494. RB to Editor of The Trifler
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 118–121.
[London]
[February 1835] [1]
“Naturally at a new author I doubt, and stick, and do not say quickly, Good: I censure much and tax.” [2] I am ordinarily of Donne’s mind; but in the instance of a certain lucubration in the number of last month, I confess, I doubt nothing and stick not to say as much,—deliberately, Bad! As for the censuring and taxing, take the present as an earnest; and I will wager (having gained somewhat by the ousting of Sir Charles) [3] that already the writer of the same,—instinctively apprehensive,—doth babble of “the common courtesy due to a stranger;” for ’tis of a truth the ungracious dissertation on debt and debtors, that I take on me to reprehend: at least, friend, I will owe thee nothing—I exult inordinately at the opportunity for rating thee roundly, which thine own flimsy reasoning hath furnished. I will neither re-read thine exercitation, nor more curiously consider my notions of its scope and tendency, nor charitably impute some better and less obvious motive to thee than is apparent in thy shallow performance—for this, and more, I fairly owe thee, and from all this dost thou voluntarily exclude thyself. I make no account, accordingly, of thy sophistries severally and in detail, but record generally that thou, ω μάταιε, [4] didst “stand up in the sun to shame creation,” [5] by an attempt to loosen and destroy the very tenure by which thy race doth exist and possess it.
For to be man is to be a debtor:—hinting but slightly at the grand and primeval debt implied in the idea of a creation, as matter too hard for ears like thine, (for saith not Luther, What hath a cow to do with nutmegs?) I must, nevertheless, remind thee that all moralists have concurred in considering this our mortal sojourn as indeed an uninterrupted state of debt, and the world our dwelling-place as represented by nothing so aptly as by an inn, wherein those who lodge most commodiously have in perspective a proportionate score to reduce, and those who fare least delicately, but an insignificant shot to discharge—or, as the tuneful Quarles well phraseth it—
“He’s most in debt who lingers out the day,
Who dies betimes has less and less to pay.” [6]
So far, therefore, from these sagacious ethics holding that
“Debt cramps the energies of the soul,” &c. [7]
as thou pratest, ’tis plain that they have willed on the very outset to inculcate this truth on the mind of every man,—no barren and inconsequential dogma, but an effectual, ever-influencing and productive rule of life,—that he is born a debtor, lives a debtor—aye, friend, and when thou diest, will not some judicious bystander,—no recreant as thou to the bonds of nature, but a good borrower and true,—remark, as did his grandsire before him on like occasions, that thou hast “paid the debt of nature.” [8] Ha! I have thee “beyond the rules,” [9] as one (a bailiff) may say!
Then, do but see, how, acknowledging, as thou needs must, this great original debt, on surveying more narrowly thy condition, thou wilt find that innumerable other debts, unperceived before, have thee fast, couldest thou even evade this primary obligation—as Gulliver only set free by a mighty wrench his head, to discover that the rest of his body was wholly subdued by minute lets and manacles. [10] Thy connexion with society, or political debt—is it not of such remote and hoar antiquity, that the impassioned Jean Jacques hath expended his best wit in the endeavour to ascertain the “origin of the social contract?” [11] Thy more immediate relation to the same, or moral debt—hath not the subtle Mandeville specially addressed himself to the task of accounting in some measure for the multiplicity of thine owings under that head, and establishing the “original of moral virtue?” [12] —And, miserable, couldst thou slip eel-like, nay, Wellesley-like, [13] from even these—could’st thou by searching find out some conjuncture wherein, to thy thinking, nothing did oblige thee—some untrodden path wherein thou wert seemingly free to follow thine own bent,—wouldst thou not say, in default of all other claims on thee, “I owe it to myself to do thus and thus?” Beset as thou art on every side by these evidences of thy debts “ut numero carrentes arenæ,” [14] —the ledgers (as it were) wherein they are registered opened wide before thee, with here a sophist urgent on their venerable standing, there a moralist voluble on their magnitude,—over thy shoulder a poet rendering more formidable the sum total in flourishes of red-ink,—under thy nose a spruce humanist jotting down an unexpected demand on any the most trifling appropriation thou mayst meditate;—in the teeth of all this, I ask, wilt thou still designate debt,—nothing reserving, nothing qualifying,—as a disease, an ulcer, and what not? or wilt thou not rather, convinced that these things are so, closely surveying the conditions of human existence, the way which flesh cannot but go, the restrictions to which flesh cannot but submit, and impressed with this doctrine so universally, so unremittingly,—wilt thou not rather submit with docile alacrity to the manifest necessity which hedges thee round and hems thee in, and, conforming thyself to a debtor’s estate, make it thine only business to contrive how best cooperating with the design of thy being, thou mayst owe more and more—as from an attentive observation of the bibulous properties of sea, earth, sun, and moon, the drouthy Teian [15] did set himself seriously to drink—as from an accurate consideration of the osculatory propensities of mountain, wind, and flower, [16] the sweet poet of our days [17] did determine sedulously to kiss? I put it to thee, friend, and with no ill-will, trust me, but rather in pity;—can it be that thou hast really lived hitherto ignorant of this important dogma? That, far from endeavouring to follow out in right earnest its minutest bearings, in their genuine spirit, thou hast, mistaken man, deemed thy solitary thwartings and withstandings of its operation nothing less than virtues, and hast plumed thyself thereon proportionably? Is it even so? Well may Professor Füglistaller thus versify:—
“Agamus ergo, meditemur
Imbellis vis quid valeat;
Homuncionem despicemur,
Qui, quæ intendit, nesciat.” [18]
I cannot withstand the itch of proselytizing, and scruple not to promise myself that the arguments I shall adduce will work their due effect in thee; but these I reserve for a separate communication, partly by reason of their magnitude, embracing as they do all the advantages which shall accrue from thy adoption of this principle in thy every-day practice, and partly because the wind bloweth sweetly from the Park, and the two strangers in dingy apparel and bright neckchains, who have so fancied the singing of the goldfinch in my window as to listen thereto beneath during the last two hours, have at last disappeared, and a sally is no longer inexpedient.
Z [19]
Text: The Trifler, February 1835.
1. This letter was prompted by an article (“Essay on Debt”) in the January issue of The Trifler, an amateur magazine edited by members of RB’s set. As far as is known, the January and February issues were the only ones published. The only extant copies are RB’s (see Reconstruction, A2345–2346).
2. From the Epistle to Donne’s The Progresse of the Soule (1601).
3. Sir Charles Manners-Sutton (later Viscount Canterbury, 1780–1845), Speaker of the House of Commons since 1817, was opposed for re-election as Speaker when the new Parliament convened on 19 February 1835.
4. “O trifler.”
5. Byron’s Cain (1821), III, 1, 304.
6. Francis Quarles (1592–1644), “On the Life of Man” (Divine Fancies, 1632, III, 69).
7. This is a quote from “Essay on Debt,” to which RB is replying.
8. The Chronicle of Fabyon, pt. II, ch. 41, by Robert Fabyon (d. 1513).
9. “The rules” were defined areas in the neighbourhood of some prisons within which certain classes of prisoners were permitted to live (OED).
10. A slightly inaccurate account of Gulliver’s struggles in chapter 1 of “A Voyage to Lilliput.”
11. Du Contrat Social (1762), by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).
12. A reference to “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” in The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville (1670?–1733).
13. Probably a reference to the escape of Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquis Wellesley (1760–1842) from impeachment proceedings arising from criticism of his handling of native rulers while Governor-General of India (1797–1805).
14. “As grains of sand without number” (Horace, Odes, I, xxviii, 1, slightly amended).
15. i.e., Anacreon, the poet of Teus in Ionia.
16. “Fruitful earth drinks up the rain; / Trees from earth drink that again; / The sea drinks the air, the sun / Drinks the sea, and him the moon. / Is it reason then, d’ye think, / I should thirst when all else drink?” (Anacreontics, 19, trans. Thomas Stanley, 1651).
17. The “sweet poet of our days” was Shelley, whose poem “Love’s Philosophy” (1819) echoed Anacreon’s ode.
18. Leonz Füglistaller (1768–1840) was a Swiss philologist who entertained himself and friends by making Latin translations of Schiller. These lines (Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke, 13–16) translate as: “Let us observe with careful eyes / What thro’ deficient strength escapes; / The thoughtless man we must despise, / Who disregards the thing he shapes” (trans. Edgar A. Bowring, 1851).
19. An inscription in an unidentified hand on the cover of the January Trifler at Harvard states “The contribution signed Z is by Browning, whose copy this was.” RB used the same signature for contributions to The Monthly Repository.
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