Political Pamphlets | Page 2

of a retained advocate, who expected his immediate
reward, on the one hand; or of a rebel, who stood to make his account
with office if he succeeded, or with savage punishment if he failed, on
the other. A distant prospect of impeachment, of the loss of ears, hands,
or life if the tide turns, is a stimulant to violence rather than to vigour. I
do not think, however, that this is the most important factor in the
problem. Parliamentary government, with a limited franchise of
tolerably intelligent voters, a party system, and newspapers
comparatively undeveloped, may not suit an ideally perfect politeia,
but it is the very hotbed in which to nourish the pamphlet. There is also
a style, as there is a time, for all things; and no style could be so well
suited for the pamphlet as the balanced, measured, pointed, and
polished style which Dryden and Tillotson and Temple brought in
during the third quarter of the seventeenth century, and which did not
go out of fashion till the second quarter of the nineteenth. We have
indeed seen pamphlets proper exercising considerable influence in
quite recent times; but in no instance that I can remember has this been
due to any literary merits, and I doubt whether even the bare fact will
be soon or often renewed in our days. The written word--the written
word of condensed, strengthened, spirited literature--has lost much, if

not all, of its force with an enormously increased electorate, and a
bewildering multiplicity of print and speech of all kinds.
Whatever justice these reasonings may have or may lack, the facts
speak for themselves, as facts intelligently regarded have a habit of
doing. The first pamphlets proper of great literary merit and great
political influence are those of Halifax in the first movement of real
party struggle during the reign of Charles the Second; the last which
unite the same requisites are those of Scott on the eve of the first
Reform Bill. The leaflet and circular war of the anti-Corn Law League
must be ruled out as much as Mr. Gladstone's Bulgarian Horrors.
This leaves us a period of almost exactly a hundred and fifty years,
during which the kind, whether in good or bad examples, was of
constant influence; while its best instances enriched literature with
permanent masterpieces in little. I do not think that any moderately
instructed person will find much difficulty in comprehending the
specimens here given. I am sure that no moderately intelligent one will
fail, with a very little trouble, to take delight in them. I do not know
whether an artful generaliser could get anything out of the
circumstances in which the best of them grew; I should say myself that
nothing more than the system of government, the conditions of the
electorate and the legislature, and the existence from time to time of a
superheated state in political feeling, can or need be collected. In some
respects, to my own taste, the first of these examples is also the best.
To Halifax full justice has never been done, for we have had no capable
historian of the late seventeenth century but Macaulay, and Halifax's
defect of fervour as a Jacobite was more than made up to Macaulay by
his defect of fervour as a Williamite. As for the moderns, I have myself
more than once failed to induce editors of 'series' to give Halifax a
place. Yet Macaulay himself has been fairer to the great Trimmer than
to most persons with whom he was not in full sympathy. The weakness
of Halifax's position is indeed obvious. When you run first to one side
of the boat and then to the other, you have ten chances of sinking to one
of trimming her. To hold fast to one party only, and to keep that from
extremes, is the only secret, and it is no great disgrace to Halifax, that
in the very infancy of the party and parliamentary system, he did not

perceive it. But this hardly interferes at all with the excellence of his
pamphlets. The polished style, the admirable sense, the subdued and
yet ever present wit, the avoidance of excessive cleverness (the one
thing that the average Briton will not stand), the constant eye on the
object, are unmistakable. They are nearly as forcible as Dryden's
political and controversial prefaces, which are pamphlets themselves in
their way, and they excel them in knowledge of affairs, in urbanity, in
adaptation to the special purpose. In all these points they resemble
more than anything else the pamphlets of Paul Louis Courier, and there
can be no higher praise than this.
No age in English history was more fertile in pamphlets than the reigns
of William and of Anne. Some men of real distinction occasionally
contributed to