At Lord Falkland's court of intellect at Great Tew,--that delightful
manor thrown open like a perpetual _salon_ to worthy visitors, where
Oxford scholars would arrive, order their bedroom, give notice of their
intention to be present at dinner, and betake themselves to the library
to read or talk,--there was at one time a constant and an honoured
guest.
This was a certain Fellow of Merton, by name John Earles,[A] some ten
years older than his host, and so devoted to his lordship that, as he
himself tells us, he gave all the time that he could make his own to
cultivating his society. And at first this was a good deal, for Earles
was not a busy man; besides his Fellowship at Merton, he was merely
chaplain to Lord Pembroke, and vicar of a distant Wiltshire parish to
which he paid but few visits. Between him and Lord Falkland there was a
kind of intellectual bargain; they read Greek together, and John said
that he learnt more than he taught, and that he was amply repaid for his
exertion by the fresh, lively light which that sympathetic mind cast
upon the great variety of subjects which passed under review in that
high argumentative atmosphere.
[A] [The name seems to have been spelt quite indifferently,
Earl, Earle, or Earles. John Earles' father was Registrar of the
Archbishop's Court at York; John Earles seems to have matriculated at
Christ Church, on June 4, 1619. But, according to Wood's Fasti, he took
his B.A. degree on July 8, 1619, at Merton, and obtained a Fellowship
there in the same year.]
John was known to his friends as a singularly sweet-tempered, amiable
man, one who could count no enemies--with the faults of a scholar, it is
true, his hair tangled, his canonical coat dusty, slovenly and negligent
in his habits; a bad man of business, and a forgetful, absent-minded
fellow. But they condoned these faults as being so unconscious, the
externals of a character which could afford to dispense with social
ornament; the habit of a dreamy yet active mind, so bent upon reverie
and so strenuous in thought, that it could not bear to waste time and
trouble upon things that were undeniably unimportant. Genuine
absent-mindedness has a great charm for thoughtful men; when it is the
index of deliberate abstraction, they are apt to look upon it almost
enviously, as the sign of a high aloofness from ordinary sublunary
anxieties, an aloofness which they are themselves unable to command.
John was in the habit of thinking a great deal about his fellow-men; he
was not philosophising nor calculating nor recording in those
ruminating periods. He had keen eyes, this untidy, peering scholar, and
when others talked he listened. He examined their features curiously; he
dwelt with inward delight upon their instinctive gestures--the tones of
their voices, the twinkling of their brows, the twitching of their
hands; he did not brood and generalise; his taste was for the special,
the particular, the individual, the characteristic. And every now and
then, when pen and paper lay in his way, he would scribble off a rough
sketch, as an artist jots down heads and limbs, towers and copses on his
blotting-paper, a mental caricature of one of the strange fellows that
he was for ever encountering in the world. Written on loose sheets,
sometimes lying in his desk, sometimes left on the table, sometimes
dropped over a friend's shoulder, he set no store on these fragments; he
did not hand them round with affected carelessness, and come down with
his candlestick to search for them when all the world was upstairs. He
had no idea of rushing into print, no ambition connected with the
publisher. The figure with all its oddities had risen in his mind, and
he had the whim to describe it. Done for the moment, he had but a
momentary interest in it; and, like the Sibyl, he saw the wind whirl the
leaves about, without regard to the precious characters they bore.
Once or twice the humour took him to sketch himself, to outline such
lineaments of his own as he had seen reflected in the looks and welcomes
of his friends; to recall for his own amusement a humorous situation or
two over which he had often made secret merriment. In words too intimate
not to be autobiographical he had written of the downright scholar,
whose "perplexitye of mannerliness will not let him feed, and he is
sharp set at an argument when he should cut his meate." With a twinkling
eye, thinking of the stable-gate at Tew and the big horse-block, he says
how such an one "ascends a horse somewhat sinisterly, though not on the
left side, and they both goe jogging in grief together;" he tells how he
"cannot speak to a Dogge in his own dialect, and understands Greeke
better than the language of a Falconer."
But like the squire who excuses trespassing and yet draws the line at
poaching, he had suddenly to show his hand. To have his witty
distinctions quoted, to see them go to form another's stock-in-trade--that
he could put up with; it was merely another grotesque turn among the
oddities of humanity that he was never tired of observing. But when,
without his leave, those fly-sheets, those scrawls and sketches on which
he had set so little store, suddenly appeared in print, garnered by some
careful hand, then he flung himself into the world with a kind of
challenge. Like Virgil he dared them to finish what they had professed
to begin, and for himself he proceeded to finish what some one else had
begun for him.
He did not set his name to the book, but allowed the world to know who
was the author. It was published in 1628 by Edward Blount, stationer and
translator, with a preface signed by the latter, but almost certainly
inspired by Earles himself, in which he professes to bring forth to the
light, as it were, infants which the father would have smothered; but
the preface is so void of partiality, it makes so little attempt to
compliment the book, or to insist, as even the most judicial friend
would have done, on the merits of the work, that it is evidently by the
hand of the author--and the author is no less evidently a modest man.
Authors have only been able to wake and find themselves famous since the
days of improved communication; yet John Earles found himself famous as
soon as the little ripple of delight could permeate to the outskirts of
society. The book was so new and bright, the humour was so penetrating
and yet so kind, and it was above all so innocent in its wisdom, that
the reading world seized upon it with delight.
This fame resulting from so slender and nugatory a performance was a
strange surprise to Earles, and had he not been a man who was apt all
through his life to be surprised at his own successes, it might have
turned his brain; but he broke off and wrote no more, at least in that
manner. In five years the book ran through eight editions; and with the
exception of adding a score of pieces to one of the editions--pieces
which at his friends' earnest solicitation he gathered out of
accumulated papers--he wrote nothing else in that kind. Nay, he was so
austere, that he had suppressed many sheets in the first edition,
because there was a dash of coarseness which had somehow invaded their
fibre.
He rose quickly in the world after this, and no one envied him or would
have detracted from him; he bore his greatness so quietly and salted it
so well with gratitude that it never was anything but pure and fragrant.
The Earl of Pembroke was Lord Chamberlain, and took his chaplain to
Court, where he conciliated so many, and showed himself of such even and
gracious temper, and possessed of so genial an authority, that when Dr.
Duppa was made Bishop of Sarum, John Earles stepped quickly into the
post of tutor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards that most gracious
monarch, Charles II.
When kings were kings, Arsenius was something of a potentate. A prince's
tutor might without absurdity reflect that he held a high and solemn
charge. The education of any human being is that; and the education of
one born to rank and greatness will always be a serious undertaking,
just because he is capable of being such a power in the world, and of
influencing so large a number of people; but the education of a king had
something national about it, and a tutor who could really affect such a
pupil's character might hope to react upon a large section of the
community.
Charles II. was undeniably a clever man, and made the most of a very
difficult position. He was not a high-minded man in any sense of the
word, and he was hopelessly, irretrievably frivolous. If he had been
ambitious or serious, terrible complications might have ensued; he would
either have fretted himself into madness, or the country into civil war.
Fortunately he did neither, but stood in a spectatorial attitude,
watching the world through wicked, humorous eyes, living a low kind of
life among lazy friends, and sauntering through difficulties which would
have wrecked an earnest man. A character like this is sure to have
appreciated such a tutor, but Charles was probably far too cold and
careless for Earles to have deeply influenced him. Charles II. must have
been a hopeless case from the beginning. A clever man in a very great
position, without a touch of generosity or affection in his nature, is
for the educational experimentalist an impossible pupil; but though we
cannot trace any good strain in Charles to the effect of Earles'
influence, yet it was something to have conciliated such a prince's
liking and to retain his esteem.
John had been made Chancellor of Sarum Church, and had just taken
possession of one of those sweet gabled and mullioned houses of grey
stone, where gardens run down to the placid, clear chalk-stream,
wandering through its water-meadows,--when the troubles began. A man
such as John had never a doubt as to his policy: he had no sort of
sympathy with the Puritans; their total lack of humour and delicacy
disgusted him as much as anything human could disgust him; and he was
not a man who clung with any hankering to houses and lands. He threw up
all his appointments and went across the sea to his master; and at one
time or another gave him in instalments all the scanty fortune he had
put aside.
He lived to be rewarded; no one was so eminently in his master's eye. At
the Restoration he was made Dean of Westminster, then Bishop of
Worcester, and then, on the death of Bishop Henchman, Duppa's successor,
in 1663, he went back to Sarum as its Bishop; and he remained through it
all the most simple-minded ecclesiastic that ever sat upon a throne. An
easy task enough nowadays, when priests move among statesmen as a lamb
moves among wolves,--so far as worldly prospects are concerned. If a
Body has to face the possibility of disendowment within a few decades,
that anticipation will preserve humility under worldly trappings, like
the skull-beaker at Norwegian feasts; but in those days, when a bishop
was in reality a petty prince, when he and his brethren made up nearly a
third of the House of Peers, when their title to Church revenues was
held (as it was in the first flush of the Restoration) as safer than
many a country gentleman's, and as rather more sacred than the
king's,--a courtier and a scholar, clad in pomp, dignified by secular
observance and sanctified by heavenly authority, may be excused if he is
a little elated by the flush of dignity; and to be gentle and natural
and simple-minded under such an accession of respect signifies an
unfailing plenitude of humility's saving spring.
Perhaps ill-health may have contributed a little to this balance and
sanity of mind; it is a wonderful tonic in the midst of riotous
prosperity. At any rate the Bishop died of a very painful disease which
had long troubled him, in the sixty-fifth year of his age; he died at
his own dear Oxford, and was buried in the chapel of his college, where
he had first practised the piety that made his life so wholesome all
along. A quaint and pompous epitaph there describes him as "Angel of
the Church of Worcester, afterwards Angel of the Church of Sarum, and
now Angel of the Church Triumphant. (_Ecclesiae Angelus Vigornensis,
postmodo Sarisburiensis, jam Triumphantis._)"
At Salisbury, in the Palace, there is no portrait of him, but there is
one at Westminster; and in a Wiltshire farmhouse, not far from Sarum,
there are portraits, rude and ill-drawn, of himself and his wife. This
lady is buried in a little churchyard, Stratford-sub-Castle, that lies
below the huge embanked mound of Old Sarum, overshadowed by a pleasant
avenue of limes. It was still rather an unpopular thing for a bishop to
marry. Hardly more than half a century before, Abbot, a predecessor of
Earles at Sarum, had been soundly scolded and threatened by his actual
as well as spiritual brother, the Primate for marrying when in Episcopal
Orders. Earles was not so severely handled: we hear little of the
marriage, except that he was happy in it. His wife lived and died
unnoticed: in those days bishops' wives were made even less of than they
are now. He himself took no prominent place; it is probable that he was
unconsciously drawn into the tide of practical affairs. At any rate for
some reason he left next to nothing behind him besides the little book
aforesaid; he wrote a few epitaphs and dedications, translated the _Icon
Basilike_ into Latin, and had nearly finished translating Hooker's
_Polity_ into the same language, when he died. The latter was lost
through the carelessness of servants, who threw it into a waste-paper
bin, and used it to wrap up butter and cheese. And perhaps one may be
excused for saying that it was not a very inappropriate ending for it;
why a man of brisk and original mind should ever have engaged in this
dismal hack-work is the real problem. His contemporaries echo the loss
with a howl of dismay that could hardly have been greater had Hooker's
original manuscript itself been lost. Perhaps the Bishop wished to
correct the impression he had created by his earlier book,--as Maurice
used to buy up copies of _Eustace Conway_,--and so engaged in a graver
and more appropriate work; he could hardly have selected one which could
have been at once so decorous and so dull. Anyhow, the destruction of
this document will be received by the modern student with, to say the
least, equanimity.
We may now turn to a closer study of the book by which he still deserves
to be well known, _The Microcosmography_, or, to give a free rendering,
"Jottings from the Note-book of a Minute Philosopher."
This kind of writing was a favourite with the age; men were beginning to
turn from the solemn impersonalities of chivalry and from the
restricted limitations of the drama, to a more minute analysis of
character, to a spectatorial interest in the more unpleasing types of
which humanity affords such numerous instances. It was the foreshadowing
of the modern novel; but it remained of course a somewhat elementary
form of delineation of character. Its elementariness consists in the
fact that the characters are labelled and classified: there can be no
mistake about the effects intended to be produced, and the success of
such work must depend upon the humour, the verisimilitude, the
liveliness of the portraiture. There is consequently a great want of
that complexity which is at once the delight and the despair of the
draughtsman of human character, and such sketches are therefore as
inferior to fine creations of character, as studies of expression like
Le Brun's, where the whole skill of the artist is directed to the
production of a single effect, are inferior to a noble portrait.
The aim of the Microcosmographist is to add touch after touch, every one
of which shall indicate in different phases, from different points of
view, the same actual characteristic; just as the physiognomist in
imaginary portraits endeavours to make eyes, ears, mouth and brow all
bear the same stamp, and illustrate the same expression. It is a
concentration of effects as opposed to a combination of causes.
Theophrastus, of course, and Aristotle are the fathers of the art;
besides Earles, Hall and Overbury are the best of the English School.
What will at once strike the reader is the exceedingly miscellaneous and
at the same time humorous nature of the contents. Under the general
designation of character we have "A Childe, a meere dull Physitian, an
Alderman, a younger Brother, a Tavern, an old College Butler, a
Pot-poet, a Baker, The Common Singing Man, a Bowle-alley, a She-precise
Hypocrite, a Trumpeter, a meere Complemental man, Paul's Walk, a Stayed
Man," &c.; still the character-sketches formed by far the most
considerable parts of these.
As instances of Earles' humour take the following extract:
"The Antiquary.--Hee will go you forty miles to see a Saint's well, or
ruined Abbey; and if there be but a Crosse or a stone footstool in the
way, hee'll be considering it so long till he forget his journey.... His
very attire is that which is the eldest out of fashion, and you may pick
a criticism out of his Breeches. He never looks upon himself till he is
grey-haired, and then he is pleased at his own antiquity. His grave does
not fright him, because he has been us'd to sepulchers, and he likes
Death the better, because it gathers him to his fathers."
Or the following, from "A Plaine Country-Fellow":
"He seems to have the judgment of Nebuchadnezar; for his conversation is
among beasts, and his tallons none of the shortest, only he eats not
grasse, because he loves not Sallets [salads]. He expostulates with his
Oxen very understandingly, and speaks Gee and Ree better than English.
His mind is not much distracted with objects, but if a good Fat Cow come
in his way, he stands dumb and astonisht, and though his haste be never
so greate, will fix here half an houre's contemplation."
Or this, from "A Universitie Dunne":
"He is like a rejected acquaintance, hunts those that care not for his
company, and he knows it well enough; yet he will not away. The sole
place to supply him is the Buttery, where he takes grievous use upon
your name, and he is one much wrought upon with good Beere and
Rhetorick."
This may illustrate Earles' penetration and sagacity of observation:
"A Suspicious Man.--It shall goe hard but you must abuse him whether you
will or no. Not a word can be spoke but nips him somewhere.... You shall
have him go fretting out of company with some twenty quarrels to every
man, stung and gall'd, and no man knows less the occasion than they that
have given it."
Or this, from "The Blunt Man":
"He is exceedingly in love with his Humour, which makes him always
profess and proclaim it; and you must take what he says patiently,
because he is a plaine man; his nature is his excuse still, and other
men's Tyrant, for he must speake his mind, and that is his worst, though
he love to teach others he is teaching himself."
"The Scepticke in Religion," a habit of mind with which Earles had
little sympathy, is well drawn:
"The Fathers jostle him from one side to the other; now Sosinas and
Vorstius afresh torture him, and he agrees with none worse than himself.
He puts his foot into Heresies tenderly, as a cat in the water, and
pulls it out again, and still something unanswered delays him; yet he
bears away some parcell of each, and you may sooner pick all Religions
out of him than one. He cannot think so many wise men can be in error,
nor so many honest men out of the way, and his wonder is doubled when he
sees these oppose one another. In summer his whole life is a question
and his salvation a greater, which death only concludes, and then he is
resolved."
But there is, beside these sharp stinging sentences, a lovely vein of
gentle tenderness in his writing. "A Childe," which opens the series, is
one of the most exquisite and feeling delineations in literature:
"His father has writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those
days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what
innocence he has outlived. The elder he grows he is a stair lower from
God, and like his first parent much worse in his breeches. Could he put
off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a
burthen, and exchanged one heaven for another."
But it would be easy to quote and quote, yet give no real idea of the
fertility, the wit, the pathos of the man. All humanity is before him,
and must be handled tenderly because he is a part of it himself, and
because faults, like ugly features, are sent us to be modified, perhaps;
to be eradicated, no!
The one strain in character which throughout afflicts him most, and for
which he reserves his most distilled contempt, is the strain of
unreality--the affectation whose sin is always to please, and which
fails so singularly of its object. Hypocrisy, pretension,
falseness--against everything which has that lack of simplicity so fatal
to true life he sets his face. For the rest he can hardly read the
enigma; he only states it reverently. Like the old Persian poet, he
seems to say:
Oh Thou, who Man of baser earth didst make,
And e'en with Paradise devise the Snake,
For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man
Is blacken'd--Man's forgiveness give--and take,