Obiter Dicta: Second Series
by Augustine Birrell · English · Gutenberg #21793 · 333,730 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Obiter Dicta: Second Series
Author: Augustine Birrell
Release date: June 10, 2007 [eBook #21793]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21793
Credits: Transcribed from the 1896 Elliot Stock edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OBITER DICTA: SECOND SERIES ***
Transcribed from the 1896 Elliot Stock edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
OBITER DICTA.
_SECOND SERIES_.
BY
AUGUSTINE BIRRELL.
_Cheap Edition_.
LONDON:
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW.
1896.
PREFACE.
I am sorry not to have been able to persuade my old friend, George
Radford, who wrote the paper on 'Falstaff' in the former volume, to
contribute anything to the second series of _Obiter Dicta_. In order to
enjoy the pleasure of reading your own books over and over again, it is
essential that they should be written either wholly or in part by
somebody else.
Critics will probably be found ready to assert that this little book has
no right to exist, since it exhibits nothing worthy of the name of
research, being written by one who has never been inside the reading-room
of the British Museum. Neither does it expound any theory, save the
unworthy one that literature ought to please; nor does it so much as
introduce any new name or forgotten author to the attention of what is
facetiously called 'the reading public.'
But I shall be satisfied with a mere _de facto_ existence for the book,
if only it prove a little interesting to men and women who, called upon
to pursue, somewhat too rigorously for their liking, their daily duties,
are glad, every now and again, when their feet are on the fender, and
they are surrounded by such small luxuries as their theories of life will
allow them to enjoy, to be reminded of things they once knew more
familiarly than now, of books they once had by heart, and of authors they
must ever love.
The first two papers are here printed for the first time; the others have
been so treated before, and now reappear, pulled about a little, with the
kind permission of the proper parties.
3, NEW SQUARE, LINCOLN'S INN.
_April_, 1887.
JOHN MILTON.
It is now more than sixty years ago since Mr. Carlyle took occasion to
observe, in his Life of Schiller, that, except the Newgate Calendar,
there was no more sickening reading than the biographies of authors.
Allowing for the vivacity of the comparison, and only remarking, with
reference to the Newgate Calendar, that its compilers have usually been
very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be owned that great
creative and inventive genius, the most brilliant gifts of bright fancy
and happy expression, and a glorious imagination, well-nigh seeming as if
it must be inspired, have too often been found most unsuitably lodged in
ill-living and scandalous mortals. Though few things, even in what is
called Literature, are more disgusting than to hear small critics, who
earn their bite and sup by acting as the self-appointed showmen of the
works of their betters, heaping terms of moral opprobrium upon those
whose genius is, if not exactly a lamp unto our feet, at all events a joy
to our hearts,--still, not even genius can repeal the Decalogue, or re-
write the sentence of doom, 'He which is filthy, let him be filthy
still.' It is therefore permissible to wish that some of our great
authors had been better men.
It is possible to dislike John Milton. Men have been found able to do
so, and women too; amongst these latter his daughters, or one of them at
least, must even be included. But there is nothing sickening about his
biography, for it is the life of one who early consecrated himself to the
service of the highest Muses, who took labour and intent study as his
portion, who aspired himself to be a noble poem, who, Republican though
he became, is what Carlyle called him, the moral king of English
literature.
Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, on the 9th of December, 1608.
This is most satisfactory, though indeed what might have been expected.
There is a notable disposition nowadays, amongst the meaner-minded
provincials, to carp and gird at the claims of London to be considered
the mother-city of the Anglo-Saxon race, to regret her pre-eminence, and
sneer at her fame. In the matters of municipal government, gas, water,
fog, and snow, much can be alleged and proved against the English
capital, but in the domain of poetry, which I take to be a nation's best
guaranteed stock, it may safely be said that there are but two shrines in
England whither it is necessary for the literary pilgrim to carry his
cockle hat and shoon--London, the birthplace of Chaucer, Spenser, Ben
Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Blake, Keats, and Browning, and
Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. Of English poets it
may be said generally they are either born in London or remote country
places. The large provincial towns know them not. Indeed, nothing is
more pathetic than the way in which these dim, destitute places hug the
memory of any puny whipster of a poet who may have been born within their
statutory boundaries. This has its advantages, for it keeps alive in
certain localities fames that would otherwise have utterly perished.
Parnassus has forgotten all about poor Henry Kirke White, but the lace
manufacturers of Nottingham still name him with whatever degree of
reverence they may respectively consider to be the due of letters.
Manchester is yet mindful of Dr. John Byrom. Liverpool clings to Roscoe.
Milton remained faithful to his birth-city, though, like many another
Londoner, when he was persecuted in one house he fled into another. From
Bread Street he moved to St. Bride's Churchyard, Fleet Street; from Fleet
Street to Aldersgate Street; from Aldersgate Street to the Barbican; from
the Barbican to the south side of Holborn; from the south side of Holborn
to what is now called York Street, Westminster; from York Street,
Westminster, to the north side of Holborn; from the north side of Holborn
to Jewin Street; from Jewin Street to his last abode in Bunhill Fields.
These are not vain repetitions if they serve to remind a single reader
how all the enchantments of association lie about him. Englishwomen have
been found searching about Florence for the street where George Eliot
represents Romola as having lived, who have admitted never having been to
Jewin Street, where the author of _Lycidas_ and _Paradise Lost_ did in
fact live.
Milton's father was the right kind of father, amiable, accomplished, and
well-to-do. He was by business what was then called a scrivener, a term
which has received judicial interpretation, and imported a person who
arranged loans on mortgage, receiving a commission for so doing. The
poet's mother, whose baptismal name was Sarah (his father was, like
himself, John), was a lady of good extraction, and approved excellence
and virtue. We do not know very much about her, for the poet was one of
those rare men of genius who are prepared to do justice to their fathers.
Though Sarah Milton did not die till 1637, she only knew her son as the
author of _Comus_, though it is surely a duty to believe that no son
would have poems like _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ in his desk, and not
at least once produce them and read them aloud to his mother. These
poems, though not published till 1645, were certainly composed in his
mother's life. She died before the troubles began, the strife and
contention in which her well-graced son, the poet, the dreamer of all
things beautiful and cultured, the author of the glancing, tripping
measure--
'Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity'--
was destined to take a part, so eager and so fierce, and for which he was
to sacrifice twenty years of a poet's life.
The poet was sent to St. Paul's School, where he had excellent teaching
of a humane and expanding character, and he early became, what he
remained until his sight left him, a strenuous reader and a late student.
'Or let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen on some high, lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear.'
Whether the maid who was told off by the elder Milton to sit up till
twelve or one o'clock in the morning for this wonderful Pauline realized
that she was a kind of doorkeeper in the house of genius, and blessed
accordingly, is not known, and may be doubted. When sixteen years old
Milton proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge, where his memory is
still cherished; and a mulberry-tree, supposed in some way to be his,
rather unkindly kept alive. Milton was not a submissive pupil; in fact,
he was never a submissive anything, for there is point in Dr. Johnson's
malicious remark, that man in Milton's opinion was born to be a rebel,
and woman a slave.
But in most cases, at all events, the rebel did well to be rebellious,
and perhaps he was never so entirely in the right as when he protested
against the slavish traditions of Cambridge educational methods in 1625.
Universities must, however, at all times prove disappointing places to
the young and ingenuous soul, who goes up to them eager for literature,
seeing in every don a devotee to intellectual beauty, and hoping that
lectures will, by some occult process--the _genius loci_--initiate him
into the mysteries of taste and the storehouses of culture. And then the
improving conversation, the flashing wit, the friction of mind with
mind,--these are looked for, but hardly found; and the young scholar
groans in spirit, and perhaps does as Milton did--quarrels with his
tutor. But if he is wise he will, as Milton also did, make it up again,
and get the most that he can from his stony-hearted stepmother before the
time comes for him to bid her his _Vale vale et aeternum vale_.
Milton remained seven years at Cambridge--from 1625 to 1632--from his
seventeenth to his twenty-fourth year. Any intention or thought he ever
may have had of taking orders he seems early to have rejected with a
characteristic scorn. He considered a state of subscription to articles
a state of slavery, and Milton was always determined, whatever else he
was or might become, to be his own man. Though never in sympathy with
the governing tone of the place, there is no reason to suppose that
Milton (any more than others) found this lack seriously to interfere with
a fair amount of good solid enjoyment from day to day. He had friends
who courted his society, and pursuits both grave and gay to occupy his
hours of study and relaxation. He was called the 'Lady' of his college,
on account of his personal beauty and the purity and daintiness of his
life and conversation.
After leaving Cambridge Milton began his life, so attractive to one's
thoughts, at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a house in
which his mother was living. Here, for five years, from his
twenty-fourth to his twenty-ninth year--a period often stormy in the
lives of poets--he continued his work of self-education. Some of his
Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one
who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls
nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious. His
second sonnet records this state of feeling:
'How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.'
And yet no poet had ever a more beautiful springtide, though it was
restless, as spring should be, with the promise of greater things and
'high midsummer pomps.' These latter it was that were postponed almost
too long.
Milton at Horton made up his mind to be a great poet--neither more nor
less; and with that end in view he toiled unceasingly. A more solemn
dedication of a man by himself to the poetical office cannot be imagined.
Everything about him became, as it were, pontifical, almost sacramental.
A poet's soul must contain the perfect shape of all things good, wise,
and just. His body must be spotless and without blemish, his life pure,
his thoughts high, his studies intense. There was no drinking at the
'Mermaid' for John Milton. His thoughts, like his joys, were not those
that
'are in widest commonalty spread.'
When in his walks he met the Hodge of his period, he is more likely to
have thought of a line in Virgil than of stopping to have a chat with the
poor fellow. He became a student of the Italian language, and writes to
a friend: 'I who certainly have not merely wetted the tip of my lips in
the stream of these (the classical) languages, but in proportion to my
years have swallowed the most copious draughts, can yet sometimes retire
with avidity and delight to feast on Dante, Petrarch, and many others;
nor has Athens itself been able to confine me to the transparent waves of
its Ilissus, nor ancient Rome to the banks of its Tiber, so as to prevent
my visiting with delight the streams of the Arno and the hills of
Faesolae.'
Now it was that he, in his often-quoted words written to the young
Deodati, doomed to an early death, was meditating 'an immortality of
fame,' letting his wings grow and preparing to fly. But dreaming though
he ever was of things to come, none the less, it was at Horton he
composed _Comus_, _Lycidas_, _L'Allegro_, and _Il Penseroso_, poems which
enable us half sadly to realize how much went and how much was sacrificed
to make the author of _Paradise Lost_.
After five years' retirement Milton began to feel the want of a little
society, of the kind that is 'quiet, wise, and good,' and he meditated
taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court, where he could have a
pleasant and shady walk under 'immemorial elms,' and also enjoy the
advantages of a few choice associates at home and an elegant society
abroad. The death of his mother in 1637 gave his thoughts another
direction, and he obtained his father's permission to travel to Italy,
'that woman-country, wooed not wed,' which has been the mistress of so
many poetical hearts, and was so of John Milton's. His friends and
relatives saw but one difficulty in the way. John Milton the younger,
though not at this time a Nonconformist, was a stern and unbending
Protestant, and was as bitter an opponent of His Holiness the Pope as he
certainly would have been, had his days been prolonged, of His Majesty
the Pretender.
There is something very characteristic in this almost inflamed hostility
in the case of a man with such love of beauty and passion for
architecture and music as always abided in Milton, and who could write:
'But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters' pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy-proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim, religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced quire below,
In service high and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before my eyes.'
Here surely is proof of an aesthetic nature beyond most of our modern
raptures; but none the less, and at the very same time, Rome was for
Milton the 'grim wolf' who, 'with privy paw, daily devours apace.' It is
with a sigh of sad sincerity that Dr. Newman admits that Milton breathes
through his pages a hatred of the Catholic Church, and consequently the
Cardinal feels free to call him a proud and rebellious creature of God.
That Milton was both proud and rebellious cannot be disputed.
Nonconformists need not claim him for their own with much eagerness. What
he thought of Presbyterians we know, and he was never a church member, or
indeed a church-goer. Dr. Newman has admitted that the poet Pope was an
unsatisfactory Catholic; Milton was certainly an unsatisfactory
Dissenter. Let us be candid in these matters. Milton was therefore
bidden by his friends, and by those with whom he took counsel, to hold
his peace whilst in Rome about the 'grim wolf,' and he promised to do so,
adding, however, the Miltonic proviso that this was on condition that the
Papists did not attack his religion first. 'If anyone,' he wrote, 'in
the very city of the Pope attacked the orthodox religion, I defended it
most freely.' To call the Protestant religion, which had not yet
attained to its second century, the orthodox religion under the shadow of
the Vatican was to have the courage of his opinions. But Milton was not
a man to be frightened of schism. That his religious opinions should be
peculiar probably seemed to him to be almost inevitable, and not
unbecoming. He would have agreed with Emerson, who declares that would
man be great he must be a Nonconformist.
There is something very fascinating in the records we have of Milton's
one visit to the Continent. A more impressive Englishman never left our
shores. Sir Philip Sidney perhaps approaches him nearest. Beautiful
beyond praise, and just sufficiently conscious of it to be careful never
to appear at a disadvantage, dignified in manners, versed in foreign
tongues, yet full of the ancient learning--a gentleman, a scholar, a
poet, a musician, and a Christian--he moved about in a leisurely manner
from city to city, writing Latin verses for his hosts and Italian sonnets
in their ladies' albums, buying books and music, and creating, one cannot
doubt, an all too flattering impression of an English Protestant. To
travel in Italy with Montaigne or Milton, or Evelyn or Gray, or Shelley,
or, pathetic as it is, with the dying Sir Walter, is perhaps more
instructive than to go there for yourself with a tourist's ticket. Old
Montaigne, who was but forty-seven when he made his journey, and whom
therefore I would not call old had not Pope done so before me, is the
most delightful of travelling companions, and as easy as an old shoe. A
humaner man than Milton, a wiser man than Evelyn--with none of the
constraint of Gray, or the strange, though fascinating, outlandishness of
Shelley--he perhaps was more akin to Scott than any of the other
travellers; but Scott went to Italy an overwhelmed man, whose only fear
was he might die away from the heather and the murmur of Tweed. However,
Milton is the most improving companion of them all, and amidst the
impurities of Italy, 'in all the places where vice meets with so little
discouragement, and is protected with so little shame,' he remained the
Milton of Cambridge and Horton, and did nothing to pollute the pure
temple of a poet's mind. He visited Paris, Nice, Genoa, Pisa, and
Florence, staying in the last city two months, and living on terms of
great intimacy with seven young Italians, whose musical names he duly
records. These were the months of August and September, not nowadays
reckoned safe months for Englishmen to be in Florence--modern lives being
raised in price. From Florence he proceeded through Siena to Rome, where
he also stayed two months. There he was present at a magnificent
entertainment given by the Cardinal Francesco Barberini in his palace,
and heard the singing of the celebrated Leonora Baroni. It is not for
one moment to be supposed that he sought an interview with the Pope, as
Montaigne had done, who was exhorted by His Holiness 'to persevere in the
devotion he had ever manifested in the cause of the Church;' and yet
perhaps Montaigne by his essays did more to sap the authority of Peter's
chair than Milton, however willing, was able to do.
It has been remarked that Milton's chief enthusiasm in Italy was not art,
but music, which falls in with Coleridge's _dictum_, that Milton is not
so much a picturesque as a musical poet--meaning thereby, I suppose, that
the effects which he produces and the scenes which he portrays are rather
suggested to us by the rhythm of his lines than by actual verbal
descriptions. From Rome Milton went to Naples, whence he had intended to
go to Sicily and Greece; but the troubles beginning at home he forewent
this pleasure, and consequently never saw Athens, which was surely a
great pity. He returned to Rome, where, troubles or no troubles, he
stayed another two months. From Rome he went back to Florence, which he
found too pleasant to leave under two more months. Then he went to
Lucca, and so to Venice, where he was very stern with himself, and only
lingered a month. From Venice he went to Milan, and then over the Alps
to Geneva, where he had dear friends. He was back in London in August,
1639, after an absence of fifteen months.
The times were troubled enough. Charles I., whose literary taste was so
good that one must regret the mischance that placed a crown upon his
comely head, was trying hard, at the bidding of a priest, to thrust
Episcopacy down Scottish throats, who would not have it at any price. He
was desperately in need of money, and the House of Commons (which had
then a _raison d'etre_) was not prepared to give him any except on terms.
Altogether it was an exciting time, but Milton was in no way specially
concerned in it. Milton looms so large in our imagination amongst the
figures of the period that, despite Dr. Johnson's sneers, we are apt to
forget his political insignificance, and to fancy him curtailing his tour
and returning home to take his place amongst the leaders of the
Parliament men. Return home he did, but it was, as another pedagogue has
reminded us, to receive boys 'to be boarded and instructed.' Dr. Johnson
tells us that we ought not to allow our veneration for Milton to rob us
of a joke at the expense of a man 'who hastens home because his
countrymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the
scene of action vapours away his patriotism in a private
boarding-school;' but that this observation was dictated by the good
Doctor's spleen is made plain by his immediately proceeding to point out,
with his accustomed good sense, that there is really nothing to laugh at,
since it was desirable that Milton, whose father was alive and could only
make him a small allowance, should do something, and there was no shame
in his adopting an honest and useful employment.
To be a Parliament man was no part of the ambition of one who still
aspired to be a poet; who was not yet blind to the heavenly vision; who
was still meditating what should be his theme, and who in the meantime
chastised his sister's sons, unruly lads, who did him no credit and bore
him no great love.
The Long Parliament met in November, 1640, and began its work--brought
Strafford to the scaffold, clapped Laud into the Tower, Archbishop though
he was, and secured as best they could the permanency of Parliamentary
institutions. None of these things specially concerned John Milton. But
there also uprose the eternal Church question, 'What sort of Church are
we to have?' The fierce controversy raged, and 'its fair enticing
fruit,' spread round 'with liberal hand,' proved too much for the father
of English epic.
'He scrupled not to eat
Against his better knowledge.'
In other words, he commenced pamphleteer, and between May, 1641, and the
following March he had written five pamphlets against Episcopacy, and
used an intolerable deal of bad language, which, however excusable in a
heated controversialist, ill became the author of _Comus_.
The war broke out in 1642, but Milton kept house. The 'tented field' had
no attractions for him.
In the summer of 1643 he took a sudden journey into the country, and
returned home to his boys with a wife, the daughter of an Oxfordshire
Cavalier. Poor Mary Powell was but seventeen, her poetic lord was thirty-
five. From the country-house of a rollicking squire to Aldersgate Street
was somewhat too violent a change. She had left ten brothers and sisters
behind her, the eldest twenty-one, the youngest four. As one looks upon
this picture and on that, there is no need to wonder that the poor girl
was unhappy. The poet, though keenly alive to the subtle charm of a
woman's personality, was unpractised in the arts of daily companionship.
He expected to find much more than he brought of general good-fellowship.
He had an ideal ever in his mind of both bodily and spiritual excellence,
and he was almost greedy to realize both, but he knew not how. One of
his complaints was that his wife was mute and insensate, and sat silent
at his board. It must, no doubt, have been deadly dull, that house in
Aldersgate Street. Silence reigned, save when broken by the cries of the
younger Phillips sustaining chastisement. Milton had none of that noble
humanitarian spirit which had led Montaigne long years before him to
protest against the cowardly traditions of the schoolroom. After a month
of Aldersgate Street, Mrs. Milton begged to go home. Her wish was
granted, and she ran back to her ten brothers and sisters, and when her
leave of absence was up refused to return. Her husband was furiously
angry; and in a time so short as almost to enforce the belief that he
began the work during the honeymoon, was ready with his celebrated
pamphlet, _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce restored to the good of
both sexes_. He is even said, with his accustomed courage, to have paid
attentions to a Miss Davis, who is described as a very handsome and witty
gentlewoman, and therefore not one likely to sit silent at his board; but
she was a sensible girl as well, and had no notion of a married suitor.
Of Milton's pamphlet it is everyone's duty to speak with profound
respect. It is a noble and passionate cry for a high ideal of married
life, which, so he argued, had by inflexible laws been changed into a
drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or
redemption. He shuddered at the thought of a man and woman being
condemned, for a mistake of judgment, to be bound together to their
unspeakable wearisomeness and despair, for, he says, not to be beloved
and yet retained is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit. Our present
doctrine of divorce, which sets the household captive free on payment of
a broken vow, but on no less ignoble terms, is not founded on the
congruous, and is indeed already discredited, if not disgraced.
This pamphlet on divorce marks the beginning of Milton's mental
isolation. Nobody had a word to say for it. Episcopalian, Presbyterian,
and Independent held his doctrine in as much abhorrence as did the
Catholic, and all alike regarded its author as either an impracticable
dreamer or worse. It was written certainly in too great haste, for his
errant wife, actuated by what motives cannot now be said, returned to her
allegiance, was mindful of her plighted troth, and, suddenly entering his
room, fell at his feet and begged to be forgiven. She was only nineteen,
and she said it was all her mother's fault. Milton was not a sour man,
and though perhaps too apt to insist upon repentance preceding
forgiveness, yet when it did so he could forgive divinely. In a very
short time the whole family of Powells, whom the war had reduced to low
estate, were living under his roof in the Barbican, whither he moved on
the Aldersgate house proving too small for his varied belongings. The
poet's father also lived with his son.
Mrs. Milton had four children, three of whom, all daughters, lived to
grow up. The mother died in childbirth in 1652, being then twenty-six
years of age.
The _Areopagitica_, _a Speech for Unlicensed Printing_, followed the
divorce pamphlet, but it also fell upon deaf ears. Of all religious
sects the Presbyterians, who were then dominant, are perhaps the least
likely to forego the privilege of interference in the affairs of others.
Instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, instead
of 'a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from the west
end of Paul's,' there was appointed a commission of twenty Presbyterians
to act as State Licensers. Then was Milton's soul stirred within him to
a noble rage. His was a threefold protest--as a citizen of a State he
fondly hoped had been free, as an author, and as a reader. As a citizen
he protested against so unnecessary and improper an interference. It is
not, he cried, 'the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a bishop,
that will make us a happy nation,' but the practice of virtue, and virtue
means freedom to choose. Milton was a manly politician, and detested
with his whole soul grandmotherly legislation. 'He who is not trusted
with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing
to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself
reputed in the commonwealth wherein he was born, for other than a fool or
a foreigner.' 'They are not skilful considerers of human things who
imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.' 'And were I the
chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as
much the forcible hindrance of evil doing.' These are texts upon which
sermons, not inapplicable to our own day, might be preached. Milton has
made our first parent so peculiarly his own, that any observations of his
about Adam are interesting. 'Many there be that complain of Divine
Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God
gave him reason He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but
choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam. We ourselves esteem
not of that obedience a love or gift which is of force. God therefore
left him free, set before him a provoking object ever almost in his eyes;
herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of
his abstinence.' So that according to Milton even Eden was a state of
trial. As an author, Milton's protest has great force. 'And what if the
author shall be one so copious of fancy as to have many things well worth
the adding come into his mind after licensing, while the book is yet
under the press, which not seldom happens to the best and diligentest
writers, and that perhaps a dozen times in one book? The printer dares
not go beyond his licensed copy. So often then must the author trudge to
his leave-giver that those his new insertions may be viewed, and many a
jaunt will be made ere that licenser--for it must be the same man--can
either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the press must
stand still, which is no small damage, or the author lose his accuratest
thoughts, and send forth the book worse than he made it, which to a
diligent writer is the greatest melancholy and vexation that can befall.'
Milton would have had no licensers. Every book should bear the printer's
name, and 'mischievous and libellous books' were to be burnt by the
common hangman, not as an effectual remedy, but as the 'most effectual
remedy man's prevention can use.'
The noblest pamphlet in 'our English, the language of men ever famous and
foremost in the achievements of liberty,' accomplished nothing, and its
author must already have thought himself fallen on evil days.
In the year 1645, the year of Naseby, as Mr. Pattison reminds us,
appeared the first edition of Milton's Poems. Then, for the first time,
were printed _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, the _Ode on the Morning of
Christ's Nativity_, and various of the sonnets. The little volume also
contained _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, which had been previously printed. With
the exception of three sonnets and a few scraps of translation, Milton
had written nothing but pamphlets since his return from Italy. At the
beginning of the volume, which is a small octavo, was a portrait of the
poet, most villainously executed. He was really thirty-seven, but
flattered himself, as men of that age will, that he looked ten years
younger; he was therefore much chagrined to find himself represented as a
grim-looking gentleman of at least fifty. The way he revenged himself
upon the hapless artist is well known. The volume, with the portrait, is
now very scarce, almost rare.
In 1647 Milton removed from the Barbican, both his father and his father-
in-law being dead, to a smaller house in Holborn, backing upon Lincoln's
Inn Fields, close to where the Inns of Court Hotel now stands, and not
far from the spot which was destined to witness the terrible tragedy
which was at once to darken and glorify the life of one of Milton's most
fervent lovers, Charles Lamb. About this time he is supposed to have
abandoned pedagogy. The habit of pamphleteering stuck to him; indeed, it
is one seldom thrown off. It is much easier to throw off the pamphlets.
In 1649 Milton became a public servant, receiving the appointment of
Latin Secretary to the Council of Foreign Affairs. He knew some member
of the Committee, who obtained his nomination. His duties were purely
clerkly. It was his business to translate English despatches into Latin,
and foreign despatches into English. He had nothing whatever to do with
the shaping of the foreign policy of the Commonwealth. He was not even
employed in translating the most important of the State papers. There is
no reason for supposing that he even knew the leading politicians of his
time. There is a print one sees about, representing Oliver Cromwell
dictating a foreign despatch to John Milton; but it is all imagination,
nor is there anything to prove that Cromwell and Milton, the body and
soul of English Republicanism, were ever in the same room together, or
exchanged words with one another. Milton's name does not occur in the
great history of Lord Clarendon. Whitelocke, who was the leading member
of the Committee which Milton served, only mentions him once. Thurloe
spoke of him as a blind man who wrote Latin letters. Richard Baxter, in
his folio history of his Life and Times, never mentions Milton at all.
{27} He was just a clerk in the service of the Commonwealth, of a
scholarly bent, peculiar habit of thought, and somewhat of an odd temper.
He was not the man to cultivate great acquaintances, or to flitter away
his time waiting the convenience of other people. When once asked to use
his influence to obtain for a friend an appointment, he replied he had no
influence, '_propter paucissimas familiaritates meas cum gratiosis_, _qui
domi fere_, _idque libenter_, _me contineo_.' The busy great men of the
day would have been more than astonished, they would have been disgusted,
had they been told that posterity would refer to most of them
compendiously, as having lived in the age of Milton. But this need not
trouble us.
On the Continent Milton enjoyed a wider reputation, on account of his
controversy with the great European scholar, Salmasius, on the
sufficiently important and interesting, and then novel, subject of the
execution of Charles I. Was it justifiable? Salmasius, a scholar and a
Protestant, though of an easy-going description, was employed, or rather,
as he had no wages (Milton's hundred _Jacobuses_ being fictitious),
nominated by Charles, afterwards the Second, to indict the regicides at
the bar of European opinion, which accordingly he did in the Latin
language. The work reached this country in the autumn of 1649, and it
evidently became the duty of somebody to answer it. Two qualifications
were necessary--the replier must be able to read Latin, and to write it
after a manner which should escape the ridicule of the scholars of
Leyden, Geneva, and Paris. Milton occurred to somebody's mind, and the
task was entrusted to him. It is not to be supposed that Cromwell was
ever at the pains to read Salmasius for himself, but still it would not
have done to have it said that the _Defensio Regia_ of so celebrated a
scholar as Salmasius remained unanswered, and so the appointment was
confirmed, and Milton, no new hand at a pamphlet, set to work. In March,
1651, his first _Defence of the English People_ was in print. In this
great pamphlet Milton asserts, as against the doctrine of the divine
right of kings, the undisputed sovereignty of the people; and he
maintains the proposition that, as well by the law of God, as by the law
of nations, and the law of England, a king of England may be brought to
trial and death, the people being discharged from all obligations of
loyalty when a lawful prince becomes a tyrant, or gives himself over to
sloth and voluptuousness. This noble argument, alike worthy of the man
and the occasion, is doubtless over-clouded and disfigured by personal
abuse of Salmasius, whose relations with his wife had surely as little to
do with the head of Charles I. as had poor Mr. Dick's memorial.
Salmasius, it appears, was henpecked, and to allow yourself to be
henpecked was, in Milton's opinion, a high crime and misdemeanour against
humanity, and one which rendered a man infamous, and disqualified him
from taking part in debate.
It has always been reported that Salmasius, who was getting on in years,
and had many things to trouble him besides his own wife, perished in the
effort of writing a reply to Milton, in which he made use of language
quite as bad as any of his opponent's; but it now appears that this is
not so. Indeed, it is generally rash to attribute a man's death to a
pamphlet, or an article, either of his own or anybody else's.
Salmasius, however, died, though from natural causes, and his reply was
not published till after the Restoration, when the question had become,
what it has ever since remained, academical.
Other pens were quicker, and to their productions Milton, in 1654,
replied with his _Second Defence of the English People_, a tract
containing autobiographical details of immense interest and charm. By
this time he was totally blind, though, with a touch of that personal
sensitiveness ever characteristic of him, he is careful to tell Europe,
in the _Second Defence_, that externally his eyes were uninjured, and
shone with an unclouded light.
Milton's _Defences of the English People_ are rendered provoking by his
extraordinary language concerning his opponents. 'Numskull,' 'beast,'
'fool,' 'puppy,' 'knave,' 'ass,' 'mongrel-cur,' are but a few of the
epithets employed. This is doubtless mere matter of pleading, a rule of
the forum where controversies between scholars are conducted; but for
that very reason it makes the pamphlets as provoking to an ordinary
reader as an old bill of complaint in Chancery must have been to an
impatient suitor who wanted his money. The main issues, when cleared of
personalities, are important enough, and are stated by Milton with great
clearness. 'Our king made not us, but we him. Nature has given fathers
to us all, but we ourselves appointed our own king; so that the people is
not for the king, but the king for them.' It was made a matter of great
offence amongst monarchs and monarchical persons that Charles was subject
to the indignity of a trial. With murders and poisonings kings were long
familiar. These were part of the perils of the voyage, for which they
were prepared, but, as Salmasius put it, 'for a king to be arraigned in a
court of judicature, to be put to plead for his life, to have sentence of
death pronounced against him, and that sentence executed,'--oh! horrible
impiety. To this Milton replies: 'Tell me, thou superlative fool,
whether it be not more just, more agreeable to the rules of humanity and
the laws of all human societies, to bring a criminal, be his offence what
it will, before a court of justice, to give him leave to speak for
himself, and if the law condemns him, then to put him to death as he has
deserved, so as he may have time to repent or to recollect himself; than
presently, as soon as ever he is taken, to butcher him without more ado?'
But a king of any spirit would probably answer that he preferred to have
his despotism tempered by assassination than by the mercy of a court of
John Miltons. To which answer Milton would have rejoined, 'Despotism, I
know you not, since we are as free as any people under heaven.'
The weakest part in Milton's case is his having to admit that the
Parliament was overawed by the army, which he says was wiser than the
senators.
Milton's address to his countrymen, with which he concludes the first
defence, is veritably in his grand style:
'He has gloriously delivered you, the first of nations, from the two
greatest mischiefs of this life--tyranny and superstition. He has
endued you with greatness of mind to be First of Mankind, who after
having confined their own king and having had him delivered into their
hands, have not scrupled to condemn him judicially, and pursuant to
that sentence of condemnation to put him to death. After performing
so glorious an action as this, you ought to do nothing that's mean and
little; you ought not to think of, much less do, anything but what is
great and sublime. Which to attain to, this is your only way: as you
have subdued your enemies in the field, so to make it appear that you
of all mankind are best able to subdue Ambition, Avarice, the love of
Riches, and can best avoid the corruptions that prosperity is apt to
introduce. These are the only arguments by which you will be able to
evince that you are not such persons as this fellow represents you,
traitors, robbers, murderers, parricides, madmen, that you did not put
your king to death out of any ambitious design--that it was not an act
of fury or madness, but that it was wholly out of love to your
liberty, your religion, to justice, virtue, and your country, that you
punished a tyrant. But if it should fall out otherwise (which God
forbid), if, as you have been valiant in war, you should grow
debauched in peace, and that you should not have learnt, by so
eminent, so remarkable an example before your eyes, to fear God, and
work righteousness; for my part I shall easily grant and confess (for
I cannot deny it), whatever ill men may speak or think of you, to be
very true. And you will find in time that God's displeasure against
you will be greater than it has been against your adversaries--greater
than His grace and favour have been to yourseves, which you have had
larger experience of than any other nation under heaven.'
This controversy naturally excited greater interest abroad, where Latin
was familiarly known, than ever it did here at home. Though it cost
Milton his sight, or at all events accelerated the hour of his blindness,
he appears greatly to have enjoyed conducting a high dispute in the face
of Europe. 'I am,' so he says, 'spreading abroad amongst the cities, the
kingdoms, and nations, the restored culture of civility and freedom of
life.' We certainly managed in this affair of the execution of Charles
to get rid of that note of insularity which renders our politics
uninviting to the stranger.
Milton, despite his blindness, remained in the public service until after
the death of Cromwell; in fact, he did not formally resign until after
the Restoration. He played no part, having none to play, in the
performances that occurred between those events. He poured forth
pamphlets, but there is no reason to believe that they were read
otherwise than carelessly and by few. His ideas were his own, and never
had a chance of becoming fruitful. There seemed to him to be a ready and
an easy way to establish a free Commonwealth, but on the whole it turned
out that the easiest thing to do was to invite Charles Stuart to reascend
the throne of his ancestors, which he did, and Milton went into hiding.
It is terrible to think how risky the situation was. Milton was
undoubtedly in danger of his life, and _Paradise Lost_ was unwritten. He
was for a time under arrest. But after all he was not one of the
regicides--he was only a scribe who had defended regicide. Neither was
he a man well associated. He was a solitary, and, for the most part, an
unpopular thinker, and blind withal. He was left alone for the rest of
his days. He lived first in Jewin Street, off Aldersgate Street; and
finally in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. He had married, four years
after his first wife's death, a lady who died within a twelvemonth,
though her memory is kept ever fresh, generation after generation, by her
husband's sonnet beginning,
'Methought I saw my late espoused saint.'
Dr. Johnson, it is really worth remembering, called this a poor sonnet.
In 1664 Milton married a third and last wife, a lady he had never seen,
and who survived her husband for no less a period than fifty-three years,
not dying till the year 1727. The poet's household, like his country,
never realized any of his ideals. His third wife took decent care of
him, and there the matter ended. He did not belong to the category of
adored fathers. His daughters did not love him--it seems even probable
they disliked him. Mr. Pattison has pointed out that Milton never was on
terms even with the scholars of his age. Political acquaintances he had
none. He was, in Puritan language, 'unconnected with any place of
worship,' and had therefore no pastoral visits to receive, or sermons to
discuss. The few friends he had were mostly young men who were attracted
to him, and were glad to give him their company; and it is well that he
had this pleasure, for he was ever in his wishes a social man--not
intended to live alone, and blindness must have made society little short
of a necessity for him.
Now it was, in the evening of his days, with a Stuart once more upon the
throne, and Episcopacy finally installed, that Milton, a defeated
thinker, a baffled pamphleteer--for had not Salmasius triumphed?--with
Horton and Italy far, far behind him, set himself to keep the promise of
his glorious youth, and compose a poem the world should not willingly let
die. His manner of life was this. In summer he rose at four, in winter
at five. He went to bed at nine. He began the day with having the
Hebrew Scriptures read to him. Then he contemplated. At seven his man
came to him again, and he read and wrote till an early dinner. For
exercise he either walked in the garden or swung in a machine. Besides
conversation, his only other recreation was music. He played the organ
and the bass viol. He would sometimes sing himself. After recreation of
this kind he would return to his study to be read to till six. After six
his friends were admitted, and would sit with him till eight. At eight
he had his supper--olives or something light. He was very abstemious.
After supper he smoked a pipe of tobacco, drank a glass of water, and
went to bed. He found the night a favourable time for composition, and
what he composed at night he dictated in the day, sitting obliquely in an
elbow chair with his leg thrown over the arm.
In 1664 _Paradise Lost_ was finished, but as in 1665 came the Great
Plague, and after the Great Plague the Great Fire, it was long before the
MS. found its way into the hands of the licenser. It is interesting to
note that the first member of the general public who read _Paradise
Lost_, I hope all through, was a clergyman of the name of Tomkyns, the
deputy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sheldon. The Archbishop was
the State Licenser for religious books, but of course did not do the work
himself. Tomkyns did the work, and was for a good while puzzled what to
make of the old Republican's poem. At last, and after some singularly
futile criticisms, Tomkyns consented to allow the publication of
_Paradise Lost_, which accordingly appeared in 1667, admirably printed,
and at the price of 3_s._ a copy. The author's agreement with the
publisher is in writing--as Mr. Besant tells us all agreements with
publishers should be--and may be seen in the British Museum. Its terms
are clear. The poet was to have 5 down pounds; another 5 pounds when the
first edition, which was not to exceed 1,500 copies, was sold; a third 5
pounds when a second edition was sold; and a fourth and last 5 pounds
when a third edition was sold. He got his first 5 pounds, also his
second, and after his death his widow sold all her rights for 5 pounds.
Consequently 18 pounds, which represents perhaps 50 pounds of our present
currency, was Milton's share of all the money that has been made by the
sale of his great poem. But the praise is still his. The sale was very
considerable. The 'general reader' no doubt preferred the poems of
Cleaveland and Flatman, but Milton found an audience which was fit and
not fewer than ever is the case when noble poetry is first produced.
_Paradise Regained_ was begun upon the completion of _Paradise Lost_, and
appeared with _Samson Agonistes_ in 1671, and here ended Milton's life as
a producing poet. He lived on till Sunday, 8th November, 1674, when the
gout, or what was then called gout, struck in and he died, and was buried
beside his father in the Church of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. He remained
laborious to the last, and imposed upon himself all kinds of drudgery,
compiling dictionaries, histories of Britain and Russia. He must have
worked not so much from love of his subjects as from dread of idleness.
But he had hours of relaxation, of social intercourse, and of music; and
it is pleasant to remember that one pipe of tobacco. It consecrates your
own.
Against Milton's great poem it is sometimes alleged that it is not read;
and yet it must, I think, be admitted that for one person who has read
Spenser's _Fairy Queen_, ten thousand might easily be found who have read
_Paradise Lost_. Its popularity has been widespread. Mr. Mark Pattison
and Mr. John Bright measure some ground between them. No other poem can
be mentioned which has so coloured English thought as Milton's, and yet,
according to the French senator whom Mr. Arnold has introduced to the
plain reader, '_Paradise Lost_ is a false poem, a grotesque poem, a
tiresome poem.' It is not easy for those who have a touch of Milton's
temper, though none of his genius, to listen to this foreign criticism
quite coolly. Milton was very angry with Salmasius for venturing to find
fault with the Long Parliament for having repealed so many laws, and so
far forgot himself as to say, '_Nam nostrae leges_, _Ole_, _quid ad te_?'
But there is nothing municipal about _Paradise Lost_. All the world has
a right to be interested in it and to find fault with it. But the fact
that the people for whom primarily it was written have taken it to their
hearts and have it on their lips ought to have prevented it being called
tiresome by a senator of France.
But what is the matter with our great epic? That nobody ever wished it
longer is no real accusation. Nobody ever did wish an epic longer. The
most popular books in the world are generally accounted too long--_Don
Quixote_, the _Pilgrim's Progress_, _Tom Jones_. But, says Mr. Arnold,
the whole real interest of the poem depends upon our being able to take
it literally; and again, 'Merely as matter of poetry, the story of the
Fall has no special force or effectiveness--its effectiveness for us
comes, and can only come, from our taking it all as the literal narrative
of what positively happened.' These bewildering utterances make one rub
one's eyes. Carlyle comes to our relief: 'All which propositions I for
the present content myself with modestly, but peremptorily and
irrevocably denying.'
Mr. Pattison surely speaks the language of ordinary good sense when he
writes: 'For the world of _Paradise Lost_ is an ideal, conventional world
quite as much as the world of the _Arabian Nights_, or the world of the
chivalrous romance, or that of the pastoral novel.'
Coleridge, in the twenty-second chapter of the _Biographia Literaria_,
points out that the fable and characters of _Paradise Lost_ are not
derived from Scripture, as in the _Messiah_ of Klopstock, but merely
suggested by it--the illusion on which all poetry is founded being thus
never contradicted. The poem proceeds upon a legend, ancient and
fascinating, and to call it a commentary upon a few texts in Genesis is a
marvellous criticism.
The story of the Fall of Man, as recorded in the Semitic legend, is to me
more attractive as a story than the Tale of Troy, and I find the
rebellion of Satan and his dire revenge more to my mind than the circles
of Dante. Eve is, I think, more interesting than 'Heaven-born Helen,
Sparta's queen'--I mean in herself, and as a woman to write poetry about.
The execution of the poem is another matter. So far as style is
concerned its merits have not yet been questioned. As a matter of style
and diction, Milton is as safe as Virgil. The handling of the story is
more vulnerable. The long speeches put in the mouth of the Almighty are
never pleasing, and seldom effective. The weak point about argument is
that it usually admits of being answered. For Milton to essay to justify
the ways of God to man was well and pious enough, but to represent God
Himself as doing so by argumentative process was not so well, and was to
expose the Almighty to possible rebuff. The king is always present in
his own courts, but as judge, not as advocate; hence the royal dignity
never suffers.
It is narrated of an eminent barrister, who became a most polished judge,
Mr. Knight Bruce, that once, when at the very head of his profession, he
was taken in before a Master in Chancery, an office since abolished, and
found himself pitted against a little snip of an attorney's clerk, scarce
higher than the table, who, nothing daunted, and by the aid of
authorities he cited from a bundle of books as big as himself, succeeded
in worsting Knight Bruce, whom he persisted in calling over again and
again 'my learned friend.' Mr. Bruce treated the imp with that courtesy
which is always an opponent's due, but he never went before the Masters
any more.
The Archangel has not escaped the reproach often brought against affable
persons of being a bit of a bore, and though this is to speak
unbecomingly, it must be owned that the reader is glad whenever Adam
plucks up heart of grace and gets in a word edgeways. Mr. Bagehot has
complained of Milton's angels. He says they are silly. But this is, I
think, to intellectualize too much. There are some classes who are
fairly exempted from all obligation to be intelligent, and these airy
messengers are surely amongst that number. The retinue of a prince or of
a bride justify their choice if they are well-looking and group nicely.
But these objections do not touch the main issue. Here is the story of
the loss of Eden, told enchantingly, musically, and in the grand style.
'Who,' says M. Scherer, in a passage quoted by Mr. Arnold, 'can read the
eleventh and twelfth books without yawning?' People, of course, are free
to yawn when they please, provided they put their hands to their mouths;
but in answer to this insulting question one is glad to be able to
remember how Coleridge has singled out Adam's vision of future events
contained in these books as especially deserving of attention. But to
read them is to repel the charge.
There was no need for Mr. Arnold, of all men, to express dissatisfaction
with Milton:
'Words which no ear ever to hear in heaven
Expected; least of all from thee, ingrate,
In place thyself so high above thy peers.'
The first thing for people to be taught is to enjoy great things greatly.
The spots on the sun may be an interesting study, but anyhow the sun is
not all spots. Indeed, sometimes in the early year, when he breaks forth
afresh,
'And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring,
we are apt to forget that he has any spots at all, and, as he shines, are
perhaps reminded of the blind poet sitting in his darkness, in this
prosaic city of ours, swinging his leg over the arm of his chair, and
dictating the lines:
'Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose,
Or flocks or herds, or human face divine.
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me--from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off; and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather, Thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inwards, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate--_there_ plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.'
Coleridge added a note to his beautiful poem, 'The Nightingale,' lest he
should be supposed capable of speaking with levity of a single line in
Milton. The note was hardly necessary, but one loves the spirit that
prompted him to make it. Sainte-Beuve remarks: 'Parler des poetes est
toujours une chose bien delicate, et surtout quand on l'a ete un peu soi-
meme.' But though it does not matter what the little poets do, great
ones should never pass one another without a royal salute.
POPE.
_A Lecture delivered at Birmingham before the Midland Institute_.
The eighteenth century has been well abused by the nineteenth. So far as
I can gather, it is the settled practice of every century to speak evil
of her immediate predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had we gone
groping about in the tenth century, we should yet have been found hinting
that the ninth was darker than she had any need to be.
But our tone of speaking about the last century has lately undergone an
alteration. The fact is, we are drawing near our own latter end. The
Head Master of Harrow lately thrilled an audience by informing them that
he had, that very day, entered an existing _bona fide_ boy upon the
school books, whose education, however, would not begin till the
twentieth century. As a parent was overheard to observe, 'An
illustration of that sort comes home to one.' The older we grow the less
confident we become, the readier to believe that our judgments are
probably wrong, and liable, and even likely, to be reversed; the better
disposed to live and let live. The child, as Mr. Browning has somewhere
elaborated, cries for the moon and beats its nurse, but the old man sips
his gruel with avidity and thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. And so we
have left off beating the eighteenth century. It was not so, however, in
our lusty prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Frederick the Great
and the French Revolution, revenged himself for the trouble it gave him
by loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a cock or a cook he
could not have called it harder names. It was century spendthrift,
fraudulent, bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but one true action,
'namely, to blow its brains out in that grand universal suicide named
French Revolution.'
The leaders of the neo-Catholic movement very properly shuddered at a
century which whitewashed its churches and thought even monthly
communions affected. The ardent Liberal could not but despise a century
which did without the franchise, and, despite the most splendid
materials, had no Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found
little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The
lovers of poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth at their
hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham
pastorals, their dilapidated classicism, and still more with their town-
bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding
groves, and, hanging over all, the moon--not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,'
but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor
century was weighed in a hundred different balances and found wanting. It
lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those things for which it
was thought certain the twentieth century would commend us. But we do
not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom,
are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all
centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal _Defence of the
Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr.
Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of
thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously
inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson
and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the very verge of
completion a splendid and long-laboured edition of the poems and letters
of the great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract and brief
chronicle of his time, a man who had some of its virtues and most of its
vices, one whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander
Pope.
Twenty years ago the chances were that a lecturer on Pope began by asking
the, perhaps not impertinent, question, 'Was he a poet?' And the method
had its merits, for the question once asked, it was easy for the
lecturer, like an incendiary who has just fired a haystack, to steal away
amidst the cracklings of a familiar controversy. It was not unfitting
that so quarrelsome a man as Pope should have been the occasion of so
much quarrelsomeness in others. For long the battle waged as fiercely
over Pope's poetry as erst it did in his own _Homer_ over the body of the
slain Patroclus. Stout men took part in it, notably Lord Byron, whose
letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though composed in his lordship's
most ruffianly vein, still make good reading--of a sort. But the battle
is over, at all events for the present. It is not now our humour to
inquire too curiously about first causes or primal elements. As we are
not prepared with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible it would
be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one whose lines not infrequently
scan and almost always rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of
asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a sting as whether the
author of the _Rape of the Lock_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ was
or was not a poet.
Pope's life has been described as a succession of petty secrets and third-
rate problems, but there seems to be no doubt that it began on May 21st,
1688, in Lombard Street, in the city of London. But this event over,
mystery steps in with the question, What was his father? The occupation
of the elder Pope occasioned nearly as fierce a controversy as the
poetical legitimacy of the younger. Malice has even hinted that old Pope
was a hatter. The poet, of course, knew, but wouldn't tell, being always
more ready, as Johnson observes, to say what his father was not than what
he was. He denied the hatter, and said his father was of the family of
the Earls of Downe; but on this statement being communicated to a
relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a
tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relationship for the
first time! 'Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,' sang one of
Pope's too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age. It
is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton
and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper. He
made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome
times he lived in; but _his_ books have all perished. He was a Roman
Catholic, as also was the poet's mother, who was her husband's second
wife, and came out of Yorkshire. It used to be confidently asserted that
the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the
poet's childhood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he needed
it,--a course of conduct the real merits of which are likely to be hid
from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind,
but invested money in the French funds, his conscience not allowing him
to do so in the English, and he also lent sums on bond to
fellow-Catholics, one of whom used to remit him his half-year's interest
calculated at the rate of 4 pounds per cent. per annum, whereas by the
terms of the bond he was to pay 4.25 pounds per cent. per annum. On
another occasion the same borrower deducted from the interest accrued due
a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. These things annoyed the
old gentleman, as they would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. The
poet was the only child of his mother, and a queerly constituted mortal
he was. Dr. Johnson has recorded the long list of his infirmities with
an almost chilling bluntness; but, alas! so malformed was Pope's
character, so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so elaborately
artificial and detestably petty many of his devices, that it is not
malice, but charity, that bids us remember that, during his whole
maturity, he could neither dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get up
without help, and that on rising he had to be invested with a stiff
canvas bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a fur doublet and
numerous stockings to keep off the cold and fill out his shrunken form.
If ever there was a man whose life was one long provocation, that man was
the author of the _Dunciad_. Pope had no means of self-defence save his
wit. Dr. Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as he
tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no
Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so
behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he
knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off
upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be
intimated to him that if he did the author of _Rasselas_ would thrash him
in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked
Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied,
'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When
he denounced Macpherson for his _Ossian_ frauds, and the irate Celt said
something about personal chastisement, Johnson told him, in writing, that
he was not to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a
ruffian, and by way of a temporary provision for his self-defence
selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating in a
head (once the root) of the size of a large orange. The possession of
great physical strength is no mean assistance to a straightforward life.
The late Professor Fawcett, who, though blind, delighted, arm-in-arm with
a friend, to skate furiously on the fens, never could be brought to share
the fears entertained on his behalf by some of the less stalwart of his
acquaintances. 'Why,' he used to exclaim apologetically, 'even if I do
run up against anybody, it is always the other fellow who gets the worst
of it.' But poor Pope, whom a child could hustle, had no such resources.
We should always remember this; it is brutal to forget it.
Pope's parents found in their only son the vocation of their later life.
He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes
were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons
were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns.
Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another
only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that
there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful
poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected.
Pope's education was, of course, private, for a double reason--his
proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching
faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was
obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster. One shudders at the
thought. It could only have ended in an inquest. As it was, the poor
little cripple was whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. Pope
was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. Every
kind of sport, from spinning cockchafers to coursing hares, he held in
loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the childhood of this
supersensitive poet was shielded from the ruffianism of the nether world
of boys as that brood then existed. Westminster had not long to wait for
Cowper. Pope was taught his rudiments by stray priests and at small
seminaries, where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped the
contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek in order that English boys
might be beaten. Of course he did not become a scholar. Had he done so
he probably would not have translated Homer, though he might have
lectured on how not to do it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that
Pope knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, and was accustomed to
carry about with him a small pocket edition of the bard in the original.
Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable
that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a French
translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire,
who knew Pope, asserts that he could not speak a word of French, and
could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one
occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope's curiosity was
too inordinate--his desire to know everything all at once too strong--to
admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was
consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of
translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early
acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and
the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting,
injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It
was a noble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in
human things.
From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year,
he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of
Windsor Forest, which he made the subject of one of his early poems,
against which it was alleged, with surely some force, that it has nothing
distinctive about it, and might as easily have been written about any
other forest; to which, however, Dr. Johnson characteristically replied
that the _onus_ lay upon the critic of first proving that there is
anything distinctive about Windsor Forest, which personally he doubted,
one green field in the Doctor's opinion being just like another. In 1715
Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, where, in 1717, his father, aged
seventy-five, died. The following year the poet again moved with his
mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 1733 she died, in
her ninety-third year. Ten years later Pope's long disease, his life,
came to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be briefly summarized
thus: his _Pastorals_, 1709; the _Essay on Criticism_, 1711; the first
version of the _Rape of the Lock_, 1712; the second, 1714; the _Iliad_,
begun in 1715, was finished 1720; _Eloisa_, 1717; the _Elegy_ to the
memory of an _Unfortunate Lady_ and the _Dunciad_, 1728; the _Essay on
Man_, 1732; and then the _Epistles_ and _Satires_. Of all Pope's
biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will probably ever remain, the
best. The _Life_, indeed, like the rest of the _Lives of the Poets_, is
a lazy performance. It is not the strenuous work of a young author eager
for fame. When Johnson sat down, at the instance of the London
booksellers, to write the lives of those poets whose works his employers
thought it well to publish, he had long been an author at grass, and had
no mind whatever again to wear the collar. He had great reading and an
amazing memory, and those were at the service of the trade. The facts he
knew, or which were brought to his door, he recorded, but research was
not in his way. Was he not already endowed--with a pension, which, with
his customary indifference to attack, he wished were twice as large, in
order that his enemies might make twice as much fuss over it? None the
less--nay, perhaps all the more--for being written with so little effort,
the _Lives of the Poets_ are delightful reading, and Pope's is one of the
very best of them. {59} None knew the infirmities of ordinary human
nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he
neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man's vanity,
insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is with a placid pen he pricks
the bubble fame, dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, burlesques the sham
philosophy of life; but for generosity, friendliness, affection, he is
always on the watch, whilst talent and achievement never fail to win his
admiration; he being ever eager to repay, as best he could, the debt of
gratitude surely due to those who have taken pains to please, and who
have left behind them in a world, which rarely treated them kindly, works
fitted to stir youth to emulation, or solace the disappointments of age.
And over all man's manifold infirmities, he throws benignantly the mantle
of his stately style. Pope's domestic virtues were not likely to miss
Johnson's approbation. Of them he writes:
'The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and
exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till he was at the
summit of poetical reputation--till he was at ease in his fortune, and
without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or
tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and
whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has,
amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give
than such a son.'
To attempt to state in other words a paragraph like this would be
indelicate, as bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.
Pope has had many editors, but the last edition will probably long hold
the field. It is more than sixty years since the original John Murray,
of Albemarle Street, determined, with the approval of his most
distinguished client Lord Byron, to bring out a library edition of Pope.
The task was first entrusted to Croker, the man whom Lord Macaulay hated
more than he did cold boiled veal, and whose edition, had it seen the
light in the great historian's lifetime, would have been, whatever its
merits, well basted in the _Edinburgh Review_. But Croker seems to have
made no real progress; for though occasionally advertised amongst Mr.
Murray's list of forthcoming works, the first volume did not make its
appearance until 1871, fourteen years after Croker's death. The new
editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman, with many qualifications
for the task,--patient, sensible, not too fluent, but an intense hater of
Pope. 'To be wroth with one you love,' sings Coleridge, 'doth work like
madness in the brain;' and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a man
you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same
effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited.
His lot--if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively
reminiscence of childhood--resembles that of an unfortunate infant being
dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest
operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of the
tub, can easily be made the vehicles of no mean torture. Good cause can
be shown for hating Pope if you are so minded, but it is something of a
shame to hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels the web
of Pope's follies with too rough a hand for my liking; and he was,
besides, far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because
somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints without comment De
Quincey's absurd strictures on the celebrated lines--
'Who but must laugh if such a man there be;
Who would not weep if Atticus were he!'
De Quincey found these lines unintelligible, and pulls them about in all
directions but the right one. The ordinary reader never felt any
difficulty. However, Mr. Elwin kept it up till old age overtook him, and
now Mr. Courthope reigns in his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy to see,
would have told a very different tale had he been in command from the
first, for he keeps sticking in a good word for the crafty little poet
whenever he decently can. And this is how it should be. Mr. Courthope's
_Life_, which will be the concluding volume of Mr. Murray's edition, is
certain to be a fascinating book.
It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is now found peculiarly
repellent. Acts of diseased egotism sometimes excite an indignation
which injurious crimes fail to arouse.
The whole story is too long to be told, and is by this time tolerably
familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began
writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of
clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who
had been struck by his precocity and anticipated his fame, and being
always master of his own time, and passionately fond of composition, he
kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the
celebrated Blair composing his sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly,
and without emotion. A packet of these addressed to a gentleman owning
the once proud name of Cromwell, and who was certainly 'guiltless of his
country's blood'--for all that is now known of him is that he used to go
hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig tied up at the
ends--had been given by that gentleman to a lady with whom he had
relations, who being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed for
money, sold them for ten guineas to Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a
bookseller and publisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse has been
heaped, not only by the authors whom he actually pillaged, but by
succeeding generations of penmen who never took his wages, but none the
less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian. In the year 1727 he was
condemned by His Majesty's judges to stand in the pillory at Charing
Cross for publishing a libel, and thither doubtless, at the appointed
hour, many poor authors flocked, with their pockets full of the bad eggs
that should have made their breakfasts, eager to wreak vengeance upon
their employer; but a printer in the pillory has advantages over others
traders, and Curll had caused handbills to be struck off and distributed
amongst the crowd, stating, with his usual effrontery, that he was put in
the pillory for vindicating the blessed memory of her late Majesty Queen
Anne. This either touched or tickled the mob--it does not matter
which--who protected Curll whilst he stood on high from further outrage,
and when his penance was over bore him on their shoulders to an adjacent
tavern, where (it is alleged) he got right royally drunk. {65} Ten years
earlier those pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got hold of
him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. This was the man who bought
Pope's letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. Pope,
oddly enough, though very angry, does not seem on this occasion to have
moved the Court of Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same
publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending of the volume.
Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when he obtained an injunction against
Curll, restraining the sale of a volume containing some of his letters to
Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid its publication had
never been established, and the view that a letter was a gift to the
receiver had received some countenance. But Pope had so much of the true
temper of a litigant, and so loved a nice point, that he might have been
expected to raise the question on the first opportunity. He, however,
did not do so, and the volume had a considerable sale--a fact not likely
to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought
occurred, 'Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I
should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.' His communications with
his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose
machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would,
and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer's feelings.
The only way to avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friendship
was for all the letters to be returned to the writer, who had arranged
for them to be received by a great nobleman, against whose strong boxes
Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope's friends did not at first
quite catch his drift. 'You need give yourself no trouble,' wrote Swift,
though at a later date than the transaction I am now describing; 'every
one of your letters shall be burnt.' But that was not what Pope wanted.
The first letters he recovered were chiefly those he had written to Mr.
Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of character. Mr. Caryll parted with
his letters with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was at the
extraordinary pains of causing them all to be transcribed; in a word, he
kept copies and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set about as
paltry a job as ever engaged the attention of a man of genius. He
proceeded to manufacture a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified
to his heart's content. He took a bit of one letter and tagged it on to
a bit of another letter, and out of these two foreign parts made up an
imaginary letter, never really written to anybody, which he addressed to
Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he chose. He did this without
much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he
thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a
sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the
originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the
library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with
much solemnity, the nobleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr.
Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good.
The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had
retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him
doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical
Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham
correspondence under the initials 'P.T.' 'P.T.' was made to state that
he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done him some
disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was
as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what 'P.T.' was
offering him. Pope replied by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying
the existence of any such letters. 'P.T.,' however, still kept it up,
and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a
clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as
forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the
advertisement certainly ran, from divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope
affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for
threatening to publish peers' letters without their leave. Curll,
however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of
their Lordship's House that this was a mistake, and that no noblemen's
letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of
which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted,
gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but
the judicious even then opined that he protested somewhat too much. He
promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's edition--a proceeding on his
part which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly
dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope's publisher, but what came
of the litigation I cannot say.
The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it actually existed, after long
remaining in manuscript, has been published, and we have now the real
letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely
disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote
to Caryll as follows:--
'I have been just taking a walk in St. James's Park, full of the
reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving
my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of
satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company
of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above and gaze on
the world at a vast distance, as now we do on those.'
Poor stuff enough, one would have thought. On re-reading this letter
Pope was so pleased with his moonshine that he transferred the whole
passage to an imaginary letter, to which he gave the, of course
fictitious, date of February 10th, 1715, and addressed to Mr. Blount; so
that, as the correspondence now stands, you first get the Caryll letter
of 1713, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine,' and so
on about the starry walks; and then you get the Blount letter of 1715, 'I
have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine;' and go on to find
Pope refilled with his reflections as before. Mr. Elwin does not, you
may be sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his second date,
February 10th, 1715; that being a famous year, when the Thames was frozen
over, and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the streets were impassable
even for strong men, a tender morsel like Pope was hardly likely to be
out after dark. But, of course, when Pope concocted the Blount letter in
1735, and gave it any date he chose, he could not be expected to carry in
his head what sort of night it was on any particular day in February
twenty-two years before. It is ever dangerous to tamper with written
documents which have been out of your sole and exclusive possession even
for a few minutes.
A letter Pope published as having been addressed to Addison is made up of
fragments of three letters actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary
letter to Addison contains the following not inapt passage from a letter
to Caryll:--
'Good God! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his
best part, his soul, and how changing and variable in his frame of
body. What is man altogether but one mighty inconsistency?'
What, indeed! The method subsequently employed by Pope to recover his
letters from Swift, and to get them published in such a way as to create
the impression that Pope himself had no hand in it, cannot be here
narrated. It is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such an
organized hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man's duty to speak
seriously. Here and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a whole it is
neither interesting, elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to
dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in connection with the Swift
correspondence, his counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects and
containing inquiries after the health of friends were not learned works,
and consequently were not within the copyright statute of Queen Anne,
which was entitled, 'An Act for the Encouragement of Learning;' but Lord
Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense, would have none of this
objection, and observed (and these remarks, being necessary for the
judgment, are not mere _obiter dicta_, but conclusive):
'It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind than
those which have appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects, and
which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this
which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part,
that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally
intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very
little worth any person's reading' (2 Atkyns, p. 357).
I am encouraged by this authority to express the unorthodox opinion that
Pope's letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one
notable exception, are very little worth any person's reading.
Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done him some injustice. It has
always been the fashion to admire the letter which, first appearing in
1737, in Pope's correspondence, and there attributed to Gay, describes
the death by lightning of the rustic lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. An
identical description occurring in a letter written by Pope to Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, and subsequently published by Warton from the original,
naturally caused the poet to be accused of pilfering another man's
letter, and sending it off as his own. Mr. Thackeray so puts it in his
world-famous _Lectures_, and few literary anecdotes are better known; but
the better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was Pope's from the
beginning, and attributed by him to Gay because he did not want to have
it appear that on the date in question he was corresponding with Lady
Mary. After all, there is a great deal to be said in favour of honesty.
When we turn from the man to the poet we have at once to change our key.
A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own
mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John
Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid--he polished and pruned.
His first draft never reached the printer--though he sometimes said it
did. This ought, I think, to endear him to us in these hasty days, when
authors high and low think nothing of emptying the slops of their minds
over their readers, without so much as a cry of 'Heads below!'
Pope's translation of the _Iliad_ was his first great undertaking, and he
worked at it like a Trojan. It was published by subscription for two
guineas; that is, the first part was. His friends were set to work to
collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirty-eight. Pope fully entered
into this. He was always alive to the value of his wares, and despised
the foppery of those of his literary friends who would not make money out
of their books, but would do so out of their country. He writes to
Caryll:
'But I am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business to mind
metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much superior to writing, and
there is a sort of little epigram I more especially delight in, after the
manner of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the same words,
namely--"Received" and "A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each
of them is tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, you have
composed several ready for me to set my name to.'
This is certainly much better than that trumpery walk in the moonshine.
Pope had not at this time joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed.
He cleared over 5,000 pounds by the _Iliad_. Over the _Odyssey_ he
slackened, and employed two inferior wits to do half the books; but even
after paying his journeymen he made nearly 4,000 pounds over the
_Odyssey_. Well might he write in later life--
'Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.'
Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, and heads the clan of
cunning fellows who have turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their
odes into acres.
Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary to speak at length.
Mr. Edmund Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day, when an old
school Homer lay on his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and taking
the book up, laid it down again, dryly observing:
'Ah! I see you have _Homer's_ Iliad! Well, I believe it is the best.'
And so it is. Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer's Iliad is the
second best. Whose is the third best is controversy.
Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not work upon the Greek text.
He had Chapman's translation ever at his elbow, also the version of John
Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660--a splendid folio, with illustrations
by the celebrated Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first book
of the _Iliad_, and a fragment of the sixth book. A faithful rendering
of the exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to be looked for. In the
first book Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking back. In
Homer she does not look back, but in Dryden she does; and Pope followed
Dryden, and did not look, at all events, any farther back.
But what really is odd is that in Cowper's translation Briseis looks back
too. Now, Cowper had been to a public school, and consequently knew
Greek, and made it his special boast that, though dull, he was faithful.
It is easy to make fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have seldom
done so. Listen to Professor Conington {76}:--
'It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every intelligent
schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty deeds in
language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting,
carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born
readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the
heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as
that which was entertained by Virgil himself.'
Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable translator and a
distinguished poet, has in effect laid down the first law of rhythmical
translation thus: 'Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a bad one.' Pope
kept this law.
Pope was a great adept at working upon other men's stuff. There is
hardly anything in which men differ more enormously than in the degree in
which they possess this faculty of utilization. Pope's _Essay on
Criticism_, which brought him great fame, and was thought a miracle of
wit, was the result of much hasty reading, undertaken with the intention
of appropriation. Apart from the _limae labor_, which was enormous, and
was never grudged by Pope, there was not an hour's really hard work in
it. Dryden had begun the work of English criticism with his _Essay on
Dramatic Poesy_, and other well-known pieces. He had also translated
Boileau's _Art of Poetry_. Then there were the works of those noble
lords, Lord Sheffield, Lord Roscommon, Lord Granville, and the Duke of
Buckingham. Pope, who loved a brief, read all these books greedily, and
with an amazing quick eye for points. His orderly brain and brilliant
wit re-arranged and rendered resplendent the ill-placed and ill-set
thoughts of other men.
The same thing is noticeable in the most laboured production of his later
life, the celebrated _Essay on Man_. For this he was coached by Lord
Bolingbroke.
Pope was accustomed to talk with much solemnity of his ethical system, of
which the _Essay on Man_ is but a fragment, but we need not trouble
ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson said about _Clarissa Harlowe_ that the
man who read it for the story might hang himself; so we may say about the
poetry of Pope: the man who reads it for its critical or ethical
philosophy may hang himself. We read Pope for pleasure, but a bit of his
philosophy may be given:
'Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find,
Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind?
First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,
Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less?
Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade!
Or ask of yonder argent fields above
Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove!'
To this latter interrogatory presumptuous science, speaking through the
mouth of Voltaire, was ready with an answer. If Jupiter were less than
his satellites they wouldn't go round him. Pope can make no claim to be
a philosopher, and had he been one, Verse would have been a most improper
vehicle to convey his speculations. No one willingly fights in handcuffs
or wrestles to music. For a man with novel truths to promulgate, or
grave moral laws to expound, to postpone doing so until he had hitched
them into rhyme would be to insult his mission. Pope's gifts were his
wit, his swift-working mind, added to all the cunning of the craft and
mystery of composition. He could say things better than other men, and
hence it comes that, be he a great poet or a small one, he is a great
writer, an English classic. What is it that constitutes a great writer?
A bold question, certainly, but whenever anyone asks himself a question
in public you may be certain he has provided himself with an answer. I
find mine in the writings of a distinguished neighbour of yours, himself,
though living, an English classic--Cardinal Newman. He says {79}:
'I do not claim for a great author, as such, any great depth of thought,
or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human
nature, or experience of human life--though these additional gifts he may
have, and the more he has of them the greater he is,--but I ascribe to
him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense, the faculty of
expression. He is master of the two-fold [Greek text], the thought and
the word, distinct but inseparable from each other. . . . He always has
the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is
brief it is because few words suffice; if he is lavish of them, still
each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of
his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say, and his
sayings pass into proverbs amongst his people, and his phrases become
household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated
with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the
marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern
palaces.' Pope satisfies this definition. He has been dead one hundred
and forty-two years; yet, next to Shakespeare, who has been dead two
hundred and seventy years, and who was nearer to Pope than Pope is to us,
he is the most quoted of English poets, the one who has most enriched our
common speech. Horace used, but has long ceased, to be the poet of
Parliament; for Mr. Gladstone, who, more than any other, has kept alive
in Parliament the scholarly traditions of the past, has never been very
Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the occasion seemed to
demand Latin, the long roll of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or
Lucretius. The new generation of honourable members might not
unprofitably turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at all events, the
labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with
downright cheers, a quotation they actually understood.
Pope is seen at his best in his satires and epistles, and in the mock-
heroic. To say that the _Rape of the Lock_ is the best mock-heroic poem
in the language is to say nothing; to say that it is the best in the
world is to say more than my reading warrants; but to say that it and
_Paradise Regained_ are the only two faultless poems, of any length, in
English is to say enough.
The satires are savage--perhaps satires should be; but Pope's satires are
sometimes what satires should never be--shrill. Dr. Johnson is more to
my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more
than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind--a strong,
gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will--nay, as
soured and savage as you like, but spiteful never.
Pope became rather by the backing of his friends than from any other
cause a party man. Party feeling ran high during the first Georges, and
embraced things now outside its ambit--the theatre, for example, and the
opera. You remember how excited politicians got over Addison's _Cato_,
which, as the work of a Whig, and appearing at a critical time, was
thought to be full of a wicked wit and a subtle innuendo future ages have
failed to discover amidst its obvious dulness. Pope, who was not then
connected with either party, wrote the prologue, and in one of the best
letters ever written to nobody tells the story of the first night.
'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party, on the one side the
theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the author
sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause
proceeded more from the hand than the head. This was the case too of
the prologue-writer, who was clapped into a stanch Whig, sore against
his will, at almost every two lines. I believe that you have heard
that, after all the applause of the opposite faction, my Lord
Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one
of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment,
as he expressed it, for his defending the cause of liberty so well
against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced
this way, as it is said, and, therefore, design a present to the said
Cato very speedily. In the meantime they are getting ready as good a
sentence as the former on their side. So, betwixt them, it is
probable that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, may have something to
live upon after he dies.'
Later on music was dragged into the fray. The Court was all for Handel
and the Germans; the Prince of Wales and the Tory nobility affected the
Italian opera. The Whigs went to the Haymarket; the Tories to the Opera
House in Lincoln's Inn Field. In this latter strife Pope took small
part; for, notwithstanding his _Ode on St. Cecilia's Day_, he hated music
with an entire sincerity. He also affected to hate the drama; but some
have thought this accounted for by the fact that, early in his career, he
was damned for the farce of _Three Hours after Marriage_, which, after
the fashion of our own days, he concocted with another, the co-author in
this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the author of _The
Beggars' Opera_. The astonished audience bore it as best they might till
the last act, when the two lovers, having first inserted themselves
respectively into the skins of a mummy and a crocodile, talk at one
another across the boards; then they rose in their rage, and made an end
of that farce. Their yells were doubtless still in Pope's ears when,
years afterwards, he wrote the fine lines--
'While all its throats the gallery extends
And all the thunder of the pit ascends,
Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep
Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.'
Pope, as we have said, became a partisan, and so had his hands full of
ready-made quarrels; but his period was certainly one that demanded a
satirist. Perhaps most periods do; but I am content to repeat, his did.
Satire like Pope's is essentially modish, and requires a restricted
range. Were anyone desirous of satirizing humanity at large I should
advise him to check his noble rage, and, at all events, to begin with his
next-door neighbour, who is almost certain to resent it, which humanity
will not do. This was Pope's method. It was a corrupt set amongst whom
he moved. The gambling in the South Sea stock had been prodigious, and
high and low, married and single, town and country, Protestant and
Catholic, Whig and Tory, took part in it. One _could_ gamble in that
stock. The mania began in February 1720, and by the end of May the price
of 100 pounds stock was up to 340 pounds. In July and August it was 950
pounds, and even touched, 1,000 pounds. In the middle of September it
was down to 590 pounds, and before the end of the year it had dropped to
125 pounds. Pope himself bought stock when it stood so low as 104
pounds, but he had never the courage to sell, and consequently lost,
according to his own account, half his worldly possessions. The Prime
Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, also bought stock, but he sold--as did his
Most Gracious Majesty the King--at 1,000 pounds. The age was also a
scandalous, ill-living age, and Pope, who was a most confirmed gossip and
tale-bearer, picked up all that was going. The details of every lawsuit
of a personal character were at his finger-ends. Whoever starved a
sister, or forged a will, or saved his candle-ends, made a fortune
dishonestly, or lost one disgracefully, or was reported to do so, be he
citizen or courtier, noble duke or plump alderman, Mr. Pope was sure to
know all about it, and as likely as not to put it into his next satire.
Living, as the poet did, within easy distance of London, he always turned
up in a crisis as regularly as a porpoise in a storm, so at least writes
a noble friend. This sort of thing naturally led to quarrels, and the
shocking incompleteness of this lecture stands demonstrated by the fact
that, though I have almost done, I have as yet said nothing abort Pope's
quarrels, which is nearly as bad as writing about St. Paul and leaving
out his journeys. Pope's quarrels are celebrated. His quarrel with Mr.
Addison, culminating in the celebrated description, almost every line of
which is now part and parcel of the English language; his quarrel with
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom he satirized in the most brutal lines
ever written by man of woman; his quarrel with Lord Hervey; his quarrel
with the celebrated Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ought not to be
dismissed so lightly, but what can I do? From the Duchess of Marlborough
Pope is said to have received a sum of money, sometimes stated at 1,000
pounds and sometimes at 3,000 pounds, for consenting to suppress his
description of her as Atossa, which, none the less, he published. I do
not believe the story; money passed between the parties and went to Miss
Martha Blount, but it must have been for some other consideration. Sarah
Jennings was no fool, and loved money far too well to give it away
without security; and how possibly could she hope by a cash payment to
erase from the tablets of a poet's memory lines dictated by his hate, or
bind by the law of honour a man capable of extorting blackmail? Then
Pope quarrelled most terribly with the elder Miss Blount, who, he said,
used to beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the mother because she
persisted in living with the daughter and pretending to be fond of her.
As for his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, are they not
writ large in the four books of the _Dunciad_? Mr. Swinburne is indeed
able to find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species of holy
war, waged, as he says, in language which is at all events strong,
'against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all
blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards.'
I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be wound up in Mr. Swinburne's
bucket to the height of his argument. There are two kinds of quarrels,
the noble and the ignoble. When John Milton, weary and depressed for a
moment in the battle he was fighting in the cause of an enlightened
liberty and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy,
'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and
contention,' we feel the sublimity of the quotation, which would not be
quite the case were the words uttered by an Irishman returning home with
a broken head from Donnybrook Fair. The _Dunciad_ was quite uncalled-
for. Even supposing that we admit that Pope was not the aggressor:
'The noblest answer unto such
Is kindly silence when they brawl.'
But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Pope did not begin
brawling first. Swift, whose misanthropy was genuine, and who begged
Pope whenever he thought of the world to give it another lash on his (the
Dean's) account, saw clearly the danger of Pope's method, and wrote to
him: 'Take care the bad poets do not out-wit you as they have done the
good ones in every age; whom they have provoked to transmit their names
to posterity. Maevius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as
well known as you if his name gets into your verses; and as for the
difference between good and bad fame, it is a mere trifle.' The advice
was far too good to be taken. But what has happened? The petty would-be
Popes, but for the real Pope, would have been entirely forgotten. As it
is, only their names survive in the index to the _Dunciad_; their
indecencies and dastardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen Anne; and if
the historian or the moralist seeks an illustration of the coarseness and
brutality of their style, he finds it only too easily, not in the works
of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their persecutor. Pope had none
of the grave purpose which makes us, at all events, partially sympathize
with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with the poetasters of his day. It is a
mere toss-up whose name you may find in the _Dunciad_--a miserable
scribbler's or a resplendent scholar's; a tasteless critic's or an
immortal wit's. A satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe
amongst the Dunces must be content to abate his pretensions to be
regarded as a social purge.
Men and women, we can well believe, went in terror of little Mr. Pope.
Well they might, for he made small concealment of their names, and even
such as had the luck to escape obvious recognition have been hoisted into
infamy by the untiring labours of subsequent commentators. It may,
perhaps, be still open to doubt who was the Florid Youth referred to in
the Epilogue to the _Satires_:
'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend
Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend?'
Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his
lordship's well-known practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who
knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of
Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, 'Certainly not. The
Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.'
Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and dejection, when
'The heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow,'
the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid
Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning spirit
must be checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that title
cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people
did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his
place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an
invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw
himself--not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping--but on a
much softer place--the consideration of their Lordship's House. Some
persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought
to enlist the poet's services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to
write an epitaph on her deceased son--a feeble lad--to which transaction
the poet is thought to allude in the pleasing lines,
'But random praise--the task can ne'er be done,
Each mother asks it for her booby son.'
Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was willing--so at least it
was reported--to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a
single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to
gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100
pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised
in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were
his wish it was gratified, and the alderman sleeps unsung.
Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. With something of exultation
he sings:--
'Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see
Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me;
Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
O sacred weapon! left for Truth's defence,
Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence!
To all but heaven-directed hands denied,
The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide:
Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal,
To rouse the watchmen of the public weal,
To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall
And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall.
Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains,
That counts your beauties only by your stains,
Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day,
The Muse's wing shall brush you all away.
All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings,
All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings,--
All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press,
Like the last gazette, or the last address.'
The poet himself was very far from being invulnerable, and he writhed at
every sarcasm. There was one of his contemporaries of whom he stood in
mortal dread, but whose name he was too frightened even to mention. It
is easy to guess who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his
caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, whitewashing Burlington
House. Pope deemed this the most grievous insult of his life, but he
said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving more than master of
the poisoned pen.
Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and cheerfully enough. His doctor
was offering him one day the usual encouragements, telling him his breath
was easier, and so on, when a friend entered, to whom the poet exclaimed,
'Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms.' In Spence's _Anecdotes_
there is another story, pitched in a higher key: 'Shortly before his
death, he said to me, "What's that?" pointing into the air with a very
steady regard, and then looked down on me and said, with a smile of great
pleasure, and with the greatest softness, "'Twas a vision."' It may have
been so. At the very last he consented to allow a priest to be sent for,
who attended and administered to the dying man the last sacraments of the
Church. The spirit in which he received them cannot be pronounced
religious. As Cardinal Newman has observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory
Catholic.
Pope died in his enemies' day.
Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all his friends to have been the
best man who ever lived, be the second-best who he might, had predeceased
the poet; and it should be remembered, before we take upon ourselves the
task of judging a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, who was as shrewd
as he was good, had for Pope that warm personal affection we too rarely
notice nowadays between men of mature years. Swift said of Arbuthnot:
'Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it I would burn my
_Travels_.' This may be doubted without damage to the friendly
testimony. The terrible Dean himself, whose azure eyes saw through most
pretences, loved Pope; but Swift was now worse than dead--he was mad,
dying a-top, like the shivered tree he once gazed upon with horror and
gloomy forebodings of impending doom.
Many men must have been glad when they read in their scanty journals that
Mr. Pope lay dead at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed the easier
for the news. Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it is an ugly
weapon. The Muse often gives what the gods do not guide; and though we
may be willing that our faults should be scourged, we naturally like to
be sure that we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our guilt, and not
merely to the fact that we have the proper number of syllables to our
names, or because we occasionally dine with an enemy of our scourger.
But living as we do at a convenient distance from Mr. Pope, we may safely
wish his days had been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his mother,
but to the Psalmist's span, so that he might have witnessed the dawn of a
brighter day. 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With
Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed,--
'Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left in the vault to brag of.'
The feats of arms that have made the first Ministry of the elder Pitt for
ever glorious would have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made him
forget the scandals of the court and the follies of the town. Who knows
but they might have stirred him, for he was not wholly without the true
poet's prophetic gift, which dreams of things to come, to foretell, in
that animated and animating style of his, which has no rival save
glorious John Dryden's, the expansion of England, and how, in far-off
summers he should never see, English maidens, living under the Southern
Cross, should solace their fluttering hearts before laying themselves
down to sleep with some favourite bit from his own _Eloisa to Abelard_?
Whether, in fact, maidens in those latitudes do read _Eloisa_ before
blowing out their candles I cannot say; but Pope, I warrant, would have
thought they would. And they might do worse--and better.
Both as a poet and a man Pope had many negations.
'Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,'
he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the lesser light,
'The eternal moon of love,
Under whose motions life's dull billows move,'
he knew but little.
His _Eloisa_, splendid as is its diction, and vigorous though be the
portrayal of the miserable creature to whom the poem relates, most
certainly lacks 'a gracious somewhat,' whilst no less certainly is it
marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem about love it may be--a
love-poem it is not. Of the 'wild benefit of nature,'--
'The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,'
Pope had small notion, though there is just a whiff of Wordsworth in an
observation he once hazarded, that a tree is a more poetical object than
a prince in his coronation robes. His taste in landscape gardening was
honoured with the approbation of Horace Walpole, and he spent 1,000
pounds upon a grotto, which incurred the ridicule of Johnson. Of that
indescribable something, that 'greatness' which causes Dryden to uplift a
lofty head from the deep pit of his corruption, neither Pope's character
nor his style bears any trace. But still, both as a poet and a man we
must give place, and even high place, to Pope. About the poetry there
can be no question. A man with his wit, and faculty of expression, and
infinite painstaking, is not to be evicted from his ancient homestead in
the affections and memories of his people by a rabble of critics, or even
a _posse_ of poets. As for the man, he was ever eager and interested in
life. Beneath all his faults--for which he had more excuse than a whole
congregation of the righteous need ever hope to muster for their own
shortcomings--we recognise humanity, and we forgive much to humanity,
knowing how much need there is for humanity to forgive us. Indifference,
known by its hard heart and its callous temper, is the only unpardonable
sin. Pope never committed it. He had much to put up with. We have much
to put up with--in him. He has given enormous pleasure to generations of
men, and will continue so to do. We can never give him any pleasure. The
least we can do is to smile pleasantly as we replace him upon his shelf,
and say, as we truthfully may, 'There was a great deal of human nature in
Alexander Pope.'
DR. JOHNSON.
If we should ever take occasion to say of Dr. Johnson's Preface to
Shakspeare what he himself said of a similar production of the poet Rowe,
'that it does not discover much profundity or penetration,' we ought in
common fairness always to add that nobody else has ever written about
Shakspeare one-half so entertainingly. If this statement be questioned,
let the doubter, before reviling me, re-read the preface, and if, after
he has done so, he still demurs, we shall be content to withdraw the
observation, which, indeed, has only been made for the purpose of
introducing a quotation from the Preface itself.
In that document, Dr. Johnson, with his unrivalled stateliness, writes as
follows:--'The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision may now
begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of
established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his
century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit.'
The whirligig of time has brought in his revenges. The Doctor himself
has been dead his century. He died on the 13th of December, 1784. Come,
let us criticise him.
Our qualifications for this high office need not be investigated
curiously.
'Criticism,' writes Johnson in the 60th _Idler_, 'is a study by which men
grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of
invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of
learning those sciences which may by mere labour be obtained, is too
great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as
he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and
idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a
critick.'
To proceed with our task by the method of comparison is to pursue a
course open to grave objection, yet it is forced upon us when we find, as
we lately did, a writer in the _Times_ newspaper, in the course of a not
very discriminating review of Mr. Froude's recent volumes, casually
remarking, as if it admitted of no more doubt than the day's price of
consols, that Carlyle was a greater man than Johnson. It is a good thing
to be positive. To be positive in your opinions and selfish in your
habits is the best recipe, if not for happiness, at all events for that
far more attainable commodity, comfort, with which we are acquainted. 'A
noisy man,' sang poor Cowper, who could not bear anything louder than the
hissing of a tea-urn, 'a noisy man is always in the right,' and a
positive man can seldom be proved wrong. Still, in literature it is very
desirable to preserve a moderate measure of independence, and we,
therefore, make bold to ask whether it is as plain as the 'old hill of
Howth,' that Carlyle was a greater man than Johnson? Is not the precise
contrary the truth? No abuse of Carlyle need be looked for here or from
me. When a man of genius and of letters happens to have any striking
virtues, such as purity, temperance, honesty, the novel task of dwelling
on them has such attraction for us, that we are content to leave the
elucidation of his faults to his personal friends, and to stern,
unbending moralists like Mr. Edmund Yates and the _World_ newspaper.
{101} To love Carlyle is, thanks to Mr. Froude's super-human ideal of
friendship, a task of much heroism, almost meriting a pension; still, it
is quite possible for the candid and truth-loving soul. But a greater
than Johnson he most certainly was not.
There is a story in Lockhart's _Life of Scott_ of an ancient
beggar-woman, who, whilst asking an alms of Sir Walter, described
herself, in a lucky moment for her pocket, as 'an old struggler.' Scott
made a note of the phrase in his diary, and thought it deserved to become
classical. It certainly clings most tenaciously to the memory--so
picturesquely does it body forth the striving attitude of poor battered
humanity. Johnson was 'an old struggler.' {102} So too, in all
conscience, was Carlyle. The struggles of Johnson have long been
historical; those of Carlyle have just become so. We are interested in
both. To be indifferent would be inhuman. Both men had great
endowments, tempestuous natures, hard lots. They were not amongst Dame
Fortune's favourites. They had to fight their way. What they took they
took by storm. But--and here is a difference indeed--Johnson came off
victorious, Carlyle did not.
Boswell's book is an arch of triumph, through which, as we read, we see
his hero passing into eternal fame, to take up his place with those--
'Dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.'
Froude's book is a tomb over which the lovers of Carlyle's genius will
never cease to shed tender but regretful tears.
We doubt whether there is in English literature a more triumphant book
than Boswell's. What materials for tragedy are wanting? Johnson was a
man of strong passions, unbending spirit, violent temper, as poor as a
church-mouse, and as proud as the proudest of church dignitaries; endowed
with the strength of a coal-heaver, the courage of a lion, and the tongue
of Dean Swift, he could knock down booksellers and silence bargees; he
was melancholy almost to madness, 'radically wretched,' indolent,
blinded, diseased. Poverty was long his portion; not that genteel
poverty that is sometimes behindhand with its rent, but that hungry
poverty that does not know where to look for its dinner. Against all
these things had this 'old struggler' to contend; over all these things
did this 'old struggler' prevail. Over even the fear of death, the
giving up of this 'intellectual being,' which had haunted his gloomy
fancy for a lifetime, he seems finally to have prevailed, and to have met
his end as a brave man should.
Carlyle, writing to his wife, says, and truthfully enough, 'The more the
devil worries me the more I wring him by the nose;' but then if the
devil's was the only nose that was wrung in the transaction, why need
Carlyle cry out so loud? After buffeting one's way through the storm-
tossed pages of Froude's _Carlyle_--in which the universe is stretched
upon the rack because food disagrees with man and cocks crow--with what
thankfulness and reverence do we read once again the letter in which
Johnson tells Mrs. Thrale how he has been called to endure, not dyspepsia
or sleeplessness, but paralysis itself:
'On Monday I sat for my picture, and walked a considerable way with
little inconvenience. In the afternoon and evening I felt myself
light and easy, and began to plan schemes of life. Thus I went to
bed, and, in a short time, waked and sat up, as has long been my
custom; when I felt a confusion in my head which lasted, I suppose,
about half a minute; I was alarmed, and prayed God that however much
He might afflict my body He would spare my understanding. . . . Soon
after I perceived that I had suffered a paralytic stroke, and that my
speech was taken from me. I had no pain, and so little dejection, in
this dreadful state, that I wondered at my own apathy, and considered
that perhaps death itself, when it should come, would excite less
horror than seems now to attend it. In order to rouse the vocal
organs I took two drams. . . . I then went to bed, and, strange as it
may seem, I think, slept. When I saw light it was time I should
contrive what I should do. Though God stopped my speech He left me my
hand. I enjoyed a mercy which was not granted to my dear friend
Lawrence, who now perhaps overlooks me, as I am writing, and rejoices
that I have what he wanted. My first note was necessarily to my
servant, who came in talking, and could not immediately comprehend why
he should read what I put into his hands. . . . How this will be
received by you I know not. I hope you will sympathize with me; but
perhaps--
'"My mistress, gracious, mild, and good,
Cries--Is he dumb? 'Tis time he shou'd."
'I suppose you may wish to know how my disease is treated by the
physicians. They put a blister upon my back, and two from my ear to
my throat, one on a side. The blister on the back has done little,
and those on the throat have not risen. I bullied and bounced (it
sticks to our last sand), and compelled the apothecary to make his
salve according to the Edinburgh dispensatory, that it might adhere
better. I have now two on my own prescription. They likewise give me
salt of hartshorn, which I take with no great confidence; but I am
satisfied that what can be done is done for me. I am almost ashamed
of this querulous letter, but now it is written let it go.'
This is indeed tonic and bark for the mind.
If, irritated by a comparison that ought never to have been thrust upon
us, we ask why it is that the reader of Boswell finds it as hard to help
loving Johnson as the reader of Froude finds its hard to avoid disliking
Carlyle, the answer must be that whilst the elder man of letters was full
to overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the younger one was full
to overflowing with something not nearly so nice; and that whilst Johnson
was pre-eminently a reasonable man, reasonable in all his demands and
expectations, Carlyle was the most unreasonable mortal that ever
exhausted the patience of nurse, mother, or wife.
Of Dr. Johnson's affectionate nature nobody has written with nobler
appreciation than Carlyle himself. 'Perhaps it is this Divine feeling of
affection, throughout manifested, that principally attracts us to
Johnson. A true brother of men is he, and filial lover of the earth.'
The day will come when it will be recognised that Carlyle, as a critic,
is to be judged by what he himself corrected for the press, and not by
splenetic entries in diaries, or whimsical extravagances in private
conversation.
Of Johnson's reasonableness nothing need be said, except that it is
patent everywhere. His wife's judgment was a sound one: 'He is the most
sensible man I ever met.'
As for his brutality, of which at one time we used to hear a great deal,
we cannot say of it what Hookham Frere said of Landor's immorality, that
it was:
'Mere imaginary classicality
Wholly devoid of criminal reality.'
It was nothing of the sort. Dialectically the great Doctor was a great
brute. The fact is, he had so accustomed himself to wordy warfare, that
he lost all sense of moral responsibility, and cared as little for men's
feelings as a Napoleon did for their lives. When the battle was over,
the Doctor frequently did what no soldier ever did that I have heard tell
of, apologized to his victims and drank wine or lemonade with them. It
must also be remembered that for the most part his victims sought him
out. They came to be tossed and gored. And after all, are they so much
to be pitied? They have our sympathy, and the Doctor has our applause. I
am not prepared to say, with the simpering fellow with weak legs whom
David Copperfield met at Mr. Waterbrook's dinner-table, that I would
sooner be knocked down by a man with blood than picked up by a man
without any; but, argumentatively speaking, I think it would be better
for a man's reputation to be knocked down by Dr. Johnson than picked up
by Mr. Froude.
Johnson's claim to be the best of our talkers cannot, on our present
materials, be contested. For the most part we have only talk about other
talkers. Johnson's is matter of record. Carlyle no doubt was a great
talker--no man talked against talk or broke silence to praise it more
eloquently than he, but unfortunately none of it is in evidence. All
that is given us is a sort of Commination Service writ large. We soon
weary of it. Man does not live by curses alone.
An unhappier prediction of a boy's future was surely never made than that
of Johnson's by his cousin, Mr. Cornelius Ford, who said to the infant
Samuel, 'You will make your way the more easily in the world as you are
content to dispute no man's claim to conversation excellence, and they
will, therefore, more willingly allow your pretensions as a writer.'
Unfortunate Mr. Ford! The man never breathed whose claim to conversation
excellence Dr. Johnson did not dispute on every possible occasion,
whilst, just because he was admittedly so good a talker, his pretensions
as a writer have been occasionally slighted.
Johnson's personal character has generally been allowed to stand high.
It, however, has not been submitted to recent tests. To be the first to
'smell a fault' is the pride of the modern biographer. Boswell's artless
pages afford useful hints not lightly to be disregarded. During some
portion of Johnson's married life he had lodgings, first at Greenwich,
afterwards at Hampstead. But he did not always go home o' nights;
sometimes preferring to roam the streets with that vulgar ruffian Savage,
who was certainly no fit company for him. He once actually quarrelled
with 'Tetty,' who, despite her ridiculous name, was a very sensible woman
with a very sharp tongue, and for a season, like stars, they dwelt apart.
Of the real merits of this dispute we must resign ourselves to ignorance.
The materials for its discussion do not exist; even Croker could not find
them. Neither was our great moralist as sound as one would have liked to
see him in the matter of the payment of small debts. When he came to
die, he remembered several of these outstanding accounts; but what
assurance have we that he remembered them all? One sum of 10 pounds he
sent across to the honest fellow from whom he had borrowed it, with an
apology for his delay; which, since it had extended over a period of
twenty years, was not superfluous. I wonder whether he ever repaid Mr.
Dilly the guinea he once borrowed of him to give to a very small boy who
had just been apprenticed to a printer. If he did not, it was a great
shame. That he was indebted to Sir Joshua in a small loan is apparent
from the fact that it was one of his three dying requests to that great
man that he should release him from it, as, of course, the most amiable
of painters did. The other two requests, it will be remembered, were to
read his Bible, and not to use his brush on Sundays. The good Sir Joshua
gave the desired promises with a full heart, for these two great men
loved one another; but subsequently discovered the Sabbatical restriction
not a little irksome, and after a while resumed his former practice,
arguing with himself that the Doctor really had no business to extract
any such promise. The point is a nice one, and perhaps ere this the two
friends have met and discussed it in the Elysian fields. If so, I hope
the Doctor, grown 'angelical,' kept his temper with the mild shade of
Reynolds better than on the historical occasion when he discussed with
him the question of 'strong drinks.'
Against Garrick, Johnson undoubtedly cherished a smouldering grudge,
which, however, he never allowed anyone but himself to fan into flame.
His pique was natural. Garrick had been his pupil at Edial, near
Lichfield; they had come up to town together with an easy united fortune
of fourpence--'current coin o' the realm.' Garrick soon had the world at
his feet and garnered golden grain. Johnson became famous too, but
remained poor and dingy. Garrick surrounded himself with what only money
can buy, good pictures and rare books. Johnson cared nothing for
pictures--how should he? he could not see them; but he did care a great
deal about books, and the pernickety little player was chary about
lending his splendidly bound rarities to his quondam preceptor. Our
sympathies in this matter are entirely with Garrick; Johnson was one of
the best men that ever lived, but not to lend books to. Like Lady
Slattern, he had a 'most observant thumb.' But Garrick had no real cause
for complaint. Johnson may have soiled his folios and sneered at his
trade, but in life Johnson loved Garrick, and in death embalmed his
memory in a sentence which can only die with the English language: 'I am
disappointed by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of
nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.'
Will it be believed that puny critics have been found to quarrel with
this colossal compliment on the poor pretext of its falsehood? Garrick's
death, urge these dullards, could not possibly have eclipsed the gaiety
of nations, since he had retired from the stage months previous to his
demise. When will mankind learn that literature is one thing, and sworn
testimony another?
Johnson's relations with Burke were of a more crucial character. The
author of _Rasselas_ and _The English Dictionary_ can never have been
really jealous of Garrick, or in the very least desirous of 'bringing
down the house;' but Burke had done nobler things than that. He had made
politics philosophical, and had at least tried to cleanse them from the
dust and cobwebs of party. Johnson, though he had never sat in the House
of Commons, had yet, in his capacity of an unauthorized reporter, put
into the mouths of honourable members much better speeches than ever came
out of them, and it is no secret that he would have liked to make a
speech or two on his own account. Burke had made many. Harder still to
bear, there were not wanting good judges to say that, in their opinion,
Burke was a better talker than the great Samuel himself. To cap it all,
was not Burke a 'vile Whig'? The ordeal was an unusually trying one.
Johnson emerges triumphant.
Though by no means disposed to hear men made much of, he always listened
to praise of Burke with a boyish delight. He never wearied of it. When
any new proof of Burke's intellectual prowess was brought to his notice,
he would exclaim exultingly, 'Did we not always say he was a great man?'
And yet how admirably did this 'poor scholar' preserve his independence
and equanimity of mind! It was not easy to dazzle the Doctor. What a
satisfactory story that is of Burke showing Johnson over his fine estate
at Beaconsfield, and expatiating in his exuberant style on its
'liberties, privileges, easements, rights, and advantages,' and of the
old Doctor, the tenant of 'a two-pair back' somewhere off Fleet Street,
peering cautiously about, criticising everything, and observing with much
coolness--
'Non equidem invideo, miror magis.'
A friendship like this could be disturbed but by death, and accordingly
we read:
'Mr. Langton one day during Johnson's last illness found Mr. Burke and
four or five more friends sitting with Johnson. Mr. Burke said to
him, "I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be oppressive to you."
"No, sir," said Johnson, "it is not so; and I must be in a wretched
state indeed when your company would not be a delight to me." Mr.
Burke, in a tremulous voice, expressive of being very tenderly
affected, replied: "My dear sir, you have always been too good to me."
Immediately afterwards he went away. This was the last circumstance
in the acquaintance of these two eminent men.'
But this is a well-worn theme, though, like some other well-worn themes,
still profitable for edification or rebuke. A hundred years can make no
difference to a character like Johnson's, or to a biography like
Boswell's. We are not to be robbed of our conviction that this man, at
all events, was both great and good.
Johnson the author is not always fairly treated. Phrases are convenient
things to hand about, and it is as little the custom to inquire into
their truth as it is to read the letterpress on banknotes. We are
content to count banknotes, and to repeat phrases. One of these phrases
is, that whilst everybody reads Boswell, nobody reads Johnson. The facts
are otherwise. Everybody does not read Boswell, and a great many people
do read Johnson. If it be asked, What do the general public know of
Johnson's nine volumes octavo? I reply, Beshrew the general public! What
in the name of the Bodleian has the general public got to do with
literature? The general public subscribes to Mudie, and has its
intellectual, like its lacteal sustenance, sent round to it in carts. On
Saturdays these carts, laden with 'recent works in circulation,' traverse
the Uxbridge Road; on Wednesdays they toil up Highgate Hill, and if we
may believe the reports of travellers, are occasionally seen rushing
through the wilds of Camberwell and bumping over Blackheath. It is not a
question of the general public, but of the lover of letters. Do Mr.
Browning, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. Stephen, Mr. Morley,
know their Johnson? 'To doubt would be disloyalty.' And what these big
men know in their big way hundreds of little men know in their little
way. We have no writer with a more genuine literary flavour about him
than the great Cham of literature. No man of letters loved letters
better than he. He knew literature in all its branches--he had read
books, he had written books, he had sold books, he had bought books, and
he had borrowed them. Sluggish and inert in all other directions, he
pranced through libraries. He loved a catalogue; he delighted in an
index. He was, to employ a happy phrase of Dr. Holmes, at home amongst
books, as a stable-boy is amongst horses. He cared intensely about the
future of literature and the fate of literary men. 'I respect Millar,'
he once exclaimed; 'he has raised the price of literature.' Now Millar
was a Scotchman. Even Horne Tooke was not to stand in the pillory: 'No,
no, the dog has too much literature for that.' The only time the author
of _Rasselas_ met the author of the _Wealth of Nations_ witnessed a
painful scene. The English moralist gave the Scotch one the lie direct,
and the Scotch moralist applied to the English one a phrase which would
have done discredit to the lips of a costermonger; {117} but this
notwithstanding, when Boswell reported that Adam Smith preferred rhyme to
blank verse, Johnson hailed the news as enthusiastically as did Cedric
the Saxon the English origin of the bravest knights in the retinue of the
Norman king. 'Did Adam say that?' he shouted: 'I love him for it. I
could hug him!' Johnson no doubt honestly believed he held George III.
in reverence, but really he did not care a pin's fee for all the crowned
heads of Europe. All his reverence was reserved for 'poor scholars.'
When a small boy in a wherry, on whom had devolved the arduous task of
rowing Johnson and his biographer across the Thames, said he would give
all he had to know about the Argonauts, the Doctor was much pleased, and
gave him, or got Boswell to give him, a double fare. He was ever an
advocate of the spread of knowledge amongst all classes and both sexes.
His devotion to letters has received its fitting reward, the love and
respect of all 'lettered hearts.'
Considering him a little more in detail, we find it plain that he was a
poet of no mean order. His resonant lines, informed as they often are
with the force of their author's character--his strong sense, his
fortitude, his gloom--take possession of the memory, and suffuse
themselves through one's entire system of thought. A poet spouting his
own verses is usually a figure to be avoided; but one could be content to
be a hundred and thirty next birthday to have heard Johnson recite, in
his full sonorous voice, and with his stately elocution, _The Vanity of
Human Wishes_. When he came to the following lines, he usually broke
down, and who can wonder?--
'Proceed, illustrious youth,
And virtue guard thee to the throne of truth!
Yet should thy soul indulge the gen'rous heat
Till captive science yields her last retreat;
Should reason guide thee with her brightest ray,
And pour on misty doubt resistless day;
Should no false kindness lure to loose delight,
Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright;
Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain,
And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain;
Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart,
Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart;
Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee.
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause a while from letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the gaol.
See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust.
If dreams yet flatter, once again attend,
Hear Lydiat's life, and Galileo's end.'
If this be not poetry, may the name perish!
In another style, the stanzas on the young heir's majority have such
great merit as to tempt one to say that the author of _The Jolly
Beggars_, Robert Burns himself, might have written them. Here are four
of them:
'Loosen'd from the minor's tether,
Free to mortgage or to sell;
Wild as wind and light as feather,
Bid the sons of thrift farewell.
'Call the Betseys, Kates, and Jennies,
All the names that banish care,
Lavish of your grandsire's guineas,
Show the spirit of an heir.
'Wealth, my lad, was made to wander,
Let it wander as it will;
Call the jockey, call the pander,
Bid them come and take their fill.
'When the bonny blade carouses,
Pockets full and spirits high--
What are acres? what are houses?
Only dirt--or wet or dry.'
Johnson's prologues, and his lines on the death of Robert Levet, are well
known. Indeed, it is only fair to say that our respected friend, the
General Public, frequently has Johnsonian tags on its tongue:
'Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.'
'The unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain.'
'He left the name at which the world grew pale
To point a moral or adorn a tale.'
'Death, kind nature's signal of retreat.'
'Panting Time toiled after him in vain.'
All these are Johnson's, who, though he is not, like Gray, whom he hated
so, all quotations, is yet oftener in men's mouths than they perhaps wot
of.
Johnson's tragedy, _Irene_, need not detain us. It is unreadable, and to
quote his own sensible words, 'It is useless to criticise what nobody
reads.' It was indeed the expressed opinion of a contemporary called Pot
that _Irene_ was the finest tragedy of modern times; but on this judgment
of Pot's being made known to Johnson, he was only heard to mutter, 'If
Pot says so, Pot lies,' as no doubt he did.
Johnson's Latin Verses have not escaped the condemnation of scholars.
Whose have? The true mode of critical approach to copies of Latin verse
is by the question--How bad are they? Croker took the opinion of the
Marquess Wellesley as to the degree of badness of Johnson's Latin
Exercises. Lord Wellesley, as became so distinguished an Etonian, felt
the solemnity of the occasion, and, after bargaining for secrecy, gave it
as his opinion that they were all very bad, but that some perhaps were
worse than others. To this judgment I have nothing to add.
As a writer of English prose, Johnson has always enjoyed a great, albeit
a somewhat awful reputation. In childish memories he is constrained to
be associated with dust and dictionaries, and those provoking obstacles
to a boy's reading--'long words.' It would be easy to select from
Johnson's writings numerous passages written in that essentially vicious
style to which the name Johnsonese has been cruelly given; but the
searcher could not fail to find many passages guiltless of this charge.
The characteristics of Johnson's prose style are colossal good sense,
though with a strong sceptical bias, good humour, vigorous language, and
movement from point to point, which can only be compared to the measured
tread of a well-drilled company of soldiers. Here is a passage from the
preface to Shakspeare:
'Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him
that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakspeare, and who
desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read
every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of
all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not
stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly
engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald
and of Pope. Let him read on, through brightness and obscurity,
through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension
of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures
of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and read the
commentators.'
Where are we to find better sense, or much better English?
In the pleasant art of chaffing an author Johnson has hardly an equal. De
Quincey too often overdoes it. Macaulay seldom fails to excite sympathy
with his victim. In playfulness Mr. Arnold perhaps surpasses the Doctor,
but then the latter's playfulness is always leonine, whilst Mr. Arnold's
is surely, sometimes, just a trifle kittenish. An example, no doubt a
very good one, of Johnson's humour must be allowed me. Soame Jenyns, in
his book on the _Origin of Evil_, had imagined that, as we have not only
animals for food, but choose some for our diversion, the same privilege
may be allowed to beings above us, 'who may deceive, torment, or destroy
us for the ends only of their own pleasure.'
On this hint writes our merry Doctor as follows:
'I cannot resist the temptation of contemplating this analogy, which I
think he might have carried farther, very much to the advantage of his
argument. He might have shown that these "hunters, whose game is
man," have many sports analogous to our own. As we drown whelps or
kittens, they amuse themselves now and then with sinking a ship, and
stand round the fields of Blenheim, or the walls of Prague, as we
encircle a cockpit. As we shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the
midst of his business or pleasure, and knock him down with an
apoplexy. Some of them perhaps are virtuosi, and delight in the
operations of an asthma, as a human philosopher in the effects of the
air-pump. Many a merry bout have these frolick beings at the
vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see a man tumble with
an epilepsy, and revive and tumble again, and all this he knows not
why. The paroxysms of the gout and stone must undoubtedly make high
mirth, especially if the play be a little diversified with the
blunders and puzzles of the blind and deaf. . . . One sport the merry
malice of these beings has found means of enjoying, to which we have
nothing equal or similar. They now and then catch a mortal, proud of
his parts, and flattered either by the submission of those who court
his kindness, or the notice of those who suffer him to court theirs. A
head thus prepared for the reception of false opinions, and the
projection of vain designs, they easily fill with idle notions till,
in time, they make their plaything an author; their first diversion
commonly begins with an ode or an epistle, then rises perhaps to a
political irony, and is at last brought to its height by a treatise of
philosophy. Then begins the poor animal to entangle himself in
sophisms and to flounder in absurdity.'
The author of the philosophical treatise, _A Free Inquiry into the Nature
and Origin of Evil_, did not at all enjoy this 'merry bout' of the
'frolick' Johnson.
The concluding paragraphs of Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary are
historical prose, and if we are anxious to find passages fit to compare
with them in the melancholy roll of their cadences and in their grave
sincerity and manly emotion, we must, I think, take a flying jump from
Dr. Johnson to Dr. Newman.
For sensible men the world offers no better reading than the _Lives of
the Poets_. They afford an admirable example of the manner of man
Johnson was. The subject was suggested to him by the booksellers, whom
as a body he never abused. Himself the son of a bookseller, he respected
their calling. If they treated him with civility, he responded suitably.
If they were rude to him he knocked them down. These worthies chose
their own poets. Johnson remained indifferent. He knew everybody's
poetry, and was always ready to write anybody's Life. If he knew the
facts of a poet's life--and his knowledge was enormous on such
subjects--he found room for them; if he did not, he supplied their place
with his own shrewd reflections and sombre philosophy of life. It thus
comes about that Johnson is every bit as interesting when he is writing
about Sprat, or Smith, or Fenton, as he is when he has got Milton or Gray
in hand. He is also much less provoking. My own favourite _Life_ is
that of Sir Richard Blackmore.
The poorer the poet the kindlier is the treatment he receives. Johnson
kept all his rough words for Shakspeare, Milton, and Gray.
In this trait, surely an amiable one, he was much resembled by that
eminent man the late Sir George Jessel, whose civility to a barrister was
always in inverse ratio to the barrister's practice; and whose friendly
zeal in helping young and nervous practitioners over the stiles of legal
difficulty was only equalled by the fiery enthusiasm with which he thrust
back the Attorney and Solicitor General and people of that sort.
As a political thinker Johnson has not had justice. He has been lightly
dismissed as the last of the old-world Tories. He was nothing of the
sort. His cast of political thought is shared by thousands to this day.
He represents that vast army of electors whom neither canvasser nor
caucus has ever yet cajoled or bullied into a polling-booth. Newspapers
may scold, platforms may shake; whatever circulars can do may be done,
all that placards can tell may be told; but the fact remains that one-
third of every constituency in the realm shares Dr. Johnson's 'narcotic
indifference,' and stays away.
It is, of course, impossible to reconcile all Johnson's recorded
utterances with any one view of anything. When crossed in conversation
or goaded by folly he was capable of anything. But his dominant tone
about politics was something of this sort. Provided a man lived in a
State which guaranteed him private liberty and secured him public order,
he was very much of a knave or altogether a fool if he troubled himself
further. To go to bed when you wish, to get up when you like, to eat and
drink and read what you choose, to say across your port or your tea
whatever occurs to you at the moment, and to earn your living as best you
may--this is what Dr. Johnson meant by private liberty. Fleet Street
open day and night--this is what he meant by public order. Give a
sensible man these, and take all the rest the world goes round. Tyranny
was a bugbear. Either the tyranny was bearable, or it was not. If it
was bearable, it did not matter; and as soon as it became unbearable the
mob cut off the tyrant's head, and wise men went home to their dinner. To
views of this sort he gave emphatic utterance on the well-known occasion
when he gave Sir Adam Ferguson a bit of his mind. Sir Adam had
innocently enough observed that the Crown had too much power. Thereupon
Johnson:
'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy
of the power of the Crown? The Crown has not power enough. When I
say that all governments are alike, I consider that in no government
power can be abused long; mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign
oppresses his people, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a
remedy in human nature against tyranny that will keep us safe under
every form of government.'
This is not, and never was, the language of Toryism. It is a much more
intellectual 'ism.' It is indifferentism. So, too, in his able
pamphlet, _The False Alarm_, which had reference to Wilkes and the
Middlesex election, though he no doubt attempts to deal with the
constitutional aspect of the question, the real strength of his case is
to be found in passages like the following:
'The grievance which has produced all this tempest of outrage, the
oppression in which all other oppressions are included, the invasion
which has left us no property, the alarm that suffers no patriot to
sleep in quiet, is comprised in a vote of the House of Commons, by
which the freeholders of Middlesex are deprived of a Briton's
birthright--representation in Parliament. They have, indeed, received
the usual writ of election; but that writ, alas! was malicious
mockery; they were insulted with the form, but denied the reality, for
there was one man excepted from their choice. The character of the
man, thus fatally excepted, I have no purpose to delineate. Lampoon
itself would disdain to speak ill of him of whom no man speaks well.
Every lover of liberty stands doubtful of the fate of posterity,
because the chief county in England cannot take its representative
from a gaol.'
Temperament was of course at the bottom of this indifference. Johnson
was of melancholy humour and profoundly sceptical. Cynical he was not--he
loved his fellow-men; his days were full of
'Little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.'
But he was as difficult to rouse to enthusiasm about humanity as is Mr.
Justice Stephen. He pitied the poor devils, but he did not believe in
them. They were neither happy nor wise, and he saw no reason to believe
they would ever become either. 'Leave me alone,' he cried to the sultry
mob, bawling 'Wilkes and Liberty.' 'I at least am not ashamed to own
that I care for neither the one nor the other.'
No man, however, resented more fiercely than Johnson any unnecessary
interference with men who were simply going their own way. The
Highlanders only knew Gaelic, yet political wiseacres were to be found
objecting to their having the Bible in their own tongue. Johnson flew to
arms: he wrote one of his monumental letters; the opposition was quelled,
and the Gael got his Bible. So too the wicked interference with Irish
enterprise, so much in vogue during the last century, infuriated him.
'Sir,' he said to Sir Thomas Robinson, 'you talk the language of a
savage. What, sir! would you prevent any people from feeding themselves,
if by any honest means they can do so?'
Were Johnson to come to life again, total abstainer as he often was, he
would, I expect, denounce the principle involved in 'Local Option.' I am
not at all sure he would not borrow a guinea from a bystander and become
a subscriber to the 'Property Defence League;' and though it is notorious
that he never read any book all through, and never could be got to
believe that anybody else ever did, he would, I think, read a larger
fraction of Mr. Spencer's pamphlet, '_Man_ versus _the State_,' than of
any other 'recent work in circulation.' The state of the Strand, when
two vestries are at work upon it, would, I am sure, drive him into open
rebellion.
As a letter-writer Johnson has great merits. Let no man despise the
epistolary art. It is said to be extinct. I doubt it. Good letters
were always scarce. It does not follow that, because our grandmothers
wrote long letters, they all wrote good ones, or that nobody nowadays
writes good letters because most people write bad ones. Johnson wrote
letters in two styles. One was monumental--more suggestive of the chisel
than the pen. In the other there are traces of the same style, but, like
the old Gothic architecture, it has grown domesticated, and become the
fit vehicle of plain tidings of joy and sorrow--of affection, wit, and
fancy. The letter to Lord Chesterfield is the most celebrated example of
the monumental style. From the letters to Mrs. Thrale many good examples
of the domesticated style might be selected One must suffice:
'Queeney has been a good girl, and wrote me a letter. If Burney said
she would write, she told you a fib. She writes nothing to me. She
can write home fast enough. I have a good mind not to tell her that
Dr. Bernard, to whom I had recommended her novel, speaks of it with
great commendation, and that the copy which she lent me has been read
by Dr. Lawrence three times over. And yet what a gipsy it is. She no
more minds me than if I were a Branghton. Pray, speak to Queeney to
write again. . . . Now you think yourself the first writer in the
world for a letter about nothing. Can you write such a letter as
this? So miscellaneous, with such noble disdain of regularity, like
Shakspeare's works; such graceful negligence of transition, like the
ancient enthusiasts. The pure voice of Nature and of Friendship. Now,
of whom shall I proceed to speak? of whom but Mrs. Montague? Having
mentioned Shakspeare and Nature, does not the name of Montague force
itself upon me? Such were the transitions of the ancients, which now
seem abrupt, because the intermediate idea is lost to modern
understandings.'
But the extract had better end, for there are, (I fear) 'modern
understandings who will not perceive the intermediate idea' between
Shakspeare and Mrs. Montague, and to whom even the name of Branghton will
suggest no meaning.
Johnson's literary fame is, in our judgment, as secure as his character.
Like the stone which he placed over his father's grave at Lichfield, and
which, it is shameful to think, has been removed, it is 'too massy and
strong' to be ever much affected by the wind and weather of our literary
atmosphere. 'Never,' so he wrote to Mrs. Thrale, 'let criticisms operate
upon your face or your mind; it is very rarely that an author is hurt by
his critics. The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out; but it often
dies in the socket. From the author of _Fitzosborne's Letters_ I cannot
think myself in much danger. I met him only once, about thirty years
ago, and in some small dispute soon reduced him to whistle.' Dr. Johnson
is in no danger from anybody. None but Gargantua could blow him out, and
he still burns brightly in his socket.
How long this may continue who can say? It is a far cry to 1985. Science
may by that time have squeezed out literature, and the author of the
_Lives of the Poets_ may be dimly remembered as an odd fellow who lived
in the Dark Ages, and had a very creditable fancy for making chemical
experiments. On the other hand, the Spiritualists may be in possession,
in which case the Cock Lane Ghost will occupy more of public attention
than Boswell's hero, who will, perhaps, be reprobated as the profane
utterer of these idle words: 'Suppose I know a man to be so lame that he
is absolutely incapable to move himself, and I find him in a different
room from that in which I left him, shall I puzzle myself with idle
conjectures, that perhaps his nerves have by some unknown change all at
once become effective? No, sir, it is clear how he got into a different
room--he was _carried_.'
We here part company with Johnson, bidding him a most affectionate
farewell, and leaving him in undisturbed possession of both place and
power. His character will bear investigation, and some of his books
perusal. The latter, indeed, may be submitted to his own test, and there
is no truer one. A book, he wrote, should help us either to enjoy life
or to endure it. His frequently do both.
EDMUND BURKE.
_A Lecture delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society_.
Mr. John Morley, who amongst other things has written two admirable books
about Edmund Burke, is to be found in the Preface to the second of them
apologizing for having introduced into the body of the work extracts from
his former volume--conduct which he seeks to justify by quoting from the
Greek (always a desirable thing to do when in difficulty), to prove that,
though you may say what you have to say well once, you cannot so say it
twice.
A difficulty somewhat of the same kind cannot fail to be felt by everyone
who takes upon himself to write on Burke; for however innocent a man's
own past life may be of any public references to the subject, the very
many good things other men have said about it must seriously interfere
with true liberty of treatment.
Hardly any man, and certainly no politician, has been so bepraised as
Burke, whose very name, suggesting, as it does, splendour of diction, has
tempted those who would praise him to do so in a highly decorated style,
and it would have been easy work to have brought together a sufficient
number of animated passages from the works of well-known writers all
dedicated to the greater glory of Edmund Burke, and then to have tagged
on half-a-dozen specimens of his own resplendent rhetoric, and so to have
come to an apparently natural and long-desired conclusion without
exciting any more than the usual post-lectorial grumble.
This course, however, not recommending itself, some other method had to
be discovered. Happily, it is out of the question within present limits
to give any proper summary of Burke's public life. This great man was
not like some modern politicians, a specialist, confining his activities
within the prospectus of an association; nor was he, like some others, a
thing of shreds and patches, busily employed to-day picking up the facts
with which he will overwhelm his opponents on the morrow; but was one
ever ready to engage with all comers on all subjects from out the stores
of his accumulated knowledge. Even were we to confine ourselves to those
questions only which engaged Burke's most powerful attention, enlisted
his most active sympathy, elicited his most bewitching rhetoric, we
should still find ourselves called upon to grapple with problems as vast
and varied as Economic Reform, the Status of our Colonies, our Empire in
India, our relations with Ireland both in respect to her trade and her
prevalent religion; and then, blurring the picture, as some may
think--certainly rendering it Titanesque and gloomy--we have the
spectacle of Burke in his old age, like another Laocoon, writhing and
wrestling with the French Revolution; and it may serve to give us some
dim notion of how great a man Burke was, of how affluent a mind, of how
potent an imagination, of how resistless an energy, that even when his
sole unassisted name is pitted against the outcome of centuries, and we
say Burke and the French Revolution, we are not overwhelmed by any sense
of obvious absurdity or incongruity.
What I propose to do is merely to consider a little Burke's life prior to
his obtaining a seat in Parliament, and then to refer to any
circumstances which may help us to account for the fact that this truly
extraordinary man, whose intellectual resources beggar the imagination,
and who devoted himself to politics with all the forces of his nature,
never so much as attained to a seat in the Cabinet--a feat one has known
to be accomplished by persons of no proved intellectual agility. Having
done this, I shall then, bearing in mind the aphorism of Lord
Beaconsfield, that it is always better to be impudent than servile, essay
an analysis of the essential elements of Burke's character.
The first great fact to remember is that the Edmund Burke we are all
agreed in regarding as one of the proudest memories of the House of
Commons was an Irishman. When we are in our next fit of political
depression about that island, and are about piously to wish, as the poet
Spenser tells us men were wishing even in his time, that it were not
adjacent, let us do a little national stocktaking, and calculate profits
as well as losses. Burke was not only an Irishman, but a typical one--of
the very kind many Englishmen, and even possibly some Scotchmen, make a
point of disliking. I do not say he was an aboriginal Irishman, but his
ancestors are said to have settled in the county of Galway, under
Strongbow, in King Henry the Second's time, when Ireland was first
conquered and our troubles began. This, at all events, is a better Irish
pedigree than Mr. Parnell's.
Skipping six centuries, we find Burke's father an attorney in
Dublin--which somehow sounds a very Irish thing to be--who in 1725
married a Miss Nagle, and had fifteen children. The marriage of Burke's
parents was of the kind called mixed--a term which doubtless admits of
wide application, but when employed technically signifies that the
religious faith of the spouses was different; one, the father, being a
Protestant, and the lady an adherent to what used to be pleasantly called
the 'old religion.' The severer spirit now dominating Catholic councils
has condemned these marriages, on the score of their bad theology and
their lax morality; but the practical politician, who is not usually much
of a theologian--though Lord Melbourne and Mr. Gladstone are
distinguished exceptions--and whose moral conscience is apt to be robust
(and here I believe there are no exceptions), cannot but regret that so
good an opportunity of lubricating religious differences with the sweet
oil of the domestic affections should be lost to us in these days of
bitterness and dissension. Burke was brought up in the Protestant faith
of his father, and was never in any real danger of deviating from it; but
I cannot doubt that his regard for his Catholic fellow-subjects, his
fierce repudiation of the infamies of the Penal Code--the horrors of
which he did something to mitigate--his respect for antiquity, and his
historic sense, were all quickened by the fact that a tenderly loved and
loving mother belonged through life and in death to an ancient and an
outraged faith.
The great majority of Burke's brothers and sisters, like those of
Laurence Sterne, were 'not made to live;' and out of the fifteen but
three, beside himself, attained maturity. These were his eldest brother
Garrett, on whose death Edmund succeeded to the patrimonial Irish estate,
which he sold; his younger brother, Richard, a highly speculative
gentleman, who always lost; and his sister, Juliana, who married a Mr.
French, and was, as became her mother's daughter, a rigid Roman
Catholic--who, so we read, was accustomed every Christmas Day to invite
to the Hall the maimed, the aged, and distressed of her vicinity to a
plentiful repast, during which she waited upon them as a servant. A
sister like this never did any man any serious harm.
Edmund Burke was born in 1729, in Dublin, and was taught his rudiments in
the country--first by a Mr. O'Halloran, and afterwards by a Mr.
FitzGerald, village pedagogues both, who at all events succeeded in
giving their charge a brogue which death alone could silence. Burke
passed from their hands to an academy at Ballitore, kept by a Quaker,
whence he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin. He was thus not only
Irish born, but Irish bred. His intellectual habit of mind exhibited
itself early. He belonged to the happy family of omnivorous readers,
and, in the language of his latest schoolmaster, he went to college with
a larger miscellaneous stock of reading than was usual with one of his
years; which, being interpreted out of pedagogic into plain English,
means that 'our good Edmund' was an enormous devourer of poetry and
novels, and so he remained to the end of his days. That he always
preferred Fielding to Richardson is satisfactory, since it pairs him off
nicely with Dr. Johnson, whose preference was the other way, and so helps
to keep an interesting question wide open. His passion for the poetry of
Virgil is significant. His early devotion to Edward Young, the grandiose
author of the _Night Thoughts_, is not to be wondered at; though the
inspiration of the youthful Burke, either as poet or critic, may be
questioned, when we find him rapturously scribbling in the margin of his
copy:
'Jove claimed the verse old Homer sung,
But God Himself inspired Dr. Young.'
But a boy's enthusiasm for a favourite poet is a thing to rejoice over.
The years that bring the philosophic mind will not bring--they must
find--enthusiasm.
In 1750 Burke (being then twenty-one) came for the first time to London,
to do what so many of his lively young countrymen are still doing--though
they are beginning to make a grievance even of that--eat his dinners at
the Middle Temple, and so qualify himself for the Bar. Certainly that
student was in luck who found himself in the same mess with Burke; and
yet so stupid are men--so prone to rest with their full weight on the
immaterial and slide over the essential--that had that good fortune been
ours we should probably have been more taken up with Burke's brogue than
with his brains. Burke came to London with a cultivated curiosity, and
in no spirit of desperate determination to make his fortune. That the
study of the law interested him cannot be doubted, for everything
interested him, particularly the stage. Like the sensible Irishman he
was, he lost his heart to Peg Woffington on the first opportunity. He
was fond of roaming about the country during, it is to be hoped, vacation-
time only, and is to be found writing the most cheerful letters to his
friends in Ireland (all of whom are persuaded that he is going some day
to be somebody, though sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so
pleasantly does he take life), from all sorts of out-of-the-way country
places, where he lodges with quaint old landladies who wonder maternally
why he never gets drunk, and generally mistake him for an author until he
pays his bill. When in town he frequented debating societies in Fleet
Street and Covent Garden, and made his first speeches; for which purpose
he would, unlike some debaters, devote studious hours to getting up the
subjects to be discussed. There is good reason to believe that it was in
this manner his attention was first directed to India. He was at all
times a great talker, and, Dr. Johnson's dictum notwithstanding, a good
listener. He was endlessly interested in everything--in the state of the
crops, in the last play, in the details of all trades, the rhythm of all
poems, the plots of all novels, and indeed in the course of every
manufacture. And so for six years he went up and down, to and fro,
gathering information, imparting knowledge, and preparing himself, though
he knew not for what.
The attorney in Dublin grew anxious, and searched for precedents of a son
behaving like his, and rising to eminence. Had his son got the legal
mind?--which, according to a keen observer, chiefly displays itself by
illustrating the obvious, explaining the evident, and expatiating on the
commonplace. Edmund's powers of illustration, explanation, and
expatiation could not indeed be questioned; but then the subjects
selected for the exhibition of those powers were very far indeed from
being obvious, evident, or commonplace, and the attorney's heart grew
heavy within him. The paternal displeasure was signified in the usual
manner--the supplies were cut off. Edmund Burke, however, was no
ordinary prodigal, and his reply to his father's expostulations took the
unexpected and unprecedented shape of a copy of a second and enlarged
edition of his treatise on the _Sublime and Beautiful_, which he had
published in 1756 at the price of three shillings. Burke's father
promptly sent the author a bank-bill for 100 pounds--conduct on his part
which, considering he had sent his son to London and maintained him there
for six years to study law, was, in my judgment, both sublime and
beautiful. In the same year Burke published another pamphlet--a one-and-
sixpenny affair--written ironically in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, and
called _A Vindication of Natural Society_; _or_, _A View of the Miseries
and Evils arising to Mankind from Every Species of Civil Society_. Irony
is a dangerous weapon for a public man to have ever employed, and in
after-life Burke had frequently to explain that he was not serious. On
these two pamphlets' airy pinions Burke floated into the harbour of
literary fame. No less a man than the great David Hume referred to him,
in a letter to the hardly less great Adam Smith, as an Irish gentleman
who had written a 'very pretty treatise on the Sublime.' After these
efforts Burke, as became an established wit, went to Bath to recruit, and
there, fitly enough, fell in love. The lady was Miss Jane Mary Nugent,
the daughter of a celebrated Bath physician, and it is pleasant to be
able to say of the marriage that was shortly solemnized between the young
couple, that it was a happy one, and then to go on our way, leaving
them--where man and wife ought to be left--alone. Oddly enough, Burke's
wife was also the offspring of a 'mixed marriage'--only in her case it
was the father who was the Catholic; consequently both Mr. and Mrs.
Edmund Burke were of the same way of thinking, but each had a parent of
the other way. Although getting married is no part of the curriculum of
a law student, Burke's father seems to have come to the conclusion that
after all it was a greater distinction for an attorney in Dublin to have
a son living amongst the wits in London, and discoursing familiarly on
the 'Sublime and Beautiful,' than one prosecuting some poor countryman,
with a brogue as rich as his own, for stealing a pair of breeches; for we
find him generously allowing the young couple 200 pounds a year, which no
doubt went some way towards maintaining them. Burke, who was now in his
twenty-eighth year, seems to have given up all notion of the law. In
1758 he wrote for Dodsley the first volume of the _Annual Register_, a
melancholy series which continues to this day. For doing this he got 100
pounds. Burke was by this time a well-known figure in London literary
society, and was busy making for himself a huge private reputation. The
Christmas Day of 1758 witnessed a singular scene at the dinner table of
David Garrick. Dr. Johnson, then in full vigour of his mind, and with
the all-dreaded weapons of his dialectics kept burnished by daily use,
was flatly contradicted by a fellow-guest some twenty years his junior,
and, what is more, submitted to it without a murmur. One of the diners,
Arthur Murphy, was so struck by this occurrence, unique in his long
experience of the Doctor, that on returning home he recorded the fact in
his journal, but ventured no explanation of it. It can only be accounted
for--so at least I venture to think--by the combined effect of four
wholly independent circumstances: _First_, the day was Christmas Day, a
day of peace and goodwill, and our beloved Doctor was amongst the
sincerest, though most argumentative, of Christians, and a great observer
of days. _Second_, the house was David Garrick's, and consequently we
may be certain that the dinner had been a superlatively good one; and has
not Boswell placed on record Johnson's opinion of the man who professed
to be indifferent about his dinner? _Third_, the subject under
discussion was India, about which Johnson knew he knew next to nothing.
And _fourth_, the offender was Edmund Burke, whom Johnson loved from the
first day he set eyes upon him to their last sad parting by the waters of
death.
In 1761 that shrewd old gossip, Horace Walpole, met Burke for the first
time at dinner, and remarks of him in a letter to George Montague:
'I dined at Hamilton's yesterday; there were Garrick, and young Mr.
Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that was
much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his
authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and
to be one. He will know better one of these days.'
But great as were Burke's literary powers, and passionate as was his
fondness for letters and for literary society, he never seems to have
felt that the main burden of his life lay in that direction. He looked
to the public service, and this though he always believed that the pen of
a great writer was a more powerful and glorious weapon than any to be
found in the armoury of politics. This faith of his comes out sometimes
queerly enough. For example, when Dr. Robertson in 1777 sent Burke his
cheerful _History of America_, in quarto volumes, Burke, in the most
perfect good faith, closes a long letter of thanks thus:--
'You will smile when I send you a trifling temporary production made
for the occasion of the day, and to perish with it, in return for your
immortal work.'
I have no desire, least of all in Edinburgh, to say anything
disrespectful of Principal Robertson; but still, when we remember that
the temporary production he got in exchange for his _History of America_
was Burke's immortal letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the American
War, we must, I think, be forced to admit that, as so often happens when
a Scotchman and an Irishman do business together, the former got the
better of the bargain.
Burke's first public employment was of a humble character, and might well
have been passed over in a sentence, had it not terminated in a most
delightful quarrel, in which Burke conducted himself like an Irishman of
genius. Some time in 1759 he became acquainted with William Gerard
Hamilton, commonly called 'Single-speech Hamilton,' on account of the
celebrity he gained from his first speech in Parliament, and the steady
way in which his oratorical reputation went on waning ever after. In
1761 this gentleman went over to Ireland as Chief Secretary, and Burke
accompanied him as the Secretary's secretary, or, in the unlicensed
speech of Dublin, as Hamilton's jackal. This arrangement was eminently
satisfactory to Hamilton, who found, as generations of men have found
after him, Burke's brains very useful, and he determined to borrow them
for the period of their joint lives. Animated by this desire, in itself
praiseworthy, he busied himself in procuring for Burke a pension of 300
pounds a year on the Irish establishment, and then the simple 'Single-
speech' thought the transaction closed. He had bought his poor man of
genius, and paid for him on the nail with other people's money. Nothing
remained but for Burke to draw his pension and devote the rest of his
life to maintaining Hamilton's reputation. There is nothing at all
unusual in this, and I have no doubt Burke would have stuck to his
bargain, had not Hamilton conceived the fatal idea that Burke's brains
were _exclusively_ his (Hamilton's). Then the situation became one of
risk and apparent danger.
Burke's imagination began playing round the subject: he saw himself a
slave, blotted out of existence--mere fuel for Hamilton's flame. In a
week he was in a towering passion. Few men can afford to be angry. It
is a run upon their intellectual resources they cannot meet. But Burke's
treasury could well afford the luxury; and his letters to Hamilton make
delightful reading to those who, like myself, dearly love a dispute when
conducted according to the rules of the game by men of great intellectual
wealth. Hamilton demolished and reduced to stony silence, Burke sat down
again and wrote long letters to all his friends, telling them the whole
story from beginning to end. I must be allowed a quotation from one of
these letters, for this really is not so frivolous a matter as I am
afraid I have made it appear--a quotation of which this much may be said,
that nothing more delightfully Burkean is to be found anywhere:--
'MY DEAR MASON,--
'I am hardly able to tell you how much satisfaction I had in your
letter. Your approbation of my conduct makes me believe much the
better of you and myself; and I assure you that that approbation came
to me very seasonably. Such proofs of a warm, sincere, and
disinterested friendship were not wholly unnecessary to my support at
a time when I experienced such bitter effects of the perfidy and
ingratitude of much longer and much closer connections. The way in
which you take up my affairs binds me to you in a manner I cannot
express; for, to tell you the truth, I never can (knowing as I do the
principles upon which I always endeavour to act) submit to any sort of
compromise of my character; and I shall never, therefore, look upon
those who, after hearing the whole story, do not think me _perfectly_
in the right, and do not consider Hamilton an infamous scoundrel, to
be in the smallest degree my friends, or even to be persons for whom I
am bound to have the slightest esteem, as fair and just estimators of
the characters and conduct of men. Situated as I am, and feeling as I
do, I should be just as well pleased that they totally condemned me as
that they should say there were faults on both sides, or that it was a
disputable case, as I hear is (I cannot forbear saying) the affected
language of some persons. . . . You cannot avoid remarking, my dear
Mason, and I hope not without some indignation, the unparalleled
singularity of my situation. Was ever a man before me expected to
enter into formal, direct, and undisguised slavery? Did ever man
before him confess an attempt to decoy a man into such an alleged
contract, not to say anything of the impudence of regularly pleading
it? If such an attempt be wicked and unlawful (and I am sure no one
ever doubted it), I have only to confess his charge, and to admit
myself his dupe, to make him pass, on his own showing, for the most
consummate villain that ever lived. The only difference between us
is, not whether he is not a rogue--for he not only admits but pleads
the facts that demonstrate him to be so; but only whether I was such a
fool as to sell myself absolutely for a consideration which, so far
from being adequate, if any such could be adequate, is not even so
much as certain. Not to value myself as a gentleman, a free man, a
man of education, and one pretending to literature; is there any
situation in life so low, or even so criminal, that can subject a man
to the possibility of such an engagement? Would you dare attempt to
bind your footman to such terms? Will the law suffer a felon sent to
the plantations to bind himself for his life, and to renounce all
possibility either of elevation or quiet? And am I to defend myself
for not doing what no man is suffered to do, and what it would be
criminal in any man to submit to? You will excuse me for this heat.'
I not only excuse Burke for his heat, but love him for letting me warm my
hands at it after a lapse of a hundred and twenty years.
Burke was more fortunate in his second master, for in 1765 being then
thirty-six years of age, he became private secretary to the new Prime
Minister, the Marquis of Rockingham; was by the interest of Lord Verney
returned to Parliament for Wendover, in Bucks; and on January 27th, 1766,
his voice was first heard in the House of Commons.
The Rockingham Ministry deserves well of the historian, and on the whole
has received its deserts. Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Lord
John Cavendish, Mr. Dowdeswell, and the rest of them, were good men and
true, judged by an ordinary standard; and when contrasted with most of
their political competitors, they almost approach the ranks of saints and
angels. However, after a year and twenty days, his Majesty King George
the Third managed to get rid of them, and to keep them at bay for fifteen
years. But their first term of office, though short, lasted long enough
to establish a friendship of no ordinary powers of endurance between the
chief members of the party and the Prime Minister's private secretary,
who was at first, so ran the report, supposed to be a wild Irishman,
whose real name was O'Bourke, and whose brogue seemed to require the
allegation that its owner was a popish emissary. It is satisfactory to
notice how from the very first Burke's intellectual pre-eminence,
character, and aims were clearly admitted and most cheerfully recognised
by his political and social superiors; and in the long correspondence in
which he engaged with most of them there is not a trace to be found, on
one side or the other, of anything approaching to either patronage or
servility. Burke advises them, exhorts them, expostulates with them,
condemns their aristocratic languor, fans their feeble flames, drafts
their motions, dictates their protests, visits their houses, and
generally supplies them with facts, figures, poetry, and romance. To all
this they submit with much humility. The Duke of Richmond once indeed
ventured to hint to Burke, with exceeding delicacy, that he (the Duke)
had a small private estate to attend to as well as public affairs; but
the validity of the excuse was not admitted. The part Burke played for
the next fifteen years with relation to the Rockingham party reminds me
of the functions I have observed performed in lazy families by a soberly
clad and eminently respectable person who pays them domiciliary visits,
and, having admission everywhere, goes about mysteriously from room to
room, winding up all the clocks. This is what Burke did for the
Rockingham party--he kept it going.
But fortunately for us, Burke was not content with private adjuration, or
even public speech. His literary instincts, his dominating desire to
persuade everybody that he, Edmund Burke, was absolutely in the right,
and every one of his opponents hopelessly wrong, made him turn to the
pamphlet as a propaganda, and in his hands
'The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains.'
So accustomed are we to regard Burke's pamphlets as specimens of our
noblest literature, and to see them printed in comfortable volumes, that
we are apt to forget that in their origin they were but the children of
the pavement, the publications of the hour. If, however, you ever visit
any old public library, and grope about a little, you are likely enough
to find a shelf holding some twenty-five or thirty musty, ugly little
books, usually lettered 'Burke,' and on opening any of them you will come
across one of Burke's pamphlets as originally issued, bound up with the
replies and counter-pamphlets it occasioned. I have frequently tried,
but always in vain, to read these replies, which are pretentious
enough--usually the works of deans, members of Parliament, and other
dignitaries of the class Carlyle used compendiously to describe as
'shovel-hatted'--and each of whom was as much entitled to publish
pamphlets as Burke himself. There are some things it is very easy to do,
and to write a pamphlet is one of them; but to write such a pamphlet as
future generations will read with delight is perhaps the most difficult
feat in literature. Milton, Swift, Burke, and Sydney Smith are, I think,
our only great pamphleteers.
I have now rather more than kept my word so far as Burke's
pre-parliamentary life is concerned, and will proceed to mention some of
the circumstances that may serve to account for the fact that, when the
Rockingham party came into power for the second time in 1782, Burke, who
was their life and soul, was only rewarded with a minor office. First,
then, it must be recorded sorrowfully of Burke that he was always
desperately in debt, and in this country no politician under the rank of
a baronet can ever safely be in debt. Burke's finances are, and always
have been, marvels and mysteries; but one thing must be said of them--that
the malignity of his enemies, both Tory enemies and Radical enemies, has
never succeeded in formulating any charge of dishonesty against him that
has not been at once completely pulverized, and shown on the facts to be
impossible. {159} Burke's purchase of the estate at Beaconsfield in
1768, only two years after he entered Parliament, consisting as it did of
a good house and 1,600 acres of land, has puzzled a great many good
men--much more than it ever did Edmund Burke. But how did he get the
money? After an Irish fashion--by not getting it at all. Two-thirds of
the purchase-money remained on mortgage, and the balance he borrowed; or,
as he puts it, 'With all I could collect of my own, and by the aid of my
friends, I have established a root in the country.' That is how Burke
bought Beaconsfield, where he lived till his end came; whither he always
hastened when his sensitive mind was tortured by the thought of how badly
men governed the world; where he entertained all sorts and conditions of
men--Quakers, Brahmins (for whose ancient rites he provided suitable
accommodation in a greenhouse), nobles and abbes flying from
revolutionary France, poets, painters, and peers; no one of whom ever
long remained a stranger to his charm. Burke flung himself into farming
with all the enthusiasm of his nature. His letters to Arthur Young on
the subject of carrots still tremble with emotion. You all know Burke's
_Thoughts on the Present Discontents_. You remember--it is hard to
forget--his speech on Conciliation with America, particularly the
magnificent passage beginning, 'Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the
truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together.' You
have echoed back the words in which, in his letter to the Sheriffs of
Bristol on the hateful American War, he protests that it was not
instantly he could be brought to rejoice when he heard of the slaughter
and captivity of long lists of those whose names had been familiar in his
ears from his infancy, and you would all join with me in subscribing to a
fund which should have for its object the printing and hanging up over
every editor's desk in town and country a subsequent passage from the
same letter:
'A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood. He
would feel some apprehension at being called to a tremendous account
for engaging in so deep a play without any knowledge of the game. It
is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by
insolent passion. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending
to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable
in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under
heaven (which in the depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of
things) that is more truly odious and disgusting than an impotent,
helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, bloated
with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to
fight, and contending for a violent dominion which he can never
exercise. . . .
'If you and I find our talents not of the great and ruling kind, our
conduct at least is conformable to our faculties. No man's life pays
the forfeit of our rashness. No desolate widow weeps tears of blood
over our ignorance. Scrupulous and sober in a well-grounded distrust
of ourselves, we would keep in the port of peace and security; and
perhaps in recommending to others something of the same diffidence, we
should show ourselves more charitable to their welfare than injurious
to their abilities.'
You have laughed over Burke's account of how all Lord Talbot's schemes
for the reform of the king's household were dashed to pieces, because the
turnspit of the king's kitchen was a Member of Parliament. You have
often pondered over that miraculous passage in his speech on the Nabob of
Arcot's debts, describing the devastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali--a
passage which Mr. John Morley says fills the young orator with the same
emotions of enthusiasm, emulation, and despair that (according to the
same authority) invariably torment the artist who first gazes on 'The
Madonna' at Dresden, or the figures of 'Night' and 'Dawn' at Florence.
All these things you know, else are you mighty self-denying of your
pleasures. But it is just possible you may have forgotten the following
extract from one of Burke's farming letters to Arthur Young:
'One of the grand points in controversy (a controversy indeed chiefly
carried on between practice and speculation) is that of _deep
ploughing_. In your last volume you seem, on the whole, rather
against that practice, and have given several reasons for your
judgment which deserve to be very well considered. In order to know
how we ought to plough, we ought to know what end it is we propose to
ourselves in that operation. The first and instrumental end is to
divide the soil; the last and ultimate end, so far as regards the
plants, is to facilitate the pushing of the blade upwards, and the
shooting of the roots in all the inferior directions. There is
further proposed a more ready admission of external influences--the
rain, the sun, the air, charged with all those heterogeneous contents,
some, possibly all, of which are necessary for the nourishment of the
plants. By ploughing deep you answer these ends in a greater mass of
the soil. This would seem in favour of deep ploughing as nothing else
than accomplishing, in a more perfect manner, those very ends for
which you are induced to plough at all. But doubts here arise, only
to be solved by experiment. First, is it quite certain that it is
good for the ear and grain of farinaceous plants that their roots
should spread and descend into the ground to the greatest possible
distances and depths? Is there not some limit in this? We know that
in timber, what makes one part flourish does not equally conduce to
the benefit of all; and that which may be beneficial to the wood, does
not equally contribute to the quantity and goodness of the fruit; and,
_vice versa_, that what increases the fruit largely is often far from
serviceable to the tree. Secondly, is that looseness to great depths,
supposing it is useful to one of the species of plants, equally useful
to all? Thirdly, though the external influences--the rain, the sun,
the air--act undoubtedly a part, and a large part, in vegetation, does
it follow that they are equally salutary in any quantities, at any
depths? Or that, though it may be useful to diffuse one of these
agents as extensively as may be in the earth, that therefore it will
be equally useful to render the earth in the same degree pervious to
all? It is a dangerous way of reasoning in physics, as well as
morals, to conclude, because a given proportion of anything is
advantageous, that the double will be quite as good, or that it will
be good at all. Neither in the one nor the other is it always true
that two and two make four.'
This is magnificent, but it is not farming, and you will easily believe
that Burke's attempts to till the soil were more costly than productive.
Farming, if it is to pay, is a pursuit of small economies; and Burke was
far too Asiatic, tropical, and splendid to have anything to do with small
economies. His expenditure, like his rhetoric, was in the 'grand style.'
He belongs to Charles Lamb's great race, 'the men who borrow.' But
indeed it was not so much that Burke borrowed as that men lent. Right-
feeling men did not wait to be asked. Dr. Brocklesby, that good
physician, whose name breathes like a benediction through the pages of
the biographies of the best men of his time, who soothed Dr. Johnson's
last melancholy hours, and for whose supposed heterodoxy the dying man
displayed so tender a solicitude, wrote to Burke, in the strain of a
timid suitor proposing for the hand of a proud heiress, to know whether
Burke would be so good as to accept 1,000 pounds at once, instead of
waiting for the writer's death. Burke felt no hesitation in obliging so
old a friend. Garrick, who, though fond of money, was as
generous-hearted a fellow as ever brought down a house, lent Burke 1,000
pounds. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who has been reckoned stingy, by his will
left Burke 2,000 pounds, and forgave him another 2,000 pounds which he
had lent him. The Marquis of Rockingham by his will directed all Burke's
bonds held by him to be cancelled. They amounted to 30,000 pounds.
Burke's patrimonial estate was sold by him for 4,000 pounds; and I have
seen it stated that he had received altogether from family sources as
much as 20,000 pounds. And yet he was always poor, and was glad at the
last to accept pensions from the Crown in order that he might not leave
his wife a beggar. This good lady survived her illustrious husband
twelve years, and seemed as his widow to have had some success in paying
his bills, for at her death all remaining demands were found to be
discharged. For receiving this pension Burke was assailed by the Duke of
Bedford, a most pleasing act of ducal fatuity, since it enabled the
pensioner, not bankrupt of his wit, to write a pamphlet, now of course a
cherished classic, and introduce into it a few paragraphs about the House
of Russell and the cognate subject of grant
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