'Some Prostitute on a Heap of Manure'

I’m as fond of vituperation as the next guy, especially when it’s colorful, imaginative and outlandishly disproportionate to its object. Invective always ends up saying more about its author than his nominal target. We have little to be proud of in this benighted age, but social media has spawned a wondrous Age of Opprobrium.

This week I happened upon a sample of denunciation from the past that possesses a sputtering, salivating, Twitter-like nastiness. Interestingly, it was written privately, without expectation of publication, meaning William Beckford (1760-1844), author of the unreadable Vathek, must have been really irked. This inscription was found on the fly-leaf to Volume IV of his copy of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:   

“The time is not far distant, Mr Gibbon, when your almost ludicrous self-complacency, your numerous, and sometimes apparently wilful mistakes . . . your affected moral purity perking up every now and then from the corrupt mass like artificial roses shaken off in the dark by some Prostitute on a heap of manure, your heartless skepticism . . .  your tumid diction, your monotonous jingle of periods, will be still more exposed & scouted than they have been. Once fairly kicked off from your lofty, bedizened stilts, you will be reduced to your just level & true standard.”

I’m especially fond of “tumid diction.” Beckford addresses Gibbon directly, as though he were in the room. What was the state of his mental health? I don’t know. I just enjoy the spectacle. It reminds me of another private performance, this one written by Thomas Carlyle in a notebook in 1831:

“Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom fool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms, and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for: more like a convulsion fit than natural systole and diastole.—Besides he is now a confirmed shameless drunkard: asks vehemently for gin-and-water in strangers’ houses; tipples until he is utterly mad, and is only not thrown out of doors because he is too much despised for taking such trouble with him. Poor Lamb! Poor England where such a despicable abortion is named genius!”

That Gibbon and Lamb are among my favorite writers, and Beckford and Carlyle are not, is no coincidence.