In this country, where his opposition to the corruptions of government has raised him so many adversaries, and such a swarm of unprincipled hirelings have exerted themselves in blackening his character, and in misrepresenting all the transactions and incidents of his life, will it not be a most difficult, nay, an impossible task, for posterity, after a lapse of I700 years, if such a wreck of modern literature as that of the ancient, should intervene, to identify the real circumstances, moral and civil, of the man?
Rev. Gilbert Wakefield, B.A., a “late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge” was invoked by Moncure Daniel Conway, in context with Paine’s remark there is no written matter by Christ himself in the Bible.
The question was attractive, so it looks, and it was put to practice on some of Thomas Paine’s writings.
Common Sense and two parts of The Age of Reason meet the requirements of style, thematic development, and verb phrase. I have translated them in extenso: the texts were maybe altered — there is no x-ray to tell that — but as long as there is no contradiction to author style, I have no ground to dig.
We can fume about word sense, as how did Thomas Paine imagine the word of God in the sky, but we may understand his health was not good in the time of writing, while he acted in opposition to the Bible. He gave his matter the strongest of his sounds and excluded human language from communicating about God completely — possibly suffering himself from the lagging vocabulary that fever might spell.
There is no requirement to adopt written matter, and thus I left the passages, with a brief note at the end of the book. We people are selective when we read anyway, and as for Thomas Paine’s condition then, you would not be allowed to drive your car today.
He was found by Monroe more dead than alive from semi-starvation, cold, and an abscess contracted in prison, and taken to the Minister’s own residence. It was not supposed that he could survive, and he owed his life to the tender care of Mr. and Mrs. Monroe. — Conway vol. 4, Editor’s introduction.
The author acknowledged the attribute, Almighty. Excluding God from natural language might belong with conditions of limited intellect:
If we permit ourselves to conceive right ideas of things, we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honor with the name of the Word of God; and therefore the Word of God cannot exist in any written or human language — Thomas Paine, Age of Reason.
The American Crisis, Letter to the Abbe, and the second part of Rights of Man clearly do yet show another hand, likely that of the “Republic of Letters”.
The Hand
A hired hand, it would have been. In the Letter to Abbe, Paine quotes Raynal on rumor. A glimpse at the original is enough to tell that.
Why did they (says he, meaning the court of France) tie themselves down by an inconsiderate treaty to conditions with the Congress, which they might themselves have held in dependance by ample and regular supplies — Conway ■volume 2, page 108.
“Such are the complaints with which all parts of the kingdom ring, and which we are not afraid to collect together here, and lay before the eyes of authority, if it deigns to read or hear them”, says Raynal ■on page 153 for the “ample opinion” on page 152.
To believe it is Paine
Paine would have proposed child labor, contradicting himself in one sentence:
If the slavery of the parents be unjust, much more is their children’s; if the parents were justly slaves, yet the children are born free; this is the natural, perfect right of all mankind; they are nothing but a just recompense to those who bring them up: And as much less is commonly spent on them than others, they have a right, in justice, to be proportionably sooner free. — African slavery in America, ■Conway volume 1, pdf page 15.
Style, verb or noun
When I translate Thomas Paine, I expect verbs in the flow of ideas. The Hand locks on the noun and attribution.
It is, as has already been observed, never young, never old. It is subject neither to nonage, nor dotage. It is never in the cradle, nor on crutches. It admits not of a separation between knowledge and power, and is superior, as government always ought to be, to all the accidents of individual man, and is therefore superior to what is called monarchy. (■Conway vol. 2, pdf page 428.)
Note. There are ■the trees, if of fancy, to analyze language structures. Hand differs from Thomas Paine. Remember to click “expand the tree”. All this cannot be just my female intuition.
Grandeur
What Athens was in miniature America will be in magnitude (■Conway vol. 2, pdf page 428).
France, great and populous as it is, is but a spot in the capaciousness of the system (ibidem).
Every object a man pursues, is, for the time, a kind of mistress to his mind… (■Conway vol. 2, pdf page 101).
“Otherworldly”
Could we suppose a spectator who knew nothing of the world, and who was put into it merely to make his observations, he would take a great part of the old world to be new, just struggling… (■Conway vol. 2, pdf page 386).
The “constitution” of the kingdom
Wrote Thomas Paine about the second part of the Rights of Man:
Another reason for deferring the remainder of the work was, that Mr. Burke promised in his first publication to renew the subject at another opportunity, and to make a comparison of what he called the English and French Constitutions (■Conway vol. 2, pdf page 398).
The British constitution remains uncodified.
Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, cited by politicians and campaigners. Lord Denning described it in 1956 as “the greatest constitutional document of all times”, says ■Wikipedia.
This is exactly the matter the second part of the Rights does not bring: the comparison of the British and French founding laws. The volume rehearses on other pieces written by Thomas Paine.
“Universal civilization”
The phrase looks picked from the Pennsylvania preamble (the act of 1780, gradual abolition of slavery). Generously applied in the “Rights, Part the Second” — it does not occur anywhere else.
The “universal church” remains associated with Catholicism; discouragingly to inhabitants of England, with their memory of the ■”Bloody Mary”. The mystery of a temple where you do not ask who sits next, could not be helpful.
The purpose of the Hand is thus overtly to deter people from the Rights. It is not an undertaking by just some naive guy hoping to get cash from a fake.
Another such device would hint of necromancy. Commerce is here as “blood in bodily circulation”. Philosophy might penetrate into “the barren cave of secrecy”, or the mind attains a “wide prospect of vegetative good”… (■Conway vol. 2, pdf page 103.)
Thomas Paine was even “demonized”. Samuel Adams wrote,
Do you think that your pen, or the pen of any other man, can unchristianize the mass of our citizens… (■Conway vol. 4, pdf page 226.)
The verb, to constitute
The verb does not occur in the sense of composing or reforming, in Thomas Paine. There are only a few exceptions from the political sense, or, potentially, the uses only extend the political meaning. If miracles would be constitutive to religion, you might think what constitutes a miracle
The ascension of a man several miles high into the air, would have everything in it that constitutes the idea of a miracle … (The Age of Reason, ■Conway vol. 4, pdf pp. 101-102).
Body build
I am not for declaring war with every man that appears not so warm as myself: difference of constitution, temper, habit of speaking, and many other things, will go a great way in fixing the outward character of a man, yet simple honesty may remain at bottom (■Conway vol. 1, pdf page 193).
We cannot alter nature, neither ought we to punish the son because the father begot him in a cowardly mood (ibidem).
Wolfe. Strange language from a British soldier! I honour the crown of Great-Britain as an essential part of her excellent constitution (■Conway vol. 1, pdf page 18).
Explicit wording
All the thing on one page, the First Crisis would almost bring an unstable blonde for a shape of a nation.
All that Howe has been doing for this month past, is rather a ravage than a conquest (…); in the fourteenth [fifteenth] century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear ; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment! (■Conway vol. 1, pdf page 179.)
Postscript to the Abbe would have intimations respecting a general peace. There are no “intimations” or “intimacy” in Paine’s Common Sense, and it can serve purposes more or less syntagmatic in telling styles apart.
Arithmetical confabulation
Sloop-or-no-sloop, the following is not like Thomas Paine at all.
The ratio I allude to, is the ratio which the nature of the thing has established for itself. (…) it is in the series of one half upon each preceding number; like the numbers 8, I2, 18, 27, 40, 60, 9O, 135. Any person can perceive that the second number, I2, is produced by the preceding number, 8, and half 8 ; and that the third number, 18, is in like manner produced by the preceding number, 12, and half 12; and so on for the rest. They can also see how rapidly the sums increase as the ratio proceeds. The difference between the two first numbers is but four; but the difference between the two last is forty five; and from thence they may see with what immense rapidity the national debt has increased, and will continue to increase, till it exceeds the ordinary powers of calculation, and loses itself in ciphers. — The English system of finance (■Conway volume 3, pdf page 305).
I proceed to ascertain the expense of the American war, of 1775, by adding, as in the former cases, one half to the expense of the preceding war …
The Forrester’s Letters come marked:
To be nobly wrong is more manly than to be meanly right …
Back to Reverend Wakefield
And how transcendentally extraordinary, I had almost said miraculous, will it be estimated, by candid and reasonable minds, that a writer whose object was a melioration of condition to the common people, and their deliverance from oppression, poverty, wretchedness, to the numberless blessings of upright and equal government, should be reviled, persecuted, and burned in effigy, with every circumstance of insult and execration, by these very objects of his benevolent intentions, in every corner of the kingdom? — ■Conway vol. 4, pdf page 35.
Who can be suspected of the forgeries?
In Paris, in 1793, I had lodgings in the Rue Fauxbourg, St. Denis, No. 63, says Conway’s edit for the piece Forgetfulness (■Conway volume 3, pdf page 332).
St. Denis remains famed for prostitution since the Middle Ages, the French name being Fauburg. Faux means false in French. Conway knew French. He evaluated Lanthenas, Paine’s translator. He wrote he had been in France at the address — and still, his spelling was Fauxburg.
Conway reportedly retrieved the essay from notes by Henry Redhead Yorke. Not a word would have been written by Paine’s hand, just as in the postulation by Rev. Wakefield here at the beginning of the post.
The writing dwells on suicide, has the word “necromancy”, and ends in saying, a human mind is a she:
All that Reason can do is to suggest, to hint a thought, to signify a wish, to cast now and then a kind of bewailing look, to hold up, when she can catch the eye, the miniature-shaded portrait, of Hope; and though dethroned and can dictate no more, to wait upon us in the humble station of a handmaid.
Purportedly “Georgeit” was Paine’s landlord at Denis. “Let George do it” is a saying originated in France, «laissez faire à Georges».
Conway would sort the Bible. In his introduction to the Age of Reason he says (in ■volume 4, pdf page 31),
Reason alone can determine how many texts are as spurious as the three heavenly witnesses (1 John 5. 7) …
Throwing the passage away would be against both Wycliffe and Gutenberg.
The Letter to Abbe has a cynical excursion:
… here, the loss must fall on the majesty of the multitude; and when he is conquered, a monarch falls (■Conway vol. 2, pdf p. 93).
Quite probably, Thomas Paine, already dead then, never would have “written” the following bit about monarchy without the first publication of Emily Dickinson’s verses…
I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open — and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter (■Conway vol. 2, pdf page 430).
A royalist would write something like that.
In it for the croutons
Imagine a wrecked food container — rather than literature — of many years ago. Fizz would not hold, but we can still be in it for the croutons. Work in progress.