Citizen Tom Paine (28 page)

The book was published, and Paine was drunk for two days; the body drunk, the smallness, meanness, wretchedness of himself apparent only too well as he lay over a table in a tavern and saw exactly what was Paine, hated it, but triumphed mightily and exulted over what he had done,
Common Sense
, the
Crisis Papers
, and now
The Rights of Man:
that was himself, that was the brief, immortal spark; that turned empires upside down and gave man hope and brought him face to face with God. Drunk and howling foul songs, he was found by Blake, the poet, Romney, the painter, the former demanding of him:

“Paine, my God, what has gotten into you?”

“Glory! Glory!”

“Paine, get out of this stinkhole!”

“Glory! Glory! Glory!”

Blake took him home, gave him a bath, preached to him and confided, “Paine, you and I are much the same—that way is no good, I tell you, no good.” He had met Blake some months ago, spent an evening talking to him and telling tales of the revolution in America. Blake liked him, and after that they were together a good deal, Blake, Romney, Sharp the engraver, Hull, Barlow, Frost, and Audibert, friends of Blake, friends of Romney, curious misfit liberals in the fashionable world of eighteenth-century London. Now Blake read him poetry in his soft, deep voice, while Paine sighed, “Glory, glory, glory—”

He came to Jordan the next day and said, “Let me smell the ink—let me get a hand on the presses.”

The new books were stacked already, one hundred in a pile. All over the world, in England, in France, in America, the good smell of printer's ink was the same. Jordan described the selling, slow at first, mostly across the stands of his own shop; but it was picking up—three hundred copies to Wales, that at three shillings. “Have three hundred people in Wales three shillings to spend on a book?” Jordan asked.

There were a thousand of the cheap edition that crawled into Scotland; a sheriff, out from Carlisle, got two hundred, and that was before they were judged treasonable. But the sheriff had a nose for that sort of thing, and what else were you to say of something entitled
Rights of Man?
But a thousand got through and then two thousand more, and then it was set in Edinburgh by Thatcher McDowell, pirated, you might say, thirty thousand run off on cheap paper—was it any wonder that the mayor of Glasgow screamed that every Gillie in the hills, every weaver, every hand at a mill, and every smith's apprentice was reading a piece of treasonable filth called
Rights of Man?

They took out three thousand words and printed it on scrap and waste in Cardiff—a thousand copies to go into the mines in a man's breeches.

London began to eat the three-shilling edition; every fop had it—for grins and wit and the sauce that could be flung at this man, Paine. “'Od's blood,” they would say. “Listen to the beast go at the pater!” Walpole had it, Pitt had it, Burke and Fox—and they didn't joke. At White's, the Duke of Devonshire, who lived more of his ducal life at the gambling tables than anywhere else, kept an open copy of Paine's book beside him, tearing leaves from it whenever he needed to light his pipe. Lord Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, read the book, tore it to shreds, and made a mental note to hang the writer. But the Tory government, after they had collectively flushed through their first passion of rage, held a meeting at which Pitt arose and said firmly, thinking perhaps of his father, who had not desired to lose America, or thinking perhaps only of the Tory government:

“For the time being, gentlemen, we will do nothing at all. A book, even a scurrilous rag, which costs three shillings can do no harm unless we publicize it enough to make three shillings a price that must be paid.…”

In that they were wrong. Jordan told Paine, “Nothing can account for the way the expensive edition is going. I've published books long enough to know the size of the fashionable reading public here—even taking into account the politicians who read it as a chore. There's a new audience here, an audience that never read a book before, an audience that's reaching into its pockets and somehow finding three shillings.…”

A weaver, Angus Grey, sought Paine out and said, “And what would you think of weavers, Mr. Paine?”

“I've not thought of them. Who are you?”

“Nobody that matters,” the man said—ill-dressed, gaunt, dark-eyed, licking his lips slowly and purposefully. “But we have been reading your book and we have a mind to set things right. If we had a weapon or two, a musket or a little pistol, would there—” He let the question hang in the air.

“There might be,” Paine said.

“And when, Mr. Paine?”

“When the time comes,” Paine said. What more could he say? What more could he say to any of them who approached him, to any of the pinched, starved faces that hungered for a utopia they found in a book, a utopia of which America was the living proof.

And then ten, twenty, fifty thousand of the cheap edition disappeared into the gaping maw of London, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool … a fire was burning under England and the muffled reverberations began to be felt.

It came down like a pack of cards, and in the gray of dawn he ran away. It came tumbling down upon his head because he had not understood that no one thing, no one man, no one cause can move the world. When he wrote
Common Sense
, he told a people already stirred to war, already fiercely indignant, with arms in their hands, why they had roused themselves in their wrath, why they should go on fighting, and what they were fighting for. They had behind them a hundred years of armed independence, factual if not political; they had fought the Indians and they had fought the French, and they lived by their arms—and, for the most part, they were religious dissenters, Methodists, Puritans, Congregationalists, even the Catholics and Jews among them had fled to America for freedom.

With
The Rights of Man
, it was different; he flung that at the heads of a people totally unprepared, a people who in many cases imagined themselves in possession of a mythical freedom that was in no way actual, but existed in song and story and legend as the possession of every Englishman.

They were not armed, they were not prepared, they were not religious dissenters; they looked at his book, yearned for freedom, and then went back to their work, their slums, and their gin-mills—and those few who had a germ of organization, the broad-faced miners of Wales, the weavers in the northern counties, the ironworkers—those few pondered their copies of Paine's book, counted their bullets, and then, frightened, buried their muskets and did nothing—and when they heard that Paine had fled from England, even their dreams stopped.

His initial mistake—afterwards he realized that—was his first return to France. Then the idea, the vague shape, the conception so huge that he had hardly dared to think of it until now, fixed itself in his mind as a reality; a united states of Europe allied with a united states of America, a brotherhood of man that at the most would take seven years to accomplish, and eventually, possibly before the end of the eighteenth century, would spread over the entire world. It would be a people's government for the people, a government to see that no man starved and no man wanted, to see that hate and misery and crime disappeared through education and enlightenment, to see the iron grip of organized religion loosened, replaced by a gentle, deistic creed wherein the brotherhood of man turned its face to the singleness and goodness of God, a creed without hate or rancor or superstition. There would be an end of war, an end of kings and despots. Christ would come to earth in the simple goodness of all men—a goodness he believed in so fervently—and all men, turning their faces to God, would never lose sight of the vision.

That was Paine's dream, his conception—and one so awful and terrible and wonderful in its implications that he hardly dared speak it fully, even to himself. It depended on too much, the course of revolution in France, his power to sway men with the written word, the course of the post-revolutionary world in America—and finally the revolution in England.

He recalled that he had crossed to France again, further arousing the suspicion of the Tories, who were beginning to believe that he was in league with the French. With Lafayette he had discussed the organization of a republican society that would eventually have world-wide ramifications. Madame Roland and Condorcet had joined in the nucleus, and Paine wrote a flaming proclamation of republicanism that raged against the king's flight from Paris and called for his abdication. The British Tories still held back, and Paine began to believe that he could bring all his plans to a head without ever rousing the Tory government from its apathy. This was the first step—to the American republic would be added the republic of France. He did not know that even at that moment British agents were filing carefully written reports of his activities. He returned to England then and found that Paine, once deliberately ignored, had become an apostle of the devil.

The forces of the government closed in slowly. England was rumbling, but they had heard her rumble before, and they judged the temper of the people well. If you crushed a revolt, you admitted a revolt, and then the demon could never be forced back into the bottle. On the other hand, if you implied, intimidated, threatened softly, arrested secretly, you could destroy a revolt before it ever realized its own strength. America had taught them a lesson.

Paine's friends and supporters had planned a meeting at an inn called the Crown and Anchor—where they would drink to the second anniversary of the downfall of the feudal system in France. A government agent saw the landlord, and suddenly the inn was not available. Clewes disappeared; a man called Luneden, who had approached Paine with an idea for an unofficial militia group modeled after the Associators of Philadelphia, was found dead in a ditch near Dover. Masterson, the ironworker, was arrested on a trumped-up charge. On the other hand, young Lord Edward Fitzgerald of Ireland, told Paine:

“Think on the green isle when you want for fighting men, Mr. Paine, and it might be that you'd find more than enough.”

“Whatever happens,” he told himself, “I must write, explain, make this thing clear.” He did a second part to
The Rights of Man
. His bridge was forgotten, his dreams of scientific and social glory so much in the past that he wondered how he could ever have entertained them. It was the old Paine now, not too well dressed, his twisted eyes gleaming, darting rapidly as he talked, his broad,, powerful shoulders bent again,, as if the burden they carried was heavy, terribly heavy.

He wrote quickly, now that most of his doubts were gone. The first part had been a handbook for revolution, and this would be a plan—elementary and crude—but a sort of plan nevertheless for the new world he dreamed of. While writing, he knew that he was being watched, and he expected some interference from the government; when there was none, he was more wary than surprised. Then Chapman, the wealthy publisher, came and asked whether Paine would agree to his issuing the second
Rights of Man
.

“Clumsy,” Paine thought, “oh, my lord, how clumsy.” And he said, “I publish with Jordan.”

“Jordan is nobody,” Chapman replied smugly. “Jordan is a little mouse gnawing at the edges of the publishing cloth. A work with the strength and importance of yours, Mr. Paine, deserves nothing but the best imprint, the finest paper, and a binding a writer can be proud of. You and I are men of the world, and we know that the buying public, fools that they are, judge a book by its cover; the best Morocco, the most exquisite tooling—”

“I publish with Jordan,” Paine smiled. “There are some who have said, and not too quietly, Mr. Chapman, that my work touches on treason. A publisher of your standing—”

“Risks are a part of publishing. We champion the printed word, the freedom of the press.”

“And the arrangements?”

“A hundred guineas for all rights.”

“All rights?” Paine smiled. “No royalties?—Really, is my work worth so little?”

“I mentioned the risks. You will admit—”

“I publish with Jordan,” Paine said.

“Two hundred guineas.”

“Then my work increases in value. Would you also purchase the right to hand my manuscript over to Mr. Walpole once the price is paid?”

Mr. Chapman kept his temper admirably. “Five hundred guineas, Mr. Paine,” he said.

“A writer's life is never dull,” Paine laughed. “Go to hell, Mr. Chapman.”

“Don't be a fool, Paine. I'll give you a thousand guineas, not a penny more.”

“Go to hell!”

“I warn you, Paine, take the thousand. A man hanged by the neck has no use for money.”

“Get out before I throw you out,” Paine said.

That settled Chapman, but not other things. When Paine brought the manuscript to Jordan, the printer said, “I don't frighten easily, but things are tightening. Do you remember Carstairs, who took a thousand of the cheap edition for Scotland? He was found at the bottom of a cliff with his neck broken—mountain climbing—When has he climbed mountains?”

“Don't you think I see them tightening?” Paine growled.

“I'm not afraid, mind you.”

Paine gave him a written statement, in which the author declared himself to be the publisher—and said that he and no other would answer for what
The Rights of Man
contained.

“You don't have to do this,” Jordan protested.

“I want to.”

“And don't walk the streets at night.”

Paine smiled, recalling other times when that same warning had been flung at him.

Then, with startling suddenness, it came to an end. All the carefully organized revolutionary cells, miners in Wales, cutlers in Sheffield, the dock workers at Liverpool and Tyne, the potters and the wheelwrights—all these who had looked for Paine's leadership were cracked wide open by the government, before he had had a chance to call a congress, to order a rising of militia, before the thin threads of revolution were even in shape to be drawn together. Then as an anticlimax, there came a message from Jordan.