The Spirit of the Age

The Spirit of the Age

William Hazlitt

Mr. Bentham is one of those persons who verify the old adage, that "A

prophet has no honour, except out of his own country." His reputation

lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are

reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe. His

name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the

plains of Chili and the mines of Mexico. He has offered constitutions

for the New World, and legislated for future times. The people of

Westminster, where he lives, hardly know of such a person; but the

Siberian savage has received cold comfort from his lunar aspect, and may

say to him with Caliban--"I know thee, and thy dog and thy bush!" The

tawny Indian may hold out the hand of fellowship to him across the GREAT

PACIFIC. We believe that the Empress Catherine corresponded with him;

and we know that the Emperor Alexander called upon him, and presented

him with his miniature in a gold snuff-box, which the philosopher, to

his eternal honour, returned. Mr. Hobhouse is a greater man at the

hustings, Lord Rolle at Plymouth Dock; but Mr. Bentham would carry it

hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu. The reason is,

that our author's influence is purely intellectual. He has devoted

his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths, and to those

studies--

"That waft a _thought_ from Indus to the Pole"--

and has never mixed himself up with personal intrigues or party

politics. He once, indeed, stuck up a hand-bill to say that he (Jeremy

Bentham) being of sound mind, was of opinion that Sir Samuel Romilly was

the most proper person to represent Westminster; but this was the whim

of the moment. Otherwise, his reasonings, if true at all, are true

everywhere alike: his speculations concern humanity at large, and are

not confined to the hundred or the bills of mortality. It is in moral as

in physical magnitude. The little is seen best near: the great appears

in its proper dimensions, only from a more commanding point of view, and

gains strength with time, and elevation from distance!

Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among

poets:--in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he

is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house

in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell,

reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely

ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have

the privilege of the _entrée_, are always admitted one by one. He does

not like to have witnesses to his conversation. He talks a great deal,

and listens to nothing but facts. When any one calls upon him, he

invites them to take a turn round his garden with him (Mr. Bentham is

an economist of his time, and sets apart this portion of it to air and

exercise)--and there you may see the lively old man, his mind still

buoyant with thought and with the prospect of futurity, in eager

conversation with some Opposition Member, some expatriated Patriot, or

Transatlantic Adventurer, urging the extinction of Close Boroughs, or

planning a code of laws for some "lone island in the watery waste,"

his walk almost amounting to a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in

shrill, cluttering accents, negligent of his person, his dress, and his

manner, intent only on his grand theme of UTILITY--or pausing, perhaps,

for want of breath and with lack-lustre eye to point out to the stranger

a stone in the wall at the end of his garden (overarched by two

beautiful cotton-trees) _Inscribed to the Prince of Poets_, which

marks the house where Milton formerly lived. To shew how little the

The Spirit of the Age was never more fully-shewn than in its treatment

of this writer--its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission

to prejudice and to the fashion of the day. Five-and-twenty years ago he

was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed

as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more

looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice

was the theme, his name was not far off:--now he has sunk below the

horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality. Mr.

Godwin, during his lifetime, has secured to himself the triumphs and the

mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame.

His bark, after being tossed in the revolutionary tempest, now raised to

heaven by all the fury of popular breath, now almost dashed in pieces,

and buried in the quicksands of ignorance, or scorched with the

lightning of momentary indignation, at length floats on the calm wave

that is to bear it down the stream of time. Mr. Godwin's person is not

known, he is not pointed out in the street, his conversation is not

courted, his opinions are not asked, he is at the head of no cabal, he

belongs to no party in the State, he has no train of admirers, no

one thinks it worth his while even to traduce and vilify him, he has

scarcely friend or foe, the world make a point (as Goldsmith used to

say) of taking no more notice of him than if such an individual had

never existed; he is to all ordinary intents and purposes dead and

buried; but the author of _Political Justice_ and of _Caleb Williams_

can never die, his name is an abstraction in letters, his works are

standard in the history of intellect. He is thought of now like any

eminent writer a hundred-and-fifty years ago, or just as he will be

a hundred-and-fifty years hence. He knows this, and smiles in silent

mockery of himself, reposing on the monument of his fame--

"Sedet, in eternumque sedebit infelix Theseus."

No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the

country as the celebrated _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_. Tom

Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old

woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was

supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of

thought. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a

young man, a student in the Temple, "and read Godwin on Necessity." Sad

necessity! Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at

twenty, and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below

_zero_ in 1814? Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense! Let

us pause here a little.--Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions, and

carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of

the time. What then? Because those opinions were overcharged, were they

therefore altogether groundless? Is the very God of our idolatry all of

a sudden to become an abomination and an anathema? Could so many young

men of talent, of education, and of principle have been hurried away by

what had neither truth, nor nature, not one particle of honest feeling

nor the least shew of reason in it? Is the _Modern Philosophy_ (as it

has been called) at one moment a youthful bride, and the next a withered

beldame, like the false Duessa in Spenser? Or is the vaunted edifice

of Reason, like his House of Pride, gorgeous in front, and dazzling to

approach, while "its hinder parts are ruinous, decayed, and old?" Has

the main prop, which supported the mighty fabric, been shaken and given