Unruly Times by A S Byatt

Author:A S Byatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

It was a gloomy prediction of police states and bureaucracy, with a large measure of truth in the vision of what abstract ideals and totalitarian states can do to human nature.

This view of democratic idealism as pure fantasy did not stop Coleridge from criticizing the government of his own day. Both he and Wordsworth were attracted to the idea of existing English political and social institutions as naturally growing organisms, which had developed to suit the needs of the people. This was backed up by their medievalism and nostalgia for what they felt to have been the organic social links of benevolence and dependence, authority and duty, in the feudal system. Coleridge castigated ‘those who commence the examination of a system by identifying it with its abuses or imperfections’: no-one should criticize an institution until he had worked out what it was ideally designed for.

‘How fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy of England, taking in and linking together the duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the country! Yet some men seem never to have thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers and barristers and tyrannical Squire Westerns.’ But he was perfectly prepared himself to criticize the actual Government and Opposition. If the Whigs, he said in 1818, had not grievously misconducted themselves, the Government ‘could not have remained in the hands of such simpleton saints as the Sidmouth Sect or of such unprincipled adventurers as the Castlereagh gang.’ He lamented the ‘awful deterioration of the lower classes, spite of Bible Societies and spite of our spinning jennies for the cheap and speedy manufacture of reading and writing’. But the blame was not wholly, or indeed largely, with the lower classes. The gentry were alarmist and full of self-interest. ‘I see an unmanly spirit of alarm, and of self-convenience, under many a soft title, domestic comfort, etc. etc. in our gentry. The hardihood of English good sense in the shape of manly compromise (on the which, by the by, all our institutions are founded) seems to me decaying.’

Wordsworth’s respect for the Constitution of England, like Coleridge’s, derived from a vision of it as something evolved, worked out through manly compromise and real experience. This was what gave it its almost religious grandeur in his eyes: writing in 1831 out of fear of the Reform Bill, he said:

The Constitution of England, which seems about to be destroyed, offers to my mind the sublimest contemplation which the history of Society and Government have ever presented to it; and for this cause especially, that its principles have the character of pre-conceived ideas, archetypes of the pure intellect, while they are in fact the results of a humble-minded experience.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.