A Genius of Common Sense
ONE of the first pieces of advice William Cobbett had to offer to the young men and (incidentally) the young women of his day was that they should start, " I beseech you, with the conviction firmly fixed in your mind, that you have no right to live in this world."
This dates his book a long way back : nowadays we start with the opposite conviction, that we have a better right to live in the world than anyone who has lived in it longer than ourselves : and Cobbett's honest, persuasive way will hardly, perhaps, seem more than humorous to us, the uncon- scious humour of an odd old priggish fellow who had a swarm of bees in his bonnet. His book dates, indeed, not only to a period, but to a type of mentality which is so out of fashion, we might say, as to be altogether absurd. Nevertheless, and neither because he is to our superior modern thinking so bigoted as to be a comical figure, nor merely for the sake of his Rural Rides, about which it is the literary custom to make a fuss, Cobbett undoubtedly (as he was so certain himself, though perhaps for not quite the right reasons, e.g., " my famous great grammar for teaching French people English, the standard work of reference on the subject ") will live on sturdily enough in his works. If only in this really masterful and rarely refreshing series of letters his prose would endure, because quite apart from any question of style or subject, he was a writer of such invariable slogging honesty as to be almost unique. We may not take his advice in these letters : but we cannot help taking notice of it. It may be pig-headed, prejudiced, occasionally impossible, but the way it is set out is magnificent. And, though fashions change, what a genius of common sense inspires the whole book !
This, surely, will always be the real reason why it must continue to be worth reprinting—not, as Mr. Earl Fisk seems to suggest in his cheerfully informal preface, that it appeals to us nowadays chiefly as a work of unconscious humour, Cobbett being the " sublime prig pinned up in all his self-satisfied smugness for all the world to look at " Still, it would be ungrateful to quarrel with Mr. Fisk. We should rather thank him for the introduction to this neglected classic and then let William Cobbett speak for himself. Here are two representative pieces of advice, the first from his letter " To a Lover " :-
" But who is to tell whether a girl will make an industrious woman Y How is the purblind lover, especially, to be able to ascertain whether she, whose smiles and dimples and bewitching lips have half-bereft him of his senses : how is he to be able to judge, from any thing he can see, whether the beloved object will be industrious or lazy ! . . . There are certain outward and visible signs, from which a man, not wholly deprived of the use of his reason, may form a pretty accurate judgment as to the matter. It was a story in Philadelphia, some years ago, that a young ;nun, who was courting one of three sisters, happened to be on a visit to her, when all three were present, and when one said to the others, 'I wonder where our needle is.' Upon which he withdrew, resolved never to think more of is girl who possessed a needle only in partnership, and who, it appeared, was not too well informed as to the place where even that share was deposited.
. . . This was, to be sure, a very flagrant instance of a want of industry ; for, if the third part of the use of a needle satisfied her when single, it was reasonable to anticipate that marriage would banish that useful implement altogether."
Is this out of date ? It may be, but only in so far as the lover might have difficulty, nowadays, in finding a girl who used a needle at all, let alone a third part of one : the moral remains as fresh as ever. And could anything be snore modern, in the best sense, than Cobbett's advice on the bringing up of children ?
"Being myself fond of book-learning, and knowing well its powers, I naturally wished them to possess it too ; but never did I impose it on any of them. Born and bred in the sweet air myself, I was resolved . . . that they should have the same enjoyments tendered to them. When I was a very little boy, I was, in the barley-sowing season, going along by the side of a field, near Waverly Abbey ; the primroses and bluebells bespangling the banks on both sides of me ; a thousand linnets singing in a spreading oak over my head ; while the jingle of the traces and the whistling of the ploughboys saluted my ear from over the hedge. . . This particular scone has presented itself to my mind many times every year from that day to this ; and I was resolved to give, if possible. the same enjoyments to my children. . . . I effected everything without scolding, and even without command. There was no force in any ease ; no command ; no authority ; none of these was ever wanted. . . . The child that was downstairs first (in the morning) was called the LARK for that day ; and, further, eat at my right hand at dinner."
That, admittedly, is Cobbett in one of his most likeable, his most deliciously revealing moments. He could be out- rageously, and, as it seems nowadays, even cruelly narrow- minded on other matters, for instance on the subject of virtue in women—to his pronouncements on which this age might take more kindly had he not so painstakingly proved, to his own entire satisfaction, the heinousness of any departure from the strict rules of female reserve, as compared with similar lapses on the part of men. (How he would have abhorred and despised this age of " equality " !) And yet even here we have his honest opinion. He made no excuses for anyone, least of all for himself. And he wrote nothing without having thought it out on his own, and very little except from personal experience : which alone would make him a rare and interesting writer, whether or not his advice is as sound as he believed it to be. But, quite apart from all this, Advice to Young Men tells a story : as Mr. Fisk says, the story of Cobbett's
"successful search for power, and, above all, his successful search for happiness. At the close of the book one can look up and almost see him standing in an open doorway—the typical John Bull of his day—robust in health, resolute, self-made, and entirely proud of his achievement."
Idwairso MACLAREN.
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