstrated that it is contrary to reason to expect virtue from those who are not free, she also recognizes that men, no less than women, inherit their roles, and that the wielding of irresponsible power corrupts the oppressor no less than it distorts the oppressed. Hence her surprising and telling comparisons between women on the one hand and men of the nobility and military on the other as classes whose values and behavior have been distorted because their social roles prevent them from becoming fully human. In writing this pioneering work, Wollstonecraft found the cause that she was to pursue the rest of her life.
In December 1792 Wollstonecraft went to Paris to observe the Revolution at firsthand. During the years that she lived in France, 1793�94, the early period of moderation was succeeded by extremism and violence. In Paris she joined a group of English, American, and European expatriates sympathetic to the Revolution and fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, a personable American who had briefly been an officer in the American Revolutionary Army and was the author of a widely read book on the Kentucky backwoods, where he had been an explorer. He played the role in Paris of an American frontiersman and child of nature, but was in fact an adventurer who had left America to avoid prosecution for debt and for freewheeling speculations in Kentucky land. He was also unscrupulous in his relations with women. The two became lovers, and Wollstonecraft bore a daughter, Fanny Imlay, in May 1794. Imlay, who was often absent on mysterious business deals, left mother and daughter for a visit to London that he kept protracting. After the publication of her book An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), Wollstonecraft followed Imlay to London, where, convinced that he no longer loved her, she tried to commit suicide. The attempt, however, was discovered and prevented by Imlay. To get her out of the way, he persuaded her to take a trip as his business envoy to the Scandinavian countries. Although this was then a region of poor or impassible roads and primitive accommodations, the intrepid Wollstonecraft traveled there for four months, sometimes in the wilds, accompanied by the year-old Fanny and a French nursemaid.
Back in London, Wollstonecraft discovered that Imlay was living with a new mistress, an actress. Finally convinced he was lost to her, she hurled herself from a bridge into the Thames but was rescued by a passerby. Imlay departed with his actress to Paris. Wollstonecraft, resourceful as always, used the letters she had written to Imlay to compose a book, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), full of sharp observations of politics, the lives of Scandinavian women, and the austere northern landscape.
In the same year Wollstonecraft renewed an earlier acquaintance with the philosopher William Godwin. His Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), the most drastic proposal for restructuring the political and social order yet published in England, together with his novel of terror, Caleb Williams (1794), which embodies his social views, had made him the most famed radical writer of his time. The austerely rationalistic philosopher, then forty years of age, had an unexpected capacity for deep feeling, and what began as a flirtation soon ripened into affection and (as their letters show) passionate physical love. She wrote Godwin, with what was for the time remarkable outspokenness on the part of a woman: "Now by these presents [i.e., this doc
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17 0 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
ument] let me assure you that you are not only in my heart, but my veins, this morning. I turn from you half abashed�yet you haunt me, and some look, word or touch thrills through my whole frame. . . . When the heart and reason accord there is no flying from voluptuous sensations, do what a woman can." Wollstonecraft was soon pregnant once more, and Godwin (who had in his Inquiry attacked the institution of marriage as a base form of property rights in human beings) braved the ridicule of his radical friends and conservative enemies by marrying her.
They set up a household together, but Godwin also kept separate quarters in which to do his writing, and they further salvaged their principles by agreeing to live separate social lives. Wollstonecraft was able to enjoy this arrangement for only six months. She began writing The Wrongs of Woman, a novel about marriage and motherhood that uses its Gothic setting inside a dilapidated madhouse to explore how women are confined both by unjust marriage laws and by their own romantic illusions. On August 30, 1797, she gave birth to a daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later the author of Frankenstein and wife of Percy Shelley. The delivery was not difficult, but resulted in massive blood poisoning. After ten days of agony, she lapsed into a coma and died. Her last whispered words were about her husband: "He is the kindest, best man in the world." Godwin wrote to a friend, announcing her death: "I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy."
To distract himself in his grief, Godwin published in 1798 Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," in which he told, with the total candor on which he prided himself, of her affairs with Imlay and himself, her attempts at suicide, and her free thinking in matters of religion and sexual relationships. In four companion volumes of her Posthumous Works, he indiscreetly included her love letters to Imlay along with the unfinished Wrongs of Woman. The reaction to these revelations was immediate and ugly. The conservative satirist the Reverend Richard Polwhele, for instance, remarked gloatingly on how it appeared to him providential that as a proponent of sexual equality Wollstonecraft should have died in childbirth�"a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable." The unintended consequence of Godwin's candor was that Wollstonecraft came to be saddled with a scandalous reputation so enduring that through the Victorian era advocates of the equality of women circumspectly avoided explicit reference to her Vindication. Even John Stuart Mill, in his Subjection of Women (1869), neglected to mention the work. It was only in the twentieth century, and especially in the later decades, that Wollstonecraft's Vindication gained recognition as a classic in the literature not only of women's rights but of social analysis as well.
From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman1
Introduction
After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial. I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools;
1. The text is from the second revised edition of tors gratefully acknowledge Poston's permission to 1792, as edited by Carol H. Poston for the Norton use the information in her annotations. Critical Edition of A Vindication (1975). The edi
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A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN / 171
but what has been the result?�a profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.�One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled2 by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.
In a treatise, therefore, on female rights and manners, the works which have been particularly written for their improvement must not be overlooked; especially when it is asserted, in direct terms, that the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement; that the books of instruction, written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions; and that, in the true style of Mahometanism, they are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species,3 when improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction which raises men above the brute creation, and puts a natural sceptre in a feeble hand.
Yet, because I am a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose that I mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality or inferiority of the sex; but as the subject lies in my way, and I cannot pass it over without subjecting the main tendency of my reasoning to misconstruction, I shall stop a moment to deliver, in a few words, my opinion.�In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favor of woman. A degree of physical superiority cannot, therefore, be denied�and it is a noble prerogative! But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavor to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.
I am aware of an obvious inference:�from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardor in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind;�all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I
2. In an archaic sense: deluded, cheated. Europeans that the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, 3. It was a common but mistaken opinion among teaches that women have no souls.
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172 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine.
This discussion naturally divides the subject. I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties; and afterwards I shall more particularly point out their peculiar designation.
I wish also to steer clear of an error which many respectable writers have fallen into; for the instruction which has hitherto been addressed to women, has rather been applicable to ladies, if the little indirect advice, that is scattered through Sandford and Merton,4 be excepted; but, addressing my sex in a firmer tone, I pay particular attention to those in the middle class, because they appear to be in the most natural state.5 Perhaps the seeds of false refinement, immorality, and vanity, have ever been shed by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society! As a class of mankind they have the strongest claim to pity; the education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless, and the unfolding mind is not strengthened by the practice of those duties which dignify the human character.�They only live to amuse themselves, and by the same law which in nature invariably produces certain effects, they soon only afford barren amusement.
But as I purpose taking a separate view of the different ranks of society, and of the moral character of women, in each, this hint is, for the present, sufficient, and I have only alluded to the subject, because it appears to me to be the very essence of an introduction to give a cursory account of the contents of the work it introduces.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists�I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.
This is a rough sketch of my plan; and should I express my conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel whenever I think of the subject, the dictates of experience and reflection will be felt by some of my readers. Animated by this important object, I shall disdain to cull5 my phrases or polish my style;�I
4. The Histor)' of Sandford and Mertotl, by Thomas spoiled son of a rich family. Day, was a very popular story for children, pub-5. The middle class is viewed as more "natural" lished in three volumes (1786�89). In it a tutor, than the upper classes because it is uncorrupted the Reverend Mr. Barlow, frequently cites the by the artificialities of leisure-class life. superiority in moral principles of Harry Sandford, 6. Be selective in. the son of a poor farmer, over Tommy Merton, the
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