A BOOK OF THE MOMENT WILLIAM COBBETT [COPYRIGHT IN TILE

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY TIM New York Times.] To summarize the spirit in which Cobbett faced the world and its troubles, and his own personal troubles and losses, one could hardly do better than borrow the mould in which Dr. Johnson explained to his own satisfaction, though not perhaps to that of the present age, the character of Milton : "He was born for whatever is arduous ; difficulties vanished at his touch," and his work as a popular agitator is not the greatest in our history "only because it is not the first." Certainly Cobbett was born for whatever was arduous. He was one of those men who sail in tempests down the stream of life. He was always attacking somebody or something, always passionate in his antagonisms and equally passionate in the blaring defence of some controversial stronghold. He boxed the whole political compass from reaction to the extremity of Radicalism, and with equal vigour and sincerity. But to say this is not to say that Cobbett was a mere fighter. Though struggle and combat, and the widest and wildest belligerency were all his means, his ends were neither personal nor hap.- hazard. He was one of those who are deeply and sincerely anxious to leave the world better than they find it. Indeed, as his new biographer, Mr. Cole, says in his admirable Life of the great publicist, Cobbett was a kind of human working model of John Bull. In his face and figure, in his dress (he generally wore a red waistcoat), in his love of horseflesh and riding, and in his passionate devotion to the land and the raising of crops, he was the boisterous, irascible, kindly John Bull of the comic papers. At the same time, he was a very shrewd politician and a master of words. Besides his power of style he had a devouring appetite for knowledge of all kinds ; and that knowledge was not flashy or superficial, but often went deep. He had, besides, a genuine sensitiveness to good literature—a sensitiveness which is delightfully shown in the first book he ever purchased. The story—one of the best in our literary history—is told with great verve and appreciation by Mr. Cole. When Cobbett was eleven years of age, as he tells us himself, though his newest biographer corrects this in a note "as more probably fourteen," he was engaged in clipping the box- edgings and weeding the flower-beds of the garden in the Bishop of Winchester's Castle at Farnham--Cobbett's native town. He had, he tells us, always a passion for beautiful gardens,

and a gardener at the Castle who had just come out of the King's Gardens at Kew gave such a description of them that Cobbett instantly determined that he would work in those Gardens.

Throughout his life when Cobbett came to a decision he

acted at once. There was no pause between sentence and execution. Accordingly, next morning, without saying a word to anyone, with no clothes except those on his back, with only sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, and arrayed in a blue smock-frock with red garters tied under his knees, he started for Richmond—a distance of something between twenty-eight and thirty miles. It was a long June day, and he had to have some food and beer on the road—price threepence in all—with the result that when he got to Richmond he had just threepence in hand. Poor child, he had somehow, he tells us, lost a halfpenny out of his pocket. The threepence he needed for his supper. It chanced, however, that when walking through Richmond he saw a bookseller's shop. In the window was a little book, and on the outside of it was written " Tale of a Tub. Price 3d." It was a question whether it should be the book or the supper. The book had it, as it always did throughout Cobbett's life when he was faced with similar dilemmas. He never sacrificed the spiritual need to the material. When he had got his little book, he tells us that he was so impatient to read it that he at once got over a gate into a field at the upper corner of Kew Gardens, sat down on the shady side of a haystack and began to read. Even the King's Gardens were forgotten for the moment. That is the true spirit of a lover of literature. You get the book you want at all costs, and when you have got it you tear it open and devour it as a wild beast seizes and devours its prey— that is, in a passion of appetite. But Cobbett's comment must be given in his own words :— " The book was so different from anything that I had ever read before ; it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description ; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect."

The blue-smocked boy read on without any thought of supper till it was too dark to read any more. Then he put the book into his pocket, slid down by the side of the stack and slept "till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning." But even then he went back to his book before he went to the Gardens, reading as he walked. Incidentally, he was given a job in the garden and some food by the gardener. He tells us also that while he swept the grass plot round the foot of the Pagoda he was laughed at by three of the young Princes, George the Fourth and two of his brothers.

The actual book became a kind of magic talisman to Cobbett. He carried it about with him wherever he went. When, how- ever, he was twenty years old he lost it in a box which fell

overboard from a transport in the Bay of Fundy—a loss which gave him, he says, greater pain than he had felt at the

losing of thousands of pounds. The story is not only told with extraordinary charm in the American Gardener, but it is a key to opening certain features of Cobbett's mind in action. One of the most remarkable things about him is his style, and it is hardly possible to doubt that in this matter of style he derived a great deal of inspiration from Swift's book, one of the greatest in the world. It is impossible to think that so young a boy could have been attracted by the matter of that strange story, full of terror and darkness and of the laughter that affrights, disturbs and mystifies. To an English farm lad with no knowledge of theological controversy and still less of satire the book must have been entirely incompre- hensible. Gulliver's Travels can, of course, be read by anyone with delight purely for the story. The little people and the big people and the horse-people and the crazy people are all food for children. The Tale of a Tub, though it gives a poignant thrill to the scholar, has no such innocent appeal. Yet to a man with a feeling for words and their management such as Cobbett had it was attractive enough. But, besides the mere words, there was in Swift's hard, combative pride and bitterness something which must subconsciously have found an echo in Cobbett's soul. Cobbett was a much happier man than Swift—a much more kindly one, and one much more quickly and happily touched by human emotion.

Again, Cobbett had none of the sex degeneracy which marked Swift. Still, below all these differences it would seem as if Cobbett's spirit had mined its way into that vault of savage

indignation from which Swift drew the inspiration which lacerated his heart—the saeva indignatio which he chose as the key-word of his epitaph.

When his intellectual voice had gained its full tone, and its master had learnt the way to make it carry furthest, it was capable of influencing all whO could read Shakespeare and the Bible. For those who did not share the English tempera- ment, in which common sense and imagination, emotion and the practical view of life are so incongruously yet so potently joined, Cobbett's voice remained unheard. His process of thought was a closed book to the men of the Celtic and of the Latin type of mind. The men who listened to Lamartine would have had no use for Cobbett. The men whose minds were beaten out and annealed on Cobbett's anvil would have found nothing but flummery in the dis- courses of the great Frenchman.

The story of Cobbett's courtship shows him to have been a man of feeling in the best sense. He became engaged to his wife while he was a soldier in Canada. She was the daughter of a sergeant in the Artillery and he an Infantryman. They resolved to be married when they got back to England ; but the girl sailed first. Cobbett entrusted her with £150—the whole of his savings, for, in spite of low pay and hard conditions, he had contrived to save that amount. He told her that she was, as it were, to prepare herself for her marriage by getting what education she could, but, above all, she was not to be afraid of spending the money which he had given her in keeping herself rather than in doing hard service. When after about two years' separation the lover discovered her, though not without some difficulty, he found her working as a general servant in a very hard place. The first thing she did was to put into his hands the £150 untouched. Consider what such devotion must have meant ! She had had the full right to ease the hardness of her life, and it must have been very hard ; but not by one penny was the talent which she had laid in her napkin reduced. And she did this, not out of fear, like the man in the parable, but out of a devotion of which Cobbett had every right to be intensely proud. She certainly had her reward. Cobbett loved her and honoured her greatly, though, apparently, she took no part whatever in his political and literary life.

Mr. Cole seems to assume that she had not mind enough to share his views. It seems to me, however, by no means impossible that she found that Cobbett was not a person you could live with if you differed from him politically in the slighteEt degree. Therefore the only safe thing was to have no views on subjects over which he claimed an intellectual empire.

Dr. Johnson, it may be remembered, when describing the limits to female education, invoked the theological bogey.

A man might find that he differed from his wife on the Arian Controversy! The wives of husbands who are fierce theo- logians or positive politicians had better avert their minds from such subjects if they desire peace and comfort. To differ from Cobbett on a question like Paper Money, or the Franchise, or (at an earlier stage of his life), Dissent from the doctrines of the Church of England, meant war without quarter.

In spite, however, of Cobbett's amazing fire as an agitator, the man had in him a very pleasant social side. That is proved by the easy way in which he made friends in all classes. He could dine with Mr. Windham to meet Pitt and Canning and, as he said, be served by footmen in gorgeous liveries, and then do himself justice in the tap-room of a village public-house.

Even a man like Lord Eldon, when Cobbett was at high war with the Government, and indeed in prison, was willing to do him

an act of courtesy. Speaking generally, he does not seem to have been anathema even to those whom he attacked so fiercely. The fact is, he firmly established on the public mind the sense that he was an honest man ; therefore, nobody at the bottom of his heart wanted to ruin him, though, no doubt, all his enemies wanted to knock him down just as he wanted to serve them in a similar way. There was not, however, the extremity of class hatred either in him or his opponents.

Cobbett will never be reckoned among the greatest of Englishmen, but there will always be a place for him in our annals. Of that I have no doubt, and he will be unques- tionably helped to keep that place by Mr. Cole's biography.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.,