FROM
PERSONAL MOTIVES
Anecdote of a BISHOP and a DOCTOR--Dr. MIDDLETON and Dr.
BENTLEY--WARBURTON and Dr. TAYLOR--WARBURTON and EDWARDS--SWIFT
and DRYDEN--POPE and BENTLEY--why fiction is necessary for satire,
according to Lord ROCHESTER'S confession--ROWE and ADDISON--POPE
and ATTERBURY--Sir JOHN HAWKINS and GEORGE STEEVENS--a fierce
controversial author a dangerous neighbour--a ludicrous instance
of a literary quarrel from personal motives between BOHUN and the
WYKEHAMISTS.
Literary Quarrels have abundantly sprung from mere personal motives;
and controversies purely literary, sometimes of magnitude, have broken
out, and been voluminously carried on, till the public are themselves
involved in the contest, while the true origin lies concealed in some
sudden squabble; some neglect of petty civility; some unlucky epithet;
or some casual observation dropped without much consideration, which
mortified or enraged the author. How greatly has passion prevailed in
literary history! How often the most glorious pages in the chronicles
of literature are tainted with the secret history which must be placed
by their side, so that the origin of many considerable works, which do
so much honour to the heads of their authors, sadly accuse their
hearts. But the heaven of Virgil was disturbed with quarrels--
Tantaene animis coelestibus irae?
_AEneid._
Can heavenly minds such high resentment show?
_Dryden._
And has not a profound observer of human affairs declared, _Ex
privatis odiis respublica crescit?_ individual hatreds aggrandize the
republic. This miserable philosophy will satisfy those who are
content, from private vices, to derive public benefits. One wishes for
a purer morality, and a more noble inspiration.
To a literary quarrel from personal motives we owe the origin of a
very remarkable volume. When Dr. Parr delivered his memorable sermon,
which, besides the "_sesquipedalia verba_," was perhaps the longest
that ever was heard--if not listened to--Bishop Hurd, who had always
played the part of one of the most wary of politicians in private
life, and who had occasion once adroitly to explain the French word
_Retenue_, which no man better understood, in a singularly unguarded
moment, sarcastically observed that he did not like "the doctor's long
vernacular sermon." The happy epithet was soon conveyed to the
classical ear of the modern Grecian: it was a wasp in it! The bishop
had, in the days of literary adventure, published some pieces of
irony, which were thought more creditable to his wit than his
feelings--and his great patron, Warburton, certain juvenile prose and
verse--all of which they had rejected from their works. But this it is
to be an author!--his errors remain when he has outlived and corrected
them. The mighty and vindictive Grecian in rage collected them all;
exhausted his own genius in perpetuating follies; completed the works
of the two bishops in utter spite; and in "Tracts by Warburton and a
Warburtonian," has furnished posterity with a specimen of the force of
his own "vernacular" style, giving a lesson to the wary bishop, who
had scarcely wanted one all his life--of the dangers of an unlucky
epithet!
Dr. Conyers Middleton, the author of the "Life of Cicero," seldom
wrote but out of pique; and he probably owed his origin as an author
to a circumstance of this nature. Middleton when young was a
_Dilettante_ in music; and Dr. Bentley, in contempt, applied the
epithet "fiddling Conyers." Had the irascible Middleton broken his
violin about the head of the learned Grecian, and thus terminated the
quarrel, the epithet had then cost Bentley's honour much less than it
afterwards did. It seems to have excited Middleton to deeper studies,
which the great Bentley not long after felt when he published
proposals for an edition of the New Testament in Greek. Middleton
published his "Remarks, paragraph by paragraph, upon the proposals,"
to show that Bentley had neither talents nor materials proper for the
work. This opened a great paper-war, and again our rabid wolf fastened
on the majestic lion, "paragraph by paragraph." And though the lion
did affect to bear in contempt the fangs of his little active enemy,
the flesh was torn. "The proposals" sunk before the "paragraph by
paragraph," and no edition of the Greek Testament by Bentley ever
appeared. Bentley's proposals at first had met with the greatest
success; the subscription-money amounted to two thousand pounds, and
it was known that his nephew had been employed by him to travel abroad
to collect these MSS. He declared he would make use of no MS. that was
not a thousand years old, or above; of which sort he had collected
twenty, so that they made up a total of twenty thousand years. He was
four years studying them before he issued his proposals. The Doctor
rested most on eight Greek MSS., the most recent of which was one
thousand years old. All this wore a very imposing appearance. At a
touch the whole magnificent edifice fell to pieces! Middleton says,
"His twenty old MSS. shrink at once to eight, and he is forced again
to own that even of these eight there are only four which had not been
used by Dr. Mill;" and these Middleton, by his sarcastic reasoning, at
last reduces to "some pieces only of the New Testament in MS." So that
twenty MSS. and their twenty thousand years were battered by the
"fiddling Conyers" into a solitary fragment of little value! Bentley
returned the subscription-money, and would not publish; the work still
lies in its prepared state, and some good judges of its value have
expressed a hope to see it yet published. But Bentley himself was not
untainted in this dishonourable quarrel: he well knew that Middleton
was the author of this severe attack; but to show his contempt of the
real author, and desirous, in his turn, of venting his disappointment
on a Dr. Colbatch, he chose to attribute it to him, and fell on
Colbatch with a virulence that made the reply perfectly libellous, if
it was Bentley's, as was believed.
The irascibility of Middleton, disguising itself in a literary form,
was still more manifested by a fact recorded of him by Bishop Newton.
He had applied to Sir Robert Walpole for the mastership of the
Charter-house, who honestly informed him that Bishop Sherlock, with
the other Bishops, were against his being chosen. Middleton attributed
the origin of this opposition to Bishop Sherlock, and wreaked his
vengeance by publishing his "Animadversions upon Sherlock's Discourses
on Prophecy." The book had been long published, and had passed through
successive editions; but Middleton pretended he had never seen them
before, and from this time Lambeth-house was a strong provocative for
his vindictive temper.
Nor was the other great adversary of Middleton, he who so long
affected to be the lord paramount, the Suzerain in the feudal empire,
rather than the republic of letters--Warburton himself--less easily
led on to these murderous acts of personal rancour. A pamphlet of the
day has preserved an anecdote of this kind. Dr. Taylor, the Chancellor
of Lincoln, once threw out in company an opinion derogatory to the
scholarship of Warburton, who seems to have had always some choice
spirits of his legion as spies in the camp of an enemy, and who sought
their tyrant's grace by their violation of the social compact. The
tyrant himself had an openness, quite in contrast with the dark
underworks of his satellites. He boldly interrogated our critic, and
Taylor replied, undauntedly and more poignantly than Warburton might
have suspected, that "he did not recollect ever _saying_ that Dr.
Warburton was no scholar, but that indeed he had always _thought_ so."
To this intrepid spirit the world owes one of the remarkable prefaces
to the "Divine Legation"--in which the Chancellor of Lincoln, intrepid
as he was, stands like a man of straw, to be buffeted and tossed about
with all those arts of distortion which the wit and virulence of
Warburton almost every day was practising at his "established places
of execution," as his prefaces and notes have been wittily termed.
Even Warburton himself, who committed so many personal injuries, has,
in his turn, most eminently suffered from the same motive. The
personal animosity of a most ingenious man was the real cause of the
utter destruction of Warburton's critical reputation. Edwards, the
author of the "Canons of Criticism," when young and in the army, was a
visitor at Allen's of Prior-park, the patron of Warburton; and in
those literary conversations which usually occupied their evenings,
Warburton affected to show his superiority in his acquaintance with
the Greek writers, never suspecting that a red coat covered more Greek
than his own--which happened unluckily to be the case. Once, Edwards
in the library, taking down a Greek author, explained a passage in a
manner which did not suit probably with some new theory of the great
inventor of so many; a contest arose, in which Edwards discovered how
Warburton came by his illegitimate knowledge of Greek authors: Edwards
attempted to convince him that he really did not understand Greek, and
that his knowledge, such as it was, was derived from French
translations--a provoking act of literary kindness, which took place
in the presence of Ralph Allen and his niece, who, though they could
not stand as umpires, did as witnesses. An incurable breach took place
between the parties, and from this trifling altercation, Edwards
produced the bitter "Canons of Criticism," and Warburton those foaming
notes in the _Dunciad_.
Such is the implacable nature of literary irascibility! Men so
tenderly alive to intellectual sensibility, find even the lightest
touch profoundly enter into the morbid constitution of the literary
temper; and even minds of a more robust nature have given proof of a
sickly delicacy hanging about them quite unsuspected. Swift is a
remarkable instance of this kind: the foundation of the character of
this great wit was his excellent sense. Yet having, when young,
composed one of the wild Pindarics of the time, addressed to the
Athenian Society, and Dryden judiciously observing that "cousin
Jonathan would never be a poet," the enraged wit, after he had reached
the maturity of his own admirable judgment, and must have been well
aware of the truth of the friendly prediction, could never forgive it.
He has indulged the utmost licentiousness of personal rancour; he even
puns miserably on his name to degrade him as the _emptiest_ of
writers. His spirited translation of Virgil, which was admired even by
Pope, he levels by the most grotesque sarcastic images to mark the
poet's diminutive genius--he says this version-maker is so lost in
Virgil, that he is like "the lady in a lobster; a mouse under a canopy
of state; a shrivelled beau within the penthouse of a full-bottomed
perriwig." He never was generous enough to contradict his opinion, and
persisted in it to the last. Some critic, about Swift's own time,
astonished at his treatment of Dryden, declares he must have been
biassed by some prejudice--the anecdote here recorded, not then
probably known, discovers it.
What happened to Pope on the publication of his Homer shows all the
anxious temper of the author. Being in company with Bentley, the poet
was very desirous of obtaining the doctor's opinion of it, which
Bentley contrived to parry as well as he could; but in these matters
an author who calculates on a compliment, will risk everything to
obtain it. The question was more plainly put, and the answer was as
plainly given. Bentley declared that "the verses were good verses, but
the work is not Homer--it is Spondanus!" From this interview posterity
derives from the mortified poet the full-length figure of "_the
slashing_ Bentley," in the fourth book of the Dunciad:
The mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.
When Bentley was told by some officious friend that Pope had abused
him, he only replied, "Ay, like enough! I spoke against his Homer, and
the _portentous cub_ never forgives!" Part of Pope's severe criticism
only is true; but to give full effect to their severity, poets always
infuse a certain quantity of fiction. This is an artifice absolutely
necessary to practise; so I collect from a great master in the arts of
satire, and who once honestly avowed that no satire could be composed
unless it was _personal_; and no personalities would sufficiently
adorn a poem without _lies_. This great satirist was Rochester. Burnet
details a curious conversation between himself and his lordship on
this subject. The bishop tells us that "he would often go into the
country, and be for some months wholly employed in study, or the
sallies of his wit chiefly directed to satire. And this he often
defended to me by saying, there were some people that could not be
kept in order, or admonished, but in this way." Burnet remonstrated,
and Rochester replied--"A man could not write with life unless he were
_heated by revenge_; for to make a satire without resentments, upon
the cold notions of philosophy, was as if a man would, in cold blood,
cut men's throats who had never offended him. And he said, the _lies_
in these libels came often in as _ornaments_, that could not be spared
without _spoiling the beauty_ of the poem." It is as useful to know
how the materials of satire are put together; as thus the secret of
pulling it to pieces more readily may sometimes be obtained.
These facts will sufficiently establish this disgraceful principle of
the personal motives which have influenced the quarrels of authors,
and which they have only disguised by giving them a literary form.
Those who are conversant in literary history can tell how many works,
and some considerable ones, have entirely sprung out of the vengeance
of authors. Johnson, to whom the feelings of the race were so well
known, has made a curious observation, which none but an author could
have made:--"The best advice to authors would be, that they should
keep out of the way of one another." He says this in the "Life of
Rowe," on the occasion of Addison's Observations on Rowe's Character.
Rowe had expressed his happiness to Pope at Addison's promotion; and
Pope, who wished to conciliate Addison towards Rowe, mentioned it,
adding, that he believed Rowe was sincere. Addison replied, "That he
did not suspect Rowe feigned; but _the levity of his heart is such,
that he is struck with any new adventure_: and it would affect him
just in the same manner as if he heard I was going to be hanged."
Warburton adds that Pope said he could not deny but Addison understood
Rowe well. Such is the fact on which Johnson throws out an admirable
observation:--"This censure time has not left us the power of
confirming or refuting; but observation daily shows that much stress
is not to be laid on hyperbolical accusations and pointed sentences,
which even he that utters them desires to be applauded, rather than
credited. Addison can hardly be supposed to have meant all that he
said. _Few characters can bear the microscopic scrutiny of WIT
quickened by ANGER._" I could heap up facts to demonstrate this severe
truth. Even of Pope's best friends, some of their severities, if they
ever reached him, must have given the pain he often inflicted. His
friend Atterbury, to whom he was so partial, dropped an expression, in
the heat of conversation, which Pope could never have forgiven; that
our poet had "a crooked mind in a crooked body." There was a rumour,
after Pope's death, that he had left behind him a satirical "Life of
Dean Swift." Let genius, whose faculty detects the foibles of a
brother, remember he is a rival, and be a generous one. In that
extraordinary morsel of literary history, the "Conversations of Ben
Jonson with his friend Drummond of Hawthornden," preserving his
opinions of his contemporaries, if I err not in my recollection, I
believe that he has not spoken favourably of a single individual!
The personal motives of an author, influencing his literary conduct,
have induced him to practise meannesses and subterfuges. One
remarkable instance of this nature is that of Sir John Hawkins, who
indeed had been hardly used by the caustic pleasantries of George
Steevens. Sir John, in his edition of Johnson, with ingenious malice
contrived to suppress the acknowledgment made by Johnson to Steevens
of his diligence and sagacity, at the close of his preface to
Shakspeare. To preserve the panegyric of Steevens mortified Hawkins
beyond endurance; yet, to suppress it openly, his character as an
editor did not permit. In this dilemma he pretended he reprinted the
preface from the edition of 1765; which, as it appeared before
Johnson's acquaintance with Steevens, could not contain the tender
passage. However, this was unluckily discovered to be only a
subterfuge, to get rid of the offensive panegyric. On examination, it
proved not true; Hawkins did not reprint from this early edition, but
from the latest, for all the corrections are inserted in his own. "If
Sir John were to be tried at Hicks's Hall (long the seat of that
justice's glory), he would be found guilty of _clipping_," archly
remarks the periodical critic.
A fierce controversial author may become a dangerous neighbour to
another author: a petulant fellow, who does not write, may be a
pestilent one; but he who prints a book against us may disturb our
life in endless anxieties. There was once a dean who actually teased
to death his bishop, wore him out in journeys to London, and at length
drained all his faculties--by a literary quarrel from personal
motives.
Dr. THOMAS PIERCE, Dean of Sarum--a perpetual controversialist, and to
whom it was dangerous to refuse a request, lest it might raise a
controversy--wanted a prebend of Dr. WARD, Bishop of Salisbury, for
his son Robert. He was refused; and now, studying revenge, he opened a
controversy with the bishop, maintaining that the king had the right
of bestowing all dignities in all cathedrals in the kingdom, and not
the bishops. This required a reply from the bishop, who had been
formerly an active controversialist himself. Dean Pierce renewed his
attack with a folio volume, entitled "A Vindication of the King's
Sovereign Right, &c.," 1683.--Thus it proceeded, and the web thickened
around the bishop in replies and rejoinders. It cost him many tedious
journeys to London, through bad roads, fretting at "the King's
Sovereign Right" all the way; and, in the words of a witness, "in
unseasonable times and weather, that by degrees his spirits were
exhausted, his memory quite gone, and he was totally unfitted for
business."[431] Such was the fatal disturbance occasioned by Dean
Pierce's folio of "The King's Sovereign Right," and his son Bob being
left without a prebend!
I shall close this article with a very ludicrous instance of a
literary quarrel from personal motives. This piece of secret history
had been certainly lost, had not Bishop Lowth condescended to preserve
it, considering it as necessary to assign a sufficient reason for the
extraordinary libel it produced.
Bohun, an antiquarian lawyer, in a work entitled "The English Lawyer,"
in 1732, in illustrating the origin of the Act of _Scandalum
Magnatum_, which arose in the time of William of Wykeham, the
chancellor and bishop of Edward III. and the founder of New College,
in Oxford; took that opportunity of committing the very crime on the
venerable manes of Wykeham himself. He has painted this great man in
the darkest colours. Wykeham is charged with having introduced "Alice
Piers, his niece or," &c., for the truth is he was uncertain who she
was, to use his peculiar language, "into the king's bosom;" to have
joined her in excluding the Black Prince from all power in the state;
and he hints at this hero having been poisoned by them; of Wykeham's
embezzling a million of the public money, and, when chancellor, of
forging an Act of Parliament to indemnify himself, and thus passing
his own pardon. It is a singularity in this libellous romance, that
the contrary of all this only is true. But Bohun has so artfully
interwoven his historical patches of misrepresentations, surmises, and
fictions, that he succeeded in framing an historical libel.
Not satisfied with this vile tissue, in his own obscure volume, seven
years afterwards, being the editor of a work of high reputation,
Nathaniel Bacon's "Historical and Political Discourse of the Laws and
Government of England," he further satiated his frenzy by contriving
to preserve his libel in a work which he was aware would outlive his
own.
Whence all this persevering malignity? Why this quarrel of Mr. Bohun,
of the Middle Temple, with the long-departed William of Wykeham?
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?
He took all these obscure pains, and was moved with this perpetual
rancour against William of Wykeham, merely to mortify the Wykehamists;
and slandered their founder, with the idea that the odium might be
reflected on New College. Bohun, it seems, had a quarrel with them
concerning a lease on which he had advanced money; but the holder had
contrived to assign it to the well-known Eustace Budgell: the college
confirmed the assignment. At an interview before the warden, high
words had arisen between the parties: the warden withdrew, and the wit
gradually shoved the antiquary off the end of the bench on which they
were sitting: a blow was struck, and a cane broken. Bohun brought an
action, and the Wykehamites travelled down to give bail at Westminster
Hall, where the legal quarrel was dropped, and the literary one then
began. Who could have imagined that the venerable bishop and
chancellor of Edward III. was to be involved in a wretched squabble
about a lease with an antiquary and a wit? "Fancying," says Bishop
Lowth, "he could inflict on the Society of New College a blow which
would affect them more sensibly by wounding the reputation of their
founder, he set himself to collect everything he could meet with that
was capable of being represented to his discredit, and to improve it
with new and horrible calumnies of his own invention." Thus originated
this defamatory attack on the character of William of Wykeham! And by
arts which active writers may practise, and innocent readers cannot
easily suspect, a work of the highest reputation, like that of
Nathaniel Bacon's, may be converted into a vehicle of personal
malignity, while the author himself disguises his real purpose under
the specious appearance of literature! The present case, it must be
acknowledged, is peculiar, where a dead person was attacked with a
spirit of rancour to which the living only appear subject; but the
author was an antiquary, who lived as much with the dead as the
living: his personal motive was the same as those already recorded,
and here he was acting with a double force on the dead and the
living!
But here I stop my hand, my list would else be too complete.
Great names are omitted--Whitaker and Gibbon;[432] Pope and Lord
Hervey;[433] Wood and South;[434] Rowe, Mores, and Ames;[435] and
George Steevens and Gough.[436]
This chapter is not honourable to authors; but historians are only
Lord Chief Justices, who must execute the laws, even on their intimate
friends, when standing at the bar. The chapter is not honourable--but
it may be useful; and that is a quality not less valuable to the
public. It lets in their readers to a kind of knowledge, which opens a
necessary comment on certain works, and enlarges our comprehension of
their spirit.
If in the heat of controversy authors imprudently attack each other
with personalities, they are only scattering mud and hurling stones,
and will incur the ridicule or the contempt of those who, unfriendly
to the literary character, feel a secret pleasure in its degradation;
but let them learn, that to open a literary controversy from mere
personal motives; thus to conceal the dagger of private hatred under
the mantle of literature, is an expedient of short duration, for the
secret history is handed down with the book; and when once the dignity
of the author's character sinks in the meanness of his motives,
powerful as the work may be, even Genius finds its lustre diminished,
and Truth itself becomes suspicious.