The Importance of "Hudibras"

Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

On 26 December 1662 Samuel Pepys, upon being told of a “new book of Drollery in verse called Hudebras, I would needs go find it out; and met with it at the Temple, cost me 2s-6d”. However, when he got it home and began to read it, he found it “so silly an abuse of the Presbyter-Knight going to the wars, that I am ashamed of it; and by and by meeting at Mr. Townsends at dinner, I sold it to him for 18d.”

Nevertheless, by 6 February 1663 Pepys had a change of heart, “and so to a bookseller’s in the Strand and there bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so set against that which all the world cries up to be the example of wit – for which I am resolved once again to read him and see whether I can find it or no.” In other words, by February, the book was so popular that the usually self-assured Pepys had begun to doubt his own judgment in not liking it.

Later in 1663, a second part was published and Pepys, ever the man of fashion, duly went to his bookseller to seek it out, “which I buy not but borrow to read, to see if it be as good as the first, which the world cries so mightily up; though it hath not a good liking in me, though I had tried by twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty.” The man was nothing if not persistent (as many a London tavern-keeper’s wife could no doubt have attested). This attempt at tackling Hudibras went no better than the previous ones; Pepys finally judged that “I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies”.

So what was this book that the intelligentsia in Restoration England cried up so mightily for its wit? It was a mock heroic poem published in three parts between 1662 and 1677, which satirized (mostly) the parliamentary side during the Civil War. Its central character was the hapless fictional Puritan gentleman soldier, Sir Hudibras. To be honest, the story is not very compelling, especially to the modern reader, and Pepys had a fair point in finding the language a little low. But there is no denying that its author, Samuel Butler (1612-1680), had a lively sense of humour.

I will not attempt to give a plot summary here. If you want to know the plot, I suggest that you go and read it yourself. Or look it up on Wikipedia. However, long-time readers of this blog will have noted by now that quotations from Hudibras appear sprinkled here and there with some frequency. Here are some examples with which I’ve previously bespattered my posts, which may give you some sense of Butler’s wit.

“‘Mong these there was a Politician,

With more heads than a Beast in Vision,

And more Intrigues in ev’ry one,

Than all the Whores of Babylon:

So politick, as if one eye

Upon the other were a Spy;

*        *        *

And when he chanc’d t’escape, mistook

For Art, and Subtlety, His Luck,

So right his Judgment was cut fit,

And made a Tally to his wit,

And both together most Profound

At Deeds of Darkness under ground:

As th’Earth is easiest undermin’d

By vermine Impotent and Blind.”

(Part III, Canto II, 351-356 and 393-400)

(The above lines appeared in a post as part of a description of Stephen Harper)

“He knew what’s what, and that’s as high

As Metaphysick wit can flie.”

(PartI, Canto I, 149-150)

And as a sample of the mock heroic style, that curious mixture of the lofty and the sinking, one cannot do much better than the “Argument” to Part I, Canto I, which opens Butler’s work:

Sir Hudibras his passing worth,

The manner how he sally’d forth:

His Arms and Equipage are shown;

His Horse’s Vertues, and his own.

Th’ Adventure of the Bear and Fiddle

Is sung, but breaks off in the middle.

Now, if Hudibras is so great, why does nobody read it anymore? The main reason probably has to do with the specificity of the subject matter. The work is full of “inside jokes”, and if you don’t have a pretty deep knowledge of the history of the Civil War years and the persons and events alluded to, much of the humour will be lost on you. It also doesn’t help that Butler was a well-educated man who made frequent references to obscure seventeenth-century – and earlier – works of philosophy, astrology, and divinity. It didn’t take long before this caused problems for readers. I have a 1739 edition of the work (with illustrations by Hogarth that became popular in their own right), which the editor has found it necessary to generously lard with explanatory footnotes. An 1811 edition, also in my possession, wisely converts these into endnotes, thereby freeing up the pages for actual verse. Clearly the printed page was getting too cluttered. The current scholarly edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, John Wilders, ed.), a virtuoso performance in the editorial arts, besides incorporating those early footnotes, devotes about a quarter of the total volume length to detailed explanatory endnote commentary. In other words, for even the most academic modern reader Hudibras has become a text to grapple with rather than to read for pleasure.

No, I can’t blame people for no longer being interested in reading Hudibras. Well, with one qualification: I would blame scholars of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English literature and history for not reading it, since Hudibras was so well-known to literate people of those times as to have been quoted almost as much as Shakespeare or the Bible. I would go so far as to say, a student of the period must have at least a working familiarity with the work in order to be regarded as trustworthy or competent from a scholarly point of view. This judgment seems harsh, but not in light of Hudibras’ influence on the culture of that time. I shall give two examples where an otherwise very good scholar has undermined their own authority by demonstrating ignorance of Butler’s work.

The first example comes from James Leheny’s otherwise quite good edition of Joseph Addison’s Freeholder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). In Freeholder No. 3 (30 December 1715), Addison offers a satirical character sketch of a Jacobite rebel. The rebel says “I must needs say I gained my Commission by my Horse’s Vertues, not my own”. Now, anyone familiar with Hudibras would have immediately recognized this as an obvious allusion to that opening  “Argument” to Part I, Canto I, quoted above (“His Arms and Equipage are shown; / His Horse’s Vertues, and his own”). Unfortunately, Leheny misses this. Instead, he takes this opportunity to offer a lengthy footnote on the English rebels who joined the Scots, and how they consisted mostly of horse, and their horses being hunting horses not fit for battle. This gloss is, speaking charitably, only marginally relevant to Addison’s text. It is possible that Leheny thought the allusion to Butler too obvious to require comment, but if so, why descant on the unfitness of rebel horses at such length? Better an obvious gloss than a meandering and irrelevant one. And given how unfamiliar Hudibras is to modern readers, I doubt that the allusion is so obvious as to require no comment. The fact is, Hudibras has become so obscure a text, that an otherwise competent scholar of the period can get away with being blissfully ignorant of it. But the Spectacled Avenger shall not let such ignorance pass.

The second example comes from Peter Laslett’s magisterial edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), which has for decades now been the last word on that text. In his “Preface” to the Two Treatises, Locke complains of the doctrine of passive obedience to monarchy being spread from the pulpit by high-flying churchmen of the time. He writes that “There cannot be done a greater Mischief to Prince and People, than the Propagating wrong Notions concerning Government, that so at last all times might not have reason to complain of the Drum Ecclesiastick.” Now that last phrase of Locke’s is clearly a reference to Hudibras, Part I, Canto I, lines 9-12:

“When Gospel-trumpeter, surrounded

With long-ear’d rout, to Battel sounded,

And Pulpit, Drum Ecclesiastick,

Was beat with fist, instead of a stick”

To this Laslett inserts a footnote, in which he unhelpfully glosses “Drum Ecclesiastick” as “pulpit”, and then proceeds to an irrelevant quotation from James Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681) about “wind blown theologues”. Now, we know that Locke read Tyrrell and knew him personally, but there is absolutely nothing in his words here to justify the inference that he had Tyrrell in mind. Laslett has overlooked Locke’s obvious allusion to Butler, instead going much further afield to find an allusion that is neither obvious nor warranted. I can only surmise that this is because Laslett was not familiar with Hudibras.

Chandler's Debates

I recently acquired, at a quite reasonable price, volumes 4, 6, 7, 9, and 12 of The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, compiled and published by Richard Chandler in fourteen volumes in 1742 (I have since also acquired volumes 6, 7, and 8 of Ebenezer Timberland’s companion History and Proceedings of the House of Lords, also published in 1742). Chandler’s Debates, as they are more commonly known, were what passed for Hansard before the latter began official publication in 1803. They were mostly compiled from newspaper reports, supplemented by notes of proceedings kept by members, along with speeches submitted to the journals for publication by the writers themselves. Chandler’s Debates were neither thorough nor entirely accurate, but it was largely the only game in town if you wanted to know what went in in the House of Commons.

Now, even for someone like me, who is sunk quite deep in the history and literature of 18^th-century Britain, Chandler’s Debates can make for some rather dry reading. I have just finished volume 4, and I can tell you, there is a sort of tedious “tick-tock” quality to the work: the Queen’s gracious address to the Commons (tick), followed by the address of thanks from the Commons to Her Majesty on her late gracious address (tock); list of Bills given royal assent that session (tick), followed by prorogation (tock), etc. Because it is the history of procedure, it has a mechanical quality, as all procedure does.

This monotonous rhythm is typically only broken up by a notable speech here, or a rumour of a French invasion there. And always there are excruciatingly detailed statements of revenue (“the Produce of the Fines arising in the Alienation-Office, including the necessary Expences of the Court of Chancery, and other Charges borne thereout, is by a Medium, 4,804 l.”) and expense (“to discharge Malt Tickets, issued 8 W[illiam III]., besides 254,557 l. for 6 years Interest, the principal Sum of 579,000 l.”).

Gripping stuff, no? And yet, there are little treasures to be gleaned from these volumes.

Parliamentary Eloquence

For instance, one comes across speeches that have undeservedly fallen into obscurity. Political speeches are unfortunately like the flies of a summer; they have their day, hatching in the heat of a political occasion, nourished by the warm excrement of politicking, and dying off along with the season. There are of course exceptions to this general rule.

In our day, eloquent and moving political oratory has almost ceased to exist. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: the only reason Barack Obama has a reputation for oratory is because there really are no orators left. As the proverb says, “in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I remember how shortly after the September 11 attacks, Tony Blair was described by a CBC reporter as having given a speech “of Ciceronian eloquence” on the subject. I heard that speech, and I don’t know which I found more surprising, the fact that such a bloodless and lacklustre performance could be described in such glowing terms, or the fact that a CBC reporter might actually have had a vague inkling of who Cicero was.

Many of the scattered speeches in Chandler’s Debates have the power to remind one that there was a time, unfortunately before living memory, when not every politician was a rhetorical dullard. As an example, I submit to you Lord Belhaven’s 1706 “Mother Caledonia” speech to the Scottish Parliament on the Act of Union, which opens volume 4 of Chandler’s Debates. Technically, it doesn’t belong there at all, since it was not delivered at Westminster, but Chandler included it anyway, because it “deserves to be forever remember’d.”

Belhaven was against the union with England. Now, a modern politician would probably have made it a “bread and butter” issue, offering arguments showing how the union would destroy national autonomy, increase taxes, or be detrimental to trade and the economy, with appropriate statistics cherry-picked to back up his case. If he were particularly clever, he might throw in a cheap and clumsy ad hominem against his opponents too.

Belhaven avoids ad hominem attacks. He doesn’t weary the listener with statistics on national revenue and trade. He rather appeals to the heart, which is really the only way to sway an assembly, since appeals to rationality rarely move the party spirit from its fixed purposes. Belhaven begins by framing his argument in the form of a vision, of a future Scotland, after the nation and its trade and economy have been dismantled:

“I think I see a free and independent Kingdom delivering up that, which all the world hath been fighting for since the Days of Nimrod; yea, that for which most of all the Empires, Kingdoms, States, Principalities, and Dukedoms of Europe, are at this time engaged in the most bloody and cruel Wars that ever were, to wit, a Power to manage their own Affairs by themselves, without the Assistance and Counsel of any other.”

He then describes his vision of the various classes of Scotland from the highest peers to the lowest day-labourer, emasculated, corrupted, hungry, cheated:

“I think I see the honest industrious Tradesman loaded with new Taxes and Impositions, disappointed of the Equivalents, drinking Water in place of Ale, eating his saltless Pottage, petitioning for Encouragement to his Manufactures, and answered by Counter-Petitions…. In short, I think I see the laborious Ploughman, with his Corn spoiling upon his Hands, for want of Sale, cursing the Day of his Birth, dreading the Expence of his Burial, and uncertain whether to marry or do worse. I think I see the incurable Difficulties of the Landed-Men, fettered under the Golden Chain of Equivalents, their pretty Daughters petitioning for want of Husbands, and their Sons for want of Employment.”

He goes on like this, in a slow burn, steadily building to that crescendo which gave the speech its name:

“But above all, my Lord, I think I see our ancient Mother CALEDONIA, like Cæsar, sitting in the midst of our Senate, ruefully looking round about her, covering herself with her royal Garment, attending the fatal Blow, and breathing out her last with an et tu quoque mi fili.”

And lest his hearers should forget the urgency and import of the question they are to decide, Belhaven brings it home, into the very room where they sit:

“Hannibal, my Lord, is at our Gates, Hannibal is come within our Gates, Hannibal is come the length of this Table, he is at the Foot of this Throne, he will demolish this Throne; if we take not notice, he’ll seize upon these Regalia, he’ll take them as our spolia opima, and whip us out of this House, never to return again.”

All through the speech, there is a running simile, wherein voting in favour of the Act of Union is characterized as a particularly loathsome kind of murder. The Romans, says Belhaven, reserved the most severe form of punishment for he who was guilty of parricide, of killing his father. Such an abomination was sewn up into a sack with a snake, a cock, and an ape, and thrown into the Tiber. How much worse punishment, Belhaven asks, do those merit who are guilty of patricide, of murdering their fatherland? Patricide, he says, is what the house is essentially contemplating, and those who vote in favour of union make themselves guilty of it.

I can’t remember ever hearing anything close to this kind of eloquence in the Canadian House of Commons in my lifetime.

The Ancient Fiscal Constitution

There are also lessons to be learned from Chandler’s Debates on how to manage the national finances.

When a government today wishes to enact a spending measure, what does it do? Well, generally speaking, and assuming it has decided for whatever reasons that the measure is a good idea, it simply estimates the cost and adds it as an item to the budget of the department concerned (this is of course somewhat oversimplified, but pretty accurate in the main).

And when a modern government adds all these items of expenditure up and finds that this column totals more than the other column in the budget (you know, the one containing estimated revenue), what does it do? Well, it depends. If, as in the United States, the expenditure in question won’t come due for several years yet (as is the case with social security and other similar unfunded entitlements), then it does nothing; it simply ignores it until it becomes some other future government’s problem.

If time does not allow for the American-style “kick-the-can-down-the-road” approach to public finance, then the new expenditure can be financed by:

1. Borrowing the money.

2. Making the new expenditure self-financing. Examples would be instituting a postal service by charging customers for delivery, or instituting a customs service whose agents are paid from the proceeds of confiscated goods.

3. Introducing a new source of revenue to pay for it. This needn’t be a tax — government lotteries were increasingly popular in the 18^th century.

The first way seems to be the most common today, but it was not always thus. In Chandler’s Debates one realizes that 2 and 3 were far more common. If old churches needed to be repaired or new ones built, then perhaps a dedicated excise tax might be placed on all spirituous liquors. Sometimes the introduction of such a new tax betrays a fairly sophisticated understanding of policy analysis, as when war with France is partly financed by a punitive 25% duty on all goods imported from France. Here, any comparative success France enjoys in trade will contribute to Britain’s comparative military success, which is fairly clever when you think that today Britain would be more likely to simply impose a complete embargo on all enemy goods.

And in the 18^th century, when the government had recourse to 3, there are a couple of ways in which it was done that differed from the way it is often done today. First, the new revenue stream was dedicated: if an excise was raised or a lottery set up to pay for road repairs, then that money went into a fund to pay for road repairs, not to wage war with France. It did not go into general revenues. As a matter of fact, the very idea of a “general revenue” was not very prominent in 18^th century public finance.

(Indeed, I suspect that our propensity to think in general revenue terms is partly a product of the development of the income tax as the primary source of revenue: when the lion’s share of the treasury is made up from one source, then that source tends to be thought of as the de facto “general revenue”. I leave it to empirical research to discover whether this way of thinking is a cause or consequence also of the decreasing reliance on dedicated revenue streams.)

There is wisdom in this way of doing things. The ideal of having each item of expenditure financed by a corresponding dedicated revenue stream meant that there was a close relationship between the revenue and expenditure columns of the public accounts. The totals at the bottom of the two columns may not have always balanced exactly, but they would typically be a lot closer, especially over the long run. The modern custom tends to treat the two columns as conceptually unrelated. Viewing the expenditure side as being indefinitely expandable through borrowing, creates a situation in which revenue and expense have become uncoupled.

Furthermore, when a proposed expenditure is required to be met by a dedicated revenue stream, it is as if the public is simultaneously receiving a good or service and the bill for it. Do I like having well-maintained roads enough to cheerfully pay the 10% excise tax on my wine and beer? It enables citizens to be better informed of the value of publicly-provided goods and services and it (hopefully) enables politicians to make better choices about how to spend money. Under the modern finance regime, you are offered spending proposals by entrepreneurial politicians without being given a clear indication of what your share of the bill will be (or your children’s share, as the case may be). Price signals under the modern fiscal regime are hopelessly opaque. This distorts decision-making.

The second way in which the 18^th-century method of raising revenue differed from the modern is that the new tax was typically closed- rather than open-ended: if the proposed road repairs were estimated to take two years, then the excise financing them would run for only two years (or however long it had to run to make good the cost of repairs). This time limit was expressly included in the legislation instituting the tax. This had the effect of curbing the “ratchet effect”, whereby new taxes are piled on top of old ones, with taxation eating up a growing share of national GDP (see Addendum 1, below). Taxation today tends to be open-ended; an incidental tax here and there may be repealed, but the overall level of taxation tends ever upward.

I have spoke at some length of revenue generation. However, I do not wish to give the impression that the British government in the 18^th century never borrowed to pay for its activities. Deficit financing is not new. Then as now there were occasionally large contingencies that simply could not be paid for by the immediate imposition of taxes without doing more harm than good. Such was the case with the growing cost of the War of the Spanish Succession against France and her allies. This was essentially a Europe-wide war that dragged on for over a dozen years and took a severe toll on national finances. Despite generally prudent fiscal practices, 18^th-century British governments were forced to borrow large sums.

Nevertheless, even in their borrowing, 18^th-century governments seemed to possess a prudence lacking in modern public finance. When was the last time you heard the word “sinking fund” uttered by a minister of finance? In the past, it sometimes so happened that a dedicated stream of revenue would produce greater funds than expected or required to pay for its mandated expenditure. Typically, this money would be put into a sinking fund, the purpose of which was to redeem government bonds and retire debt. Often, where there was a plan to borrow money to finance an endeavor, such a sinking fund would also be mandated to pay down that debt according to a fixed schedule at the very same time the debt was incurred. Today, whenever there is a budget surplus (an admittedly rare occurrence under the modern fiscal constitution), great pressure is exerted by entrepreneurial politicians to apply the windfall to an expansion of spending. In the 18^th century there would often be legislation that already earmarked it for debt retirement ahead of time, foreclosing the schemes of such entrepreneurial politicians.

(Of course, in practice it was not always that smooth: then as now, the temptation to raid a pot of surplus funds to pay for current exigencies was often too much for governments to resist. The difference is that in the past surpluses were spoken for before they even accrued, whereas today they become a political prize for politicians to fight over. And in theory at least, having clear sinking fund provisions should reduce the perceived credit risk of accepting government debt in the first place, thereby lowering the government’s cost of borrowing. At least, that is the theory; I leave it to abler minds than mine to prove or disprove it.)

All of these characteristics of 18^th-century public finance make up what, paraphrasing James M. Buchanan, we might call the “ancient fiscal constitution” (see Buchanan’s Democracy in Deficit: The Legacy of Lord Keynes). To reiterate, these characteristics are:

1. A preference for financing through dedicated revenue streams
2. A systematic relationship between revenue and expense columns
3. Revenue streams that are closed-ended
4. Debt retirement through a sinking fund

It is worth noting that these characteristics were more a matter of custom and habit, a sort of generally accepted public-sphere morality. Sometimes there were deviations from this morality, and it was not enforced by some supreme lawgiver. Like all moralities, it was necessarily fragile, and contingencies gradually broke it down.

Addendum 1: Clarendon and the Excise

I recently came across the following little gem towards the end of Book VII of Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. It is an early illustration of that “ratchet effect” spoken of earlier. When you read it, you might want to reflect upon how the income tax, introduced during World War One, was intended to be a temporary measure only.

Clarendon writes that in 1643 Parliament “laid an imposition, which they called an excise, upon wine, beer, ale, and many other commodities… for carrying on the war. This was the first time that ever the name of payment of excise was heard of or practiced in England.” The King’s side followed their lead, and “in Oxford, Bristol, and other garrisons, it did yield a reasonable supply for the provision of arms and ammunition; which, for the most part, it was assigned to; both sides making ample declarations, with bitter reproaches upon the necessity which drew on this imposition, ‘that it should be continued no longer than to the end of the war, and then laid down, and utterly abolished;’ which few wise men believed it would ever be.”

Addendum 2: “The Norfolk Steward”

Lest you think that I look upon the 18^th-century as a Golden Age of public finance, I offer the following little gem to illustrate that even then, enterprising and unscrupulous politicians were quite capable of cooking the public books. It is extracted from “The History of the Norfolk Steward”, appearing as an Appendix to volume 3 of the collected Craftsman papers (London: R. Francklin, 1731).

The story is this: Mr. Lyn is steward to kindly Sir George English. It seems that the estate is being grossly mismanaged and run into debt, and the rack-rented tenants are grumbling. They are pressing Sir George to replace his incompetent steward. They repeatedly ask Lyn for a full accounting of Sir George’s affairs. Lyn avoids submitting his accounts for as long as he can, all the while claiming that as great as the debt may seem, it is greatly reduced from what it had been the decade previous. Thus, you see, all is not as bad as it may seem on paper.

Undeterred, the tenants continue to press him for full disclosure, in which demands Sir George concurs. Finally, being able to put it off no longer, the steward — too clever by half — submits his accounts, but with an explanation of the rather unorthodox method he has used to arrive at them.

The tale of the Norfolk Steward is allegorical. Mr. Lyn represents Prime Minister Robert Walpole, since Lyn is a town in Norfolk, and the “Norfolk mortgage” represents Walpole’s own constituency, since he was a Norfolk man and commonly stood accused of enriching himself and his cronies at the expense of the nation. Sir George English represents the King, and of course, the grumbling tenants represent the people of Great Britain. I leave you to reflect on whether Mr. Lyn’s accounting is not a piece of political cant as poetically sublime as Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”:

“There is not, perhaps, so great a Master in Europe of the grand Art of Bambouzle as Mr. Lyn. Though, said He, there are new Debts incurr’d, the old Debt is not increas’d. There are real Debts and nominal Debts. There are real nominal Debts, and nominal real Debts. There are family Debts and personal Debts; which, though the Family must pay, ought not to be brought to the Family Account. There are Debts never stated, tho’ incurred; and Debts which, tho’ incurred and stated, might never be paid; so that, upon the whole, you see, Gentleman, I have paid off a considerable Part of the Mortgage upon Sir George’s Estate. But when he was told, that tho’ it was true that Part of the Norfolk Mortgage was paid off, yet Sir George was really now as much in debt as before; because Mr. Lyn, to perform this mighty Deed, had borrow’d just as much upon Sir George’s Estate in Leicestershire, as he had paid off in Norfolk, so that the Ballance continued as before; he broke into a loud Laugh, and told the Tenants they knew nothing of Accounts, nor the difference between a Debt incurred and a Debt increased…. Nay, what is still more extraordinary, he stated his Account of Debts contracted to Christmas last only; whereas he calculated the Sum of Debts discharged to Lady-day next; a Method of stating and ballancing Accounts, which was never before practiced or heard of in these Parts!”

Spenser’s Art of Sinking

My three favourite English poets, in rank order are Milton, Pope, and Spenser.

(I would add James Thomson, except for the fact that he was technically a Scot. I would also add Rochester, except that he is too uneven; when he is good he is great, but when he’s bad he’s wretched).

My love for Milton is based almost solely on Paradise Lost and the odd sonnet or two (though I should mention that much of his prose is also well worth the reading). Paradise Lost is always grand, and I never read it without coming away from it feeling ennobled somehow. No poet is perfect, though each may be imperfect in his own way. With Milton, his imperfections lie in his coinages and his Latinate vocabulary, which are not always elegant or felicitous, sounding a little too much of the learned chit-chat at the college High Table.

In Pope, I admire his wit. He is at his best when he is being funny, which is why it was a shame that my college professors had us spend so much time studying An Essay on Man rather than The Dunciad. Pope was no philosopher, and the Essay on Man reads like a cheap verse bowdlerization of Shaftesbury or Bolingbroke. He was a master of comedic irony and a vicious and brutal satirist (I mean this in a good way). If he has one major drawback, for me, it would be his tiresome heroic couplets, which were unfortunately the characteristic vice of the age and by no means peculiar to Pope. They are often clever, but over long stretches they are tiresome. Still, to blame him for this is about as useful as blaming your parents for the platform shoes or velour tracksuits they wore in those old family photographs; one must look past them.

And then we come to Spenser. His language is earthy, his vocabulary is English (except where he focuses on the minutiae of chivalric deeds and accoutrement, wherein he has recourse to a bastard French lexicon). Whether he is describing shepherds or battle wounds, his images are striking — someone should do a count of how often he uses the word “grisly” in The Faerie Queene. He loves to use archaisms, and although this could seem rather contrived and intrusive in a poet of lesser skill, in Spenser it is more often charming.

As for faults, Spenser has two that are, to my mind, only excusable by the fact that he wrote in an age when English criticism was still in its infancy. On the other hand, he was a Cambridge man and had a decent classical education, so he would have had ample opportunity to know about the poetic sins he was committing from such authorities as Horace, Quintilian, and perhaps Longinus. He cannot, I think, plead ignorance.

Spenser’s “Sinking”

In 1727, Pope published his humourous essay “Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry”. Its subject was the ways in which writers of his time commonly failed to hit at the level of sublimity or loftiness they were aiming at in their work, instead sinking into the commonplace, the bombastic, or the anticlimactic.

Sometimes a poet, whilst singing of great themes, goes on too long, until the reader is simply wearied. Or else, although not exactly wearied, the reader’s expectations are built up to such a height that the tension created is out of all proportion to the actual issue. Here I think of the Earl of Roscommon’s line in An Essay on Translated Verse (1685), echoing Horace:

“The Mountains Labour’d and a Mouse was Born” (p. 6)

When Spenser sinks, he more often does so by cramming his verse with commonplaces unworthy of his skill. Perhaps the best example of this is the following stanza from The Faerie Queene, in which Florimell is chased by the Foster:

“So as they gazed after her a while,
    Lo where a griesly Foster forth did rush,
    Breathing out beastly lust her to defile:
    His tyreling iade he fiercely forth did push,
    Through thicke and thin, both ouer banke and bush
    In hope her to attaine by hooke or crooke,
    That from his gorie sides the bloud did gush:
    Large were his limbes, and terrible his looke,
And in his clownish hand a sharp bore speare he shooke.”
[Bk. III, Canto I, stanza xvii]

This is ugly stuff, no? If the only way one can fill out a stanza is by stuffing it with such peasantries as “through thick and thin”, “over bank and bush”, and “by hook or crook”, then it were better never writ.

In fairness, we might excuse Spenser on this occasion, since perhaps it was done intentionally, in keeping with the Foster’s bestiality and rustic clownishness. It may also be a feeble attempt at archaism, a monstrous facsimile of what Spenser thought was traditional Middle English alliterative verse. But still, there are other instances of such sinking in the book where no reason can be plausibly offered other than sheer laziness on the poet’s part. What it most commonly achieves is a combination of the serious with the frivolous, to the detriment of the former.

Spenser’s “Ten-Monosyllable Heroicks”

In his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Lord Shaftesbury described his impression of the effect that too many consecutive monosyllables will have on the ear:

“I see no reason why… an un-interrupted Succession of these well-strung Monosyllables might not be allow’d to clatter after one another, like the Hammers of a Paper-Mill, without any breach of Musick, or prejudice to the Harmony of our Language. But if Persons who have gone no farther than a Smith’s Anvil to gain an Ear, are yet likely, on fair trial, to find a plain defect in these Ten-Monosyllable Heroicks; it wou’d follow, methinks, that even a Prose-Author, who attempts to write politely, shou’d endeavour to confine himself within those Bounds, which can never, without breach of Harmony, be exceeded in any just Metre, or agreeable Pronunciation.” (III.265-266)

Technically speaking, the basis of heroic verse — the “Heroicks” to which Shaftesbury refers — was the rhyming couplet composed of ten-syllable lines in iambic pentameter, as in the opening lines of Pope’s Iliad:

“Achilles’ Wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heav’nly Goddess sing!
That Wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The Souls of mighty Chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unbury’d on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.”

Whether arranged in rhyming couplets or not, the ten-syllable iambic pentameter line is common in English verse. Spenser’s stanzas are typically composed of ten-syllable pentameter, with a final twelve-syllable alexandrine. Having ten syllables to a line is no sin. Having ten monosyllables only to a line is.

Shaftesbury’s nephew, James Harris, noted in his Philological Inquiries (1780) that “It has been called a fault in our Language, that it abounds in MONOSYLLABLES. As these, in too lengthened a suite, disgrace a Composition; Lord Shaftesbury, (who studied purity of Stile with great attention) limited their number to nine, and was careful, in his Characteristics, to conform to his own Law” (Works, vol. II, p. 340).

In prose, the auditory effect of ten or more consecutive monosyllables is rather akin to the clattering hammers of a paper mill. Indeed, as his nephew notes, Shaftesbury took pains to excise examples of it from his own prose for the second edition of Characteristicks (compare, for example, volume I, page 66 of the first and second editions). It has a somewhat different effect in poetry, but just as jarring. In his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), Jonathan Swift also remarked on “how much our Language was already overstocked with Monosyllables” (p. 21). The bad effects of this on poetry was, he claimed, exacerbated by the Restoration poets’ habit of contracting words to make them fit the measure, effectively rendering polysyllabic words monosyllabic.

Let us look at an example of a ten-monosyllable line in one of these Restoration poets. I mentioned earlier that when Lord Rochester is good he is great, but when he’s bad, he’s wretched. At line 109 of Rochester’s “Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country,” we come across the following literary atrocity:

“They still find out why what may, should not please”

True, the line does not contain one of the contractions of which Swift complained. But in other respects it serves to illustrate the effect of the ten-monosyllable string on a line of verse. In this case, if we imagine the line to move along, like a horse, at a trot, the horse seems to stumble somewhere around the “what may”, a little before or a little after it, depending on how you scan it. (Notice that I have violated the nine-monosyllable rule myself in the foregoing sentence, to what effect I’ll leave you to judge). The same distance is travelled, but with confused steps, making the journey seem longer than it should.

Rather than clattering or hammering, for Pope the ten-monosyllable heroic was a creeping thing. Again, we are given the image of something at the same time ungraceful, ignoble, and unduly slow:

“Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.”
[An Essay on Criticism (1711), p. 21, ll. 345-349]

More than nine consecutive monosyllables make a line seem longer than it is, and more than one such line in a stanza outright kills it. Spenser is more than once guilty of this kind of murder. Stanza xix of Bk. III, Canto V of The Faerie Queene is disfigured by two lines of ten consecutive monosyllables. Actually, there are three such lines if you believe, as I do, that Spenser intended “powre” to be pronounced as one syllable rather than two, as indicated by the altered spelling, allowing it to be crammed into a ten-syllable line. Thus, I end with this supreme example of Spenser’s art of sinking in poetry:

With that at him a quiu'ring dart he threw,
    With so fell force and villeinous despighte,
    That through his haberieon the forkehead flew,
    And through the linked mayles empierced quite,
    But had no powre in his soft flesh to bite:
    That stroke the hardy Squire did sore displease,
    But more that him he could not come to smite;
    For by no meanes the high banke he could sease,
But labour'd long in that deepe ford with vaine disease.
(Bk. III, Canto V, stanza 19)


Bibliography

HARRIS, James. Philological Inquiries (1780). In The Works of James Harris, Esq. (2 vols.). London: F. Wingrave, 1801.

POPE, Alexander. An Essay on Criticism. London: W. Lewis, 1711 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

—— Poetical Works. Herbert Davis (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

ROCHESTER, John Wilmot, Earl of. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. David M. Vieth (ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968.

ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of. An Essay on Translated Verse. London: Jacob Tonson, 1685 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols.). Birmingham: John Baskerville, 1773.

SPENSER, Edmund. The Faerie Queene (2 vols.). J. C. Smith (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.

SWIFT, Jonathan. A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1969).

Living off the Avails...

Inside a government-sponsored anti-gambling initiative

When the government becomes the people’s pander, when it actively and consciously encourages vice, immorality, and plain folly among them, then that people is nigh doomed — it is not necessarily the end of civilization, but it is certainly VIP seating for the event.

My home city is deep in debate about whether it should approve a giant casino and “entertainment complex”. I use the word “debate” with a sense of reservation, since it implies that there are roughly an equal number of people on both sides of the issue. In truth, I have yet to personally meet a single person who supports this casino, though I’m sure such people are out there somewhere, especially among assorted developers and those city councillors who are deep in their pockets. I do after all run in rather rarefied circles.

Rather than argue over all the pros and cons of the casino, I would simply like to consider one argument offered in support of it, since it is the argument that is most commonly trotted out when the discussion comes up. The argument — let us call it the Revenue Argument — at its simplest is this:

THE REVENUE ARGUMENT: The gambling revenue that will flow into city coffers from a casino will allow us to finance badly needed infrastructure, such as new subways.

Presumably, that revenue will come in the form of either (i) levies on gamblers, or (ii) levies on the winnings of casinos, or else (iii) from the enlarged tax base created by the new jobs casinos will provide. These are not mutually exclusive revenue streams, and the city may derive funds from all of them. However, in truth they are all reducible to (i). For example, in order for those new jobs to become a reality, the casino must make money from gamblers sufficient to pay the workers (I leave aside the very real question of the quality of these jobs and whether there aren’t better ways of creating better jobs). So the new jobs are funded ultimately from the losses of gamblers. Similarly, and more obviously, in order for a casino to be able to pay taxes, it must make profits; these profits ultimately come from — wait for it — the losses of gamblers.

Thus, the new revenue must come one way or another from the gamblers themselves. The only question is whether the money will come from their losses (via taxation of the house’s revenue and/or the revenue of its employees) or from their winnings (via direct taxation of gamblers’ gains). Again, because these are not mutually exclusive, it doesn’t really matter whether gamblers win or lose, since the government will get its cut either way. Just as the house never loses, so neither it seems does the government. This puts the government in the less than upright position of having to positively encourage gambling, since they make their end by having people gamble (win or lose); they make nothing when people do not gamble. Call it government as public croupier.

So who is the net loser? Well, since both the house and the government must always make their end, it is necessarily the gamblers who must lose. Hence, what the Revenue Argument proposes, in essence, is that public projects be funded by gamblers, and that gamblers ought to open their pockets to pay for our city’s subways. This naturally leads us (or should lead us) to the question: What justifies forcing gamblers to pay for our services? There are a few possible justifications, each of them dubious, to say the least. Let us consider them in turn.

1.    Gamblers are Vicious and Immoral

Many often see gambling as a vice and therefore the people engaging in it as somehow vicious. They might characterize the very folly of gamblers as a kind of vice in itself. Or they might characterize gamblers as wastrels, idly throwing away unjustifiable amounts of their time, talent, and treasure on activities of no social benefit when they could be better employed elsewhere to the common good.

Of course, it may not be simply that gambling is of no net benefit at all, since the gambler can be assumed to derive some pleasure from gambling, no matter how small and fleeting it may be. Instead, let us think of it in opportunity cost terms: although gambling is pleasurable to the gambler himself, the resources he devotes to it could have been better employed elsewhere and therefore represents net social loss.

I think there is a good case to be made for this view of gambling as wasteful and vicious, but I won’t make that case here. I will simply assume it to be true for the sake of argument. What tends to follow from viewing gambling as immoral is that it is now seen as justified to pick gamblers’ pockets to pay for public projects. This picking of pockets can either be done directly, through taxing his winnings, or indirectly, through taxing his (more certain) losses, which represent the winnings of the house. In either case, the money ultimately comes out of the pockets of gamblers, as has already been explained.

The main differences between taxing gamblers and taxing the general citizenry are that (i) this subset of citizens derives some pleasure from the activity taxed, (ii) they engage in it willingly, and (iii) they are viewed ex hypothesi as immoral and their activity is therefore to be discouraged. These characteristics of taxation of gamblers generally lead observers to view the taxation more favourably. After all, we can discourage bad behavior and make the bad people pay for public goods as a sort of penance for their voluntary sins. And it magically makes wastefulness efficient. This favourable view is wrong.

First, if the activity is truly immoral and if gamblers are by extension guilty of vice, then wouldn’t the logical answer to be to make the activity illegal? We certainly shouldn’t be encouraging it by building flashy new gambling facilities with attached “entertainment complexes” for the whole family. As I said before, in order for the government to make its end in this racket it must encourage more gambling, which is rather inconsistent with the claim that it is justified in taxing gambling because such taxation will discourage it. The government’s position here is at bottom incoherent.

Secondly, assuming gamblers are somehow vicious, I don’t see a close rational connection between mulcting them and rewarding non-gamblers with the proceeds, which is what we are doing when we purchase public goods for the latter with wealth confiscated from the former. The gambler may deserve punishment, but it does not logically follow from this that non-gamblers deserve to profit from his vice. Criminal sanctions may be appropriate for certain vicious behaviours, but it seems to me that redistribution from gamblers to non-gamblers would have to be justified on the basis of the latter somehow being victims of the former. This is a stretch. But even if it’s not, we come back again to my earlier point: when someone commits a crime and there is a victim involved, it may be appropriate to penalize the criminal by making him pay compensation to the victim. But we do not make it part of public policy to positively encourage crime and make it attractive so that more victims can be created and more money be paid to them. That is what is commonly called a “racket”, and a very degenerate one at that (more on rackets later). Yet this is precisely what we are doing when we purposely create more casinos, encourage more gambling, and then tax it on the basis that it does harm to society. Either gambling is morally tainted or it isn’t. If it is tainted, society ought not to avail itself of the proceeds of the crime, any more than a pimp ought to avail himself of the proceeds of his prostitutes.

On the other hand, if gambling is a vicious though victimless activity, then assuming that we are conservative enough to want to punish victimless crimes, we ought to do so without rewarding people who are not victims, otherwise we make the general citizenry share in the proceeds of vice, which is wrong. (Of course, in a more liberal approach, we shouldn’t be punishing victimless crimes at all. But that’s a debate for another day.)

If you and I want things like new subways, we ought to be willing to pay for them. We are not justified in paying for them with the money of gamblers except insofar as their behavior is somehow either unjustly depriving us of those subways (which it is not) or insofar as they will be the exclusive users of the subways (which they won’t be). To make them pay for our subways is — pardon the pun — free riding, a shakedown.

Far from justifying the Revenue Argument, viewing gambling as a vice makes the Revenue Argument an instrument of our own corruption, insofar as it would have us living off the avails of immorality.

And yet, the way governments and casino developers typically present it, the Revenue Argument sounds like a wonderful alchemical method for turning base vice into golden virtue. And much like the claims of alchemy, this one is too good to be true.

2.    The Casino Industry is Vicious and Immoral

I once had a professor in a class on probability and inductive logic explain to us that lotteries are a government’s way of taxing people who can’t do math. We may be neutral on whether or not gamblers themselves are immoral, while still believing that the industry that profits from them is immoral. Maybe gamblers are gullible, or sick, or weak, and therefore shouldn’t be taken advantage of. If so, it may be argued that it is hence justifiable to mulct casinos in order to penalize them for fleecing the sick, the weak, and the stupid.

Notice that on this account, much of what I argued above would still apply. First, as I’ve already explained, the money mulcted from casinos ultimately comes from the putatively sick, weak, and irrational gamblers themselves. If casinos prey on the weak, then when governments impose “punitive” taxes on casinos they are ultimately skimming the profits of an injustice rather than addressing it. Again, we — through the agency of our government — become the casinos’ accomplices in wrongdoing.

Second, if what casinos are doing is immoral, then we ought not to be encouraging the building of new ones. By advocating for new casinos, we are advocating for more vice and making ourselves complicit in the immorality of the gambling industry. We further implicate ourselves by offering tax breaks and incentives to casino developers. Far from being high-minded in our taxing of evildoers to create public good, we are creating and encouraging public ill and then spending some of the ill-gotten gains on public works to expiate our sins, so that we may continue to sin. Actually, that view is too flattering, for we actually derive benefit from this expiation of our sins, which means it is no expiation at all, no matter how much we fool ourselves into believing we’re righting a wrong.

Third, again, I’m not sure the public has the right to profit from casino owners’ putative wrongdoing. If their actions create victims, then it is the victims that ought to be compensated. Who are the victims? Well, ex hypothesi they would be the poor gullible gamblers whom the casinos take advantage of. I do not gamble, and if I am not harmed by what casinos do, then what right have I to demand my cut of the “compensation” to spend on projects I happen to favour, such as subways? If I want subways, I ought to pay my own fair share for them rather than shaking down third parties to fund them for me, especially when those third parties are sick, weak, or mentally disadvantaged. If the activities of casinos cause harm to certain people, then those people ought to be compensated. I’m not sure why I would deserve compensation (barring, of course, certain vague and indirect negative spillover effects I may be said to suffer from the presence of casinos — but I highly doubt that an honest costing of these would be enough to fund subways).

3.    Gambling is an Inefficient Economic Activity

Maybe gamblers are not vicious. And maybe casinos aren’t either. Perhaps gamblers are not weak or stupid, but rather they knowingly and willingly gain satisfaction from engaging in self-destructive or plain wasteful activity. They make a choice, even though from the standpoint of economic efficiency it is a bad one. And maybe casinos don’t necessarily take advantage of them, but are simply helping them satisfy their reasoned preferences, and making effective use of the knowledge that there is a certain market created by the inefficient choices of gamblers. Maybe, just maybe, there is no immorality in gambling per se, but rather that it represents an economic problem. In other words, instead of being a moral issue, perhaps gambling is just an issue of misallocated resources that needs correcting through policy instruments like taxation.

Well, again, we run into the following problem: If the government aims to discourage gambling by taxing it, then it seems counter-productive to do so by positively encouraging the building of new casinos, complete with exciting new “entertainment complexes”.

In any case, leaving morality out of it, and viewing gambling as an economic problem of misallocated resources, I would argue that if we want a public good like new subways, we should tax the public (i.e. ourselves) in order to pay for them. Once that is done, if gamblers want to spend some of their remaining disposable income on slot machines or ponies, then let them. Once the subways are paid for through general taxation, that particular misallocation of resources has been rectified and the justification for taxing gamblers falls away.

Government Racketeering

We can roughly define “racketeering” as the sale of a solution to a problem that perpetuates the problem it claims to solve, thereby promoting continued recourse to the solution. The textbook example is the protection racket, whereby an organization terrorizes you (creating a problem) and then offers you its “solution” in the form of protection from the organization. Normally, if you have a problem, say cockroaches, you pay an exterminator, who hopefully eliminates the cockroaches; an actual problem has thereby been solved through the purchase of an actual solution. However, in a protection racket, the problem never goes away, because the problem and the solution are essentially the same thing.

Let us assume, as we have been all along, that gambling is a problem because it constitutes either a vice, a sickness, or a net social waste. The Revenue Argument is predicated on characterizing gambling this way, since that is the only plausible way to justify taxing gambling without it amounting to a blatant shakedown. The government’s “solution” to the problem is to build a shiny new casino to encourage gambling, and then to tax the gamblers it creates and/or provides with new opportunities to gamble.

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing more than racketeering. To put it another way, when the government builds casinos it is creating or expanding a “problem” (assuming it is one), by creating gamblers or expanding the opportunities of existing gamblers to gamble. It then profits from this by selling a “solution” to the social problem of gambling, by claiming to tax gamblers to supposedly discourage their behavior, which was encouraged by the government in the first place.

Furthermore, in this case the racketeer takes some of its winnings and pays off the public by spending some of that revenue on public goods like subways, in much the same way that criminal racketeers pay police officers to “look the other way”. When the racket becomes this systemic and this insidious, we call it corruption. More people now have a stake in making sure that a purported social ill continues. Once casinos are built, gambling will not be eliminated, because it has become counterproductive for the government to do so. If anything, it will be expanded.

If gambling is neither a vice nor a sickness nor an inefficiency, then gambling is simply the consumption of a product, much like any other product. It is then hard to see how it is legitimate for the government to discriminate against gamblers in its taxation policies. Gamblers should pay taxes, of course, but for the same reasons and in the same amount that the rest of us should.

On the other hand, if gambling is a vice or a sickness, then any scheme to purchase public goods from its proceeds amounts to nothing more than a racket. I fail to see how it is that racketeering is antisocial and criminal when engaged in by older Italian gentleman, while suddenly becoming a praiseworthy and public-minded endeavour when engaged in by the government (once it has used its monopoly of force to muscle out its Italian competitors).

The racket is not made legitimate by the fact that some of the proceeds are funneled to public works, for that only makes the public complicit in racketeering. If subways are truly a public good, then we all ought to pay our fair share of the taxes necessary to purchase them, gamblers and non-gamblers alike. I should add that as a city grows and its roads become more congested, subways become more of a public good, since even non-users benefit from the positive externality created by having fewer drivers on the road. Toronto has grown well beyond that point.

Addendum

All of the arguments I have offered here against the claim that we should use gambling revenue to pay for public goods have been at bottom moral arguments, not economic ones. In part this is because I have an aversion to merely economic arguments that violate moral principles. I believe that economics and policy analysis are incomplete disciplines insofar as they fail to incorporate and be constrained by our moral values and principles. Of course, there’s room for manoeuver here, since those moral values and principles can themselves be contested. But economics and policy analysis cannot be value-free endeavours.

Maybe this privileging of morality is just mere prejudice on my part. It may very well be the case that it makes economic sense to use gambling revenue to pay for public goods, and if so, then who am I to stand in the way of progress and the “public good”? All I can say to this — besides questioning whether violating moral principles can truly be part of the public good — is that if you attempt to make this argument, then the onus is also on you to provide a further argument: You will have to convince me that not only does it make economic sense to use gambling revenue to pay for public goods, but also that there is no other way the same goal can be achieved without violating moral principles. If we are to violate morality, it must be because there is no other way. (And if there is no other way, then are we really violating morality?)

In any case, I am confident that the casino debate poses no such dilemma. If things like subways are truly public goods, then as long as we could be funding subways by imposing an equitable tax (or fee) on all users to pay for them there will always be an option that is less immoral than building more casinos. Casino mania only becomes a public policy option when politicians lack integrity, courage, and imagination.