Not only is it spurious and hollow in the way that Mr. Locke points out, by one man’s taking up at second hand the opinion of another, but worse than this, one man takes up what he believes another will think, and which the latter professes only because he believes it held by the first! All, therefore, that is necessary to control public opinion, is to gain possession of some organ loud and lofty enough to make yourself heard, that has power and interest on its side; and then, no sooner do you blow a blast in this trump of ill-fame, like the horn hung up on an old castle-wall, than you are answered, echoed, and accredited on all sides: the gates are thrown open to receive you, and you are admitted into the very heart of the fortress of public opinion, and can assail from the ramparts with every engine of abuse, and with privileged impunity, all those who may come forward to vindicate the truth, or to rescue their good name from the unprincipled keeping of authority, servility, sophistry, and venal falsehood!
...... and drop into an English reading-room hard by: what are you the better? You see a dozen or score of your countrymen with their faces fixed, and their eyes glued to a newspaper, a magazine, a review—reading, swallowing, profoundly ruminating on the lie, the cant, the sophism of the day! Why? It saves them the trouble of thinking; it gratifies their ill-humour, and keeps off ennui! Does a gleam of doubt, an air of ridicule, or a glance of impatience pass across their features at the shallow and monstrous things they find? No, it is all passive faith and dull security; they cannot take their eyes from the page, they cannot live without it. They believe in their adopted oracle (you see it in their faces) as implicitly as in Sir John Barleycorn, as in a sirloin of beef, as in quarter-day—as they hope to receive their rents, or to see Old England again!
When Kitty Holland of the Irish Times in the interests of Ethos, Pathos and a little light Logos told the world about her two abortions offers a story about how in a nailed down liberal vote bank like Dublin South there is uncertainty about repeal of the Eight Amendment:
kitty holland
I find that I too am shocked by such an obvious fable. Remembering Holland’s coverage of the Savita case which has been disputed as to its veracity I wonder what is the point? Are pro-life canvassers being misdirected to where their efforts will be in vain away from the working class areas where there are undecided voters? What was also being promoted by Pat Leahy a senior political correspondent in the same paper this morning was the plea for respectful disagreement. Ah the soothing muzak of political liberalism. Sweet reason and compromise must prevail.
Philosophers will, by reducing this intractable conflict to a discussion of personhood etc miss the point completely. The issue is not a matter of definition or what can be teased out and agreed on. It’s instinctive or a gut feeling about what is at the bottom of the abortionist’s bucket.
When reading this essay be aware that the ironist in Hazlitt is driving. The man who cared little for the opinion of the world because his friends had his back is the antithesis of the writer’s own experience. His erstwhile friends were busily stabbing that back and reviving his escapade in the Lake District which his biographer Duncan Wu describes:
"These tensions were broken by an event no one could have foreseen. Hazlitt had taken to visiting the local tavern, eager to escape Greta Hall, and one evening found himself in close quarters with a girl who teased him with promises of sex. When he responded in what he thought the appropriate manner, she slapped him down with the taunt: ‘You’re a black-faced rascal, sir!’ The entire tavern burst into laughter, ribald remarks shot across the room, and Hazlitt was made ‘the laughing-stock of the village’. His reaction was characteristic. He threw her over his knee, lifted her petticoats, and spanked her on the bottom.
The peasantry of the Lakes, then as now, was tight-knit: they were unlikely to tolerate any such action by an outsider. Hazlitt was lucky to get out of the building, and probably subjected to physical violence in the process. He ran the half mile to Greta Hall, where he explained what had happened to Coleridge and Southey. To him it was hardly worth bothering about, but Coleridge took a different view: a gang had already formed to give Hazlitt a ducking, soon to arrive at their door. He would arrange to get him out of harm’s way. There was no time to pack, and Hazlitt left his possessions, including his painting materials and the portraits. Coleridge later claimed to have given him ‘all the money I had in the world, and the very Shoes off my feet, to enable him to escape over the mountains’. (from ‘William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man’ by Duncan Wu)
Coleridge and Wordsworth kept this story alive long after the event and he generally came to be painted by his Tory enemies as a disreputable character. Add to this his Liber Amoris imbroglio with Sarah Walker and her family and you have a pre-facebook shaming which a tut tutting posse could embellish with the inventions of scurrility. His own irascibility which spawned enemies on every side wrought to the uttermost by acerbic portraits of his opponents such as Laureate Southey made ‘cancellation’ his permanent hazard. Publishers balked, books failed, poverty resulted and his advances from publishers and tapping of supporters made him an expensive friend.
As he himself writes of himself:
“There is nothing in which all the world agree but in running down some obnoxious individual. It may be supposed that this is not for nothing, and that they have good reasons for what they do. On the contrary, I will undertake to say, that so far from there being invariably just grounds for such an universal outcry, the universality of the outcry is often the only ground of the opinion; and that it is purposely raised upon this principle, that all other proof or evidence against the person meant to be run down is wanting.”
His defiance of public opinion as a Jacobin radical and admirer of Napoleon the saviour of the revolution as he took him to be was bound to affront the Tories. He didn’t care and his last words were “Well, I’ve had a happy life”.
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