The Life of William Cobbett
by . New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1925. 8vo. x+435 pp. Frontispiece. $3.00.
To share the English point of view toward Napoleon’s era is to be separated abysmally from any understanding of the nineteenth century. Justice to Napoleon, that is to say, the shift of attention from caricature to portraiture, seems still too hard for Englishmen, but it is not too hard for them to do something which might seem harder — that is, to judge their own Napoleonic past. Any but a mock judgment cannot evade the decision that politically this past was one of perfidious duplicity. William Cobbett spent his life recording this duplicity, anti in presenting the life Mr. Cole is not evasive.
The book, in its trustworthy treatment of an entire literature, is indispensable to anyone bothering to acquaint himself with the departure Englishmen now make from those priggish Whig historians with whom we have all grown up to be familiar. The author makes several far-fetched comparisons of Cobbett to Whitman, but this is a little thing. The precision and fidelity of his achievement cannot be overestimated. These good qualities are emphasized rather than obscured by the chapter which the late F. E. Green contributed to the work; the bibliography is more accurate than the one published in 1913 by Lewis Melville.
The life of Cobbett lies athwart the Romantic period and is to be proved by the rules which prove Romanticism. His basis was sentimental rather than intellectual, his characteristics those of tendency and movement rather than of achievement and force. He was given corn to husk, and when he had stripped the green leaves off he found the ears mildewed, but he kept on husking to the end of his days. These characteristics make the life an excellent subject for laboratory work in politics. Cobbett himself lived by the scientific method of trial and proof. All he arrived at finally was the record of having pursued the method, but he is the one essential English romantic publicist and one essential in the history of politics.
JOHN BROOKS WHEELWRIGHT