ECCENTRIC PERSONS, WHY APPARENTLY MORE COMMON IN ENGLAND THAN IN OTHER
COUNTRIES. HARRY BINGLEY.
Blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.
HAMLET.
There is a reason why eccentricity of character seems to be much more
frequent in England than in other countries.—
Here some reflective reader, methinks, interrupts me with—“seems, good
Author?”
“Aye, and it is!”
Have patience good reader, and hear me to the end! There is a reason
why it seems so; and the reason is, because all such eccentricities
are recorded here in newspapers and magazines, so that none of them
are lost; anti the most remarkable are brought forward from time to
time, in popular compilations. A collection of what is called
Eccentric Biography is to form a portion of Mr. Murray's Family
Library.
But eccentric characters probably are more frequent among us than
among most other nations; and for this there are two causes. The first
is to be found in that spirit of independence upon which the English
pride themselves, and which produces a sort of Drawcansir-like bravery
in men who are eccentrically inclined. It becomes a perverse sort of
pleasure in them to act preposterously, for the sake of showing that
they have a right to do as they please, and the courage to exercise
that right, let the rest of the world think what it will of their
conduct.
The other reason is that mad-houses very insufficiently supply the
place of convents, and very ill also. It might almost be questioned
whether convents do not well nigh make amends to humanity for their
manifold mischiefs and abominations, by the relief which they afford
as asylums for insanity, in so many of its forms and gradations. They
afford a cure also in many of its stages, and precisely upon the same
principle on which the treatment in mad-houses is founded: but oh! how
differently is that principle applied! That passive obedience to
anothers will which in the one case is exacted by authority acting
through fear, and oftentimes enforced by no scrupulous or tender
means, is in the other required as a religious duty—an act of
virtue,—a voluntary and accepted sacrifice,—a good work which will be
carried to the patient's account in the world to come. They who enter
a convent are to have no will of their own there; they renounce it
solemnly upon their admission; and when this abnegation is sincerely
made, the chief mental cause of insanity is removed. For assuredly in
most cases madness is more frequently a disease of the will than of
the intellect. When Diabolus appeared before the town of Mansoul, and
made his oration to the citizens at Ear-Gate, Lord Will-be-will was
one of the first that was for consenting to his words, and letting him
into the town.
We have no such asylums in which madness and fatuity receive every
possible alleviation, while they are at the same time subjected to the
continual restraint which their condition requires. They are wanted
also for repentant sinners, who when they are awakened to a sense of
their folly and their guilt, and their danger, would fain find a place
of religious retirement, wherein they might pass the remainder of
their days in preparing for death. Lord Goring, the most profligate
man of his age, who by his profligacy, as much as by his frequent
misconduct, rendered irreparable injury to the cause which he intended
to serve, retired to Spain after the ruin of that cause, and there
ended his days as a Dominican Friar. If there be any record of him in
the Chronicles of the Order, the account ought to be curious at least,
if not edifying. But it is rather (for his own sake) to be hoped than
supposed that he did not hate and despise the follies and the frauds
of the fraternity into which he had entered more heartily than the
pomps and vanities of the world which he had left.
On the other hand wherever convents are among the institutions of the
land, not to speak of those poor creatures who are thrust into them
against their will, or with only a mockery of freedom in the
choice,—it must often happen that persons enter them in some fit of
disappointment, or resentment, or grief, and find themselves when the
first bitterness of passion is past, imprisoned for life by their own
rash but irremediable act and deed. The woman, who when untoward
circumstances have prevented her from marrying the man she loves,
marries one for whom she has no affection, is more likely (poor as her
chance is) to find contentment and perhaps happiness, than if for the
same cause she had thrown herself into a nunnery. Yet this latter is
the course to which if she were a Roman Catholic, her thoughts would
perhaps preferably at first have turned, and to which they would
probably be directed by her confessor.
Men who are weary of the ways of the world, or disgusted with them,
have more licence, as well as more resources than women. If they do
not enter upon some dangerous path of duty, or commence wanderers,
they may chuse for themselves an eccentric path, in which if their
habits are not such as expose them to insult, or if their means are
sufficient to secure them against it, they are not likely to be
molested,—provided they have no relations whose interest it may be to
apply for a statute of lunacy against them.
A gentleman of this description, well known in London towards the
close of George the Second's reign by the name of Harry Bingley, came
in the days of Dr. Dove to reside upon his estate in the parish of
Bolton upon Derne, near Doncaster. He had figured as an orator and
politician in coffee houses at the west end of the town, and enjoyed
the sort of notoriety which it was then his ambition to obtain; but
discovering with the Preacher that this was vanity and vexation of
spirit, when it was either too late for him to enter upon domestic
life, or his habits had unfitted him for it, he retired to his estate
which with the house upon it he had let to a farmer; in that house he
occupied two rooms, and there indulged his humour as he had done in
London, though it had now taken a very different direction.
“Cousin-german to Idleness,” says Burton, is “_nimia solitudo_, too
much solitariness. Divers are cast upon this rock for want of means;
or out of a strong apprehension of some infirmity, disgrace, or
through bashfulness, rudeness, simplicity, they cannot apply
themselves to others company. _Nullum solum infelici gratius
solitudine, ubi nullus sit qui miseriam exprobret._ This enforced
solitariness takes place and produceth his effect soonest in such as
have spent their time, jovially peradventure, in all honest
recreations, in good company, in some great family, or populous city;
and are upon a sudden confined to a desert country cottage far off,
restrained of their liberty and barred from their ordinary associates.
Solitariness is very irksome to such, most tedious, and a sudden cause
of great inconvenience.”
The change in Bingley's life was as great and sudden as that which the
Anatomist of Melancholy has here described; but it led to no bodily
disease nor to any tangible malady. His property was worth about
fourteen hundred a year. He kept no servant, and no company; and he
lived upon water-gruel and celery, except at harvest time, when he
regaled himself with sparrow pies, made of the young birds just
fledged, for which he paid the poor inhabitants who caught them two
pence a head. Probably he supposed that it was rendering the
neighbourhood a service thus to rid it of what he considered both a
nuisance and a delicacy. This was his only luxury; and his only
business was to collect about a dozen boys and girls on Sundays, and
hear them say their Catechism, and read a chapter in the New
Testament, for which they received remuneration in the intelligible
form of two pence each, but at the feasts and statutes, “most sweet
guerdon, better than remuneration,” in the shape of sixpence. He stood
godfather for several poor people's children, they were baptized by
his surname; when they were of proper age he used to put them out as
apprentices, and in his will he left each of them an hundred guineas
to be paid when they reached the age of twenty-five if they were
married, but not till they married; and if they reached the age of
fifty without marrying, the legacy was then forfeited. There were two
children for whom he stood godfather, but whose parents did not chuse
that they should be named after him; he never took any notice of these
children, nor did he bequeath them any thing; but to one of the others
he left the greater part of his property.
This man used every week day to lock himself in the church and pace
the aisles for two hours, from ten till twelve o'clock. An author who
in his own peculiar and admirable way, is one of the most affecting
writers of any age or country, has described with characteristic
feeling the different effects produced upon certain minds by entering
an empty or a crowded church. “In the latter,” he says, “it is chance
but some present human frailty,—an act of inattention on the part of
some of the auditory,—or a trait of affectation, or worse vain-glory
on that of the preacher,—puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing
the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of
holiness?—go alone on some week day, borrowing the keys of good master
Sexton; traverse the cool aisles of some country church; think of the
piety that has kneeled there,—-the congregations old and young that
have found consolation there,—the meek pastor,—the docile
parishioners,—with no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting
comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself
become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and
weep around thee!”[1]
[Footnote 1: The Last Essays of Elia.]
Harry Bingley died in lodgings at Rotherham, whither he had removed
when he felt himself ill, that he might save expence by being nearer a
physician. According to his own directions his body was brought back
from thence to the village, and interred in the churchyard; and he
strictly enjoined that no breast-plate, handles or any ornaments
whatever should be affixed to his coffin, nor any gravestone placed to
mark the spot where his remains were deposited.
Would or would not this godfather-general have been happier in a
convent or a hermitage, than he was in thus following his own humour?
It was Dr. Dove's opinion that upon the whole he would; not that a
conventual, and still less an eremital way of life would have been
more rational, but because there would have been a worthier motive for
chusing it; and if not a more reasonable hope, at least a firmer
persuasion that it was the sure way to salvation.
That Harry Bingley's mind had taken a religious turn, appeared by his
chusing the church for his daily place of promenade. Meditation must
have been as much his object as exercise, and of a kind which the
place invited. It appeared also by the sort of Sunday-schooling which
he gave the children, long before Sunday Schools,—whether for good or
evil,—were instituted, or as the phrase is, invented by Robert Raikes
of eccentric memory. (Patrons and Patronesses of Sunday Schools, be
not offended if a doubt concerning their utility be here implied! The
Doctor entertained such a doubt; and the why and the wherefore shall
in due time be fairly stated.) But Bingley certainly came under the
description of a humourist, rather than of a devotee or religious
enthusiast; in fact he bore that character. And the Doctor's knowledge
of human nature led him to conclude that solitary humourists are far
from being happy. You see them, as you see the blind, at their
happiest times, when they have something to divert their thoughts. But
in the humourist's course of life, there is a sort of defiance of the
world and the world's law; indeed any man who departs widely from its
usages, avows this; and it is, as it ought to be, an uneasy and
uncomfortable feeling, wherever it is not sustained by a high state of
excitement; and that state, if it be lasting, becomes madness. Such
persons when left to themselves and to their own reflections, as they
necessarily are for the greater part of their time, must often stand
not only self-arraigned for folly, but self-condemned for it.