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ESSAYS ABOUT MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS
* * * * * *
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
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IN THE NAME OF THE BODLEIAN, AND OTHER ESSAYS.
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ESSAYS ABOUT MEN, WOMEN, & BOOKS.
RES JUDICATÆ.
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Vol. I. contains: OBITER DICTA. Series I.
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RES JUDICATÆ.
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.
* * * * * *
MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS
by
AUGUSTINE BIRRELL
Author of ‘Obiter Dicta,’ etc.
London: Elliot Stock
62, Paternoster Row, E.C.
1910
CONTENTS
PAGE
DEAN SWIFT 1
LORD BOLINGBROKE 16
STERNE 28
DR. JOHNSON 38
RICHARD CUMBERLAND 47
ALEXANDER KNOX AND THOMAS DE QUINCEY 58
HANNAH MORE 70
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF 81
SIR JOHN VANBRUGH 96
JOHN GAY 109
ROGER NORTH’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 121
BOOKS OLD AND NEW 134
BOOK-BINDING 147
POETS LAUREATE 157
PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES 167
THE BONÂ-FIDE TRAVELLER 176
‘HOURS IN A LIBRARY’ 189
AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS 199
AUTHORS AND CRITICS 210
DEAN SWIFT.
Of writing books about Dean Swift there is no end. I make no complaint,
because I find no fault; I express no wonder, for I feel none. The
subject is, and must always remain, one of strange fascination. We
have no author like the Dean of St. Patrick’s. It has been said of
Wordsworth that good-luck usually attended those who have written about
him. The same thing may be said, with at least equal truth, about
Swift. There are a great many books about him, and with few exceptions
they are all interesting.
A man who has had his tale told both by Johnson and by Scott ought
to be comprehensible. Swift has been, on the whole, lucky with his
more recent biographers. Dr. Craik’s is a judicious life, Mitford’s an
admirable sketch, Forster’s a valuable fragment; Mr. Leslie Stephen
never fails to get to close quarters with his subject. Then there
are anecdotes without end--all bubbling with vitality--letters, and
journals. And yet, when you have read all that is to be read, what are
you to say--what to think?
No fouler pen than Swift’s has soiled our literature. His language
is horrible from first to last. He is full of odious images, of base
and abominable allusions. It would be a labour of Hercules to cleanse
his pages. His love-letters are defaced by his incurable coarseness.
This habit of his is so inveterate that it seems a miracle he kept
his sermons free from his blackguard phrases. It is a question not
of morality, but of decency, whether it is becoming to sit in the
same room with the works of this divine. How the good Sir Walter ever
managed to see him through the press is amazing. In this matter Swift
is inexcusable.
Then his unfeeling temper, his domineering brutality--the tears he
drew, the discomfort he occasioned.
‘Swift, dining at a house, where the part of the tablecloth which
was next him happened to have a small hole, tore it as wide as he
could, and ate his soup through it; his reason for such behaviour
was, as he said, to mortify the lady of the house, and to teach
her to pay a proper attention to housewifery.’
One is glad to know he sometimes met his match. He slept one night at
an inn kept by a widow lady of very respectable family, Mrs. Seneca,
of Drogheda. In the morning he made a violent complaint of the sheets
being dirty.
‘Dirty, indeed!’ exclaimed Mrs. Seneca; ‘you are the last man, doctor,
that should complain of dirty sheets.’
And so, indeed, he was, for he had just published the ‘Lady’s
Dressing-room,’ a very dirty sheet indeed.
Honour to Mrs. Seneca, of Drogheda!
This side of the account needs no vouching; but there is another side.
In 1705 Addison made a present of his book of travels to Dr. Swift, in
the blank leaf of which he wrote the following words:
‘To Dr. Jonathan Swift,
The most agreeable companion,
The truest friend,
And the greatest genius of his age.’
Addison was not lavish of epithets. His geese, Ambrose Philips
excepted, were geese, not swans. His testimony is not to be
shaken--and what a testimony it is!
Then there is Stella’s Swift. As for Stella herself, I have never felt
I knew enough about her to join very heartily in Thackeray’s raptures:
‘Who has not in his mind an image of Stella? Who does not love her?
Fair and tender creature! Pure and affectionate heart.... Gentle lady!
so lovely, so loving, so unhappy.... You are one of the saints of
English story.’ This may be so, but all I feel I know about Stella is,
that Swift loved her. That is certain, at all events.
‘If this be error, and upon we proved,
I never writ, and no man ever loved.’
The verses to Stella are altogether lovely:
‘But, Stella, say what evil tongue
Reports you are no longer young,
That Time sits with his scythe to mow
Where erst sat Cupid with his bow,
That half your locks are turned to gray
I’ll ne’er believe a word they say.
’Tis true, but let it not be known,
My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown.’
And again:
‘Oh! then, whatever Heaven intends,
Take pity on your pitying friends!
Nor let your ills affect your mind
To fancy they can be unkind.
Me, surely me, you ought to spare
Who gladly would your suffering share,
Or give my scrap of life to you
And think it far beneath your due;
You, to whose care so oft I owe
That I’m alive to tell you so.’
We are all strangely woven in one piece, as Shakespeare says. These
verses of Swift irresistibly remind their readers of Cowper’s lines to
Mrs. Unwin.
Swift’s prose is famous all the world over. To say anything about
it is superfluous. David Hume indeed found fault with it. Hume paid
great attention to the English language, and by the time he died had
come to write it with much facility and creditable accuracy; but
Swift is one of the masters of English prose. But how admirable
also is his poetry--easy, yet never slipshod! It lacks one quality
only--imagination. There is not a fine phrase, a magical line to be
found in it, such as may occasionally be found in--let us say--Butler.
Yet, as a whole, Swift is a far more enjoyable poet than Butler.
Swift has unhappily written some abominable verses, which ought never
to have been set up in type; but the ‘Legion Club,’ the verses on
his own death, ‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’ the ‘Rhapsody on Poetry,’ the
tremendous lines on the ‘Day of Judgment,’ and many others, all belong
to enjoyable poetry, and can never lose their freshness, their charm,
their vitality. Amongst the poets of the eighteenth century Swift sits
secure, for he can never go out of fashion.
His hatred of mankind seems genuine; there is nothing _falsetto_
about it. He is always in sober, deadly earnest when he abuses his
fellow-men. What an odd revenge we have taken! His gospel of hatred,
his testament of woe--his ‘Gulliver,’ upon which he expended the
treasures of his wit, and into which he instilled the concentrated
essence of his rage--has become a child’s book, and has been read with
wonder and delight by generations of innocents. After all, it is a
kindly place, this planet, and the best use we have for our cynics is
to let them amuse the junior portion of our population.
I only know one good-humoured anecdote of Swift; it is very slight,
but it is fair to tell it. He dined one day in the company of the Lord
Keeper, his son, and their two ladies, with Mr. Cæsar, Treasurer of
the Navy, at his house in the City. They happened to talk of Brutus,
and Swift said something in his praise, and then, as it were, suddenly
recollecting himself, said:
‘Mr. Cæsar, I beg your pardon.’
One can fancy this occasioning a pleasant ripple of laughter.
There is another story I cannot lay my hands on to verify, but it is to
this effect: Faulkner, Swift’s Dublin publisher, years after the Dean’s
death, was dining with some friends, who rallied him upon his odd way
of eating some dish--I think, asparagus. He confessed Swift had told
him it was the right way; therefore, they laughed the louder, until
Faulkner, growing a little angry, exclaimed:
‘I tell you what it is, gentlemen: if you had ever dined with the Dean,
you would have eaten your asparagus as he bade you.’
Truly a wonderful man--imperious, masterful. Yet his state is not
kingly like Johnson’s--it is tyrannical, sinister, forbidding.
Nobody has brought out more effectively than Mr. Churton Collins[A]
Swift’s almost ceaseless literary activity. To turn over Scott’s
nineteen volumes is to get some notion of it. It is not a pleasant
task, for Swift was an unclean spirit; but he fascinates and makes
the reader long to peep behind the veil, and penetrate the secret of
this horrible, yet loveable, because beloved, man. Mr. Collins is
rather short with this longing on the part of the reader. He does
not believe in any secret; he would have us believe that it is all
as plain as a pikestaff. Swift was never mad, and was never married.
Stella was a well-regulated damsel, who, though she would have liked
very much to have been Mrs. Dean, soon recognised that her friend
was not a marrying man, and was, therefore, well content for the rest
of her days to share his society with Mrs. Dingley. Vanessa was an
ill-regulated damsel, who had not the wit to see that her lover was
not a marrying man, and, in the most vulgar fashion possible, thrust
herself most inconveniently upon his notice, received a snubbing, took
to drink, and died of the spleen. As for the notion that Swift died
mad, Mr. Collins conceives himself to get rid of that by reprinting a
vague and most inconclusive letter of Dr. Bucknill’s. The mystery and
the misery of Swift’s life have not been got rid of by Mr. Collins.
He has left them where he found them--at large. He complains, perhaps
justly, that Scott never took the trouble to form any clear impression
of Swift’s character. Yet we must say that we understand Sir Walter’s
Swift better than we do Mr. Collins’. Whether the Dean married Stella
can never be known. For our part, we think he did not; but to assert
positively that no marriage took place, as Mr. Collins does, is to
carry dogmatism too far.
A good deal of fault has lately been found with Thackeray’s lecture
on Swift. We still think it both delightful and just. The rhapsody
about Stella, as I have already hinted, is not to our mind. Rhapsodies
about real women are usually out of place. Stella was no saint, but a
quick-witted, sharp-tongued hussy, whose fate it was to win the love
and pacify the soul of the greatest Englishman of his time--for to call
Swift an Irishman is sheer folly. But, apart from this not unnatural
slip, what, I wonder, is the matter with Thackeray’s lecture, regarded,
not as a storehouse of facts, or as an estimate of Swift’s writings,
but as a sketch of character? Mr. Collins says quite as harsh things
about Swift as are to be found in Thackeray’s lecture, but he does
not attempt, as Thackeray does, to throw a strong light upon this
strange and moving figure. It is a hard thing to attempt--failure in
such a case is almost inevitable; but I do not think Thackeray did
fail. An ounce of mother-wit is often worth a pound of clergy. Insight
is not always the child of study. But here, again, the matter should
be brought to the test by each reader for himself. Read Thackeray’s
lecture once again.
What can be happier or truer than his comparison of Swift with a
highwayman disappointed of his plunder?
‘The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and
crosier in it, which he intends to have for his share, has
been delayed on the way from St. James’s. The mails wait until
nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has
taken a different road and escaped him. So he fires his pistols
into the air with a curse, and rides away in his own country.’
Thackeray’s criticism is severe, but is it not just? Are we to stand
by and hear our nature libelled, and our purest affections beslimed,
without a word of protest? ‘I think I would rather have had a potato
and a friendly word from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the
Dean for a guinea and a dinner.’ So would I. But no one of the Dean’s
numerous critics was more keenly alive than Thackeray to the majesty
and splendour of Swift’s genius, and to his occasional flashes of
tenderness and love. That amazing person, Lord Jeffrey, in one of his
too numerous contributions to the _Edinburgh Review_, wrote of the
poverty of Swift’s style. Lord Jeffrey was, we hope, a professional
critic, not an amateur.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] ‘Jonathan Swift,’ by J. Churton Collins: Chatto & Windus, 1893.
LORD BOLINGBROKE.
The most accomplished of all our political rascals, Lord Bolingbroke,
who once, if the author of ‘Animated Nature’ is to be believed, ran
naked through the Park, has, in his otherwise pinchbeck ‘Reflections
in Exile,’ one quaint fancy. He suggests that the exile, instead
of mourning the deprivation of the society of his friends, should
take a pencil (the passage is not before me) and make a list of his
acquaintances, and then ask himself which of the number he wants to see
at the moment. It is, no doubt, always wise to be particular. Delusion
as well as fraud loves to lurk in generalities.
As for this Bolingbroke himself, that he was a consummate scoundrel is
now universally admitted; but his mental qualifications, though great,
still excite differences of opinion. Even those who are comforted by
his style and soothed by the rise and fall of his sentences, are fain
to admit that had his classic head been severed from his shoulders a
rogue would have met with his deserts. He has been long since stripped
of all his fine pretences, and, morally speaking, runs as naked through
the pages of history as erst he did (according to Goldsmith) across
Hyde Park.
That Bolingbroke had it in him to have been a great Parliamentarian is
certain. He knew ‘the nature of that assembly,’ and that ‘they grow,
like hounds, fond of the man who shows them sport, and by whose halloo
they are used to be encouraged.’ Like the rascally lawyer in ‘Guy
Mannering,’ Mr. Gilbert Glossin, he could do a good piece of work when
so minded. But he was seldom so minded, and consequently he failed to
come up to the easy standard of his day, and thus brought it about that
by his side Sir Robert Walpole appears in the wings and aspect of an
angel.
St. John has now nothing to wear but his wit and his style; these still
find admirers amongst the judicious.
Mr. Churton Collins, who has written a delightful book about
Bolingbroke, and also about Voltaire in England, has a great notion
of Bolingbroke’s literary merits, and extols them with ardour. He is
not likely to be wrong, but, none the less, it is lawful to surround
yourself with the seven stately quartos which contain Bolingbroke’s
works and letters, and ask yourself whether Mr. Collins is right.
Of all Lord Bolingbroke’s published writings, none is better than his
celebrated Letter to Wyndham, recounting his adventures in France,
whither he betook himself hastily after Queen Anne’s death, and where
he joined the Pretender. Here he is not philosophizing, but telling a
tale, varnished it may be, but sparkling with malice, wit, and humour.
Well may Mr. Collins say, ‘Walpole never produced a more amusing sketch
than the picture of the Pretender’s Court at Paris and of the Privy
Council in the Bois de Boulogne’; but when he proceeds further and
adds, ‘Burke never produced anything nobler than the passage which
commences with the words “The ocean which environs us is an emblem of
our government,”’ I am glad to ejaculate, ‘Indeed he did!’
Here is the passage:
‘The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our government,
and the pilot and the Minister are in similar circumstances. It
seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct course, and
they both arrive at their ports by means which frequently seem
to carry them from it. But, as the work advances, the conduct of
him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing
inconsistencies are reconciled, and, when it is once consummated,
the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so natural, that
every dabbler in politics will be apt to think he could have done
the same. But, on the other hand, a man who proposes no such
object, who substitutes artifice in the place of ability, who,
instead of leading parties and governing accidents, is eternally
agitated backwards and forwards, who begins every day something
new and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose a while on
the world, but, a little sooner or later, the mystery will be
revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched under it but
a thread of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end of which never
extended farther than living from day to day.’
A fine passage, most undoubtedly, and an excellent homily for
Ministers. No one but a dabbler in literature will be apt to think he
could have done the same--but noble with the nobility of Burke? A noble
passage ought to do more for a reader than compel his admiration or win
his assent; it should leave him a little better than it found him, with
a warmer heart and a more elevated mind.
Mr. Collins also refers with delight to a dissertation on Eloquence,
to be found in the ‘Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism,’ and again
expresses a doubt whether it would be possible to select anything
finer from the pages of Burke.
The passage is too long to be quoted; it begins thus:
‘Eloquence has charms to lead mankind, and gives a nobler superiority
than power that every dunce may use, or fraud that every knave may
employ.’
And then follows a good deal about Demosthenes and Cicero, and other
talkers of old time.
This may or may not be a fine passage; but if we allow it to be the
former, we cannot admit that as it flows it fertilizes.
Bolingbroke and Chesterfield are two of the remarkable figures of
the first half of the last century. They are both commonly called
‘great,’ to distinguish them from other holders of the same titles.
Their accomplishments were as endless as their opportunities. They
were the most eloquent men of their time, and both possessed that
insight into things, that distinction of mind, we call genius. They
were ready writers, and have left ‘works’ behind them full of wit and
gracious expressions; but neither the one nor the other has succeeded
in lodging himself in the general memory. The ill-luck which drove
them out of politics has pursued them down the path of letters, though
the frequenters of that pleasant track are wisely indifferent to the
characters of dead authors who still give pleasure.
No shrewder men ever sat upon a throne than the first two Georges,
monarchs of this realm. The second George hated Chesterfield, and
called him ‘a tea-table scoundrel.’ The phrase sticks. There _is_
something petty about this great Lord Chesterfield. The first George,
though wholly illiterate, yet took it upon himself to despise
Bolingbroke, philosopher though he was, and dismissed an elaborate
effusion of his as ‘_bagatelles_.’ Here again the phrase sticks, and
not even the beautiful type and lordly margins of Mallet’s edition of
Lord Bolingbroke’s writings, or the stately periods of that nobleman
himself, can drive the royal verdict out of my ears. There is nothing
real about these writings save their colossal impudence, as when, for
example, in his letter on the State of Parties on the accession of
George I., he solemnly denies that there was any design during the four
last years of Queen Anne’s reign to set aside the Hanover succession,
and, in support of his denial, quotes himself as a man who, if there
had been anything of the sort, must have known of it. By the side of
this man the perfidy of Thurlow or of Wedderburn shows white as wool.
By the aid of his own wits and a cunning wife, and assisted by the
growing hatred of corruption, Bolingbroke, towards the close of his
long life, nearly succeeded in securing some measure of oblivion of
his double-dyed treachery. He managed to inflame the ‘Young England’
of the period with his picture of a ‘Patriot King,’ and if he had only
put into the fire his lucubrations about Christianity he might have
accomplished his exit from a world he had made worse for seventy-five
years with a show of decency. But he did not do so; the ‘cur Mallet’
was soon ready with his volumes, and then the memory of Bolingbroke was
exposed to the obloquy which in this country is (or was) the heritage
of the heterodox.
Horace Walpole, who hated Bolingbroke, as he was in special duty bound
to do, felt this keenly. He was glad Bolingbroke was gibbeted, but
regretted that he should swing on a wrong count in the indictment.
Writing to Sir Horace Mann, Walpole says:
‘You say you have made my Lord Cork give up my Lord Bolingbroke. It is
comical to see how he is given up here since the best of his writings,
his metaphysical divinity, has been published. While he betrayed and
abused every man who trusted him, or who had forgiven him, or to whom
he was obliged, he was a hero, a patriot, a philosopher, and the
greatest genius of the age; the moment his “Craftsmen” against Moses
and St. Paul are published we have discovered he was the worst man and
the worst writer in the world. The grand jury have presented his works,
and as long as there are any parsons he will be ranked with Tindal
and Toland--nay, I don’t know whether my father won’t become a rubric
martyr for having been persecuted by him.’
My sympathies are with Walpole, although, when he pronounces
Bolingbroke’s metaphysical divinity to be the best of his writings, I
cannot agree.
Mr. Collins’ book is a most excellent one, and if anyone reads it
because of my recommendation he will owe me thanks. Mr. Collins values
Pope not merely for his poetry, but for his philosophy also, which he
cadged from Bolingbroke. The ‘Essay on Man’ is certainly better reading
than anything Bolingbroke ever wrote--though what may be the value of
its philosophy is a question which may well stand over till after the
next General Election, or even longer.
STERNE.
No less pious a railway director than Sir Edward Watkin once prefaced
an oration to the shareholders of one of his numerous undertakings by
expressing, in broken accents, the wish that ‘He who tempers the wind
to the shorn lamb might deal gently with illustrious personages in
their present grievous affliction.’ The wish was a kind one, and is
only referred to here as an illustration of the amazing skill of the
author of the phrase quoted in so catching the tone, temper, and style
of King James’s version, that the words occur to the feeling mind as
naturally as any in Holy Writ as the best expression of a sorrowful
emotion.
The phrase itself is, indeed, an excellent example of Sterne’s genius
for pathos. No one knew better than he how to drive words home.
George Herbert, in his selection of ‘Outlandish Proverbs,’ to which
he subsequently gave the alternate title ‘Jacula Prudentum,’ has the
following: ‘To a close-shorn sheep God gives Wind by measure’; but
this proverb in that wording would never have succeeded in making the
chairman of a railway company believe he had read it somewhere in the
Bible. It is the same thought, but the words which convey it stop far
short of the heart. A close-shorn sheep will not brook comparison with
Sterne’s ‘shorn lamb’; whilst the tender, compassionate, beneficent
‘God tempers the wind’ makes the original ‘God gives wind by measure’
wear the harsh aspect of a wholly unnecessary infliction.
Sterne is our best example of the plagiarist whom none dare make
ashamed. He robbed other men’s orchards with both hands; and yet no
more original writer than he ever went to press in these isles.
He has been dogged, of course; but, as was befitting in his case,
it has been done pleasantly. Sterne’s detective was the excellent
Dr. Ferriar, of Manchester, whose ‘Illustrations of Sterne,’ first
published in 1798, were written at an earlier date for the edification
of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Those were
pleasant days, when men of reading were content to give their best
thoughts first to their friends and then--ten years afterwards--to the
public.
Dr. Ferriar’s book is worthy of its subject. The motto on the
title-page is delightfully chosen. It is taken from the opening
paragraph of Lord Shaftesbury’s ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’: ‘Peace
be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who for the
common benefit of his fellow-Authors introduced the ingenious way
of MISCELLANEOUS WRITING.’ Here Dr. Ferriar stopped; but I will add
the next sentence: ‘It must be owned that since this happy method
was established the Harvest of Wit has been more plentiful and the
Labourers more in number than heretofore.’ Wisely, indeed, did Charles
Lamb declare Shaftesbury was not too genteel for him. No pleasanter
penance for random thinking can be devised than spending an afternoon
turning over Shaftesbury’s three volumes and trying to discover how
near he ever did come to saying that ‘Ridicule was the test of truth.’
Dr. Ferriar’s happy motto puts the reader in a sweet temper to start
with, for he sees at once that the author is no pedantic, soured churl,
but a good fellow who is going to make a little sport with a celebrated
wit, and show you how a genius fills his larder.
The first thing that strikes you in reading Dr. Ferriar’s book is the
marvellous skill with which Sterne has created his own atmosphere and
characters, in spite of the fact that some of the most characteristic
remarks of his characters are, in the language of the Old Bailey,
‘stolen goods.’ ‘“There is no cause but one,” replied my Uncle Toby,
“why one man’s nose is longer than another’s, but because God pleases
to have it so.” “That is Grangousier’s solution,” said my father.
“’Tis he,” continued my Uncle Toby, looking up and not regarding
my father’s interruption, “who makes us all, and frames and puts
us together in such forms and proportions and for such ends as is
agreeable to His infinite wisdom.”’
‘“Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh”; and if those are
not the words of my Uncle Toby, it is idle to believe in anything’:
and yet we read in Rabelais--as, indeed, Sterne suggests to us we
should--‘“Pourquoi,” dit Gargantua, “est-ce que frère Jean a si beau
nez?” “Parce,” répondit Grangousier, “qu’ainsi Dieu l’a voulu, lequel
nous fait en telle forme et à telle fin selon son divin arbitre, que
fait un potier ses vaisseaux.”’
To create a character and to be able to put in his mouth borrowed words
which yet shall quiver with his personality is the supreme triumph of
the greatest ‘miscellaneous writer’ who ever lived.
Dr. Ferriar’s book, after all, but establishes this: that the only
author whom Sterne really pillaged is Burton, of the ‘Anatomy of
Melancholy,’ a now well-known writer, but who in Sterne’s time, despite
Dr. Johnson’s partiality, appears to have been neglected. Sir Walter
Scott, an excellent authority on such a point, says, in his ‘Life of
Sterne,’ that Dr. Ferriar’s essay raised the ‘“Anatomy of Melancholy”
to double price in the book market.’
Sir Walter is unusually hard upon Sterne in this matter of the
‘Anatomy.’ But different men, different methods. Sir Walter had his own
way of cribbing. Sterne’s humorous conception of the character of the
elder Shandy required copious illustration from learned sources, and a
whole host of examples and whimsicalities, which it would have passed
the wit of man to invent for himself. He found these things to his
hand in Burton, and, like our first parent, ‘he scrupled not to eat.’
It is not easy to exaggerate the extent of his plunder. The well-known
chapter with its refrain, ‘The Lady Baussiere rode on,’ and the chapter
on the death of Brother Bobby, are almost, though not altogether, pure
Burton.
The general effect of it all is to raise your opinion immensely--of
Burton. As for your opinion of Sterne as a man of conduct, is it
worth while having one? It is a poor business bludgeoning men who
bore the brunt of life a long century ago, and whose sole concern now
with the world is to delight it. Laurence Sterne is not standing for
Parliament. ‘Eliza’ has been dead a dozen decades. Nobody covers his
sins under the cloak of this particular parson. Our sole business is
with ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘The Sentimental Journey’; and if these
books are not matters for congratulation and joy, then the pleasures
of literature are all fudge, and the whole thing a got-up job of ‘The
Trade’ and the hungry crew who go buzzing about it.
Mr. Traill concludes his pleasant ‘Life of Sterne’ in a gloomy vein,
which I cannot for the life of me understand. He says: ‘The fate of
Richardson might seem to be close behind him’ (Sterne). Even the fate
of ‘Clarissa’ is no hard one. She still numbers good intellects, and
bears her century lightly. Diderot, as Mr. Traill reminds us, praised
her outrageously--but Mr. Ruskin is not far behind; and from Diderot
to Ruskin is a good ‘drive.’ But ‘Tristram’ is a very different thing
from ‘Clarissa.’ I should have said, without hesitation, that it was
one of the most popular books in the language. Go where you will
amongst men--old and young, undergraduates at the Universities, readers
in our great cities, old fellows in the country, judges, doctors,
barristers--if they have any tincture of literature about them, they
all know their ‘Shandy’ at least as well as their ‘Pickwick.’ What more
can be expected? ‘True Shandeism,’ its author declares, ‘think what you
will against it, opens the heart and lungs.’ I will be bound to say
Sterne made more people laugh in 1893 than in any previous year; and,
what is more, he will go on doing it--‘“that is, if it please God,”
said my Uncle Toby.’
DR. JOHNSON.
Dr. Johnson’s massive shade cannot complain of this generation. We are
not all of us--or, indeed, many of us--much after his mind, but, for
all that, we worship his memory. Editions of Boswell, old or new, are
on every shelf; but more than this, there is a healthy and commendable
disposition to recognise that great, surpassingly great, as are the
merits of Boswell, still there is such a thing as a detached and
separate Johnson.
It is a good thing every now and again to get rid of Boswell. It is a
little ungrateful, but we have Johnson’s authority for the statement
that we hate our benefactors. After all, even had there been no
Boswell, there would have been a Johnson. I will always stick to it
that Hawkins’s Life is a most readable book. Dr. Birkbeck Hill stands
a good chance of being hated some day. We owed him a debt of gratitude
already. He has lately added to it by publishing at the Clarendon
Press, in two stately volumes, uniform with his great edition of the
Life, the ‘Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.’
For a lazy man who loathed writing Dr. Johnson did not do badly--his
letters to Mrs. Thrale exceed three hundred. It is not known that he
ever wrote a letter to Burke. I cannot quite jump with the humour of
Dr. Hill’s comment on this fact. He observes: ‘So far as we know, he
did not write a single letter to Edward Burke--he wrote more than three
hundred to the wife of a Southwark brewer.’ What has the beer got to
do with it? and why drag in Southwark? Every man knows, without being
told, why Johnson wrote three hundred letters to Mrs. Thrale; and as
for his not writing to Burke, it is notorious that the Doctor never
could be got to write to anybody for information.
Dr. Hill’s two volumes are as delightful books as ever issued from
the press. In them Dr. Johnson is to be seen in every aspect of his
character, whilst a complete study may be made from them of the
enormous versatility of his style. It is hard to say what one admires
most--the ardour of his affection, the piety of his nature, the
friendliness of his disposition, the playfulness of his humour, or his
love of learning and of letters.
What strikes one perhaps most, if you assume a merely critical
attitude, is the glorious ease and aptitude of his quotations from
ancient and modern writings. Of pedantry there is not a trace. Nothing
is forced or dragged in. It is all, apparently, simply inevitable. You
do not exclaim as you read, ‘What a memory the fellow has!’ but merely,
‘How charming it all is!’
It is not difficult to construct from these two volumes alone the
gospel--the familiar, the noble gospel according to Dr. Johnson. It
reads somewhat as follows:
‘Your father begot you and your mother bore you. Honour them
both. Husbands, be faithful to your wives. Wives, forgive your
husbands’ unfaithfulness--once. No grown man who is dependent on
the will, that is the whim, of another can be happy, and life
without enjoyment is intolerable gloom. Therefore, as money means
independence and enjoyment, get money, and having got it keep it.
A spendthrift is a fool.
‘Clear your mind of cant and never debauch your understanding. The
only liberty worth turning out into the street for, is the liberty
to do what you like in your own house and to say what you like in
your own inn. All work is bondage.
‘Never get excited about causes you do not understand, or about
people you have never seen. Keep Corsica out of your head.
‘Life is a struggle with either poverty or ennui; but it is better
to be rich than to be poor. Death is a terrible thing to face. The
man who says he is not afraid of it lies. Yet, as murderers have
met it bravely on the scaffold, when the time comes so perhaps may
I. In the meantime I am horribly afraid. The future is dark. I
should like more evidence of the immortality of the soul.
‘There is great solace in talk. We--you and I--are shipwrecked on
a wave-swept rock. At any moment one or other of us, perhaps both,
may be carried out to sea and lost. For the time being we have a
modicum of light and warmth, of meat and drink. Let us constitute
ourselves a club, stretch out our legs and talk. We have minds,
memories, varied experiences, different opinions. Sir, let us
talk, not as men who mock at fate, not with coarse speech or foul
tongue, but with a manly mixture of the gloom that admits the
inevitable, and the merriment that observes the incongruous. Thus
talking we shall learn to love one another, not sentimentally but
fundamentally.
‘Cultivate your mind, if you happen to have one. Care greatly for
books and literature. Venerate poor scholars, but don’t shout
for “Wilkes and Liberty!” The one is a whoremonger, the other a
flatulency.
‘If any tyrant prevents your goings out and your comings in, fill
your pockets with large stones and kill him as he passes. Then go
home and think no more about it. Never theorize about Revolution.
Finally, pay your score at your club and your final debt to Nature
generously and without casting the account too narrowly. Don’t be
a prig like Sir John Hawkins, or your own enemy like Bozzy, or a
Whig like Burke, or a vile wretch like Rousseau, or pretend to be
an atheist like Hume, but be a good fellow, and don’t insist upon
being remembered more than a month after you are dead.’
This is but the First Lesson. To compose the Second would be a more
difficult task and must not be here attempted. These two volumes of Dr.
Hill are endless in their variety. Johnson was gloomy enough, and many
of his letters may well move you to tears, but his was ever a human
gloom. The year before his death he writes to Mrs. Thrale:
‘The black dog I hope always to resist and in time to drive, though I
am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. The neighbourhood
is impoverished. I had once Richardson and Lawrence in my reach. Mrs.
Allen is dead. My house has lost Levet, a man who took interest in
everything and therefore ready at conversation. Mrs. Williams is so
weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is
solitary--the black dog waits to share it; from breakfast to dinner he
continues barking, except that Dr. Brocklesby for a little keeps him
at a distance. Dinner with a sick woman you may venture to suppose not
much better than solitary. After dinner, what remains but to count the
clock and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect? Night comes at
last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a
day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation
like this? If I were a little richer I would perhaps take some cheerful
female into the house.’
It is a melancholy picture, but the ‘cheerful female’ shoots a ray of
light across the gloom. Everyone should add these two volumes to his
library, and if he has not a library, let him begin making one with
them.
RICHARD CUMBERLAND.
‘He has written comedies at which we have cried and tragedies at which
we have laughed; he has composed indecent novels and religious epics;
he has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by writing his
own life and the private history of his acquaintances.’ Of whom is this
a portrait, and who is the limner? What are the names of the comedies
and the tragedies and the novels thus highly recommended to the curious
reader? These are questions, I flatter myself, wholly devoid of public
interest.
The quotation is from a review in the _Quarterly_, written by
Sir Walter Scott, of old Richard Cumberland’s last novel, ‘John
de Lancaster,’ published in 1809, when its author, ‘the Terence
of England,’ was well-nigh eighty years of age. The passage is a
fierce one, but Scott’s good-nature was proof against everything but
affectation. No man minded a bad novel less than the author of ‘Guy
Mannering’ and ‘The Heart of Midlothian.’ I am certain he could have
pulled Bishop Thirlwall through ‘The Wide, Wide World,’ in the middle
of which, for some unaccountable reason, that great novel-reading
prelate stuck fast. But an author had only to pooh-pooh the public
taste, to sneer at popularity, to discourse solemnly on his function as
a teacher of his age and master of his craft, to make Sir Walter show
his teeth, and his fangs were formidable; and the storm of his wrath
all the more tremendous because bursting from a clear sky.
I will quote a few words from the passage in ‘John de Lancaster’ which
made Scott so angry, and which he pronounced a doleful lamentation over
the ‘praise and pudding which Cumberland alleges have been gobbled up
by his contemporaries’:
‘If in the course of my literary labours I had been less studious
to adhere to nature and simplicity, I am perfectly convinced
I should have stood higher in estimation with the purchasers
of copyright, and probably have been read and patronized by my
contemporaries in the proportion of ten to one.’
It seems a harmless kind of bleat after all, but it was enough to sting
Scott to fury, and make him fall upon the old man in a manner somewhat
too savage and tartarly. Some years later, and after Cumberland was
dead, Sir Walter wrote a sketch of his life in the vein we are better
accustomed to associate with the name of Scott.
Cumberland was a voluminous author, having written two epics,
thirty-eight dramatic pieces, including a revised version of ‘Timon
of Athens’--of which Horace Walpole said, ‘he has caught the manners
and diction of the original so exactly that I think it is full as bad
a play as it was before he corrected it’--a score or two of fugitive
poetical compositions, including some verses to Dr. James, whose
powders played almost as large a part in the lives of men of that time
as Garrick himself, numerous prose publications and three novels,
‘Arundel,’ ‘Henry,’ and ‘John de Lancaster.’ Of the novels, ‘Henry’
is the one to which Sir Walter’s epitaph is least inapplicable--but
Cumberland meant no harm. Were I to be discovered on Primrose Hill, or
any other eminence, reading ‘Henry,’ I should blush no deeper than if
the book had been ‘David Grieve.’
Cumberland has, of course, no place in men’s memories by virtue of
his plays, poems, or novels. Even the catholic Chambers gives no
extracts from Cumberland in the ‘Encyclopedia.’ What keeps him for ever
alive is--first, his place in Goldsmith’s great poem, ‘Retaliation’;
secondly, his memoirs, to which Sir Walter refers so unkindly; and
thirdly, the tradition--the well-supported tradition--that he was the
original ‘Sir Fretful Plagiary.’
On this last point we have the authority of Croker, and there is none
better for anything disagreeable. Croker says he knew Cumberland well
for the last dozen years of his life, and that to his last day he
resembled ‘Sir Fretful.’
The Memoirs were first published in 1806, in a splendidly printed
quarto. The author wanted money badly, and Lackington’s house gave him
£500 for his manuscript. It is an excellent book. I do not quarrel with
Mr. Leslie Stephen’s description of it in the ‘National Dictionary
of Biography’: ‘A very loose book, dateless, inaccurate, but with
interesting accounts of men of note.’ All I mean by excellent is
excellent to read. The Memoirs touch upon many points of interest.
Cumberland was born in the Master’s Lodge, at Trinity, Cambridge, in
the Judge’s Chamber--a room hung round with portraits of ‘hanging
judges’ in their official robes,and where a great Anglican divine and
preacher told me he had once passed a sleepless night, so scared was
he by these sinful emblems of human justice. There is an admirable
account in Cumberland’s Memoirs of his maternal grandfather, the
famous Richard Bentley, and of the Vice-Master, Dr. Walker, fit to
be read along with De Quincey’s spirited essay on the same subject.
Then the scene is shifted to Dublin Castle, where Cumberland was
Ulster-Secretary when Halifax was Lord-Lieutenant, and Single-speech
Hamilton had acquired by purchase (for a brief season) the brains of
Edmund Burke. There is a wonderful sketch of Bubb Dodington and his
villa ‘La Trappe,’ on the banks of the Thames, whither one fair evening
Wedderburn brought Mrs. Haughton in a hackney-coach. You read of Dr.
Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith, of Garrick and Foote, and participate in the
bustle and malice of the play-house. Unluckily, Cumberland was sent to
Spain on a mission, and came home with a grievance. This part is dull,
but in all other respects the Memoirs are good to read.
Cumberland’s father, who became an Irish bishop, is depicted by his son
as a most pleasing character; and no doubt of his having been so would
ever have entered a head always disposed to think well of fathers had
not my copy of the Memoirs been annotated throughout in the nervous,
scholarly hand of a long-previous owner who, for some reason or
another, hated the Cumberlands, the Whig clergy, and the Irish people
with a hatred which found ample room and verge enough in the spacious
margins of the Memoirs.
I print one only of these splenetic notes:
‘I forget whether I have noticed this elsewhere, therefore I
will make sure. In the novel “Arundel,” Cumberland has drawn an
exact picture of himself as secretary to Halifax, and has made
the father of the hero a clergyman and a keen electioneerer--the
vilest character in fiction. The laborious exculpation of Parson
Cumberland in these Memoirs does not wipe out the scandal of such
a picture. In spite of all he says, we cannot help suspecting that
Parson Cumberland and Joseph Arundel had a likeness. N.B.--In
both novels (_i.e._, “Arundel” and “Henry”) the portrait of a
modern clergyman is too true. But it is strange that Cumberland,
thus hankering after the Church, should have volunteered two such
characters as Joseph Arundel and Claypole.’
‘Whispering tongues can poison truth,’ and a persistent annotator who
writes a legible hand is not easily shaken off.
Perhaps the best story in the book is the one about which there is most
doubt. I refer to the well-known and often-quoted account of the first
night of ‘She Stoops to Conquer,’ and of the famous band of _claqueurs_
who early took their places, determined to see the play through.
Cumberland tells the story with the irresistible verve of falsehood--of
the early dinner at the ‘Shakespeare Tavern,’ ‘where Samuel Johnson
took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life and soul
of the corps’; of the guests assembled, including Fitzherbert (who
had committed suicide at an earlier date), of the adjournment to the
theatre with Adam Drummond of amiable memory, who ‘was gifted by Nature
with the most sonorous and at the same time the most contagious laugh
that ever echoed from the human lungs. The neighing of the horse of the
son of Hystaspes was a whisper to it; the whole thunder of the theatre
could not drown it’; and on the story rolls.
It has to be given up. There was a dinner, but it is doubtful whether
Cumberland was at it; and as for the proceedings at the theatre, others
who were there have pronounced Cumberland’s story a bit of _blague_.
According to the newspapers of the day, Cumberland, instead of sitting
by Drummond’s side and telling him when to laugh in his peculiar
manner, was visibly chagrined by the success of the piece, and as
wretched as any man could well be. But Adam Drummond must have been a
reality. His laugh still echoes in one’s ears.
ALEXANDER KNOX AND THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
Amongst the many _bizarre_ things that attended the events which led
up to the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, was the
circumstance that Lord Castlereagh’s private secretary during the
period should have been that Mr. Alexander Knox whose Remains in four
rather doleful volumes were once cherished by a certain school of
theologians.
Mr. Knox was a man of great piety, some learning, and of the utmost
simplicity of life and manners. He was one of the first of our moderns
to be enamoured of primitive Christian times, and to seek to avoid the
claims of Rome upon the allegiance of all Catholic-minded souls by
hooking himself on to a period prior to the full development of those
claims.
It is no doubt true that, for a long time past, Nonconformists of
different kinds have boldly asserted that they were primitive; but it
must be owned that they have never taken the least pains to ascertain
the actual facts of the case. Now, Mr. Knox took great pains to be
primitive. Whether he succeeded it is not for me to say, but at all
events he went so far on his way to success as to leave off being
modern both in his ways of thought and in his judgments of men and
books.
English Nonconformity has produced many hundreds of volumes of
biography and Remains, but there is never a primitive one amongst them.
To anyone who may wish to know what it is to be primitive, there is
but one answer: Read the Remains of Alexander Knox. Be careful to get
the right Knox. There was one Vicesimus, who is much better known than
Alexander, and at least as readable, but (and this is the whole point)
not at all primitive.
And it was this primitive, apostolic Mr. Knox who is held by some to
be the real parent of the Tractarian movement, whose correspondence is
almost entirely religious, and whose whole character stands revealed
in his Remains as that of a man without guile, and as obstinate as a
mule, who was chosen at a most critical moment of political history to
share the guilty secrets of Mr. Pitt and Lord Castlereagh. It seems
preposterous.
The one and only thing in Knox’s Remains of the least interest to
people who are not primitive, is a letter addressed to him by Lord
Castlereagh, written after the completion of the Union, and suggesting
to him the propriety of his undertaking the task of writing the history
of that event--the reason being his thorough knowledge of all the
circumstances of the case.
Such a letter bids us pause.