As we saunter through those famous courts where Dr. Bentley once reigned
supreme we sometimes catch sight of a figure hurrying on its way to
Chapel or Hall which, as it disappears, draws our thoughts
enthusiastically after it. For that man, we are told, has the whole of
Sophocles at his finger-ends; knows Homer by heart; reads Pindar as we
read the _Times_; and spends his life, save for these short excursions
to eat and pray, wholly in the company of the Greeks. It is true that
the infirmities of our education prevent us from appreciating his
emendations as they deserve; his life’s work is a sealed book to us;
none the less, we treasure up the last flicker of his black gown, and
feel as if a bird of Paradise had flashed by us, so bright is his
spirit’s raiment, and in the murk of a November evening we had been
privileged to see it winging its way to roost in fields of amaranth and
beds of moly. Of all men, great scholars are the most mysterious, the
most august. Since it is unlikely that we shall ever be admitted to
their intimacy, or see much more of them than a black gown crossing a
court at dusk, the best we can do is to read their lives—for example,
the _Life of Dr. Bentley_ by Bishop Monk.
There we shall find much that is odd and little that is reassuring. The
greatest of our scholars, the man who read Greek as the most expert of
us read English not merely with an accurate sense of meaning and grammar
but with a sensibility so subtle and widespread that he perceived
relations and suggestions of language which enabled him to fetch up from
oblivion lost lines and inspire new life into the little fragments that
remained, the man who should have been steeped in beauty (if what they
say of the Classics is true) as a honey-pot is ingrained with sweetness
was, on the contrary, the most quarrelsome of mankind.
“I presume that there are not many examples of an individual who has
been a party in six distinct suits before the Court of King’s Bench
within the space of three years”, his biographer remarks; and adds that
Bentley won them all. It is difficult to deny his conclusion that though
Dr. Bentley might have been a first-rate lawyer or a great soldier “such
a display suited any character rather than that of a learned and
dignified clergyman”. Not all these disputes, however, sprung from his
love of literature. The charges against which he had to defend himself
were directed against him as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He
was habitually absent from chapel; his expenditure upon building and
upon his household was excessive; he used the college seal at meetings
which did not consist of the statutable number of sixteen, and so on. In
short, the career of the Master of Trinity was one continuous series of
acts of aggression and defiance, in which Dr. Bentley treated the
Society of Trinity College as a grown man might treat an importunate
rabble of street boys. Did they dare to hint that the staircase at the
Lodge which admitted four persons abreast was quite wide enough?—did
they refuse to sanction his expenditure upon a new one? Meeting them in
the Great Court one evening after chapel he proceeded urbanely to
question them. They refused to budge. Whereupon, with a sudden
alteration of colour and voice, Bentley demanded whether “they had
forgotten his rusty sword?” Mr. Michael Hutchinson and some others, upon
whose backs the weight of that weapon would have first descended,
brought pressure upon their seniors. The bill for £350 was paid and
their preferment secured. But Bentley did not wait for this act of
submission to finish his staircase.
So it went on, year after year. Nor was the arrogance of his behaviour
always justified by the splendour or utility of the objects he had in
view—the creation of the Backs, the erection of an observatory, the
foundation of a laboratory. More trivial desires were gratified with the
same tyranny. Sometimes he wanted coal; sometimes bread and ale; and
then Madame Bentley, sending her servant with a snuff-box in token of
authority, got from the butteries at the expense of the college a great
deal more of these commodities than the college thought that Dr. Bentley
ought to require. Again, when he had four pupils to lodge with him who
paid him handsomely for their board, it was drawn from the College, at
the command of the snuff-box, for nothing. The principles of “delicacy
and good feeling” which the Master might have been expected to observe
(great scholar as he was, steeped in the wine of the classics) went for
nothing. His argument that the “few College loaves” upon which the four
young patricians were nourished were amply repaid by the three sash
windows which he had put into their rooms at his own expense failed to
convince the Fellows. And when, on Trinity Sunday 1719, the Fellows
found the famous College ale not to their liking, they were scarcely
satisfied when the butler told them that it had been brewed by the
Master’s orders, from the Master’s malt, which was stored in the
Master’s granary, and though damaged by “an insect called the weevil”
had been paid for at the very high rates which the Master demanded.
Still these battles over bread and beer are trifles and domestic trifles
at that. His conduct in his profession will throw more light upon our
inquiry. For, released from brick and building, bread and beer,
patricians and their windows, it may be found that he expanded in the
atmosphere of Homer, Horace, and Manilius, and proved in his study the
benign nature of those influences which have been wafted down to us
through the ages. But there the evidence is even less to the credit of
the dead languages. He acquitted himself magnificently, all agree, in
the great controversy about the letters of Phalaris. His temper was
excellent and his learning prodigious. But that triumph was succeeded by
a series of disputes which force upon us the extraordinary spectacle of
men of learning and genius, of authority and divinity, brawling about
Greek and Latin texts, and calling each other names for all the world
like bookies on a racecourse or washerwomen in a back street. For this
vehemence of temper and virulence of language were not confined to
Bentley alone; they appear unhappily characteristic of the profession as
a whole. Early in life, in the year 1691, a quarrel was fastened upon
him by his brother chaplain Hody for writing Malelas, not as Hody
preferred, Malela. A controversy in which Bentley displayed learning and
wit, and Hody accumulated endless pages of bitter argument against the
letter _s_ ensued. Hody was worsted, and “there is too much reason to
believe, that the offence given by this trivial cause was never
afterwards healed”. Indeed, to mend a line was to break a friendship.
James Gronovius of Leyden—“homunculus eruditione mediocri, ingenio
nullo”, as Bentley called him—attacked Bentley for ten years because
Bentley had succeeded in correcting a fragment of Callimachus where he
had failed.
But Gronovius was by no means the only scholar who resented the success
of a rival with a rancour that grey hairs and forty years spent in
editing the classics failed to subdue. In all the chief towns of Europe
lived men like the notorious de Pauw of Utrecht, “a person who has
justly been considered the pest and disgrace of letters”, who, when a
new theory or new edition appeared, banded themselves together to deride
and humiliate the scholar. . . all his writings. Bishop Monk remarks of
de Pauw, “prove him to be devoid of candour, good faith, good manners,
and every gentlemanly feeling: and while he unites all the defects and
bad qualities that were ever found in a critic or commentator, he adds
one peculiar to himself, an incessant propensity to indecent allusions.”
With such tempers and such habits it is not strange that the scholars of
those days sometimes ended lives made intolerable by bitterness,
poverty, and neglect by their own hands, like Johnson, who after a
lifetime spent in the detection of minute errors of construction, went
mad and drowned himself in the meadows near Nottingham. On May 20, 1712,
Trinity College was shocked to find that the professor of Hebrew, Dr.
Sike, had hanged himself “some time this evening, before candlelight, in
his sash”. When Kuster died, it was reported that he, too, had killed
himself. And so, in a sense, he had. For when his body was opened “there
was found a cake of sand along the lower region of his belly. This, I
take it, was occasioned by his sitting nearly double, and writing on a
very low table, surrounded with three or four circles of books placed on
the ground, which was the situation we usually found him in.” The minds
of poor schoolmasters, like John Ker of the dissenting Academy, who had
had the high gratification of dining with Dr. Bentley at the Lodge, when
the talk fell upon the use of the word _equidem_, were so distorted by a
lifetime of neglect and study that they went home, collected all uses of
the word _equidem_ which contradicted the Doctor’s opinion, returned to
the Lodge, anticipating in their simplicity a warm welcome, met the
Doctor issuing to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed him
down the street in spite of his indifference and annoyance, and, being
refused even a word of farewell, went home to brood over their injuries
and wait the day of revenge.
But the bickerings and animosities of the smaller fry were magnified,
not obliterated, by the Doctor himself in the conduct of his own
affairs. The courtesy and good temper which he had shown in his early
controversies had worn away. “. . . a course of violent animosities and
the indulgence of unrestrained indignation for many years had impaired
both his taste and judgement in controversy”, and he condescended,
though the subject in dispute was the Greek Testament, to call his
antagonist “maggot”, “vermin”, “gnawing rat”, and “cabbage head”, to
refer to the darkness of his complexion, and to insinuate that his wits
were crazed, which charge he supported by dwelling on the fact that his
brother, a clergyman, wore a beard to his girdle.
Violent, pugnacious, and unscrupulous. Dr. Bentley survived these storms
and agitations, and remained, though suspended from his degrees and
deprived of his mastership, seated at the Lodge imperturbably. Wearing a
broad-brimmed hat indoors to protect his eyes, smoking his pipe,
enjoying his port, and expounding to his friends his doctrine of the
digamma, Bentley lived those eighty years which, he said, were long
enough “to read everything which was worth reading”, “Et tunc”, he
added, in his peculiar manner.
Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago.
A small square stone marked his grave in Trinity College, but the
Fellows refused to record upon it the fact that he had been their
Master.
But the strangest sentence in this strange story has yet to be written,
and Bishop Monk writes it as if it were a commonplace requiring no
comment. “For a person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical
taste to venture upon such a task was no common presumption.” The task
was to detect every slip of language in _Paradise Lost_, and all
instances of bad taste and incorrect imagery. The result was notoriously
lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ from those in which
Bentley was held to have acquitted himself magnificently? And if Bentley
was incapable of appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we accept
his verdict upon Horace and Homer? And if we cannot trust implicitly to
scholars, and if the study of Greek is supposed to refine the manners
and purify the soul—but enough. Our scholar has returned from Hall; his
lamp is lit; his studies are resumed; and it is time that our profane
speculations should have an end. Besides, all this happened many, many
years ago.