When Clarendon's _History_ was at last made public, no part of it
was more frequently discussed, or more highly praised, than its
characters--'so just', said Evelyn, 'and tempered without the least
ingredient of passion or tincture of revenge, yet with such natural
and lively touches as show his lordship well knew not only the
persons' outsides, but their very interiors.'[1] About the same time,
and probably as a consequence of the publication of Clarendon's work,
Bishop Burnet proceeded to put into its final form the _History_ on
which he had been engaged since 1683. He gave special attention to his
characters, some of which he entirely rewrote. They at once invited
comparison with Clarendon's, and first impressions, then as now, were
not in their favour. 'His characters are miserably wrought,' said
Swift.[2]
Burnet was in close touch with the political movements of his time.
'For above thirty years,' he wrote, 'I have lived in such intimacy
with all who have had the chief conduct of affairs, and have been so
much trusted, and on so many important occasions employed by them,
that I have been able to penetrate far into the true secrets of
counsels and designs.'[3] He had a retentive memory, and a full share
of worldly wisdom. But he was not an artist like Clarendon. His style
has none of the sustained dignity, the leisurely evolution, which in
Clarendon is so strangely at variance with the speed of composition.
All is stated, nothing suggested. There is a succession of short
sentences, each perfectly clear in itself, often unlinked to what
precedes or follows, and always without any of the finer shades of
meaning. It is rough work, and on the face of it hasty, and so it
would have remained, no matter how often it had been revised. Again,
Burnet does not always have perfect control of the impression he
wishes to convey. It is as if he did not have the whole character in
his mind before he began to write, but collected his thoughts from
the stores of his memory in the process of composition. We are often
uncertain how to understand a character before we have read it all. In
some cases he seems to be content to present us with the material from
which, once we have pieced it together ourselves, we can form our own
judgement. But what he tells us has been vividly felt by him, and is
vividly presented. The great merit of his characters lies in their
realism. Of the Earl of Lauderdale he says that 'He made a very ill
appearance: He was very big: His hair red, hanging oddly about him:
His tongue was too big for his mouth, which made him bedew all that
he talked to.' There is no hint of this in Clarendon's character of
Lauderdale, nor could Clarendon have spoken with the same directness.
Burnet has no circumlocutions, just as in private life he was
not known to indulge in them. When he reports what was said in
conversation he gives the very words. Lauderdale 'was a man, as the
Duke of Buckingham called him to me, of a blundering understanding'.
Halifax 'hoped that God would not lay it to his charge, if he could
not digest iron, as an ostrich did, nor take into his belief things
that must burst him'. It is the directness and actuality of such
things as these, and above all his habit of describing men in relation
to himself, that make his best characters so vivid. Burnet is seldom
in the background. He allows us to suspect that it is not the man
himself whom he presents to us but the man as he knew him, though
he would not have admitted the distinction. He could not imitate the
detachment of Clarendon, who is always deliberately impersonal, and
writes as if he were pronouncing the impartial judgement of history
from which there can be no appeal. Burnet views his men from a much
nearer distance. His perspective may sometimes be at fault, but he
gets the detail.
With all his shrewd observation, it must be admitted that his range of
comprehension was limited. There were no types of character too subtle
for Clarendon to understand. There were some which eluded Burnet's
grasp. He is at his best in describing such a man as Lauderdale, where
the roughness of the style is in perfect keeping with the subject.
His character of Shaftesbury, whom he says he knew for many years in a
very particular manner, is a valuable study and a remarkable companion
piece to Dryden's _Achitophel_. But he did not understand Halifax. The
surface levity misled him. He tells us unsuspectingly as much about
himself as about Halifax. He tells us that the Trimmer could never be
quite serious in the good bishop's company.
We learn more about Halifax from his own elaborate study of Charles
II. It is a prolonged analysis by a man of clear vision, and perfect
balance of judgement, and no prepossessions; who was, moreover, master
of the easy pellucid style that tends to maxim and epigram. A more
impartial and convincing estimate of any king need never be expected.
In method and purpose, it stands by itself. It is indeed not so
much a character in the accepted sense of the word as a scientific
investigation of a personality. Others try to make us see and
understand their men; Halifax anatomizes. Yet he occasionally permits
us to discover his own feelings. Nothing disappointed him more in the
merry monarch than the company he kept, and his comprehensive taste in
wit. 'Of all men that ever _liked_ those who _had wit_, he could the
best _endure_ those who had _none_': there is more here than is on the
surface; we see at once Charles, and his court, and Halifax himself.
As a class, the statesmen and politicians more than hold their
own with the other character writers of the seventeenth century.
Shaftesbury's picture of Henry Hastings, a country gentleman of the
old school, who carried well into the Stuart period the habits and
life of Tudor times, shows a side of his varied accomplishments which
has not won the general recognition that it deserves. It is a sketch
exactly in the style of the eighteenth century essayists. It makes us
regret that the fragmentary autobiography in which it is found did not
come down to a time when it could have included sketches of his famous
contemporaries. The literary skill of his grandson, the author of the
_Characteristicks_, was evidently inherited.
Sir Philip Warwick has the misfortune to be overshadowed by Clarendon.
As secretary to Charles I in the year before his execution, and as
a minor government official under Charles II, he was well acquainted
with men and affairs. Burnet describes him as 'an honest but a weak
man', and adds that 'though he pretended to wit and politics, he was
not cut out for that, and least of all for writing of history'. He
could at least write characters. They do not bear the impress of a
strong personality, but they have the fairmindedness and the calm
outlook that spring from a gentle and unassertive nature. His Cromwell
and his Laud are alike greatly to his credit; and the private view
that he gives us of Charles has unmistakable value. His _Mémoires_
remained in manuscript till 1701, the year before the publication of
Clarendon's _History_. It was the first book to appear with notable
characters of the men of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate.
The Histories and Memoirs of the seventeenth century contain by far
the greatest number of its characters; but they are to be found also
in scattered Lives, and in the collections of material that mark the
rise of modern English biography. There are disappointingly few by
Fuller. In his _Worthies of England_ he is mainly concerned with the
facts of a man's life, and though, in his own word, he fleshes the
bare skeleton of time, place, and person with pleasant passages,
and interlaces many delightful stories by way of illustrations, and
everywhere holds us by the quaint turns of his fertile fancy, yet the
scheme of the book did not involve the depicting of character, nor did
it allow him to deal with many contemporaries whom he had known. In
the present volume it has therefore been found best to represent him
by the studies of Bacon and Laud in his _Church-History_. Bacon he
must have described largely from hearsay, but what he says of Laud is
an admirable specimen of his manner, and leaves us wishing that he had
devoted himself in larger measure to the worthies of his own time.
There are no characters in Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, which are only a
series of rough jottings by a prince of gossips, who collected what
he could and put it all on paper 'tumultuarily'. But the extracts from
what he says of Hobbes and Milton may be considered as notes for a
character, details that awaited a greater artist than Aubrey was to
work them into a picture; and if Hobbes and Milton are to be given a
place, as somehow or other they must be, in a collection of the kind
that this volume offers, there is no option but to be content with
such notes, for there is no set character of either of them. The value
of the facts which Aubrey has preserved is shown by the use made of
them by all subsequent biographers, and notably by Anthony à Wood,
whose _Athenæ Oxonienses_ is our first great biographical dictionary.
Lives of English men of letters begin in the seventeenth century,
and from Rawley's _Life of Bacon_, Sprat's _Life of Cowley_, and the
anonymous _Life of Fuller_ it is possible to extract passages which
are in effect characters. But Walton's _Lives_, the best of all
seventeenth century Lives, refuse to yield any section, for each of
them is all of a piece; they are from beginning to end continuous
character studies, revealing qualities of head and heart in their
affectionate record of fact and circumstance. There is therefore
nothing in this volume from his _Life of Donne_ or his _Life of
Herbert_. As a rule the characters that can be extracted from Lives
are much inferior to the clearly defined characters that are inserted
in Histories. The focus is not the same. When an author after dealing
with a man's career sums up his mental and moral qualities in a
section by itself, he does not trust to it alone to convey the total
impression. He is too liable also to panegyric, like Rawley, who could
see no fault in his master Bacon, or Sprat who, in Johnson's words,
produced a funeral oration on Cowley. There are no characters
of scholars or poets so good as Clarendon's Hales, or Earle, or
Chillingworth, or Waller; and for this reason, that Clarendon
envisages them, not as scholars or poets but as men, and gains a
definite and complete effect within small compass.
Roger North made his life of his brother Lord Keeper Guilford an
account of the bench and bar under Charles II and James II. Of its
many sketches of lawyers whom he or his brother had known, none is
so perfect in every way as the character of Chief Justice Saunders, a
remarkable man in real life who still lives in North's pages with
all his eccentricities. North writes at length about his brother,
yet nowhere do we see and understand him so clearly as we see and
understand Saunders. The truth is that a life and a character have
different objects and methods and do not readily combine. It is only
a small admixture of biography that a character will endure. And with
the steady development of biography the character declined.
A character must be short; and it must be entire, the complete
expression of a clear judgement. The perfect model is provided
by Clarendon. He has more than formal excellence. 'Motives', said
Johnson, 'are generally unknown. We cannot trust to the characters
we find in history, unless when they are drawn by those who knew the
persons; as those, for instance, by Sallust and by Lord Clarendon.'[4]
[Footnote 1: Letter to Pepys, January 20, 1703; Pepys's _Diary_, ed.
Braybrooke, 1825, vol. ii, p. 290.]
[Footnote 2: 'Short Remarks on Bishop Burnet's _History_,' _ad init._]
[Footnote 3: _History_, preface]
[Footnote 4: Boswell, 1769, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. ii, p. 79.]
* * * * *
Sooner or later every one who deals with the history or literature
of the seventeenth century has to own his obligations to Professor
C.H. Firth. My debt is not confined to his writings, references to
which will be found continually in the notes. At every stage of
the preparation of this volume I have had the advantage of his most
generous interest. And with his name it is a pleasure to associate in
one compendious acknowledgement the names of Dr. Henry Bradley and Mr.
Percy Simpson.
Oxford,
September 16, 1918.
D.N.S.
1.