[12] 'That tamer of housemaids': [Greek: Hektoros ippodamoio]--of
Hector, the tamer of horses ('Iliad').
[13] 'On pinion of expectation.' Here I would request the reader to
notice that it would have been easy for me to preserve the regular
dactylic close by writing '_pinion of anticipation_;' as also in the
former instance of '_many a dark December_' to have written '_many a
rainy December_.' But in both cases I preferred to lock up by the massy
spondaic variety; yet never forgetting to premise a dancing
dactyle--'many a'--and 'pinion of.' Not merely for variety, but for a
separate effect of peculiar majesty.
[14] Alluding to a ridiculous passage in Thomson's 'Seasons':
'Delightful task! to teach the young idea how to shoot.'
[15] All these arts, viz., teaching the horse to fight with his forelegs
or lash out with his hind-legs at various angles in a general melée of
horse and foot, but especially teaching him the secret of 'inviting' an
obstinate German boor to come out and take the air strapped in front of
a trooper, and do his duty as guide to the imperial cavalry, were
imported into the Austrian service by an English riding-master about the
year 1775-80. And no doubt it must have been horses trained on this
learned system of education from which the Highlanders of Scotland
derived their terror of cavalry.
[16] 'Blind rams, brainless wild asses,' etc. The 'arietes,' or
battering-rams with iron-bound foreheads, the 'onagri,' or wild asses,
etc., were amongst the poliorcetic engines of the ancients, which do not
appear to have received any essential improvement after the time of the
brilliant Prince Demetrius, the son of Alexander's great captain,
Antigonus.
_XIII. SOME THOUGHTS ON BIOGRAPHY._
We have heard from a man who witnessed the failure of Miss Baillie's 'De
Montford,' notwithstanding the scenic advantages of a vast London
theatre, fine dresses, fine music at intervals, and, above all, the
superb acting of John Kemble, supported on that occasion by his
incomparable sister, that this unexpected disappointment began with the
gallery, who could not comprehend or enter into a hatred so fiendish
growing out of causes so slight as any by possibility supposable in the
trivial Rezenvelt. To feel teased by such a man, to dislike him,
occasionally to present him with your compliments in the shape of a
duodecimo kick--well and good, nothing but right. And the plot
manifestly tended to a comic issue. But murder!--a Macbeth murder!--not
the injury so much as the man himself was incommensurate, was too slight
by a thousand degrees for so appalling a catastrophe. It reacts upon De
Montford, making _him_ ignoble that could be moved so profoundly by an
agency so contemptible.
Something of the same disproportion there is, though in a different way,
between any quarrel that may have divided us from a man in his life-time
and the savage revenge of pursuing the quarrel after his death through a
malicious biography. Yet, if you hated him through no quarrel, but
simply (as we all hate many men that died a thousand years ago) for
something vicious, or which you think vicious, in his modes of thinking,
why must you, of all men, be the one to undertake an edition of his
works, 'with a life of the author'? Leave that to some neutral writer,
who neither loves nor hates. And whilst crowds of men need better
biographical records whom it is easy to love and not difficult to
honour, do not you degrade your own heart or disgust your readers by
selecting for your exemplification not a model to be imitated, but a
wild beast to be baited or a criminal to be tortured? We privately hate
Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could
expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon
what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we
hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in
fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their
lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand
as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own
bias. For it is too odious a spectacle to imprison a fellow-creature in
a book, like a stag in a cart, and turn him out to be hunted through all
his doubles for a day's amusement. It too much resembles that case of
undoubted occurrence both in France and Germany, where 'respectable'
individuals, simply as amateurs, and not at all with any view to the
salary or fees of operating, have come forward as candidates for the
post of public executioner. What is every man's duty is no man's duty by
preference. And unless where a writer is thrust upon such a duty by an
official necessity (as, if he contracts for a 'Biographia Britannica,'
in that case he is bound by his contract to go through with the whole
series--rogues and all), it is too painful to see a human being courting
and wooing the task of doing execution upon his brother in his grave.
Nay, even in the case where this executioner's task arises spontaneously
out of some duty previously undertaken without a thought of its severer
functions, we are still shocked by any exterminating vengeance too
rancorously pursued. Every reader must have been disgusted by the
unrelenting persecution with which Gifford, a deformed man, with the
spiteful nature sometimes too developed in the deformed, had undertaken
'for our fathers in the Row' an edition of Massinger. Probably he had
not thought at the time of the criminals who would come before him for
judgment. But afterwards it did not embitter the job that these
perquisites of office accrued, _lucro ponatur_, that such offenders as
Coxeter, Mr. Monck Mason, and others were to be 'justified' by course of
law. Could he not have stated their errors, and displaced their rubbish,
without further personalities? However, he does _not_, but makes the air
resound with his knout, until the reader wishes Coxeter in his throat,
and Monck Mason, like 'the cursed old fellow' in Sinbad, mounted with
patent spurs upon his back.
We shall be interrupted, however, and _that_ we certainly foresee, by
the objection--that we are fighting with shadows, that neither the
_éloge_ in one extreme, nor the libel in the other extreme, finds a
place in _our_ literature. Does it not? Yes, reader, each of these
biographical forms exists in favour among us, and of one it is very
doubtful indeed whether it ought not to exist. The _éloge_ is found
abundantly diffused through our monumental epitaphs in the first place,
and _there_ every man will countersign Wordsworth's judgment (see 'The
Excursion' and also Wordsworth's prose Essay on Epitaphs), that it is a
blessing for human nature to find one place in this world sacred to
charitable thoughts, one place at least offering a sanctuary from evil
speaking. So far there is no doubt. But the main literary form, in which
the English _éloge_ presents itself, is the Funeral Sermon. And in this
also, not less than in the churchyard epitaph, kind feeling ought to
preside; and for the same reasons, the sanctity of the place where it is
delivered or originally published, and the solemnity of the occasion
which has prompted it; since, if you cannot find matter in the departed
person's character fertile in praise even whilst standing by the
new-made grave, what folly has tempted you into writing an epitaph or a
funeral sermon? The good ought certainly to predominate in both, and in
the epitaph nothing _but_ the good, because were it only for a reason
suggested by Wordsworth, viz., the elaborate and everlasting character
of a record chiselled out painfully in each separate letter, it would be
scandalous to confer so durable an existence in stone or marble upon
trivial human infirmities, such as do not enter into the last solemn
reckoning with the world beyond the grave; whilst, on the other hand,
all graver offences are hushed into 'dread repose,' and, where they
happen to be too atrocious or too memorable, are at once a sufficient
argument for never having undertaken any such memorial. These
considerations privilege the epitaph as sacred to charity, and tabooed
against the revelations of candour. The epitaph cannot open its scanty
records to any breathing or insinuation of infirmity. But the Funeral
Sermon, though sharing in the same general temper of indulgence towards
the errors of the deceased person, might advantageously be laid open to
a far more liberal discussion of those personal or intellectual
weaknesses which may have thwarted the influence of character otherwise
eminently Christian. The _Oraison Funèbre_ of the French proposes to
itself by its original model, which must be sought in the _Epideictic_
or panegyrical oratory of the Greeks, a purpose purely and exclusively
eulogistic: the problem supposed is to abstract from everything _not_
meritorious, to expand and develop the total splendour of the individual
out of that one centre, that main beneficial relation to his own age,
from which this splendour radiated. The incidents of the life, the
successions of the biographical detail, are but slightly traced, no
farther, in fact, than is requisite to the intelligibility of the
praises. Whereas, in the English Funeral Sermon, there is no principle
of absolute exclusion operating against the minutest circumstantiations
of fact which can tend to any useful purpose of illustrating the
character. And what is too much for the scale of a sermon literally
preached before a congregation, or modelled to counterfeit such a mode
of address, may easily find its place in the explanatory notes. This is
no romance, or ideal sketch of what might be. It is, and it has been.
There are persons of memorable interest in past times, of whom all that
we know is embodied in a funeral sermon. For instance, Jeremy Taylor in
that way, or by his Epistles Dedicatory, has brought out the
characteristic features in some of his own patrons, whom else we should
have known only as _nominis umbras_. But a more impressive illustration
is found in the case of John Henderson, that man of whom expectations so
great were formed, and of whom Dr. Johnson and Burke, after meeting and
conversing with him, pronounced (in the Scriptural words of the
Ethiopian queen applied to the Jewish king, Solomon) 'that the half had
not been told them.' For this man's memory almost the sole original
record exists in Aguttar's funeral sermon; for though other records
exist, and one from the pen of a personal friend, Mr. Joseph Cottle, of
Bristol, yet the main substance of the biography is derived from the
_fundus_ of this one sermon.[17] And it is of some importance to cases
of fugitive or unobtrusive merit that this more quiet and sequestered
current of biography should be kept open. For the local motives to an
honorary biographical notice, in the shape of a Funeral Sermon, will
often exist, when neither the materials are sufficient, nor a writer
happens to be disposable, for a labour so serious as a regular
biography.
Here then, on the one side, are our English _éloges_. And we may add
that amongst the Methodists, the Baptists, and other religious
sectaries, but especially among the missionaries of all nations and
churches, this class of _éloges_ is continually increasing. Not
unfrequently men of fervent natures and of sublime aspirations are thus
rescued from oblivion, whilst the great power of such bodies as the
Methodists, their growing wealth, and consequent responsibility to
public opinion, are pledges that they will soon command all the
advantages of colleges and academic refinement; so that if, in the
manner of these funeral _éloges_, there has sometimes been missed that
elegance which should have corresponded to the weight of the matter,
henceforwards we may look to see this disadvantage giving way before
institutions more thoroughly matured. But if these are our _éloges_, on
the other hand, where are our libels?
This is likely to be a topic of offence, for many readers will start at
hearing the upright Samuel Johnson and the good-humoured, garrulous
Plutarch denounced as traffickers in libel. But a truth is a truth. And
the temper is so essentially different in which men lend themselves to
the propagation of defamatory anecdotes, the impulses are so various to
an offence which is not always consciously perceived by those who are
parties to it, that we cannot be too cautious of suffering our hatred of
libel to involve every casual libeller, or of suffering our general
respect for the person of the libeller to exonerate him from the charge
of libelling. Many libels are written in this little world of ours
unconsciously, and under many motives. Perhaps we said that before, but
no matter. Sometimes a gloomy fellow, with a murderous cast of
countenance, sits down doggedly to the task of blackening one whom he
hates worse 'than toad or asp.' For instance, Procopius performs that
'labour of hate' for the Emperor Justinian, pouring oil into his wounds,
but, then (as Coleridge expresses it in a 'neat' sarcasm), oil of
vitriol. Nature must have meant the man for a Spanish Inquisitor, sent
into the world before St. Dominic had provided a trade for him, or any
vent for his malice--so rancorous in his malignity, so horrid and
unrelenting the torture to which he subjects his sovereign and the
beautiful Theodora. In this case, from the withering scowl which
accompanies the libels, we may be assured that they _are_ such in the
most aggravated form--not malicious only, but false. It is commonly
said, indeed, in our courts, that truth it is which aggravates the
libel. And so it is as regards the feelings or the interests of the man
libelled. For is it not insufferable that, if a poor man under common
human infirmity shall have committed some crime and have paid its
penalty, but afterwards reforming or out-growing his own follies, seeks
to gain an honest livelihood for his children in a place which the
knowledge of his past transgression has not reached, then all at once he
is to be ruined by some creature purely malignant who discovers and
publishes the secret tale? In such a case most undoubtedly it is the
truth of the libel which constitutes its sting, since, if it were not
true or could be made questionable, it would do the poor man no
mischief. But, on the other hand, it is the falsehood of the libel which
forms its aggravation as regards the publisher. And certain we are, had
we no other voucher than the instinct of our hatred to Procopius, that
his disloyal tales about his great lord and lady are odiously
overcharged, if not uniformly false. Gibbon, however, chooses to gratify
his taste for the luxury of scandal by believing at once in the perfect
malice of the slanderer, and the perfect truth of his slanders.
Here then, in this Procopius, is an instance of the gloomy libeller,
whose very gloom makes affidavit of his foul spirit from the first.
There is also another form, less odious, of the hostile libeller: it
occurs frequently in cases where the writer is not chargeable with
secret malice, but is in a monstrous passion. A shower-bath might be of
service in that case, whereas in the Procopius case nothing but a
copious or a _Pro_copius application of the knout can answer. We, for
instance, have (or had, for perhaps it has been stolen) a biography of
that same Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, with whom Andrew Marvell
'and others who called Milton friend' had such rough-and-tumble feuds
about 1666, and at whose expense it was that Marvell made the whole
nation merry in his 'Rehearsal Transprosed.' This Parker had a 'knack'
at making himself odious; he had a _curiosa felicitas_ in attracting
hatreds, and wherever he lodged for a fortnight he trailed after him a
vast parabolic or hyperbolic tail of enmity and curses, all smoke and
fire and tarnish, which bore the same ratio to his small body of merit
that a comet's tail, measuring billions of miles, does to the little
cometary mass. The rage against him was embittered by politics, and
indeed sometimes by knavish tricks; the first not being always
'confounded,' nor the last 'frustrated.' So that Parker, on the whole,
was a man whom it might be held a duty to hate, and therefore, of
course, to knout as often as you could persuade him to expose a fair
extent of surface for the action of the lash. Many men purchased a knout
for his sake, and took their chance for getting a 'shy' at him, as
Parker might happen to favour their intentions. But one furious
gentleman, who is resolved to 'take his full change' out of Parker, and
therefore to lose no time, commences operations in the very first words
of his biography: 'Parker,' says he, 'the author of ----, was the _spawn_
of Samuel Parker.' His rage will not wait for an opportunity; he throws
off a torrent of fiery sparks in advance, and gives full notice to
Parker that he will run his train right into him, if he can come up with
his rear. This man is not malicious, but truculent; like the elder
Scaliger, of whom it was observed that, having been an officer of
cavalry up to his fortieth year (when he took to learning Greek), he
always fancied himself on horseback, charging, and cutting throats in
the way of professional duty, as often as he found himself summoned to
pursue and 'cut up' some literary delinquent. Fire and fury, 'bubble and
squeak,' is the prevailing character of his critical composition. 'Come,
and let me give thee to the fowls of the air,' is the cry with which the
martial critic salutes the affrighted author. Yet, meantime, it is
impossible that he can entertain any personal malice, for he does not
know the features of the individual enemy whom he is pursuing. But thus
far he agrees with the Procopian order of biographers--that both are
governed, in whatever evil they may utter, by a spirit of animosity: one
by a belligerent spirit which would humble its enemy as an enemy in a
fair pitched battle, the other by a subtle spirit of malice, which would
exterminate its enemy not in that character merely, but as an individual
by poison or by strangling.
Libels, however, may be accredited and published where there is no
particle of enmity or of sudden irritation. Such were the libels of
Plutarch and Dr. Johnson. They are libels prompted by no hostile
feelings at all, but adopted by mere blind spirit of credulity. In this
world of ours, so far as we are acquainted with its doings, there are
precisely four series--four aggregate bodies--of _Lives_, and no more,
which you can call celebrated; which _have_ had, and are likely to have,
an extensive influence--each after its own kind. Which be they? To
arrange them in point of time, first stand Plutarch's lives of eminent
Greeks and Romans; next, the long succession of the French Memoirs,
beginning with Philippe de Commines, in the time of Louis XI. or our
Edward IV., and ending, let us say, with the slight record of himself
(but not without interest) of Louis XVIII.; thirdly, the _Acta
Sanctorum_ of the Bollandists; fourthly, Dr. Johnson's 'Lives of the
Poets.' The third is a biographical record of the Romish saints,
following the order of the martyrology as it is digested through the
Roman calendar of the year; and, as our own 'Biographia Britannica' has
only moved forwards in seventy years to the letter 'H,' or thereabouts
(which may be owing to the dissenting blight of Dr. Kippis), _pari
passu_, the _Acta Sanctorum_ will be found not much farther advanced
than the month of May--a pleasant month certainly, but (as the
_Spectator_ often insinuates) perilous to saintship. Laying this work
out of consideration, as being chiefly employed in eulogy such as
_could_ not be extravagant when applied to the glorious army of martyrs
(although here also, we doubt not, are many libels against men
concerning whom it matters little whether they were libelled or not),
all the rest of the great biographical works are absolutely saturated
with libels. Plutarch may be thought to balance his extravagant slanders
by his impossible eulogies. He sees nothing wonderful in actions that
were far beyond the level of any motives existing under pagan
moralities; and, on the other hand, he traduces great men like Cæsar,
whose natures were beyond his scale of measurement, by tracing their
policy to petty purposes entirely Plutarchian. But he was a Greekling in
a degenerate age of Grecians. As to the French Memoirs, which are often
so exceedingly amusing, they purchase their liveliness by one eternal
sacrifice of plain truth. Their repartees, felicitous _propos_, and
pointed anecdotes are but one rolling fire of falsehoods. And,
generally, it may be laid down as a rule, that all collectors of happy
retorts and striking anecdotes are careless of truth. Louis XIV. _does_
seem to have had a natural gift of making brilliant compliments and
happy impromptus; and yet the very best of his reputed _mots_ were
spurious. Some may be traced to Cicero, Hierocles, Diogenes; and some to
his modern predecessors. That witty remark ascribed to him about the
disposition of Fortune, as being a lady, to withdraw her favours from
old men like himself and the Maréchal Boufflers, was really uttered
nearly two centuries before by the Emperor Charles V., who probably
stole it from some Spanish collection of jests. And so of fifty in every
hundred beside. And the French are not only apt beyond other nations to
abuse the license of stealing from our predecessor _quod licuit
semperque licebit_, but also, in a degree peculiar to themselves, they
have a false de-naturalized taste in the humorous, and as to the limits
of the extravagant. We have formerly illustrated this point, and
especially we noticed it as a case impossible to any nation _but_ the
French to have tolerated the pretended 'absences' of La Fontaine--as,
for instance, his affecting to converse with his own son as an entire
stranger, and asking the lady who had presented him what might be the
name of that amiable young man. The _incredulus odi_ faces one in every
page of a French memoir; veracity is an unknown virtue, and, wherever
that is the taste, look for libels by wholesale. Too often even the
unnatural and the monstrous is courted, rather than miss the object of
arresting and startling. Now, Dr. Johnson's calumnies or romances were
not of that order. He had a healthy spirit of reverence for truth; but
he was credulous to excess, and he was plagued by an infirmity not
uncommon amongst literary men who have no families of young people
growing up around their hearth--the hankering after gossip. He was
curious about the domestic habits of his celebrated countrymen;
inquisitive in a morbid degree about their pecuniary affairs: 'What have
you got in that pocket which bulges out so prominently?' 'What did your
father do with that hundred guineas which he received on Monday from
Jacob Jonson?' And, as his 'swallow' was enormous--as the Doctor would
believe more fables in an hour than an able-bodied liar would invent in
a week--naturally there was no limit to the slanders with which his
'Lives of the Poets' are overrun.
Of the four great biographical works which we have mentioned, we hold
Dr. Johnson's to be by far the best in point of composition. Even
Plutarch, though pardonably overrated in consequence of the great
subjects which he treats (which again are 'great' by benefit of distance
and the vast abstracting process executed by time upon the petty and the
familiar), is loose and rambling in the principles of his _nexus_; and
there lies the great effort for a biographer, there is the strain, and
that is the task--viz., to weld the disconnected facts into one
substance, and by interfusing natural reflections to create for the
motions of his narrative a higher impulse than one merely chronologic.
In this respect, the best of Dr. Johnson's 'Lives' are undoubtedly the
very best which exist. They are the most highly finished amongst all
masterpieces of the biographic art, and, as respects the Doctor
personally, they are, beyond comparison, his best work. It is a great
thing in any one art or function, even though it were not a great one,
to have excelled all the literature of all languages. And if the reader
fancies that there lurks anywhere a collection of lives, or even one
life (though it were the 'Agricola' of Tacitus), which as a work of
refined art and execution can be thought equal to the best of Dr.
Johnson's, we should be grateful to him if he would assign it in a
letter to Mr. Blackwood:
'And though the night be raw,
We'll see it too, the first we ever saw.'
We say nothing of the Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann's
'Streifereien') that their 'Dschangariade' is the finest of all epic
poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets
will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy
literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr.
Johnson's efforts as a biographer. Consequently, we cannot be taxed with
any insensibility to his merit. And as to the critical part of his
Lives, if no thoughtful reader can be expected to abide by his haughty
decisions, yet, on the other hand, every man reads his opinions with
pleasure, from the intellectual activity and the separate justice of the
thoughts which they display. But as to his libellous propensity, that
rests upon independent principles; for all his ability and all his logic
could not elevate his mind above the region of gossip.
Take his 'Life of Savage.' This was the original nest-egg, upon which,
as a basis, and perhaps as the occasional suggestion of such an
enterprise, all the rest--allow us a pompous word--supervened. It was
admirably written, because written _con amore_, and also because written
_con odio_; and under either impulse is it possible to imagine grosser
delusions? Johnson persuaded himself that Savage was a fine gentleman (a
_rôle_ not difficult to support in that age, when ceremony and a
gorgeous _costume_ were amongst the auxiliary distinctions of a
gentleman), and also that he was a man of genius. The first claim was
necessarily taken upon trust by the Doctor's readers; the other might
have been examined; but after a few painful efforts to read 'The
Wanderer' and other insipid trifles, succeeding generations have
resolved to take _that_ upon trust also; for in very truth Savage's
writings are of that order which 'do not let themselves be read.' Why,
then, had publishers bought them? Publishers in those days were mere
tradesmen, without access to liberal society. Even Richardson, though a
man of great genius, in his publisher's character was an obsequious,
nay, servile, admirer of the fine gentleman who wore a sword,
embroidered clothes, and Mechlin ruffles about his wrists; above all
things, he glorified and adored a Lovelace, with a fine person, who sang
gaily to show his carelessness of low people, never came abroad except
in a sedan-chair, and liberally distributed his curses to the right and
the left in all respectable men's shops. This temper, with her usual
sagacity, Lady M. Wortley Montagu could detect in Richardson, and for
this she despised him. But this it was, and some little vision of
possible patronage from Lord Tyrconnel, which had obtained any prices at
all for Savage from such knowing publishers as were then arising; but
generally Savage had relied upon subscriptions, which were still common,
and, in his case, as a man supposed unfortunate, were given purely as
charity. With what astonishment does a literary foreigner of any
judgment find a Savage placed amongst the classics of England! and from
the scale of his life reasonably he must infer that he is ranked amongst
the leaders, whilst the extent in which his works are multiplied would
throw him back upon the truth--that he is utterly unknown to his
countrymen. These, however, were the delusions of good nature. But what
are we to think of Dr. Johnson's abetting that monstrous libel against
Lady Macclesfield? She, unhappily, as a woman banished without hope from
all good society by her early misconduct as a wife (but, let it not be
forgotten, a neglected wife), had nobody to speak a word on her behalf:
all evil was believed of one who had violated her marriage vows. But had
the affair occurred in our days, the public journals would have righted
her. They would have shown the folly of believing a vain, conceited man
like Savage and his nurse, with no vouchers whatever, upon a point where
they had the deepest interest at stake; whilst on the opposite side,
supposing their story true, spoke for them the strongest of all natural
instincts--the pleading of the maternal heart, combated by no
self-interest whatever. Surely if Lady Macclesfield had not been
supported by indignation against an imposture, merely for her own ease
and comfort, she would have pensioned Savage, or have procured him some
place under Government--not difficult in those days for a person with
her connections (however sunk as respected _female_ society) to have
obtained for an only son. In the sternness of her resistance to all
attempts upon her purse we read her sense of the fraud. And, on the
other hand, was the conduct of Savage that of a son? He had no legal
claims upon her, consequently no pretence for molesting her in her
dwelling-house. And would a real son--a great lubberly fellow, well able
to work as a porter or a footman--however wounded at her obstinate
rejection, have been likely, in pursuit of no legal rights, to have
alarmed her by threatening letters and intrusions, for no purpose but
one _confessedly_ of pecuniary extortion? From the very mode of pursuing
his claim it is plain that Savage felt it to be a false one. It seems,
also, to be forgotten by most readers, that at this day real sons--not
denied to be such--are continually banished, nay, ejected forcibly by
policemen, from the paternal roof in requital of just such profligate
conduct as Savage displayed; so that, grant his improbable story, still
he was a disorderly reprobate, who in these days would have been
consigned to the treadmill. But the whole was a hoax.
Savage, however, is but a single case, in relation to which Dr. Johnson
stood in a special position, that diseased his judgment. But look at
Pope's life, at Swift's, at Young's--at all the lives of men
contemporary with himself: they are overrun with defamatory stories, or
traits of that order which would most have stung them, had they returned
to life. But it was an accident most beneficial to Dr. Johnson that
nearly all these men left no near relatives behind to call him to
account. The public were amused, as they always are by exhibitions of
infirmity or folly in one whom otherwise they were compelled to admire;
that was a sort of revenge for them to set off against a painful
perpetuity of homage. Thus far the libels served only as jests, and,
fortunately for Dr. Johnson, there arose no after-reckoning. One period,
in fact, of thirty years had intervened between the last of these men
and the publication of the Lives; it was amongst the latest works of Dr.
Johnson: thus, and because most of them left no descendants, he escaped.
Had the ordinary proportion of these men been married, the result would
have been different; and whatever might have been thought of any
individual case amongst the complaints, most undoubtedly, from the great
number to which the Doctor had exposed himself, amongst which many were
not of a nature to be evaded by any vouchers whatsoever, a fatal effect
would have settled on the Doctor's moral reputation. He would have been
passed down to posterity as a dealer in wholesale scandal, who cared
nothing for the wounded feelings of relatives. It is a trifle after that
to add that he would frequently have been cudgelled.
This public judgment upon Dr. Johnson and these cudgellings would have
been too severe a chastisement for the offences, which, after all,
argued no heavier delinquency than a levity in examining his chance
authorities, and a constitutional credulity. Dr. Johnson's easiness of
faith for the supernatural, the grossness of his superstition in
relation to such miserable impostures as the Cock Lane ghost, and its
scratchings on the wall, flowed from the same source; and his
conversation furnishes many proofs that he had no principle of
resistance in his mind, no reasonable scepticism, when any disparaging
anecdote was told about his nearest friends. Who but he would have
believed the monstrous tale: that Garrick, so used to addressing large
audiences _extempore_, so quick and lively in his apprehensions, had
absolutely been dismissed from a court of justice as an idiot--as a man
incapable of giving the court information even upon a question of his
own profession? As to his credulity with respect to the somewhat
harmless forgeries of Psalmanazer, and with respect to the villainous
imposture of Lander, we imagine that other causes co-operated to those
errors beyond mere facility of assenting. In the latter case we fear
that jealousy of Milton as a scholar, a feeling from which he never
cleansed himself, had been the chief cause of his so readily delivering
himself a dupe to allegations _not_ specious, backed by forgeries that
were anything but ingenious. Dr. Johnson had a narrow escape on that
occasion. Had Dr. Douglas fastened upon him as the collusive abettor of
Lander, as the man whose sanction had ever won even a momentary credit
for the obscure libeller, and as the one beyond all others of the age
whose critical occupation ought most to have secured him against such a
delusion, the character of Johnson would have suffered seriously.
Luckily, Dr. Douglas spared him; and Johnson, seeing the infamy of the
hoax, and the precipice near which he stood, hastened to separate
himself from Lander, and to offer such reparation as he could, by
dictating that unhappy letter of recantation. Lander must have consented
to this step from hopes of patronage; and perhaps the obscure place of
slave-driver in the West Indies, in which he died (after recanting his
recantation), might be the unsatisfactory bait of his needy ambition.
But assuredly Lander could have made out a better case for himself than
that which, under his name, the Doctor addressed to the Bishop; it was a
dark spot in Dr. Johnson's life. A Scotsman, said he, must be a strange
one who would not tell a falsehood in a case where Scotland was
concerned; and we fear that any fable of defamation must have been gross
indeed which Dr. Johnson would not have countenanced against Milton. His
'Life of Milton,' as it now stands, contains some of the grossest
calumnies against that mighty poet which have ever been hazarded; and
some of the deepest misrepresentations are coloured, to the unsuspecting
reader, by an affectation of merriment. But in his 'heart of hearts' Dr.
Johnson detested Milton. Gray, even though, as being little of a meddler
with politics, he furnished no handle to the Doctor for wrath so
unrelenting, was a subject of deep jealousy from his reputed
scholarship. Never did the spite of the Doctor more emblazon itself
than in his review of Gray's lyrical compositions; the very affectation
of prefacing his review by calling the two chief odes 'the wonderful
wonder of wonders' betrays a female spite; and never did the arrogance
of Dr. Johnson's nature flame out so conspicuously as in some of the
phrases used on this occasion. Perhaps it is an instance of
self-inflation absolutely unique where he says, 'My kindness for a man
of letters'; this, it seems, caused him to feel pain at seeing Gray
descending to what he, the Doctor (as a one-sided opinion of his own),
held to be a fantastic foppery. The question we point at is not this
supposed foppery--was it such or not? Milton's having cherished that
'foppery' was a sufficient argument for detesting it. What we fix the
reader's eye upon is, the unparalleled arrogance of applying to Gray
this extreme language of condescending patronage. He really had 'a
kindness' for the little man, and was not ashamed, as some people would
be, to own it; so that it shocked him more than else it would have done,
to see the man disgracing himself in this way.
However, it is probable that all the misstatements of Dr. Johnson, the
invidious impressions, and the ludicrous or injurious anecdotes fastened
_ad libitum_ upon men previously open to particular attacks, never will
be exposed; and for this, amongst other reasons, that sometimes the
facts of the case are irrecoverable, though falsehood may be apparent;
and still more because few men will be disposed to degrade themselves by
assuming a secondary and ministerial office in hanging upon the errors
of any man. Pope was a great favourite with Dr. Johnson, both as an
unreflecting Tory, who travelled the whole road to Jacobitism--thus far
resembling the Doctor himself; secondly, as one who complimented
himself whilst yet a young man, and even whilst wearing a
masque--complimented him under circumstances which make compliments
doubly useful, and make them trebly sincere. If any man, therefore, he
would have treated indulgently Pope: yet his life it is which has mainly
fixed upon Pope that false impression which predominates at this
day--that doubtless intellectually he was a very brilliant little man;
but morally a spiteful, peevish, waspish, narrow-hearted cynic. Whereas
no imputation can be more unfounded. Pope, unless in cases when he had
been maddened by lampoons, was a most benignant creature; and, with the
slightest acknowledgment of his own merit, there never lived a literary
man who was so generously eager to associate others in his own
honours--those even who had no adequate pretensions. If you, reader,
should, like ourselves, have had occasion to investigate Pope's life,
under an intention of recording it more accurately or more
comprehensively than has yet been done, you will feel the truth of what
we are saying. And especially we would recommend to every man, who
wishes to think justly of Pope in this respect, that he should compare
his conduct towards literary competitors with that of Addison. Dr.
Johnson, having partially examined the lives of both, must have been so
far qualified to do justice between them. But justice he has _not_ done;
and to him chiefly we repeat that at this day are owing the false
impressions of Pope's selfish, ungenial, or misanthropic nature; and the
humiliating associations connected with Pope's petty manoeuvring in
trivial domestic affairs, chiefly through Dr. Johnson's means, will
never be obliterated. Let us turn, however, from Dr. Johnson, whom, with
our general respect for his upright nature, it is painful to follow
through circumstances where either jealousy (as sometimes) or credulity
and the love of gossip (as very often) has misled him into gratifying
the taste of the envious at a great sacrifice of dignity to the main
upholders of our literature. These men ought not to have been 'shown up'
for a comic or malicious effect. A nation who value their literature as
we have reason to value ours ought to show their sense of this value by
forgetting the _degrading_ infirmities (not the venial and human
infirmities) of those to whose admirable endowments they owe its
excellence.
Turning away, therefore, from those modes of biography which have
hitherto pursued any vicious extreme, let us now briefly explain our own
ideal of a happier, sounder, and more ennobling biographical art, having
the same general objects as heretofore, but with a more express view to
the benefit of the reader. Looking even at those memoirs which, like
Hayley's of Cowper, have been checked by pathetic circumstances from
fixing any slur or irreverential scandal upon their subject, we still
see a great fault in the mass of biographic records; and what _is_ it?
It is--that, even where no disposition is manifested to copy either the
_éloge_ or the libellous pasquinade, too generally the author appears
_ex officio_ as the constant 'patronus' or legal advocate for the person
recorded. And so he ought, if we understand that sort of advocacy which
in English courts the judge was formerly presumed to exercise on behalf
of the defendant in criminal trials. Before that remarkable change by
which a prisoner was invested with the privilege of employing separate
counsel, the judge was his counsel. The judge took care that no wrong
was done to him; that no false impression was left with the jury; that
the witnesses against him should not be suffered to run on without a
sufficient rigour of cross-examination. But certainly the judge thought
it no part of his duty to make 'the worse appear the better reason'; to
throw dust into the eyes of the jury; or to labour any point of
equivocation for the sake of giving the prisoner an extra chance of
escaping. And, if it is really right that the prisoner, when obviously
guilty, should be aided in evading his probable conviction, then
certainly in past times he had less than justice. For most undoubtedly
no judge would have attempted what we all saw an advocate attempting
about a year ago, that, when every person in court was satisfied of the
prisoner's guilt, from the proof suddenly brought to light of his having
clandestinely left the plate of his murdered victim in a particular
party's safe keeping, at that moment the advocate (though secretly
prostrated by this overwhelming discovery) struggled vainly to fix upon
the honourable witness a foul stigma of self-contradiction and perjury
for the single purpose of turning loose a savage murderer upon society.
If this were not more than justice, then assuredly in all times past the
prisoner had far less. Now, precisely the difference between the
advocacy of the judge, and the advocacy of a special counsel retained by
the prisoner, expresses the difference which we contemplate between the
biographer as he has hitherto protected his hero and that biographer
whom we would substitute. Is he not to show a partiality for his
subject? Doubtless; but hitherto, in those lives which have been
farthest from _éloges_, the author has thought it his duty to uphold the
general system, polity, or principles upon which his subject has acted.
Thus Middleton and all other biographers of Cicero, whilst never
meditating any panegyrical account of that statesman, and oftentimes
regretting his vanity, for instance, have quite as little thought it
allowable to condemn the main political views, theories, and
consequently actions, of Cicero. But why not? Why should a biographer be
fettered in his choice of subjects by any imaginary duty of adopting the
views held by him whose life he records? To make war upon the man, to
quarrel with him in every page, _that_ is quite as little in accordance
with our notions; and we have already explained above our sense of its
hatefulness. For then the question recurs for ever: What necessity
forced you upon a subject whose conduct you thoroughly disapprove? But
let him show the tenderness which is due to a great man even when he
errs. Let him expose the _total_ aberrations of the man, and make this
exposure salutary to the pathetic wisdom of his readers, not alimentary
to their self-conceit, by keeping constantly before their eyes the
excellence and splendour of the man's powers in contrast with his
continued failures. Let him show such patronage to the hero of his
memoir as the English judge showed to the poor prisoner at his bar,
taking care that he should suffer no shadow of injustice from the
witnesses; that the prisoner's own self-defence should in no part be
defeated of its effect by want of proper words or want of proper skill
in pressing the forcible points on the attention of the jury; but
otherwise leaving him to his own real merits in the facts of his case,
and allowing him no relief from the pressure of the hostile evidence but
such as he could find either in counter-evidence or in the intrinsic
weight of his own general character. On the scheme of biography there
would be few persons in any department of life who would be accompanied
to the close by a bowing and obsequious reporter; there would be far
less of uniform approbation presumable in memoirs; but, on the other
hand, there would be exhibited pretty generally a tender spirit of
dealing with human infirmities; a large application of human errors to
the benefit of succeeding generations; and, lastly, there would be an
opening made for the free examination of many lives which are now in a
manner closed against criticism; whilst to each separate life there
would be an access and an invitation laid bare for minds hitherto
feeling themselves excluded from approaching the subject by imperfect
sympathy with the principles and doctrines which those lives were
supposed to illustrate.
But our reformed view of biography would be better explained by a sketch
applied to Cicero's life or to Milton's. In either case we might easily
show, consistently with the exposure of enormous errors, that each was
the wisest man of his own day. And with regard to Cicero in particular,
out of his own letters to Atticus, we might show that every capital
opinion which he held on the politics of Rome in his own day was false,
groundless, contradictory. Yet for all that, we would engage to leave
the reader in a state of far deeper admiration for the man than the
hollow and hypocritical Middleton ever felt himself, or could therefore
have communicated to his readers.
EDITOR'S NOTE.--The reference on p. 122 is to the famous case of
Courvoisier, in 1840, and this fixes 1841 as the date of the essay.
Courvoisier was a valet who murdered and robbed his master, putting
the plate into the care of an old woman, and making it appear a
burglary. He was defended by a barrister named Philips, who
received from the prisoner a confession of his guilt, and
afterwards, in court, took Heaven to witness that he believed him
innocent, though the woman, by accident almost, had been found, and
given evidence. Philips was disbarred.