AKENSIDE.
There were two Akensides--Akenside the poet, and Akenside the man; and
of the _man_ Akenside there were numerous subdivisions. Remarkable as
a poet, he was even yet more noteworthy a private individual in his
extreme inconsistency. No character is more commonplace than the one
to which is ordinarily applied the word contradictory; but Akenside
was a curiosity from the extravagance in which this form of "the
commonplace" exhibited itself in his disposition and manners.
By turns he was placid, irritable, simple, affected, gracious,
haughty, magnanimous, mean, benevolent, harsh, and sometimes even
brutal. At times he was marked by a childlike docility, and at other
times his vanity and arrogance displayed him almost as a madman. Of
plebeian extraction, he was ashamed of his origin, and yet was
throughout life the champion of popular interests. Of his real
humanity there can be no doubt, and yet in his demeanour to the
unfortunate creatures whom, in his capacity of a hospital-physician,
he had to attend, he was always supercilious, and often cruel.
Like Byron, he was lame, one of his legs being shorter than the other;
and of this personal disfigurement he was even more sensitive than was
the author of "Childe Harold" of his deformity. When his eye fell on
it he would blush, for it reminded him of the ignoble condition in
which he was born. His father was a butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne;
and one of his cleavers, falling from the shop-block, had irremediably
injured the poet's foot, when he was still a little child.
Akenside was not only the son of a butcher--but, worse still, a
Nonconformist butcher; and from an early period of his life he was
destined to be a sectarian minister. In his nineteenth year he was
sent to Edinburgh to prosecute his theological studies, the expenses
of this educational course being in part defrayed by the Dissenters'
Society. But he speedily discovered that he had made a wrong start,
and persuaded his father to refund the money the Society had advanced,
and to be himself at the cost of educating him as a physician. The
honest tradesman was a liberal and affectionate parent. Mark remained
three years at Edinburgh, a member of the Medical Society, and an
industrious student. On leaving Edinburgh he practised for a short
time as a surgeon at Newcastle; after which he went to Leyden, and
having spent three months in that university took his degree of doctor
of physic, May 16, 1744. At Leyden he became warmly attached to a
fellow-student named Dyson; and wonderful to be related, the two
friends, notwithstanding one was under heavy pecuniary obligations to
the other, and they were very unlike each other in some of their
principal characteristics, played the part of Pylades and Orestes,
even into the Valley of Death. Akenside was poor, ardent, and of a
nervous, poetic temperament. Dyson was rich, sober, and
matter-of-fact, a prudent place-holder. He rose to be clerk of the
House of Commons, and a Lord of the Treasury; but the atmosphere of
political circles and the excitement of public life never caused his
heart to forget its early attachment. Whilst the poet lived Dyson was
his munificent patron, and when death had stepped in between them, his
literary executor. Indeed, he allowed him for years no less a sum than
£300 per annum.
Akenside was never very successful as a physician, although he
thoroughly understood his profession, and in some important
particulars advanced its science. Dyson introduced him into good
society, and recommended him to all his friends; but the greatest
income Akenside ever made was most probably less than what he obtained
from his friend's generosity. Still, he must have earned something,
for he managed to keep a carriage and pair of horses; and £300 per
annum, although a hundred years ago that sum went nearly twice as far
as it would now, could not have supported the equipage. His want of
patients can easily be accounted for. He was a vain, tempestuous,
crotchety little man, little qualified to override the prejudices
which vulgar and ignorant people cherish against lawyers and
physicians who have capacity and energy enough to distinguish
themselves in any way out of the ordinary track of their professional
duties.
He was admitted, by mandamus, to a doctor's degree at Cambridge; and
became a fellow of the Royal Society, and a fellow of the Royal
College of Physicians. He tried his luck at Northampton, and found he
was not needed there; he became an inhabitant of Hampstead, but failed
to ingratiate himself with the opulent gentry who in those days
resided in that suburb; and lastly fixed himself in Bloomsbury Square
(ætat. 27), where he resided till his death. After some delay, he
became a physician of St. Thomas's Hospital, and an assistant
physician of Christ's Hospital--read the Gulstonian Lectures before
the College of Physicians, in 1755--and was also Krohnian Lecturer. In
speeches and papers to learned societies, and to various medical
treatises, amongst which may be mentioned his "De Dysentariâ
Commentarius," he tried to wheedle himself into practice. But his
efforts were of no avail. Sir John Hawkins, in his absurd Life of Dr.
Johnson, tells a good story of Saxby's rudeness to the author of the
"Pleasures of Imagination." Saxby was a custom-house clerk, and made
himself liked in society by saying the rude things which other people
had the benevolence to feel, but lacked the hardihood to utter. One
evening, at a party, Akenside argued, with much warmth and more
tediousness, that physicians were better and wiser men than the world
ordinarily thought.
"Doctor," said Saxby, "after all you have said, my opinion of the
profession is this: the ancients endeavoured to make it a science, and
failed; and the moderns to make it a trade, and succeeded."
He was not liked at St. Thomas's Hospital. The gentle Lettsom, whose
mild poetic nature had surrounded the author of "The Pleasures of
Imagination" with a halo of romantic interest, when he entered himself
a student of that school, was shocked at finding the idol of his
admiration so irritable and unkindly a man. He was, according to
Lettsom's reminiscences, thin and pale, and of a strumous countenance.
His injured leg was lengthened by a false heel. In dress he was
scrupulously neat and delicate, always having on his head a
well-powdered white wig, and by his side a long sword. Any want of
respect to him threw him into a fit of anger. One amongst the students
who accompanied him on a certain occasion round the wards spat on the
floor behind the physician. Akenside turned sharply on his heel, and
demanded who it was that dared to spit in his face. To the poor women
who applied to him for medical advice he exhibited his dislike in the
most offensive and cruel manner. The students who watched him closely,
and knew the severe disappointment his affections had suffered in
early life, whispered to the novice that the poet-physician's
moroseness to his female patients was a consequence of his having felt
the goads of despised love. The fastidiousness of the little fellow at
having to come so closely in contact with the vulgar rabble, induced
him sometimes to make the stronger patients precede him with brooms
and clear a way for him through the crowd of diseased wretches. Bravo,
my butcher's boy! This story of Akenside and his lictors, pushing back
the unsightly mob of lepers, ought to be read side by side with that
of the proud Duke of Somerset, who, when on a journey, used to send
outriders before him to clear the roads, and prevent vulgar eyes from
looking at him.
On one occasion Akenside ordered an unfortunate male patient of St.
Thomas's to take boluses of bark. The poor fellow complained that he
could not swallow them. Akenside was so incensed at the man's
presuming to have an opinion on the subject, that he ordered him to be
turned out of the hospital, saying, "He shall not die under my care."
A man who would treat his _poor_ patients in this way did not deserve
to have any _rich_ ones. These excesses of folly and brutality,
however, ere long reached the ears of honest Richard Chester, one of
the governors, and that good fellow gave the doctor a good scolding,
roundly telling him, "Know, thou art a servant of this charity."
Akenside's self-love received a more humorous stab than the poke
administered by Richard Chester's blunt cudgel, from Mr. Baker, one of
the surgeons at St. Thomas's. To appreciate the full force of the
story, the reader must recollect that the jealousy, which still exists
between the two branches of the medical profession, was a century
since so violent that even considerations of interest failed in some
cases to induce eminent surgeons and physicians to act together. One
of Baker's sons was the victim of epilepsy, and frequent fits had
impaired his faculties. Baker was naturally acutely sensitive of his
child's misfortune, and when Akenside had the bad taste to ask to what
study the afflicted lad intended to apply, the father answered, "I
find he is not capable of making a surgeon, so I have sent him to
Edinburgh to make a physician of him." Akenside felt this sarcasm so
much, that he for a long time afterward refused to hold any
intercourse with Baker.
But Akenside had many excuses for his irritability. He was very
ambitious, and failed to achieve that success which the possession of
great powers warranted him in regarding as his due. It was said of
Garth that no physician understood his art more, or his trade less!
and this, as Mr. Bucke, in his beautiful "Life of Arkenside," remarks,
was equally true of the doctor of St. Thomas's. He had a thirst for
human praise and worldly success, and a temperament that caused him,
notwithstanding all his sarcasms against love, to estimate at their
full worth the joys of married life; yet he lived all his days a poor
man, and died a bachelor. Other griefs also contributed to sour his
temper. His lot was cast in times that could not justly appreciate his
literary excellences. His sincere admiration of classic literature and
art and manners was regarded by the coarse herd of rich and stupid
Londoners as so perfectly ridiculous, that when Smollett had the bad
taste to introduce him into _Peregrine Pickle_, as the physician who
gives a dinner after the manner of the ancients, the applause was
general, and every city tradesman, with scholarship enough to read the
novel, had a laugh at the expense of a man who has some claims to be
regarded as the greatest literary genius of his time. The polished and
refined circles of English life paid homage to his genius, but even in
them he failed to meet with the cordial recognition he deserved.
Johnson, though he placed him above Gray and Mason, did not do him
justice. Boswell didn't see much in him. Horace Walpole differed from
the friend who asked him to admire the "Pleasures of Imagination."
The poets and wits of his own time had a high respect for his critical
opinion, and admitted the excellence of his poetry--but almost
invariably with some qualification. And Akenside was one who thirsted
for the complete assent of the applauding world. He died after a brief
illness in his forty-ninth year, on the 23rd of June, 1770; and we
doubt not, when the Angel of Death touched him, the heart that ceased
to beat was one that had known much sorrow.
Akenside's poetical career was one of unfulfilled promise. At the age
of twenty-three he had written "The Pleasures of the Imagination."
Pope was so struck with the merits of the poem, that when Dodsley
consulted him about the price set on it by the author (£120), he told
him to make no niggardly offer, for it was the work of no every-day
writer. But he never produced another great work. Impressed with the
imperfections of his achievement, he occupied himself with incessantly
touching and re-touching it up, till he came to the unwise
determination of re-writing it. He did not live to accomplish this
suicidal task; but the portion of it which came to the public was
inferior to the original poem, both in power and art.