• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2133 0

of judgment, and since this was true of the vast majority making up the public sphere, that realm practiced not thought, properly speaking, but reflex. It was a slave to passion. That was a major reason why the "modern doctrine" of determining issues by reference to public judgment was mistaken.36 The same principle applied a fortiori to authors, who needed seclusion in order to recognize and articulate sensations. A central aspect of the literature of the 1790s was this resort to pastoral solitude. Faced by an increasingly fractured and faction-ridden public realm, many writers-radicals like Godwin as well as reactionaries like Brydges-made idyllic retreat into their source of authority. In effect, authors became publicly private. Yet Brydges insisted that it was the combination of solitude andwhat he called "artificial society" that was truly productive. The "bard" -a category in which he certainly included himself -should occupy the same place in the field of literature as the landed nobleman did in politics. In both cases retreat lent the space and time for disinterested observation and reflection. But it must be retreat from a bustling city to which the artist/noble returned in order to act, and within which literature could flourish.37 While genius was antithetical to the kind of "cunning" needed to get ahead in the metropolis, engagement with the cultivated arts of the city remained essential if the sublimity of nature were to work its magic. So any author possessed of genius was probably doomed to a life of frustration and poverty All the more so, indeed, "so long as the voice of the multitude is to rule," and "every mechanic thinks his own councils ought to govern the State."

Brydges was emphatically not an Enlightenment man. He disdained notions of human perfectibility as simply "false," and denied that knowledge progressed. Even political economy, by manyreckoned to be the new science of its age, had in his view made no advances since Charles Dav- enant in the late seventeenth century. The issue of progress in the natural sciences he evaded (as would Coleridge) by declaring that those sciences had been professionalized out ofprofundity. And above all the press, commonly seen as the engine and guarantor of progress, was in Brydges's eyes not a "vehicle of reason" but of passion. It pandered to the hasty and capricious judgments of the mass of readers who could not retreat to seclu- sion.38 "If the merit of a literary work is to be tried by the number of readers," he asked, "what work of genius can be put in competition with a NEWSPAPER?" Brydges therefore maintained that literature had become a subject of the same political economy that underlay the mass press and the decline of the peerage. With the new aristocracy came an "aristocracy of false Genius" that was at least as bad. It operated by "combinations," and rendered futile all individual expression. Press and Parliament were in "exactly the same state."39 In opposing "the sect, the propagandists, the Illrcininati, who talk about `the March ofMind, "' he saw himself as opposing popular "despotism and tyranny."40 Significantly, in printing his own case Brydges was careful to stipulate that he was not appealing to the public as a tribunal; only a properly constituted court could legitimately decide such arguments.41

Brydges labored ever more frantically on his genealogical researches, forlornly seeking the one manuscript that would secure his own character. That character was in turn central to his arguments about print culture, and to his attempts to overturn it. More broadly, the role of the genius author, he believed, had largely disappeared with the advent of modern industrial culture, along with that of the senatorial peer. Genius and print had parted company.

THE PRINTING COUNTERREVOLUTION

What was to be done? Brydges pursued two strategies. One was a parliamentary campaign. This involved challenging copyright law- the lynchpin of the commercial publishing community The other involved a more direct intervention in printing itself. This strategy took