III • Robert Treat Paine, Jr. • Wit
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Parrington, Vernon Louis
This green-eyed monster changes shape at will;
Like snakes of smaller breed, she sheds her skin;
Strips off the serpent, and turns—Jacobin.
In view of the fact that Governor Samuel Adams, chief of the New England Jacobins, was to occupy the stage, President Willard had diplomatically struck from the manuscript the ten lines last quoted; but Paine had the audacity to re-insert them in speaking, and the tumultuous applause was sufficient proof that it was not from a Harvard audience that Sam Adams got the votes that annually returned him governor.
Verse imposed some slight restraint on Paine’s rhetoric, but in prose when he was in full career—as in the grotesque eulogy of Washington which stirred the patriotism of Boston Federalists—the reins are on the neck of his eloquence, and he takes all barriers with fiery abandon. Fact troubles his wild and frolic imagination not at all, but like any plebeian demagogue—whose factional appeals he so furiously condemned—he blew the bellows of Federalist partisanship with extraordinary vigor, stoking his fire with rumor and misrepresentation and party spleen. No slander was too gross, no lie too palpable to serve his end. He baited the democrats quite shamelessly, and aroused the mob of Boston gentlemen like a true Tory. One of his political orations has been preserved by his editor in the collected edition of his works, for the enlightenment of posterity—an oration delivered in 1799, “at the request of the young men of Boston,” on the theme of France and democracy. In this extraordinary composition Paine seems to have been quite ravished by his own rhetoric, that flashes in many a feint and parry before it impales its victim. It is a Federalist philippic, designed to destroy the good name of all who have quitted the sacred Federalist tribe. Words could hardly go further; disregard for truth could scarcely be more brazen. Paine’s delight in clever antitheses overweighs any scruples in regard to just statement. “The French Republick,” he asserted, “has exhibited all the vices of civilization, without one of the virtues of barbarism.”
One or two bits from this tremendous oration, that in “the glow of feeling, the swell of language, and the brilliancy of sentiments” has “very seldom been surpassed,” and that was “received with rapturous and enthusiastic applause,” must suffice to illustrate the justice of the Federalist claim to the custodianship of political good manners. “Politics should have no passions,” Fisher Ames asserted—which excellent principle young Robert Treat Paine exemplified thus:
Political Empiricism has never attained, in any age or nation, so universal an ascendency, as at the present day in the “Illuminated Republick.” Unfettered by the fear of innovation, and unshackled by the prejudice of ages, the modern Frenchman is educated in a system of moral and religious chimeras, which dazzle by their novelty those volatile intellects, which prescriptive wisdom could never impress with veneration. Every Frenchman, who has read a little is a pedant; and the whole race of these horn-book Philosophers is content with the atheism of Mirabeau ... the absurd philanthropy of Condorcet, and the visionary politics of Rousseau. These are the boundaries of their literary ambition, of their political science. Hence it is, that they pretend to be too enlightened for belief, too virtuous for government.
The feculence of party is not yet drained of its rankest sediment. The worshippers of democracy, though their altars are thrown down, are not yet converted from their devotions. The frozen snake has still some sparks of animation; and, if placed by compassion near your hospitable fires, he will revive with exasperated venom, and sting the hardy fool that fostered him. Deal therefore with these ferocious demoralizers, as our crafty mariners trade with the savages of the Indian ocean—with your men at their posts, your guns loaded, and your slow matches burning. (Works, p. 319.)
For all democrats Paine had the hearty contempt of an honest man for a rogue, but for the intellectuals who expounded the new romantic philosophy his indignation was measureless. “The legitimate plebeian democrat,” he asserted, is “an enemy to all government, under which he holds no office”; but fling him a bone from the public table and “he becomes the very scavenger of administration.” The “Illuminated Jacobin,” on the other hand, “never changes his principles.”
His whole science is directed to unhinge society, his whole ambition to plunder it. He is too ravenous to be content with a system of order himself; and too selfish to permit its enjoyment by others. Like a hog in a flower-garden, he sets no value on the variegated foliage he destroys, and seems only desirous to root out every twig of vegetation, that can satiate his voracity. (Ibid., p. 321.)
To such fustian was he reduced when his wit left him. That a gentleman could talk like that, and other gentlemen applaud, is a sad commentary on the intellectual honesty of partisanship, even amongst decent Federalists. Fustian was the order of the day, and Paine was merely baying with his pack. If only he had not professed such virtues his extravagance might be forgiven; but extravagance ill becomes a distinguished repository of political wisdom. Once, indeed, his vivacity got him into a nasty mess. While editor of The Federal Orrery, he accepted in 1795 a political poem entitled The Jacobiniad, the satire of which Paine “new-pointed and new-edged” before printing. The democrats, at whom it was directed, were vastly incensed, and a mob gathered before his lodging but was dispersed. Later the son of one of the victims challenged him to a duel. Paine declined but armed himself with an unloaded pistol. Accidentally meeting his challenger in the street, he drew his weapon, but the young fellow, standing in no awe of a favorite of the muses, struck the pistol down and proceeded to give Paine a sound drubbing. To such base treatment may genius come, when wit forgets that a sally of the tongue may invite a counter sally of the fists. And so we leave him in the dust of the street, ignobly laid low by the strength of that vulgar democracy which was to bring down so many things held dear by Boston Tories. His was, very largely, a wasted life—wasted by sheer indolence and feeble will.
He was a fellow of some parts, and a sentence from one of his dramatic criticisms may not inaptly apply to him: “The character is not a sot, but his humor has a mellower tilth for having been husbanded and manured by ‘the excellent endeavor of drinking.’”