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Palgrave Studies in Globalization,
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 Miriam Meissner

Narrating the Global

Financial Crisis
Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth
Miriam Meissner
Department of Sociology
Lancaster University
Lancaster, United Kingdom

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society

ISBN 978-3-319-45410-8 ISBN 978-3-319-45411-5 (eBook)
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing this book would have been impossible, and also much less plea-
sant, without the support of many, whom I wish to thank here. The
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of
Amsterdam generously provided the financial support for the first four
years of this project, which allowed me to focus fully on the research and
writing, as well as to travel and “test” my ideas in different environments.
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University provided its
support for the finalization of this project and helped me to include some
of the visual material that I discuss in this book as illustrations.
Many scholars have helped me to develop, challenge and re-develop my
ideas for this book. I would like to thank some of them, in particular, for
sharing their interests and insights, as well as for helping me to bring my
writing into a publishable form. More gratitude than I could express here
goes to Christoph Lindner, who encouraged this project from its very
beginning five years ago, and whose heartening enthusiasm, attentive
feedback, and thoughtful practical advice were crucial to every step of its
further development.
I wish to thank Marieke de Goede, Jeroen de Kloet, Nicky Marsh,
Esther Peeren, Patricia Pisters, and Gillian Rose for their careful reading
and invaluable comments on my writing. Esther Peeren and Jeroen de
Kloet I want to thank twice. Their help and confidence allowed me to have
this book be part of the Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and
Society series, which is a great opportunity. I thank Joyce Goggin for
passing on to me her fascination with the critical study of finance and
financial fiction, and for including me in every event related to these topics.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Patricia Pisters and Greg de Cuir for encouraging me to

publish my first research findings in NECSUS: European Journal of Media
Studies. I also thank NECSUS for allowing me to reprint some of that
material in this book. I am grateful to Julia Ott and Joseph Heathcott for
inviting and welcoming me at the New School for Social Research, which –
apart from an interesting guest research experience – also provided a great
opportunity to get to know New York.
In terms of moral and intellectual support, I wish to thank all of the
members of ASCA for being such an energizing, inspiring and warm-
hearted group! ASCA’s Ph.D. community provided great support for,
and distraction from, this project. I am grateful for all the helpful, exciting
and funny conversations at the office, during breaks and beyond. From the
Ph.D. community, I particularly wish to thank Judith Naeff and Pedram
Dibazar, whom I consider a dream team, as well as Simon Ferdinand,
Marie Beauchamps, Tim Yaczo, Tijmen Klous, Selçuk Balamir, Lara
Mazurski, Enis Dinç, Uzma Abid Ansari, Blandine Joret, Nur Ozgenalp,
Niall Martin, Melle Kromhout and Irene Villaescusa Illán.
My friends have been, and continue to be great in supporting me, but also
in making sure that I do not get “lost in my head”. I cannot acknowledge all
of the different ways in which they manage to do so, but I wish to thank
some of them, in particular, for being there for me throughout the past few
years. Anna-Helena Klumpen, Dea van Lierop, and Diana Soto de Jesús, I
thank for being close during our first few years in Amsterdam, and for
continuing to care and stay in touch in spite of our present distance.
Marine Delgado, Clara Dutilleul, Marina Henao, Marika Tsombikos,
Lorna Kirkpatrick and Jella Lorenz – my Radioweg family – I thank for a
fantastic time living together, for their care, their wit, and for making
Amsterdam home. I thank Neli Dobreva for her longtime support and belief
in me, and for providing a home in Paris; Dana Rubin Macioti for being an
inspirational thinker and fighter; Hania Raciborska for organizing energiz-
ing travels around Europe; Elwira Lewandowska and Ritesh Kumar for
“adopting me” as an almost stranger at their place in New York – and for
being the best (and also the most funny) impression I took home from this
city. I am also grateful to Julia Baldus, Francis Bendel, Lena Heuel, Carmela
La Marca, Alicja Malinowski, Jenny Neumann, Claudia Pinnhammer, Anita
Prochnicki, Ilka Schlegel and Marie-Christine Ulmen, for staying in touch
and making me feel as if I never left whenever I come back to Bonn.
Finally, I wish to express much gratitude to my family – to my grand-
parents Maria and Werner Krapohl, and Gertrud and Günther Meissner, as
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

well as to Walter, Heike, Patrick, Tobias Meissner and Margarete Siegberg –

for believing in me even if it was not always clear what I was doing (maybe it
still isn’t). Most of all, I wish to thank my parents, Jeannine and Bernd
Meissner, for their trust and love, and for finding ways to be, move and
celebrate with me at every moment and despite any geographical distance.
Last but not least, I thank Federico Savini, for sharing with me all the
important (and also some of the less important) thoughts, ideas and feelings
of the last years, and for being able to turn even the more difficult moments
into laughter.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Myths of Finance and the City 1

2 Mythical Crisis Perspectives 17

3 Setting the Scene: Financial Spaces and Architectures 41

4 Figuring Flows: Urban Transport Myths of Trading 83

5 Dwelling in Times of Financialization: Dreams, Ruins,

Escapism 133

6 Specters of Finance and the Black Box City 173

7 Conclusion: Financialization, Spectral Absence

and the Politics of Myth 221

Bibliography 229

Index 243

ix
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.1 Geometrical aesthetics in the opening credits of Wall Street:

Money Never Sleeps (2010) 53
Fig. 3.2 High angle shot of the grid city in Inside Job (2010) 55
Fig. 3.3 The financial gaze in Freefall (2009) 56
Fig. 3.4 Estranged perspectives: trading screen reflections
in the windowpane of a London-based investment bank
in Freefall (2009) 59
Fig. 3.5 Skyline index in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 61
Fig. 3.6 Fictitious capital block skyscraper in The Big Short (2015) 63
Fig. 3.7 Skyscraper-bomb imaginary. Front cover of DER SPIEGEL
(29/2009) 67
Fig. 3.8 Building the bubble in Inside Job (2010) 68
Fig. 3.9 Transparency versus preclusion. Meeting at Lehman Brothers
shortly before its bankruptcy, photo by Kevin Coombs
(2008, Reuters) 74
Fig. 3.10 Spectral heralds of the crisis in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
(2010) 78
Fig. 4.1 Subway specters: flashback to Louis Zabel’s suicide in Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 92
Fig. 4.2 Photograph of Winnie as the underlying asset of Gekko
and Jacob’s “subway deals” in Wall Street: Money Never
Sleeps (2010) 129
Fig. 4.3 Sacrificial suicide in Cosmopolis (2012) 130
Fig. 5.1 Housing imaginary of wealth distribution in the U.S.A,
published in Vanity Fair (2011). Illustration by Stephen
Doyle. Courtesy of Doyle Partners 135

xi
xii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.2 Foreclosure housing interior in Cleveland contre Wall Street

(2010) 138
Fig. 5.3 Rococo dreams. David and Jackie Siegel in the opening
credits of The Queen of Versailles (2012) 143
Fig. 5.4 Real vs. “unreal” estate in The Queen of Versailles (2012) 148
Fig. 5.5 The “new ruin” of Versailles. Blending between actual and
envisioned state of the estate in The Queen of Versailles
(2012) 155
Fig. 5.6 Dwelling congestion and negligence in The Queen
of Versailles (2012) 163
Fig. 5.7 “Dwelling back to the future”: Jasmine’s house viewing
with Hal in Blue Jasmine (2013) 166
Fig. 6.1 High angle “black box” shot in Money and Speed: Inside
the Black Box (2011) 179
Fig. 6.2 Spectral interurban streams in The Wall Street Code (2013) 181
Fig. 6.3 “Strange overtones” in the global financial city, in Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 185
Fig. 6.4 New Jersey data center “black box” from the car perspective
in Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box (2011) 188
Fig. 6.5 New Jersey data center “black box” from the satellite
perspective in Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box (2011) 189
Fig. 6.6 “Back to Work”. People walking past Wall Street’s stock
exchange on September 29, 2008, photo by Justin Lane
(2008, EPA) 204
Fig. 6.7 Businessmen passing the classicist stone columns of London’s
Bank of England on September 30, 2008. “Stormy
Weather”, photo by Daniel Berehulak (2008, Getty) 205
Fig. 6.8 “Financial news of today’s turbulent stock market is displayed
on a news ticker in Times Square May 6, 2010 in New York
City”, photo by Daniel Barry (2010, Getty) 206
Fig. 6.9 “FTSE 100 Financial boards on the Cromwell Road,
London”, photo by Paul Grover (2011, Telegraph Media
Group Limited) 207
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Myths of Finance and the City

In 2008, a series of financial market events occurred that seemingly created

the immediate urgency to communicate what is happening in global banking
and monetary systems to the public. These events – which included worldwide
stock market plunges, a widespread interbank liquidity freeze, bailouts and
nationalizations of international financial institutions by national governments
and the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers – were directly
termed a “financial crisis”. Regarding the severity of its worldwide economic
impacts, this financial crisis was compared to the Great Depression, and it was
named the “2007–2008 Financial Crisis”, the “late 2000s Financial Crisis”,
the “North Atlantic Financial Crisis” and the “Global Financial Crisis”.
For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to these events as the Global
Financial Crisis (GFC), though I also wish to acknowledge that calling
these events “global”, “financial” and a “crisis” bears several proble-
matic connotations, which are at the heart of the very dynamics of crisis
depiction that this book seeks to address. Does the adjective “global”
imply that the market events of 2008, whose causes and impacts reach
far beyond the year 2008, occurred simultaneously and in a similar
fashion anywhere around the globe? Does the attribute “financial”
refer to financial markets alone, or does it also comprise financial
practices that extend beyond the immediate sphere of professional
investment and trading? And what qualifies the events of 2008 as a
crisis – in particular, given that the very concept of crisis may refer to a
situation of choice between alternatives, to a state of revolution, to the

© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Meissner, Narrating the Global Financial Crisis,
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45411-5_1
2 M. MEISSNER

end of an epoch, to a phase of transition, or to a recurring event that is

implicated in a certain system (Koselleck 2006)?
Questions about the conceptual, narrative and aesthetic framings of con-
temporary crisis depictions are at the center of this book, which examines
portrayals of the GFC in popular film, literature and journalistic photography.
In so doing, my analysis will focus on “urban imaginaries” in GFC portrayals.
Building on Marxian sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s theory of a social “produc-
tion of space” (Lefebvre 1974), contemporary scholarship in the fields of
sociology, geography, anthropology, film, cultural and literary studies uses
the concept of urban imaginary to refer to the ways in which socio-culturally
constructed images of urban form and experience shape individuals’ percep-
tions of, attitudes to, and behavior in cities, as well as the interpretations of
urban settings and aesthetics in narrative and visual cultures.
In filmic, literary and photographic portrayals of the GFC, such urban
imaginaries are strikingly prevalent. Particularly noteworthy is that similar
imaginaries – such as skyline shots of Manhattan in the opening credits of
GFC films – recur in a vast amount of crisis narratives. Oliver Stone’s
financial crisis drama film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is an example of
this tendency. With box office returns of about 134 million dollars, it is
one of the most popular and lucrative crisis films. The film features shots
that bring into focus the city of New York, its architecture, infrastructures,
office and housing designs. Similar shots can be found in a range of crisis
films, whether fictional or documentary, such as Adam McKay’s The Big
Short (2015), J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011), Curtis Hanson’s Too
Big to Fail (2011), Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010), Alex Gibney’s
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010) and Michael Samuel’s
The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (2009).
These corporate and inner city imaginaries feature motifs of suburban
single-family houses, urban abandonment and building ruins as a counter-
part. Suburban, ruin and abandonment imaginaries are particularly pre-
valent in documentaries about the GFC-inflicted U.S. foreclosure crisis,
including Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes (2014), Patrick Lovell’s Forward 13:
Waking up the American Dream (2014), the Al Jazeera Fault Lines
documentary For Sale: The American Dream (Fault Lines 2012), Heidi
Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Detropia (2012), Raymond A. Schillinger’s
Dreams for Sale: Lehigh Acres and the Florida Foreclosure Crisis (2010)
and Jean-Stéphane Bron’s Cleveland contre Wall Street (2010).
And even financial crisis novels, which – in contrast to film – are less
bound to drawing a detailed image of their plots’ settings, set cities at the
 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF FINANCE AND THE CITY 3

center of their respective crisis elaborations. This is reflected in detailed

descriptions of urban settings, which often associate finance with a certain
urban Zeitgeist or mindset. It is also reflected in novel titles, such as John
Lancaster’s Capital (2012) – which ambivalently refers both to finance
capital and to the national-financial capital city of London – Douglas
Brunt’s Ghosts of Manhattan (2012), Alex Preston’s This Bleeding City
(2010) and Paul Auster’s Sunset Park (2010).
Repeated in various guises in multiple crisis portrayals – whether literary,
filmic or photographic – the urban imaginaries of these texts and images are
thus likely to be associated with finance. In this vein, they act as framings
through which both the GFC and contemporary finance in general are
conceived. The concept of framing in this context refers to “the words,
images, phrases and presentation styles” that crisis portrayals use to com-
municate the crisis event, which is how a branch of social sciences and
communication studies apply the concept of framing as a tool of discourse
analysis (Druckman 2001: 227). In cinema and theatre studies, this aspect of
crisis depiction would correspond to the concept of mise-en-scène, under-
stood as the setting, décor, light, sound and perspectival features of a given
scene, which convey information about the spatio-temporal context of the
narrative’s plot, a certain atmosphere and interpretative clues.
Understood this way, the role of urban imaginaries in GFC portrayals is
that of active determining factors – of narrative-aesthetic features that, by
shaping the ways in which the GFC is perceived and conceived, potentially
influence socio-political responses to this crisis, thus co-determining the
ways in which the crisis event unfolds. However, the role of urban imagin-
aries in GFC portrayals also extends these definitions of framing and mise-
en-scène, because, in many GFC portrayals, urban imaginaries “produce”
the crisis as an event. I will argue that the GFC lacks many conventional
characteristics of narrative eventfulness, in particular that of a “change of
state”, implying the clear “transition from one state (situation) to another”
(Hühn 2009: 80; see also Chapter 6). Urban imaginaries in GFC por-
trayals narratively and aesthetically produce the crisis as an event despite its
lack of conventional eventfulness.
Therefore, and despite the productive potential that the concepts of
framing and mise-en-scène yield as analytical concepts, I will use the con-
cept of myth as a lens through which to close read urban imaginaries in
GFC portrayals. This choice has two main motivations. The first motiva-
tion is that, like urban imaginaries, the concept of myth is strikingly
prevalent in contemporary discourses on finance and economics. Book
4 M. MEISSNER

title, Mark A. Martinez’ The Myth of the Free Market: The Role of the State in
a Capitalist Economy (2009) are examples of this tendency. This raises the
question of why economic practice today – finance in particular – is thought
of in terms of myth, and what the concept of myth means in contemporary
economic theory and critique, as well as in media culture.
The second and more important reason to use myth as my main
concept of analysis is that disciplines such as anthropology, semiology,
psychology, sociology and cultural studies highlight the relationship
between myth, ideological communication and situations of crisis. The
term “crisis” in this context applies in a double sense. Myth has been
defined as a form of expression that accrues from worldly crises, but also
from crises of representation. Both conceptualizations of crisis are rele-
vant with regard to the GFC.

PORTRAYING FINANCE
In The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel has argued that the basic work-
ing principle of money is to abstract from concrete objects and contexts to
make them comparable in terms of exchange value: “[A]bandoning all
quality of value, it [money] represents the pure quantum of value in
numerical form” (Simmel 2009 [1900]: 191; my translation). The ques-
tion that arises from this is how the operations of the finance economy can
be represented without taking recourse to numerical form? And, even
more difficult to answer is the question of how the various “processes of
abstraction” (La Berge 2014: 97) that finance includes – from the
exchange abstractions that money numerically represents, to the more
complex abstractions of financial instruments, such as credits and deriva-
tives – can be portrayed. In other words, how can financial processes be
portrayed in non-abstract, non-numerical ways?
Throughout the history of the money economy, different attempts have
been made to portray finance in various media. The edited volumes Money:
Lure, Lore, and Literature (1994) and Literature and Money (1993)
provide exemplary overviews of the many ways in which money has been
treated in literature and language. Both volumes start from the assumption
that money and art/literature are oppositional. While, in Money: Lure,
Lore, and Literature, money and art are termed “irreconcilable opposites”
(book cover), in Money and Literature “mobilizations of the aesthetic (or
the textual)” are described as experimental “sites of resistance to economic
hegemony” (Purdy 1993: 6).
 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF FINANCE AND THE CITY 5

However, even if the money economy and the arts are often deemed
oppositional, critical theory also points to the interdependencies between
both. In Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Century Britain, Mary Poovey argues that, in the late seven-
teenth and first three quarters of the eighteenth century, literary writing in
Britain notably mediated the prospering credit economy of the time, in
that it “helped to make the system of credit and debt usable and the market
model of value familiar as well” (Poovey 2008: 2). As a “genre of the credit
economy”, Poovey argues, literary writing provided readers “an imagina-
tive relationship to the economic, social and (increasingly) ethical and
aesthetic issues raised by Britain’s maturing credit economy” (Poovey
2008: 30); and it served to naturalize the social functions of the money
economy – to the extent that money, in its various forms, has become a
largely taken-for-granted tool of exchange.
This state of naturalization of the money and credit economy tends
to become de-naturalized in times of financial crisis, when the capacity
of different monetary genres to represent a certain value loses cred-
ibility (Poovey 2008: 6). Situations of financial crisis call attention to
the potential of monetary genres – such as shares, but also simple
paper money – to turn into pure fiction, that is, to lose its capacity of
representing a factual value within a given socio-economic system and
situation. Money therefore “constitutes one of the earliest, and most
important, forms of representation in relation to which it seemed
crucial to make and reinforce a distinction between fact and fiction”
(Poovey 2008: 5). It is for this reason, Poovey argues, that economic
and literary theory – both concerned with the “problematic of repre-
sentation” – are deeply related.
The GFC also constitutes a situation in which the “problematic of
representation” inherent to monetary genres – which nowadays take on
far more diverse and intricate forms than paper money or letters of credit –
has become apparent. In particular, the so-called U.S. subprime mortgage
crisis – the investment bubble, from which the GFC emerged – has shown
how, within a short amount of time, supposed assets and profits can turn
into “toxic assets”, losses and ruins. The monetary genres used to repre-
sent these market values – mortgages, asset backed securities (ABS),
collateralized debt obligations (CDO) – turned from supposed representa-
tions of “value facts” into fictions, whereas the GFC’s effects on compa-
nies, households, cities, economies, nation states and more were anything
but fictional.
6 M. MEISSNER

This field of tension, between finance, its diverse instruments and that
which, in contrast, is often termed reality or the “real economy”, “con-
cerned with actually producing goods and services” (Financial Times
Lexicon 2012), is also crucial to the understanding of urban imaginaries
in GFC portrayals. However, in contrast to Poovey’s study of literary
genres that worked to support and mediate the credit economy, this
book explores literature, film and photography that emerged in an attempt
to narrate and criticize finance in a situation that exposes the fictional side
of contemporary “monetary genres”.
This side is always inherent to the money economy as a system of
exchange, abstraction and value representation. The fact that the monetary
genres can turn from representations of fact into fictions is, thus, not
problematic per se, but only becomes problematic under certain condi-
tions. “A system of representation is experienced as problematic only when
it ceases to work – that is, when something in the social context calls
attention to the deferral or obfuscation of its authenticating ground”
(Poovey 2008: 6). However, in the contemporary financial system, it is
indeed questionable whether financial instruments ever represent anything
in a non-deferred, non-obfuscating way.
In Show me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present, Paul
Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh suggest that “[t]he failures in
the global financial system that occurred in 2008 were experienced as a
crisis because they were confusing and chaotic. The causes and implica-
tions of the event appeared to be too complex, too impenetrable and too
surprising to be understood” (Crosthwaite et al. 2014: 1). One of the
reasons why this crisis has so often been described as “too complex to be
understood” is that finance has significantly changed over the last four
decades. This transformation does not only refer to the instruments and
infrastructures of financial trading, but also to the overall relationship
between finance and society. This process, which amplified the “proble-
matic of representation” inherent to monetary genres, is often referred to
as “financialization”. Yet, what does financialization signify, and how can
the concept inform the critical analysis of GFC portrayals?

FINANCIALIZATION
While the origins of the term “financialization” are unclear, it gained
popularity in the early 1990s (Foster 2007), and turned into a catchphrase
during the GFC. Yet, in spite of its increasing prevalence in discourses
 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF FINANCE AND THE CITY 7

about global economic development, the concept remains contested –

both in terms of definition and utility (see also Aalbers 2015;
Christophers 2015). In very general terms, scholars agree on financializa-
tion broadly denoting the “increasing role of finance in the operations of
capitalism” (Sweezy and Magdoff 1972; qtd. in Foster 2007: 1). Beyond
that, there are attempts within contemporary scholarship to retrace the
emergence of financialization historically.
Economist Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century emphasizes
the historically recurrent character of financialization as a form of financial
expansion and systematic restructuring of the capitalist world economy.
For Arrighi, financialization is therefore nothing new, but the “continua-
tion of a long-established tendency . . . of historical capitalism towards the
formation of ever more powerful blocs of governmental and business
organizations as leading agencies of capital accumulation on a world
scale” (Arrighi 2010 [1994]: 309). While Arrighi’s historical trajectory is
highly influential in financialization scholarship, there is disagreement on
the extent to which contemporary financialization exposes “abnormal”
features, setting it apart from earlier patterns of financial expansion.
Randy Martin, Michael Rafferty and Dick Bryan, for example, trace
back the distinct contemporary logic of financialization to the Fordist
manner of thinking about production in abstract, structural and compara-
tive terms: “[R]ather than decomposing production into door assembly
and wheel fitting (and comparing their performances), finance decomposes
assets into their exposures and commensurates their values” (Martin et al.
2008: 126). This particular manner of handling assets is facilitated by
means of financial derivatives whose “central, universal characteristic” is
“their capacity to ‘dismantle’ or ‘unbundle’ any asset into constituent
attributes and trade those attributes without trading the asset itself”
(Martin et al. 2008: 126). The application of derivatives in financial trad-
ing thus produces a form of “meta-trading”, a trading of financial assets’
risk exposures. It produces a new system of value creation that – to a
certain extent – operates independently of its underlying assets.
It is this quality of contemporary finance that sociologist John Bellamy
Foster has called an “inverted relation” of finance capital, meaning that
“[t]here is no necessary direct connection between productive investment
and the amassing of financial assets. It is thus possible for the two to be
‘decoupled’ to a considerable degree” (Foster 2007: 5). Foster regards this
“possibility of a contradiction between real accumulation and financial
speculation” as “intrinsic to the system [of capitalism] from the start”
8 M. MEISSNER

(Foster 2007: 5). As the re-emergence of financial investment bubbles

throughout the history of capitalism indicates, financial accumulation has,
time and again, uncoupled from productive value creation. Rather than
breaking with this principle, financialization thus constitutes an intensifi-
cation of finance capital’s tendency to dissociate from the so-called real
economy.
Among other factors, this intensification can be ascribed to a combina-
tion of the following three interrelated conditions: a stagnation of “real”
economic growth since the 1970s – simultaneous to the proliferation of
multinational corporations; the consequent need for corporations to find
new assets for capital investment; and the growth of the finance sector as a
new means of capital absorption in response to economic stagnation
(Foster 2007; Sweezy 1997). This analysis corresponds to a Marxian read-
ing of financialization as the effect of what social geographer David Harvey
has termed the “surplus capital absorption problem” (Harvey 2010b).
Accordingly, the financial sector responds to the basic necessity to reinvest
accumulated capital – intrinsic to the logic of capital reproduction – with
the innovation of new tools of capital investment, such as financial secu-
rities and derivatives. This tendency – supported by deregulatory policies,
such as the abolition of the Bretton Woods system of monetary manage-
ment in 1971 – ultimately generates enormous amounts of “fictitious”
capital, which Harvey has described as “an infinite regression of fictions
built upon fictions” (Harvey 2012:10; see also Chapter 2).
Yet, the question that arises from this rhetoric of fictionalization is: if the
process of financialization is based on fictions, created within the self-con-
tained domain of financial markets, why does it create perceptible economic
crises, which are not only publicly acknowledged, but also provoke strong
civil and political reactions? The rhetoric of financial abstractness and self-
referentiality is at times misleading, because it draws attention away from the
still existing bonds between finance and the real economy.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary register of financialization scholarship,
this book refers to financialization to describe, not only, recent transfor-
mations in financial innovation, neoliberal policymaking and “fictitious”
capital accumulation – but also global developments in everyday social
practice that are closely linked to these transformations. Financialization,
thus, also describes the over-spilling of financial market dynamics into
domains of both economic and everyday life that, traditionally, are con-
sidered external to the financial business. Such a perspective, for instance,
considers how practices of financial securitization draw upon a socially
 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF FINANCE AND THE CITY 9

widespread everyday culture of private consumption and real estate invest-

ment, which – due to factors, such as income repression and unemploy-
ment – is largely debt-financed.
In this context, economic geographer Paul Langley – focusing on the
U.K. and U.S. – points out the growing investment of private savings in
financial market products. “Through the ownership of shares and contribu-
tions to pension plans and mutual funds, the savings of a much greater
number of individuals and households are now bound-up with the capital
markets. Many savers have, in short, become financial investors” (Langley
2008: vii). Langley’s analysis emphasizes the joint increase of private invest-
ing and borrowing, calling attention to the fact that both tendencies are,
first, interrelated and, second, not as private as it seems, but – via financial
instruments, in particular securities – wound up with the global business of
financial trading: “In meeting their obligations, American mortgagors are,
for example, often unwittingly ensuring that the wheels of the mortgage-
backed securities market continue to turn, a bond market even larger than
that for US federal government debt” (Langley 2008: vii). Today, private
investing and borrowing act as major drivers of global financial trading and
speculation. Langley calls this the “financialization of everyday life”.
Defining the concept of financialization as an analytical perspective,
economist Johnna Montgomerie argues that financialization joins analyses
of everyday life and political economy. It maps the more subtle manifesta-
tions of financial culture in contemporary society: “how financial market
logics succeed in reaching down into the minutiae of daily life”, and how
everyday “narratives and performances shape, rather than conform to, the
logics and practices of financialisation” (Montgomerie 2008: 243). An
example of this is the pervasive use of financial jargon in everyday language.
In the volume It’s the Political Economy Stupid: The Global Financial Crisis
in Art and Theory, Oliver Ressler and Gregory Sholette polemicize this
tendency as “econospeak”:

Even Occupy Wall Street talks about “stakeholders” in its decision-making

processes, and refers to “creative factories”, all the while no less symptoma-
tically using percentage points to illustrate what is wrong with modern
society. Which is to say that being in the world now means being worthy
of capitalization. And as the language of ultra-deregulated capitalism pene-
trates every detail of our lives it has emerged as the default medium of our
very self-expression, becoming a kind of toxic mortgage of the soul. (Ressler
and Sholette 2013: 10)
10 M. MEISSNER

While Ressler and Sholette lament the encroachment of entrepreneurial

jargon into language, which, like the Orwellian “newspeak”, might ulti-
mately preconfigure – if not limit – our ways of thinking, other financia-
lization theories call attention to the proliferation of financial media
coverage (Clark et al. 2004). Accordingly, financial market news is increas-
ingly provided in different types of media, leading to “finance as entertain-
ment” (Clark et al. 2004: 289).
This ties in with what Joyce Goggin has described as the blurring of
lines “between the supposedly rational technologies of finance, and the
‘less serious’ or ‘irrational’ sphere of culture”, including film, fiction and
computer games (Goggin 2012: 223). Examining, among others, popular
and documentary films about finance, the neuro-emotive effects of trad-
ing, and financial speculation within Massively Multiplayer Online Role
Playing Games (MMORPGs), Goggin shows how “play is steadily enter-
ing into the realm of finance, and finance is becoming ever more ludic”
(Goggin 2012: 223).
Yet other theories emphasize how financialization may be embedded in,
while at the same time reinforcing, a broader societal awareness and
psychology of risk. Examining what he terms the “assembly of everyday
investor identities” (Langley 2007: 70), Langley argues that the process of
financialization produces “uncertain subjects” who seek to gain future
economic security by means of private investment. Central to Langley’s
theory, which again focuses on the U.K. and U.S., is the argument that
uncertainty results from the decline of the welfare state and the concomi-
tant demise of collective insurance provision – a situation exacerbated by
investor acquisition strategies that “advertise” risks to lure individuals into
private investment.
A similar argument, which situates the crisis within the broader frame-
work of neoliberalism, has been made by urban planner Raquel Rolnik,
who considers the financialization of homeownership a deficient neoliberal
response to neoliberal economies’ incapacity to provide access to housing
on a broad societal level. Accordingly, “the crisis (and its origins in the
housing markets) reflects the inability of market mechanisms to provide
adequate and affordable housing for all” (Rolnik 2013: 1058).
What these manifold theoretical and analytical perspectives bring into
focus are the socio-economic and cultural dimensions that the “increasing
dominance of finance in the operations of capitalism” entail on a broader
societal level. Capturing these different dimensions of contemporary finan-
cialization scholarship, Manuel Aalbers has defined financialization as “the
 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF FINANCE AND THE CITY 11

increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements

and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of
economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households”
(Aalbers 2015: 214). Using financialization as a framework to explore
“how individuals, firms and the domestic economy are increasingly
mediated by new relationships with financial markets” (Montgomerie
2009: 1), this approach also addresses the forms of socio-psychological
relations that the process of financialization both strategically harnesses
and systematically reproduces.
This observation is relevant, because it calls attention to the importance
of not only analyzing GFC portrayals in terms of accuracy, but also in
terms of framework, structure and emphasis. For instance, narratives that
explain the U.S. subprime crisis by focusing on the “growth of the housing
bubble” may be accurate regarding the facts and data they provide, but
they may nevertheless fail to register the interrelation between this housing
bubble, wage stagnation as a result of both real economic stagnation and
repressive labor policies, culturally produced ideologies of homeownership
and the capitalist imperative to ensure continuous economic growth.
Financialization as a perspective that “connects different disciplines but
also different levels of analysis, from the very micro to the very macro”
(Aalbers 2015: 216) – and, in so doing, interlinks the economic, social,
cultural and psychological dimensions of the GFC – informs my subse-
quent analysis of urban crisis imaginaries. I will argue that these imagin-
aries are dissimilar in their capacity to allude to financialization as a
multidimensional and systematic perspective on the crisis. The concept
of myth will be used to map and conceptualize these differences.

MAPPING MYTH
To develop the concept of myth as a tool for close reading urban GFC
imaginaries, this book draws on different elaborations of myth in anthro-
pology, semiology, philosophy and communication studies. Yet, while
myth stands out as its main analytical concept – as the lens though which
crisis narratives will be read – the book actually revolves around three key
concepts: myth, finance and the city.
Denoting constantly evolving sets of socio-material practices, these
three concepts are inevitably provisional, and their meaning interdepends
with a range of related concepts, such as: narrative, aesthetics, neoliberal-
ism, globalization, imaginary, abstraction, global city et cetera. In the
12 M. MEISSNER

course of this book, definitions and explanations of these terms will be

provided. At the same time, however, I wish to stress that the struggle over
the understanding of these different concepts – which serve to describe and
theorize complex, still evolving phenomena – is at the heart of the dynamic
of mythmaking that this book seeks to explore, conceptualize and critique.
To theorize finance and the challenges it poses in terms of understanding
and representation, this book mainly draws on sociological, anthropological,
economic and geographical studies of financial practice and development. In
order to situate finance within the systemic framework of capitalism, space
and culture as intersecting fields, the book particularly draws on neo-
Marxian analyses, such as David Harvey’s extensive work on neoliberalism,
capital flows and globally uneven economic development; Frederic
Jameson’s elaborations of the “cultural dynamics of late capitalism” and
the problems of “representing capital”; as well as Slavoj Žižek’s critique of
capitalist ideology as reflected in global media and crisis discourses.
Complementing the concept of myth as a tool of discourse, narrative
and visual analysis, the book draws on concepts from the interrelated fields
of cultural, media and literary studies, which currently show a notable
interest in articulations of finance, crisis, and the seemingly “spectral”
dynamics of invisible socio-economic and cultural phenomena. Examples
of this tendency include Leigh Claire La Berge’s analysis of 1980s financial
fiction in Scandals of Abstraction (2015); Oliver Ressler and Gregory
Sholette’s exploration of the GFC in art and theory in It’s the Political
Economy Stupid (2013); Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky
Marsh’s historical study of “the image of finance, 1700 to the present”
in Show me the Money (2014); The Journal of Cultural Economy’s special
issues on “financial panics and crisis” (2012), “financial subjects” (2012)
and “fictions of finance” (2013); the NECSUS – European Journal of
Media Studies’ special issues on “crisis” (2012) and “tangibility” (2012);
as well as the so-called “spectral turn” in culture and theory (del Pilar
Blanco and Peeren, 2013, 2010; see also Chapter 6).
Finally, to combine and put into dialogue these various and interdisci-
plinary perspectives, the book uses cultural analysis as self-reflective “con-
cept-based methodology” (Bal 2002: 5). Central to this approach is the
practice of close-reading cultural objects through the lens of a specific
research concept, which cultural analysis deploys in an interdisciplinary
manner – with the aim to put different analytical perspectives into a
dialogue. The implication of this approach is that the concepts applied in
this book – in particular that of myth – are not used in a normative fashion,
 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF FINANCE AND THE CITY 13

but in a way that allows my objects of analysis – urban crisis imaginaries –

to “speak back” (Bal 2002: 45), that is, to resist, enlighten and shape my
concepts of analysis. Thus, even though the next chapter brings together
myth concepts that will be used for the critical analysis of GFC narratives,
my close reading of these narratives will further define, flesh out and
problematize the concept of myth in its various theoretical and analytical
elaborations.
As the book organizes a vast body of different objects of literary and
visual culture under the concept of “narrative”, I wish to clarify that –
drawing on Mieke Bal’s Narratology – I use the concept of narrative in
a broader sense, as a particular mode of relating (telling) “a story in
a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a
combination thereof” (Bal 2009 [1986]: 5). Based on this concept of
narrative, the book examines entire film scenes, but also single film shots,
journalistic crisis photography, literary texts – both fictional and non-
fictional – and crisis rhetoric in public GFC discourses. In so doing, the
book has two major aims. The first is to examine and critique recurring
imaginaries – urban imaginaries – by means of which contemporary pop-
ular cultures frame and iconicize the GFC. The second is to explore a
particular practice of crisis narration and communication – the dynamic of
myth – and identify its specific politics.
The narratives analyzed in this book belong to an extensive, mostly
English-speaking popular culture of crisis depiction, whose geographic
roots are mainly – though not exclusively – in the U.K. and the U.S. In
these narratives, two cities – London and, even more so, New York – tend
to be overrepresented. The fact that imaginaries of London and New York
dominate crisis narratives is, on the one hand, due to these cities’ status as
“global financial centers” (Sassen 1999), where global financial institu-
tions and infrastructures tend to conglomerate, and, on the other hand,
due to the fact that both cities already have a particular prominence in the
global imaginary of literature and film, photography, tourism and urban
theory. As myths tend to build on, combine and extend established
signifiers, the prominent imaginaries of London and New York offer
ideal settings for the semiotic operations of myth. However, the focus on
these two cities bears the risk of obscuring the preconditions and effects
that the GFC has in urban and rural places beyond London and New York.
To specify and develop the concept of myth as a tool of close reading
urban GFC imaginaries, the second chapter of this book introduces dif-
ferent concepts of myth from scholars in the fields of anthropology,
14 M. MEISSNER

semiology, philosophy and communication studies. The chapter places

particular emphasis on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural theory and Roland
Barthes’ semiotic theory of myth, which will be crucial to the analysis of
urban crisis imaginaries. To illustrate how a “mythical reading” opens up
productive ways of understanding popular crisis imaginaries, the chapter
examines a scene from Oliver Stone’s financial crisis film Wall Street: Money
Never Sleeps (2010).
The following chapters are organized around specific urban imaginaries
that tend to reappear in GFC narratives. Chapter 3 explores imaginaries of
urban architecture and public space. It situates these motifs within a
tradition of capitalism critique that revolves around cities and the ways in
which urban design developed from the modern toward the postmodern.
GFC depictions both perpetuate and play on this tradition. They narrate
and aestheticize modern city geometries, skyscraper shapes, urban panor-
ama shots, corporate glass façades and motifs of “present absence” in
urban public space. In so doing, they project conflicting ideas and percep-
tions of finance (such as the idea of market efficiency vs. the idea of
financial excess) onto single “mythical” imaginaries.
Chapter 4 explores how crisis narratives associate imaginaries of urban
subway and limousine transport with financial market dynamics that are
produced by the relatively new mechanisms of digital and derivative trad-
ing. In particular, the chapter analyzes Oliver Stone’s GFC film Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Sebastian Faulk’s crisis novel A Week
in December (2010), and David Cronenberg’s film Cosmopolis (2012),
which is based on Don DeLillo’s 2001 novel of the same name. To
theorize how digital and derivative trading produce new forms of financial
market interaction and temporality, the chapter draws on studies in the
fields of financial sociology, anthropology and science and technology
studies. It argues that, on the one hand, urban transport imaginaries
express questions and uncertainties about the particular ontology and
phenomenology of financial derivatives, digital trading and its global
“flows”. On the other hand, however, these “transport myths” reduce
the underlying assets and destructive effects of financial speculation to the
simplistic trope of sacrificial human bodies. Transport imaginaries of
finance thus reveal much about the challenges of representing capital in
its new digital and speculative forms and mobilities. At the same time,
however, these myths conceal how – via the mechanisms of debt and
securitization – finance affects a multiplicity of individual citizens, corpora-
tions, cities, states and more.
 INTRODUCTION: MYTHS OF FINANCE AND THE CITY 15

In contrast, the dwelling imaginaries examined in Chapter 5 hint at the

broader societal effects of the GFC in the U.S. context. Analyzing, in
particular, Jean Stéphane Bron’s foreclosure crisis film Cleveland contre
Wall Street (2010) as well as Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen
of Versailles (2012), the chapter demonstrates how imaginaries of urban
and suburban dwelling reflect cultural dynamics that are related to indebt-
edness, financial securitization and leveraged investment. These imagin-
aries tend to focus attention on the concrete effects that the GFC has had
on the aesthetics and utilization of real estate, as well as on the individual
attachments that people maintain with their properties and dwelling styles.
Dwelling imaginaries have gained popularity in post-crisis popular culture,
because they visually manifest socio-cultural conditions – such as immobi-
lity and sedentariness – that seem to run counter to the popular rhetoric of
“unrestricted global flows”, which has hitherto dominated globalization
discourses. They indicate that culturally constructed ideals of real estate
ownership are central to the contemporary cultures of financializaton.
Chapter 6 draws on recent elaborations of the “spectral metaphor” in
cultural theory in order to explore imaginaries of urban spectrality in GFC
narratives. Comparing “black box scenarios” in Marije Meerman’s finance
documentaries Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box (2011) and The Wall
Street Code (2013) with motifs of urban haunting in journalistic crisis
photographs, the novels Sunset Park (Paul Auster 2010), The Big Short
(Michael Lewis 2010), This Bleeding City (Alex Preston 2010), Get Me
Out of Here (Henry Sutton 2010), Capital (John Lancaster 2012), and
the film Margin Call (J.C. Chandor 2011), the chapter develops a more
general theory on the politics of myth. At the center of this theory is the
argument that, although all myths form partial expressions of the multi-
dimensional process of financialization, some myths tend to focus atten-
tion on partial aspects of this process, whereas others succeed in indicating
their own insufficiencies – their “spectral absences” – in articulating finan-
cialization. While the former type of myth tends to limit itself to one-
dimensional interpretations and critiques of the crisis – perpetuating a
post-political tendency to avoid systemic critiques of the wider process of
financialization – the latter type of myth opens up more systemic and
political readings of the crisis event.
The overall argument running through this book is that financialization
can only be experienced in a partial and fragmented manner.
Financialization experience therefore leaves multiple “spectral absences”
in terms of comprehension and perceptibility, both in everyday experience
16 M. MEISSNER

and in its media representations. It is impossible to narrate financialization

in its totality. Myth, I argue, is a practice of narrative expression that
develops both as a symptom of, and response to, this problem. It may be
described as a “bridge strategy” of cultural expression, which, instead of
attempting to construct a total image of financialization, focuses on the
very fragments, contradictions and absences that the experience of finan-
cialization poses. This provisionality does, however, not prevent myths
from having political implications. The narrative and aesthetic structures
by means of which myths process the fragments, contradictions and “spec-
tral absences” of financialization experience determine their respective
“politics of myth”. It is the aim of the following chapters to explore
these structures and politics in the urban imaginaries of popular GFC
portrayals.
 CHAPTER 2

Mythical Crisis Perspectives

What does a financial crisis look like? In Oliver Stone’s crisis film Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), a financial crisis resembles the fall from a
skyscraper. Depicting the stock market crash of September 29, 2008, the
film first shows images of Manhattan’s skyline viewed from the waterfront.
In fast motion, clouds pass above the depicted skyline and water streams
alongside the island. Providing a contrast to these fast motion shots, the
next frame shows people walking in slow motion on a crowded inner city
street. Dulled traffic noises sound in the background, together with muted
classical music. The next frame focuses on the glass façade of several
skyscrapers viewed from another high position – such as the top of an
opposite skyscraper. During the next few seconds, the impression created
is that of a fall from the edifice. The filmic angle remains focused on the
skyscraper façades, but the camera moves down vertically in high speed,
accompanied by a sound that is reminiscent of an unfastened rope tackle.
The movement is interrupted by quick interludes depicting domino stones
that collapse in a chain reaction, which fade into close-up shots of a single
skyscraper façade and – subsequently – into shots of a digital market ticker
chart. Meanwhile, the movement of the camera keeps on imitating an
accelerating fall, rattling down the distinct floors of the skyscraper that
eventually blend into the columns of a digital market index chart. To picture
the end of the market downfall – the crash – the film shows nothing but
black screen for a few seconds, introduced by the ringing of a stock market
opening bell. Immediately afterwards, a faster melody begins, accompanying

© The Author(s) 2017 17

M. Meissner, Narrating the Global Financial Crisis,
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45411-5_2
18 M. MEISSNER

a filmic collage of print and TV news media coverage of the crisis, flickering
market ticker screens, falling index curves, upset financial professionals,
chaos on the trading floor and shots of New York’s financial district,
picturing Trinity Church and Wall Street’s charging bull bronze statue.
The complex editing of this montage scene indicates how difficult it is
to visually portray financial market dynamics. Even a crash, the most
extreme market development, is hard to visualize, which is why the film
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps employs an abundance of metaphors and
symbols – such as the fall from a skyscraper, or the domino effect – and
displays financial news media coverage to indicate that a market crash is
happening at this moment of the filmic plot. However, the articulation of
financial market dynamics does not only challenge the filmic genre. Verbal
descriptions of finance appear infeasible without the employment of meta-
phor and abstract market jargon. Terms such as “bubble” or “downfall” as
well as references to the most significant global market indexes can be
found in almost every financial crisis report, whether journalistic, encyclo-
pedic or academic. Nevertheless, various different attempts to portray
financial market dynamics have been made throughout the history of
financial capitalism, exploiting the narrative potential of diverse media
such as film, literature and photography. This is particularly true with
regard to the GFC, which has provoked a flood of multimedia crisis
narratives ranging from films to novels to hypertextual crisis timelines.
Many of these narratives have been criticized for obscuring the con-
crete mechanisms of financialization – a critique which is of particular
relevance considering that future directions in economic and regulatory
policymaking depend on present-day means of describing and assessing
the financial system, and of communicating potential critiques to a
broader public. Critiquing the rhetoric of excess that pervades financial
crisis discourses, political scientist Marieke de Goede has argued that “[a]
complex reality like financial crisis has no unequivocal and immediate
meaning, but depends upon political and cultural processes of articula-
tion, mediation, and sedimentation to be able to lead to enactment of
regulatory change” (De Goede 2009: 296). De Goede contends that, by
overstating excess, irrationality and madness, crisis discourses tend to
obscure systemic reasons of the GFC – such as the interdependency
between subprime lending and financial securitization that led up to
the 2008 subprime bubble. Suggesting that the GFC resulted from
supposedly “abnormal” behaviors such as reckless borrowing or the
“irrational exuberance” of greedy bankers, crisis discourses therefore
Another random document with
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reduced. It is like proposing a riddle, and then, after playing with the
curiosity and impatience of the company for some time, giving the
solution, which nobody else has the wit to find out. We never saw
fuller attendances or more profound attention than at the Tron
Church in Glasgow—it was like a sea of eyes, a swarm of heads,
gaping for mysteries, and staring for elucidations—it was not the
sublime or beautiful; the secret was that which has been here
explained, a desire to get rid of the difficult, the disagreeable, the dry,
and the discordant matter that had been conjured up in the
imagination. Dr. Chalmers, then, succeeds by the force of sophistry
and casuistry, in our humble judgment. Riddles (of which we spoke
just now) are generally traditional: those that Dr. Chalmers unfolds
from the pulpit, are of his own invention, or at least promulgation.
He started an objection to the Christian religion (founded on its
supposed inconsistency with the Newtonian philosophy) which
objection had never been noticed in books, on purpose that he might
answer it. ‘Well,’ said a Scotchman, ‘and if the answer was a good
one, was he not right?’ ‘No, assuredly,’ we should answer, ‘for there is
no faith so firm as that which has never been called in question.’ The
answer could only satisfy those who had been unsettled by the
question; and there would be many who would not be convinced by
the Doctor’s reasoning, however he might plume himself on his
success. We suspect that this is looking after a reputation for literary
ingenuity and philosophical depth, rather than the peace of
consciences or the salvation of souls; which, in a Christian minister,
is unbecoming, and savours of the Mammon of unrighteousness. We
ourselves were staggered by the blow (either then or long before) and
still gasp for a reply, notwithstanding Dr. Chalmers’s nostrum. Let
the reader briefly judge:—The Doctor tells us, it may be said, that the
Christian Dispensation supposes that the counsels of God turn upon
this world as its center; that there is a heaven above and an earth
beneath; and that man is the lord of the universe, the only creature
made in the divine likeness, and over whom Providence watches, and
to whom revelations are given, and an inheritance everlasting. This
agrees with the cosmogony of Moses, which makes the earth the
center of all things, and the sun, moon, and stars, little shining spots
like silver sixpences moving round it. But it does not so well agree
with Newton’s Principia (we state Dr. Chalmers’s objection) which
supposes the globe we inhabit to be but a point in the immensity of
the universe; that ours is but one, and that the most insignificant
(perhaps) among innumerable worlds, filled, probably, with created
intelligences, rational and fallen souls, that share the eye of God with
us, and who require to know that their Redeemer liveth. We alone (it
would appear) cannot pretend to monopolize heaven or hell: there
are other contingent candidates besides us. Jacob’s dream was
poetical and natural, while the earth was supposed to be a flat
surface and the blue sky hung over it, to which angels might ascend
by a ladder, and the face of God be seen at the top, as his lofty and
unchangeable abode; but this beautiful episode hardly accords with
the Antipodes. Sir Isaac turned the world upon its back, and divided
heaven from itself, and removed it far from every one of us. As we
thought the universe turned round the earth as its pivot, so religion
turned round man as its center, as the sole, important, moral and
accountable agent in existence. But there are other worlds revolving
in infinite space, to which this is a speck. Are they all desert,
worthless? Were they made for us? Have they no especial
dispensations of life and light? Have we alone a God, a Saviour,
revealed to us? Is religion triumphant only here, or is it itinerant
through each? It can hardly seem that we alone have occupied the
thoughts or been the sole objects of the plans of infinite wisdom from
eternity—that our life, resurrection, and judgment to come, are the
whole history of a wide-seeing Providence, or the loftiest events in
the grand drama of the universe, which was got up as a theatre only
for us to perform our petty parts in, and then to be cast, most of us,
into hell fire? Dr. Chalmers’s Astronomical Discourses indeed may
be said to dwarf his mighty subject, and make mankind a very
Lilliputian race of beings, which this Gulliver in vain dandles in the
hard, broad, brawny hand of school divinity, and tries to lift into
their bigotted self-sufficiency and exclusive importance again. How
does he answer his own objection, and turn the tables on himself—
how reverse this pitiful, diminished perspective, and aggrandise us in
our own estimation once more as undoubted heirs of heaven or of
hell—the sole favoured or reprobated sons of God? Why, his answer
is this—that the microscope has done as much to lift man in the scale
of being, and to enlarge the bounds of this atom the earth, as the
telescope has done to circumscribe and lessen it; that there are
infinite gradations BELOW man, worlds within worlds, as there are
degrees of being above, and stars and suns blazing round each other;
that, for what we know, a speck, a lucid drop circulating in a flea’s
back, may be another habitable globe like this!—And has that, too, a
revelation of its own, an avenging God, and a Christ crucified? Does
every particle in a flea’s back contain a Mosaic dispensation, a Popish
and a Protestant religion? Has it its Tron Church and its Caledonian
Chapel, and Dr. Chalmers’s Discourses and Mr. Irving’s Orations in
little? This does not seem to obviate the difficulty, but to increase it a
million-fold. It is his objection and his answer to it, not ours: if
blasphemy, it is his; and, if orthodoxy, he is entitled to all the credit
of it. But his whole scheme shows how impossible it is to reconcile
the faith delivered to the saints with the subtleties and intricacies of
metaphysics. It displays more pride of intellect than simplicity of
heart, is an insult equally on the understandings or prejudices of
men, and could only have been hit upon by that personification and
abstraction of cross-purposes, a Scotch metaphysical divine. In his
general preaching, Dr. Chalmers is a great casuist, and a very
indifferent moralist. He states the pros and cons of every question
with extreme pertinacity, and often ‘spins the thread of his verbosity
finer than the staple of his argument.’ He assigns possible reasons,
not practical motives, for conduct; and vindicates the ways of God,
and his own interpretation of the Scriptures, to the head, not to the
heart. The old school-divines set this practice afoot; for being
accustomed to hear the secrets of confession, and to salve the tender
consciences of the great and powerful, they had to bandy all sorts of
questions about; and if they could find out ‘a loop or peg to hang a
doubt on,’ were well rewarded for their trouble; they were constantly
reduced to their shifts, and forced to go on the forlorn hope of
morality by the ticklish cases referred to them for arbitration; and
when they had exhausted the resources of humanity and natural
sentiment, endeavoured to find new topics within the range of
abstract reason and possibility. Dr. Chalmers’s reasoning is as unlike
as possible to a chapter in the Gospels: but he may do very well to
comment on the Apocalypse or an Epistle of St. Paul’s. We do not
approve of this method of carving out excuses or defences of
doctrinal points from the dry parchment of the understanding or the
cobwebs of the brain. Whatever sets or leaves the dogmas of religion
at variance with the dictates of the heart, hardens the last, and lends
no advantage to the first.
 Mr. Irving is a more amiable moralist, and a more practical
reasoner. He throws a glancing, pleasing light over the gloomy
ground of Calvinism. There is something humane in his appeals,
striking in his apostrophes, graceful in his action, soothing in the
tones of his voice. He is not affected and theatrical; neither is he
deeply impassioned or overpowering from the simple majesty of his
subject. He is above common-place both in fancy and argument; yet
he can hardly rank as a poet or philosopher. He is a modernised
covenanter, a sceptical fanatic. We do not feel exactly on sure ground
with him—we scarcely know whether he preaches Christ crucified, or
himself. His pulpit style has a resemblance to the florid gothic. We
are a little mystified when a man with one hand brings us all the nice
distinctions and air-drawn speculations of modern unbelievers, and
arms the other with ‘fire hot from Hell,’—when St. Paul and Jeremy
Bentham, the Evangelists and the Sorrows of Werter, Seneca,
Shakespear, the author of Caleb Williams and the Political Justice,
are mingled together in the same passage, and quoted in the same
breath, however eloquent that breath may be. We see Mr. Irving
smile with decent scorn at this remark, and launch one more
thunderbolt at the critics. He is quite welcome, and we should be
proud of his notice. In the discourses he has lately delivered, and
which have drawn crowds to admire them, he has laboured to
describe the Sensual Man, the Intellectual Man, the Moral Man, and
the Spiritual Man; and has sacrificed the three first at the shrine of
the last. He gave certainly a terrific picture of the death-bed of the
Sensual Man—a scene where few shine—but it is a good subject for
oratory, and he made the most of it. He described the Poet well,
walking by the mountain side, in the eye of nature—yet oppressed,
panting rather than satisfied, with beauty and sublimity. Neither
Fame nor Genius, it is most true, are all-sufficient to the mind of
man! He made a fair hit at the Philosophers; first, at the Political
Economist, who draws a circle round man, gives him so many feet of
earth to stand upon, and there leaves him to starve in all his nobler
parts and faculties: next, at the great Jurisconsult, who carves out a
mosaic work of motives for him, cold, hard, and dry, and expects him
to move mechanically in right lines, squares, and parallelograms,
drills him into perfection, and screws him into utility. He then fell
foul of the Moralist and Sentimentalist, weighed him in the balance
and found him wanting—deficient in clearness of sight to discern
good, in strength of hand and purpose to seize upon it when
discerned. But Religion comes at last to the aid of the Spiritual Man,
couches the blind sight, and braces the paralytic limb; the Lord of
Hosts is in the field, and the battle is won, his countenance pours
light into our souls, and his hand stretched out imparts strength to
us, by which we tower to our native skies! In treating of this subject,
Mr. Irving introduced several powerful images and reflections, to
show how feeble moral and intellectual motives are to contend with
the allurements of sense and the example of the world. Reason alone,
he said, was no more able to stem the tide of prejudice and fashion,
than the swimmer with his single arm (here he used an appropriate
and spirited gesture, which reminded us of the description of the
heroic action of the swimmer in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia) is able to
oppose the raging torrent, as the voice of conscience was only heard
in the tumultuous scenes of life like the faint cry of the sea-bird in
the wide world of waters. He drew an animated but mortifying sketch
of the progress of the Patriot and Politician, weaned by degrees from
his attachment to young Liberty to hug old Corruption; and showed
(strikingly enough) that this change from youthful ardour to a hoary,
heartless old age of selfishness and ridicule (there were several
Members of the Honourable House present) was not owing to
increased wisdom or strength of sight, but to faltering resolution and
weakness of hand, that could no longer hold out against the bribes,
the snares, and gilded chains prepared for it. The romantic Tyro was
right and free, the callous Courtier was a slave and self-conceited. All
this was true; it was honest, downright, and well put. There was no
cant in it, as far as regards the unequal odds and the hard battle that
reason has to fight with pleasure, or ambition, or interest, or other
antagonist motives. But does the objection apply to morality solely,
or has not religion its share in it? Man is not what he ought to be—
Granted; but is he not different from this ideal standard, in spite of
religion as well as of morality? Is not the religious man often a slave
to power, the victim of pleasure, the thrall of avarice, hard of heart, a
sensual hypocrite, cunning, mercenary, miserable? If it be said that
the really religious man is none of these, neither is the truly moral
man. Real morality, as well as vital Christianity, implies right
conduct and consistent principle. But the question simply at issue is,
whether the profession or the belief of sound moral opinion implies
these; and it certainly does it no more than the profession or belief of
orthodox religious opinions does. The conviction of the good or ill
consequences of our actions in this life does not absolutely conform
the will or the desires to good; neither does the apprehension of
future rewards or punishments produce this effect completely or
necessarily. The candidate for Heaven is a backslider; the dread of
eternal torments makes but a temporary impression on the mind.
This is not a reason, in our judgment, for neglecting or giving up in
despair the motives of religion or morality, but for strengthening and
cultivating both. With Mr. Irving, it is a triumphant and
unanswerable ground for discarding and denouncing morality, and
for exalting religion, as the sovereign cure for all wounds, as the
thaumaturgos, or wonder-worker, in the reform of mankind! We are
at a loss to understand how this exclusive and somewhat intolerant
view of the subject is reconcileable with sound reason or with history.
Religion is no new experiment now first making on mankind; we live
in the nineteenth century of the Christian æra; it is not as if we lived
in the age of apostles, when we might (from novelty and inexperience
of the intended dispensations of Providence) expect the earth to wear
a new face, and darkness suddenly to flee away before the light of the
gospel: nor do we apprehend that Mr. Irving is one of those who
believe with Mr. Croly, that the millennium actually commenced
with the battle of Waterloo; that event seems as far off, to all outward
appearance, as it was two thousand years ago. What does this make
against the doctrines of Christianity? Nothing; if, as far as they are
implanted and take root, they bear fruit accordingly,
notwithstanding the repugnance and thanklessness of the soil. Why
then is Mr. Irving so hard upon the labours of philosophers,
moralists, and men of letters, because they do not do all their work at
once? Bishop Butler indeed wrote a most able and learned quarto
volume, to prove that the slow growth and imperfect influence of
Christianity was a proof of its divine origin, and that in this respect
we had a right to look for a direct analogy between the operations of
the world of grace and nature, both proceeding as they did from the
same Almighty hands! Our deservedly popular preacher has,
however, an answer to what we have here stated: he says, ‘the time
MUST and WILL shortly come!’ We never contradict prophecies; we
only speak to facts. In addressing himself to this point, Mr. Irving
made a spirited digression to the Missionary Societies, and the
impending propagation of the Gospel at home and abroad—all
obstacles to it would speedily be surmounted:—‘The Negro slave was
not so enchained but that the Gospel would set him free; the
Hottentot was not so benighted but that its light would penetrate to
him; the South Sea Islander was not so indolent and voluptuous but
that he would rouse himself at its call; neither the cunning of the
Italian, nor the superstition of the Spaniard, nor the tameness of the
German, nor the levity of the French, nor the buoyancy of the Irish,
nor the indomitable pride of the English, nor the fiery manhood of
the Scotch, would be long able to withstand its all-pervading
influence!’ We confess, when our Caledonian pastor launched his
canoe from the South Sea Isles and landed on European terra firma,
taking measure of the vices of each nation that were opposed to the
spirit of Christianity, we did prick up our ears to know what fault he
would, in due course of argument, find with his native country—it
would go against the grain, no doubt, but still he had undertaken it,
and he must speak out—When lo! for some sneaking vice or sordid
pettifogging disposition, we have our own ‘best virtue’ palmed upon
us as the only failing of the most magnanimous natives of the North
—fiery manhood, quotha! The cold sweat of rankling malice,
hypocrisy, and servility, would be nearer the mark—Eh! Sir Walter?
Nay, good Mr. Blackwood, we meant no offence to you! ‘Fiery
manhood’ is the Anti-Christian vice or virtue of the Scotch that meets
true religion on the borders, and beats her back with suffocating
breath! Is Christianity still then to be planted like oak timber in
Scotland? What will Dr. Chalmers and the other labourers in the
vineyard say to this?—‘We pause for a reply!’ The best and most
impressive part of Mr. Irving’s discourse (Sunday, the 22nd June)
was that, in which he gave a very beautiful account of what
Christianity had done, or rather might do, in aid of morality and the
regeneration of the spirit of man. It had made ‘corruption blossom,’
‘annihilated time in the prospect of eternity,’ and ‘changed all nature,
from a veil hiding the face of God, into a mirror reflecting his power
and beneficence.’ We do not, however, see why in the fervour of his
enthusiasm he should affirm ‘that Jesus Christ had destroyed
melody,’ nor why, by any allowed licence of speech, he should talk of
‘the mouth of God being muzzled by man.’ We might not perhaps
have noticed this last expression, considering it as a slip of the
tongue; but Mr. Irving preaches from written notes, and his style is,
on the whole, polished and ambitious. We can conceive of a deeper
strain of argument, of a more powerful and overwhelming flood of
eloquence; but altogether we deem him an able and attractive
expounder of Holy Writ; and farther, we believe him to be an honest
man. We suspect there is a radical ‘taint in him,’ and that Mr.
Canning will be advised to withdraw himself from the congregation.
His strokes aimed at iniquity in high places are bold, unsparing, and
repeated. We would however suggest to him the propriety of
containing his indignation at the advancement of the secular
priesthood by ‘the powers that be;’ it is a thing of course, and his
impatience of their elevation may be invidiously construed into a
jealousy of the spoil. When we compare Mr. Irving with some other
preachers that we have heard, and particularly with that crawling
sycophant Daniel Wilson (who tendered his gratuitous submission to
Nero the other day in the excess of his loyalty to George IV.) we are
sorry that we have not been able to make our tribute of approbation
unqualified as it is cordial, and to stifle their venal breath with the
applauses bestowed upon him. ‘Oh! for an eulogy to kill’ all such
with!
 ARGUING IN A CIRCLE

The Liberal.]
[1823.

There was an account in the newspapers the other day of a fracas

in the street, in which a Lord and one or two Members of Parliament
were concerned. It availed them nought to plead the privilege of
Peerage, or to have made speeches in the House—they were held to
bail, like the vilest of the rabble, and the circumstance was not
considered one to come before the public. Ah! it is that public that is
the sad thing. It is the most tremendous ring that ever was formed to
see fair play between man and man; it puts people on their good
behaviour immediately; and wherever it exists, there is an end of the
airs and graces which individuals, high in rank, and low in
understanding and morals, may chuse to give themselves. While the
affair is private and can be kept in a corner, personal fear and favour
are the ruling principles, might prevails over right: but bring it
before the world, and truth and justice stand some chance. The
public is too large a body to be bribed or browbeat. Its voice, deep
and loud, quails the hearts of princes: its breath would make the
feather in a lord’s cap bend and cower before it, if its glance,
measuring the real magnitude of such persons with their lofty, tiptoe,
flaunting pretensions, had not long since taken the feathers out of
their caps. A lord is now dressed (oh! degenerate world) like any
other man; and a watchman will no sooner let go his grasp of his
plain collar than he will that of a Commoner or any other man, who
has his ‘fancies and good-nights.’ What a falling off is here from the
time when if a ‘base cullionly fellow’ had dared to lay hands on a
nobleman, on ‘one of quality,’ he would have whipped his sword out
of its scabbard and run him through the body; the ‘beggarly,
unmannered corse’ would have been thrown into the Thames or the
next ditch; and woe to any person that should have attempted to
make a stir in the matter! ‘The age of chivalry is gone, that of
constables, legislators, and Grub-street writers, has succeeded, and
the glory of heraldry is extinguished for ever.’
‘The melancholy Jacques grieves at that.’

Poor Sir Walter! the times are changed indeed, since a Duke of
Buckingham could send a couple of bullies, equipped in his livery,
with swords and ribbons, to carry off a young lady from a Peveril of
the Peak, by main force, in the face of day, and yet the bye-standers
not dare to interfere, from a dread of the Duke’s livery and the High
Court of Star Chamber! It is no wonder that the present Duke of
Buckingham (the old title new revived) makes speeches in the Upper
House to prove that legitimate monarchs have a right, whenever they
please, to run their swords through the heart of a nation and pink the
liberties of mankind, thinking if this doctrine were once fully
restored, the old times of his predecessor might come again,—
‘New manners and the pomp of elder days!’

It is in tracing the history of private manners that we see (more than

any thing else) the progress that has been made in public opinion
and political liberty, and that may be still farther made. No one
individual now sets up his will as higher than the law: no noble Duke
or Baron bold acts the professed bully or glories in the character of a
lawless ruffian, as a part of the etiquette and privileges of high rank:
no gay, gaudy minion of the court takes the wall of the passengers,
sword in hand, cuts a throat, washes his white, crimson-spotted
hands, and then to dinner with the king and the ladies.—That is over
with us at present; and while that is the case, Hampden will not have
bled in the field, nor Sydney on the scaffold, in vain! Even the
monarch in this country, though he is above the law, is subject to
opinion; ‘submits,’ as Mr. Burke has it, both from choice and
necessity, ‘to the soft collar of social esteem, and gives a domination,
vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners!’
It is this which drives the Despots of the Continent mad, and
makes their nobles and chief vassals league together, like a herd of
tygers, to destroy the example of liberty which we (the people of
England) have set to the rest of the world. They are afraid that if this
example should spread and things go on much farther in the road
they have taken, they will no longer be able to give their subjects and
dependants the knout, to send them to the galleys or a dungeon
without any warrant but their own unbridled will, and that a lord or a
king will be no more above the law than any other man. Mankind, in
short, till lately and except in this country, were considered as a herd
of deer which the privileged classes were to use for their pleasure, or
which they were to hunt down for spite or sport, as liked them best.
That they should combine together with a knot of obscure
philosophers and hair-brained philanthropists, to set up a plea not to
be used at any man’s pleasure, or hunted down like vermin for any
man’s sport, was an insult to be avenged with seas of blood, an attack
upon the foundations of social order, and the very existence of all
law, religion, and morality. In all the legitimate governments of
Europe, there existed, and there still exist, a number of individuals
who were exempted (by birth and title) from the law, who could offer
every affront to religion, and commit every outrage upon morality
with impunity, with insolence and loud laughter, and who pretended
that in asserting this monstrous privilege of theirs to the very letter,
the essence of all law, religion, and morality consisted. This was the
case in France till the year 1789. The only law was the will of the rich
to insult and harass the poor, the only religion a superstitious
mummery, the only morality subserviency to the pleasures of the
great. In the mild reign of Louis XV. only, there were fifteen thousand
lettres de cachet issued for a number of private, nameless offences,
such as the withholding a wife or daughter from the embraces of
some man of rank, for having formerly received favours from a king’s
mistress, or writing an epigram on a Minister of State. It was on the
ruins of this flagitious system (no less despicable than detestable)
that the French Revolution rose; and the towers of the Bastille, as
they fell, announced the proud truth in welcome thunder to the
human race—to all but those who thought they were born, and who
only wished to live, to exercise their sweeping, wholesale, ruthless
tyranny, or to vent the workings of their petty, rankling spleen, pride,
bigotry, and malice, in endless, tormenting details on their fellow-
creatures.
It will, I conceive, hereafter be considered as the greatest enormity
in history, the stupidest and the most barefaced insult that ever was
practised on the understandings or the rights of men, that we should
interfere in this quarrel between liberty and slavery, take the wrong
side, and endeavour to suppress the natural consequences of that
very example of freedom we had set. That we should do this, we who
had ‘long insulted the slavery of Europe by the loudness of our boasts
of freedom,’ who had laughed at the Grand Monarque for the last
hundred and fifty years, and treated his subjects with every indignity,
as belonging to an inferior species to ourselves, for submitting to his
cruel and enervated sway; that the instant they took us at our word
and were willing to break the chains of Popery and Slavery that we
never ceased to taunt them with, we should turn against them, stand
passive by ‘with jealous leer malign,’ witnessing the machinations of
despots to extinguish the rising liberties of the world, and with the
first plausible protest, the first watch-word given (the blow aimed at
the head of a king confederate with the enemies of his country
against its freedom) should join the warwhoop, and continue it
loudest and longest, and never rest, under one hollow, dastard,
loathsome pretence or other, till we had put down ‘the last example
of democratic rebellion’ (we, who are nothing but rebellion all over,
from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot!) and had restored
the doctrine of Divine Right, that had fallen headless from its throne
of Ignorance and Superstition with the First Charles, long before it
was condemned to the same fate in the person of the French king;
that we should do this, and be led, urged on to the unhallowed task
by a descendant of the House of Brunswick, who held his crown in
contempt of the Stuarts, and grew old, blind, and crazed in the
unsated, undiverted, sacred thirst of Legitimacy, is a thing that
posterity will wonder at. We pretend to have interfered to put down
the horrors of the French Revolution, when it was our interference
(with that of others) that produced those horrors, of which we were
glad as an excuse to justify our crooked policy and to screen the
insidious, deadly, fatal blow aimed at liberty. No; the ‘cause was
hearted’ in the breasts of those who reign, or who would reign, in
contempt of the people, and with whom it rests to make peace or
war. Is not the same principle at work still? What horrors have the
Holy Alliance to plead in vindication of their interference with
Spain? They have not a rag, a thread of all their hideous tissue of
sophistry and lies to cover ‘the open and apparent shame’ of this
sequel and consistent comment on their former conduct. It is a
naked, barefaced, undisguised attack upon the rights and liberties of
the world: it is putting the thing upon its true and proper footing—
the claim of Kings to hold mankind as a property in perpetuity. There
are no horrors, real or pretended, to warrant this new outrage on
common sense and human nature. It stands on its own proud basis
of injustice—it towers and mocks the skies in all the majesty of regal
wrong. ‘The shame, the blood be upon their heads.’ If there are no
horrors ready-made to their hands, they stand upon their privilege to
commit wanton outrage and unqualified aggression; and if by these
means they can provoke horrors, then the last are put first as the
most plausible plea, as a handsome mask and soft lining to the hard
gripe and features of Legitimacy—Religion consecrates, and Loyalty
sanctions the fraud! But, should the scheme fail in spite of every art
and effort, and the wrong they have meditated be retorted on their
own heads, then we shall have, as before, an appeal made to Liberty
and Humanity—the motto of despots will once more be peace on
earth and good will to men—and we too shall join in the yell of blood
and the whine of humanity. We are only waiting for an excuse now—
till the threats and insults and cruelties of insolent invaders call forth
reprisals, and lead to some act of popular fury or national justice that
shall serve as a signal to rouse the torpid spirit of trade in the city, or
to inflame the loyalty of country gentlemen deaf for the present to all
other sounds but that appalling one of Rent! We must remain neuter
while a grievous wrong is acting, unless we can get something by the
change, or pick a quarrel with the right. We are peaceable, politic,
when a nation’s liberty only is at stake, but were it a monarch’s
crown that hung tottering in the air, oh! how soon would a patriot
senate and people start out to avenge the idle cause: a single speech
from the throne would metamorphose us into martyrs of self-
interest, saviours of the world, deliverers of Europe from lawless
violence and unexampled wrong. But here we have no heart to stir,
because the name of liberty alone (without the cant of loyalty) has
lost its magic charm on the ears of Englishmen—impotent to save,
powerful only to betray and destroy themselves and others!
We want a Burke to give the thing a legitimate turn at present. I
am afraid the Editor of the New Times can hardly supply his place.
They could hardly have done before, without that eloquent apostate,
that brilliant sophist, to throw his pen into the scale against truth
and liberty. He varnished over a bad cause with smooth words, and
had power to ‘make the worse appear the better reason’—the devil’s
boast! The madness of genius was necessary to second the madness
of a court; his flaming imagination was the torch that kindled the
smouldering fire in the inmost sanctuary of pride and power, and
spread havoc, dismay, and desolation through the world. The light of
his imagination, sportive, dazzling, beauteous as it seemed, was
followed by the stroke of death. It so happens that I myself have
played all my life with his forked shafts unhurt, because I had a
metaphysical clue to carry off the noxious particles, and let them sink
into the earth, like drops of water. But the English nation are not a
nation of metaphysicians, or they would have detected, and smiled or
wept over the glittering fallacies of this half-bred reasoner, but, at the
same time, most accomplished rhetorician that the world ever saw.
But they are perplexed by sophistry, stupified by prejudice, staggered
by authority. In the way of common sense and practical inquiry, they
do well enough; but start a paradox, and they know not what to make
of it. They either turn from it altogether, or, if interest or fear give
them motives to attend to it, are fascinated by it. They cannot
analyze or separate the true from the seeming good. Mr. Pitt, with
his deep-mouthed common-places, was able to follow in the same
track, and fill up the cry; but he could not have given the tone to
political feeling, or led on the chase with ‘so musical a discord, such
sweet; thunder.’ Burke strewed the flowers of his style over the rotten
carcase of corruption, and embalmed it in immortal prose: he
contrived, by the force of artful invective and misapplied epithets, to
persuade the people of England that Liberty was an illiberal, hollow
sound; that humanity was a barbarous modern invention, that
prejudices were the test of truth; that reason was a strumpet, and
right a fiction. Every other view of the subject but his (‘so well the
tempter glozed’) seemed to be without attraction, elegance, or
refinement. Politics became poetry in his hands, his sayings passed
like proverbs from mouth to mouth, and his descriptions and similes
were admired and repeated by the fashionable and the fair. Liberty
from thenceforward became a low thing: philosophy was a spring-
nailed, velvet-pawed tyger-cat, with green eyes, watching its
opportunity to dart upon its prey: humanity was a lurking assassin.
The emblems of our cardinal and favourite virtues were overturned:
the whole vocabulary of national watch-words was inverted or
displaced. This was a change indeed in our style of thinking, more
alarming than that in our calendar formerly: and this change was
brought about by Mr. Burke, who softened down hard reasons in the
crucible of his fancy, and who gave to his epithets the force of
nicknames. Half the business was done by his description of the
Queen of France. It was an appeal to all women of quality; to all who
were, or would be thought, cavaliers or men of honour; to all who
were admirers of beauty, or rank, or sex. Yet what it had to do with
the question, it would be difficult to say. If a woman is handsome, it
is well: but it is no reason why she should poison her husband, or
betray a country. If, instead of being young, beautiful, and free of
manners, Marie Antoinette had been old, ugly, and chaste, all this
mischief had been prevented. The author of the Reflections had seen
or dreamt he saw a most delightful vision sixteen years before, which
had thrown his brain into a ferment; and he was determined to
throw his readers and the world into one too. It was a theme for a
copy of verses, or a romance; not for a work in which the destinies of
mankind were to be weighed. Yet she was the Helen that opened
another Iliad of woes; and the world has paid for that accursed
glance at youthful beauty with rivers of blood. If there was any one of
sufficient genius now to deck out some Castilian maid, or village girl
in the Army of the Faith, in all the colours of fancy, to reflect her
image in a thousand ages and hearts, making a saint and a martyr of
her; turning loyalty into religion, and the rights and liberties of the
Spanish nation, and of all other nations, into a mockery, a bye-word,
and a bugbear, how soon would an end be put to Mr. Canning’s
present bizarre (almost afraid to know itself) situation! How gladly
he would turn round on the pivot of his forced neutrality, and put all
his drooping tropes and figures on their splendid war-establishment
again!
Mr. Burke was much of a theatrical man. I do not mean that his
high-wrought enthusiasm or vehemence was not natural to him; but
the direction that he gave to it, was exceedingly capricious and
arbitrary. It was for some time a doubtful question which way he
should turn with respect to the French Revolution, whether for or
against it. His pride took the alarm, that so much had been done with
which he had nothing to do, and that a great empire had been
overturned with his favourite engines, wit and eloquence, while he
had been reforming the ‘turn-spit of the king’s kitchen,’ in set
speeches far superior to the occasion. Rousseau and the
Encyclopædists had lamentably got the start of him; and he was
resolved to drag them back somehow by the heels, and bring what
they had effected to an untimely end,—
‘Undoing all, as all had never been.’

The ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ was a spiteful and dastard

but too successful attempt to put a spoke in the wheels of knowledge
and progressive civilization, and throw them back for a century and a
half at least. In viewing the change, in the prospects of society, in
producing which he had only a slight and indirect hand by his efforts
in the cause of American freedom, he seemed to say, with Iago in the
play,—
‘Though that their joy be joy,
Yet will I contrive
To throw such changes of vexations on it;
As it may lose some colour.’

He went beyond his own most sanguine hopes, but did not live to
witness their final accomplishment, by seeing France literally
‘blotted out of the map of Europe.’ He died in the most brilliant part
of Buonaparte’s victorious and captain-like campaigns in Italy. If it
could have been foreseen what an ‘ugly customer’ he was likely to
prove, the way would have been to have bribed his vanity (a great
deal stronger than his interest) over to the other side, by asking his
opinion; and, indeed, he has thrown out pretty broad hints in the
early stage of his hostility, and before the unexpected success of the
French arms, and the whizzing arrows flung at him by his old friends
and new antagonists had stung him to madness, that the great error
of the National Assembly was in not having consulted able and
experienced heads on this side the water, as to demolishing the old,
and constructing the new edifice. If he had been employed to lay the
first stone, or to assist, by an inaugural dissertation, at the baptism of
the new French Constitution, the fabric of the Revolution would
thenceforth have risen,—
‘Like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumery,’

without let or molestation from his tongue or pen. But he was

overlooked. He was not called from his closet, or from his place in
the House (where, it must be confessed, he was out of his place) to
‘ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm’; and therefore he tried,
like some malicious hag, to urge the veering gale into a hurricane; to
dash the labouring vessel of the state in pieces, and make shipwreck
of the eternal jewel of man’s happiness, which it had on board—
Liberty. The stores of practical and speculative knowledge which he
had been for years collecting and digesting, and for which he had no
use at home, were not called into play abroad. His genius had
hitherto been always too mighty for the occasion; but here his utmost
grasp of intellect would hardly have been sufficient to grapple with it.
What an opportunity was lost! Something, therefore, was to be done,
to relieve the galling sense of disappointed ambition and mortified
self-consequence. Our political Busy body turned Marplot; and
maliciously, and like a felon, strangled the babe that he was not
professionally called in to swaddle, and dandle, and bring to
maturity. He had his revenge: but so must others have their’s on his
memory.
Burke was not an honest man. There was always a dash of
insincerity, a sinister bias in his disposition. We see, from the letters
that passed between him and his two brothers, and Barry the painter,
that there was constantly a balancing of self-interest and principle in
his mind; a thanking of God that he was in no danger of yielding to
temptation, yet as if it were a doubtful or ticklish point; and a
patient, pensive expectation of place and emolument, till he could
reconcile it with integrity and fidelity to his party; which might easily
be construed into a querulous hankering after it, and an opinion that
this temporary self-denial implied a considerable sacrifice on his
part, or that he displayed no small share of virtue in not immediately
turning knave. All this, if narrowly looked into, has a very suspicious
appearance. Burke, with all his capricious wildness and flighty
impulses, was a self-seeker and more constant in his enmities than in
his friendships. He bore malice, and did not forgive to the last. His
cold, sullen behaviour to Fox, who shed tears when they had a
quarrel in the House, and his refusal to see him afterwards, when the
latter came to visit him on his death-bed, will for ever remain a
stigma on his memory. He was, however, punished for his fault. In
his latter writings, he complains bitterly of the solitariness of his old
age, and of the absence of the friends of his youth—whom he had
deserted. This is natural justice, and the tribute due to apostacy. A
man may carry over his own conscience to the side of his vanity or
interest, but he cannot expect, at the same time, to carry over along
with him all those with whom he has been connected in thought and
action, and whose society he will miss, sooner or later. Mr. Burke
could hardly hope to find, in his casual, awkward, unaccountable
intercourse with such men as Pitt or Dundas, amends for the loss of
his old friends, Fox and Sheridan, to whom he was knit not only by
political ties, but by old habitudes, lengthened recollections, and a
variety of common studies and pursuits. Pitt was a mere politician;
Dundas, a mere worldling. What would they care about him, and his
‘winged words’? No more of talk about the meetings at Sir Joshua’s—
the Noctes cœnæque Deûm; about the fine portraits of that great
colourist; about Johnson or Goldsmith, or Dunning or Barrè; or their
early speeches; or the trying times in the beginning of the American
war; or the classic taste and freeborn spirit of Greece and Rome;—
‘The beautiful was vanish’d, and return’d not.’

Perhaps, indeed, he would wish to forget most of these, as ungrateful

topics; but when a man seeks for repose in oblivion of himself, he
had better seek it, where he will soonest find it,—in the grave!
Whatever the talents, or the momentary coincidence of opinion of his
new allies, there would be a want of previous sympathy between
them. Their notions would not amalgamate, or they would not be
sure that they did. Every thing would require to be explained, to be
reconciled. There would be none of the freedom of habitual intimacy.
Friendships, like the clothes we wear, become the easier from
custom. New friendships do not sit well on old or middle age.
Affection is a science, to which it is too late to serve an
apprenticeship after a certain period of life. This is the case with all
patched-up, conventional intimacies; but it is worse when they are
built on inveterate hostility and desertion from an opposite party,
where their naturally crude taste is embittered by jealousy and
rankling wounds. We think to exchange old friends and connections
for new ones, and to be received with an additional welcome for the
sacrifice we have made; but we gain nothing by it but the contempt of
those whom we have left, and the suspicions of those whom we have
joined. By betraying a cause, and turning our backs on a principle,
we forfeit the esteem of the honest, and do not inspire one particle of
confidence or respect in those who may profit by and pay us for our
treachery.
Deserters are never implicitly trusted. There is, besides the
sentiment or general principle of the thing, a practical reason for
this. Their zeal, their eagerness to distinguish themselves in their
new career, makes them rash and extravagant; and not only so, but
there is always a leaven of their old principles remaining behind,
which breaks out in spite of themselves, and which it is difficult for
their encouragers and patrons to guard against. This was remarkably
the case with the late Mr. Windham. He was constantly running a-
muck at some question or other, and committing the Ministers. His
old, free-thinking, opposition habits returned upon him before he
was aware of it; and he was sure to hazard some paradox, or stickle
for some objectionable point, contrary to the forms of office. The
cabinet had contemplated no such thing. He was accordingly kept in
check, and alarmed the treasury-bench whenever he rose. He was
like a dog that gives mouth before the time, or is continually running
on a stray scent: he was chid and fed! The same thing is observable in
the present Poet-Laureat, whose jacobinical principles have taken
such deep root in him (intus et in cute) that they break out even in
his Court poems, like ‘a thick scurf’ on loyalty; and he presents them
unconsciously, (as an offering of ‘sweet smelling gums,’) at the very
foot of the throne. He at present retains his place apparently on
condition of holding his tongue. He writes such Odes on kings, that it
is next to impossible not to travestie them into lampoons!
The remarks I have made above apply strongly to him and some of
his associates of the Lake School. I fancy he has felt, as much as
anyone, the inconvenience of drawing off from a cause, and that by
so doing we leave our oldest and our best friends behind. There are
those among the favourers and admirers of his youth, whom his dim
eyes discover not, and who do not count his grey hairs. Not one or
two, but more;—men of character and understanding, who have
pledged mutual faith, and drank the cup of freedom with him, warm
from the wine-press, as well as the ‘dews of Castalie.’ He gave up a
principle, and one left him;—he insulted a feeling, and another fled;
he accepted a place, and received the congratulations of no one but
Mr. Croker. He looks round for them in vain, with throbbing heart,
(the heart of a poet can never lie still; he should take the more care
what it is that agitates it!)—sees only the shadows or the carcases of
old friendships; or stretches out his hand to grasp some new patron,
and finds that also cold. If our friends are sometimes accused of
short memories, our enemies make it up by having long ones. We
had better adhere to the first; for we must despair of making cordial
converts of the last. This double desolation is cheerless, and makes a
man bethink himself. We may make a shift (a shabby one) without
our self-respect; but it will never do to have it followed by the loss of
the respect of those whose opinion we once valued most. We may
tamper with our own consciences; but we feel at a loss without the
testimony of others in our favour, which is seldom paid, except to
integrity of purpose and principle. Perhaps, however, Mr. Southey
consoles himself for a certain void without and within, by receiving
the compliments of some Undergraduate of either of our
Universities, on his last article in defence of Rotten Boroughs, in the
Quarterly Review; or of a Dignitary of the Church, on his share in the
Six Acts, and for suggesting to Lord Sidmouth the propriety of
punishing the second conviction for libel with banishment. We do
not know how this may be: but with us, it would barb the dart.
It would not matter, if these turn-coats were not in such violent
extremes. Between the two, they must be strangely perplexed in their
own minds, and scarcely know what to make of themselves. They
must have singular qualms come over them at times—the apparitions
of former acquaintance and opinions. If they were contented to
correct, to qualify their youthful extravagancies, and to be taught by
experience to steer a middle course, and pay some deference to the
conclusions of others, it would be mighty well; but this is not their
humour. They must be conspicuous, dogmatical, exclusive,
intolerant, on whichever side they are: the mode may be different,
the principle is the same. A man’s nature does not change, though he
may profess different sentiments. A Socinian may become a
Calvinist, or a Whig a Tory: but a bigot is always a bigot; an egotist
never becomes humble. Besides, what excuse has a man, after thirty,
to change about all of a sudden to the very opposite side? If he is an
uneducated man, he may indeed plead ignorance yesterday of what
he has learnt to-day: but a man of study and reading can’t pretend
that a whole host of arguments has suddenly burst upon him, of
which he never heard before, and that they have upset all his earlier
notions: he must have known them long before, and if they made no