a processional
of lives....
HISTORY is important only be-
cause it happens to human be-
ings. OXF. MIGHTY TORRENT is the
drama of four centuries of history
in terms of a living stream of men
and women whose characters reflect
the spirit of their times.
More than a book about biography,
it is an anthology that contains the;
substance of the great biographies, a i
critical history of biography. In it;
we may see Cardinal Wolsey swell-
ing In crimson, or hear John Donne
preaching like an angel from a cloud
in St. Paul's, or hear the elegant!
banter of Walpole and the bluster of
Samuel Johnson.
Emerging to the modern world we
come upon such significant figures as
H. G. Wells, Lawrence, the disillu-
sioned Henry Adams and the genial,
hopeful Lincoln Steffens, They are
essential in a book that attempts to,
set down the chronicle of men in
dynamic relation to world-forces, to
know the very pulse and living fibre
of history.
Edgar Johnson has succeeded in
mingling with these threads of history
.and dramatic character a sensitive
criticism of the art of biographers,
diarists, letter-writers and autobiog-
raphers, His journey takes us from
the distant pinnacles of the 'Renais-
sance to the vibrant reality of the
:' present day. The book, scholarly,
1 original in form and in many of its 1 '
judgments, is bound to become a recj^
uisite item in the library of biog-'j
raphv. ,' . , ^_J
JOHNSON, the author
C> of ONE MIGHT Y TORRENT, was
born in New York City and likes
living there. The publishers suspected
that a writer who commanded a
cavalcade of Kings, Queens, Cardi-
nals, Presidents, martyrs and mystics,
business men and poets, explorers and
politicians, as Mr. Johnson does in
this volume, would be a formidable .
fellow. They found, instead, that he
is a literary scholar who refuses to'
fall into a routine of specialization,,
He enjoys playing poor tennis and 1
bobs around in the cold waters off;
the Maine coast for hours on end.'
He is fanatical about clear definition
of ideas and exact statement. He;
likes Mo/art and Shostakovich, Breu- '
ghel and Van Gogh, Fielding and!
'Dos Passos. He dislikes telephones,'
automobiles, philately and nearly all ;
radio programs. i
Johnson started out to be an archi-
tect, but decided after several years
that he would never be more than 1
a good mediocrity in designing build-
ings. He has lectured on literature
at Columbia and Washington Uni-
versities, and now teaches in the Col-
lege of the City of New York. He
also iecwttts at the New School for
Social 'Research.
In 1931, his first novel, UNWEAVE A
RAINBOW, was published, and critics
fetrad if lyrical, witty, .sensuous and
tfotnanttc. The following year fee
began ONE MIGHTY TORRENT, wtiteh.
his gaged life attention since, He
tots a vary anal Aftfltte^ Judith*
wf bom a ffw fays fte
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
By Edgar Johnson
UNWEAVE A RAINBOW: A SENTIMENTAL FANTASY
THE ANALYSIS OF SATIRE (in preparation)
ONE MIGHTY
TORRENT
THE DRAMA OF BIOGRAPHY
, , h
EDGAR JOHNSON
STACKPOLE SONS
NEW YORK CITY
COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY EDGAR JOHNSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE
RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR
PORTIONS THEREOF, IN ANY FORM
Printed and bound in the United States of America
by The Telegraph Press of Hanisburg, Pennsylvania
. . . a. great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro,
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam .
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent . . .
SHELLEY
To Eleanor
FOREWORD
WHEN John Foxe quoted Cicero's words, 'the witnesse of
truth, the glasse of times,' it was of history that he was writ-
ing. But they are equally appropriate, in a way even more true,
of biography. History is important only because it happens to
human beings; a Genghis Khan of the groundhogs would move
ur> hardly at all, or a Rhodes among the rhododendrons. Fabre
can fascinate us with the social life and engineering skill of ants,
spiders, and bees (humanizing them a little in so doing); but he
would strain our attention if he tried to tell their history for even
a hundred years. Without a living sense of personality suffusing
its framework, the abstractions of history are only half-truths.
Biography never lets us forget that the processes of history clothe
themselves in human lives; it is indeed 'personal history.'
That is why in recent years biography has been so enormously
popular. Biographers portray their living fellows even before
these have reached their middle years; they turn a backward ex-
ploring telescope on all of time from the Pharaohs to Henry Ford.
More men write the stories of their own lives than ever before,
trying to see and understand themselves in relation to their times.
The Journals of Arnold Bennett, the Letters of D. H. Lawrence,
the reminiscences of William Butler Yeats, are read eagerly; parts
of them may even appear in magazines. Biography steadily ex-
pands on publishers' lists, almost rivalirig the novel, and a tre-
ii
FOREWORD
mendous public responds to its lure. Biography is no longer the
possession of the hackwriter and the journeyman of letters: it has
become a serious and dignified realm of literary art.
Very little has been done, however, to clarify the principles of
biographical art or to reveal its function in reflecting and deepen-
ing our understanding of our human heritage. The few volumes
that have been published, some of them excellent in their own
realm, are mainly historical surveys of various periods in English
or American biography or else studies of formal biography ex-
cluding all the variety of other forms. No critical work in
biography has taken all this wealth for its province; tried to re-
veal the intensity and vividness with which biography can light
present and past, and how it does so. These I have attempted in
the present volume.
With such a range, encyclopaedic inclusiveness would be self-
defeating. Bold emphasis and omission must be our principles,
not reduction to scale. And so, although we range far afield,
drawing from all the forms of biographical writing, in each period
we focus on only a selected few. It was tempting to consider
including the Confessions of St Augustine, the Vita Nuova of
Dante, Cellini, Casanova, and Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin,
Goethe's Dichtung und Warheit, Thoreau, Emerson, and Haw-
thorne as revealed in their respective notebooks, Amiel, Gide, and
many another. But ultimately I decided to confine myself to
English biography, although in a few places I have violated my
own rule. It would be almost heresy, it seemed, to discuss letter-
writing without even mentioning Madame de SeVigne; and in
modern times I could find no satisfactory English rendering of
tendencies represented in The Education of Henry Adams, some
of the works of Van Wyck Brooks and Andre Maurois, and
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.
Even so, there were many inclusions in my original plan that
had in the end to be discarded. Hervey's Memoirs of the Reign
of George II almost persuaded me to a chapter on court memoirs
that would have included the Due de Saint-Simon, Horace Walpole,
Fanny Burney's Diaries and Letters, and the entire body of the
Greville Diaries. It would have been fascinating to compare
Newman's Apologia with Bunyan's Grace Abounding (which I
have included) and Pascal's Pensees (which I have not). And
FOREWORD
there are The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, and the charming
Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, and the waspishly witty ones of
Jane Welsh Carryle any scholar, should he do me the honor of
glancing at this book, could point out many other glaring omis-
sions.
It would have been easy, of course, on another plan, to mention
more names. Like the historians of literature I might have sum-
marized writer after writer in three or four pages of exposition,
starred here and there with graceful allusion or gossip, and dis-
missed scores more in a marble Roman aphorism. But writing
s, we convey information only to those who already have it.
o those acquainted with our subject we may point or illumine
experience, and if we are lucky shoot a new gleam on their
(familiar landscape. Otherwise, no matter how felicitous our phrases,
we will tell facts but not reveal essences.
My hope for this book is something more ambitious. I wish,
first, to convey the flavor of each life and personality; to re-
create a vignette of the original subject, by narrative in minkture,
by rich and flavorous quotation, by sample as it were, by re-
LOevoking and realizing the character. If my second aim of critical
S^and historical interpretation is to be attained, only so can it be
' Alone. Lacking the vital foundation of such a re-creation, dis-
cussions of the literary qualities of books, their success in rendering
personality, their revelations of historical color and living currents
in their time, are hardly more than barren obiter dicta. I have
<3 tried to remember that history and biography are about human
^beings and I have tried to fill this book full of them, and never
forget them as human beings.
E. J.
New York City,
December, 1936.
THE CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 2 1
I. TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY 35
Chiaroscurists of Souls
A Rapid-Motion Panorama
Two Princes of the Church
II. A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHIES 6 1
On Understanding the Past
Blood and Smoke
Chancellor of Utopia
Dark Reflective Glass
Pure Crystal Water
Cloistral Images
Without Lilies and Roses
III. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY 97
1 7th and i8th Centuries
Pitfalls for Sincerity
Favorite of Heaven
Lurid Stage
Whip-Syllabub of Wit
Roman Profile
Periods and Self Portrayals
IV. MEMOIR AND DIARY 123
iyth Century
Their Character and Flavor
Featherwit and Cavalier
Regicides and Puritans
Pepys the Man
The Model Virtuoso
The Color of the Times
15
CONTENTS
V. HEYDAY OF THE LETTER- WRITERS 155
The Coming of the Post
The Most Personal Art
Two Ladies, a Dean and Some Others
VI. HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS , 177
(Continued)
Eighteenth Century Ideal
Class of Fashion
Elegy and Burlesque
Twilight Landscape
VII. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE 207
The Doctor as Biographer
The Mystery of Mr. Bo swell
Eighteenth Century Lion
Flemish Portrait
VIII. ROMANTIC LETTER-WRITERS 237
Journey to the Inner World
Anger and Pride
The Love of God and III
Pictures of a World
IX. TRANSITIONAL MISCELLANY 273
Citizen of the World
Elia in Laughter and Flight
The Governing Classes
X. TOWARD VICTORIANISM 305
Prologue to an Age
The Wizard of the North
Darkness over Haworth
16
CONTENTS
XL TWO MONUMENTS OF THE LIFE-AND-LETTERS
METHOD 3 3 I
The Inimitable Boz
Child in Armor
XII. TWO NINETEENTH CENTURY EDUCATIONS 357
New Lamps for Old
'A Reasoning Machine'
'The Loneliness Was Very Great
Sereneness and Defeat
XIII. VICTORIAN SUNDOWN
Nineteenth Century Waste Land
Ikon of a Prophet
Epilogue to an Age
XIV. TURN OF THE CENTURY 4*5
(Autobiography)
The Phooka
Pilgrim of Sensibility
Twilight of an Education
XV. TURN OF THE CENTURY 44 *
(Biography)
The Varied Stream
Tory Pioneer
Journalist of Art
Conflict toith a Dying Age
XVI. HERE AND NOW 47 r
Kaleidoxcope of Forces
Realms of Romance
The Deeper Springs
Wit in the Archives
'7
CONTENTS
XVII. ART AND IRONY 5 3
Declaration of Independence
Classic-Romantic Ironist
Homage to Two Queens
Sand and Gold
XVIII. MACHINERY, STRUGGLE, AND LIGHT 527
Keys to Our Times
Disciple of the Dark God
The Educational Dawn
EPILOGUE 569
Pageant of the Past
The Future of Biography
NOTES y 583
INDEX 587
18
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
BIOGRAPHY
and the
VITALIZING OF HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
BIOGRAPHY AND THE VITALIZING OF HISTORY
THE deadness of Queen Anne is a special and deeply mortuary-
kind of deadness because, poor lady, for most of us she was
never alive. Perhaps we faintly recall some portrait with a glitter of
diamonds on a slab chest and a heavy face with unsparlding eyes.
But what was she like, this Queen who gave her name to the age
of Swift and Addison? She was alive enough for Samuel Johnson,
remembering the stout lady richly dressed who leaned over him
when he was a child and touched him for scrofula. She is probably
alive for Winston Churchill, recreating the life and times of his
soldier-ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. She is alive for his-
torians like Macaulay and Trevelyan, living in imagination the
events and personalities of her age. But for those with no special
interest in her personality or her day she is only a forgotten face
and a name for the proverbially dead. But she need not remain
entirely so, for the art of biography has the magic to reanimate this
Queen. Guided by biography we can explore the box mazes
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
and topiary work of Hampton Court and its rose-flushed brick
parterres, and wander through rooms adorned with marquetry
cabinets acquired under Dutch William. We can repeople the
drawing rooms and terraces with Marlborough and Bolingbroke in
their steep periwigs, and the crowds of statesmen, soldiers, beaux,
fops, ladies-in-waiting, belles, in conclave or at play. In bi-
ography's mirror we may observe the royal jaw drop in dis-
pleasure at the irreverent humors of Swift's Tale of a Tub, see her
being forced by Sarah, Marlborough's indomitable Duchess, into
sharing even the privacy of her bedroom, and behold her at last
substituting for her bullying favorite the less arbitrary Mrs Masham.
Gradually, by many such touches, this plain, malleable, obstinate,
and not too intelligent lady may be given solidity, and become a
living if not a vivacious creature.
Her deadness, however, is only a part of the deadness of history.
For history is almost necessarily abstract in design, and in subduing
everything to its intellectual structure the historian sometimes
loses sight of the fact that he is dealing in the end with human
beings. All the warm drama of men passionately believing and
struggling, men toiling and starving or idling and luxuriating, he
is too prone to bury beneath an avalanche of generalization. His-
tory sorely needs the humanizing voice of biography to remind us
of the flesh and blood behind its abstractions. To realize that this
is true we need only remember what history is and how historians
operate.
History is whatever we know about the past. In our less thought-
ful moments we are apt to associate it exclusively with great and
striking events: Marathon, the signing of Magna Carta at Runny-
mede, Socrates drinking the hemlock, the retreat from Moscow,
Marco Polo returning to Venice and telling the golden wonders
of Cathay, Descartes' Discours sur la methods, the growth of in-
dustrialism, the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. But history is
really much more queer and inclusive than this. History is the
erection of the Parthenon and the tearing-down of Madison Square
Garden; it is clay pots dug up from the site of Nineveh, and oily
waste and tar belched out of modern steamers polluting ocean
beaches; it is Louisi XIV teetering on red heels through Versailles
and the soft moccasin-tread of Indians; it is the magnificent ban-
quets served by Vatel and it is canned soups and potted meats,
24
INTRODUCTION
The plays Samuel Pepys tells us he enjoyed in seventeenth cen-
tury London are no more a part of history than the glorification
of the American Girl by Florenz Ziegfeld. Benjamin Franklin's
declaration, 'Where liberty is, there is my country,' is part of
history, and so is Jimmie Durante's 'There's a traitor in our midst.'
The materials of history may be found in yellowing laundry lists
like those Catherine Morland drew from the old chest at North-
anger Abbey as well as in brown Greek manuscripts revealing three
lost and surpassingly beautiful words by Sappho. Everything re-
memberable or fmdable, everything not lost or totally forgotten,
is a part of history. History is the entire recoverable past.
In such huge heaps of the most incongruous things, rubbish and
jewels, delusions and blinding flashes of truth, lyric poems and ad-
vertising folders, the historian delves for the significant. He must
find within himself some principle of organization other than one
of mere chronology. Historians have tried to solve this problem
in many ways. The simplest solution has seen the important events
of history as the results of personal forces the interplay of am-
bitions or loyalties in the leaders of mankind, the deeds of great
soldiers, the emotions swayed by great orators, the policies of kings
and emperors, the dreams of poets, the machinations of scoundrels,
the revelations of philosopher and scientist and sage. It sees the
eighteenth century in France as Louis XV and a luscious parade
of Pompadours and Du Barrys; and the Middle Ages as Frederick
Hohenstaufen kneeling down to let the Pope place the ecclesiastical
foot on his neck, but muttering 'Non tibi, sed Petro,' while the
Pope grinds his heel down a little harder and grunts back l Et rnihi,
et Petro.'
It is easy to ridicule this naive mode of interpreting history, but
it has its illuminating qualities. Not only is a single person or a
trivial event sometimes at the fulcrum of circumstances. Some-
times a man may seem to concentrate within himself one of those
great forces of his time, to be the voice of the human spirit giving
form to the deep convictions or the strong passions of his age.
It may be hard to tell whether Voltaire molded in certain ways the
temper of his age and fired its scornful anger or whether that
temper charged him with its energy until he broke out in the
electric discharges of the Dictionnaire Phihsophique and the pam-
phlet on Jean Galas. But whether instrument or explosive force,
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
the grinning skull of Voltaire is a violent center of eighteenth
century activity; without the fierce turmoil surrounding him our
picture of the century would be changed.
Such men seem to be powers shocking the world into directions
it might never have entered without their startling appearance at
certain times or floods of light illuminating paths that without
their aid might never have been seen. Sometimes they fall wholly
and harmoniously, as Newton did, within the pattern of their age;
sometimes they run afoul of its currents and have to struggle
against hatred or persecution, like Shelley or William Lloyd Garri-
son or Tom Paine. The genius of Newton epitomized the most
passionate faith of his age: the faith in Reason as a guide surveying
the labyrinth of the universe and plotting the clockwork movements
of the world-machine. Others who have been buffeted in the
currents of their time may appear like the Emperor Julian to be
trying vainly to turn back a flood to reverse time's arrow and
bring back an irrecoverable past or they may be, as Socrates said
of himself, midwives of the truth that struggles to be born.
The truth is that any time is really a mixture of times, with
many people living culturally in different ages. We all live
physically in a world of telephones and tractors, wireless and
linotype machines. Emotionally some of us are still blue-daubed
Britons with clubs, or seventeenth century witch-hunters, or pre-
historic devil-worshipers. Only an adventurous few nose ahead
into what may prove either blind alleys or the road the rest of
the world is laggingly to follow.
For these reasons it seems hopeless to deal with the essence of
history in the characters of its great men. To remedy these de-
fects historians in modern times have tried to interpret their ma-
terial in terms of abstract forces. They have tried to achieve a
philosophy of history. In so doing they gave us a wider view of
the events included within history. Trying to discover the func-
tioning of its laws, they expanded its view, raising their eyes from
the amours of monarchs and the bloodsoaked battlefields, to take
in the panorama of fields of corn and manufactories and counting-
houses, trying to see between them and the battlefield deeper con-
nections than the mere dynastic ambitions of princes. They made
us aware of the existence of masses of peasants and Chinese coolies
and negro slaves and urban proletariat. History thrust out a rich
INTRODUCTION
network of interpretation connecting the dominant forms of society
-economic, social, political and their cultural flowerings in art,
morals, philosophy, science. Everywhere it scooped things into
associations that had not been felt before; worked the mediaeval
cathedral into a synthesis with the moated castle, the feudal system,
villeins, chivalry, the Courts of Love, the worship of the Blessed
Virgin, morality plays, and the craft guilds.
This was a great and serious achievement in interpretation of
human behavior. But in widening the scope of history, it made
history dryer and less concrete. Manipulating their figures, sta-
tistics, and graphs, historians sometimes came to forget the sweat
and the laughter and the toil and the eating or starving that were
buried deep in the significance of their tables and charts. Even
a gifted historian, when he tries to teach his knowledge, may for-
get that its structure was derived from the experiences of living
beings and that its significance will be lost for others unless it is
shown in relationship to those lives. To that human past biog-
raphy is a significant key.
Reanimating Queen Anne and a thousand others among the
great or obscure dead, with them it can reflesh the skeletal struc-
ture of history. In real experience the struggle of abstract forces
is always embodied in the behavior and feelings of living men.
Only if we try to glimpse the colors of human lives will the great
empty abstractions round into fullness and begin to move; only
when we can see the wide panorama and at the same time the
individual hearthstone. The little backwaters of self-absorbed lives
may seem to themselves to be entirely independent, but they are
part of the moving stream of events in which all unknown to them-
selves they are participating, quite as much as those few lives that
are consciously at the focal points of action and change.
Biography is thus almost a vital necessity to history. It includes
not only formal biography, but all the kinds of autobiography-
letters, journals, reminiscences for all biography is ultimately
founded in a kind of autobiography. They contain within them
history in the concrete, its meanings made tangible, its struggles
brought near. Personality everywhere permeates living experience
and is the very breath of biography. It enables biography to
rectify the deadness of abstract history by flooding it with breath-
ing Hfe.
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
This is perhaps why, in the developing educational system of the
Soviet Union, it was decided in 1935 that all teachers and writers
should lay more stress upon the subject-matter the people and
events and less upon an 'exclusively Marxist' that is, 'economically
materialist' interpretation. The seventeenth century struggle in
England between royal prerogative and the insistence of a rising
bourgeoisie on parliamentary control of taxation has little meaning
if we are unable to clothe it in an awareness of what it was like to be
alive when John Hampden refused to pay twenty shillings for ship-
money. Interpretation to which we can supply no living content
is merely an empty shell of pretended knowledge, all the more
dangerous because we may be deceived by our scientific termin-
ology into believing that we have the substance as well. History
without a philosophy is only a tale of wonder, but a philosophy
of history without life a history accepted on faith in a conceptual
world void of the color and shape and breath and movement of
living things is an impoverishment of the very meaning of
experience.
As readers, then, we need to try doing what the historians do
not often enough do for us: we need to bring the awareness of
individual life and personality back into history. Not by for-
getting or turning our backs on the struggle of abstract forces,
not by denying their reality or significance, but by realizing that
in living experience they are always embodied in the behavior and
feelings of individuals. There is no contradiction or antagonism
between this and sociological history or economic history, or any
of the other ways of realizing the past.
Nowhere is this sense of personality in history more amply re-
warded than in biography. It enables us to avoid being blind
dwellers in a parochial present; it enables us to see a living past,
errors and triumphs, in all the mist of contention, hope, debate,
indifference, or despair it wore at the time it was taking place.
It puts us in no sort of competition with the scientific historian.
What it does do is to fill in the vast framework of the historian
with some knowledge of what it has been like for individuals to
be alive in all ages.
They themselves have voiced for us their sense of their lives.
We may find Sir Walter Raleigh on the night when he believed
he was to be put to death, penning a letter to his wife, and saying
INTRODUCTION
'Written with the dying hand of sometime thy Husband, but now
(alas) overthrown
Wa: Raleigh.
Yours that was, But now not my own.'
There is Henry Adams telling how as a little boy rebelling against
going to school, he was taken in hand by Ms grandfather, the
President, an old man of almost eighty, and led all the way over
a long dusty road on a hot summer day until he found himself
much to his surprise seated in the school. Then we have men
recording their sense of the lives of others: John Aubrey telling
us that Hobbes in his old age would sit bare-headed and never
take cold, but complained of the flies walking over his baldness;
and Hazlitt describing how Jeremy Bentham made such a fetich
of reason that if he could discern no error in the projects of in-
ventors he felt himself bound in reason to stake his money on their
ventures.
In letters, in diaries, in table-talk, memoirs, and autobiographies,
men have recorded how the passing current of their lives and
feelings seemed to them, what they thought of their friends and
enemies, and all the things that colored the passing current of
their days. Therein, sometimes with no thought of being a wit-
ness to future generations, they have exclaimed over the trivia
of their existences, aired their quarrels, jotted down a comment
on their pleasures. What a rich fragrance of the life and person-
ality of the past arises out of these personal records! As we read
them, the dust that has sifted down over the far-away is blown
from its surface by a wind of life; and the dried yellow pages that
have been so hard and shriveled gradually open, expand, and take
on bright colorings, like those tight little pellets of paper that
placed in water unfold into flowers and trees and fountains and
tiny castles.
Such a stirring of the life of the past is both like and different
from that which we find in its novels and poems. They too re-
flect what life has meant for people in the days when they were
written, and sometimes in ways of far deeper significance than
the merely factual report. But the responses men have had to
their actual fellows, the cravings they have had for their actual
possessions whether shoe-buckles or spiritual integrity their laugh-
29
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
ter over personal joys and their tears over personal despairs, will
always have a kind of meaning for us, a special character of
reality, which is not more meaningful in the end, but differently
meaningful from their works of imagination. We need their works
of art if we are to recover some of the deepest manifestations of
what past times were like, but we also need their personal and
intimate revelations of their individual lives, their lives of everyday
fact and material surrounding.
Not only has biographical literature this profound importance
to the realization of history. It has another value as well: it is
exciting and moving in itself. The lives that men have really led,
the characters they have really displayed, the adventures they have
really had, and the fates that have overtaken them, are as strange
and fascinating as those they have imagined. Although sometimes
men's accounts of themselves and their fellows have become en-
tangled in falsehood or imagination, there is an intimacy of revela-
tion in the biographical realm that their ideal creations do not
entirely parallel. Achilles and Don Quixote stir us in unequaled
ways, but Wellington and Faraday have a meaning for as that
even the grandest heroes of epic and tragedy do not. If there
are ways in which real life cannot compete with poetry there are
also ways in which poetry cannot compete with life.
The biographical muse presides over a hybrid realm. She is
inspired by :the power of imagination, but ever held, too, within
the limits of what has actually been attained among all the range
of the possible. Her Pegasus is hobbled and cannot soar. It is
the hard earth, no insubstantial field of asphodel, that rings beneath
his hooves. He leaves that earth only briefly by spurning it with
sharp blows, not in winged flights. But the realms to which he
gallops are as exciting and even as real as Valhalla and Olympus.
Let us try to follow on some of these journeys. The whole
world is before us, but that would be too unending an adventure.
We might write a library of comment alone and never get to
biography itself. Let us stay within the realm of the biographical
literature of our own language. There we may find statesmen,
men of letters, merchants, ecclesiastics, tinkers, kings, queens, actors,
dilettantes, soldiers, bricklayers, explorers 'God's plenty'! Their
stories range through grandeur, pathos, laughter, meanness, triumph,
despair. And these personal lives will enable us to see also, in
30
INTRODUCTION
tangible form, something of the history of the western world,
intimate and warm: the profile of time.
Biography written in the English language makes its first formal
appearance in the reign of Henry VIII, and from then on the
stream grows ever fuller and richer. And almost from the same
time Englishmen, who had been insignificant islanders on the edge
of Europe, despised for their uncouthness by the polished Italians,
elbowed and bullied by the swaggering grandeur of Spain, and
troublesome mainly to their neighbor France, began to be a power
in the western world. By the eighteenth century England's po-
litical and cultural stars were ascendant; during the nineteenth they
were dominant. Her arts and letters grew international, borrowing
sometimes polish and lustre from France, and exchanging in philos-
ophy and science the influence of Newton and Darwin for that
of Descartes and Pasteur. And during all this time, in English
biographical writing, we may see the personal threads running
through the widespread destinies of peoples. If I can give some sense
of the lighting and vitalization the experience of such literature
brings to our understanding of the human adventure, even in only
a part and over only a few centuries, then this book will have
accomplished its purpose.
And because biographical writing is literature as well a realm of
art I have tried also to suggest some principles by which we may
evaluate its merits. Sometimes the technician including the literary
technician and craftsman may be carried too far, and in his enthusi-
astic preoccupation with analysis lose sight of the life for which
analysis exists. But all true analysis rightly used can only deepen our
sense of the meaning and value of experience. We never understand
all the life in a work of art unless we also understand why it is as it
is and not otherwise.
Partly, then, in the following chapters we shall be concerned
with tSe aims and standards of the different forms of biographical
art. Knowing what the biographer and autobiographer are trying
to achieve, or what they should be trying to achieve, cannot fail
to enhance our realization of the personality they mirror. Under-
standing by what means they have achieved the ends of biographical
literature, or why they have failed, must clarify and enrich our
perception of their nature. To do so is no barren aestheticism but
a vital necessity to the experiencing of all the life they may contain.
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
Only by coming to them so shall we be able to see it when they
are most truly themselves, when they attain in the highest degree
the life that is theirs.
When they do, there stirs before us an intimate revelation of
personality, moving among the surroundings in which it found
significance. With a multiplied sense of personalities crowding
within those surroundings, a part of the past awakes for us, and
we flash into awareness of the breathing existence of its society.
And then we begin to have an understanding of history; it is alive
for us; and the quest for a philosophy of history is not a juggling
of grey and dusty abstractions but an exciting adventure in the
life of the understanding. We find a living, glowing, and organic
past.
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING
OF BIOGRAPHY
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
Chiaroscurists of Souls
Men have always been fascinated by the lives of those who have
appealed to their imagination, from Euripides, a sad old man with
a long beard, meditating on something great and high as he gazed
seaward from his cave on Salamis, to Napoleon marooned on his
bare rock at St Helena or Gordon madly dying pierced with lances
at Khartoum. The motives of such interest are usually of the
simplest: curiosity, admiration, the action and excitement of a true
story. More complex and various, though, are the motives of the
biographer; and so inter-related that they often quarrel with each
other and destroy the effectiveness of the biography.
In The Development of English Biography Mr Harold Nicolson
divides the reasons for biography-writing into two, which he iden-
tifies as a commemorative instinct and a didactic instinct. Only
if we take these terms loosely and stretch them to their utmost
capacity is the statement true. The commemorative impulse may
proceed from personal affection for a man, from admiration for
35
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
his character or achievements, from the glamour of a particular
historical background or series of events, from dislike for his op-
ponents or the principles they represent (leading to glorifying
their antagonist simply because he is in the other camp from them),
from an indignant desire to defend him from slander and calumny
from hosts of other reasons as tangled and obscure. And the
didactic impulse may run all the way from sheer crankism through
various kinds of religious, ethical, or political affiliations, to the
desire to find and communicate some key to the involutions of
human character and destiny.
On the level of the crank and partisan biography is vulgar, and
sometimes vicious; but when it reaches the height of an honest
and intelligent effort to understand those elements of the universal
in the life of an individual it achieves its finest justification as a
literary art. Any telling of the story of a human, life involves
having some criterion of choice, some standards of judgment.
The difference between the meretricious and the valuable is a
matter of integrity and intelligence. The artist in biography must
inevitably have a philosophy, but he must refrain from doctrinaire
systemizing. Many degrees of sincerity and thoughtfulness sep-
arate the conscious liar from the ideal biographer, but not one
involves having no point of view. And put in its crudest terms,
the demonstration or illustration of a point of view is didactic.
Certain kinds of motive for writing biographies we could not
include under Mr Nicolson's classification without distending the
meanings until they cracked. Large numbers of memoirs have
proceeded from the very opposites of the mood of pious commem-
oration: and could accurately be characterized as biographies of
hate. Rufus Griswold's life of Poe is an infamous example of
biographical rancor. And we can often find a vicious reverse-
didacticism in the stories told by the pious of those whose lives
they disapprove, such as the pious legends of the deathbed terrors
of notorious infidels like Voltaire and Ingersoll.
Like in subject matter but different in intent are various popular
lives of criminals. Pearson and Roughead in our day have retold
the stories of many gory murders. Tfiey gratify an old human
fascination, mingLng delight with nausea and blood-horror. In
the eighteenth century the publishers were forever busy with the
lives of highwaymen, footpads, housebreakers, and shoplifters. Jack
3*
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
Sheppard and Jonathan Wilde each inspired several books; and,
a century later, one of De Quincey's most horribly effective pieces
of writing was a veracious account of the Ratcllffe murders. The
expressions of loathing for their subjects that such writers often
let fall was but a sop to conventional morality; they really regarded
their criminal heroes with no more hatred than one does the ogres
in the fairy tales.
But hatred may play a part in biography, and a very useful
part providing it is kept in hand. I do not believe any first-rate
biography could ever be dominated by hate, but with a certain
amount of dislike as a seasoning much may be done. Strong an-
tagonism falsifies just as strong affection does. But who can doubt
that much of the flavor of Mr Strachey's Eminent Victorians
comes from a certain dash of the malign that pervades his attitude?
At its best such a quality makes for a kind of detachment, a
judicial irony. At its worst it may lead to the dullness of some of
Mr Strachey's cheaper imitators, who will allow their subjects
no virtues, no abilities, no merits whatever, until the reader wonders
why they ever chose to chronicle so futile a clown.
The motives of the autobiographer resemble in many ways those
of the biographer, but they differ to the extent that men's attitudes
toward themselves differ in kind and degree from their attitude
toward other people. The man who writes his own life may be
fond of himself, and he may despise himself; he may wish to blow
up and exhibit still farther his self-esteem, and he may want to
abase and humiliate himself. The well-nourished ego, even after
a lifetime of feeding, may still find a few tidbits previously over-
looked by spreading its feast between the pages of a book; and
the man who has been hurt, defeated, laughed at, or overwhelmed
with abuse may seek there to defend himself against attack, to
justify himself, and demonstrate that if he failed it was not his
fault: it was the world that was cruel and wrong. Such lives,
whether they are a tortured confession or a boast, a triumphant
crow or an apologia, are emanations of the personal ego.
Not all autobiographers, however, find so sweet the meat that
clings to their own bones. There are abstract enthusiasms, de-
votions to principles and causes here as well as among the biogra-
phers. The man who has participated in great events may desire
that their memory be perpetuated with truth and fervor, just
37
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
as they were: deeds of war, achievements of art, triumphs of science.
The man who has served an ideal may want to record struggles
that, in his mind, are less his than its. A man may believe his life
is important for what he has learned, or for the truths he thinks it
has exemplified. When John Stuart Mill wrote his own story it
was a chronicle both of the abstract passions that had governed
his behavior and of an educational experiment in which he re-
garded himself as merely typical. And when St Augustine wrote
his Confessions it was to boast neither of the sins of his youth nor
the achievements of his age, but to embody what he considered
the significant truths about all human life as they had represented
themselves in his own.
The autobiographer has first hand personal experience to draw on
the loves and aversions he has felt, the enthusiasms that have
warmed him, the sensations and ideas that have passed through his
consciousness, the people and books he has known, the events
that have passed him by or swept him up into their turmoil.
Twisted and self -blinded as he may be by misunderstanding or pas-
sion, everything about himself that he knows he knows. If an
entirely candid and complete autobiography has never been writ-
ten it is because the poor, vain, humbled, and deluded human soul,
even when it can bear the spectacle of its own nakedness, cannot
bear revealing it to another.
The biographer, too, can have personal knowledge of his sub-
ject. Not the internal, secret knowledge he has of himself, of
course, but the knowledge one can have from talking with others,
observing the tones of their voices, their gestures and fleeting
changes of countenance, examining their clothes, the houses they
live in, and the affections they demonstrate in their lives. And in
compensation for the secret knowledge he cannot have, the biogra-
pher may learn much more certainly and completely than the sub-
ject himself may ever hope to, what others think of him and what
part he plays in their lives. The biographer may weigh and com-
pare and elicit things that his subject can never know if he even
suspects. He may hear the gossip, the rumors, the scandal, the
malice, the buzz that dies down when its subject enters a room;
he may penetrate to places where his subject has never gone, al-
though he has left his trace.
The biographer of a later time, who may never have met his
38
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
subject, or at the best have encountered him only in his old age,
has access to still other sources of information. History local his-
tory at least may not have forgotten the man; and there may still
be anecdotes of him among old enemies or cronies. There are
the letters he has written and received, which may be extant and
7 if
available, as well as other letters in which he is mentioned and dis-
cussed. Journals and diaries may be brought to light that reveal
now one, now another side of his character and career. It is
with such a congeries as this, of undigested and formless materials
that the biographer has to deal. The problem of the biographer's
art is what use he is to make of them.
Before we try to answer the question let us stop for a moment
to examine its difficulties. In the first place there may be the dif-
ficulty of sheer mass. If the writer knows so much, what is he
to do with it? How is he to arrange it? on what principle of chrono-
logy or definition of themes? Is he to use it all, or eliminate some
of it? and are his eliminations to be based on considerations of
tautology, good taste, truth to fact, interest or dullness, reliability
of evidence, or what? How is he to decide what evidence is re-
liable, or adjudicate between rival interpretations of a given set
of alleged events? And the converse of a plethora of conflicting
evidence what is he to do about periods or events in a life about
which material is lacking, or conjectural, or scanty? How much is
he entitled to guess? Finally, the complicated problem of truth
and significance: what principles are to guide his course in deciding
that just such and such were the deeds and qualities that gave this
life its importance and meaning?
These are some of the copious problems of the conscientious
biographer, and we may turn with a little relief from them to the
task of noting some of the principles governing what he should
try to achieve. What should a good biography be trying to attain?
Primarily, I think we must say, truth truth to the character of the
human life it portrays. An absolute candor, seeking neither to
blacken nor to palliate, but as clearly as may be, to understand.
Such an aim necessarily involves interpretation, for a mere recital
of fact will not do. Analysis must come to the aid of the deed;
sometimes an entire background of social and historical color may
be needed to reveal the truth about a single characteristic, and
sometimes a delving into the most elusive problems of the soul.
39
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
In saying these things it becomes clear that a biography is not
a psychological casebook but a work of art. If the biography
must present the truth-or what seems the truth, which is as near
as human achievement can come it must do what poetry and fic-
tion also strive after. And when we formulate the second quality
of good biography we see that it is obviously a branch of literary
art. For a good biography is not only true, it is the significant story
of an individual life. It must have value, and not be merely a point-
less and unimportant sequence of events. It must be a story, that is,
a unity of events having coherence and relevance successively, not
a chaos. And, lastly, the subject must be individualized. He must
be shown not a puppet or figure-head of general or abstract quali-
ties, but a living and life-like human being, colored with those traits
and quirks that make him unique among men, and at the same time
no monster of the imagination foreign to all the rest of the human
race. Biography, in short, must accomplish the miracle of all art:
that of embodying in an aesthetic form some elements of the uni-
versal through particulars.
The artist biographer must have both poetic insight and critical
detachment. He must have sympathy and understanding and at
the same time judgment. He must be able to enter into the dark-
est, most morbid, most unreally colored parts of the imagination
with familiarity, and still maintain his footing in the external world.
He must be a partisan or victim of no extraneous theory, drawing
no sermons out of the stones where he had previously concealed
them, contorting his tale into no parable to exemplify a moral
morsel or a political, or economic, or sociological one. (This is
not to say, of course, that there are no legitimate uses of these
disciplines as approaches to interpretation.)
And, although no biography was ever written that gave no idea
of the character of the writer, he must not thrust himself into
the foreground. Somewhere shadowy, on the edge of the stage-
he is bound to be, but he must not push his characters into the
wings and expose himself. He must not, as many modern pseudo-
biographers do, guy his subject, twist it around for satiric effect,
display his own wit and cleverness on the subject- victim by mak-
ing him a figure of fun. Sometimes in reading Mr Philip Guedalla
we quite forget the subject through being poked brilliantly in the
ribs by the author. Quips and epigrams have their place, but when
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
they explode all over the pages of a biography, the poor subjects
turn to paper dolls and fall flat on their faces.
A Rapid-Motion Panorama
Naturally enough, an awareness of the aims and methods of
biography, and of the qualifications for the biographer, grew very
slowly. The contemporary biographer, with all his temptations
to self-display, still has the foundation of centuries of growing
clarification of his task. But the earliest biographers hardly knew
whether they were writing biography or history or only disordered
notes of whatever events had for some reason impressed their
minds. Even the best of classical biography is often mingled in-
extricably with legend credulously accepted in the very breath
in which the writer critically analyses the type of character thus re-
vealed; so that we find Plutarch, for example, treating the state-
craft of Caesar and the mythical exploits of Theseus with little
diif erence. And after the decay of Roman civilization the monkish
chroniclers of the Christian world had to evolve painfully almost
anew the difficult steps that had already been taken. Early Chris-
tian recorders are with few exceptions wandering, planless, un-
critical, superstitious, and obsessed with smothering human char-
acter under thick blankets of moralizing.
The earliest English biographies were compiled by monks and
schoolmen, and written, of course, in Latin. Nearly always they
were concerned with the lives of saints, and from the Historla
Brittonum (about 650) on, hagiographies and martyrologies bloom-
rather bleakly world without end. The venerable Bede drove
a clear shaft of form through these often muddled compilations,
and wrote with simplicity and tenderness, but even Bede continues
the bad tradition of awarding ethical judgments and accepts the
miraculous with monastic gullibility.
The first biography of a layman is the Life of Alfred the Great
attributed to Bishop Asser. It conveys little real impression of
Alfred's personality, giving merely a shadowy portrayal of devout-
ness, industry, chastity, and learning. Also there is much wandering
from the point, much general talk, and many evasive improbabilities.
An honorable exception to the flatness of most of the saints' lives
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
is Eadmer's Life of Anselm, of which William of Malmesbury
writes 'Eadmer has told everything so lucidly that he seems some-
how to have placed events before our very eyes.' William of
Malmesbury himself contributed other merits to the developing
art. He believed in literary creation and molded his- writings to
definite form; 'he possessed imagination, style, and humor; above
all, he was immensely inquisitive.' He delighted in vivid images
and narrative detail: 'A variety of anecdote,' he remarks, 'cannot
be displeasing to anyone, unless he be morose enough to rival the
superciliousness of Cato.'
Among the thirteenth century chroniclers Matthew Paris was
an eminent historiographer who adopted a genuinely critical atti-
tude in the endeavor to reach historical truth. Adam of Eynsham's
Life of St Hugh of Lincoln is noteworthy in the same century for
repudiating miracles. In the age of Chaucer interest in saints' lives
became more languid and even skeptical, and even the edifying
legend grew less popular, so that Chaucer could teasingly allow
the Monk's Tragedies, in the Canterbury Tales, to grow unbear-
ably tedious. The Knight finally interrupts with the exclamation
'Good sir, na-moore of this!' while Harry Bailly adds 'Your tale
anoyeth all this companye.'
The fifteenth century was almost devoid of biography, but in
the sixteenth martyrology makes a bloodily dramatic return in
Foxe's Acts and Monuments, usually called The Book of Martyrs.
There are also Holinshed's chronicles, Camden's Annals, and that
History of Richard III usually ascribed to Thomas More but prob-
ably by Cardinal Morton. And finally there were Roper's Life
of Sir Thomas More and Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, which are
the first sustained narratives of individual lives written in the
English language. Both of these books go so far along the way
of true biography that I shall refer to them at greater length later
on.
But even when that path had been partly retraced there were
still impediments enough. Izaak Walton, I believe, was the earliest
English biographer to quote letters written by his characters; and
William Mason's Life of Thomas Gray the first to make a syste-
matic use of them as a means of showing his subject's character.
The very word biography was first used by Dryden in the preface
to his translation of Plutarch, where he defined it as 'the history
42
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
of particular men's lives,' and went on to explain that therein 'The
pageantry of life is taken away: you see the poor reasonable animal
as naked as ever nature made him: are made acquainted with his
passions and his follies: and find the demi-god a man.'
In Dryden's day, however, you did not see the poor creature
naked as nature made him: his passions and his follies were stiffened
into a fixed symmetrical pattern laid down in a series of antitheses
where abstract qualities were balanced against each other. There
were, perhaps, two leading reasons for this state of affairs. One
was the influence of the classics; the other, related to the first, was
the fascinating theory of the 'ruling passion.' North's translation
of Plutarch, first published in 1579, achieved immense popularity,
and paved the way for hosts of others: Holland's Livy and his
Suetonius, Grenewey's Tacitus, Savile's Agricola, Heywood's
Sallust, and, above all, Casaubon's Latin translation of the ethical
characters of Theophrastus.
Of all these Tacitus and Theophrastus were the most influential.
They led to a veritable rage of interest in typical 'characters'
that is, psychological stereotypes rather than individual tempera-
ments, built up upon a deductive scheme of what was consistent
for such and such a type to be like, rather than upon detailed ob-
servation of what a man was in fact like. Each person, so ran the
theory, had one ruling passion, with all the others grouped like
vassals round and swaying to its imperious motions. Any incon-
venient feature of observation that didn't happen to fit, according
to this method, was either firmly ignored as a mere presumptuous
upstart, or else kneaded and strait] acketed somehow into the
scheme. During the seventeenth century no less than fifty-six
deliberate imitations of Theophrastus were printed, including Over-
bury's Characters or Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sun-
dry Persons, and Bishop Earle's Microcosmographie, and the method
ran riot in fiction, history, and biography. Even the often glow-
ingly etched portraits in Clarendon's History of the Rebellion are
dramatic presentations of personified qualities, synthesized into
ethical types.
Running almost underground through all this, appearing ex-
citingly here and there in such people as John Aubrey and Roger
North, there still continued what we might call the realistic tradi-
tion. It received another critical statement By the pen of Samuel
43
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
Johnson, a man of insatiable curiosity and a passionate interest in
the strange manifestations of individual character. Johnson insisted
on truth, on vivid detail, on psychological insight. And, with
his usual hatred of cant, he preceived, and repudiated, the obituary
bogey about loyalty to the dead. 'If,' says he, 'we owe regard to
the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be laid to
knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.'
Johnson's principles were brilliantly embodied in the achieve-
ment of his admiring follower, Bosweil, and not unworthily repre-
sented by Macaulay's striking biographical essays and Lockhart's
Life of Scott. Piety grew uppermost again in Stanley's Arnold,
and panegyric irradiated Carlyle's Sterling, but the impulse toward
realism did not die. Mrs Gaskell made an effort to present even
the astringencies of Charlotte Bronte; and much later in the century
Froude's courageous biography of Carlyle revived the tradition
of trenchant honesty. Foster's Dickens, although too gently ret-
icent about the marital career of the great novelist, is full of bril-
liant quotation in which Dickens characterizes himself, and Treve-
lyan's Macaultty is a triumph of character-painting in the same
school. The run-of-the-mill Victorian biography, however, was
not only dominated by Mrs Grundy, but pervaded by a sickly dull-
ness. Reality was buried again and again under the heavy loam of
reverence and good taste, with the twin tombstones of the official
Life-and-Letters to hold it down and prevent any threatened
resurrection.
Gloomy as this picture may seem, it is relieved by many bright
exceptions, verdurous hollows among the crags, gleaming flesh
strolling surprisingly through the grey shadows of the Elysian
Fields, and living voices resounding suddenly amid the funeral
utterance of galvanized corpses. Vivid among cumbrous detail we
strike a passage that lights up the whole. Slyly peaking through
a pious attitude we catch some glimpse of a less admirable truth that
the biographer himself, perhaps, never realized was revealed. And
sometimes who knows? while maintaining all the proprieties, a
subtle writer spreads before the reader hints and fragments that
enable him to fill out the whole even what has been craftily left
unsaid.
Indeed, although we may find recent biographers easier reading
than their predecessors we will not find them markedly more re-
44
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
warding. Contemporary writers trim their sails to a short-winded
public. Mostly, they demand little depth of sympathy or un-
derstanding; even their 'subtleties' are heavily underlined. They
have the obvious polish and style of writing in a technique that
is as modern as an armored tractor. Their language, their allusions,
are drenched in an easily recognizable present. Styles and language
and conventions thus change, but when the writers of the past fail
to yield their secrets to us it is not always they who have been
maladroit. Sometimes we have lacked wit and insight, been im-
patient and obtuse. For those with some skill and patience to put
themselves imaginatively in a day and a frame of mind no longer
current, the spoils may be startlingly rich and suggestive. Even the
luminaries of the present may dim but it may be interesting to
pursue the query in a little more detail.
Two Princes of the Church
Aside from the name George Cavendish, and the fact that he
was 'Gentleman Usher' to Cardinal Wolsey, we know hardly any
fact about the sixteenth century biographer of the great Churchman.
Certain things we can infer about his character from the book, but
the facts of his life are so dark that for long he was even confused
with a cousin, William Cavendish. On the other hand we know
a great deal about Mr Lytton Strachey, a brilliant writer only
recently dead. We know his associates in a literary London that
still flourishes, we know his enthusiasm for the French classics,
we know his polished skepticism, his incisive and lapidary style.
We know that Mr Strachey, more than anyone else, has been re-
sponsible for drawing attention again to the possibility that biog-
raphy might be an art, a contention that he demonstrated in his
own achievement; and we are familiar with the bedlam of imita-
tors who, lacking both his scholarship and his ironic point of view,
believed it a sufficient substitute to howl with mirth at grand-
mother's comic hats and grandfather's dusty ideas.
But suppose that, forgetting all these bits of extraneous infor-
mation, and trying to ignore how much more familiar his language
is to us than that of Elizabethan England, we sought to compare him
and his work with that of George Cavendish. Mr Strachey has
also written a life of a Cardinal: Henry Manning, whose career
45
stretched through almost all the nineteenth century. Manning, like
Wolsey, was a political ecclesiastic; Mr Strachey remarks of him
that he 'seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line
of diplomatic and administrative clerics that, one would have
thought, had come to an end with Cardinal Wolsey.'
The hint comes from the modern writer; where could we find a
better one? What may we learn of the art of biography and its
fluctuations by examining these two works? What may we learn
of the two writers and the qualities in the development of their
art which they represent? Two churchmen, both administrators;
two biographers, one at almost the beginning of the art in English,
the other only recently lost to the world at the height of his
prestige.
At the beginning it is clear that their aims and scopes are very
different. To the eighty-five years of Manning's life Strachey
devotes something like 36,000 words; the stately pace of Cavendish
takes 84,000 to cover a life shorter by more than a score of years.
The life of Wolsey is conceived on a grand scale as a tragedy of
fortune, and it is built in such a way as to make us both anticipate
and look with foreboding to the dread downfall that is to come.
Strachey's Cardinal Manning is what? a drama, an apologue, a
comedy? If it is a drama, the excitement is dependent upon accident,
for the character is known, and the character never changes. Only
in the struggle between the inner principle and outer circumstance
can anything occur, never in the heart. If it is an apologue, the
fable is dark and not easily applied to any conclusion, unless it be
that there are natures at once supple and as hard as granite. If it
is a comedy, it can be presided over only by George Meredith's
Spirit of Comedy, who 'will look humanely malign and cast an ob-
lique light' whenever men are 'self-deceived or hookwinked . . .
whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice, are false in humility
or mined with conceit.' One might even characterize Mr Strachey's
handling of his characters as a laboratory demonstration or a dis-
section, if it did not seem every now and then to turn into a
flaying.
The opening is skilful. A few details, and the outline of Man-
ning's character is ineradicably impressed. The little episode in
which he outwits a school master who finds him out of bounds,
by fetching a circle and riding off on the master's horse; his tak-
46
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
ing orders after his father's bankruptcy had made a political career
impossible; the facility with which, forgetting the lady he had
been in love with, 'he married his rector's daughter' and stepped into
the rector's shoes when he died these things need to complete
them only the sentence at the end of the chapter, 'In after years, the
memory of his wife seemed to be blotted from his mind.* We
already know Henry Manning.
The chapter on the Oxford Movement is a fine piece of bravura
writing, irresistibly comic and at the same time presenting suffici-
ently an outline of events to show how Manning became entangled
in them. From the point of view of perfect art the personality of
the writer is perhaps too intrusive, the material is somewhat too
ruthlessly laughed at, and there are places where the sneer becomes
even rather cheap. (Dr Pusey was startled at the outcry that
greeted his article on fasting. 'I thought serious-minded people at
least supposed they practiced' fasting in some way; 'we live and
learn' comments Mr Strachey, 'even though we have been to Ger-
many.') But how wittily presented the conscientious struggles and
the metaphysical problems of Hurrell Froude, how delicious the
absurd quotations from Tracts for the Times, and, in the following
chapters, how hilariously funny the combination in W. G. Ward
of a priori dialectic and Opera Bouffe! What is left unexplained,
except for a misty implication of the all-coveringness of human
silliness, is why such doings should ever have begun a significant
movement.
Manning began to play a double game. The pretensions of the
new teachings attracted him by exalting the dignity of priesthood;
on the other hand a neighboring, and influential, Archdeacon was
violently low-church. He wrote an article on Justin and began,
secretly, holding confession. But when alarms circulated he
preached a virulent Protestant sermon at Oxford. On the day
after, he walked out to Littlemore 'in the hope of being able to
give a satisfactory explanation' to Newman, but that was beyond
even Manning's skill. Dr Newman was not at home. Manning did
not forget the rebuff.
Newman was converted, after fearful wavering, to Rome. Man-
ning, too, agonized, in elaborate tables with numbered heads and
subheads, over the temptation that was for him, he knew, 'the
most subtle and terrible of all temptations.' Were his ambitions
47
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
really for 'an elevation into a sphere of higher usefulness' or were
they vanity? He rejected, after bitter self-examination, the office
of sub-Almoner to the Queen, but 'in all this Satan tells me I am
doing it to be thought mortified and holy,' and then came gnawing
regret. He fell ill, and spent his convalescence in Rome, where
he had a long interview with the Pope. In all the detailed pages
of his Diary for the time the only mention made of this event is
'the bald statement: "Audience to-day at the Vatican." ' Two years
later he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Fourteen
years later he 'was Archbishop of Westminster and the supreme
ruler of the Roman Catholic community in England.'
In London he had made himself useful to Cardinal Wiseman,
had defeated the Old Catholics and Dr Errington, the Archbishop
of Trebizond and Coadjutor of Westminster; had separated Cardi-
nal Wiseman from his confidant, Monsignor Searle, and 'touched
with a deft finger the chord of the Conversion of England' the
Cardinal's great dream. In the Vatican he had made a friend of
Monsignor Talbot, whose humble door at the top of a little
winding stair had singular communications with Pio Nono. When
Wiseman died, Manning, by a Pontifical act, became Archbishop
of Westminster. Talbot wrote: l My policy throughout was never
to propose you directly to the Pope. . . . This I say, because
many have said that your being named was all my doing. I do not
say the Pope did not know that I thought you the only man eligible;
as I took care to tell him over and over again what was against
all the other candidates. . . . Nevertheless, I believe your ap-
pointment was specially directed by the Holy Ghost.'
In his new dignity the implacable fighter proved all magnanimity.
But one thing irked him still: 'a figure which, by virtue of a pecu-
liar eminence, seemed to challenge the supremacy of his own.
That figure was Newman's.' 'Since his conversion, Newman's life
had been a long series of misfortunes and disappointments.' And
then, at the age of sixty-three he wrote his Apologia fro Vita Sua.
It 'was recognized at once as a classic, not only by Catholics, but
by the whole English world. From every side expressions of
admiration, gratitude, and devotion poured in.' Proposals were
made that an oratory be established at Oxford, with Newman at
the head. Manning poured comment into Monsignor Talbot's
ear. Monsignor Talbot quite agreed: 'Blande suaviterque' New-
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
man was to be deterred. The Oratory was immediately quashed.
Years passed. Manning served busily at the Council that, al-
most at the moment the Pope lost his Temporal Power, proclaimed
his Infallibility. He was made a Cardinal; 'he ruled his diocese
with the despotic zeal of a born administrator'; he lectured; he sat
on committees; his name appeared on public documents immediately
below that of the Prince of Wales. Monsignor Talbot was by now
confined within padded walls in a Home at Passy. In neither
speech nor writing did Manning ever mention him again. Pius IX
died; Leo XIII ruled in his place. And once again Newman's name
came up. Manning delayed sending a letter for six months, and
even when a Cardinalate was definitely offered to Newman, and
almost accepted, he tried yet one more trick. But the little room
on the winding stair was empty; the voice that had whispered in
the Papal ear was stilled, and the ear was that of another Pope.
This time it failed.
Once, long after, the two Cardinals met. 'What do you think
Cardinal Manning did to me?' Newman asked. 'He kissed me!'
And after Newman's death: 'Poor Newman!' Manning exclaimed.
'He was a great hater!'
Manning had made a brilliant showing at the Oxford Union,
but he had taken orders because his father's bankruptcy had closed
the triumphs of politics to him. For Wolsey, however, the son
of a poor man (a butcher, by some rumors), the Church was the
only possible entry to a career of wealth and power. As chaplain
to the Treasurer of Calais, he speedily drew himself to the attention
of Henry VII. When the young Henry VIII, 'lusty, disposed all
to mirth and pleasure,' and 'nothing minding to travail in the busy
affairs' of the realm, came to the throne, Wolsey was already Al-
moner and a member of the Council. 'Full of subtil wit and policy,'
the crafty cleric showed himself 'most earnest and readiest . . .
to advance the king's only will and pleasure, without any respect
to the case.' His 'filed tongue and ornate eloquence' soon advanced
him.
With tremendous energy he arranged all the details of sending
and supplying the King's army in France, and his favor grew.
In a single year he was made Bishop of Tournai, Bishop of Lincoln,
and finally Archbishop of York. BUY: Canterbury stood in his
light: the Primate of All England, before whom even York must
49
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
'abate the advancing of his cross.' Wolsey pulled strings, and be-
came Priest Cardinal and Legatus de latere. But the purple pall
was sent by a mean messenger, without pomp; and Wolsey's
triumph must be public. The messenger was stayed, appareled
'with all kind of costly silks,' and then received at Blackheath with
'great assembly of prelates and lusty gallant gentlemen.' The in-
vestiture took place at Westminster, in the presence of bishops and
abbots 'in rich mitres and copes.' Presently Warham, the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, was dismissed from the Chancellorship, and
Wolsey took the Great Seal.
Glorious now was his state. The benefices of Durham and Win-
chester swelled his revenues; Bath, Worcester, and Hereford added
their incomes to the flood. In his kitchen a Master Cook 'went
daily in damask satin, or velvet, with a chain of gold about his
neck.' When the Cardinal stirred abroad a numerous train of
gentlemen and yeomen 'in livery coats of crimson velvet of the
most purest colour' accompanied his progress, and he was pre-
ceded by two silver pillars and two great crosses of silver borne
by tall and comely priests. Clad in 'crimson satin, tatfety, damask,
or caffa,' 'a round pillion, with a noble of black velvet' on his
head, and 'a tippet of fine sables about his neck,' he paraded his
garden pestered with suitors and smelling a fair vinegar-orange
as a protection against the pestilent airs; or took his barge to Green-
wich from his own privy stairs to dine richly and entertain the
King. In his magnificence he did not forget old scores. A Sir
Amyas Pawlet who had once put the young priest in stocks was
sent for, greeted with 'sharp and heinous words,' and made to dance
attendance on the Council for six years.
'Thus passed the cardinal his life and time.' But the King began
to cast amorous glances on Anne Boleyn, and to his rage it was
uncovered that young Lord Percy had dared to make love to her.
Henry spoke to Wolsey and the rash youth was sent for. 'I mar-
vel not a little,' Wolsey bullied, 'of thy peevish folly, that thou
wouldst tangle and ensure thyself with a foolish girl yonder in the
court, I mean Anne Boleyn.' The young man tried to defend
himself. 'Lo, sirs/ Wolsey roared, 'ye may see what conformity
and wisdom is in this wilful boy's head.' Percy was hectored with
threats of the King's anger; his father, the old Earl of Northumber-
land was sent for to add his intimidations. 'Son,' he began, 'thou
50
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
hast always been a proud presumptuous disdainful, and a very un-
thrift waster,' and threatened with disinheritance if the boy did
not yield his lewd fact.'
Under all this pressure the young man weakened, he departed
from the court, and Mistress Anne Boleyn was sent to the country.
'She smoked' with rage at the Cardinal, for she thought it all his
doing, having no idea of the King's 'secret mind.' When she
knew 'the King's pleasure, and the great love he bare her in the
bottom of his stomach, then she began to look very hault and stout.'
With her the jealous lords of the Council conspired 'to take the
Cardinal in a brake.' Wolsey's doom was near.
Henry demanded action. On Wolsey's motion the Universities
debated whether the King's marriage to his brother's widow was
legal, and finally a court was appointed by the Pope, presided over
by Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio, to try the cause. At Black-
friars the crier called 'King Henry of England, come into the
court,' and the King answered 'Here, my lords!' Queen Catherine
kneeled at his feet, and prayed: 'Sir, I beseech you for all the
loves that hath been between us, and for the love of God . . .
take of me some pity and compassion.' She had been 'a true humble
and obedient wife,' and when he had her first, she swore 'a true
maid, without touch of man.' She begged that the trial be put aside.
Ending thus, she left the court.
Henry made a speech of extraordinary and cynical hypocrisy.
He would declare unto them all, he said, 'that she hath been to me
as true, as obedient, and as conformable a wife as I could in my
fantasy wish or desire.' But his 'scrupulous conscience' had been
pricked in respect of her marriage with the late Prince Arthur, so
'that it bred a doubt within my breast,' which 'pricked, vexed, and
troubled so my mind . . . that I was in great doubt of God's
indignation.' Was not the fact that the marriage had produced
no heir male a sign of God's anger? Out of consideration for 'the
estate of this realm,' therefore, he thought to 'take another wife
in case that my first copulation with this gentlewoman were not
lawful,' which, he added, 'I intend not for any carnal concupis-
cence, ne for any displeasure or mislike of the queen's person or
age,' but only out of holy concern for God's laws.
The trial dragged on. One day the Bishop of Carlisle, wiping
his brow, complained of the heat. 'Yea,' said Wolsey, 'if ye had
5 1
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
been as well chafed as I have been within this hour, ye would say
it were very hot.' At last Cardinal Campeggio refused to give a
decision without presenting the arguments to the Pope himself, and
dissolved the court. The King raged, and the Duke of Suffolk
stepped forth from his side. 'It was never merry in England, 1 he
said opprobriously, 'whilst we had cardinals among us.'
Going down to Grafton to the King, Wolsey found no lodging
appointed for him, and it was late when 'he came by torchlight'
to improvised lodgings at Euston. Suddenly a blow fell. He was
deprived of the Great Seal, his goods seized, and himself ordered
from the Court, He made an inventory of his rich stuffs and
velvets, the cloth of gold and silver in his great galleries, the gor-
geous vestments, the plate and jewels and books to be handed
over, and took his leave. At the water-stairs were 'a thousand boats
full of men and women of the city of London, ivaffeting up and
down in Thames,' supposing that he was being sent to the Tower,
'whereat they rejoiced.'
At Esher, still in hope of reinstatement, he abode a while 'with-
out beds, sheets, table cloths, cups and dishes to eat our meat,
or lie in.' 'In a white rochet upon a violet gown' 'floods of tears
distilled from his eyes' in the sight of his servants; and 'fountains
of water' gushed out of their 'faithful hearts down their cheeks.'
The devoted Thomas Cromwell defeated an attainder of treason
in Parliament, but a writ of premunire deprived Wolsey of all the
income from his benefices. He threw himself on the King's
mercy: 'The king's highness knoweth right well whether I have
offended his majesty and his laws or no.' But, though he might
justly stand on trial, he ended, he would not do so, but 'confess the
offense in the inditement, and put me wholly in the mercy and grace
of the king.'
The rich endowments of the Church once seized, however,
Henry was not staying. Perhaps his anger with his former Chan-
cellor had vanished; his greed had not. York Place (which be-
longed to the Bishopric) was taken and the Cardinal ordered to his
See. Ailing, but still humbly protesting, the hunted man removed
from Esher to Richmond and from Richmond to Oxford, where
he 'washed, wiped, and kissed' the feet of fifty-nine poor men on
Maundy Thursday. At St Oswald's Abbey he confirmed children,
and was waiting at Cawood the arrangements for his formal in-
52
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
stallation at York when he was arrested. The Earl of Northumber-
land arrived; the sick priest greeted him with cringing courtesy.
In the bed chamber, 'the Earl trembling said, with a very faint and
soft voice,' laying his hand on Wolsey's arm: 'My Lord, I arrest
you of high treason.'
His illness grew worse in confinement, *with a thing that Heth
overthwart my breast,' he said, 'as cold as a whetstone.' At last
he knew there was no hope. 'Master Kingston,' he told the Con-
stable of the Tower, 'all these comfortable words which ye have
spoken be but for a purpose to bring me into a fool's paradise.'
He died in 'an excoriation of the entrails,' saying 'If I had served
God as diligently as I have done the king, he would not have
given me over in my grey hairs . . . This is the just reward
that I must receive for my worldly diligence.'
So the ruthless, glittering, and broken career ended. As Caven-
dish tells it, it is both a tragedy and a pageant of Renaissance
magnificence. Time and again we are surrounded by the glow of
gold, the sparkle of jewels, the shimmer of rich stuffs worn by
all 'fair ladies that bare any bruit or fame of beauty in all the realm,'
whose lovely forms seemed 'more angelic than earthly made of flesh
and bone.' We are told of noble feasts which, the narrator says,
'I do lack wit in my gross old head, and cunning in my bowels
to declare,' and from which the guests 'were fain to be led to their
beds.'
But running through all this display there is an ominous note
that sounds more often as the pomp grows overwhelming. The
great ecclesiastic, glorying in his power, offensive in his pride,
ruthless and domineering in his control, haughtily unforgiving in
memory, commits again in all of these the tragic sin of hubris.
Hubris was the sin of Agamemnon and Oedipus; hubris is the
Cardinal's overweening pride. Tragic is the cause of his undoing
as well, for it is precisely that 'king's only will and pleasure' that
he had himself fostered 'without any respect to the case.'
So Cavendish bathes in all the colors of tragedy the fall of his
disastered lord. At the end he breaks into a valediction, the theme
of which has been running implicitly throughout: 'Who list to
read and consider, with an indifferent eye, this history, may behold
the wondrous mutability of vain honour, the brittle assurance of
abundance; the uncertainty of dignities, the flattering of feigned
53
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
friends, and the fickle trust to worldly princes. Whereof this lord
cardinal hath felt both of the sweet and the sour in each degree
. . . O madness! O foolish desire! O fond hope! O greedy desire
of vain honours, dignities, and riches! Oh what inconstant trust
and assurance is in rolling fortune!'
There is no color in Mr Strachey's handling of Manning, only
a clear, cold intellectual atmosphere, dramatic enough, indeed, but
stark. I can recall only two places where he uses any description
at all, and both are for analytic purposes. One is when the astute
priest observes that Newman has changed into grey trousers, and
knows thereby that he no longer considers himself in Anglican
orders. The other is the picture of Newman's tears outside the
Church at Littlemore. It signalized the fact that blande suaviterque
Newman's spirit had been crushed. Strachey lights his administra-
tive cleric with an acid luminance. His analysis makes it clear
enough that he regards Manning as one 'who had won by art what
he never would have won by force,' who had 'managed to be one
of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through
a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank/
Further, it is another of Strachey's triumphs that he gains his
effects with great economy of means. There are no superfluous
strokes, every sharp paragraph, every brief quotation, bites deep in
the hewing. Compared with this stripped speed, this fierce pressing
on the goal, Cavendish seems like the armor-plated tortoise. He
winds through long and loosely constructed sentences, as unper-
turbed for breath as King Henry was in the intricate mendacity of
his speech before the court of divorce. And sometimes, in fact,
Cavendish is longwinded; in occasional stretches positively dull
He places before us none of those tingling draughts whose bitter
flavor we have come to relish. He is not astringent. But-rotate
the prism a few degrees, let the noble colors dissolve, and gaze
again. Does not the harsh character that appears seem almost iden-
tical with Strachey's hawklike old man?
If Manning is a schemer, a subtle player upon the emotions of
men, so is Wolsey. He had early estimated the nature of Henry
VIII, and used it for his ends. 'Rather than he will either miss
or want any part of his will or appetite, he will put the loss of
one-half his realm in danger.' At first the King had wanted pleasure,
freedom from the drudgery of state, pomp and display. Wolsey
54
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
had given them to him, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, pageantry,
military strutting; and taken on himself the intrigues of state. As
the King grew interested in the game of power, Wolsey undertook
his embassies for him. He profited by all.
Like Manning, Wolsey is ruthless and determined in his own
ambitions. Witness how he gets himself made Cardinal in order
to outrank Canterbury. (He accomplished it by holding in the
Tower, in spite of repeated remonstrances from Rome, the deputy
collector of Adrian, Bishop of Bath, whose influence he demanded.)
Like Manning, Wolsey is vindictive to those who had baulked him
as the unfortunate Sir Amyas Pawlet learned. And like Manning
he is wily in human nature. Cavendish asked him why he had
confessed himself guilty of premunire when it was untrue. Once
the King had seized all his goods and possessions, Wolsey replied,
'rather than yield, or take a foil in the law, and thereby restore to
me all my goods again' the King would 'imagine my utter undoing.'
And besides this 'if I had been found stiff necked' Anne Boleyn, a
continual 'serpentine enemy' (he also calls her 'the night crow')
would have breathed poison into Henry's ear and his favor been
lost forever. Wolsey had observed them both well. For all her
cajoleries when she needed him, Anne Boleyn had never forgiven
the Cardinal. And Henry defy that deep-jowled egoism and his
rancor would be implacable. Wolsey knew. But what he could
not guard against was the rapacity which, once it had plunged its
fangs into the juicy flanks of the Church's revenues, would never
relinquish them.
Cavendish places the Cardinal's worldly knowledge beyond all
possible doubt. The administrator who raised, equipped, dispatched,
and maintained a victorious army in France, the diplomat who suc-
cessfully conducted the most intricate negotiations again and again,
the statesman who pulled with his sensitive fingers the threads of all
Henry VTIFs entangled foreign policy and made England a power
in Europe, the flatterer who held the fickle favor of that monarch
for twenty years, was a master of his craft.
The two Cardinals are almost stardingly alike. It is significant,
then, to note the contrast in the methods by which they are re-
vealed. Both churchmen are assuredly, as Mr Strachey puts it,
among those who 'have been distinguished less for saintliness and
learning than for practical ability,' and the fact that Wolsey's
55
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
career ended in disaster does not really destroy the parallel. But
all Wolsey's traits, clearly shown as they are by Cavendish, are
unobtrustively and as it were innocently revealed. If we wish to
observe them, we must keep our eyes open and our minds alert.
He is not underlining and pointing his material for us, as Strachey
is. He may even be at some pains not to be too obvious.
We are seldon unaware while reading Cardinal Manning that
the author is a very clever man. His pen is dipped in the inkwell
of Voltaire. He flashes the instruments of his wit, the evidence
of his research, before our eyes; the dexterity is admirable, and
we can hardly fail to realize clearly the purpose of the whole dem-
onstration. There is the scalpel, and if it perform a scalping, how
neat! But always we are as aware of the performer as we are of
Manning, and we realize gradually that he is out to 'get' Manning.
The proof seems convincing, certainly, we murmur; yes, Manning
must have been so, there are these and these quotations from veri-
table documents, and yet-! The animus is palpable, the writer
brilliant-he has proved it beyond cavil-may the facts perhaps be,
we wonder, not fabricated, but-manipulated 1 '? We may rejoice
thus in Mr Strachey's writing as a piece of delightful literary
virtuosity, but we end by feeling dubious of how far he tried
to live up to his professed aim: 'Je n'impose rien; je ne propose rien;
j 'expose.'
But so retiring is Cavendish that we are seldom aware of him at
all, except when one of his phrases strikes a modern ear as quaint,
or when he is making some deprecatory remark about his 'gross
old head.' This simplicity is deceptive. He is by no means as in-
nocent as he appears. It is no simpleton who depicts the tortuous
ramifications of several of Wolsey's missions, and who gives that
marvelously perjured speech of the King's from which I have
quoted. The naivete of the colloquy in which he asks Wolsey
to explain why he submitted to the King's injustice is only a drama-
tic device. The wits that understood and remembered the explanation
for over twenty years were no 'gross old wits.'
There is a tremendous skill in the way he tells us all those pride-
ful doings of Wolsey's prime, even those that depict him as un-
principled, revengeful, and hard. When he reaches the stage of
1 Mr Strachey is not here accused of any factual duplicity, but of the
aesthetic failure of losing the reader's confidence.
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF BIOGRAPHY
Wolsey's decline we already believe in the honesty of the man who
has not hesitated to show his master's faults, and so we accept his
account of the conspiracy that leads to Wolsey's ruin, and sympa-
thize with the meekness, the sorrow, and the too-late piety that then
appear. If these things are deliberately done, as I believe them
to be, they are more skilful than Mr Strachey's attainment. The
clever modern writer has left us dubious of his trustworthiness,
and has failed to remove the signs of his personality from the
scene. The unobtrusive gentleman usher retains our faith and is us-
ually in the background unnoticed.
The issue here is not whether either writer is actually coloring
the truth; it is one of literary tact. Cavendish clearly avoids writ-
ing an apologia, although his mood is sympathetic. He makes no
apparent effort to conceal or palliate Wolsey's flaws. They had
raised up enemies, and had left him naked to them in his age. His
fall is just, but who could withhold the feeling of awe and pity?
Sympathy in such case demands no excuse, for it makes no defense.
Attack, however, requires double and three times the strength
that forgiveness does. Biography is not diatribe, and it must guard
itself against all suspicion of being. When animus lies in one scale,
if the writer be skilful the other must be heaped to overflowing.
With the reader a seemingly unchivalrous foe defeats himself. So
Mr Strachey mercilessly at his victim loses the confidence an
author less on the scene might have retained. Readers have often
said that Mr Strachey was subtle, but in all such genuine attributes
of subtlety Cavendish is clearly superior.
Strachey is ironic (a quite different thing from subtlety), he is
sharp, harsh, and witty, in a way that Cavendish neither attempts
nor could achieve. There is a spark of the romantic in the older
writer; the realism of the other is almost sinisterly bleak. Cavendish
is magnificent, although sometimes wordy; Strachey is always bare.
And, last, Mr Strachey's art almost ostentatiously makes us aware
that it is art. Cavendish, in his serene manner, takes all that by
the way. That both have made penetrating, and curiously like,
portraits, will not be denied. That Cavendish presents some ob-
stacles to the impatience of the modern reader is also probably
true, but mostly the obstacles are not his, only the detritus of time.
That the sixteenth century biographer suffers in comparison with
liis modern rival is very dubious indeed.
57
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
1 6th and ifth Centuries
n
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
l6TH AND lTH CENTURIES
On Understanding the Past
QUEEN ELIZABETH'S favorite oath was 'God's death!' but it is
no stranger than various exclamations that may be found
in popular magazines today. Nor is it more normal for women
now to smoke cigarettes than for those of earlier times to take snuff.
And still we are constantly tempted to regard such differences of
time as proofs of our own superiority, and to be discomposed by
what seem to us the oddities of the past in dress and in manners,
in ideas and diction, in rhythms and ways of thought.
Especially in literature these obstacles are often more or less in
our paths. We are more familiar with the nineteenth century and
with our own time than with the sixteenth century, and more
familiar with certain modernisms of tone and overtone than with
those of Tudor England. And so we may find it easier at first to read
Strachey than Cavendish, although the latter is as vivid and as
sound in portraiture as his modern rival, and perhaps fuller and
richer in background.
61
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
But in approaching any older writer we may feel such difficulties.
The world has so changed in even these last few hundred years
that we live veritably in a mist of ignorance about bygone days.
It is hard for us, often, to understand the very fabric of our ances-
tors' minds. Loyalties and passions for which their hearts flamed
may be only old wives' tales to us. Geographical exploration and
discovery, political and economic change, new inventions and ways
of living, altering religious and philosophic views all these place
us in a vastly different world from that of no more than a hundred
years ago.
Should we flounce impatient shoulders and pass on? If we do,
we shall miss a great deal that is wonderful, moving, and revealing.
Under the outward changes men have not grown really strange to
what they once were, and it is not too hard to strip the masks.
There is wisdom in history. Only by exploring the past can we
know that our tastes are not parochial, our truths not a whim or
passing fashion. Our enlightenment, if real, we shall see as mostly
the fortune of heritage rather than personal insight. 'The dead
writers are remote from us,' some one claims, 'because we know
so much more than they did.' 'Precisely, and they are that which
we know.'
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not so remote that
we cannot approach their biographers as human beings. If we do,
they will illumine the past and revive its life. They will also
clarify the aims of biography. The biographers in this chapter,
ranging from the time of Cavendish to the end of the seventeenth
century, are not treated in strict chronological order and they are
not exhaustive. I wanted to avoid implying that they represent a
'development' of biography, with each learning from his prede-
cessors and avoiding their errors. It is possible that North and
Aubrey may not even have read Cavendish or Roper. The six
biographers chosen here are presented only as illustrations of differ-
ent efforts and different degrees of success in handling their prob-
lems.
Some of them are failures as biographers. There are two reasons
why a writer may be a bad biographer: one, pure incompetence;
the other, lack of intent. Sometimes the incompetent writer is
turgid and empty. Sometimes he lacks any conception of character
or depicts a stiff and lifeless paragon. Sometimes he is wandering
62
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
or over-minute, or intrudes himself into the narrative, or is a mel-
ancholy and pompous bore. Nothing can mitigate such complete
failure in biography. But in other cases the writer was not trying
to produce biography. He may have done something highly inter-
esting in itself, that is in a way the raw material of biography.
Some of these diverse aims appear now, and others the chroniclers,
the memoir-writers, and, at their best the most vivid of all, the
diarists appear in later chapters.
Blood and Smoke
Few modern readers are acquainted with John Foxe's Book of
Martyrs. And yet it is a work that used to be found in countless
households where its only companions were the Bible and Pilgrim's
Progress. First published in 1563, it went into four editions in
Foxe's lifetime, and remained tremendously popular for long after-
wards. In its great success we may find perhaps a mingling of
piety and the Old Adam, for if it was intended for Protestant edi-
fication it also gave plentiful satisfaction to an impulse which was
very shortly later to revel in the piled-up corpses of The Spanish
Tragedy and the barbarities of The Jew of Malta.
The material of the work is the progress of Reformation, and
its method is partly biography, partly chronicle. Beginning with
a rather cursory sketch of the persecutions of the early Christians
and outlining the career of the Emperor Constantine, who first
adopted Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, it
focuses attention upon such reformers as Wickliff and the Lollards
in England, John Huss in Bohemia, and Martin Luther in Germany,
and then returns to the England of Foxe's own day with detailed
accounts of the burnings of hundreds in the bloody reign of Mary
Tudor.
Sometimes the narrative is vivid and powerful. But only too
often it is tedious beyond bearing. In the first place Foxe has no
conception of literary architectonics. He tells his story chrono-
logically under each reign until one of his heroes comes on the
scene. Then he pulls up, goes back, and tells his biography from
his birth: and then resumes the main line of narrative until the next
interruption. He almost invariably gives all the details of the
martyrs being examined before their judges, with all the points of
63
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
theological controversy, no matter how many times they may
virtually duplicate previously quoted trials. Worse than these
faults, the prevailing tone of undiscriminating piety is such that
hardly any of the characters stand out as individuals. Latimer and
Tyndale cannot be separated in one's mind from John Hooper;
one may recall what happens to them, but not how they differ from
each other.
Occasionally, however, there is a flash of characterization. In
examining Dr Rowland Taylor, we are told, Gardiner, Bishop of
Winchester and Lord Chancellor, 'according to his custom reviled
him, calling him knave, traitor, heretic, with many other villainous
reproaches,' and this dialogue takes place. Gardiner demands:
'How darest thou look me in the face for shame?'
'If I should be afraid of your lordly looks, why fear you not
God? . . . With what countenance will ye appear before the judg-
ment-seat of Christ and answer to your oath made first unto King
Henry the Eighth of famous memory, and afterward unto King
Edward the Sixth his son?'
'Tush, tush,' [the Bishop responds] 'that was Herod's oath, unlaw-
ful; and therefore worthy to be broken' [and when Taylor argues
this point, loses his temper and bursts out]
'I see thou art an arrogant knave, and a very fool.'
'My Lord,' [Taylor replies] 'leave your railing at me, which is not
seemly for such a one in authority as you are.'
Both men are clearly revealed in this scene, and it is not without
parallels. Probably the best of all the narratives is that of Cranmer,
which skilfully evokes his milk-mildness and obedience to the King
and his mingling of simplicity and spiritual subtlety perhaps more
skilfully than its author knew. We are introduced to his intricate
argument that 'the Bishop of Rome had no such authority, as where-
by he might dispense with the Word of God,* and Henry's jubilant
exclamation, 'That man has the sow by the right ear!' There is
even a sort of humor in the Protestant delight with which Foxe
tells the story of the Pope offering his foot to be kissed by Henry's
ambassadors. The Earl of Wiltshire, one of the envoys, had a
spaniel, which while his master made no move, 'straightway went
directly to the Pope's foot, and not only kissed the same unman-
nerly, but took fast with his mouth the great toe of the Pope, so
that in haste he pulled in his feet: our men smiling in their sleeves.'
Comedy and drama mingles in the episode of Cranmer consulting
64
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
the Suffragan of Dover and Dr Barber while he has their treach-
erous letters in his bosom, and getting them to condemn themselves
as worthy to be hanged.
Under Queen Mary comes his fall, and we see the trial speed
apace, with the judges gagging the prisoner's efforts to plead:
'Short arguments, master doctor! short arguments!' and later we
see Cranmer desperately wriggling in the net of recantation and
counter-recantation. Indeed, as Foxe says, if *a bishop ought not
to be stubborn,' with that vice 'this archbishop in no wise ought
to be charged.' But when at last 'the archbishop began to surmise
what they went about,' his wavering ended. The final scene on
the scaffold is superb: the cunning of Cranmer's declaration,
couched until almost the end in such innocuous terms of repentance
and profession of faith that the officials have no intimation of
what is coming: 'As my hand offended, writing contrary to my
heart, my hand shall first be punished therefore; for, may I come
to the fire, it shall be first burned. And as for the Pope, I refuse
him, as Christ's enemy, and antichrist, with all his false doctrine.'
Consternation follows, while doctors 'yelp and bawl': 'Stop the
heretic's mouth!' Foxe observes in satisfaction, 'I think there was
never cruelty more notably or in better time deluded; for they
looked for a glorious victory and a perpetual triumph by this
man's retractation.'
If there is no other single story that has the dramatic complete-
ness of this one, there are terrible episodes in many others, such
as this of the deaths of Latimer and Ridley:
Master Ridley took his gown, and his tippet, and gave them to his
brother-in-law, Master Shipside. . . . He gave away, besides, divers
other small things to gentlemen standing by, pitifully weeping, as to
Sir Henry Lea a new groat; and to divers of my Lord William's
gentlemen some napkins, some nutmegs, and rases of ginger; his dial,
and such other things as he had about him. . . .
Master Latimer very quietly suffered his keeper to pull off his
hose, and his other array, which was very simple: being stripped into
his shroud, he seemed as comely a person to them that were there
present, as one should see; and whereas in his clothes he appeared
a withered and crooked old man, he now stood bolt upright, as
comely a father as one might lightly behold. . . .
Then the smith took a chain of iron, and brought the same about
both Dr Ridley's, and Master Latimer's middles: and as he was knock-
ing in a staple, Dr Ridley took the chain in his hand, and shaked
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
the same, and looking aside to the smith, said 'Good fellow, knock it
in hard, for the flesh will have his course.'
Then they brought a faggot, kindled with fire, and laid the same
down at Dr Ridley's feet. To whom Master Latimer spake in this
manner: 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We
shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I
trust shall never be put out.'
When Dr Ridley saw the fire flaming up towards him, he cried
with a wonderful loud voice, 'Lord, Lord, receive my spirit.' Master
Latimer, crying as vehemently on the other side, 'O Father of heaven,
receive my soul!' received the flame as it were embracing of it. After
that he had stroked his face with his hands, and as it were bathed
them a little in the fire, he soon died (as it appeareth) with very little
pain or none.
By reason of the evil making of the fire unto Master Ridley, because
the wooden faggots were laid about the gorse, and over-high built,
the fire burned first beneath . . . that it burned clean all his nether
parts, before it once touched the upper [so that he cried] 'Let the
fire come unto me, I cannot burn.' In which pangs he labored till one
of the standers by with his bill pulled off the faggots above, and
where he saw the fire flame up Master Ridley wrested himself to that
side. [Presently he stirred no more.]
The glare and horror of passages like these do much to explain
the fascination of the book. What though there are hundreds of
'godly martyrs' burned in the fires of Smithfield of whom one
learns no more than that 'altogether in one fire most joyfully and
constantly' they 'ended their temporal lives, receiving there-fore
life eternal'? What though repetition, wanderingness, and mono-
tonous iteration of holy rhetoric fill page after page? When the
narratives speed toward their dreadful ends and the flames rise
around the figures bound in chains piety and debate are consumed
in the smoke. The Martyrologist is a forerunner of the tragedy
of blood, and the ingredients of his drama are blood and fire.
Chancellor of Utopia
More nearly satisfactory as biography than Foxe is William
Roper's life of his father-in-law, Sir Thomas More. Although this
work was probably written long before The Book of Martyrs, some
time after the Chancellor was beheaded in 1535, it was not pub-
lished until 1626. It is a fairly lucid telling of More's life story,
colored with vivid reminiscence, but weakened by being deter-
66
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
minedly encomiastic, so much so that his subject is presented to
us only in solemn lights. This might not be wrong, in itself, if
we did not have some evidence of More's liveliness of disposition
and quickness of wit, neither of which appears in Roper. John
Aubrey tells us that More's 'discourse was extraordinarily facetious,'
and that he enjoyed playing tricks on people. He gives us an
anecdote illustrative of the Chancellor's ingenuity: musing on the
top of a tower, he was surprised by an escaped madman who 'had
a Mind to have thrown him from the battlements, saying Leap,
Tom, Leap.' More said shrewdly, pointing to his little dog, 'Let
us first throw the dog down, and see what sport that will be.' The
luckless animal was tossed; 'This is very fine sport, sayd my Lord,
Let us fetch him up, and try once more.' The trusting lunatic
descended, and More was able to fasten the door and call for help.
In More's Utopia it was a law that young people were to see
each other naked before marriage, so that they might conceal no
physical defects and make sure they had no mislike of each other.
According to another of Aubrey's tales, the Chancellor was so far
consistent as to exemplify his own theory, and when a suitor ar-
rived (according to the story, this very William Roper), More
'carries Sir William into the chamber' where both his daughters
are sleeping in a truckle-bed, 'and takes the Sheete by the corner
and suddenly whippes it off. They lay on their Backes, and their
smocks up as highe as their armepitts. This awakened them, and
immediately they turned on their bellies.' Thus the suitor saw
both sides and More showed himself unconventionally willing to
act on his own plan.
Now it may be that these anecdotes are apocryphal, or it may
be that Roper, if he was concerned in the latter of them, had no
mind to tell how he took Megge More to wife. He was, Mr
Nicolson remarks, 'not very intelligent,' and it may have been that
in his partisanship for More he believed such things would be
damaging (which they should not be), but he does not even give
any indication of the traits of character they exemplify. His pic-
ture of More is solemn, worshipful, and idyllic. He tells us of the
days when the Lord Chancellor and his King were on so friendly
terms that 'after dinner in a faire garden' they would walk together
with the King 'holding his arme about his neck.' There is a pleasant
scene of More hauling the King up on the leads by night, 'there
67
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
to consider with him the diversities, course, motions, and operations
of the Stars and Planetts.'
More's evil days came upon him, and from the Tower he wrote
his daughter letters telling how he answered the Secretary, 'I do
nobody no harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish
everybody good; and if this be not enough to keep a man alive,
in good faith I long not to live.' Roper handles this part of the
narrative with skill. There is a tragic farewell between Megge and
her father when he is condemned, and another between him and
his more practical spouse. Lady More has come to the Tower
to urge that he be not obstinate, but yield to the King. More asks,
characteristically, 'Is not this house as nigh heaven as mine own?'
She feels impatient at this high-flown question and replies:
'Tille valle, Tiile valle.'
'Howe say you, Mistress Alice, is it not soe?'
'Bone Deus, bone Deus, man, will this geere never be left?'
More was unaltered by this brusquerie, or, as Roper says, 'So her
persuasions moved him but a little.'
In spite of the merits of such bits, the book as a whole is dis-
appointing, and intellectually it is especially faulty because it throws
no light at all on all the more lofty and significant aspects of
More's character, and leaves untouched the strange paradox of his
career. We find in Roper's book nothing of the splendid dawn of
the Renaissance, with the new pulsations of vitality in art and archi-
tecture, and the luminous beacon of the humanities. He gives us
nothing of the communion with Erasmus, and the high, disappointed
hopes to which Erasmus had dedicated The Praise of Folly. The
gentle and wise and brave-minded iconoclast of the Utopia is un-
known to him.
On the other hand Roper does try to glorify More in the re-
spects he does understand. He makes him out more independent
as Speaker than he really was. A great many of his activities as
Chancellor are untouched. How, we wonder, did More reconcile
his speculative idealism in political theory with doing the dirty
work of Henry VIIFs diplomacy; how did the enlightened toler-
ance which pleaded complete religious freedom in his Utopia, issue
in the black religious cruelty that led Foxe to call him a 'bitter
68
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
persecutor of good men 5 ? Roper does not begin to answer these
queries; he remains silent.
Dark Reflective Glass
If Roper fails because he is over-reverential and undercompre-
hending, the same reasons cannot be given for the pallid character-
ization of Philip Sidney in the Life by his friend, Fulke Greville.
That strange, dark, and saddened poet and philosopher was simply
not trying to write biography. It is true that he 'observed, hon-
oured, and loved' his friend much, and that he intended in his book
to 'stir up my drooping memory touching this mans worth, powers,
wayes, and designes: to the end that in the tribute I owe him, our
nation may see a Sea-mark, rais'd upon their native coast, above the
levell of any private Pharos abroad: and so by a right Meridian
line of their own, learn to sayl through the straits of true vertue,
into a calm, and spacious Ocean of humane honour.' These are
the words of panegyric, and where Greville remembers Sidney, he
adheres to them. But mostly he is off on another enterprise, which
is likewise stated in his title. After the words 'The Life of the
Renowned Sir Philip Sidney* come these:
'With The True Interest of England as it then stood in relation
to all Forrain Princes: And particularly for suppressing the power
of Spain Stated by Him.' And the copious page goes on to
promise an account of the governmental maxims of Queen Eliza-
beth as well. This book, then, is a sort of combination of biog-
raphy (a very little) with statecraft, in which Greville uses the
prestige of his dead and reverenced friend to enforce the principles
and policies he lays down. There is an introductory chapter about
Sidney's boyhood, education, travels, and poetry (interrupted by
'reflections on faineant kings'), and two chapters of testimonials
to his merits, followed by an account of his embassy to the Em-
peror Rudolph but then comes a disquisition on European rela-
tionships under the form of Sidney's arguments against Elizabeth
marrying the Duke of Anjou. Another two chapters of narrative
are followed by a survey of the whole state of continental politics,
in which Greville tries to remind the reader at intervals that it is
Sidney who is supposed to be speaking by parentheses like 'said
Sir Philip' and 'saith he.' By the middle of the book Greville has
told of Sidney's wound at Zutphen, his lingering illness, and death;
69
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
and from then on talks frankly of such topics as Queen Elizabeth,
her governmental practices, how he himself came to write poetry,
and the 'Object, arguments, and style' of his tragedies.
Although there is little of either Sidney's actions or his character
in this odd treatise, it is not without interest, even to the passing
reader, if he have a feeling for the mysterious harmonies and as-
sociations of words. Strange vibrations tremble in Greville's
rhythms, and in his long and almost wandering periods images pass
and repass, seen, darkly, as in a glass (to use one of his own favorite
similes), sometimes illumined and sometimes obscured by the
writer's intricate or melancholy wit. 'But many times it pleaseth
God,' he says, 'by the breaking out of concealed flashes from these
fatall cloudes of craft, or violence, to awake even the most super-
stitious Princes out of their enchanted dreams'; and Satan he calls
'the dark Prince, that sole author of dis-creation, and disorder, who
ever ruines his ends with over-building.' He speaks of 'hypocriticall
sacrifices upon the Altar of death, as peace-offerings from pride to
the temple of fear, or smoaks of a dying diseased conscience choked
up with innocent blood.' The tyrannical encroachments of con-
querors 'carry the images of Hell, and her thunder-workers, in
their own breasts, as fortune doth misfortune in that wind-blown,
vast, and various womb of hers.' From true poetry one who passes
'through any straights, or latitudes, of good, or ill fortune' may
'see how to set a good countenance upon all the discountenances
of adversitie, and a stay upon the exorbitant smilings of chance.'
Crowding upon each other, one ingenuity suggesting another,
wandering through the 'careless-ordered garden' of his fantastic
mind, the images elaborate themselves; an occasional sardonic hu-
mor appears and glimmers gone again; puns and contrasts of sense
and sound echo and fade. It is not mere verbal juggling, because
running through it although uncontrolled there is a deeply pensive
spirit. That spirit leaves behind it a richness haunting and profound.
Pure Crystal Water
A real biographer, in his own curious way, was John Aubrey:
an indefatigable collector of curious fragments and details of people's
lives, which he was always intending to reduce to order and never
got around to doing. And- yet Aubrey's disjecta membra contain
70
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
the very flesh and blood of the matter, and often enough the spirit
too. His notes on his own life are not the least curious and fas-
cinating of his data. Born a country gentleman, in the county of
Wiltshire, he spent his youth, he tells us, in 'an eremiticall solitude*
and was sent to his 'beloved Oxon' for his education. 'But now
Bellona thundered' in the Civil Wars, and his father sent for him
home. Presently, however, he returned again to the felicitous
scene ('ingeniose youth, as Rosebudds, imbibe the morning dew,'
he says) but soon misfortune darkened. His father died, leaving
him debts and lawsuits, and, always a muddler and luckless besides,
he saw his estates melt away. His love-affairs went badly too; by
1666, he notes, 'all my businesses and affairs ran kim kam'; and
at last even his birthplace, with its 'jedeau,' its grotto, and its
'volant Mecury', was sold. He had lost everything.
But there were two alleviations. His pride had been pleased by
his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in i66z, and he had
friends in town and country who delighted in his conversation and
who were charmed to offer him food and shelter. Chatting with
Sir Christopher Wren in London, drinking with Edmund Wylde
in Shropshire, gleaning strange observations for the Royal Society,
he found himself serene: 'I had never quiett, nor anything of hap-
piness,' he wrote, 'till divested of all.'
The range of his enquiries was striking. *He was learned,' Lytton
Strachey remarks, 'in natural history, geology, Gothic architecture,
mineralogy, painting, heraldry; ... he was a profound astrologer,
and a learned geometrician.' Cookery also had no mysteries for
him, and his labors included 'a collection of approved receipts.'
So he passed busily a happy enough life. Only one thing dis-
turbed him: he 'wished monastrys had not been putt downe, that
the reformers would have been more moderate as to that point.'
There should be 'provisions for contemplative men'; and he im-
agines 'What pleasure 'twould have been to travel from monastery
to monastery.'
Among his other activities he collected biographical data for his
friend Mr Anthony Wood, who was compiling materials for short
biographies of the graduates of Oxford. Everything that came to
him was fish to his net. Personal descriptions, physical oddities,
traditional stories, scandalous anecdotes, all were taken down in
short and sometimes formless notes. Little by little a pride of
7 1
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
authorship became involved. At last he sent Wood a huge manu-
script. Wood rudely tore out a chunk of it, and returned the
undesired remainder to its author. Aubrey was hurt, gently hurt;
it seemed impossible for him to be angry; he wrote a pathetic note
complaining that he had been ill 'of a surfeit of peaches,' but that
Wood's 'unkindness and choleric humour was a great addition' to
his illness. 'I thought you so deare a friend that I might have
entrusted my life in your hands, and now your unkindnes doth
almost break my heart . . . '
Some excuse there was for Wood's omissions, but not for the
barbarous manner of making them. Three-quarters of Aubrey's
work 'is an accumulation of fragmentary sentences and old dry
broken facts'; he often wrote after drinking debauches with
Edmund Wylde, and many of his notes are only 'marks made to
remind himself to remember better.' For example, entries like this:
James Harrington, Esq., borne the first Fryday in January, 1611, neer
Northampton; the son of Sk Sapcote Harrington, of , in the
countie of , by , daughter of Sk Samuel, was
borne at Upton (Sir Samuel's house in Northamptonshire)
anno .
In still other cases Aubrey's zeal had gone beyond wisdom; he
had included scurrilous and libellous matter that might indeed, as
Wood had once told him, be 'things that would cutt' his throat.
For Aubrey, honest fellow that he was, held back . nothing, con-
cealed nothing; and in his simplicity everything that he heard from
a friend he believed. 'I here laye downe to you,' he wrote to
Wood, '(out of the conjunct friendship between us) the trueth,
and, as neer as I can and that religiously as a poenitent to his con-
fessor, nothing but the trueth: the naked and plaine trueth, which
is here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and
affords many passages that would raise a blush in a young virgin's
cheeke.'
These qualities, which frightened Wood, are the very essence
of Aubrey's merits as a biographer. Aubrey's honest simplicity
was so great that everything in him is purified to the impersonality
of art. He gave no lewd snickers to a scandalous story about one
of his subjects; he listened, and wrote it down in such a way as to
reveal clearly that it was told just for what light it threw upon his
subject. 'Ben Johnson had one eie lower than t'other, and bigger,
72
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
like Clun the player; perhaps he begott Gun.' The importance of
this, as Mr John Collier points out, is not whether Jonson actually
did or not, but that it is at once clear he was capable of it. Some
of Aubrey's tales may thus be those inspired Fictions in which a
man's true character is caught by his contemporaries with a per-
fection that no moment of actuality has attained. E. F. Benson
points out the same quality in a story about the Oxford don, Oscar
Browning, returning from London, where he had met the Emperor
Wilhelm III, and saying he was 'quite one of the nicest emperors
I ever met.' Aubrey's mind was in fact, as he says of it, Very cleer;
phansie like a mirrour, pure chrystal water': it reflected without
distorting, even in the medium of fiction.
Further than that, he had a kind of artistry that managed to
catch out of a long life 'just the two or three episodes which show
u^ all the man.' What a vivid flash we get of Richard Corbet,
Bishop of Oxford, for example, in the scene where, confirming
some country people, being about to lay his hands on the head of
a very bald man, 'he turns to his chaplaine Lushington, and sayd,
Some Dust, Lushington, (to keepe his hand from slipping). There
was a man with a greate venerable Beard: sayd the Bishop, You,
behind the beard.'
In his descriptions of people and their traits, he gives us just those
details of person or idiosyncrasy that illumine their characters. It
is striking to be told that Francis Bacon would often drink some
strong beer before going to bed, to quiet a too active mind that
would otherwise keep him awake; and that he had 'a delicate,
lively, hazel eie,' 'like the eie of a viper.' Milton, Aubrey says,
'pronounced the letter R (littera canina) very hard,' and adds,
a certaine signe of a satyricall Witt.' Sir Walter Raleigh had 'an
exceeding high Forehead, long-faced and sour eie-lidded, a kind of
pigge-eie,' and 'spake broad Devonshire/ Once he took a 'per-
petuall Talker' and sealed up his mouth, ' i. e. his upper and neather
beard, 5 with sealing wax. In a racier passage we are told of his
'getting up one of the Mayds of Honour against a tree . . . who
seemed at first boarding to be something dfearfull.' She began
crying 'Sweet Sir Walter, what doe you me ask? Will you undoe
me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter!
At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher,
she cryed in the extacy, Swisser Swatter! Swisser Swatter!'
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Even more interesting than these are some of the episodes in the
brief careers he gives of certain of the characters. There is Dr Wil-
liam Butler, the great physician, who cured a man of an overdose of
opium by placing his body into the warm belly of a just-slaughtered
cow, and who responded to the low bows of a courtly Frenchman
by whipping his leg over the man's politely bowed head and going
away. Dr Butler used to get drunk at the tavern and be called for
by a servant named Nell, to take him home. She called him a
drunken beast, and then stumbled herself, whereupon he called
her a drunken beast; 'and so they did drunken beast one another
all the way till they came home.'
The accumulation of Aubrey's biographical data is collected
together mostly in his Brief Lives. Formless as they are in total,
they are works of art. The choice of material, the honest love of
reality, the limpid style, all combine to make them at their best
little masterpieces: or at the least, the stuff out of which master-
pieces might come. Aubrey has the eye for detail, the love of a
good story, the flak for character, and the unfalsifying selflessness
of the genuine enthusiast for the lives of men. I cannot go so far
as Mr Strachey, who says: 'A biography should either be as long
as Boswell's or as short as Aubrey's. The method of enormous and
elaborate accretion which produced the Life of Johnson is excel-
lent, no doubt; but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us
have the pure essentials a vivid image, on a page or two, without
explanations, transitions, commentaries, or padding.' The vivid
image Aubrey does have, and the golden ore of biography, and
his own artless art. He reveals what can be done with brevity and
selection. To Aubrey's gifts we need only add the sense of form,
of development, and of story.
Cloistral Images
These three things, on the other hand, Izaak Walton had, and,
although he was no painstaking grubber into the minutiae of a man's
life, honesty of intention and accuracy to fact as well. And yet,
in a very grave way, Walton was inaccurate in essence, for his own
nature inclined him to a devoutly reflective existence and a serenity
in which he falsely bathes all his subjects. 'There is no doubt,'
says Professor Saintsbury, 'about the strange flood of light which
74
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
the book pours on the more contemplative side of English life in
the seventeenth century.' But who were the subjects of Walton's
Lives? A tormented and ambitious sensualist, a worldly diplomat,
the learned author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a courtly
aristocrat who became a rural saint, and a celebrated casuist. Now
all these people had their contemplative side, of course, and they
were all sincerely devout, but the point is that they were not all
alike. Nevertheless, save for occasional hints or insinuations, Wal-
ton subdues them to a curiously marmoreal sameness: despite the
varying incidents of their lives, and despite the occasional hidden
humor of the narration, they are like memorial images posed in the
stillness of a chapel or set in the greenery of a college cloister.
Even from their youth Walton begins molding them to his in-
clination. As a student Donne *gave great testimonies of his Wit,
his Learning, and of his Improvement'; Wotton, during his child-
hood paid his mother for her pains 'with such visible signs of
future perfection in Learning, as turned her imployment into a
pleasing-trouble'; Hooker as a young scholar was notable for 'a
remarkable Modesty, and a sweet serene quietness of Nature, and
with them a quick apprehension 1 that made his elders believe him
'to have an inward blessed Divine Light'; 'George Herbert spent
much of his Childhood in a sweet content'; and Robert Sanderson
began 'a meek and innocent life' by dedicating himself from youth
to 'Piety and Vertue.' Such uniformity of zeal as an outstanding
trait seems hardly in nature; and throughout the lives the un-
obtrusive but decided hand of Walton is ever shaping, clipping,
and smoothing.
Naturally such interference requires considerable art. Walton
has art, and delightfully. He consciously composed biography; he
arranged his material with beautiful literary construction; his style
is serene and translucent; he can flash scenes and episodes before
you with a bright vividness; for all his assumed simplicity, he is
urbane and subtle, with a touch here and there of exquisite faint
raillery. Beyond these things, his writing has the quality of in-
timacy, the flavor of being really and deeply at home with his
subjects when he knew them personally; and in the one case where
he did not, that of Richard Hooker, it has been noted that 'he is
clearly ill at ease' through being unable to convey a sense of
familiarity. Biographers have presented their subjects more fully
75
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
and accurately; few have given the impression of being more af-
fectionately at one with them.
And still, as I have implied, this is sometimes more atmosphere
than truth. Nowhere in the Life of Donne do we find an open
dealing with the sensual, passionate, and disillusioned soul of that
tortured man. The ambitions and vices of his youth are passed
over with hardly a hint, the struggles to discipline himself to res-
ignation in missing worldly power are presented only as humble
doubts of his fitness for the priesthood, his alternations of rejoicing
in his salvation and feeling the blackest despair are portrayed as
the signs of a saintly piety. That Donne had piety I do not mean
to deny, only that Walton reveals him with anything like com-
pleteness or due perspective. Where is the rebellious victim of
passion who describes love as 'the tyran Pike, our hearts the Frye,'
and who furiously uncovers in his own heart
The spider love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert Manna to gall
who alternates between shouting to his mistress 'For Godsake hold
your tongue, and let me love' and trying to believe that whereas
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence
his passion is 'Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate'? All that Walton
says about this aspect of Donne is, astonishingly, that it was 'as if
nature and all her varieties had been made only to exercise his sharp
wit and high fancy'; and that in these 'facetiously Composed' writ-
ings 'it may appear by his choice Metaphors, that both Nature and-
all the Arts joined.' This is strangely tempered comment on the
author of Loves Infinitenesse, The Canonization, The Will, and The
Extasy.
Nor does his presentation of the religious poet seem to me much
better. Professor Saintsbury finds 'a curious kind of awe' therein;
and some awe I suppose there is, but not of a kind to suggest the
poetry, nor are the quotations the best for the purpose. His de-
clining age, Walton says, was 'witnessed then by many Divine
Sonnets, and other high, holy, and harmonious Composures.' And
he quotes the Hymn to God the Father, beginning 'Wilt thou for-
76
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
give that sin where I begun.' How much more of Donne there is
in 'Batter my heart, three person'd God,' and the sonnet to Death,
with its marvellous listing:
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, ivarre, and sicknesse dwell,
and the magnificent opening of another:
At the round earths imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you fiumberlesse infinities
Of souleSj and to your scattered bodies goe.
Almost the only thing in Walton's depiction of Donne, in fact,
that would enable us to penetrate into the tangled heart of the
man, if we were unacquainted with his poems and sermons, is the
occasional quotation of a letter. The mourning lamentation, for
example, of the following:
'tis now Spring, and all the pleasures of it displease me; every other
tree blossoms, and I wither: I grow older and not better; my strength,
diminished! and my load grows heavier; and yet I would fain be or
do something; but, that I cannot tell what is no wonder in this time
of my sadness; for, to chuse is to do; but to be no part of any body,
is as to be nothing; and so I am, and shall so judge myself . . .
my fortune hath made me such, as that I am rather a Sickness or a
Disease of the world than any part of it ... Sir, I profess to you
truly, that my lothness to give over writing now seems to myself a
sign that I should write no more
Your poor friend, and
Gods poor patient
JOHN DONNE
The man who felt himself 'a Sickness of a Disease' of the world
has in him more of the saddened spirit of John Donne than the
'angel from a cloud' whom Walton elsewhere emphasizes.
Sir Henry Wotton spent nearly all his years as a diplomat, having
been Ambassador to Venice and to several of the German Princes,
and Envoy Extraordinary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand,
and closed his career as the Provost of Eton. He seems thus to
have united in his character the nature of man of action and that
which Walton sympathized with so much more, man of reflection.
77
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
'Sir Henry who had for many years (like Sisyphus)' says Walton,
'rolled the restless stone of a State-imployment; knowing experi-
mentally, that the great blessing of sweet content was not to be
found in multitudes of men or business' pleaded with King James,
and, in true diplomatic style, made use besides of 'a piece of honest
policy' 'which,' Walton remarks in parenthesis, 'I have not time
to relate' and obtained the grant that placed him in his last haven.
Although it is this part of Wotton's life that his biographer has
most sympathy 'for and devotes most space to, the earlier part of
his story is not without liveliness and characterization. From his
youth he showed the true diplomat's quality. After hearing of the
arrest of Essex, for example, he did Very quickly, and as privately
glide through Kent to Dover, without so much as looking toward
his native and beloved Bocton' until, sixteen hours later, he landed in
France and heard subsequently that his patron was beheaded and
his friend Henry Cuffe hanged. We are told that he endeared
himself to the Venetians *by a fine sorting of fit Presents, curious
and not costly Entertainments, always sweetned by various and
pleasant Discourse'. There is both tact and wit in his aphorism
for serviceable negotiations: The envoy 'should always, & upon
all occasions, speak the truth (it seems a State-Paradox) for, says
Sir Henry Wotton, you shall never be believed; and by this means,
your truth will secure your self, if you shall ever be called to any
account; and 'twill also put your Adversaries (who will still hunt
counter) to a loss in all their disquisitions and undertakings.'
One could wish that Walton had given more examples of Wot-
ton's facetious wit, which sometimes displays a kind of oddity.
The stone over his grave he directed to be inscribed in Latin:
Here lies the first Author of this Sentence
THE ITCH OP DISPUTATION WILL PROVE THE SCAB OF THE CHURCH
Inquire his name elsewhere
And even more odd is that unfortunate slip that infuriated King
James, of his writing in a gentleman's album, in Germany, the
sentiment that 'An Embassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad
for the good of his Country.'
For that matter, when once examined, there appears a certain
oddity in all Walton's characters. There is the gloomy oddity of
78
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
Donne posing upon his urn in a winding-sheet, with his eyes shut,
and his hands placed as dead bodies are usually fitted, while a
painter thus depicted him in a portrait that he kept by his bedside.
There is the quaintness of Dr Sanderson's very notable good mem-
ory yet never working for the recollection of his own sermons,
because 'he had such an innate, invincible fear and bashfulness,' so
that he always had to read them and disastrously failed on the one
occasion he was persuaded not to. Perhaps strangest of all is the
unworldliness of Hooker, who, allowing his landlady at an inn to
persuade him that what he needed was a wife to take care of him,
empowered her to choose one for him, and was surprised but not
rebellious when she chose her own daughter. This young woman,
Walton tells us, 'brought him neither Beauty nor Portion,' her con-
ditions indeed being 'too like that Wife's which is by Solomon
compar'd to a dripping house?
These oddities lead us to another aspect of Walton's writing:
what has been termed his 'peculiar suppressed humour.' For Walton
was sly, and it is often by no means certain that he is not making
fun of his characters, and sometimes quite sure that he is laughing
at himself. When he tells us that Mr Danvers had so great an
affection for George Herbert that 'he publickly declar'd a desire
that Mr Herbert would marry any of his Nine Daughters' we are
on the scent; but we get his full flavor in the statement that one
of the daughters, Jane, 'became so much a Platonick, as to fall in
love with Mr Herbert unseen.' At their first meeting Love 'en-
tered into both their hearts, as a Conqueror enters into a surprized
City' and 'made there such Laws and Resolutions as neither party
was able to resist,' so that Jane 'chang'd her name into Herbert,
the third day after this first interview.'
Quieter still in character is his comment on the struggle between
the Pope and the Venetian state, in which the latter suspended the
powers of the Inquisition; 'and the Flood-gates being thus set open,'
scoffing and libels against the Pope became safely indulged in: and
Very pleasant to the people.' Of another episode in Wotton's life,
when his uncle, the Dean of Canterbury, dreamed that he would
be involved, if he were not prevented, in a project ruinous to the
family, we are told that the good man besought Queen Mary to
imprison his nephew for a while. This was done, and Wotton
protected thus from losing his life in Sir Thomas Wyatt's con-
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
spiracy, which he would infallibly have done 'if his Uncle had
not so happily dream'd him into a Prison.'
Nor is Walton more averse to playing with himself and his own
actions. He knows that he has a tendency to be digressive, and
is often begging the reader's pardon for taking so long, and promis-
ing that he 'shall presently lead him back' to the subject. In the
Life of Dr Sanderson this becomes a sort of game; he brings the
reader to Dr Sanderson at Boothby Pannel, deserts him there for
several digressions, comes back again, and goes away, telling us
'I cannot lead my Reader to Dr Hammond and Dr Sanderson where
we left them at Boothby Pannel till' he has made an historical
digression, and only then, at last, decides to 'return to Boothby
Pannel, where we left Dr Hammond and Dr Sanderson together,
but neither can be found there'! For while Izaak has been talking
the one has gone to London and the other been seized and com-
mitted to prison by the Roundheads. In the Life of Herbert we
find another example of his slyness of phrase when he tells how
the Rector of St Andrews, a man of 'unruly wit' and 'furious
Zeal,' was so insolent to the King that he was committed to the
Tower, 'where he remained very angry for three years.'
In some ways the Life of Herbert is one of the most skilfully
handled of the five. We receive intimations of the yearning for
worldly glitter that enticed the poet for some time: 'the love of a
Court-conversation,' his favor with the King and being granted
the very 'Sine Cure^ that Queen Elizabeth had given Sir Philip
Sidney, his wit, as he himself described it, 'like a Pen-knife in too
narrow a sheath, too sharp for his body.' Here, faint perhaps, but
recognizable, are the outlines of the ardent temperament that ex-
claimed:
I smote the board, and cried No more;
1 <will abroad!
What! shall I ever sigh and pine?
* # * # #
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted,
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit
And thou hast hands.
80
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
But equally strong in Herbert from the first was the holy vocation
that 'heard one calling Child'; and replied 'My Lord.' After the
death of King James he retired to Kent, and 'had many Conflicts
with himself, Whether he should return to the painted pleasures
of a Court-life, or betake himself to a study of Divinity.' Presently
he beheld the Court 'with an impartial Eye,' and saw that it was
'made up of Fraud, and Titles, and Flattery, and many other such
empty, imaginary Pleasures,' and became installed in the parsonage
of Bemerton, where he lived such 'an almost incredible story, of
great sanctity' as Walton hardly knows how to prepare the reader
to receive. The short remainder of his life was one of devotion,
piety, and deeds of gentleness and kindness that he found 'Musick
to him at Midnight.'
This life, indeed, shows Walton's character as a biographer. What
he knows he does not conceal, but he does manipulate it. He is a
panegyrist at bottom after all, and the personality that emerges from
his handling represents a will to show his friends and admired sub-
jects in a favorable light. That light, for him, was a tone of calm
and meditative goodness. He will not lie: 'Honest Izaak,' his friend
the Bishop of Chichester addresses him, and the epithet is justified.
He will only arrange, so that if we know what to look for, in many
cases there is more to be found than meets the casual eye. In this
sense, none of the lives is more revealing than the life of John
Donne.
The three qualities most emphatic in Donne's character were his
ambitions, his sensual passions, and the fierce vacillations of his
religious feelings. If we peruse Walton's account looking for these
things they will stand out on almost every page. And something
else will stand out too: the strange way in which, while recogniz-
ing his talents, everyone steadily refused him political dignities.
Donne's first studies were in law, and during the several years of
his foreign travels 'he made many useful observations' of the 'lawes
and manner of Government' of the realms he visited. On his return
he became a part of the household of the Lord Chancellor, who
designed him 'to some more weighty Employment in the State.'
How fortunate that, having been educated a Roman Catholic, he
had some years before changed his religion! Truth, says Walton,
'hath too much light about her to be hid from so sharp an Inquirer;
and he had too much ingenuity not to acknowledge he had found
8r
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
her.' So what would have been the insuperable obstacle of his re-
ligion no longer stood in the way. Besides this, he 'had a strange
kind of elegant irresistible art' in his manner.
Why, with these advantages, wit, learning, personality, was his
marriage to the daughter of Sir George More so 'immeasurably un-
welcome' to that gentleman that he was in transports of anger?
Walton supplies only hints, which we must cull here and there
from the whole story. In Donne's taking orders, we are told, the
English Church had 'gain'd a second St Austin? and a St Ambrose
as well, for 'if his youth had the infirmities of the one, his age had
the excellencies of the other.' In his later years Donne was wont
to lament the excesses of his life. When we recall many of his poems,
and take Walton's remark that his 'youth, and travels and needless
bounty, had brought his estate into a narrow compass,' we may
guess the reasons in 'dear-bought Experience' for his being strongly
distrusted.
Those who might advance his career proved equally chary. Lord
Ellesrnere did nothing for him; King James, who 'had also given
some hopes of a State-imployment,' remained apathetic; many who
'were powerful at Court,' and 'watchful and solicitous for him,'
still did him no good. Dr Morton, the Bishop of Durham, tried to
solicit him into the Church, beginning significantly, 'I know your
expectation' of a political career, 'and I know too, the many delays
and contingencies that attend Court-promises.' Could Dr Morton
have received any hint that these hopes were destined to be fruit-
less? This can only be conjecture, but if we entertain it for a mo-
ment how significant the narrative at this point: 'Mr Donne's faint
breath and perplext countenance gave a visible testimony of an in-
ward conflict.' John Donne had a subtle and intricate mind. He
too may have guessed in this solicitation more than met the ear.
His refusal was couched in the proper terms of reverence; he was
not too good for the priesthood in his own estimation, but feared
that 'some irregularities' in his life Visible to some men' might cast
the sacred calling into dishonor. He still waited, hoping for prefer-
ment from the King. But at last the time came when 'the King gave
a positive denial to all requests.' The political channel was closed.
His abilities were recognized, but some lack must have been felt
in himof sobriety or steadiness? that the toils of ordination might
supply. James 'descended to a persuasion, almost to a solicitation,'
82
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
and 'at last forced him to a compliance.' Once the step was taken it
must needs be good. The life of power became for Donne 'this
wilderness of the many temptations, and various turnings of a dan-
gerous life,' He had 'required a temporal, God gave him a spiritual
blessing.' 'Be it with thy servant as seemeth best in thy sight/ 'Lord,
who am I, that thou art so mindful of me?'
The step had been taken, and it must needs be good. He became
a 'Preacher in earnest' 'like an Angel from a cloud, but in none,'
and still his friends that had often witnessed his 'free and facetious
discourse' could ask him, 'Why are you sad?' He might deny it,
but at other times he would grant 'that he long'd for the day of his
dissolution.' His sermons were full of the vision of sin and death.
Sometimes he saw plainly that it was God's 'hand that prevented me
from all temporal employment; and that it was his Will I should
never settle nor thrive till I entred into the Ministry; in which, I
have now liv'd almost twenty years (I hope to his glory)'; and
then again he groaned, 'I were miserable if I might not dye.'
So much we may guess out of Walton's account. The proud
and bitter man lusted after the fleshpots all his life, but It could
not be borne that he had failed of everything his ambition de-
manded. God had favored him by denying what he wanted; indeed
he had been blest, and he was a sinner to go on being recalcitrant in
his heart; no, he would not be stubborn. But his years were embit-
tered to the end. Is this the truth about Donne? We cannot tell, but
it fits in better with the intricate poems and the terrible and mag-
nificent sermons than the placid contours in Walton of which the
quotations I have made are only buried fragments.
So we return to the thesis with which we opened. Walton, musing
by his pensive stream, transmutes everything into an autumn calm.
Beneath the brown waters we may perceive flittingly a kind of
streak now and then that enables us to guess at deeper and fiercer
eddies than ever reach the unflurried surface, but we must be quick.
Now it is gone, and we are on our way to rejoin Dr Sanderson at
Boothby Pannel or being carried to Heaven in holy raptures while
Dr Donne leans over the pulpit at St Paul's. It is only a strain of a
certain kind of truth that permeates here, nothing fierce or passion-
ate, not even too deep love, for love 'is a flattering mischief, that
hath denied aged and wise men a foresight of those evils that too
often prove to be the children of that blind father, a passion! that
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
carries us to commit Errors with as much ease as whirlwinds re-
move feathers.' Walton prefers that our souls and bodies should be
purely, as he says of Donne's, 'a Temple of the Holy Ghost? which,
he adds, 'is now become a small quantity of Christian dust:
'But I shall see it reanimated.'
Without Lilies and Roses
Commemoration was also the motive of Roger North's Lives of
his three brothers, Francis Baron Guilford, Sir Dudley North, and
Dr John North, but the writer's vivacity, his natural honesty, and
his curious inquiringness combine to frame a much greater achieve-
ment than pious laudation. Roger North had, in fact, what we may
call the biographical instinct, and even when reason and sense of
duty unite to lead him astray, his natural soundness sets him right'.
Strictly speaking, he is not a seventeenth century writer, most of
his work having been done in the earlier part of the next century,
but the three brothers he chronicles were all dead by the last decade
of the seventeenth, so we shall consider him of the period he deals
with.
North's Lives were commemorative, and they were written with
an affection that often shows itself, whether he be writing with
pride of 'His Lordship' 'their best brother,' as he often lovingly
designates the Cord Keeper or 'the Merchant,' that gay and slightly
unscrupulous Turkey trader, or 'the Doctor,' the timorous young
scholar whom North every now and then apologizes to the reader
for so dignifying before he had actually been honored with the
degree. But even so his zest for truth will not permit him to falsify
the case; 'a Life,' he says, 'should be a Picture; which cannot be
good, if the peculiar Features, whereby the subject is distinguish' d
from all others, are left out. Nay, Scars and Blemishes, as well as
Beauties, ought to be expressed; otherwise it is but an outline fill'd
up with Lillies and Roses.'
Nor are these only mouth-protests. Summarizing the career of
his brother Dudley in Turkey, he says, 'I must allow that, as to all
the Mercantile Arts, and Stratagems of Trade, which could be used,
to get Money from those he dealt with, I believe he was no Niggard;
but as for Falsities, such as cheating by Weights or Measures . . .
even with Jews or Turks, he was as clear as any Man living . . .
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
But as to Women, while he was in Turky (barring the Excess) I
mean such Looses and Escapes, as almost all Men, there, are more
or less guilty of, I cannot altogether wipe him clean.' And he has
given evidence to support these conclusions.
In the life of the Lord Keeper, and, to a higher degree, in the
Examen, an important Tory political document with which we
shall not be concerned, North encountered the difficulty of sepa-
rating historical writing from biography. As one of the great jurists
of the day, Francis North was intimately involved in political
events. Roger North was fully aware of the boundaries and diffi-
culties. 'If the History of a Life,' he observes, 'hangs altogether
upon great Importance, such as concern the Church and State, and
drops the peculiar Oeconomy, and private Conduct of the Person
that gives Title to the Work, it may be a History, and a very good
one: but of any Thing rather than of that Person's Life.' North
understood the problem, and mostly he solves it well. Only some-
times his sense of historical obligation overwhelms his skill as a nar-
rator, and produces longueurs, such as the too protracted account
of the Turkish Avanias (unjust demands made upon merchants) and
the long examination of some of the legal decisions of the Lord
Chief Justice Hales, which could be of interest only to a lawyer or
historian. But even in such passages the author's sprightliness leaps
out occasionally, as when he describes one of the decisions as being
'upon a metaphysical Notion, hard to the Party that lost it,' and ad-
mits 'this Matter is somewhat dark to me.'
Such strokes of nature are always appearing, even in the midst
of passages dictated by his sense of duty, but although North
apologizes for the character-drawing and the historically trivial but
picturesque detail, he knows well that it is good. 'I fancy myself a
Picture-Drawer,' he tells the reader, and goes on to point out that
the leaves and branches of a tree, for example, are much harder
to describe than the solid trunk, but if they were left out 'it would
make but a sorry Picture of a Tree.' So, life-writing is 'the Pour-
trait, or Lineament, and not a bare Index or Catalogue of Things
done; and without the How and Why, all History is jejune and
unprofitable.' In such details, almost as brilliant and characteristic
as Aubrey's, combined with a feeling for narrative sequence only
less than Walton's (his digressions are not so skilfully arranged, and
sometimes obscure the clarity of outline), his peculiar ability lies.
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
The least extraordinary of the narratives is the comparatively
placid one of the highly respectable lawyer Francis North. Leading
a 'Spider-kind of Life' in his chambers, the young man worked as-
siduously, studying hypothetical problems when he was not work-
ing on real ones ('No Man could be a good Lawyer, that was not a
Put-Case,' he used to say). By the combination of industry and the
recommendations of his friends, he went 'loping into Preferments'
until his practice 'flowed in upon him like an Orage.'
Although he had strong passions, he had schooled himself so that
he was hardly ever observed to speak or act except under perfect
control, and the worst libel his enemies in later years were able to
invent of him was that he had frivolously climbed up upon the back
of an enormous rhinoceros, 'than which a more infantine Exploit
could not have been fasten'd upon him.' At this 'impudent buffoon
Lye,' (to which the biographer recurs indignantly several times in
the course of his narrative) 'His Lordship was much roiled'; his
brothers had never seen him in such a rage; and as for those who
came to inquire if the scandalous tale was true, 'he sent them away
with Fleas in their Ears.'
Lord Guilford was a virtuoso, too, 'one of the neatest Violists of
his Time,' and even did some theorizing about the mathematical
relations involved in the vibrations of musical notes. He liked
nothing so well as to foregather with a few friends for 'a petit Sup-
per, but ample Feast of Discourse.' Sometimes these gatherings were
at the house of Mr Weld, 'a rich Philosopher' of Bloomsbury, whose
dwelling was a 'Sort of Knick-knack-atory,' and sometimes with Mr
Longueville, whose 'fluent, witty, literate, copious, and instructive'
discourse led those who 'did not understand him' to think 'he talked
too much.'
So passed his life, worried somewhat, it is true, by the machina-
tions of the court and by sad prognostications about what would
happen to the realm and to the crown if the prerogative were not
upheld. And then there was King James: 'So strong were his Preju-
dices, and so feeble his Genius': what was a conscientious Lord
Keeper to do? His last illness came on; with 'Axes and Hammers
and Fireworks in his Head' he nevertheless insisted on making out a
long memorial to the King, dealing with all these evils. So he died.
All his public acts had been 'without any affected Lustre, or Handles
to Fame.' 'No wonder he is so soon forgot.'
86
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
Sir Dudley North, the Turkey merchant, showed an early dis-
position to the trade for which he was destined, and even at school
'drove a subtle Trade among the Boys, by buying and selling.* In
other ways, too, he revealed the trader's spirit: he was wont to bet
on cock-fights, borrowing to pay his losses. 'But he had some dor-
mant Sparks of Honour that galled him cruelly,' so he made out for
his parents 'counterfeit Bills of Expences . . . only enlarging a little,
and inserting some choice Items.'
These experiences stood him in good stead in his later dealings in
the East, where he learned that in lawsuits 'a false Witness was a
surer Card than a true one, 1 for an honest witness can easily be con-
fused by 'captious Questions,' whereas the cheat, prepared for such
handling, f can clear himself, when the other will be confounded.'
He also dealt there in jewels and loans, 'ordinarily twenty or thirty
per cent?, giving part of the loan not in cash but in goods, and
thereby 'getting off his rotten Cloth and trumpery Goods, which
were not otherwise vendible.' Aside from little harmless tricks like
these, the merchant was quite honest.
He was a lively man, fond of jokes. We hear him making bur-
lesque complaints on his first voyage of how the 'Motion of the
Vessel raiseth a Tempest in my Guts,' so that when he lightens the
ship he has 'enough to do to keep back Entrails, Heart and all'; and
finding the White sea most unfitly named, for it looks like nothing so
much as Mead Beer.' He was fond of food, 'particularly what was
savoury, as Cavear, or Anchovies, sufficient to relish a Glass of Wine
or two before he went to Bed,' and on such diet 'began to grow fat'
and 'well-whiskered' till he looked jolly as a Turk.
Meanwhile he was not neglecting affairs. He had begun at Smyr-
na, but was then called into a partnership at Constantinople, where,
so loosely had things been done, the partners 'found themselves in a
Miz-Maze.' Mr North began setting things aright. But one of the
partners 'had no Brains to understand what was done, and his Drink
made him rude' to the Merchant, and 'more fastidious to him than
all the Toil of the Whole Day.' 'This was a Wolf by the Ears, which
the Merchant scarce knew how to hold, or to let go.' Finally he
wrote the principals in England, explaining the case and separating
himself from the enterprise, and most of its business remained with
him. Year by year he waxed richer; in 1680 he began his voyage
home.
8?
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
In England he settled down, became the man of business for his
family, played politics for a time, married and removed to the coun-
try, and there enjoyed a calm old age. From a friend he learned 'a
little Algebra' and 'was extremely pleased with this new kind of
Arithmetic, which he had never heard of before.' 'If Time lay on his
Hands, he would assist his Lady in her Affairs,' and was once found
'very busy in picking out the Stitches of a dislaced Petticoat.' He
was fond of carpentry and stone-hewing and working in iron, al-
though he allowed his brother, being a lawyer, 'to be the best
Forger.'
The Life of Dr John North, of which Lytton Strachey has given
so lively a condensation in his Portraits in Miniature, is little more
than a memoir, but it is packed full of lively and revealing details.
He was a grave and docile youth, a trait that usually 'argues Im-
becility of Body and Mind,' his brother remarks; but fortunately
did not do so in his case. He soon became an accomplished scholar,
doing readily all that his tutors laid upon him and more. If he had a
fault, it was a certain timidity, so that even when he had gone to
Cambridge he was 'afraid in the dark,' and 'when he was in Bed
alone, he durst not trust his Countenance above the Cloaths.' Once
his tutor, with whom he slept for a time, came home late, and 'in-
discretely enough, pulled him by the Hair; whereupon the Scholar
sunk down . . . and at last, with a great outcry . . . sprung up, ex-
pecting to see an enorm Spectre.'
This strange timidity extended to remarkable lengths. He had
been presented with a living in Wales, a sinecure, and visiting it was
received with great enthusiasm by his parishioners, who 'came about
and hugged him, calling him their Pastor, and telling him they were
his Sheep.' This was too much for the Doctor, who 'got him back to
his College as fast as he could.' All his enormous studies led to no
tangible works. He became Professor of Greek early in his career,
and Master of Trinity at thirty-two, but all that he published was a
small volume of commentary on Plato's Dialogues. His multitudinous
notes were all to be burnt, and in a small notebook which he dreaded
losing he had written 'I beshrew his Heart, that gathers my Opinionn
from any Thing he finds wrote here.'
His appearance strangely belied this fearfulness of nature, 'for his
Face was always tinct with a fresh Colour,' 'his Looks vegete and
sanguine,' 'his Features were scandalous, as shewing rather a Madam
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
cntravestie, than a bookworm; and he had 'a florid Head of flaxen
Hair.' He liked 'to refresh himself with the Society of the young
Noblemen,' and was often seen 'as merry as a Schoolboy with a
Knot of them, like the Younglings about old Silenus.' 'But'his Flesh
was strangely flaccid and soft, his going weak and shuffling, often
crossing his Legs, as if he were tipsey.'
This meticulous and eccentric being had an odd 'Entertainment
in his House besides Books; and that was keeping of great House-
Spiders in wide mouthed Glasses.' 'He supplied them with Crumbs
of Bread' but 'their Regale was Flies, which he sometimes caught
and put to them,' observing curiously how they avoided coming
near 'a great Master Flesh Fly' ('for he had Claws sharp as Cats')
but wound him first in a web. Indeed, some kinds of eccentricity
run in this family, too, and the Lord Keeper so far shared his young-
er brother's timidity that he could not bear coming into a public
place alone, and used to wait for others to enter 'behind whom . . .
he might be shaded from the view of the Rest,' and would some-
times 'stand dodging at the Screen' thus for a considerable period,
'for it was Death to him to walk up alone in open View.' Sir Dud-
ley, who had the habit of disciplining himself, used to enjoy clam-
bering in high places, and once, in the tower of Bow Church, being
unable to go between the columns and the wall because of his stout-
ness, 'took the Column in his Arm, and swung his Body about on
the outside,' and so all around the colonnade. He and Roger used to
go on visits to houses being erected, where they 'almost turned into
Rope-Dancers, and walked' merely for enjoyment 'familiarly upon
Joice in Garrets, having a View, through all the Floors, down to
the Cellar.'
The Doctor, who would have shivered at such exposure, was also
mightily afraid of 'Gravel and Rheumes.' But his real danger was
being paralytic and epileptic. He caught a slight cold and, with his
usual docility, obeyed all the orders of the physicians, physic
'enough to have purged a strong Man from off his Legs' and amber
'as Tobacco, in Pipes,' and astringent powders 'in Quills, blown
into his Mouth.' This reduced him to 'extreme Weakness' at once,
and he appeared 'helmeted in Caps upon Caps,' with a meagre coun-
tenance. He was fearful of stirring abroad after sunset, and distressed
about his diet: 'Grapes, and Peaches, being full of Humidity, were
Poison.'
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
Admonishing some students, very acrimoniously, during this ill-
ness 'down he dropt' in a fit; and the physicians, after reviving him,
insisted 'that if he fell asleep, he would never wake more.' A Con-
sort of Tongs, Firegrate, Wainscote Drum, and dancing of Curtains
and Curtain Rings, such as would have made a sound Man mad' pro-
vided a 'perpetual Noise and Clangor.' His mother, the dowager
Lady North, put a stop to this tintinnabulation, and nursed him in
quiet. The Physicians were exceedingly surprised' that he recov-
ered, but 'his Mouth and Face was drawn up on the lame Side, and
his left Arm and Leg altogether enervous.' He lingered on, oddly
changed in disposition (you must consult his brother to know how),
but the doctors had been too much for him. He did not live long.
All these details are told in a racy, flowing language, highly
copious and sometimes a little over-indulged. Our quotations hardly
indicate to the full how often his choice of words is not only
vigorous but almost inventively slangy. Telling of his Lordship being
placed with a tutor as a small child, he describes the habit in the
tutor's family of making all their scholars kneel to pray by their
bedsides. 'But this petit Spark was too small for that Posture, and
was set upon the Bed to kneel with his Face to the Pillow.' One of
his masters in college, a very learned scholar, had been 'a famous
Man indeed' 'if his Heart could have been shewed without a Micro-
scope.' An uncle is characterized as kind to the boy 'Teeth out-
wards' and the later opponents of the successful lawyer are 'these
Fourbs.'
Besides these, North had gifts of vivid description and caustic
remark. A Mr Sydersin is portrayed as having a 'Hatchet Face and
Shoulder of Mutton Hand, and he walked splay, stooping and nod-
dling,' Commenting on the scheme to retire the Lord Keeper and
advance Lord Jeffreys, he notes that no help could be expected for
his brother from the court: 'The rising Sun hath a charming effect,
but not upon Courtiers as upon Larks; for it makes these sing, and
the other silent.' Throughout these troublous times his Lordship
'all along trod upon Eggs,' and there is hardly an extended passage
that does not give some example of an individual richness unparal-
leled by anyone in his time.
He loves anecdotes. No considerations of dignity or piety seern
to hold him back from telling amusing ones. His whole account, for
example, of the rising lawyer's wooings, is irrepressible. First there
90
A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
was the daughter of an 'old Usurer of Gray'i Inn? but the father
offered no marriage settlement, and his Lordship, 'glad of his Es-
cape,' resolved 'never to come near the terrible old Fellow again.*
Next there was the widow of a former friend, who held him 'at the
long Saw above a Month' until he tired of being 'held in a Course
of bo-peep Play with a crafty Widow,' and retired. (Roger, in the
margin, comments with typical exuberance, 'Courted a Widow, and
was little better than jilted.') The third prospect was a lady reputed
to have 6,000, which shrank on negotiation to 5,000. His Lord-
ship withdrew; presently the father offered 500 more on the birth
of the first child. Disgusted by 'such screwing,' his Lordship ex-
claimed that 'he would not proceed if he might have 20,000.' Such
scenes are not only amusing and brilliant in themselves, but they are
in fact the very fragments in which character is mirrored clear.
Of all our six biographers, only Aubrey and North had purely
biographical aims, for only they seemed to remain uninfluenced by
the desire to glorify their subjects. Foxe was really a chronicler
blended with a hagiographer; Roper was trying, within his limita-
tions, to defend the memory of his father-in-law; Greville was not
really writing, or even trying to write, biography at all, and Wal-
ton, who was consciously composing biography, was deflected from
his aim by influences, apparently, of personal temperament.
Nevertheless, they all wrote works that embodied some biogra-
phical materials. Much as Foxe is a jumble, as we have seen, there
are parts where the action is exciting and significant and the charac-
ters suddenly real; there are even fragments of dramatic construc-
tion. Roper, too, although all the higher reaches of Sir Thomas
More's character were above his understanding, caught something
of the affectionate and affection-inspiring man. Therein, inferior as
he was to Lord Brooke in intellect, he proved superior as a biogra-
pher, for the latter in his grave political fervor really forgets to limn
Sidney at all. His was a wandering and confusion of aims, each
straining against the other. With singleness of purpose he might
have composed a fine biography: he was a poet, and he knew his
friend. We cannot tell, but it might well have been penetrating and
wise.
Walton had honesty, and style, and a feeling for form, and intelli-
9 1
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
gence and humor, and yet, as we have seen, his achievement as a
biographer was seriously at fault. His preference for the contem-
plative colors all his work; the calm folds of Walton's personality
cover every turbulence. In him the nature of the author obliterates
the people he deals with until they all become variegated echoes of
himself.
Not so either Aubrey or North. Aubrey's transparency, North's
serious exuberance, are guarantors of essential accuracy in every
morsel. Aubrey had both professedly and really no purpose except
honest delineation; North was professedly an apologist, but he
couldn't maintain the role. They are the only biographers we have
considered so far in whom we do not feel any trace of ulterior in-
fluence. And of the two it may be that Aubrey, being almost pure
anecdotalist, is sometimes more interesting in detail; but North is as
clearly superior in every other relevant way. Both are individual
stylists, but North has a sustained narrative skill and an ability at
complete and complex projection that Aubrey, of course, never
essayed.
Save for occasional dullnesses introduced by his sense of historical
obligation (for although North distinguished in his mind between
history and biography he did not quite succeed in keeping them
apart in practice), North's tale moves smoothly and logically and
interestingly along. We might, in fact, so long as we do not think
of him as actually learning from Aubrey and Walton for we have
no evidence that he had read either consider him as combining
their characteristic merits, Walton's vision of the life as a connected
whole, and Aubrey's shining vignettes of reminiscence and charac-
ter.
Historically all these writers are highly illuminating, even more
in comparison than when read alone. Even minor details of daily
life and manners suddenly gleam into life for us: Sir Dudley not
being too high and mighty to pick the stitches out of his wife's
petticoat; the domestic intimacy that could allow Dr Butler, the
great physician, to be called for in his cups by a servant and to ex-
change abuse with her about their inebriation on the way home; the
screen at which Francis North in his timidity stood dodging and
which existed to keep the wintry drafts out of large public rooms.
There is the typical John Bull scorn of the middle-class Englishman
for French courtliness, expressed in whipping the leg over the deep-
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A SHEAF OF SIX BIOGRAPHERS
ly bowing foreigner, and crude rough-and-tumble in even a Raleigh
stopping a too loquacious talker by forcibly sealing his beard with
wax. Sir Dudley's little brotherly jokes about lawyers and forging
show us one way in which human nature and opinion have not
changed.
We have only to shift our gaze a little and we are seeing the
'knick-knack-atory' of Mr Weld, that rich philosopher of Blooms-
bury, enjoying his 'ample feast of discourse,' and hearing the strains
of 'one of the neatest violists of his time.' Or from the dilettantism
of Guilford and the fantastic enquiringness of Aubrey we may go
to More pacing the leads and discoursing to the King on the stars,
the learned speculations of the Royal Society, and the enormous if
unproductive erudition of Dr John North. The College of Physi-
cians prescribes amber and astringent powders, and Donne tries to
strangle his tortured emotions in coils of scholastic ingenuity. Bacon
fastidiously makes all his servants go shod in Spanish leather be-
cause he can not bear the smell of neats' leather, and meanwhile
sends his mind out on shining voyages of Utopian speculation, ob-
livious of the hand closing over a bribe and the darkening jealous
storm.
There is a rich variety in the revelation of sexual manners. Al-
ways frank-spoken (even Walton has his joke about the conditions
of Hooker's wife being too like a dripping house), the biographers
show us the range from the Platonizing idealism of the chivalrous
tradition to the 'looses and escapes' of violent sensuality. There are
the bourgeois humors of Francis North's unsuccessful courtships,
the vaguely hinted excesses of Donne, the Platonic Jane falling in
love with Mr Herbert unseen, Ben Jonson 'perhaps' begetting Clun,
Sir Walter Raleigh, that brusque 'boarder' of Maids of Honour-
indeed 'the very pudenda are not covered.' And from married life
we have the commonsense brusquerie of Lady More, the easy do-
mesticity of Sir Dudley and his wife in the country, the meta-
physical devotion of Donne 'like gold to aery thinnesse beat.'
But more than anything else we receive a sense of the fierce re-
ligious prejudices and the yawning political pitfalls of the age. The
flaming fires of Smithfield and the grim 'Short arguments, Master
Doctor, short arguments,' are found not only in Foxe, but every-
wherein Walton, in Aubrey, in North. Even in Greville there is
a grave political fervor, a passion of diplomatic reasoning, that shows
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
us how much almost every gentleman and courtier of the period was
a politician and a watcher of the stage of diplomacy. If Walton
pours 'a strange flood of light' upon 'the more contemplative side of
English life in the Seventeenth century,' he has curious subdued
sideglances at the hidden shoals in the life of the government and
court. Those 'imaginary painted pleasures' are mined with tortuous
plots by which one may be brought to the executioner's block and
disembowelled. The King's favor may be forfeited by an ill-advised
pun or the Tower yawn upon an 'unruly wit.' Only the discretion
of his friend Wood saved Aubrey from revealing 'things that would
cutt' his throat for him; and during the reign of James II, even
through the deliberations of the Royal Society we hear the howling
fury of Papist Plots, the bellowing ferocity of Jeffries, and the vio-
lent prejudices of the King. Savagery and scholarship go side by
side, through both centuries, and More, with all his Utopian toler-
ance, could be a 'bitter persecutor of good men.'
Such are the sinister undertones of the entire period. We can
hardly hear them or believe in. them when we find ourselves in some
of the serene abodes of learning or science; they seem out of key
with the 'high, holy, and harmonious Composures' of John Donne,
or Herbert finding his good deeds 'music at midnight' to him. It
seems very remote from Sir Dudley learning 'a little algebra' and
enjoying this 'new kind of arithmetic.' In the academic cloisters
where Dr North carries on petty feuds with disgruntled Fellows, or
in the convivial bouts of Aubrey and Wylde in Shropshire we can
hardly credit these rancors and cruelties. But perhaps violence and
some kinds of urbanity will seem less incongruous if we remember
certain scholars of Harvard finding no flaw in the condemnation of
Sacco and Vanzetti, and well-bred gentlemen in their clubs growing
bitter about the need of making a fish-peddler burn.
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY
and i Sill Centuries
Ill
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY
iyTH AND l8TH CENTURIES
Pitfalls -for Sincerity
HONESTY is the greatest stumbling-block of the autobiographer.
The resolution to tell the truth about oneself takes a
spartan rigor of character, and the ability to do so requires a more
than common insight. There have been few if any autobiographers
who have told no untruths. The degrees of truthfulness, moreover,
go beyond the letter; those stern spirits who would scorn any sup-
pressio veri may fall into an unconscious suggestio falsi. The subtler
forms of self-deception lie all around us, and never do they lie more
temptingly at hand than when the subject is our own character with
all its merits and the extenuations of its infrequent errors. The reader
of an autobiography is in much the same relationship with its writer
as we are with a living acquaintance: if he wishes not to be deceived
he must be on his guard against even those innocent strokes of in-
gratiation that may give him a quite wrong impression of character.
It may be noted, too, that the errors are not always in the same di-
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
rection. The writer who tells his own life-story, like the acquaint-
ance, may have an unfortunate manner or a disagreeable surface to
prejudice us against a character underlyingly worthy and even ad-
mirable. The plausible knave and the man of maladroit virtue are in
print as well as in the flesh. There is no substitute for judgment and
perception in the reader.
Autobiographers reveal, however, a curious desire to tell the truth
about themselves. 'The man who writes his own life,' Schopenhauer
notes, 'surveys it as a whole, the particular becomes small, the near
becomes distant, the distant becomes near again, the motives that
influenced him shrink; he seats himself at the confessional, and has
done so of his own free will; the spirit of lying does not easily take
hold of him here, for there is also in every man an inclination to
truth which has first to be overcome whenever he lies, and which
here has taken up a specially strong position.'
When the story has not been called forth as a defense against any
specific ill-fame, as an apology to a man's contemporaries for actions
still conceived to be in the public eye, when there is no more world-
ly advantage to be gained in changing the minds of his living fellows
then, it would seem, a man ultimately looks on himself with
enough dignity so that he desires to lay bare the truth. Perhaps he
believes that the lights will more than balance the darkness, perhaps
he believes the explaining circumstances will show him more than
justified. He may believe the free confession of error and penitence
in a way dissociates him from the evils he sees he has done. He may
even take a pride in feeling that his moral courage makes him su-
perior to other men, that he at least is free from the hypocrisy that
makes them conceal what he openly confesses. Whatever the rea-
sons, seldom, and then only in the most painful deeps of humilia-
tion, the most searing of shames, has the autobiographer at the end
of a lifetime been led into conscious lying about external facts. Col-
oring and omission are more frequent; against them only what in-
sight we possess can enable us to guard. And the degree to which
the writer avoids even them is largely determined by the depth and
purity of his purpose.
If the autobiographer has purity of purpose he wants to tell us
the story of his life and to paint a portrait of his character as it ap-
pears to him. Only those elements he wants to emphasize, or, at
least, that he is willing to have there, will be consciously included:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY
the sort of man, with the sort of activities and interests, he wants to
be taken for. Any other emphases we must either find in uncon-
scious revelation or seek from other sources than his own testimony,
but the degree to which his self-portrait approximates what he
really believes himself to be is the degree to which his work is pure
iti motivation and not a piece of propaganda. His perception of him-
self, however, may be blurred, superficial, or otherwise faulty. If so,
only by means of that blessed fairy of the unconscious, which we
have already invoked several times, will we be able to see many as-
pects of the real man which lie further down than the surface image.
How deep the man's insight into himself goes, then, will determine
the fundamental truth of his self -portrayal. Only those autobiogra-
phies that have purity of purpose and depth, as here defined, are of
the highest quality.
These criteria are counsels of perfection. If they preserve us from
valuing too highly those autobiographies in which they are but
slightly regarded, their absence should not prevent our enjoyment
of many more superficial kinds of interest or excitement. The writer
of impure purpose or shallow perception may still be highly reveal-
ingsometimes more revealing than he knows and the writer held
by a powerful distortion may plumb stranger depths than are pos-
sible to the Lucretian gods in their elegant detachment. We shall
see some of these distortions and impurities coloring the work of a
few seventeenth and eighteenth century autobiographers. They will
show a number of the influences and uncertainties operating upon
the writer who narrates his own life in the same way as the preced-
ing chapter showed some of the problems of the biographer.
Favorite of Heaven
One of the earliest English autobiographies is that of Lord Herbert
of Cherbury (1583-1648). Unearthed with chuckles of glee by Hor-
ace Walpole and printed sumptuously at Strawberry Hill for the
delectation of his friends, the work is a curious and amusing ex-
ample of a book often interesting in another fashion than its author
knew. For Edward Herbert, whose fame is now far outshone by his
younger brother George Herbert, author of The Temple, was in his
day a diplomat of no mean talents and a philosopher respected by
Descartes and Gassendi. But hardly any suggestion of these things
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
appears in the autobiography. Although written at the age of sixty,
it chronicles with a naive egoism and complacency his youthful
triumphs in wit, bravery, politeness, and knight errantry, and stops
short at the age of thirty-seven, when he had just published the De
veritate which was his chief contribution to philosophy.
How is it that a man who was a grave pioneer in the development
of freedom of thought and a penetrating observer of men and gov-
ernments shows himself to us as a childish issuer of challenges to
mortal combat and an ingenuous boaster about his own beauty,
charm, and success? Was it perhaps that the old man, contemptu-
ously forgotten by the Court, the glory and triumphs of his youth
vanished from the minds of all but himself, comforted himself by
remembering those glittering times, and put down his pen, sick at
heart, before he reached the days of reversal and oblivion? Or was
itj as Professor Herf ord suggests, that we find in him a divided char-
acter 'who may be called with equal plausibility the last of the
knights errant and the first of the deists, in whom the fantastic ex-
travagances of medieval chivalry seem to join hands with the prosaic
reason of the eighteenth century'? Certainly, although the self-con-
scious and self-important young man dominates the autobiography,
there are pages in which his graver and elder companion looks over
his shoulder or even borrows the pen.
'His Life is delightful and amusing/ Professor Herford remarks,
'precisely because he himself seems to have no humour at all. We
laugh at his "Quixotic" adventures, and he himself appears as devoid
of humour as the Don.' Whether he is threatening a gentleman with
corporal punishment for playfully snatching away the hair-ribbon
of a little girl (an episode that his chivalrous imagination sees as an
affront to a lady's honor) or charging a gang of robbers single-
handed in his nightshirt, his life presents itself to him, Edmund
Blunden points out, as a series of vindications of knighthood, of evil
or impolite people punished, according to the best rules, by himself.
The touches of self-credit, so punctiliously recorded, are among the
most enjoyable features of his autobiography. 'This Motto by me.*
One learns to look for that decorous *by me* either in words or im-
plied: The Spanish ambassador Gondomar astonished by the Eng-
lishman's power handsomely to refuse a request; Monsieur de Luynes
being put in his place 'by me'; the grave maladies he has cured after
physicians had given the cases up; the ladies who have admired his
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY
person and keep portraits or miniatures of him (although always
with the utmost purity of character and behavior).
At times we hear a deeper tone. 'I much approve those parts of
logic which teach men to deduce their proofs from firm and un-
doubted principles, and show men to distinguish betwixt truth and
falsehood, and help them to discover fallacies, sophisms, and that
which schoolmen call vicious argumentations,' but it is not needful
to spend much time in learning 'the subtleties of logic' which fits
people 'for little more than to be excellent wranglers.* But 'a virtuous
man may not only go securely through all the religions, but all the
laws in the world, and whatsoever obstructions he meet, obtain both
an inward peace and outward welcome.' And once he appeals sadly
to his readers 'whether any worldly felicity did so satisfy their hope
here, that they did not wish and hope for something more excellent,
or whether they had ever that faith in their own wisdom, or in the
help of man, that they were not constrained to have recourse to
some diviner and superior power, than they could find on earth, to
relieve them in their danger or necessity; whether ever they could
place their love on any earthly beauty, that it did not fade and
wither, if not frustrate or deceive them, or whether ever their joy
was so consummate in anything they delighted in, that they did not
want, much more than it, or indeed this world can afford, to make
them happy.'
Presently, however, the hortatory opening passed by (for the
book was written, astoundingly enough, 'to relate to my posterity
those passages of my life, which I conceive may best declare me,
and be most useful to them'), we are hearing the characteristic tone
again. As an infant he knew how to talk long before he spoke a
word, but 'did forebear to speak, lest I should utter something that
were imperfect or impertinent.' Seeing him when he was a youth,
Queen Elizabeth swore 'her usual oath' and opined it a pity that he
had married so young. At the siege of Juliers he tried conclusions in
bravery with Balagny, one of the most celebrated French officers,
by springing into the open space between the trenches and walking
round. The garrison opposite opened fire on these amiable idiots,
and Balagny, admitting 'It is very hot here,' suggested going back.
'You shall go first,' Herbert retorted, 'or else I will never go' and
thereupon, Herbert says, 'he ran with all speed, and somewhat
crouching towards the trenches; I followed after, leisurely and up-
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
right.' And 'no doubt,' comments Edmund Blunden, 'he believed he
did.'
It is hardly possible to exhaust or to be exhausted by Herbert's
accounts of the victories, gallantries, and repartees, 'by me.' Perhaps
the highest achievement of all is that on which Heaven itself set the
seal of approval. The philosopher argued that supernatural revelation
was an idle fallacy, but when he was doubtful whether or not to
publish his book, 'one fair day in the Summer, my Casement being
opened towards the South, the Sun shining clear and no Wind stir-
ring, 1 he took his book in hand, kneeled, and prayed for some sign,
which was no sooner done than 'a loud though yet gentle Noise
came from the Heavens (for it was like nothing on Earth) which
did so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition as granted and
that I had the Sign I demanded . . . ' In this devout and approved
position let us leave him. Heaven decreed that he should be more
handsome, more valiant, more witty, more inspired than other men.
Lurid Stage
Herbert's life and character, so external, so worldly and even
trivial in the interests he mostly reveals to us, form a strange contrast
with the next life we are going to consider. John Bunyan's Grace
Abounding is a spiritual autobiography. Of his parentage, his educa-
tion, his outward career, we learn almost nothing: all is concentrated
on the inward drama, the crucial struggle of his life. We are told
that he played cat as a boy (a game placed with a ball), that he used
to ring the befls in a church steeple, that he became a preacher, that
his enemies slandered him with the imputation of loose living, that
he was imprisoned for his religious views, but hardly any other ex-
ternal facts at all.
Herbert's career as depicted by himself was all the easy assertion
of a right never doubted; Bunyan's was all an agony in seeking, a
suffering under temptation to betray, a martyrdom for bearing
witness to an awful truth. If that truth ultimately sustained him,
it was not his weakness that triumphed, but the might of God. The
urbane and courtly Herbert, even the philosopher, achieved with
ease a pleased serenity about matters that to Bunyan were a flame
consuming his being.
No book gives a deeper insight into the fiercer, the more tor-
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY
merited aspects of English Puritanism, not even the fiery apocalyptic
sermons and dark predestinarianism of Jonathan Edwards. The
humble Bedford tinker struggled through the actual smoke and
stench of hell's flame, with the Devil a real presence by his side
and divine voices sometimes sounding in his ears. The story he tells
in Grace Abounding is a Dostoyevskyan drama of dread and horror
and damnation and repentance, communicated in a voice of tense
and terrible conviction. It is a confession not to be read casually;
if the effect is to be felt it must be with a full realization, of the
appalling sincerity of every stage. The Biblical imagery and turns
of phrase are no easy rhetoric strung out with conventional unc-
tion. The hasty and obtuse reader who fails to realize that they
came burning out of Bunyan's heart will miss the intensity of the
struggle. In the small lurid center of the stage, lit with flares, Bunyan
struggles with the Devil for his soul, and around all the rest is dark-
ness, the darkness of perdition, with no glimpse of the sunlit English
scene. Not until years later did he attain the serenity of the Inter-
preter's House, the fair vision of the Delectable Mountains, and the
shining City of God.
It was while he was playing that game of cat as a boy that the
conviction of sin first came on him: 'a voice did suddenly dart
from heaven into my soul, which said, Wilt thou leave thy sins and
go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' and looking to hea-
ven it was as if he had 'with the eyes of my understanding seen
the Lord Jesus looking down ... as being very hotly displeased
. . .' The sinfulness of playing games struck deep into his con-
science; Jesus was no pitiful savior filled with divine compassion,
but a stern and implacable judge. Brooding on this, 'despair did so
possess my soul, that I was persuaded I could never attain to any
other comfort than what I should get in sin.' Heaven was already
lost, so he might as well take his fill of sin, 'studying what sin was
yet to be committed' to 'taste the sweetness of it' and fill his belly
'with its delicates.'
But presently he 'fell to some outward reformation' and began
to think how he 'had taken much delight in bell-ringing,' which
'practice was but vain,' and yet his mind hankered so that he would
still go to the steeple-house and look at it. So doing, the thought
came, 'How, if one of the bells should fall?' so he stood to one
side under a beam for shelter until he thought that the bell might
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fall with a swing and rebound from the wall upon him, killing him
despite the beam, and then he stood in the thickness of the door.
But 'How if the steeple itself should fall' in punishment? and 'I durst
not stand in the steeple door any longer, but was forced to flee, for
fear the steeple should fall upon my head.'
Satan tempted him that 'there was no way for me to know I had
faith but by trying to work some miracle,' and he was mightily im-
pelled to 'say to the puddles that were in the horse-pads' on the
the road, 'Be dry; and to the dry places, Be you the puddles.' In
dreams he saw himself freezing in cold snow and dark clouds, and a
wall between him and the saved on the sunny side of a high moun-
tain. 'I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw,
for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch';
he found himself 'as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir.'
'Darkness seized upon me, after which whole floods of blasphemy,
both against God, Christ, and the Scriptures, were poured upon
my spirit.'
He believed himself actually possessed by the devil, borne away:
'Kick sometimes I did, and also scream and cry; but yet I was bound
in the wings of temptation, and the wind would carry me away.'
Sometimes the temptation to shout blasphemies was so strong that 'I
have been ready to clap my hand under my chin, to hold my mouth
from opening' or 'to leap with my head downward, into some muck-
hill hole or other, to keep my mouth from speaking.' He felt the
devil behind him pulling at his clothes, saying to him at the time of
prayer, 'Break off, make haste, you have prayed enough.'
For years these torments continued. Sometimes he would hear
a voice of comfort which said 'Thou art my love; and nothing shall
separate thee from my love,' and he felt so glad that he could have
spoken of God's love and mercy 'even to the very crows that sat
upon the ploughed land'; sometimes the voice would sound so loud
that he turned his head to see if one had really called from a dist-
ance. But soon Satan was at him again, urging him to sell Christ, so
that 'I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or
cast mine eye to look on this or that, but still the temptation would
come, Sell Christ for this or sell Christ for that; sell him, sell him.'
He put his very body into resistance, 'pushing or thrusting with my
hands or elbows, still answering as fast as the destroyer said, Sell
him; I will not, I will not, I will not; no, not for thousands of
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worlds.' 'But at last, after much striving, even until I was out of
breath, I felt this thought pass through my heart, Let him go, if
he will!' 'Now was the battle won, and down fell I, as a bird that
is shot from the top of a tree, into great guilt, and fearful despair.'
Horror overwhelmed him, and like a hot thunderbolt he felt the
conviction that he had sinned the unpardonable sin. *I could feel
. . . my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under
the sense of the dreadful judgment of God' for 'that most fearful
and unpardonable sin,' and it seemed as if his 'breast bone would
have split in sunder.'
Rescue came at last. A text fell into his mind: 'Return to me,* it
would cry aloud, 'Return to me, for I have redeemed thee,' and he
would 'look over my shoulder behind me, to see if I could discern
that the God of grace did follow me with a pardon in his hand,'
but then 'all would be dark and clouded again' until once more
'it did holloa after me.' Finally a voice commanded a silence 'of
all those tumultuous thoughts that before did use, like masterless
hell-hounds, to roar and bellow, and make a hideous noise within
me.' 'See,' it said, 'that he refuse not him that speaketh'; and a
'sudden rushing wind was as if an angel had come' bringing 'a great
calm in my soul.'
There were later struggles and temptations, but the great battle
was won. Never again was the vision of damnation and despair
so awful; never again did the nightmare of irrevocable sin draw
him into the blackness.
It is easy enough to dismiss Bunyan as unbalanced, and there
can be no doubt that he suffered from hullucinations. But the author
of The Holy War, The Life and Death of Mr Eadman, and The
Pilgrim's Progress was something more than merely unbalanced,
and shares his visions with other men of greatness and purity of
heart. Even the mundane Herbert heard the sound from Heaven ap-
proving his enquiry into truth, and Socrates had his daemon to
guide him.
The religious possession that drove Bunyan almost crazed has
passed again and again, in various forms, through whole communi-
ties, and Bunyan's is a valuable and penetrating record of the form
it took in a simple heart. If he was never as sinful, in his bell-ringing
and his cat-playing, as he believed, he stabs his dread and repentance
home to us with words of blood. The strange interior drama has
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more of truth than most displays of the outer world: a truth narrow
and limited, but of unfathomable depth.
Whip-Syllabub of Wit
With Colley Gibber's Apology for His Life we return to the
light and frothy surface of things again. The dark interior world of
the Puritans condemned the stage as vain when it was least harmful,
and found it ungodly and licentious at its worst. Colley Gibber,
as player and as playwright, spent his entire life in the service of the
stage. His life as narrated by himself is almost as devoid of per-
sonal and private action as Bunyan's own, but for a very different
reason. To Bunyan, absorbed in the fierce drama of salvation, whom
he had married and the character of his wife and all the gentler
feelings of daily life, faded into triviality; to Gibber it may have
seemed none of the public's business what his private life had been,
or it may have been that the lively pleasure of theatrical reminiscence
and of letting his tongue rattle at will on any topic that came into
his head made him almost forgetful of the less brilliantly lighted
stage of domestic life.
For indeed, save in the sense that it gives a vivid picture of the
man, Gibber's apology is very little a real autobiography. Instead
it is a collection of theatrical memoirs, of brilliant dramatic por-
traits and skilful analyses of the actor's art; an informal and gossipy
history of the stage during his time; a gallimaufrey of philosophic
reflections, anecdotes, witticisms, genteel moralizings, and good
humor; all as light and trivial and gay, and as sensible and keen in
an everyday, worldly way as its author.
It must be emphasized that clear and well-lighted as the image
of Gibber stands before us, it is the social image we behold, never
anything more profound. In a way this reticence (if it was reticence
and not a lack of deeper interest) is typical of the eighteenth cen-
tury; intimate gossip about the less seemly aspects of a man's be-
havior there might be, but seldom any speculation about his inward
nature; scandal about his weaknesses, respect for his virtues of action
or strength of thought, but hardly ever any probing into the dark
hidden springs, the half-lights and obscurities of the spirit. It is for
this reason that the eighteenth century, its poetry, its thought, and
its character, so often seem dry and sapless to people who feel the
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need of bathing life in more romantic and deeply moving hues. The
earnestness and enthusiasm and feeling of the eighteenth century
(and it had all these) were allowed to appear only decently clothed
in a garb of the didactic or cerebral, and even then wore often the
mask of light carelessness.
So it is with Gibber. Chattering away, the pert, lively creature, he
gives us a glimpse of a sensible and warm-hearted man underneath
the coxcomb and the rattle, lets us see a hardworking and penetrat-
ing technician in the art of the theatre, a generous appreciator of
talent in his fellow-actors, a frequently witty observer of life and
manners. But all these are things that any reasonably keen spectator
of his public life might have noticed The curtain falls: And what
of the man? we ask; the real, inner Gibber? Ah, ladies and gentle-
men, he has gone home.
To say so much is not to derogate from the clearness and viva-
city of the public image Gibber has, in fact, drawn, nor from its sin-
cerity or its own level of truth. He begins with a gay avowal of
folly: 'But why make my follies publick? Why not? I have passed
my time very pleasantly with them, and I don't recollect that they
have ever been hurtful to any other man living.' Further, when a
man 'has pass'd above forty years of his life upon a theatre, where
he has never appeared to be himself people may naturally like
to know 'what he really was, when in nobody's shape but his own.'
And consequently he promises 'as true a picture as natural vanity
will permit,' for to promise no vanity might, 'like a looking-glass
too large . . . break itself in the making.' From this we pass to a
little outline of his birth and early schooling, but are soon, by way
of the dislike his wit aroused in his schoolmates, proceeding on a
brisk digression about the disadvantages of superior wit unaccom-
panied by great discretion, and thence to an argumentative defense
of folly, but 'all this my parade, and grimace of philosophy, has only
been making a mighty merit of following my own inclination.'
From then on the game of digression and return is merrily played.
A few speculations about how he might have entered Cambridge
and become a celebrated preacher, or joined the army during the
Revolution of 1688 and become a great soldier (for Gibber infuri-
ates the prosaic-minded by his bland assumption that he would have
shone in these professions as well as in his own), are followed by an
account of how the theatre fascinated his youthful imagination,
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and then, by a lively imitation of an adverse critic damning his book.
Little fragments of narrative alternate with bits about his indif-
ference to being satirized (and he had occasion, for the great Pope
had made him the comic hero of The Dunciad)> and these in turn
mingle with reflections on the sad inferiority of the actor's place in
society, the state of the theatre in 1690, the talents of its several
leading lights, and his own early fortunes therein. By the eleventh
chapter the sport is demurely admitted: 'But as I have no objection
to method, when it is not troublesome,' he remarks after a more
than usually long digression, 'I return to my subject.'
Witticisms and aphorisms are frequent. In vulgar repartee, he
notes, 'he that has the least wit generally gives the first blow.'
TPraise, though it may be our due, is not like a bank-bill, to be
paid on demand ... If compulsion insists upon it, it can only be
paid as persecution in points of faith is, in a counterfeit coin.' It
'would be a sort of tyranny in wit for an author to be publickly
putting every argument to death that appear'd against him . . .
praise is as much the reader's property, as wit is the author's.' Of an
actress who had appeared very often in virtuous roles he remarks
that she came to feel herself really the sort of character she played
'to such a height that she was, very near, keeping herself chaste
by it.'
His anecdotes are often pleasant. We have King Charles, himself
of swarthy complexion, complaining of the way villains and scoun-
drels were so often represented in plays as black and menacing in
appearance: 'Pray, what is the meaning that we never see a rogue
in a play, but, godsfish, they always clap him in a black perriwig?
when, it is well known, one of the greatest rogues in England al-
ways wears a fair one?' We have the mild reproof of a great per-
sonage to his chaplain, who was noted for the dissoluteness rather
than the purity of his life. He told him 'with a smile of good-
humour, that if to the many vices he had already, he would give
himself the trouble to add one more ... his reputation might still
be set up again.' The chaplain desiring to know what it was, received
the reply, 'Hypocrisy, doctor, only a little hypocrisy!' And when he
is speculating why 'the celebrated Waller' was employed to alter the
end of The Maid's Tragedy so that Evadne no longer murders the
king in his bed, he remarks that this denouement 'was shewing a too
dangerous example to other Evadnes, then shining at Court, in the
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same rank of royal distinction; who, if their consciences should have
ran equally mad, might have had frequent opportunities of putting
the expiation of their frailty into the like execution.'
All these passages are in his lightest key. He strikes a more
serious note on the subject he feels most seriously about, the art
of acting; and in his analyses of the talents of Betterton, Monfort,
Nokes, Mrs Barry, Mrs Verbruggen, Mrs Bracegirdle, and numerous
other actors he is not only always generous and appreciative, but
truly skilful in the way he puts them before us. There is Betterton
as Brutus in the quarrel scene: 'his spirit flew only to his eye; his
steady look alone supply'd that terror, which he disdain'd an intem-
perance in his voice should rise to. Thus, with a settled dignity of
contempt, like an unheeding rock, he repelled upon himself the foam
of Cassius.' Monfort's men of wit 'had a particular talent, in giving
life to bons mots and repartees' so that they 'seem'd always to come
from him extempore, and sharpen'd into more wit from his brilliant
manner of delivering it'; but when he did 'the false, flashy pre-
tender' he was another person in 'the insipid, soft civility, the ele-
gant and formal mien; the drawling delicacy of voice, the stately
flatness of his address, and the empty eminence of his attitudes.'
His description of the comic actor Nokes is masterly. 'When he
debated any matter by himself, he would shut up his mouth with
a dumb studious powt, and roll his full eye into such a vacant amaze-
ment, such a palpable ignorance of what to think of it, that his
silent perplexity' was as eloquent as the most absurd speech. As Sir
Martin Mar-all, where he played a blunderer afraid of his govern-
ing servant and counsellor,
what a copious, and distressful harangue have I seen him make with
his looks (while the house has been in one continued roar, for several
minutes) before he could prevail with his courage to speak a word
to him! Then might you have, at once, read in his face vexation that
his own measures which he had piqued himself upon, had fail'd. Envy
of his servant's superior wit. Distress to retrieve, the occasion he had
lost. Shame-to confess his folly: and yet a sullen desire, to be recon-
ciled and better advised, for the future! What tragedy ever shew'd
us such a tumult of passions, rising, at once, in one bosom! or what
buskin'd heroe standing under the load of them, could have more
effectually mov'd his spectators by the most pathetic speech, than
poor miserable Nokes did, by this silent eloquence, and piteous plight
of his features?
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No less brilliant are his appreciations of the beauties of some of
the ladies of the stage. When Mrs Bracegirdle acted Millamant, 'all
the faults, follies, and affectations of the agreeable tyrant, were veni-
ally melted down into so many charms and attractions' 'that few
spectators that were not past it, could behold her without desire'
and every audience were 'half of them her lovers, without a sus-
pected favorite among them.' Mrs Monfort as Melantha calls forth
another vivacious picture. She has just received from a gallant a
letter in which her father recommends the young man to her good
graces as an honorable lover. There is no modesty in her reception:
No, sir; not a tittle of it: modesty is the virtue of a poor-soul'd
country gentlewoman; she is too much a court lady, to be under so
vulgar a confusion; she reads the letter, therefore, with a careless,
dropping lip, and an erected brow, humming it hastily over, as if she
were impatient to outgo her father's commands, by making a corn-
pleat conquest of him at once: and that the letter might not embarrass
her attack, crack! she crumbles it at once into her palm, and pours
upon him her whole artillery of airs, eyes, and motion; down goes her
dainty, diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the
conscious load of her own attractions; then launches into a flood of
fine language, and compliment, still playing her chest forward in
fifty falls and risings, like a swan upon waving water; and, to com-
plete her impatience, she is so rapidly fond of her own wit, that she
will not give her lover leave to praise it. Silent assenting bows, and
vain endeavors to speak, are all the share of the conversation he is
admitted to, which, at last, he is relieved from by her engagement to
half a score visits, which she swims from him to make, with a promise
to return in a twinkling.
Nowhere is Gibber more ingratiating than where he speaks of the
shafts of satire that were so often aimed at himself. 'Shall I be sin-
cere, and own my frailty?' he amiably asks. 'Its usual effect is to
make me vain! For I consider, if I were quite good for nothing, the
pidlers in wit would not be concerned to take me to pieces . . .'
And as for the critics of greater fame, 'Not our great imitator of
Horace himself can have more pleasure in writing his verses than I
have in reading them, tho' I sometimes find myself there (as Shake-
spear terms it) dispraisingly spoken of.' 'When I therefore find my
name at length in the satyrical works of our most celebrated living
author, I never look upon those lines as malice meant to me (for
he knows I never provok'd it) but as profit to himself; and 'as a little
bad poetry is the greatest crime he lays to my charge, I am willing
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to subscribe to his opinion of rt.' Surely never was Pope's slashing
onslaughts met with more good humor.
Roman "Profile
The same public character we have noted in Gibber's portrayal
of himself may be seen in a work of considerably more formal
dignity. Edward Gibbon saw himself as the author of The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, and as such it seemed to him fitting
that those who knew his reputation as an eminent man of letters
should have a full length narrative of those parts of his life that
might satisfy a legitimate curiosity. 'He had written a magnificent
history . . . ' says Augustine Birrell: 'It remained to write the his-
tory of the historian.' The word history is well-chosen. Gibbon
approached his Autobiography with the same weighty dignity he
gave to the panorama of a crumbling civilization, and although he
tells us that he is 'reviewing the simple transactions of a private and
literary life' in a style 'simple and familiar' it was hardly possible
for him to regard the subject as of less moment than the Roman
Empire.
'Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious
history,' he had remarked in the same passage, 'must be the sole
recommendation of this personal narrative.' And truth, on the whole,
Gibbon told. But it was truth tempered by the considerations of a
certain concern for propriety. The propriety of Gibbon, how-
ever, was not of a conventional or moral kind: he had no squeamish-
ness about the detached admission of youthful excesses in 'the tav-
erns and bagnios of Convent Garden' or about giving the name of
that Oxford tutor who 'well remembered that he had a salary to re-
ceive and only forgot that he had a duty to perform.' His propriety
is neither a tactful avoidance of offense to individuals nor a white-
washing of his own character, but a feeling of what it is too personal
or vulgar to dilate upon. 'Of the various and frequent disorders of
my childhood my own recollection is dark; nor do I wish to ex-
patiate on so disgusting a topic.' The odor of the sickroom must not
be permitted to offend the nose of the fastidious reader. But still
other matters were none of the reader's business, and Gibbon an-
nounced plainly that such was the case. 'I shall not expatiate on my
economical affairs, which cannot be instructive or amusing to the
reader. It is a rule of prudence, as well as of politeness, to reserve
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such confidence for the ear of a private friend, without exposing
our situation to the envy or pity of strangers.'
Gibbon's portrait of himself is, in fact, a good deal like the one
painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds on which Charles James Fox de-
scribes him 'casting a look of complacency' 'that wonderful por-
trait, in which, while the oddness and vulgarity of the features are
refined away, the likeness is perfectly preserved.' But Gibbon man-
ages to retain even the oddity and the touch of ostentation that
made his contemporaries sometimes regard him as vulgar, and elimi-
nates only those details of fact or feeling that are too 'private' or
'disgusting.' And if the elegant mirror chills a little the warmth of
affection in the man, it reflects faithfully many little touches of
peculiarity and innocent vanity that its maker may not have been
completely aware of.
Of the warmer aspects of his character it may be desirable to
speak here, because he brings it out so little himself. His relation
with his father he dismisses in few words; from the time he returned
from abroad they were 'on the same terms of easy and equal polite-
ness.' The stepmother whom he had first been disposed to regard
with displeasure was 'an amiable and deserving woman' admirable for
'her understanding, her knowledge, and the elegant spirit of her
conversation': and moreover 'her polite welcome, and her assiduous
care to study and gratify my wishes, announced' that all 'suspicions
of art and falsehood' were unjustified.
From these tempered commendations it would be difficult to
guess the depth of his feelings. But he felt the tenderest devotion
to the aunt who had cared for his childhood, and his stepmother,
even as a very old lady, adored her stepson. In what proved to be
the closing weeks of his life he hurried home from Lausanne, al-
though stout and gouty, and in spite of the dangers of the French
Revolution through which he had to pass, to join his friend Lord
Sheffield, whose wife had just died, and who, he felt, needed his
presence. These, however, are perhaps among those personal feel-
ings which he felt to belong to his friends rather than to the
curiosity of the public, and an autobiography that understates the
sensibility of its subject errs in a way that is little blameworthy.
Gibbon was fully aware of what he was doing in his autobiog-
raphy, and the form in which we have it is perhaps proof that in
his own mind he had not quite solved its problems. 'It would most
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assuredly be in my power,' he wrote, 'to amuse the reader with a
gallery of portraits and a collection of anecdotes. 5 (in a way, what
Gibber did do.) 'But I have always condemned the practice of
transforming a private memorial into a vehicle of satire or praise.'
We find very few set pieces, therefore, in the book. Further, as it
is usually printed, it does not represent Gibbon's own final rendi-
tion of his story, but is a synthesis of six different sketches, partly
overlapping and on different scales, put together after his death by
Lord Sheffield. The problem of scale is a special one, too complex
and irrelevant for our present purposes; and fortunately for those
purposes the tone of formal and somewhat reserved portraiture is
a single one. But the six sketches are not so much signs of egoism
as of literary artistry seeking for the right handling.
The handling that we find, in the separate sketches and in Lord
Sheffield's fusion of them, is, as I have tried to make clear, definitely
the rendition of himself as the eminent man of letters. The choice
of details and their tone are everywhere dictated by that purpose.
Some traces of pride of family appear, qualified by a philosophic
awareness that it is not altogether rational: 'the longest series of
peasants and mechanics would not afford much gratification to the
pride of their descendants,' but 'we should learn to value the gifts
of nature above those of fortune.' Therefore, to Gibbon personally
'the family of Confucius is ... the most illustrious in the world.'
We are speedily brought, however, into an account of his intel-
lectual growth, the devouring of works of history and geography
in such incoherent masses that he 'arrived at Oxford with a stock
of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of
ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.'
The University, then at a low ebb in its intellectual vitality, aided
him little. 'The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded
in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted
with the vices of their origin.' They were 'supposed to be schools of
science, as well as of education; nor is it unreasonable to expect
that a body of literary men, devoted to a life of celibacy, exempt
from the care of their own subsistence, and amply provided with
books, should devote their leisure to the prosecution of study . . .'
But 'The fellows or monks of my time were decent easy men, who
supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder . . . From the toil of read-
ing, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their conscience; and
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the first shoots of learning and ingenuity withered on the ground,
without yielding any fruits to the owners or the public.'
Unaided by the Professors, he fell in with the works of Bossuet
in defense of Catholicism and was easily persuaded by that 'mas-
ter of all the weapons of casuistry' that 'the ten-horned monster'
was indeed 'the milk-white hind, who must be loved as soon as she
is seen.' He was expelled from the University, and sent abroad by
his father to Lausanne, where he was put under the tutelage of a
Calvinist minister charged with the duty of reconverting him. We
have a verbal picture of him at the time: c a thin little figure, with
a large head, disputing and urging, with the greatest ability, all the
best arguments that had ever been used in favour of Popery.' Slowly
he was weaned away from the pernicious creed and back into a for-
mal profession of faith in Protestantism. But the experience had ex-
hausted his capacity for religious fervor, and the gradual expansion
of his philosophic reading completed the attitude of ironic scorn
with which he thereafter regarded the subject. Of a friend of his
aunt's, Gibbon remarks that he might have ranked high as a writer
'had not his vigorous mind been clouded by enthusiasm.' The mature
Gibbon was in litde danger of that error.
Once, however, in a different realm than that of religion, he
approached it. He fell in love, a passion by which he means 'the
union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a
single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which
seeks her possession as the supreme or sole happiness of our being.'
The lady, Mile Susan Curchod (who later became Mme Necker
and the mother of Mine de Stael) was 'learned without pedantry,
lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners.'
The combination proved irresistible: 'I saw and loved.' But Gibbon's
father 'would not hear of this strange alliance' with the daughter
of a poor clergyman. 'After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate:
I signed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly
healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life. My cure was
accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquility and cheerfulness
of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship and esteem.'
These passages, especially in their almost complacent serenity,
reveal the difference between the private and the public man that
we have commented on. In fact, as his Diary reveals, 'he was deeply
mortified at the time by the calmness with which the lady had ac-
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cepted the rupture. He heard with resentment that she shared In the
social amusements of Lausanne' and 'was surrounded by admirers.'
Her amusements, he said, convicted her 'of the most odious dissim-
ulation, and if infidelity is sometimes a weakness, duplicity is al-
ways a vice. This episode, curious throughout, has been of great
use to me; it has opened my eyes to the character of women, and
will serve me long as a preservative against the seductions of love.*
His youthful chagrin melted away, and he was in later years on gay
and friendly terms with ladies, but he never seriously considered
matrimony again.
Meanwhile he had continued reading on a monumental scale. He
had long since remedied the ignorance of Latin and Greek that he
had brought to Oxford, and had already become a serious scholar
at the age of twenty-two. 'I cannot forget the joy with which I
exchanged a bank-note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes
of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions; nor would it have
been easy, by any other expenditure of the same sum, to have pro-
cured so large and lasting a fund of rational amusement.' The quali-
fication of the noun is significant. Living in the country with his
father and stepmother, 'I never handled a gun, I seldom mounted
a horse; and my philosophic walks were soon terminated by a shady
bench, where I was long detained by the sedentary amusement of
reading or meditation.' Once, the ill-advised step of offering their
names as volunteers in the Hampshire militia, which they had never
expected to come to anything, involved him and his father in two
years of bothersome military service uncompensated for 'by any
elegant pleasure.' There may have been some alleviation, however,
in the fact that the 'discipline and evolution of a modern battalion
gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion.'
The days when the historian would begin his work were ap-
proaching fast. In a visit abroad, the grand project was born. 'It
was at Rome, on the i5th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst
the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing ves-
pers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline
and fall of the city first started to my mind.' A dozen years later
the first volume appeared. 'I am at a loss how to describe the suc-
cess of the work, without betraying the vanity of the writer. . . .
My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette'; Robert-
son and Hume added their discriminating praise to the approbation
"5
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
of the polite world. The last volume was finished eleven years later
still, in 1787, 'I wrote the last line of the last page, in a summer-
house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several
turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a
prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was
temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was re-
flected from the water, and all nature was silent.' His first emotion
of joy and pride 'was humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread
over my mind' by realizing that he had taken his leave 'of an old and
agreeable companion' and that the historian probably had not much
longer to live.
But his temper was naturally cheerful and moderate; he felt that
he had 'drawn a high prize in the lottery of life'; his health, since
the illnesses of his childhood, was good; he was a rich man, 'since
my income is superior to my expense, and my expense is equal to
my wishes'; he had spent twenty happy years 'animated by the
labour of my History ,' and its success had given him a name in the
world. He might still hope on a reasonable estimate for about fif-
teen years more of life, he thought; and he was entering 'the period
which, as the most agreeable of his long life, was selected by the
judgment and experience of the sage Fontenelle.' With such feel-
ings of peace and complacence he laid down his pen.
Periods and Self -Portrayals
Our four autobiographers show us a sort of historical panorama,
from the fantastic chivalry and braggadocio of Lord Herbert (which
has in it much of the more exuberant side of Elizabethan life),
through the dark and Puritan agonizings of Bunyan to the fluttering
gaiety of Gibber and the characteristic elegance and eighteenth cen-
tury classicism of Gibbon.
If Herbert seems at times a comic parody of the ideals of Sir
Philip Sidney, in many ways he still represents the versatility of the
Renaissance man that attained such splendor in the many-sided
activities of a Leonardo or even a Raleigh. And, although drier and
more circumscribed, there is in him also much of the tremendous
craving for intellectual expansion with which Bacon took all knowl-
edge for his province.
In Bunyan the reverberations of the Protestant Reformation pene-
trate to the humbler classes, and mingle with some of that moral
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY
rigor that shattered Cavalier armies before CromwelFs Ironsides.
The country gentlemen and aH the more urbane supporters of Puri-
tanism retired before the wave of licentiousness that came in with
the restored Stuart throne. Bunyan and his fellows in their shabby
meeting houses, persecuted by the authorities and harried by their
own soul-searchings, stubbornly protested the duties of a kingdom
that was not of this world.
And, although not strictly contemporaneous, Gibber gives the
other side of the same period: its skepticism, its lack of moral earn-
estness, its relaxed mood of frivolity. He reveals also the slightly
cynical worldliness, not always unkindly, and the materialism that
led Charles II to declare that he would never set forth on his
'travels' again.
With Gibbon the hedonism of the Restoration has changed to
the Epicureanism of the Classic Age. Its worldliness is no less, but
is tempered by sobriety, balance, and calm. Not averse to enjoy-
ment, it feels that there is also a serious side to life, and grows in-
terested in philosophy, in scholarship, in progress. In these four
autobiographies we have sampled characteristic flavors of their
time.
They not only flash light on salient qualities of the periods in
which their authors lived, however; they illuminate as well the
problems of autobiography as an art. I think it will be agreed that
all of them partially succeed in their purpose, in the sense that none
is dull or lacking in a feeling of personality. The degrees and ways
of their success, and the nature of their limitations, are instructive.
In Herbert of Cherbury, for all his verve and aplomb, I think
we feel a serious lack of both depth and purity of purpose. The man
whom Descartes regarded as the most serious English philosopher
after Francis Bacon could hardly, even as a youngster, have been
nothing but the harebrained and quarrelsome boaster he usually
paints himself. Nor, even as a youngster, is it likely that his career
was so uniformly prosperous as he tells us, although it may be
that the charm and beauty of his youth graced a tendency to con-
tentiousness that was not so easily forgiven as he grew older. But
we are forced to believe that there were qualities in the boy and man
that he did not perceive and of one so ready to envision his own
merit as Herbert that seems unlikely or, that he chose not to
reveal.
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
Possibly the temptation to daydream about his youth and drama-
tize his character to a secret, and curiously shallow, vision of him-
self proved too strong to be mastered. That he told the story of only
half his life is perhaps a mechanical accident; that he knew or told
only a part of his personality in that half is fundamental. It does
not prevent many passages of unconscious revelation, but even that
unconscious revelation fails to show us nearly all of what in him
commanded respect. If the autobiography in spite of all has fresh-
ness and delight, it attains them often enough by the not altogether
admirable means of arousing the reader's amusement at the author.
This pleasure Herbert would have been little gratified to know he
produced; and pleasure achieved so, through self-complacence, is
of a trivial kind.
Of none of these faults can Bunyan be accused. Instead of the
shallow stage without perspective or chiaroscuro, we seem to have
a cavernous depth of darkness and lurid glares. Peering into that
bleak inferno of the conscience, we cannot doubt, nay we see, deeps
beyond deeps, plumbed as darkly and fearfully as Bunyan explored
them and struggled with their monsters himself. Nor is the purity
of his intention more dubious; the frightful sincerity of the man
dominates every sentence. But if the vision was deep and sincere,
it was terribly distorted, distorted well-nigh to madness. All the
light and air of every day is lost in Grace Abounding, all the love
of wife and children which in one fleeting passage even Bunyan
confesses to be irrationally dear to him, all the stir and pleasant dis-
tractions of life and business, of soldiering and tinkering, which even
Puritanism knew, and the serene visions of the Land of Beulah and
the loveliness in a flower that Bunyan himself came in the end to
know. The stark and bitter principle of selection governed all; it
ruled out half of life, and left a story that was true, but bare of all
everyday and external fact, and bare of all those milder thoughts
and feelings that failed to burn with the red heat of a crisis.
It needs no great insight to perceive that there is little depth in
Colley Gibber's Apology. We are given a cheerful and good-
humored creature with a considerable knowledge of the surfaces of
men's conduct, agreeable, tolerant, wise enough in those kinds of
judgment called knowing the world, generous and appreciative of
the kind of merit, in the restricted realm of the theatre, he is es-
pecially interested in. He was wise enough to know that he was
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY
far better fitted for acting the butterfly roles of farce and comedy
than the tragic conceptions of Hamlet and Othello; but he did play,
and successfully, the characters of lago, Wolsey, and Richard the
Third, which, even though tinged with melodrama, are not devoid
of shading. Where the shades were hidden in him that answered
to those powerful distortions we can only guess. He shows merely
the bright and witty intelligence.
His purity of purpose, within limits, is less to be arraigned. The
social image of the man, as we have said, he perceived and rendered
clearly; if it was less than he perceived, it was all he intended to
tell, and there is neither deception nor intention of deception. There
is no specious air of inward revelation. All is frankly on the sur-
face alone. Of either organization or completeness we find hardly
a trace. The events of his life are only sketchily referred to. He
mentions his marriage, but without naming his wife, and an an-
nouncement of his almost annual parenthood appears only while
he is telling us that his muse was nearly as prolific. The book is,
what Gibbon disclaimed desiring his to be, *a gallery of portraits,'
mainly irrelevant to the story of Gibber's life, however glittering
in themselves. Cluttered thus with irrelevance in a way found neither
in Herbert nor in Bunyan, for so bright a picture of the surface man
to appear is a triumph of vivacity that owes nothing to either depth
or form.
Gibbon's lack of depth in certain ranges of his life is undoubtedly
the result of deliberate choice. Some little falsifications vanity may
have produced, but no 'enthusiasm' clouded his vision even of him-
self; the round and rather pompous little man in his flowered velvet
was as sharply aware of his own nature as was even the partisan
malice of Boswell. But those perceptions were part of his 'private'
character; they did not belong in, because he did not see that they
affected, the character of the great historian. The nature and the
depths of the historian Gibbon saw, and rendered. For this reason
we can say that, within its limitations, Gibbon's purity of purpose
was sustained. It was not the naked man he was painting, but 'the
history of the historian.' As a historian he well knew his qualities
and his debts: his irony, he tells us, was consciously formed on the
Lettres Provinciates of the great Pascal. If, in our modern tendency
to ride the hobby-horse of psychoanalysis, we feel some relation-
ship between his youthful resentment at Mile Curchod's cheerful
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
acquiescence in his loss and the calm with which his history nar-
rates wholesale rape, Gibbon was hardly to blame if he was unaware
of it.
As a literary structure, his work surpasses any of the others we
have here examined. It neither stops short midway, like Herbert's,
nor confines itself to one significant struggle and crisis, like Bun-
yan's, but is the whole story of the historian carried into the au-
tumn of life, past his struggles and triumphs, almost to the end of
his days. Unlike Gibber's, which is formless and scattered in pur-
pose, there is no particle of irrelevance. A social image, like Gibber's,
it is fuller and better planned, and has more shading, if not all that
would have been possible in the delineation of the inward man.
Completely untinged by Romantic passion, it is a work of Classic
art.
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
ifth Century
IV
MEMOIR AND DIARY
I7TH CENTURY
Their Character and Flavor
MEMOIRS and reminiscences are a rather miscellaneous class of
personal writing. Diaries are somewhat more sharply defined.
But both are the raw materials out of which biography and auto-
biography may be shaped more often than they are clearly formed
works of art themselves. The very words, reminiscence and memoir,
imply a certain informality of nature and purpose; they are what
the writer can remember at the time of writing. They pretend to
no effort at filling in blanks or correcting false impressions or achiev-
ing any perspective of reasoned judgment; they make no claim to
have consulted documents or other people, nor to the discipline of
remembering better.
And, whatever blanks and jerks of movement there may be in a
diary, it is conversely a day-to-day record. In all sorts of moods,
in fair fortune and in ill, the writer put down whatever struck him,
deeds, gossip, public events, impressions of other people, possibly
all helter-skelter. He promises nothing in the way of bringing to-
"3
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
gather scattered judgments or feelings into any singleness of vision.
Violent contradictions may flow from him unchecked, as the entry
of one day is written in hate, another in love, one in high spirits and
another in grief.
Unified plan seldom exists in such writings. If they achieve
striking effects of singleness, if they are bathed in any strong light
of personality, it is apt to be less through the organization of their
several parts than the stamp of their maker's character upon them.
The nature of a man may dye so deeply the texture of everything
he writes that the mere color of his work, as it were, is suffused
with him. Or a complex impression of personality may be built up,
bit by bit, in a bright mosaic of minute touches, as multitudinous
as the tiny hints from which we shape our idea of a man's character
in life. Informality may run riot here, and even if there be a system
it may well be shaped on a different plan than those of biography
and autobiography.
The appeal of any of these forms of writing may be biographical
or autobiographical in nature. The memoirist may train his atten-
tion upon some figure whose personality and doings he projects
from the magic-lantern store of memory. Or, like a string of shin-
ing beads, he may show us in turn experiences and encounters with
a host of others associated only by having been known to him. In
this sense, Colley Gibber's Apology , although it is strung upon a
loose thread of life-narrative, is rather more a volume of memoirs
than an autobiography; and indeed he does not call it his life-story,
but an apology for his life. Even the diarist may be read sometimes
with more interest in the events he observed, as we do in Samuel
Pepys's account of the festive return of Charles II to England, and
sometimes with more interest in the man there unveiled, as we do
in other, slyer passages of that exhilarating work.
.Our line of distinction, then, between these writings and history,
biography, or autobiography, is a slim and fluctuating one. Evelyn's
Diary is so complete and characteristic that it tells almost all the
story of his life; and although only nine years is covered by the
Diary of Samuel Pepys it gives us a brilliant full-length portrait of
the man. The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson are hard-
ly distinguishable from a formal biography. The naming in such
case is more a matter of arbitrary choice than of correctness. Usu-
ally, however, memoirs and reminiscence are apt to lean heavily
MEMOIR AND DIARY
on anecdote, episode, and character-sketch, isolated fragments rather
than connected narrative. The memoirist sometimes analyzes his
subject under an abstract psychology, or presents us with a stiff
panegyric, or a group of Theophrastian characters. When plan
does exist it may be one of these rather than that of following
events in their sequence of time.
In writings so little defined hardly any formal rules of excellence
are to be found. Scattering and diversity are almost in their nature.
Vividness and truthfulness of effect they should have. But even
here, a monumental boaster, like Benvenuto Cellini, or a scandalous
talemonger, like Brantome, may achieve what we may call the truth
of characteristic falsehood through a cloud of prevarication or
hyperbole. Sometimes the drama of men and events, and always
their character, we may legitimately look for. The criteria of depth
and purity in such things are still relevant. But organization and
any save a superficial continuity, if we find them, are added gifts.
Featherwit and Cavalier
The Civil War into which the obstinate royal folly of Charles 1
precipitated his realm split England in two. Poetry and drama has
often presented it as a struggle of Cavaliers and Roundheads, the
gay, courtly, long-curled gentlemen, rhyming, wining, and wench-
ing, and all loyal to their King, and the dour Jeremiah Spintexts, in
sad drab clothes, moralizing rebellion and regicide. It was not really
so, although it is true that republicanism and puritanism usually went
together, and that most of the lighter wits, the Lovelaces and the
Sucklings, fought for the King. In the desperate struggle that sharp-
ened to civil conflict, the claims of interest or conscience divided
members of the same family, and brother fought against brother.
Not the least of the interest in the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel
Hutchinson and The Life of the Duke of Newcastle resides in the
way they show us opposing sides during those trying times.
Margaret Lucas, who became Duchess of Newcastle, was no more
than twenty-four years of age when the King was beheaded in
1649 and during nearly all of the struggle she was abroad, first as
Maid of Honour to the Queen and later as the second wife of her
exiled Lord. But he himself had played a prominent role in com-
mand of the King's forces before the fatal defeat at Hessom-moor.
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
It was partly in defense of his generalship that her book was written.
Lucy Hutchinson was born the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley,
Lieutenant-Governor of the Tower. Only seven years, at most,
the senior of the Duchess of Newcastle, her marriage brought her
from the first into the thick of hostilities. Her father and his family
were Royalists, but Colonel John Hutchinson, a man of serious,
almost puritanic disposition and of republican sentiments, had
speedily declared himself on the side of the Parliament. He took a
leading position both in military and legislative opposition to the
King.
Both the ladies were women of some originality, and hesitate
not to lay claim thereto. The Duchess had a fertile invention, at-
tested by a copious bibliography beginning ambitiously at the age
of twenty-seven with a work entitled Philosophical Fancies, and
running through poems, orations, 'sociable letters,' comedies, trage-
dies, and observations upon experimental philosophy. 'I have heard,'
she says, that Aristotle 'was a great philosopher,' but also that 'his
memory failed in his writings, for that he sometimes contradicted
himself.' She had not read his works, because she 'had a naturall
stupidity towards the learning of any other language than my native
tongue,' but she 'swore if the schools did not banish Aristotle' and
read her instead 'they did her wrong.' 'Some should say,' she tells
us, 'my wit seemed as if it would overpower my brain,' but she be-
lieves her brain to be even stronger than her wit. In speech she may
not be quite appreciated, for she fears that when she has spoken
to people it has not always been 'according as their capacities lay.'
And even in writing she doubts that she can do herself justice, for
'the several wayes my thoughts move in are much smoother than
the tongue in my mouth, from whence words flow, or the paper
on which my pen writes,' and therefore the swiftness of her fancy
'is many times lost.'
There is much evidence that her mind outstrips her pen, leaving
that exhausted implement almost gasping in the effort to hold the
pace. In a single sentence she speaks of her father's death, her
mother's grief, the way the rebels plundered them of plate, corn,
jewels, and cattle, her mother's majesty of carriage, her beauty, and
her affection for her children, who are thus described: 'three sons
and five daughters . . . not any one crooked, or any ways de-
formed, neither were they dwarfish, or of giant-like stature, but
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
every ways proportionable; likewise well-featured, cleer complex-
ions, brown hairs, but some lighter than others, sound teeth, sweet
breaths, plain speeches, tunable voices, I mean not so much to sing
as in speaking, as not stuttering, nor wharling in the throat, or speak-
ing through the nose, or hoarsly, unless they had a cold, or squeak-
ingly, which impediments many have: neither were their voices of
too low a strain, or too high, but their notes and words were tunable
and timely': and from thence the voluble sentence runs on for an-
other full page of variegated topics.
The same qualities she reveals in her account of herself appear
in her life of the Duke. Samuel Pepys read it, and was roundly con-
temptuous. 'March 18 [1668],' he writes. 'Thence home, and there in
favour to my eyes, staid at home reading the ridiculous history of
my Lord Newcastle, wrote by his wife; which shows her to be a
mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he an ass to suffer her to
write what she writes about him and of him. So to bed, my eyes
being very bad.' Somewhat more curtailed and less Molly-Bloomish
in syntax than her own Memoirs (possibly the Duke's more scholas-
tic eye overran the pointing), it is almost equally without system,
and what system it has is bad.
The Life is divided into four books. The first two are narrative,
dealing with his life until his departure from England, and his life
in exile and after the Restoration. The Third Book celebrates his
notable qualities under a series of such headings as 'Of His Prud-
ence and Wisdom,' 'Of His Natural Wit and Understanding,' 'Of
His Discourse,' 'Of His Outward Shape and Behaviour,' and 'Of
His Diet.' The Fourth Book consists of 'Several Essays and Dis-
courses Gathered from the Mouth of My Noble Lord and Hus-
band.'
Such a method is admirably calculated to divorce action from
character: in one part of the book we are told, almost barely, what
the Duke did; in another, entirely separated, what he thought or
said about such things. We alternate between a nearly colorless
catalog of narrative and the dry sawdust of empty generalization
and unpointed anecdote.
If people like Charles Lamb have admired the Duchess, his 'fan-
tastical and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle,' it has
perhaps been because she has tickled their fancy by the cloud-
capped pinnacles of her vanity and the unpredictable nature of her
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
observations. She hopes her readers will not think her vain for writ-
ing her life, 'since there have been, many that have done the like,
as Caesar, Ovid, and many more, both men and women, and I know
no reason I may not do it as well as they:' but in another place we
are told that she does not regard 'carping tongues, or malicious cen-
sorers, for I despise them.' All readers may know she writes 'for
my own sake, not theirs'; but she would not like it if 'after-ages
should mistake, in not knowing ... I was second wife to the
Lord Marquess of Newcastle; for My Lord having had two wives,
I might easily have been mistaken, especially if I should dye and
My Lord marry again.'
Although a rival to Aristotle, her 'serious study could not be
much, by reason I took great delight in attiring, fine dressing, and
fashions, especially such fashions as I did invent myself, not taking
that pleasure in such fashions as was invented by others . . . f or I
always took delight in a singularity . . .' Pepys bears testimony to
this, for he records that 'all the town-talk is now-a-days of her ex-
travagancies, with her velvet-cap, her hair about her ears; many
black patches, because of pimples about her mouth; naked-necked,
without anything about it, and a black juste-au-corpsJ But, for all
these 'antique fashions' and fantasies, she had as soon enclose her-
self 'like an anchoret, wearing a frize gown, tied with a cord about
my waste.'
The fantastic creature begins her life of her husband with some
ostentation, dividing the kinds of history into '(i) A general his-
tory. (2) A national history. (3) A particular history . . . The
first is mechanical, the second political, and the third heroical . . .
This History' like Caesar's Commentaries, she tells us 'is of the
third sort.' Therefore it cannot be expected 'that I should here
preach of the beginning of the world' nor give 'tedious moral dis-
courses'; and a number of other ways of 'swelling the bulk' of her
work are also denied her, so that she cannot 'make this book larger.'
And with this we are in full cry of panegyric and celebration of
misfortune.
When His Majesty was so 'unjustly and unmannerly treated' by
Parliament, her Lord raised an army of eight thousand foot, horse,
and dragoons, and as a general some time later won a tremendous
victory at Atherton-moor, 'notwithstanding he had quitted 7000
men to conduct Her Majesty': 'about 3000 were taken prisoners,'
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
But 'There was such jugling, treachery, and falsehood in his own
army' that it was impossible for him to be prosperous. 'In all ac-
tions and undertakings where My Lord was in person himself, he
was always victorious . . . ; but whatsoever was lost or succeeded
ill, happened in his absence . . .' There was no doubt of the Duke's
gallantry and courage; it was only in the fantasy of his wife, how-
ever, that he was a military tactician.
Abroad he lived on credit till the Restoration. The return was
not so glorious as had been hoped. Some of his estates had been
in the rebels' hands and were in ruins; Welbeck and Bolsover were
unrepaired and almost pulled down; his parks were nearly all de-
stroyed and their timbers cut: all told his losses, including revenue
from the estates for those sixteen years, she indignantly totals as
941,303. And His Majesty was not as grateful as he should have
been; some of his estate her Lord could not get back at all, in spite
of all his services to the crown, including two magnificent enter-
tainments given years ago to Charles I, at Welbeck, with a splendid
feast and a masque by Ben Jonson.
But he bore it all with equanimity, for 'My Lord may justly be
compared to Titus the Deliciae of Mankind, by reason of his sweet,
gentle, and obliging nature.' He engaged, by virtue of a natural
wit and judgment, in philosophical discussion, although he had
not much scholarship, and supplied Mr Hobbes, the philosopher,
with a number of valuable ideas the latter used in his Leviathan.
He took great delight in the exercise of weapons, but even more in
the 'art of Mannage,' or riding the warhorse, in which he was so
pre-eminent that he wrote a dignified treatise thereon. 'The rest of
Ms time he spends in musick, poetry, architecture, and the like.'
The delight of Charles Lamb in the feather-brained author of this
work was a mixture of affection and amusement, and his sense of
humor has fathered an entire school rather less amiable than he was,
for in Lamb the amusement was tempered by a lively awareness of
the way in which the lady epitomized the follies of humanity, in-
cluding himself. Some of the modern admirers of the Duchess smirk
knowingly at her unconscious absurdities, and enhance their own
sense of superiority by a supercilious enjoyment. It is no such ad-
mirable wit to perceive that a rattle-pate is a rattle-pate, and the
pleasures of unintended humor the civilized reader should easily
exhaust. Margaret Newcastle was an amiable creature, but her
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
achievements in the life of her husband and the memoir of herself
are slight and mostly accidental.
Regicides and Puritans
Lucy Hutchinson is a more serious person altogether. If she too
has the vanity of telling us how she outstripped her brothers in the
study of Latin as a child, and of remarking that her husband first
became interested in her because he thought one of her sonnets
showed 'something of rationality . . . beyond the customary reach
of a she-wit,' she amply justifies her own good opinion by her nar-
rative. It has vividness of phrase, skill in construction and charac-
terization, clarity and depth in judgment. Although blemished by
a few very occasional longueurs, and some repetitious pieties of
language, it moves with drama and force. Her admiration for her
husband was high, and it may be that she represents him as a little
more invariably right than any human being is likely to be. Many
others, however, admired him almost as highly and his deeds tell
their own objective story. The writing is full of the flavor and color
and feeling of the times. Lucy Hutchinson has been called a sour
and disagreeable bluestocking, but her book seems to me to reveal a
very pleasing youthful romanticism in its earlier pages and a serious
serenity in many of its later.
We begin with her birth. 'The land was then at peace ... if
that quietness may be called a peace, which was rather like the calm
and smooth surface of the sea, whose dark womb is already im-
pregnated with a horrid tempest,' and we are reminded ominously
that the throne of England was the heritage of a 'Norman usurper,
who partly by violence, partly by falsehood, laid here the founda-
tions of his monarchy, in the people's blood, in which it hath swain
about five hundred years, till the flood that bore it was ploughed
into such deep furrows as had almost sunk the proud vessel.'
But meanwhile all was calm. Her mother, 'while she was with
child of me,' dreamed that she was walking in a garden and a star
came down into her hand: and the child was talented in languages,
music, dancing, and writing. Although piously brought up, the
young girl 'thought it no sin to learn or hear witty songs and
amorous sonnets or poems, and twenty things of that kind.' Pres-
ently Mr Hutchinson came to hear of 'how reserved and studious'
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
she was, and found some of her Latin books in a closet, and his desire
of seeing her was inflamed. For, though he 'practised tennis' for
exercise and had 'a great mastery on the viol/ he was a serious
young man himself. He had already resisted the advances of ladies
who were handsome, witty, wealthy, and 'set out with all the gaiety
and vanity that vain women put on to set themselves off,' including
one whose beauty 'would have thawed a rock of ice.*
All these he passed by, but falling strangely infatuated with this
lady whom he had not yet seen, on hearing a rumor that she was
married, he 'turned pale as ashes, and felt a fainting to seize his
spirits.' The rumor proved untrue, and they presently were made
acquainted. The story of their courtship 'would make a true history
of a more handsome management of love than the best romances
describe.' But 'There is only this to be recorded, that never was a
passion more ardent and less idolatrous,' and that 'she was a very
faithful mirror, reflecting truly, though but dimly, his own glories
on him' until he was gone, and then 'was only filled with a dark
mist, and could never again . . . return any shining representation.'
Find among the noblest of the Cavaliers a deeper romanticism!
The shining and carefree days soon passed. 'About the year 1639,
the thunder was heard afar off rattling in the troubled air, and even
the most obscured woods were penetrated with some flashes, the
forerunners of the dreadful storm . . .' For Charles I, though he
'was temperate, chaste, and serious,' encouraging 'men of learning
and ingenuity in all arts,' was proving 'a worse encroacher upon the
civil and spiritual liberties of his people by far than his father. He
married a papist, a French lady, of a haughty spirit, and a great wit
and beauty, to whom he became a most uxorious husband.' 'He was
the most obstinate person in his self-will that ever was, and so bent
upon being an absolute, uncontrollable sovereign, that he was re-
solved either to be such a king or none.' Strafford and Laud were
powerful instruments of tyranny, but in November, 1640, the Long
Parliament convened and the two were convicted of high treason
and sent to their deaths. But the King would abide by no covenants.
Open rebellion at last broke out.
Mrs Hutchinson's account of events has been called bigoted and
intolerant. Harold Nicolson accuses her of regarding the Royalists
simply as 'debauchees' and 'ungodly,' and of speaking continually of
'their darkness and our light.' It may be interesting to compare her
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
characterization of the Earl of Newcastle (as he then was) with
what she says of some of her own party. His 'great estate, his liberal
hospitality, and constant residence in his country' had 'so endeared
them to him, that no man was a greater prince in all that northern
quarter; till a foolish ambition of glorious slavery carried him to
court, where he ran himself much into debt, to purchase neglects of
the king and queen, and scorns of the proud courtiers.' This is
adverse, but not without respect for his merits and loyalty; and she
tells of his magnanimous behavior much later when Colonel Hutch-
inson was under arrest. 'Colonel,' said he, 'they say you desire to
know your accusers, which is more than I know,' and showed him
a letter from the Duke of Buckingham accusing him of a plot;
'which my lord was so satisfied the colonel was innocent of, that
he dismissed him without guard to his own house, only engaging
him to stay there one week, till he gave account to the council . . . '
Her severity to her own side is no less than her moderation to
the other. 'When puritanism grew into a faction, the zealous dis-
tinguished themselves, both men and women, by several affectations
of habit, looks, and words' which were only a pretense and a
hypocrisy. The troops of Sir John Gell, one of the Parliament men,
she characterizes as 'good stout, fighting men, but the most licen-
tious, ungovernable wretches,' and Sir John himself as 'a foul adul-
terer,' unjust, revengeful, and malicious. Millington and White, two
leading members of the Puritan party, 'were so ensnared that they
married a couple of alehouse wenches,' a course especially scandal-
ous in the former, 'a man of sixty, professing religion, and having
but lately buried a religious, matronly gentlewoman.' There is not
much in these passages of 'their darkness and our light.'
Indeed her history is full of the evils produced by dissensions with-
in her own camp. As Governor of the town and castle of Notting-
ham, Colonel Hutchinson was constantly harassed by the jealousies
of his associates. At last, hating these 'secret heartburnings,' he was
obliged to call them together and tell them that if his power was
in any way disagreeable to them he would decline serving, but if
they wished him to continue he would not brook 'any thwarting
or crossing of powers and commands.' But although they answered
with smooth words, they continued to be obstructive, and the whole
cause everywhere suffered much from 'secret enemies and refractory
friends.' Sometimes their treasurers cheated the soldiers out of their
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
rewards and pay, so that the men were close to mutiny and difficult
to make obey orders; sometimes wandering detachments of troops
used such 'saucy language' that once the Colonel was provoked to
'beat them out of the house and town'; and the factions of presby-
terians and independents into which the party had split gave courage
to the King and his party, and 'hardened him and them to their
ruin.'
At last there seemed only one resort. The King was brought to
trial, charged with 'betraying the public trust' and 'being an im-
placable enemy to the commonwealth.' He disowned the authority
of the court, and the charges of all the blood spilled by his misdeeds,
'he heard with disdainful smiles, and looks and gestures which
rather expressed sorrow that all the opposite party to him were
not cut off, than that any were . . . ' He was sentenced to death,
and beheaded at the block.
'But now had the poison of ambition so ulcerated Cromwell's
heart' that he began 'moulding the army to his mind, weeding out
the godly and upright-hearted . . . ' 'The colonel saw through him,
and' rather irritatingly ' forebore not to tell him what was sus-
pected of his ambition, what dissimulations of his were remarked,'
and how destructive 'to the most glorious cause' these things would
be if true. Cromwell wore 'the most open face' of friendship, al-
though the Colonel knew he resented it. Ultimately he made himself
tyrant under the title of Lord Protector, 'only, to speak the truth
... he had much natural greatness, and well became the place he
had usurped.' Although solicited to do so by the Lord Protector
himself, Colonel Hutchinson refused to act in any office, and re-
tired to his house at Owthorpe, where he busied himself arranging
his paintings, sculptures, and engravings, in improving his estate,
in the enjoyment of music with his viol, 'and entertaining tutors
for the diversion and education of his children.'
With the death of Cromwell the Commonwealth fell to pieces
and at last confusion could think of no better solution than to
recall the Stuarts. Bonfires burned rumps in scorn of that Rump
Parliament which had crept back after the shadow of Cromwell,
and when Charles II came by water to London, seeing 'all the
nobility and gentry of the land flowing in to him,' he asked 'where
were his enemies.'
The Colonel, however, remained unchanged in his principles.
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
'If he had erred,' he said in his defense before Parliament, 'it was
the inexperience of his age, and the defect of his judgment, and not
the malice of his heart'; if the sacrifice of him were for the public
good, he would submit to it; and as for the death of Charles I, 'he
desired them to believe he had that sense of it that befitted an
Englishman, a Christian, and a gentleman.' The art and dexterity
of this address, respectful without retraction, temporarily effected
hi? safety, and it seemed that by the Act of Oblivion he was freed
of future danger.
But the King was reported to have said that if the Colonel were
unrestrained he 'would do the same thing for him that he had done
for his father,' and efforts were made to terrify him into betraying
his late associates. On a 'bitter, stormy, pitchy, dark, black, rainy
night' he was illegally arrested and guarded in 'a most vile room.'
After a brief release he was again arrested, confined in the Tower,
and then sent to Sandown Castle. Here 'the bleak air of the sea' and
the tide washing 'the foot of the castle walls' made the chamber
'so unwholesome and damp, that even in the summer' things were
covered with mould and rain seeped through the cracks in the
walls.
The Colonel had long been unwell, and at last, coming home to
jail after a walk by the seaside, he 'found himself aguish, with a
kind of shivering and pain in his bones, and going to bed did sweat
exceedingly: . . . after that he slept no more till his last sleep came
upon him . . . When some named Mrs Hutchinson, and said "Alas,
how will she be surprised!" he fetched a sigh, and within a little
while departed; his countenance settling so amiably and cheerfully
after death, that he looked . . . as he used to do when best pleased
in life.' He was brought home to Owthorpe 'with honour to his
grave through the dominions of his murderers, who were ashamed
of his glories, which all their tyrannies could not extinguish with
his life.'
Mrs Hutchinson's narrative is not only a valuable historical docu-
ment ,t>ut a vivid personal record. If she does not color the actions
of the King and the~opposing party with the fervor of loyalty and
prerogative they might use in their own minds, she is remarkably
fair and restrained as a partisan writer. However noble the devotion
of some of the Cavaliers to their sovereign, and however pathetic
their sufferings, their opponents clearly had justice with them. And
'34
MEMOIR AND DIARY
if there were zealots and fanatics who blackened the name of Puritan
with intolerance and gloom, the calm and serious cheerfulness and
the moderation of those like the Hutchinsons all show plainly
enough that Puritanism too had its more gracious side. The squab-
bles between Colonel Hutchinson and the committee of Notting-
ham we can hardly adjudicate, and the Colonel seems at times almost
annoyingly right in a sea of wrongheadedness and self-seeking. But
it is noteworthy that many leading Royalists, and a Parliament that
could agree on hardly anything else, united to exempt Mm from the
measures taken against the other regicides. These facts confirm our
belief that the loving prejudice of the wife very little exaggerated
the merits of the man.
Pepys the Man
The voice of Samuel Pepys is heard just a little while before
that of Mrs Hutchinson falls silent. He tells us of the festivities that
hailed the end of the Rump Parliament. 'In Cheapside there was a
great many bonfires, and Bow bells and all the bells in all the
churches as we went home were a-ringing . . . and all along burn-
ing, and roasting, and drinking for rumps. There being rumps tied
upon sticks and carried up and down. The butchers at the May
Pole in the Strand rang a peal with their knives when they were
going to sacrifice their rump ... At one end of the street you
would think there was a whole lane of fire, and so hot that we were
fain to keep still on the further side merely for heat.' And only that
morning he had lain long abed, had a roasted pullet for dinner,
enjoyed singing with Mr Chetwind, and drunk sundry half pints
of wine in a number of alehouses.
Thus, characteristically, the Diary of Samuel Pepys starts speak-
ing to us. He had begun it on the New Year of 1660, and this was
only the eleventh of February, but already he had recorded a num-
ber of representative adventures. We have been to church with
him and heard that Mr Gunning 'made a very good sermon' on the
text 'That in the fullness of time God sent his son, made of a
woman &c.' We have seen him buy a dozen bottles of sack, play
cards at Will's, spend a little time 'at our viols,' be troubled by a
swelling nose, and come home late at night to find 'my wife and
maid a-washing. I staid up till the bell-man came by with his bell
just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried,
'35
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
"Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning." I then
went to bed, and left my wife and the maid a-washing still.'
The strange thing is that such trivial details can body forth the
inner subleties of the man who wrote them. We not only have the
man in the round, in a way much more familiar with the flavor of
daily life than any of our autobiographers, but somehow the singing
with Mr Chetwind and the wife and maid washing late at night
while he goes to bed are the unpretentious signs by which we read
much that ordinarily goes unnoted. These daily annotations give
us Pepys in spiritual undress in a way that even the least ostenta-
tious autobiography is not apt to achieve.
Mr Pepys was, for example, as we have already seen, fond of
music. The autobiographer would be liable, even with no intention
of 'impressing' his readers, to generalize a bit about his musical de-
velopment and tastes: 'at this time,' he would say, 'I was fond of
such and such and went much to . . .' and there would almost
necessarily be a slight self-consciousness about his handling of the
subject, a heightening of dignity and a loss in the real living quality
of his enjoyment. Through trying to choose what is profoundly
significant out of so much, a kind of freshness is lost.
But, says Pepys, 'Thence we went to the Green Dragon, on
Lambeth Hill, both the Mr Pinckneys, Smith, Harrison, Morice,
that sang the bass, Sheply and I, and there we sang of all sorts of
things, and I ventured with good success upon things at first sight,
and after that I played on my flageolet, and staid there till nine
o'clock, very merry and drawn on with one song after another till
it came to be so late.' We do not know what songs Mr Pepys and
liis friends sang in the Green Dragon, but we do know the flavor
of their enjoyment, and we relish the air of innocent vanity with
which he congratulates himself on the not altogether expected
triumph of his sight-reading. We feel sure that they had a very
gay melodious time indeed.
The difference in quality is a result of a very delicate adjustment
in the nature of the details chosen. Precisely through the fact that
he has not tried to choose things weighted down with significance
for the heavy entity a man is apt to be for himself, he attains an
artlessness that tells us even more. If Colley Gibber and Edward
Gibbon in their varying ways were drawing their public selves for
us, Samuel Pepys is as clearly unveiling the private man, for whose
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
image a swelling nose is sometimes more important than, the influ-
ence of Pascal. If Gibbon had seen himself as an almost spherical
little figure, tapping his snuff-box while he formed his periods, and
'His mouth, mellifluous as Plato's, a round hole, nearly in the center
of his visage,' how much clearer an image of the man as well as
the historian he would have given us!
For those aspects of Gibbon we must depend on the outside ob-
server; Samuel Pepys is the observer, and sometimes even the
eaves-dropper, on himself. He curiously devotes the same attention
to his privacies as most autobiographers devote to their public
achievements, and his references to his public life are almost as
casual and accidental as their revelations of the secret man. 'Did
business, though not much at the office,' he says, or 'Busy all mom-
ing writing letters'; but then he must go to dinner, or there is a
new 'coloured silk suit very fine, and my new periwigg' to be tried
on, and the less enticing subject disappears.
It was not that he had no business of importance to perform. At
the time of the Restoration he was twenty-seven years of age, a
graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His worldly prospects
largely depended on his being a protege of the Earl of Sandwich,
who presently obtained him a minor post in the Admiralty. He
became Clerk of the Acts in the same year, and, as Secretary of the
Admiralty, did almost all the work of the Admiralty during the
plague.
Mainly through his ability and conscientious labors the British
navy became soundly organized and efficiently administered; and
during a Parliamentary investigation of charges of corruption Pepys
not only destroyed the accusations but scored a resounding personal
triumph. His complete grasp of all naval affairs was acknowledged,
but he retired from office when William and Mary came to the
throne. Two years later, in 1690, he published his Memoirs relative
to the State of the Royal Navy.
He was not only an able public servant, but a man of taste and
scientific curiosity as well He was a member of the Royal Society,
its President from 1684 to 1686, and a friend of the eminent con-
noisseur, Mr John Evelyn. His valuable library of about three
thousand volumes, including his Diary in six volumes bound in calf
and stamped with his crest and arms, was bequeathed to Magdalene
College.
137
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
But the public figure that looms so large in other men's recordings
of themselves is no more than on the margin of Pepys's Diary. The
doings he sets down with endless exuberance are the ephemerae
that make up nine-tenths of life. Therefore his Diary is alive in a
way seldom attained by others. And it is not only the things re-
corded that gives his entries their peculiar life. It is the strange white
light of absolute honesty in which they are bathed. Pepys seems to
have written with no idea of any other eyes than his ever reading
his pages, and to have been singularly free from the temptation of
posing before himself. Blame himself he often did, but a strength
or an equanimity underlying all enabled him to view the naked
man without palliation; although sometimes the embarrassed wrig-
glings of conscience forced him to resort to a jargon of bastard
French or Spanish: a not incurious trait. But never is there a hint
of the kind of embarrassment or disingenuousness that might pro-
ceed from the thought of his intimate life being seen.
Whether this purely private character was true in fact we can
only guess. The Diary was kept from 1660 to 1669, and was written
in a sort of cipher or shorthand the key to which is found in a
treatise called Tachygraphy, by Thomas Shelton. This volume is in
the Pepysian Library. Undoubtedly Pepys did not intend his Diary
to be read by any of his companions or house-mates. Perhaps he
wrote it entirely for himself, and it was merely left unread or un-
readable among the mass of books he willed the College. Perhaps
in later years (for he survived the last entry he wrote by thirty-
four years) he decided that what had been intended for himself
alone should be given a chance to meet the eye of posterity. What-
ever the truth, it was not so revealed until 1825, when it was first
published by Lord Braybrooke. It had taken a young Magdalene
undergraduate three years, working twelve to fourteen hours a
day, to decipher it.
Mr Pepys enjoyed the theatre, especially works of comedy if
they were not too fanciful (for he shared some of the narrow Gallic
classicism of his day) and tragedy done in the grand style. 'To the
Opera,' he writes, 'and there saw "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,"
done with scenes very well, but above all, Betterton did the prince's
part beyond imagination.' But Midsummer's Night's Dream was
'the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw,
I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
was all my pleasure.' Indeed the introduction of women on the
stage is a great sensation to him. *Saw "Argalus and Parthenla," '
he notes, 'where a woman acted Parthenla, and came afterwards on
the stage in men's clothes, and had the best legs that ever I saw,
and I was very pleased with it.' Macbeth he approved, and The
Feign Innocence, or Sir Martin Memr-all, by the Duke of New-
castle. 'It is the most entire piece of mirth, a complete farce from
one end to the other, that certainly was ever writ ... I laughed
till my head [ached] all the evening and night with laughing; and
at very good wit therein, not fooling.' But The Silent Womm was
'the best comedy, I think, that ever was wrote; and sitting by
Shadwell the poet, he was big with admiration of it.'
The theatre, too, was often the scene of adventures with the fair
sex, of whom Mr Pepys was an ardent admirer. At a performance
of The Lost Lady, 'sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit back-
ward on me by mistake, but after seeing her to be a very pretty
lady, I was not troubled at it at all.' But he was somewhat discom-
posed when he and Captain ooke were received with more
intimacy than he had anticipated at the house of Mr Glanville,
where they 'sat talking and playing with Mrs Penington, whom we
found undressed in her smocke and petticoats by the fireside, and
there we drank and laughed, and she wiLlingly suffered me to put
my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long.
Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as
a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought
she could have suffered it, by her former discourse with me; so
modest she seemed and I know not what.'
Indeed, beauty was never far from the yielding heart of Mr
Pepys. Whether at an inn where he 'kissed the daughter of the
house, she being very pretty,' or letting himself be overcharged
for a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon, because 'she is
so pretty, that God forgive me, I could not think it too much,' he
is always thrilled by feminine loveliness. Of a new housemaid he
remarks glumly that she is ugly to look at (his jealous young French
wife perhaps took care of that), even if satisfactory in other re-
spects. When the sermons were dull at divine worship, his imagina-
tion (like ours) was apt to go sliding up some graceful leg or
sinking into a pretty bosom; and he tells us of his experience
standing by a maid in St Dunstan's Church 'whom I did labor to
139
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
take by the hand and body' until she was forced to repel his atten-
tions by taking 'pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should
touch her again which seeing I did forebear and was glad I did
spy her design.'
Lady Castlemaine, the lovely mistress of Charles II, however,
was the far-off goddess of his dreams. Even the sight of her lingerie
hung to dry is thrilling to him. 'And in the Privy-garden saw the
finest smocks and linen petticoat of my Lady Castlemaine's laced
with rich lace at the bottom, that I ever saw; and did me good to
look upon them.' His Diary saddens when she is rumored out of the
King's favor, and 'strange it is,' he confesses, 'how for her beauty
I am willing to construe all this to the best and to pity her wherein
it is to her hurt, though I know well enough she is a whore,'
These same romances of his, whether they were confined to
amorous reverie or found outlet in stray caresses, gave him suffi-
cient trouble at home. For Mrs Pepys knew or suspected the
susceptible nature of her husband and had a violent temper herself.
And, like many another husband, Pepys did not care to extend to
his wife that liberty he conferred on himself. At Mrs Hunt's, he
'found a Frenchman, a lodger of her's, at dinner, and just as I came
in was kissing my wife, which I did not like . . . '
And the woman persisted in wearing garments which, while attrac-
tive on other women, on his wife were brazen. This occasioned
quarrels: 'she fell all of a sudden to discourse about her clothes and
my humours in not suffering her to wear them as she pleases, and
grew to high words between us . . .' Seeing that the storm was
going to continue for some time Mr Pepys, enragingly, 'fell to read
a book (Boyle's Hydrostatiques) aloud . . . and let her talk till
she was tired and vexed that I would not hear her,' and so they
became friends again, 'and to bed together the first night after 4
or 5 that she hath lain from me by reason of a great cold she had
got.'
All told, 'poor wretch,' she made him fond of her, and although
only the Sunday before he had stayed in the church- 'door to gaze
upon a pretty lady, and from church dogged her home' to near
Tower Hill, he notes of 10 October, 1664: 'This day, by the blessing
of God, my wife and I have been married nine years . . . bless
God for our long lives and loves and health together, which the
same God long continue, I wish from my very heart!'
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
The Diary is a rich mine of information about domestic mariners
in the period. We have him whipping their bcy-of-all-work with a
rod, but so small that 4 it did not much hurt to him, but only to my
arm . . . ' The servants dwell not only in the house but sometimes
sleep in the same room with their masters, and they often join in
the music and song which were so frequent in the home. His wife
and her maids quarrel, appealing to him for judgment: "Before
going to bed Ashwell began to make her complaint ... I do per-
ceive she has received most base usage from my wife, which my
wife sillily denies, but it is impossible the wench could invent
words and matter so particularly, which my wife has nothing to
say but flatly to deny.' Meals are always copious: 'a dish of mar-
row bones; a leg of mutton; a loin of veal; a dish of fowl, three
pullets, and two dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart; a neat's
tongue, a dish of anchovies; a dish of prawns, and cheese.'
Sometimes we are given a glimpse into the intricacies of business.
One piece of policy is suggestive. Pepys had obtained for a Captain
Grove 'the taking up of vessels for Tangier,' and consequently he
did not immediately open the letter of acknowledgment from that
gentleman. Waiting till he reached his office, 'there I broke it open,
not looking into it till all the money was out, that I might say I
saw no money in the paper if ever I should be questioned about it.
There was a piece of gold and 4 in silver/
But if he now and then accepted a small present, Pepys was a
painstaking public servant who did not spare himself. 'Up at four
o'clock in the morning and at five by water to Woolwich there to
see the manner of tarring, and all the morning looking to see the
several proceedings in making of cordage'; and then a surprise
descent on Deptford, where he 'discovered many abuses, which
we shall be able to understand hereafter and amend.' In Waltham
Forest he discovered how the King was cheated in the timber he
bought. His knowledge and alertness were constantly on the in-
crease. In 1665 he had been elated by Albernarle's praise *that I was
the right hand of the Navy here ... At which I was (from him)
not a little proud.' But a few years later, when the same nobleman
was given a vote of thanks for his conduct of the Dutch War,
Pepys exclaims 'I know not how, the blockhead Albernarle hath
strange luck to be loved, though he be, and every man must
know it, the heaviest man in the world, but stout and honest to his
country.'
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
Mr Pepys was present on many historical occasions. He heard
the King's speech on the Bill for Repealing the Triennal Act, and
comments frankly 'he speaks the worst that ever I heard man in
mv life . . . ' The great naval victory over the Dutch is noted with
excitement and jubilation. 'Admirall Opdam blown up, Trump
killed ... all the rest of their admiralls, as they say, but Everson
are killed . . .' The great Plague is described in poignant entries:
'how empty the streets are and melancholy; so many poor sick
people in the streets full of sores . . .* And, although Pepys was
no saint himself, we find him recording that 'the King and Court
were never in the world so bad as they now are for gaming, swear-
ing, whoring, and drinking, and the most abominable vices that
ever were in the world . . . the Court is in a way to ruin all for
their pleasures'; and Sir George Carteret had 'taken the liberty to
tell the King the necessity of having, at least, a show of religion in
the Government, and sobriety.'
In every situation the figure of Mr Pepys is a pleasant one.
Whether burning 'Uescholle des filles, a mighty lewd book,' so
that *it might not be among my books to my shame,' or having his
annual feast to celebrate the successful operation he had undergone
for the stone, or listening to Dr Tearne deliver a lecture on 'the
kidneys, ureters, &c., which was very fine,' he is a pleasant talking-
companion. But unhappily his eyes were beginning to trouble him.
All the reading he had done and this writing in cipher late at night
were threatening him with blindness. So 'I must now forebear:
and therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by
my people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set
down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know . . . '
'And so I betake me to that course which is almost as much as
to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts
that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!'
So he ended, a little more than ten years after he had begun. It is
good to know that he did not grow blind after all, but lived an-
other third of a century in respect, activity, and good cheer.
The Model Virtuoso
On the 4th of June, 1679 Mr John Evelyn had dinner with Mr
Pepys. The circumstances were somewhat peculiar, for Pepys was
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MEMOIR AND WARY
a prisoner in the Tower of London, where he had been thrown
charged with misdemeanors while he was Secretary of the Ad-
miralty. *I believe he was unjustly charged,' Evelyn wrote stoutly,
and proceeding to send him a piece of venison somewhat later,
'went and din'd with him' again. As we already know, Pcpys tri-
umphantly refuted the charges against him, but the entry and even
more the action are indices to the character of John Evelyn. He
was a more serious-minded man than Mr Pepys, and his sense of
right and wrong was strongly developed. Diplomatic enough to
avoid giving offense (for during this same time he was conferring
with the new Commissioners of the Admiralty), he adhered too
firmly to principle to desert a friend whom he believed innocent.
He had managed himself with similar skill on previous occasions.
Since the time, in 1649, when his translation Of Liberty and Servi-
tude had given offense ('for the Preface of which I was severely
threatened'), Evelyn had behaved with great circumspection. He
was a Royalist, but during the Protectorate, he says, he never took
the Covenant, and yet succeeded in retaining his estates and even
obtained permission to travel abroad.
Evelyn had, in fact, the happy secret of getting on with every-
body. He was so sincerely and indefatigably interested in every-
thing, his curiosity was so endless, he was so eager to hear whatever
you had to say, and so restrained in his gentlemanly capacity for
avoiding the least suggestion of disapproval, that it was no wonder
both the King and his mistresses were no less pleased to have Mr
Evelyn being polite to them than were Sir Thomas Browne and
Monsieur Zulichem, 'the great mathematician and virtuoso,' 'in-
ventor of the pendule clock, and discoverer of the phenomenon of
Saturn's annulus.' It was not that Evelyn was a sycophant. He was
well-informed and intelligent, he was an interesting talker and at
the same time modest, he was a man of the world. He would not
do violence to his conscience, but his conscience was not so exigent
that it demanded his being rude to those in great stations. For
these, almost as much as Monsieur Zulichem and Sir Thomas
Browne, could add to those stores of knowledge he was always
insatiably collecting.
His appetite for facts was enormous and his memory for them
no less. When he traveled he noted down detailed accounts of the
arts, architecture, literature, commerce, state of manufactures, ac-
H3
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
tivities in science, public buildings, gardens, and inventions in
foreign lands: everything that could be discovered by enquiry or
observation. He wrote books on the state of France, sculpture,
forestry, numismatics, gardening and topiary work. He was a fellow
of the Royal Society, a member of its council in 1662, and Secre-
tary in 1672. His diplomatic talents obtained for it the great
Arundelian Library in 1678. When St Paul's Cathedral was to be
repaired just before the Fire of London his architectural knowledge
led to his being one of the Commissioners. In the same year he was
on a Commission for regulating the manufacture of saltpetre. As
Treasurer of Greenwich Hospital he did an enormous amount of
work. His industry was as inexhaustible as his curiosity.
And everything that he learned, saw, and did, he recorded in
his Diary. He began keeping it in detail in the year 1641 (the
entries before that date are occasional and summary) and continued
it in a very small, close hand until he reached the end of a 700 page
quarto in 1697, and thence carried it on in a smaller book till within
tliree weeks of his death in his eighty-sixth year. He recorded
everything that is to say, everything of public interest or of in-
tellectual curiosity.
His personal or private adventures and emotions, save on the
solemn occasion of a death, he seldom mentions. The flow of in-
structive or curious facts is endless, current history finds him nearly
always on the very spot, sometimes an eccentric anecdote brightens
his pages: but there are none of the graceless revelations we find in
Pepys. If John Evelyn ever misbehaved his Diary does not know
of it. Therein we find the gentleman, the Christian, and the man of
learning, but the serious pages are never disfigured with even a
moment of embarrassment or of absurdity.
Only once can I recall a bit of even unconscious humor, when
he records, with some dismay, that 'In the night a cat kitten'd on
my bed, and left on it a young one having six ears, eight leggs, two
bodys from the navil downwards, and two tayles.' Even here the
scientific curiosity soon overbalances the displeasure. Evelyn is
always impeccable. He is therefore sometimes a little tiresome.
His even perfection and elevation are real, but either they are
not all the man or else he is a man of regrettable solemnity. As he
appears in those restrained pages of his, he lacks the charm of Mr
Pepys. If he ever had a moment of self-doubt, we feel, it must have
144
MEMOIR AND DIARY
been like a debate In some marmorealiy lofty Senate: grave,
weighty, and imbued with the underlying assurance that ultimately
the right decision would be made, unlike the remorses and humilia-
tions of Samuel Pepys. A cheerful and amiable companion in Ms
lifetime he may have been, and possibly although his Diary shows
no evidence thereofeven witty, but of any capacity for unbending,
for foolery, he shows not a single trace.
It is in the intellectual and historical realms that his Diary is
especially valuable. When he visited Antwerp he described the
Church of the Jesuits Vholly incrusted with marble, inlay'd and
polish'd into divers representations of histories, landskips, flowers,
&c.' with 'the Statue of the B. Virgin and our Saviour in white
marble' on the altar, and the pulpit 'supported by foure angels and
adorn'd with other carvings.' And then, ascending the tower of
Notre Dame d'Anvers, 'a venerable fabriq, built after the Gotick
manner,' he speculates on the nature of the moon: the bright re-
flection of the sun's rays from the surface of the earth confirmed
his 'opinion of the moon's being of some such substance as this
earthy globe consists of; perceiving all the subjacent country, at so
small a horizontal distance, to repercuss such a light . . .' On the
way to Brussels he admired a canal 'carried on an aqueduct of stone
so far above' another which it intersected 'that the waters neither
mingle nor hinder one another's passage,' and in Brussels he Vas
pleas'd with certain small engines by which a girl or boy was able
to draw up, or let downe, great bridges. . .'
He visited the silk-manufacturing at Tours, 'went to see the
wonderful engine for weaving silk stockings, said to have been the
invention of an Oxford schollar 40 years since'; and followed a trip
to Lambeth, 'that rare magazine of marble,' to order chimney-pieces
for the house of his friend Mr Godolphin by a visit to 'the Duke
of Buckingham's Glasse-worke, where they made huge vases of
mettal as cleare, ponderous, and thick as chrystal; also looking-
glasses far larger and better than any that come from Venice.' 'At
the Hospital of La Charit I saw the operation of cutting for the
stone, A child of 8 or 9 yeares old underwent the operation with
most extra-ordinary patience . . .' During the second war with
the Dutch he saw a sailor's leg amputated, 'the stout and gallant
man enduring it with incredible patience, without being bound to
his chaire as usual on such painful occasions. I had hardly courage
'45
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
enough to be present. Not being cut high enough, the gangreen
prevail'd, and the second operation cost the poore creature his
life.'
He dined at 'that most obliging and universally-curious Dr Wilk-
ins's, at Wadhani College,' and was shown the 'hollow statue which
gave a voice and utter'd words,' and all the Doctor's collection of
'shadows, dyals, perspectives, and many other artificial, mathe-
matical, and magical curiosities, a way-wiser, a thermometer, a
monstrous magnet, conic and other sections . . .'In Paris 'I went
to see a Dromedarie, a very monstrous beast . . . and the water-
spouter, who drinking only fountaine water, rendred out of his
mouth in severall glasses all sorts of wine and sweete waters, &c.
For a piece of money he discover'd the secret to me.' It is charac-
teristic of Evelyn that even a magician's trick he insists on under-
standing. It interested him hardly less than the rare collection of
'that famous scholar and physitian, Dr T. Browne, author of the
"Religio Medici," and "Vulgar Errors" &c, now lately knighted.'
He was fascinated to be told by Captain Baker, who had been
looking for the North West Passage, of the 'prodigious depth of
ice, blew as a sapphire, and as transparent.' He listened to Sir
Kenelm Digby's tale of how Lady St Ledger had 'such an anti-
pathic' to roses that, 'laying but a rose upon her cheeke when she
was asleep, it rais'd a blister'; but this was a shade too much, and
'Sir Kenelm,' he writes, 'was a teller of strange things.'
Unlike his friend Mr Pepys, he was not fond of the theatre. He
'saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark played, but now the old plays
began to disgust this refined age,' and he disapproved that display
of feminine charm that aroused the susceptible Pepys. The play-
houses, he noted, 'were abused to an atheistical liberty, fowle and
undecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appeare
and act, who inflaming severall young noblemen and gallants, be-
came their misses ... to the reproch of their noble families, and
mine of both body and soul.' The King's mistress, Mrs Barlow, he
had dismissed wrily as 'a browne, beautifull, bold, but insipid crea-
ture,' and the even more celebrated Louise de Querouaille as 'a
childish, simple, and baby face'; but he was scandalized at the King
exchanging pleasantries with Nell Gwyn, 'an impudent comedian,
she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall,
and [he] standing on the greene walke under it.' He adds that the
146
MEMOIR AND DIARY
King left her to join the Duchess of Cleveland, 'another lady of
pleasure, and curse of our nation.'
The more solemn events of history found him present and
observant as well He 'beheld on Tower Hill the fatal stroke which
sever' d the wisest head in England from the shoulders of the Earie
of Strafford; whose crime coming under tfie cognizance of no hu-
man law, a new one was made not to be a precedent, but his de-
struction.' The famous windows of Canterbury he saw before they
were destroyed by Roundhead fanatics. At Whitehall 1 got privately
into the council of the Rebell Army . . . where I heard horrid
villanies.'
He saw the return of Charles II: 'the wayes strew" d with flowers,
the bells ringing, the streetes hung with tapistry, fountaines running
with wine; the Maior, Aldermen, and all the Companies in their
liveries, chains of gold, and banners; Lords and Nobles clad in cloth
of silver, gold, and velvet; the windowes and balconies well set
with ladies;- trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking, 1 and
'I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and bless'd God.' He describes
the coronation of the King, in all its pageantry, and the punish-
ment of the Regicides: 'I saw not their execution, but met their
quarters mangl'd and cutt and reeking as they \vere brought from
the gallows in baskets on the hurdle.'
He devotes vivid pages to the Fire of London, with 'nothing
heard or scene but crying out and lamentation, running about Mke
distracted creatures, without at all attempting to save even their
goods,' and 'all the skie of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning
oven,' 'the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames,'
and 'the fall of Towers, Houses, and Churches Uke an hideous
storme' with clouds of smoke computed to reach fifty-six miles. In
the streets 'the stones . . . flew like granados, the mealting lead
running downe . . . in a streame, and the very pavements glowing
with fiery rednesse . . .'
Save when he deals with regicide or harlotry, Evelyn's opinions
are usually tolerant enough. He felt strongly about Milton's de-
fense of the execution of Charles I, but he employed Milton's neph-
ew Edward Phillips, who Vas not at all infected with his
principles,' as a tutor for his own son. He was a devout member
of the Church of England, but he was able to speak calmly of the
Church of Rome. Even from the first he was not infected by the
'47
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
hysteria of the nation in the alleged Catholic Assassination Plot, and
distrusted the testimony of the notorious Titus Gates. Only once
a little insular prejudice leaps out of him, when, obviously remem-
bering Jeanne d'Arc as well, he speaks of the Church of St Gene-
vieve in Paris as 'dedicated to another of their Amazons.'
So Mr Evelyn lies embalmed in his own pages for us: the perfect
model of an English gentleman (except that he is more curiously
enquiring than an English gentleman absolutely needs to be), re-
strained, intelligent, correct. His feelings and principles are unob-
trusive but proper. He is much more like the nineteenth century
ideal exemplified by the Prince-Consort than he is like the madrigal-
loving and emotional Englishman we find in the annals of
English history from the times of Henry VIII to the country
squires of Fielding. As we read, the mind is continually stimulated,
but the emotions are almost unstirred and the sense of personality
is consequently rather thin.
The Color of the Times
Although the Duchess of Newcastle called the work we have
examined The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, its scattered and
fragmentary treatment and its eccentric plan clearly place it among
the memoirs and reminiscences. And although Lucy Hutchinson
modestly laid claim to no more than writing memoirs of her hus-
band, she remembered so clearly and in such detail that there is
little to distinguish her book from formal biography. Both ladies
were eulogistic rather than entirely scientific in their aim, Mrs
Hutchinson much more convincingly than the Duchess. Historically
Mrs Hutchinson is invaluable, so much so that the only fault we
might be inclined to find with the formal merit of her work as
biography is that it so often becomes history, and is therefore a
mingling of two genres. Even so, her history is so sharply etched
and brilliant in itself, so revealing in its delineation of aspects of
Puritanism we seldom do justice to, and so often justified by the
commanding position Colonel Hutchinson took in public events,
that we can be grateful for the historical inclusions. Our view of
those times would be gravely distorted by Restoration satire if we
did not have some few like Mrs Hutchinson.
It can hardly be said that the Duchess of Newcastle gives us a
148
similar insight into the Cavalier side of the Rebellion. The self-
absorbed lady enables us to deduce a fairly clear portrait of her own
fantastic self, but beyond that circle of radiance aH is blurred, and
we perceive neither the royal cause nor the years of exile, neither
the high devotion nor the gleaming triumph of return. As for the
Puritans, they do not appear at all: they are heap of captured and
slain after one of the Duke's victories or they have just retired
from the stage, having ruined his manorial parks. The ego of the
Duchess is a bright cloud obscuring the insignificances of mere
history. Mrs. Hutchinson not only gives us a firm and convincing
outline of the Parliamentary cause, and numerous vignettes of its
leaders, but sometimes ventures even into the Royalist camp with
an acid but not altogether unfair sketch.
Their success as biographers seems to me all in favor of Mrs
Hutchinson. Noble too noble as the image of Colonel Hutchin-
son may seem, it is there. The man is realized. His life at Owthorpe
is painted, the red cloak in which he went to Lreton's funeral, his
squabbles with the committee at Nottingham, his slightly over-
ostentatious frankness, the finesse and bravery with which he de-
fended himself under cross-examination, the bleakness of Sandown
and his death in fever. Scenes and actions are not left to be assumed:
they are presented. But what a vague bundle of unvisualized per-
fections is the Duke of Newcastle! The method the Duchess em-
ployed gives us an occasional humorous morsel, but mostly a mist
of panegyric and generalization. By ingenious cogitation we can
sometimes hazard a shrewd guess as to what the man really was
like, and how he differed from the faint outline of the Duchess's
adulation, but the reward is slight. Many other sources than the
Duchess would need to be consulted for anything Hke an adequate
picture of that somewhat insouciant amateur-general, luxurious
prince, horse-fancier, and gentleman-farce-writer.
The contrast between Pepys and Evelyn is less to the latter's
disadvantage than that of the two ladies is to the Duchess. In spite
of their difference in length (and Evelyn covers sixty years on al-
most the same scale as Pepys's ten), both are detailed enough to give
us full-length portraits of their authors. Pepys, with his ever-busy
psychological curiosity, and his alternations of complacence and
humility, analyzes himself in a way Evelyn never seems to think
of attempting, and gives us an infinitely more intimate feeling. But
149
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
it was equally natural, I imagine, for Evelyn not to delve within
himself in such ways; he was less introspective if also less truly
sociable, and one feels that even his emotions were more often
dictated by cerebration and deep rational conviction than by any
merely instinctive spontaneity such as always wells up in Pepys. He
liked being with people, but more for what they could tell him than
through gregariousness. Pepys is full of personal anecdote, his
gaieties, amours, triumphs, humilations, excitements, self-examina-
tions, enthusiasms, discoveries. Evelyn's reticence about himself is
perhaps as significant to reflection as the volatile chatter of Pepys,
but it gives us the impression the man may well have created in
life, of being a kind and benevolent man, but one not easily known.
If this is not so, and those who knew him in real life felt close and
warm and affectionate with the man, then Evelyn's Diary is less
translucent to personality than that of Pepys.
The society they reveal and the ten years of Pepys fall almost
midway in the more than sixty of Evelyn is of course the reflection
of their individual differences. The world of Pepys is filled with
eating and drinking and bedding and singing and buying new
clothes and squeezing pretty girls: all activities that Evelyn gives
gives no verbal evidence that he ever performed. We have numerous
comments on the plays Pepys went to see and the books he pur-
chased and readeither in private, like Uescholle des filles, or aloud
to his young wife. Evelyn, as we have seen, disapproved of the
theatre, and although there is evidence that he was a well-read and
even an erudite man, he seldom mentions reading a book in his Diary.
His world is a compendium of facts, meetings of learned societies,
conversations with virtuosos and savants, general speculations, and
brief notes of the trend of the times.
It is not strange that Pepys and Evelyn should paint very similar
pictures of the Fire and the Plague, for men do not differ pro-
foundly in their responses to great natural calamities. But there may
be some wonder, considering how different they were in tempera-
ment, at their revealing even a very similar view of public events.
The one was so much interested in personalities and the other so
much in things, the one so free and easy and the other so almost
priggish, we should have imagined their interpretations would show
wide divergences. But here is how Evelyn tells of the dismissal and
disgrace of the Earl of Clarendon: 'Visited the Lo. Chancellor, to
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MEMOIR AND DIARY
whom his Majesty had sent for the sales a few dap before; I
found him in his bed-chamber very sad. The Parliament had ac-
cus'd him, and he had enemies at Court, especially the buffoones
and ladys of pleasure, because he thwarted some of them and stood
in their way; I could name some of the cheife.' And Pepys: *TMs
business of my Lord Chancellor's was certainly designed in my
Lady Castlemayne's chamber; . . . when he went from the King
on Monday morning, she was in bed t though about twelve o'clock,
and ran out in her smock into the aviary . . . and stood there
joying herself at the old man's going away/ Pepys is, as usual, more
dramatic and pictorial, and less discreet in the way he mentions
names, but both men trace the event to the same causes.
Such agreement in men so different would not always exist, and
is not altogether easy to explain. Partly it may be that they were
not deeply engaged in these events (and undoubtedly the King
and Lord Clarendon would have given different explanations of the
dismissal), partly that the stage of politics was less crowded with
actors and the whole more confined to a narrow and intimate group
than it is today, partly that in the small world of seventeenth cen-
tury England the complexities of economics and sociology were less
confusing than they are now, and partly that the instruments of
falsification and propaganda were not as well developed as those of
our newspaper-lords. When the enquiring intellectual looked for
explanations he did not have to ferret his way through a maze of
false scents, and when the eager gossip nosed about he was not led
through a muckheap of mass-suggestion. The intelligent observer,
providing he were not deceived by his own prejudices or loyalties,
could more easily arrive at a fair conclusion.
And so, different as they are in spirit and in emphasis, the worlds
of Pepys and Evelyn are obviously the same world. It is not merely
that they often mention the same names and comment on the same
events. Pepys, although so much the emotional and animal man,
was a man of intellectual curiosity as well. In his virtuosity, he often
plunges us into the world of Tillotson and Newton, where Evelyn
more habitually dwelt. And Evelyn, for all that he so often im-
pressed us as an almost disembodied intelligence, lived in the social
atmosphere of his times, and fragments of it cling to his academic
dryness. His descriptions of glass-works and the carvings of Grin-
ling Gibbons and the planning of Greenwich Palace and his labori-
151
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
ous activities in behalf of the Hospital and finding the Lord Chan-
cellor in bed and the innumerable convivial dinners with which
men of learning enlivened their graver deliberation all these are
deeply infused in the life of that busy and chaotic and yet narrow
world of seventeenth century London. Evelyn reflects, a little bit
chillily, the color of that warm and active Hfe; and Pepys, in the
midst of his concerts and wenching and toiling at the Admiralty
and feasting, scoops up typical fragments of the life of the learned
world which goes on nearly in an eddy of the other. Their two
diaries supplement each other, almost like a stereopticon, the dif-
ference of focus giving the shape of history atmosphere and depth.
152
HEYDAY
OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
V
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
The Coming of the Post
THE art of letter-writing develops relatively late in any civiliza-
tion. In early days nobody save a king t a great noble, or a
member of some priestly hierarchy had the means of sending written
messages over great distances; and even these were more likely to
confine their correspondence to the necessities of state-craft and di-
plomacy or to questions of ecclesiastical administration and theology
than to exchange any merely friendly news or greetings. When cor-
respondence had to be maintained by special courier service or pri-
vate messenger only interchanges of grave import could take place.
During the early Renaissance some of the great Florentine bank-
ers and some of the merchants of the Hanseatic League had cor-
respondents in the leading cities of other countries, but these again
were utilitarian and bore mainly on those events, political and
economic, that might presumably affect business. Such letters were
really news-bulletins. Only if society is relatively stable and secure,
and travel moves constantly over many highways, does it become
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
possible for letters to be delivered inexpensively enough to serve
individuals who are not great nobles or men of enormous wealth.
But the means of communication are not enough. There must
be a class of people, relatively comfortable and prosperous if not
wealthy, whose lives allow them sufficient leisure to write each
other. They must move around freely so that they become scattered
in places not easily or often reached in person. And they must be
well enough educated so that writing has for them no purely
mechanical difficulties, so that the labor of forming written symbols
with their ringers or the difficulty of 'thinking of what to say' does
not overwhelm them. Letter-writing requires a certain ease, a tinge
of urbanity, some ability really to see yourself and things around
you: not necessarily great depths of culture or profound reflective
powers, but a little of the capacity to stand aside for a while from
the heat and rush of activity and realize imaginatively what your
experience has been.
Only when the means of communication have thus existed simul-
taneously with a group of such people has letter-writing flourished.
In Rome under the Caesars there were a few men of wealth, country
gentlemen, great landowners or urban patricians, who wrote each
other and used their slaves as messengers. We have letters of Cicero
and of Pliny, the naturalist, but either the Romans wrote in an
extremely formal style or else their letters, as we have them, were
not real letters at all, but a kind of literary exercise intended to
show their command of rhetorical eloquence and striking reflections.
From the Middle Ages few letters have survived; and probably few
were written, for conditions were unstable and the lives of most
men parochial Monastic communications there were, and the dis-
patches of nobles and diplomats, but seldom personal letters. Those
attributed to Abelard and Heloise are among the few that have
come down to us.
With the Renaissance communication became easier and literacy
outside the clergy a little more widespread. We have many oc-
casional letters of celebrated personages and sometimes those of
relatively obscure people. In the fifteenth century there are the
letters of the Paston family, useful to the historian, but rather dull.
The sixteenth century shows a considerable body of scholarly
correspondence, the letters of Roger Ascham and of John Lyly,
and some of those between Sir Philip Sidney and his friend Languet.
156
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
A little later royal posts became established in France and England
(the first inland post was inaugurated by Charles I). Although they
were intended largely for the carrying-on of public business many
people connected with the government or in lofty stations were
given franking privileges and extended the service to their friends
by allowing letters to be sent under their own seal.
Especially in the clear and well-ordered world of the late seven-
teenth and the eighteenth centuries, nearly all the gentry at least
had access to somebody's franking privilege if they desired it, and
through them men of letters and polite learning as well. The
nobility of France, rotating in the glittering orbit of Louis XIV,
became a polite miniature world where everyone was known to
all the others. Attached to these splendid gyrations there were all
the attendant brilliances of poets, dramatists, musicians, savants,
virtuosos, philosophers, and princes of the church. In the grand
salons of Versailles and the less magnificent but equally luxurious
drawingrooms and boudoirs of noble ladies they met according to
the rules of a stately ritual. Out of these highly artificial conditions,
a sort of narrow and hot house culture, came some of the finest
letters ever written: the wonderful letters of Madame de Sevigne,
which are so often referred to in the pages of Marcel Proust.
The Gallicized courtiers of Charles II brought back French man-
ners and French standards with them. Their comedies sparkled with
borrowed brilliants intermingled with bursts of native wit, and
their manners were refined sometimes to an exquisite foppery de-
rived partly from the Hotel de Rambouillet. Although all over the
countryside booby squires like Fielding's Squire Western and
Goldsmith's Tony Lumpkin, and simple-minded country gentle-
men like Sir Roger de Coverley, were to linger for many a long
decade, the tone of English society became more polished and
urbane. The England of Elizabeth and James, for all its blaze of
learning and genius, had had no such general diffusion, even among
those at court, of education and poise.
But after the unsettled conditions produced by the fanaticism
and obstinacy of James II had cleared into the relative security of
the succeeding reigns, the life of the upper classes became increas-
ingly stable and unified. Londoners especially, and those among the
country gentry urbane enough to spend part of their time in
London, developed a closely knit social life. Communication became
157
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
even cheaper and easier. A halfpenny post was established in London
in 1708, and by 1783 there were mailcoaches that would carry a
letter twenty miles for fourpence and three hundred miles for a
shilling. Through the eighteenth century these influences spread
over the whole countryside. And correspondingly during this period
there is a spread of refined and versatile letter-writing.
The Most Personal Art
There is some difficulty in isolating those merits that peculiarly
belong to a letter, and that letters do not merely have in common
with other kinds of good writing. When Gregory, in a letter to
Nicobulus, remarks that 'we neither ought to be long when there
is not much to say, nor brief when there is a press of matter,' he
is saying something true, but it is equally true of a Greek tragedy
or a treatise on determinants.
There is no hard and fast rule to show when a piece of writing
is too long or too short. A letter may be spun out into the frailest
Venetian glasswork of whimsy or deliberate absurdity, and no
matter how slight its intertwining and translucent threads may be,
if their shapes and colors charm the attention it is not too long for
its matter. And the weightiest of subjects may exhaust the capacity
a feeble writer brings to them long before he has ceased elaborating
truisms and prodding a Pegasus that falls down in the stable.
The same deficiencies are to be found in the statement that letters
should have variety and interest. A letter may be a potpourri or
ic may have a single theme. But it need say nothing very original,
nor is it likely that it often will, for most situations have occurred
so many times before that nearly all reflections have been made.
There need only be some newness and life in the way old things
are apprehended: no invention of strange and hitherto unimagined
things nor any vaudeville-succession of themes. Variety is a matter
of delicate changes of tone or rhythm even more than a delicatessen
of subjects. It is a waste of time to say to the writer, 'Be varied.' If
he can, he will. It is pointless to tell him, 'Be interesting.' Interest is
a possession of the reader's, which not Merlin nor Trismegistus may
command. Variety and interest are indefinable merits of all good
writing.
Other touchstones that have been suggested are those of general
158
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
appeal and familiar style. These notions seem to me without founda-
tion. A letter is not a public performance. (Or if so, it is really a
bulletin, a proclamation, or a harangue masquerading as a letter.)
Letters are written to single persons, or, at most, to small groups.
They should be fitted to the tastes, understandings, and sympathies
of their recipients, and that is all. There is no more literary obliga-
tion for letters to be intelligible to the unlearned, if they were not
sent to the unlearned, than for Hegel, Lobachevsky, or Brahms to
be received with lucid delight by an alderman.
Is there anything to distinguish a good letter from any other
form of good writing? We may reasonably look in a letter, it would
seem, for a quality, or at least a degree, of ease and spontaneity
somewhat more than we invariably expect elsewhere. Unless the let-
ter be written with the desire to goad or madden, we write to please,
and a letter can give little pleasure that bears visible signs of having
been dragged out with difficulty.
This is not true of all other forms of writing. Certain kinds of
song and lyric we expect to have spontaneity, and many more
forms of writing to have grace, but seldom in quite the same seem-
ingly artless way as in the letter. Many a work of art shows for-
midable signs of its maker's struggles with his conception, erosions
of contour that only enhance our awe at the genius able to wrestle
with such problems and tear their solution from them. Those
coagulations of language in Meredith and Browning, and even
more, certain obstructions in the utterances of Blake and Nietz-
sche, are not idiosyncratic, but the pangs of labor entailed in tremen-
dous struggles of birth. We can be grateful for what they give us
with no more feeling of personal responsibility than we have in
accepting an inoculation against some dread disease which men lost
their lives to discover. But we should be distressed if these heroes
of science told us personally, 'We are dying of anthrax, of rabies,
of cancer, and we are enduring these torments for you.''
And, in its lesser realm, we want to feel that a letter written for
our enjoyment cost its author no onerous pains to write. The letter
may in truth have been exquisitely polished, but it should bear no
signs of its workmanship. The novelist and the tragic dramatist may
compose themselves to observe every painful detail of an experi-
ence, they may agonizingly dissect it down to the last dark and
trembling fibre, and they may stumble and fall in the effort to make
'59
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
its remotest inward meaning waver before us. They reveal the
obscure to us, but we have no personal bond, and the author is for
us even in his suffering only one of the vast almost anonymous army
of martyrs to the exploration of consciousness. But the letter-writer
who sought bitterness in order to wound his friends with it would
be going beyond the bounds, and even when bitterness comes to
him a letter is not appropriate for the travail of discovery.
We may also look for one other quality. Letters are personal
communications. Therefore they should have the flavor of per-
sonality. We should be able to distinguish between the tone of
Lincoln's letter to Mrs Bixby and the Gettysburg address, not be-
cause the one is informal in tone and the other not, but because in
the one a man is speaking his own heart to a bereaved woman and
in the other he is trying to voice the emotion of a people.
The word personality, however, we must use with care. All
works of imagination, and even works of history and philosophy,
have about them a flavor which is the personality of their authors.
But there is a direct intimacy that is not merely permissible but
desirable in a letter, and that is apt to be either an intrusion or an
artistic blunder in any other form of writing.
Of course, the personality of any good writer is always present
in his work. The personality of Flaubert is as much responsible for
the seemingly 'objective' rendering of Madame B ovary as the per-
sonality of Thackeray, making its little bow and delivering its
stageman's speech, in the pages of Vanity Fair. The charming and
witty personal intrusions of Fielding into the pages of his novels
we may relish because they are so ingenious and so consciously
impudent; and the brilliant egomania of Byron parading his bleed-
ing heart may enamour an era or inflame the enthusiasm of the
young. But these are unusual victories; we forgive the violation of
the principle because we are offered so much in compensation.
Usually we resent an author who insists on displaying himself in
a formal work of literature, to the exclusion of his alleged subject.
In a letter, however, the precise opposite is true. The subject of
the letter is the writer, and his personality has everywhere the right
to appear. In his pages who speaks and what he feels about things
is central; part of our pleasure is tasting the suffusion of personality
even in every phrase and turn of epithet. The direct presence of the
writer's personality, by whatever magical touches he can use to
1 60
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITEES
conjure his breathing self up before us, is the very aim and heart
of the enterprise. In the glimmering sequence of moods, in gossip
or admonition or nonsense, in news or words of sympathy, in
personal narration or reflective interludes, a character should take
shape before us: the character of the man who wrote there,
Two Ladies, a Dem, md Some Others
Two of the earliest noteworthy letter-writers were women. The
Marquise de Sevigne was a member of that world of pageantry and
fashion that shone so brightly in the rays of Le Roi SoleE; and
from Paris and Versailles, where the comedies and ballets of
Moliere darted their arrows of satire, from Chantilly at the Due de
Rochefoucauld's mansion, from her country home at Les Rochers,
she let fall the clear manna of her letters: wit, vivacity, taste, gossip,
sentiment all deliciously mingled, in the purest of styles, and per-
fectly translucent to the spirit of the age. Madame de Sevigne died
when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a little girl of six, but
the latter was to be a rival to her talents. A daughter of Evelyn
Pierrepont, Esq., (afterward Duke of Kingston) a young lady of
wit and fashion, a toast of the famous Kitcat Club, and until some
mysterious quarrel a friend of Alexander Pope, the young lady
formed a romantic runaway match with Mr Edward Wortley
Montagu, traveled abroad with him while he was Ambassador to
Constantinople, and unfolded in the letters of fifty years a character
strong, sensible, penetrating, and worldly, but not without depth
and sensibility. They are a little harder and dryer than the letters
of Madame de Sevign6. They do not have her sometimes exquisite
tenderness, her delicate perceptiveness of the refinements of feeling.
The one is thinking and feeling in prose, and the other, for all her
balance and restraint, is feeling in poetry. Lady Mary's style is
sharp and brilliant like a black-and-white, Madame de Svign6's
transparent like a water-color.
Even the trivial gossip of more than two centuries ago Madame
de SeVign6 can infuse with the glow of life: 'I am going to tell you
of an event which is the most astonishing, the most surprising, the
most marvellous, the most miraculous, the most magnificent, the
most bewildering, the most unheard-of, the most singular, the most
extraordinary, the most incredible, the most unexpected, the great-
161
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
est, the least, the most rare, the most common, the most public, the
most private till today,' how adroitly Madame provokes our curi-
osity by the antitheses of the last three pairs! 'the most brilliant,
the most enviable . . . ; an event which we cannot believe in Paris
(how then can it be believed in Lyons?), an event which makes
everybody exclaim, "Lord have mercy upon us!" . . . an event,
in fact, which will take place on Sunday next, when those who are
present will doubt the evidence of thek senses; an event which,
though it is to happen on Sunday, may perhaps not be accom-
plished on Monday. I cannot persuade myself to tell you. Guess
what it is! I give you three guesses. Do you give it up? Well, then
I must tell you. Monsieur de Lauzun is to be married next Sunday
at the Louvre guess to whom! I give you four guesses, I give you
ten, I give you a hundred. Madame de Coulanges says, "It is not
very difficult to guess, it is Madame de Valliere." You are quite
wrong, Madame. "It is Mademoiselle de Retz, then." No, it is not;
you are very provincial.
* "Dear me, how stupid we are," you exclaim, "it is Mademois-
elle de Colbert, of course." You are farther off than ever. "Then
it must be Mademoiselle de Cre"qui." You are no nearer. Well, I
find I must tell you.' And so, after another paragraph of lively de-
lay, to the momentous announcement to 'Mademoiselle, first cousin
to the King.' The thing that is noteworthy about these flowing and
glancing sentences is not their denouement, of course, but the de-
licious way in which they build up their suspense, until we are
well nigh as eager to know as Madame de Grignan must have been
herself. And there are the faint touches, besides, by which we are
given a slyer taste of the period. That slightly naughty 'which,
though it is to happen on Sunday, may perhaps not be accomplished
till Monday'; and the pretended patronage of the dry 'you are
very provincial/ in answer to one imagined guess. The whole, by
the lightest touches in the world, is as alive in its airy way today
as it was when it was written. Who will write of any fashionable
wedding in our time and be assured of making it as charming to
read two centuries hence?
Sometimes her wit has a hint of malice. 'Madame de Brissac was
ill today, and remained in bed, with her hair dressed so beautifully,
and looking so handsome, that she was fit to turn everybody's head.
I wish you could have seen how prettily she managed her suffer-
162
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
ings, her eyes, her arms, and her cries, with her hands lying help-
lessly in the quilt, and looking for the sympathy she expected from
all bystanders. I was quite overcome with tenderness and admira-
tion . . .' And how prettily the Marquise manages her little
cat-stroke of insinuation for us. We too axe quite overwhelmed
with admiration. But she can turn that little claw in upon herself
as well: 'I have grown rather more unceremonious than you, for
the other day I let a carriageful of the Fonesuel family go home
through a tremendous rain for want of a little pressing them with
a good grace to stay . . . ' We have the entire picture implied, of
the somewhat boring family, wanting to be urged to stay, and
being urged, but not quite enough, so that off they go and although
there is a dig for the social absurdity that insists on being urged
and urged again, there is also a bit of compunction at the omission:
for it was a breach! A whole background of manners and standards
is shadowed in those few words.
Through the lady of wit, however, the tender-hearted woman
and mother is easily to be seen. She tries to rationalize her sorrow
at the departure of her son for Lorraine: 'You know how it vexes
me to see the breaking up of an agreeable party, and how delighted
I am when I see a carriage driving off with people who have wearied
me to death all day; upon which we might make the observation
that bad company is more desirable than good.' And she goes on
to say, 'I recollect all the odd things we used to say when you were
here, and all you said yourself, and all you did; the thought of you
never leaves me; and then, again, I suddenly remember where you
are, my imagination represents to me an immense space and a great
distance . . . ' Family affection, indeed, is never far from Madame
de Sevign6's heart. Madame de Brissac's illness reminds her: 'My
child, when I remember with what simplicity you are ill, and the
calmness in your pretty face, you seem to me a mere bungler!' And
always, 'Love, love your daughter, my dear child; it is the most
natural and delightful employment in the world.'
Letter-writing flourished in England as well as in France. Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu was not the first to follow in the footsteps
of her distinguished foreign predecessor. The earliest published col-
lections of personal letters were those of Bishop HaU (1574-1656)
and the Familiar Letters of James Howell (1594-1666). Pope's
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
letters in some curious way had been pirated by the publisher
Gurll in 1737, and the injured poet had felt himself obliged to bring
out a personally supervised edition, correcting Curll's misprints,
omissions, and falsifications. Pope was vain of his epistolary talents,
and the piracy may not have been completely unauthorized: indeed
many of the letters have a suspiciously formal and elaborated style,
with conceits both of language and concept that smell strongly of
manufacture for publication, or, at least, of ex-post-facto revision.
Swift's Journal to Stella (a name he did not use, supplied by his
cousin, the first editor) was written as a series of journal-letters
between 1710 and 1713, and not published until 1769 twenty-four
years after his death.
Many other occasional and collected letters of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries have been preserved and are now available
in print, but none attain the bulk or the importance of some of
those I have mentioned. A few samples of such fugitive correspond-
ence may prove interesting. Here is a letter to Charles II:
King Charles, One of your subjects, the other night, robbed me
of forty pounds, for which I robbed another of the same sum, who
has inhumanly sent me to Newgate, and he swears I shall be hanged;
therefore, for your own sake, save my life, or you will lose one of
the best seamen in your navy.
JACK SKIFTON
The condescending monarch replied:
Jack Skifton, For this time I'll save thee from the gallows; but if
hereafter thou art guilty of the like, by God I'll have thee hanged,
though the best seaman in my navy. Thine,
CHARLES REX
There are some charming domestic letters of Sir Richard Steele,
that manage in their few Ikies to distil much of the affection and
carefreeness and devotion of the man.
Dear, lovely Mrs Scurlock, I have been in very good company,
where your health, under the character of the woman I lov'd best,
has been often drunk, so that I may say I am dead drunk for your
sake, which is more than I die for you. Yours,
R. STEELE.
And only two days later, from St James's Coffee-House, conies
this:
Madam,-It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love and yet
attend to businesse. As for me, all who speaks to me find me out,
164
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
and I must lock myself up or people wiH do k for me. A
ask'd me this morning what news from Lisbon, and I answer'd
she's exquisitely handsome. Another clesir'd so know when I had
been last at Hampton Court, I reply'd 'twfll be cm Toesday
se'nmght. Prithee allow me at least to yocur feaad before that
day, that my mind may be in some composure . . .
They were married 'Tuesday come se'nnight,' and we have
thereafter little showers of one- and two-line notes written in the
course of business and sent home to her. *I desire, my dear,, that
you have nothing else to do but to be a darling,* and *Dctr Prae,
I am very sleepy and tired, but I could not think of closing my
eyes' until 'From the Press' at one in the morning he had sent this
note of affection. Here is one written in 1712 five years kter:
Dear Prue,~I thank you for your kind billet. The nurse shall have
money this week. I saw your son Dick, but he is a peevish chtt.
You cannot conceive how pleased I am that I shall have the prettyest
house to receive the prettyest woman who is the darling of
RICHARD STEEUB.
Compared with the freshness and gaiety of these, the journal-
letters in the Journal to Stella are wooden indeed. Important to the
political historian for the light they throw on the partisan warfare
of the Whig and Tory parties, and the struggles of Harley and
Bolingbroke to control the country, they are of rather less value
to the spiritual historian. They are without the artificiality and
decorative elaborateness of Pope's letters, it is true, but they have
little liveliness of observation or comment, and alternate between
a bare and fatigued abstract of where he has been and whom he
has seen, and the repetitious puerilities of the little language' he
used to show affection for his two correspondents. The Stella,
Cadenus, and Vanessa entanglement has been romanticized in a way
that throws fictitious glamor on the Journal; but a person who reads
it for light on that dark realm of Swift's life will find little, and
even of politics little but the bones of fact: no color of characteriza-
tion or blazoning of issues.
Sometimes we find a detail that enables us to reconstruct some-
thing of the age. On his way to Sir Godfrey Kneller's, the painter,
he 'met the electors for parliament-men: and the rabble came about
our coach, crying A Colt, A Stanhope, &c. we were afraid of a dead
cat, or our glasses broken, and so were always of their side.' We
have short accounts of dinners with Rowe and Prior and other
165
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
celebrities, and frequent glimpses of Harley, the celebrated poli-
tician, who became Earl of Oxford.
In spite of their different political affiliations Swift wanted to be
helpful to Steele; he went to make suggestions about it to Addison,
'but found Party had so possessed him, that he talked as if he sus-
pected me, and would not fall in with anything I said. So I stopt
short in my overture, and we parted very dryly; and I shall say
nothing to Steele, and let them do as they will; but if things stand
as they are, he will certainly lose' his place 'unless I save him . . .'
But, as for Addison, at the coffee-house 'I behaved myself coldly
enough' and 'I shall not alter my behaviour to him, till he begs my
pardon, or else we shall grow bare acquaintance.'
There is a description of the witty Congreve, who had burned
the candle at both ends and who was now, although younger than
Swift, a decrepit man. He 'is almost blind with cataracts growing
on his eyes; and his case is, that he must wait two or three years
until the cataracts are riper, and till he is quite blind, and then he
must have them couched; and besides he is never rid of the gout,
yet he looks young and fresh, and is as chearful as ever . . . He
gave me a pain in the great toe, by mentioning the gout.'
The hypochondria of this last comment is a frequent quality, and
so is the parsimony about trifles which is so striking a contrast to
Swift's generous charities. 'I find all rich fellows have that humour
of using all people without any consideration for their fortunes,' he
grumbles; 'but I'll see them rot before they shall serve me so.' And
the occasion for this? 'Lord Halifax is always teazing me to go
down to his country house, which will cost me a guinea to his serv-
ants, and twelve shillings coach hire; and he shall be hanged first.'
And during a rainy spell, he frets, "Tis plaguy twelve-penny
weather this last week, and has cost me ten shillings in coach and
chair hire.' He is fond of a dubious turn of phrase, even with his two
feminine correspondents, and says, a propos his first appointment
with Harley for a Saturday afternoon, 'I will open my business to
him; which expression I would not use if I were a woman;' and
then adds, chucklingly, 'I know you smoakt it;' (saw the meaning
of it) 'but I did not till I writ it.'
His occasional letters to his friends, however, reveal much more
of the proud and bitter and witty and affectionate man than is to
be found in the curtailed notes of the Journal. Writing to Pope, for
1 66
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
example, while he was finishing the revision of Gulliver, he says:
'But the chief end I propose to myself In all my labours, is to r
the world, rather than divert it; and if I could compass that design
without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the most
indefatigable writer you have ever seen without reading.* (His Trie
of a Tub had long since ruined his chances of ecclesiastical advance-
ment in the time of Queen Anne.) *. . . I have ever hated all na-
tions, professions, and communities; and all my love is towards in-
dividuals . . . But principally I hate and detest that animal called
man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years
(but do not tell), and so I shall go on until I have done with them.
*I have got materials toward a treatise proving the falsity of that
definition animal rationale, and to show it should be only rations
capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy (though not in
Timon's manner) the whole building of my travels is erected; and
I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opin-
ion.'
Many letters to Pope, to Arbuthnot, to Gay, and othersshow
that he spoke truly in claiming his love 'towards individuals.' Only
three years before the melancholy insanity in which he ended his
days, he wrote to Pope that he had learned 'with great concern that
you were taken ill. I have heard nothing since; only I have continued
in great pain of mind; yet for my own sake and the world's more
than for yours; because I well know how little you value life both
as a philosopher and a Christian ... If you are well recovered, you
ought to be reproached for not putting me especially out of pain,
who could not bear the loss of you; although we must be for ever
distant as much as if I were in the grave ... I have nobody left
now but you. Pray be so kind as to outlive me; and then die as soon
as you please; but without pain . . /
In a livelier mood, he jested with Miss Hoadly, one of the young
ladies whom he had always had the ability to fascinate with his
raillery. 'Madam, When I lived in England, once every year I is-
sued an edict, commanding that all ladies of wit, sense, merit, and
quality who had an ambition to be acquainted with me, should make
the first advances at their peril; which edict, you may believe, was
universally obeyed.' And he proceeds to Vender how you came so
long to neglect your duty,' and to thank her for some gifts recently
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
dispatched in these words: 'I have heard of a judge bribed with a
pig, but discovered by the squeaking; and, therefore, you have been
so politic as to send me a dead one, which can tell no tales. Your
present of butter was made with the same design, as a known court
practice, to grease my fist that I might keep silence. These are
great offences, contrived on purpose to corrupt my integrity . . .
However, I have two ways to be revenged: first, I will let all the
ladies of my acquaintance know [that you] understand house-
wifery; which every girl of this town, who can afford sixpence a
month for a chair, would scorn to be thought to have the least
knowledge in; and this will give you as ill a reputation as if you had
been caught in the act of reading a history, or handling a needle, or
working in a field at Tallagh;' and second, he will swear that her
letter is 'written in a fair hand, rightly spelt, and good plain sense,'
which will make 'every female scrawler . . . spread about the town
that your writing and spelling are ungenteel and unfashionable,
more like a parson than a lady.'
Many of Pope's letters, as I have already mentioned, were prob-
ably not real letters at all, but formal literary compositions arbi-
trarily cast into the letter-mold; and even those that were actually
sent to people were often revamped for publication. Nearly all have
2 set elegance, a highly wrought Augustan polish, a striving for ef-
fect, that sometimes produces an air of insincerity and at the best
hides the man beneath the fashionable garments of paradox and
elaboration. His Letter to a Noble Lord is a brilliant piece of irony
and invective, but it was really a studied public insult to Lord Her-
vey, and not a letter at all; and the same is true of a number of Pope's
other letters. Although they were designed to find their way into
print by seeming accident, they were really prose satires, having no
more of the personal in them than any other such work. It need not
be denied that there was sincerity and gentleness in Pope, but these
are qualities that seldom appear with much convincingness in his
letters. Here is part of one to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which
is self-explanatory:
I prodigiously long for your sonnets, your remarks, your Oriental
learning; but I long for nothing so much as your Oriental self . . .
I expect to see your soul as much thinner dressed as your body;
and that you have left off, as unwieldy and cumbersome, a great
many damned European habits. Without offense to your modesty
168
HEYDAY OP THE LETTER-WRITERS
be it spoken, I have a Iteming desire to see yoar naked,
for I am confident h is the prettiest kind of white "m the
universe . . . But if I must be content with seeing your body maty,
God send it to come quickly: I honour k more than the diamond-
casket that held Homer's Iliads; for in the very twinkle of one eye
of it there is more wit, and in the very dimple of one cheek 01 k
there is more meaning, than all the souls that ever were carnally
put into women since men have had the making of them.
I have a mind to fill the rest of this paper with an accident that
happened just under my eyes, and has made a great impression "upon
me. I have just passed part of this summer at an old romantk seat
of my Lord Harcourt's, which he lent me. It overlooks a common-
field, where, under the shade of a hay-cock, sat two lovers, as
constant as ever were found in romance, beneath a spreading beech
... a terrible storm of thunder and lightning arose, that drove
the labourers to what shelter the trees or hedges afforded. Sarah,
frightened and out of breath, sunk on a haycock, and |ofra (who
never separated from her) sate by her side, having raked two or
three heaps together to secure her. Immediately there was heard so
loud a crack as if heaven had burst asunder. The labourers, solicitous
for each other's safety, called to one another: those that were
nearest our lovers, hearing no answer, stepped to the place where
they lay: they first saw a little smoke, and after, this faithful pair;
John, with one arm about his Sarah's neck, and the other held over
her face, as if to screen her from the lightning. They were struck
dead, and already grown stiff and cold in this tender posture.
There was no mark or discolouring on their bodies, only that Sarah's
eyebrow was a little singed, and a small spot between her breasts.
And to the letter he adds an epitaph on the lovers:
When Eastern lovers feed the funeral fire
On the same pile their faithful fair expire;
Here pitying Heaven that virtue mutual found,
And blasted both that it might neither wound.
Hearts so sincere th* Almighty saw well pleased
Sent his own lightning and the victims seiz'd.
Think not, by rigorous judgment
A pair so faithful could expire;
Victims so pure Heaven saw well pleased
And snatched them in celestial fire.
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
The rather strained pastoralism of this sentimental effusion be-
speaks it much more the occasion for quoting his epitaph than any
spontaneous flow of feeling. The whole episode has been manu-
factured, wrought up, as a literary production; and the letter is
therefore a kind of set piece designed to display the talents of the
author rather than the feelings of the man. Lady Mary, who no-
where shows her good sense more than by the quiet way she ig-
nores his artificial professions of gallantry towards herself, reacts
from the pseudo-Arcadianism of these raptures into a tone of bald
insensibility: 1 must applaud your good nature in supposing that
your pastoral lovers (vulgarly called haymakers) would have lived
in everlasting joy and harmony, if the lightning had not interrupted
their scheme of happiness. I see no reason to imagine that John
Hughes and Sarah Drew were either wiser or more virtuous than
their neighbors. That a well-set man of twenty-five should have a
fancy to marry a brown woman of eighteen is nothing marvellous
... His endeavoring to shield her from the storm was a natural
action, and what he would have certainly done for his horse, if he
had been in the same situation.' And she makes up her own epitaph
on the same event:
Here lies John Hughes and Sarah Drew;
Perhaps you'll say, what's that to you?
Believe me, friend, much may be said
On this poor couple that are dead.
On Sunday next they should have married;
But see how oddly things are carried!
On Thursday last It rain'd and lightened;
These tender lovers, sadly frightened,
Sheltered beneath the cocking hay.
In hopes to pass the storm away;
But the bold thunder found them out.
Who knows if 'twas not kindly done?
For if they had seen next year's sun,
A beaten wife and cuckold swam
Had jointly cursed the marriage chain;
Now they are happy in their doom,
For P. has written on their tomb.
'I confess these sentiments are not altogether as heroic as yours;
but I hope you will forgive them in favor of the two last lines.'
The ironic worldliness of this passage is an admirable foil to Pope's
literary ecstasy, and the deliberately prosaic tone of her epitaph is
neatly joined to the concluding compliment. A certain sharpness
170
HEYDAY OF THE I.FTTF.R-WRtTERS
and common sense, far removed from a poetic romanQckiB,
as she reveals here, are what we ordinarily find In her letters. Site
has a sane disillusion about the world and human society, penetrat-
ing if slightly cynical judgments on character and motive, an in-
tellectual vitality that is close to wit, and a sustained capacity for
keen and inclusive observation.
Even in her earliest letters she reveals little of the affectation one
might expect in an attractive and much flattered young kdy with a
reputation for wit and fashion to justify. The letters to Mr Wortley
Montagu before their marriage reveal much warmth and steadiness
of feeling. Although theirs was a runaway match, it was neither
heedless nor impulsive, but was undertaken only after much reflec-
tion had convinced them it was the only solution.
We find him wondering at first if she were not too frivolous and
fond of pleasure to be a suitable companion to one as sober as him-
self, and her writing, 'Give me leave to say it, (I know it sounds
vain,) I know how to make a man of sense happy; but then that
man must resolve to contribute something towards it himself. I
have so much esteem for you, I should be very sorry to hear you
was unhappy; but for the world I would not be the instrument of
making you so; which (of the humour you are) is hardly to be
avoided if I am your wife.'
He praised some of her qualities and frankly blamed others; she
replied: 'I suppose ... I should thank you for the wit and beauty
you give me, and not be angry at the follies and weaknesses; but, to
my infinite affliction, I can believe neither one nor t'other. One part
of my character is not so good, nor t'other so bad as you fancy it.
Should we ever live together . . . you would find an easy equality
of temper you do not expect, and a thousand faults you do not
imagine.*
A struggle of wills went on between them, and she handed him
his entire freedom, although with no animosity or pretence of in-
difference. 'After all I have said, I pretend no tie but on your heart.
If you do not love me, I shall not be happy with you; if you do, I
need add no farther. I am not mercenary, and would not receive an
obligation that comes not from one that loves me.' But, although
she was not mercenary, financial obstacles lay between them. Her
father would not consent to the marriage without a settlement on
their children that her lover would not consent to. Lady Mary was
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
agitated with both: 'I writ you a letter last night in some passion.
I begin to fear again; I own myself a coward ... I am afraid you
flatter yourself that my F. [father] may be at length reconciled and
brought to reasonable terms. I am convinced ... he never will.'
Finally they resolved to defy opposition, and we have a cry of un-
certainty the night before they ran off; 'I tremble for what we are
doing. Are you sure you will love me for ever? Shall we never re-
pent? I fear and I hope.'
She is never more attractive than in the combination in these
letters of good sense and sincere feeling, of modesty and an occa-
sional very slight teasing coquettishness, deepening as their intimacy
deepened, into a direct truthfulness of statement worthy of high
esteem.
Edward Wortley Montagu was appointed ambassador to Con-
stantinople, and she followed him on that difficult journey. Her
letters from there are full of vivid details about Turkish life and
manners. She speaks highly of the kindness with which slaves are
treated, and denies the fiction of Mohammedan contempt for
women. 'I assure you it is certainly false . . . that Mahomet ex-
cludes women from any share in a future happy state.' He denies a
Paradise only to Virgins, who die virgins, and the widows who
marry not again, dying in mortal sin' by not fulfilling their office
'of multiplying the human race.' If St Catherine and St Theresa are
'judged by this system of virtue,' she humorously adds, they will
be found 'infamous creatures, that passed their whole lives in most
abominable libertinism.' And, so far is the Turkish lady from being
confined or enslaved, 'I have not seen any such prudes as to pretend
fidelity to their husbands,' although 'No woman dares appear
coquette enough to encourage two lovers at a time.'
She gives a full account of the Turkish method of inoculation
against smallpox, which she had the courage to practise on herself
and her children, and was responsible for introducing into England.
An 'old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best
sort of smallpox,' she writes, and pricks several veins at your choice,
inserting into them 'as much venom as can lie upon the head of her
needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of
shell . . . ' The illness is very slight, lasting only a week, and never
leaving any mark. 'Every year thousands undergo this operation;
and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-
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HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITEES
pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other
countries.*
Her comments on other countries are often striking. 'All the
country villages of France,' she says, 'show nothing else' but misery,
'While the post-horses are changed, the whole town comes out t
beg, with such miserable starved faces, and thin tattered clothes,
that they need no other eloquence to persuade of the wmeheciaess
of their condition. This is all the French magnificence til! you
come to Fontainbleau. There you begin to think the kingdom rich
when you are shewed one thousand five hundred rooms in the
King's hunting palace.' This was in 1718, but the French Revolution
was already germinating in these starved hamlets.
Again, she pictures the field of Carlowitz, scene of Prince Eugene's
great victory over the Turks: 'The marks of that glorious bloody
day are yet recent, the field being strewed with the skulls and
carcases of unburied men, horses, and camels. I could not look
without horror, on such numbers of mangled human bodies, and
reflect on the injustice of war, that makes murder not only neces-
sary but meritorious. Nothing seems to be a plainer proof of the
irrationality of mankind . . . ' If the style here is cool, the senti-
ments are just.
The truth is, Lady Mary's mind was nearly always well in
control of her feelings. But the feelings were usually well-grounded;
if she and her husband ultimately disowned their son, he was a
scamp who richly deserved it; and she displayed a constant affec-
tion for her daughter, who became the Countess of Bute. Her com-
mon sense disposes of most problems in short order. There is Mr,
who demands that his wife shall suckle their newly born son, in-
stead of giving it cow's milk, and argues that breast-feeding is ac-
cording to Nature. 'Indeed, if Mrs was a buxom, sturdy woman,
who lived on plain food, took regular exercise, enjoyed proper re-
turns of rest, and was free from violent passions (which you and I
know is not the case), she might be a very good nurse for her child;
but as matters stand, I do verily think that the milk of a good
comely cow, who feeds quietly in her meadow, never devours rag-
outs, nor drinks ratafia, nor frets at quadrille . . . would be [more]
likely to nourish the young squire . . . '
In her youth we are often treated to fashionable gossip. 'Mr
Sterne, the titular bishop,' she could write as a young lady, Svas
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
last week married to a very pretty woman, Mrs Bateman, whom
he fell in love with for falling backwards from her horse leaping
a ditch, where she displayed all her charms, which he found irresist-
ible.' And even later she found it hard to resist a juicy morsel, like
the story of the Duke of Bedford, 'who by the care of a pious
mother, certainly preserved his virginity to his marriage bed,'
where he was so much shocked at what was expected of him 'that
he already pukes at the very name' of his bride, and determined
'to let his estate go to his brother, rather than go through the
filthy drudgery of getting an heir to it.' 'This comes,' Lady Mary
adds, 'of living till sixteen without any competent knowledge either
of practical or speculative anatomy, and literally thinking fine ladies
composed of lilies and roses.'
But in her later years she becomes less addicted to scandal, and,
always something of a bluestocking, comments on philosophy and
books, tells what she thinks of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, dis-
cusses the novels of Richardson and Sterne, of Fielding and Smollett.
1 was such an old fool as to weep over Clarissa Harlowe, like any
milkmaid of sixteen.' But she knew well that Richardson's whole
view of society was so absurd and ignorant as to make it clear he
'was never admitted into higher company, and should confine his
pen to the amours of housemaids.'
The merits of her own letters she was well aware of. 'The last
pleasure that fell in rny way was Madame Sevigne's letters,' she
writes; Very pretty they are, but I assert, without the least vanity,
that mine will be full as entertaining forty years hence.' She was
guilty of a serious underestimation there, finding no more than
'a lively manner and fashionable phrases, mean sentiments, vulgar
prejudices, and endless repetitions. Sometimes the tittle-tattle of a
fine lady, sometimes that of a nurse,' but 'well gilt over by airy
expressions, and a flowing style.' Today we do not prize Lady
Mary quite as highly as we do her chosen rival, but she commands
our respect and admiration. And it may be that only Madame de
SeVigne's more charming depths as a person lead us to praise her
more.
'74
HEYDAY
OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
(Continued)
VI
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
Eighteenth Century Ideal
No WRITER of didactic letters has ever given so clear a por-
trait of his own character as the Earl of Chesterfield. This is
probably because Chesterfield almost alone was wholeheartedly
intent on inculcating an attainable result, and one that he really
believed in. Didactic letters there have been, doubtless, by millions,
on all subjects from the perfect epistolary style to the nature of
the faultless knight but mostly they have been marred either by
an unworldly insistence on the ideal or by author's feeling that
he must pretend to embody all the virtues he praised. These de-
formities have given nearly all such works an air of unavoidable
priggishness or of moral unreality.
Lord Chesterfield set a standard high but not ineffable. As much
as any man, he had lived by the principles he laid down, which
were therefore tried by practice; and even the respects in which,
as a young man, he had failed to exemplify his later injunctions,
he did not hesitate to use as object-lessons in error. With no
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
shadow of pose, he threw himself into Ms task of shaping a human
character: and the Letters, which are the strokes devoted to that
task, are also the image of the man.
Philip Stanhope, to whom they were addressed, was the Earl's
illegitimate child. He was an awkard and shy little boy, and these
traits, for all the advice and example of the letters, did not entirely
leave him when he became a young man. Early his father realized
that ease and grace in society were the respects in which the boy
was especially lacking. If the letters seem to labor these points
more than they do those needful to a virtuous character it was not
because of any cynical disregard of virtue in the father's mind,
but because the problem was more one of external than of inward
grace.
Chesterfield was a man of the world: he wanted his son to be a
good man (not an impossible, namby-pamby paragon, but good
as might be reasonably hoped), and, quite as much as this, he
wanted him to be a successful man. The grand aim of the letters is
not to form the young man into a graceful and useless coxcomb,
but to enable him to achieve those graces of manner and those solid
traits of character that may further a serious and valuable career.
For these purposes it is essential that one have charm of manner;
for that, rather than virtue, is what most people judge by. 'Virtue
and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value; but if they are
not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their lustre; and
even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.'
One should begin with grace of carriage, and Chesterfield draws a
lively caricature of 'an awkward fellow' coming into a room,
stumbling over his sword, letting his hat fall down, and in retrieving
it, throwing down his cane. 'At dinner his awkwardness distinguishes
itself particularly, as he has more to do: he eats with his knife
to the great danger of his mouth, picks his teeth with his fork,
and puts his spoon, which has been into his throat twenty times,
into the dishes again . . . Besides all this, he has strange tricks and
gestures; such as snuffing up his nose, making faces, putting his
fingers in his nose, or blowing it and looking afterwards in his
handkerchief, so as to make the company sick. His hands are
troublesome to him . . . and he does not know where to put
them . . .'
These pitfalls avoided, there are graces of conscious behavior
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HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
to be attended. One should be attentive in company: What is
commonly called an absent man, is commonly either a very weak,
or a very affected man:' and in either case 'a very disagreeable man
in company.' It might be permissible in a Newton or a Locke,
immersed in intellectual tasks, but only a few people 'since the crea-
tion of the world, have had a right to absence, from that intense
thought which the things they were investigating required 7 ; a young
man deservedly earns his exclusion from good society by such be-
havior. His language must be well-chosen and correct, neither vul-
gar nor pedantic: 'Proverbial expressions and trite sayings are the
flowers of the rhetoric of a vulgar man. Would he say that men
differ in their tastes; he both supports and adorns that opinion, by
the good old saying, as he respectfully calls it, that what is (me
marts meat is another man's poison. If anybody attempts being
smart, as he calls it, upon him, he gives them tit for tat, ay, that he
does.' Equally undesirable, however, is an ostentatious display of
scholarship. 'Speak the language of the company that you are in;
speak it purely, and unlarded with any other . . . Wear your
learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not merely
pull it out ... to show you have one.'
Even handwriting and little things like dancing are worth a
gentleman's care: 'Dancing is in itself a very trifling, silly thing;
but it is one of those established follies to which people of sense
are sometimes obliged to conform; and then they should be able
to do it well.' 'Frequent and loud laughter is ... the manner in
which the mob express their silly joy at silly things . . . True wit,
or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it; they
please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance . . .
I am neither of a melancholy, nor a cynical disposition; and am as
willing, and as apt, to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that,
since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me
laugh.' Therefore 'I could heartily wish that you may be often seen
to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.'
If in this last bit of advice Chesterfield carries a fashionable idea
of the day to an excessive degree, there is nevertheless much inge-
nuity and shrewdness in what he says. And when he goes beyond
these superficial matters, his worldly wisdom is penetrating. Men
'will much sooner forgive an injustice than an insult.' 'Never yield
to that temptation, which to most young men is very strong, of
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
exposing other people's weaknesses and infirmities . . . You may
get the laugh on your side by it, for the present; but you will make
enemies by it for ever; and even those who laugh with you then
will, upon reflection, fear, and consequently hate you.'
'Have a real reserve with almost everybody, and have a seeming
reserve with almost nobody; for it is very disagreeable to seem re-
served, and veiy dangerous not to be so.' Open looks, thoughts
restrained volto sciolto, pensieri stretti is one of his favorite
sayings. Even people capable of reasoning 'live and die in a thou-
sand errors, from laziness; they will rather adopt the prejudices of
others, than give themselves the trouble of forming opinions of
their own.' But the man of judgment should analyse his impressions
both of things and people; he should study human nature. 'Search
every one for that ruling passion' 'to which the others are subor-
dinate.' Use the ruling passion to move a man by, but 'remember
never to trust him where that passion is concerned.'
Especially study the ruling passions of women, for 'their suffrages
go a great way towards establishing a man's character in the fash-
ionable part of the world': but never take them seriously. 'Women
. . . are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining
tattle and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I
never in my life knew one that had it, or who reasoned and acted
consequently for four-and-twenty hours together ... A man
of sense only trifles with them . . . but he neither consults them
about, nor trusts them with, serious matters; though he often makes
them believe he does both . . . No flattery is either too high or
too low for them. They will greedily swallow the highest, and
gratefully accept of the lowest; and you may safely flatter any
woman, from her understanding down to the exquisite taste of
her fan . . .'
'But these are secrets which you must keep inviolably, if you
would not, like Orpheus, be torn to pieces by the whole sex . . .'
It would be foolhardy indeed, after being so expressly warned,
to quote these sentiments with any appearance of approbation, but
perhaps they may be allowed to stand by virtue of their insist-
ence on the importance of feminine influence. Whether 'from the
weakness of men' or other causes that Chesterfield does not analyze,
that influence is probably as strong today as then. And, in any case,
no outline of Chesterfield's character would be veracious unless it
1 80
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
allowed room for an opinion to which he more than once recurs.
A central feature of his social strategy is playing on the weak-
nesses of others. Though he nowhere advises the despicable
of a Bel-Ami, an adroit use of flattery Is one of the graces by
which a man advances his career. And his career is always the para-
mount concern. For it he cultivates the Graces whom Chesterfield
is ever invoking. The Graces! The Graces! senza di not, ognl
fatica e vana. But beneath the winning air there most always be the
determination of iron. Suaviter in modo-another favorite saying
fortiter in re.
It would be an error, however, to believe that Chesterfield fixes
his attention exclusively on worldly success, or that he has no
principles other than those that conduce to getting on. It has al-
ready been shown that he despises the mere man of fashion almost
as much as he does the Man of Pleasure, whom he early in his
letters stigmatizes as 'a beastly drunkard, an abandoned whoremaster,
and a profligate swearer and curser.' He speaks with disgust of the
way he was misled in his own youth into drunkenness 'because I then
considered drinking as a necessary qualification for a fine gentle-
man.' Wine and play in moderation are not evils; but, letting others
do as they will, one should 'stop short of the pains inseparably an-
nexed to an excess' of drinking, and one should *play for trifles*
only, conforming to custom, but not venturing sums it would be
painful to lose.
Indeed, the law of moderation governs all wisdom, and even
every virtue carried to excess becomes a vice. 'Generosity often
runs into profusion, economy into avarice, courage into rashness,
caution into timidity . . .' 'The sure characteristic of a sound and
strong mind is, to find in everything those certain bounds, quos ultra
citraque nequit consistere rectum ... In manners, this line is
good breeding; beyond it, troublesome ceremony; short of it, is
unbecoming negligence and inattention. In morals it divides osten-
tatious puritanism from criminal relaxation. In religion, supersti-
tion from impiety; in short, every virtue from its kindred vice or
weakness.'
His feeling for merit is strong, and his essential contempt for
merely fortuitous honors consistent. 'The penetration of Princes,*
he remarks, 'seldom goes deeper than the surface' (princes are
'about the pitch of women; bred up like them, and are to be ad-
181
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
dressed and gained in the same way'). Thek suffrage, like that of
society in general, is worth intrinsically nothing, but is one of
those worldly influences without which no great aim can come
to fruition. Therefore they must be cultivated in season, but the
only really good company is that of men of personal distinction.
'I used to think myself in company as much above me, when I was
with Mr Addison and Mr Pope, as if I had been with all the Princes
in Europe.' (My italics.) His judgment of the course of events was
as sound as his evaluation of merit. 'I foresee,' he wrote in 1752, 'that
before the end of the century, the trade of both King and priest
will not be half so good a one as it has been.'
Chesterfield's letters are always instructive, and they never fail
to be interesting and full of character as well. Their style is as
easy and well-bred as he was urging his son to be, shaped to the
highest elegance but never either empty or ornate; and in these
letters the style is indeed the man. They have intellectual power
and urbanity, they have judgment and poise. Although he was much
a man of his age, he was not incapable of decided personal judg-
ments as well. 'Homer's hero, Achilles, was both a brute and a
scoundrel . . .; he had so little regard for his country, that he
would not act in defense of it because he had quarrelled with
Agamemnon about a whore; and then, afterwards, animated by
private resentment only, he went about killing people basely, I will
call it, because he knew himself invulnerable . . .' His wit con-
stantly concentrates itself into epigram, and his choice of indivi-
dual words is often brilliant. 'A constant smirk upon the face, and
a whiffling activity of the body are strong indications of futility.'
The word whiffling, here, has just the silly and undignified air of
useless f ussiness he wants to evoke.
His standards are worldly, but they are not contemptible. Noth-
ing could be less true than Dr Johnson's biased statement that the
Letters 'teach the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-
master.' Dancing, as we have seen, Chesterfield despised sufficiently,
and he never failed to warn against debauchery and vice. He
took the world, however, as he found it, and if it was unfortunate
that young men could hardly be expected to remain quite chaste,
he was concerned to ensure that his son be no libertine. Above
all, his fundamental principles were sound; the best company is
that of 'people of sense and learning,' the best life one of serious
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HEYDAY OF THE LBTTBR-WRITEES
endeavor, knowledge, and moderation. Many haw; aught no
more than this polished gentleman and man of the world.
Glass of Fashion
When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was in Florence in, 1740,
she met 'Horry Walpole,' as she calls him in one of her letters, and
she speaks of him as 'particularly civil" to her. The favorable
impression was not reciprocal, for although he grants her *wit and
style superior to any letters I ever read but Madame SvignV
he had a low opinion of both her character, as avaricious, and her
mentality, as prcieuse. During that very stay in Florence he
wrote: 'On Wednesday we expect a third she-meteor. Those learned
luminaries the Ladies Pomfret and Walpole are to be joined by the
Lady Mary Wortley Montague . . . Only figure the coalition of
prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French,
Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by
halves, by quarters, or not at all.' And when she actually arrived he
was no less hard on her person: 'She wears a foul mob, that does not
cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or
curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and dis-
covers a canvas petticoat.' The white paint on her face *for cheap-
ness she has bought so coarse, that you would not use It to wash
a chimney.'
These two passages are characteristic of the feline and rather
malicious wit of Walpole. Youngest son of the great prime minister,
a dilettante in literature, the arts, mediaeval lore, old books, Gothic
architecture, and half a dozen other subjects, he lived a life of
dabbling and tasting, moving gracefully in the highest society of
England and the Continent, clever, alert, urbane, just a little bit
shallow, but not devoid of a capacity for loyalty, sound judgments,
and sincere affections. He was a connoisseur of paintings, etchings,
and engravings. He built a sham-Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill,
and installed a printing-press where he ran off limited editions of
the odes of his friend Gray and of rare finds like the Life of Lord
Herbert of Cherbury. He wrote, himself, a mystery-thriller of super-
natural goings-on, called The Castle of Otranto. And from every-
whereStrawberry Hill, London, Florence, Paris he wrote his
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
friends letters that were vivacious, brilliant, scandalous, full of
observation and amusing comment.
His wit plays over almost every subject he touches. Talking of
the coldness of the Italian climate, he says: The men hang little
earthen pans of coals upon their wrists, and the women have port-
able stoves under their petticoats to warm their nakedness, and
carry silver shovels in their pockets, with which their Cicisbeos
stir them Hush! by them, I mean their stoves.' During a period of
widespread earthquakes, which the clergy were attributing to
heavenly disapproval of the luxury of the age, he remarks ironic-
ally of a cancelled masquerade that 'the Bishops . . . have made
an earthquake point of it,' and had it postponed. General Wolfe he
describes as 'a commander whom a child might outwit, or terrify
with a popgun.' Meeting Lady Mary, years later, he finds 'Her face
less changed in twenty years than I could have imagined; I told her
so, and she was not so tolerable twenty years ago that she need have
taken it for flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the
ear. She is very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as im-
perfect as ever, her avarice greater.' As he grew older, like many
who age, he found a decay in manners, a growing brusquerie his
formal training led him to disapprove, but even this he phrased
with his usual sprightliness: 'This sublime age reduces everything
to its quintessence; all periphrases and expletives are so much in dis-
use, that I suppose soon the only way of making love will be to
say "Lie down." '
As 'son of Sir Robert Walpole, he knew everybody, went every-
where, and commented on everything, from the witticisms of Lord
Chesterfield or the trial of a noble murderer to the American War
and the loot of India. He notes the passing of a celebrity of the
last generation: 'Old Marlborough [Sarah, the Dowager Duchess]
is dying but who can tell! last year she had lain a great while ill,
without speaking; the physicians said "She must be blistered, or she
will die." She called out, "I won't be blistered, and I won't die."
If she takes the same resolution now, I don't believe she will.' He
tells how, when Lord Lovat was going to his trial for rebellion, 'a
woman looked into the coach, and said, "You ugly old dog, don't
you think you will have that frightful head cut off?" He replied,
"You damned ugly old bitch, I believe I shall." '
Walpole's letters are a running commentary on all public events.
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HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
Braddock's defeat lie describes at some length, including how the
'common soldiers in general fled; the officers stood heroically, and
were massacred; our Indians were not surprised, and behaved gal-
lantly. The General had five horses shot: under him , . . What
makes the rout more shameful is, that instead of a great pursuit,
and a barbarous massacre by the Indians , , . not a black or white
soul followed our troops, but we had leisure two days afterwards
to fetch off our dead. In short, our American laurels are strangely
blighted!'
The War against the American Colonies he both disapproved
and thought unlikely to bring them to obedience, and says ironi-
cally, 'The war with America goes on briskly, that is as far as
voting goes. A great majority in both Houses is as brave as a mob
ducking a pickpocket. They flatter themselves they shall terrify
the Colonies into submission, and are amazed to hear that there
is no such probability.' And a little later: *I hear the Congress have
named General Washington Generalissimo, with two thousand a
year and five pounds a day for his table; he desired to be excused
receiving the two thousand. If these folks will imitate both the
Romans and Cromwellians in self-denial and enthusiasm, we shall be
horridly plagued with them.'
The earlier, constitutional stages of the French Revolution he
approved; it was only later, as violence and outrage flamed out,
that he swung around to agreement with the mournful diatribes
of Burke. At first it all seemed benevolent and orderly; M. Turgot
began several reforms and then retracted them: Madame du Deffand
remarked, 'Dans les bons vieux terns on reculoit pour mieux sauter,
an lieu que Mons. Turgot saute pour mieux reculer.' The King was
amiable, and his ministers not disposed to 'let their master's benev-
olent disposition rust.' Corve"es were to be abolished, 'but the
country gentlemen,' Walpole keenly foresaw, 'that race of inter-
ested stupidity,' would baffle the attempt, Malesherbes himself gave
Walpole an account of freeing the prisoners in the Bastille, and told
how one man who had been a prisoner fifteen years, and had noth-
ing left, refused to leave unless he received a pension. *M. de
Malesherbes reported it to the King, who replied, "Cert juste" and
the man has fifteen hundred livres a year and his freedom.'
Walpole's judgments on public questions, indeed, are usually
humane and sound. He perceived clearly enough that the empire
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
of trade created war, and says, 'I have no public spirit, and don't
care a farthing for the interests of the merchants. Soldiers and
sailors who are knocked on the head, and peasants plundered or
butchered, are to my eyes as valuable as a lazy luxurious set of men,
who hire others to acquire riches for them; who would embroil
all the earth, that they may heap or squander; and I dare to say this,
for I am no minister. Beckford is a patriot because he will clamour
if Guadaloupe or Martinicio is given up, and the price of sugar
falls. I am a bad Englishman, because I think the advantages of
commerce are dearly bought for some by the lives of many more.'
The plunderer of India he often alludes to with special anger.
'We are Spaniards in our lust for gold, and Dutch in our delicacy
of obtaining it . . .' General Clive, 'the heaven-born general,' Wai-
pole bitterly echoes Pitt's encomium of him, 'knows of a part of
India where such treasures are buried, that he will engage to send
over enough to pay the National Debt.' And, three months later,
when Clive came to London, 'General Clive is arrived all over
estates and diamonds. If a beggar asks charity, he says, "Friend, I
have no small brilliants about me." '
The sharp dealing used in seizing the Americas aroused his equal
indignation: 'At present my chief study is West Indian history.
You would not think me very ill-natured if you knew all I feel
at the cruelty and villainy of European settlers: but this very
morning I found that part of the purchase of Maryland from the
savage proprietors (for we do not massacre, we are such good
Christians as only to cheat) was a quantity of vermilion and a
parcel of Jews'-harps!'
Sometimes his views have a trace of superciliousness or of fash-
ionable affection. 'The French affect philosophy, literature, and
freethinking: the first never did, and never will possess me; of the
two others I have long been tired,' he writes languidly. 'Freethink-
ing is for one's self, surely not for society; besides one has settled
one's way of thinking, or knows it cannot be settled, and for others
I do not see why there is not as much bigotry in attempting
conversions from any religion as to it . . . For literature, it is
very amusing when one has nothing else to do. I think it rather
pedantic in society; tiresome when displayed professedly . . .'
The effete patricianism of this attitude is largely pose; it is classic
taste playing at being hellenistic. The sentiments of the educated
1 86
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
man of the age are found in Ms opinion of Wesley, the preacher,
whose performance he called an 'opera,' with hymns to *Scotch
ballad runes ... so long, chat one would think they were already
in eternity . . . ' Wesley himself was 'as evidently an actor as Gar-
rick,' and his sermon had 'parts and eloquence in it; but towards
the end he exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm, de-
cried learning, and told stories': ail very vulgar and repulsive.
If enthusiasm was plebeian, and the airs of a world-weary aesthete
enjoyable, there was nevertheless much that was understanding in
Walpole, and even more that was tender and loyal. Certain fetiches
of his day he did not worship at all. If all his training and tastes
led to his despising vulgar beliefs, he was no blind camp-follower
of his own class. 'Lord Byron has killed a Mr Chaworth in a duel
at a tavern. I, who should like the trial of a Laud or a Strafford,
as a wholesome spectacle now and then, am not interested about
an obscure Lord, whose birth alone procures his being treated like
an overgrown criminal.' But his gentle heart was harrowed by the
way dogs were run over in the London streets: *a very picture of
the murder of the innocents one drives over nothing but poor
dead dogs! The dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures!
Christ! how can anybody hurt them?*
When his friend Conway was deprived of his offices for inde-
pendence in using his vote in the Commons, Walpole begged to be
allowed 'to make your loss as light as it is in my power to make
it: I have six thousand pounds in the funds; accept all, or what part
of it you want. Do not imagine I shall be put off with a refusal . . .
You have ever been the dearest person to me in the world. You
have shown that you deserve to be so. You suffer for your spotless
integrity. Can I hesitate a moment to show that there is at least
one man who knows how to value you?'
The generosity and the other virtues of Walpole had their roots,
of course, in a world of privilege and sinecure. The public offices
which he held were not graced by his presence; clerks paid by
the public did all of his work. It was the custom of his age, and
Walpole never even thought of thinking of it. He despised the
'interests of the merchants,' and 'the heaven-born general' looting
the poor Indian filled him with rage, but he did not realize that
his disinterestedness could hardly have existed without such instru-
ments of imperialism. He would have been far in advance of his
187
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
time if he had. Instead, the kindhearted, dandified creature played
with his toy Gothic castle, his books and his pictures, looked on
ac the entertaining spectacle of life and formulated his reflections
and sentiments about it in letters where pungency, sensibility, play-
fulness, insight, and persiflage are mingled in an incomparable en-
tertainment.
Elegy and Burlesque
His friend Thomas Gray, the poet, is more of a scholar than
Walpole, more serious, perhaps less the man of the world if that
term be regarded as implying enjoyment of the beau monde. Pen-
sive and with a love of solitude, Gray's wit shines less brightly and
constantly than Walpole's, and he is urbane with a difference: for
it is not so much fashionable society that he has mingled with as
chosen society. Walpole laughs at the absurdities of the world he
dwells in, but he dwells there. Gray retired from it. After going
to Eton and Cambridge, spending a short time in London, and
traveling on the continent with Walpole from 1739 to 1741, he made
Cambridge his headquarters for the remainder of his life. Three
years before his death he was appointed Regius Professor of His-
tory and Modern Languages at Cambridge, but otherwise his life
was entirely devoted to reflection, friendship, study, and literature.
Friendship is more especially displayed in the letters of Gray
than in those of Walpole, for Gray was a reserved man, opening
out only to those of whom he felt fond, whereas Walpole scattered
letters everywhere among his acquaintance. Gray's 'rare and mar-
vellous quality of sympathy' is shown not merely in those letters
written to his friends to comfort them in times of sorrow, but in
his ability to feel with them and adapt himself to them in all the
variations of mood. Writing to Walpole in London he is gay and
whimsical, to his mother on a bereavement he is gently philosoph-
ical, to Wharton serious and literary, and to all of them any of
these by turns, with modulations suited to their different natures.
The same quality of sympathy appears in his literary judgments,
combined with a critical acumen that makes his discussions of the
writings of his contemporaries both revealing and, usually, sound.
And, although he was so retired a scholar, he was no mere book-
worm, but had enough practical wisdom and knowledge of the
world to spice with urbanity and wit the judgments of the man
188
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
of learning. Of the academic community in which he dwelt he
thought poorly enough: 'The Masters of Colledgcs are twelve
grey-hair'd Gentlefolks, who are all mad with Pride," he wrote;
'the Fellows are sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things; the Fellow-
Commoners are imitatours of the Fellows, or else Beaux, or eke
nothing: the Pensioners grave, formal Sots, who would be thought
old; or else drink Ale, & sing Songs against ye Excise. The Sixers
are Graziers Eldest Sons, who come to get good Learning,, that
they may all be Archbishops of Canterbury . . .'
He endured 'lectures daily and hourly since I came,' but he
felt in himself no talent for metaphysics or mathematics, all of
which these people seemed to know 'and more, and yet I do not
know one of them who inspires me with any ambition of being
like him. Surely it was of this place, now Cambridge, but formerly
known by the name of Babylon, that the prophet spoke when he
said, "the wild beasts of the desert shall dwell there, and their
houses be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall build there, and
satyrs shall dance there; their forts and towers shall be a den for
ever, a joy of wild asses." ' Idleness and pedantry have ever el-
bowed themselves into the homes of scholarship; the satire of a Gray
needs remembrance in our time.
He is equally amusing in a parody of University tittle-tattle:
'Cambridge . . . is, as it was, for all the World; & the People
are, as they were; and Mr Trollope is as he was, that is, half ill, half
well. I wish with all my heart they were better, but what can one
do? there is no News, only I think I heard a Whisper, as if the
Vice-Chancellour should be with Child (but I beg you not to
mention this, for I may come into trouble about it); there is some
suspicion that the Professor of Mathematics had a Hand in die
thing. Dr Dickens says the University will be obliged to keep it,
as it was got, in Magistxu. 1
Turning to the more serious realms of literary criticism, we
find him praising the characters in Joseph Andrews as having 'a
great deal of nature,' and Fielding's reflections upon high and low
people, and misses and masters' as being very good, although 'The
incidents are ill-laid and without invention.' But Fielding's painting
of human nature he considers 'as weighty and much more useful
than your grave discourses upon the mind, the passions, and what
not.' The vogue of Lord Shaftesbury as a philosopher he can ex-
189
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
plain only in the following way: 'First, he was a Lord; idly, he
was as vain as any of his readers; sdly, men are very prone to believe
what they do not understand; 4thly, they will believe anything at
all, provided they are under no obligation to believe it; 5thly, they
love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; tfthly,
he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more
than he said. Would you have any more reasons?' This may not be
sufficient as a permanent analysis of Shaftsbury's importance, but
it is a shrewd statement of some of the influences of fashion.
Addison, he thought, 'had ... not above three or four notes in
poetry, sweet enough, indeed, like those of a German flute, but
such as soon tire and satiate the ear with their frequent return.'
Johnson's London was 'one of those few imitations that have all
the ease and spirit of an original.' Macpherson's Ossian he was 'gone
mad about,' but could not quite decide on its authenticity; he made
enquiries and received answers so 'ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, unsatis-
factory, calculated (one would imagine) to deceive one, and yet
not cunning enough to do it cleverly' that he could not but regard
the poem as counterfeit, but the work itself was so admirable he
'resolved to believe' it 'genuine, spite of the Devil and the Kirk.'
Rousseau's Emile 'abounds with his usual glorious absurdity' and its
'scheme of education' is 'an impracticable chimera: yet there are a
thousand lights struck out, a thousand important truths better ex-
press'd than ever they were before . . .'
In his amused comments of the failures of his readers to under-
stand The Bard there is an air of dandified patronage that reflects
some of the superciliousness of his fashionable friends. He had
really not expected many to understand the poem, but 'The IWroi
appear to be still fewer, than even I expected.' He dismisses criticism
of the gnomic language of the prophecy: 'Mr Fox, supposing the
Bard sung his song but once over, does not wonder if Edward
the First did not understand him . . . though it had been sung a
hundred times under his window, it was impossible King Edward
should understand him; but that is no reason for Mr Fox, who lives
almost 500 years after him. It is very well; the next thing I print
shall be in Welch,-that's all.'
The wit of his personal comments is often superior. His friend
Ashton was deciding on marriage, but 'two things he is terrified
at,' lest his wife 'should not breed, and lest she should love him:
190
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
I comforted him by saying, there was no Danger of either.' The
use of the word comforted is a Walpolian touch. And to Walpole
he writes, in burlesque anger at not having heard from Mm,
'Gadsbud! I am provoked into a fermentation! when I see you next
I'll firk you, I'll rattle you with a Certiorari: let me tell you; I am at
present as full of wrath & choler asasyou are of wit & good-
nature; though I begin to doubt your title to the last of them, since
you have balked me in this manner . . .'He parodies Walpole's
scandalous gossip with an account of *an amour carried on almost
under my window between a boar & a sow, people of very good
fashion, that come to an assignation, and squeak like ten masquer-
ades; I have a great mind to make you hear the whole progress
of the affair, together with the humours of Miss Pignies, the Lady's
Confidente. . .'
Burlesque, in fact, is one of his favorite figures, and he uses it
gorgeously in his letters from abroad during his two years of
European travel. The Duke of Modena's palace draws the follow-
ing description: 'Imprimis, a house, being in circumference a quar-
ter of a mile, two feet and an inch; the said house containing the
following particulars, to wit, a great room. Item, another great
room; item, a bigger room; item, another room; item, a vast room;
item, a sixth of the same; a seventh ditto; an eighth as before; a
ninth as abovesaid; a tenth (see No. i); item, ten more such, be-
sides twenty besides, which, not to be too particular, we shall pass
over. The said rooms contain nine chairs, two tables, five stools,
and a cricket. From whence we shall proceed to the garden, con-
taining two millions of superfine laurel hedges, a clump of cypress
trees, and half the river Teverone, that pisses into two thousand
several chamberpots. Finis.'
Even more hilarious is his prospectus for printing a volume of
travels:
Proposals for printing by Subscription, in
THIS LARGE
LETTER,
THE TRAVELS OF T: G: GENT:
which will consist of the following Particulars,
CHAP: i:
The Author arrives at Dover; his conversation with the Mayor
of that Corporation; sets out in the Pacquet-Boat, grows very sick;
191
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
the Author spews, a very minute account of all the circumstances
thereof; his arrival at Calais; how the inhabitants of that country
speak French, & are said to be all Papishes; the Author's reflexions
thereupon. . . .
3
... a Cut of the inside of a Nunnery; its Structure, wonder-
fully adapted to the use of the animals, that inhabit it: a short
account of them, how they propagate without the help of a Male,
and how they eat up their own young ones, like Cats and Rabbits,
supposed to have both sexes in themselves, like a Snail. Dissection
of a Dutchess with Copper-Plates, very curious. . . .
7
Goes into the country to Rheims in Champagne, stays there 3
Months, what he did there (he must beg the reader's pardon) he
has really forgot.
8
Proceeds to Lyons. Vastness of that City. Can't see the Streets for
houses, how rich it is and how much it stinks. Poem upon the
confluence of the Rhone & the Saone, by a friend of the Author's;
very pretty!
9
Makes a journey into Savoy, & in his way visits the Grand
Chartreuse; he is set astride upon a Mule's back, & begins to climb
up the Mountain. Rocks & Torrents beneath; Pine-trees, & Snows
above; horrours, & terrours on all sides, the Author dies of the Fright.
ii
Sets out the latter end of November to cross the Alps, he is
devoured by a Wolf, & how it is to be devoured by a Wolf . . .
how he lights among a certain fat nation, call'd Clouds: how they
are always in a Sweat, and never speak, but they f 1. how they
flock about him, & think him very odd for not doing so too . . .
12
. . . locked out of Parma in a cold winter's night: the author
by an ingenious stratagem, gains admittance, depises that City, &
proceeds through Reggio to Modena. how the Duke, & Duchess lie
over their own Stables, and go every night to a vile Italian comedy;
despises them, & it; & proceeds to Bologna. . . .
15
Arrival at Florence . . . Account of the City, & manners of
the inhabitants. A learned Dissertation on the true situation of
Gomorrah . . .
And here will end the first part of these instructive & entertaining
192
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WMTEES
voyages, the Subscribers are to pay so Guineas; ig doun, & the
remainder upon delivery of the book. N: B: A few arc printed
on the softest Royal Brown paper for the use of the Giricws.
In many ways the letters of Gray, no less than his more formal
writings, are portents of the change of taste that was coming over
the eighteenth century. His admiration for the rude Ossuuuc frag-
ments, his own delving in Celtic and Iceland sages, the incipient
romaniticism transfusing the classic form of his Elegy and his Odes^
the leaning toward the mediaeval he shared with Horace Walpole,
the changing attitude toward wild scenes in nature: all are to be
found in Gray. Crossing Mount Cenis, although he still speaks in
the earlier way of 'the savageness and horror of the place,* he is
awed by the 'immensity of the precipices, the roaring of the river
and torrents that run into it, the huge craggs covered with ice and
snow, and the clouds below you and about you;' and on another
occasion he says, 'None but those monstrous creatures of God know
how to join so much beauty with so much horror.'
Romanticism, indeed, breaks out again and again in Gray, and
he is always writing of his garden or of landscape with a seeing eye
that shames the classic use of standardized epithet. 'The sea/ he
says, ' . . . mixes its white transient sails and glittering blue expanse
with the deeper and brighter greens of the woods and corn'; and
though he adds apologetically, 'this last sentence is so fine, I am
quite ashamed: but, no matter! you must translate it into prose,*
the picture remains.
The loving heart of the man appears in many ways. Here is
part of a letter to Norton Nicholls: 'It is long since, that I heard
you were gone in haste into Yorkshire on account of your Mother's
illness, and the same letter informed me she was recovered; other-
wise I had then wrote to you, only to beg you would take care
of her, and to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little
known, which is, that in one's whole life one can never have more
than a single Mother. You may think this obvious, and (what you
call) a trite observation. You are a green GosslingI I was at the
same age (very near) as wise as you, and yet I never discovered
this (with full evidence and conviction, I mean) till it was too late.
It is 13 years ago, and seems but yesterday, and every day I live
it sinks deeper into my heart.'
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
One might quote endlessly from Gray's letters. Though in his
early days he spoke lightly of erudition, and denied possessing
any talent for metaphysics or morals, he made them, and criticism,
science, history, and antiquarianism, all a part of his knowledge;
and his acquaintance with them was not superficial. He loved
voyages and travels, and had taste in painting, prints, and architec-
ture. A year after his death, the Reverend William Temple described
him as not only 'perhaps the most learned man in Europe,' but, more
than that, 'a good man, a well-bred man, a man of virtue and
humanity.' And Dr Johnson, who had no very high appreciation
of Gray's talents as a man of letters, save for the Hymn to Ad-
versity and the Elegy, saw that 'he was a man likely to love much
where he loved at all.' There is hardly a letter in which that fact
may not be read plain.
Twilight Landscape
In minor keys the still and gentle life of William Cowper echoes
many of the tones we have heard in the life of Gray. Most of
his days were passed in quiet retirement first in the little village
of Olney and then in Weston Underwood: even more rural re-
treats than Cambridge and Stoke Poges. His correspondents, Lady
Hesketh and Lady Austen, Joseph Hill, William Hayley, a few old
schoolfellows, and various quiet country clergymen, were not bril-
liant luminaries like Madame du Defraud, Conway, Sir Horace
Mann, and Walpole; but the first three named among Cowper's
friends lived among London gentlefolk, and Hayley was a literary
man rather over-famous in his day.
Neither as poet nor as scholar was Cowper so notable a figure
as Gray, but his scholarship was solid enough to make his transla-
tion of Homer both more exact and more noble in language than
that of Pope, and his own poetry is full of charm and gentle humor.
Cowper's nature was affectionate and lovable, although inclining
to melancholy. In this respect, indeed, his life strikes sadder notes
than that of Gray, for if Gray had a leaning to twilight pensiveness
he experienced no unusual sorrows, and in Cowper there was an
obscure religious melancholia that always hung over him and threat-
ened to envelop him in insanity.
His first seizure had come upon him when he was thirty-two,
194
HEYDAY OF THE
and a straggling barrister hoping for an appointment as Clerk of
the Journals to the House of Lords, to whkh his uncle had the
reversion. He tormented himself with the thought that he desired
the Clerk in possession to die, and brooding on his sin and failure,
he fell prey to suicidal mania. He was ill for two years, and on his
recovery his relatives placed him in the retirement in whkh most
of the rest of his life was passed. His delicate balance was con-
tinually threatened by periods of despair, and times came when he
was again insane. For a golden stretch of sixteen years he was
comparatively serene, and then in 1792 the clouds began to darken
again, and by 1794 he was hopelessly buried in despondency. He
roused a few times after that, but briefly, and died in 1800.
Out of this sombre background the homely charm and domestic
ease of Cowper's letters move, with all their playfulness, serenity,
and good sense. Homely and personal Cowper's letters are in the
highest degree, and hardly another master of letter-writing has used
his pen so exclusively on matters confined to his own direct obser-
vation. Leading a confined life in a small village, he lets his mind
run humorously and easily over the mild events of his daily life,
and everywhere the result is clarity and exquisite grace. No one
has made so much charm out of so little.
It is strange to remember that his whimiscal lightness comes to
us from such depths of shadow. He tells of a visit he once made to
the Isle of Thanet: 'One sight, ... I remember, engaged my curios-
ity, and I went to see it: a fine piece of ruins, built by the late
Lord Holland, at a great expense, which, the day after I saw it,
tumbled down for nothing. Perhaps, therefore, it is still a ruin;
and if it is . . .it must have been much improved by this fortunate
incident. It is hardly possible to put stones together with that air
of wild and magnificent disorder which they are sure to acquire
by falling down of their own acord.' Or, having no other adventure
to record, he tells us, 'In the morning I walk with one or other
of the ladies, and in the afternoon wind thread. Thus did Hercules,
and thus probably did Samson, and thus do I; and were both those
heroes living, I should not fear to challenge them to a trial of skill
in that business, or doubt to beat them both.' To his friend the
Reverend John Newton, visiting the seaside at Lymington, he
writes: 'I am not . . . totally destitute of such pleasures as an
inland country may pretend to. If my windows do not command
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
a view of the ocean, at least they look out upon a profusion of
mignonette, which, if it be not so grand an object, is however quite
as fragrant: and if I have not a hermit in a grotto, I have neverthe-
less myself in a greenhouse, a less venerable figure perhaps, but not
at all less animated . . . '
'When I read your letters,' he says to Lady Hesketh, 'I hear
you talk, and I love talking letters, especially from you.' Talking
letters are the kind he writes himself, for his are full of exactly
such spontaneous and amiable chatter as comes into the heads of
two friends gossiping with each other. He dislikes the sort of letter
that sounds like a set-piece, and makes a jesting little sermon on
his own vanity, which might have made him 'as disgusting a letter-
writer as Pope, who seems to have thought that unless a sentence
was well-turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, it
was not worth the carriage. Accordingly he is to me, except in a
very few instances, the most disagreeable maker of epistles I ever
met with.'
For himself this temptation had almost been a pitfall. 'Your
mother communicated to me,' he wrote to the Reverend William
Unwin, '. . . that you thought me entertaining and clever, and so
forth: now you must know, I love praise dearly, especially from
the judicious, and those who have so much delicacy themselves as
not to offend mine. But then I found this consequence ... if my
friend thought me witty before, he shall think me ten times more
witty hereafter; where I joked once, I will joke five times, and
for one sensible remark I will send him a dozen. Now this foolish
vanity would have spoiled me quite . . . ' The true way to write a
letter is just to begin and go ahead:
. . , I have nothing to say: this seems ... a good reason why
I should not [write]. Yet if you had alighted from your horse
at our door this morning and at this present writing, being five
o'clock in the afternoon, had found occasion to say to me "Mr
Cowper, you have not spoke since I came in; have you resolved
never to speak again?" it would be but a poor reply, if in answer
to the summons I should plead inability as my best and only excuse
... a letter may be written on anything or nothing just as that
anything or nothing happens to occur. A man that has a journey
before him twenty miles in length, which he is to perform on
foot, will not hesitate and doubt whether he shall set out or not,
because he does not readily conceive how he shall ever reach the
196
HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WEITEES
end of k: for he knows, that by the simple operation of moving one
foot forward first, and then the otto:, he shall be sort to acccBipSisii
it. So it is in the present case, and so k k m ewry similar case,
A letter is written as a conversation B maintained, or a journey
performed; not by preconcerted or premeditated means, a new
contrivance, or an invention never heard of before,~-twt merely by
maintaining a progress ... If a man. may talk wkbtmt thinking;
why may he not write upon the same terms?
The prescription might not work with everyone, but with Gow-
per the results are delicious. 'All the bees in the neighborhood
resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite the window, and pay me
for the honey they get out of it by a hum . . . which is as agree-
able to my ears as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that
nature utters are delightful, at least in this country. I should not
perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia,
very pleasing; but I know no beast in England whose voice I do
not account musical, save and except always the braying of an ass
... I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that
I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but
a goose upon a common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer;
and as to insects ... in whatever key they sing, from the gnat's
fine treble to the bass of the humble-bee, I admire them aU.*
Or he has recently 'glazed two frames designed to receive my
pine plants,' and thinks of mending the kitchen windows: 'and pos-
sibly the happy time may come when I shall be seen trudging away
to the neighboring town with a shelf of glass hanging at my back.
If government should impose another tax on that commodity, I
hardly know another business in which a gentleman might more
successfully employ himself. A Chinese, of ten times my fortune,
would avail himself of such an opportunity without scruple; and why
should not I, who want money as much as any mandarin in China?'
Or, writing to Lady Hesketh, * I know well, my Cousin, how for-
midable a creature you are when you become once outrageous.
No sprat in a storm is half so terrible. But it is all in vain. You are
at a distance, so we snap our fingers at you. 1
His literary comments are often fascinating. With Johnson's
unmerciful treatment of Milton in his Lives of the Poets, Cowper
had no patience: 'A pensioner is not likely to spare a republican;
and the Doctor, in order, I suppose, to convince his royal patron
of the sincerity of his monarchical principles, has belaboured that
197
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
great poet's character with the most industrious cruelty . . .
Churlishness in his private life, and a rancorous hatred of everything
royal in his public, are the two colours with which he has smeared
all the canvas ... as a poet, he has treated him with severity
enough, and has plucked one or two of the most beautiful feathers
out of his Muse's wing, and trampled them under his great foot
. . . Oh! I could thresh his old jacket, till I made his pension
jingle in his pocket.'
This is the only time I can recall rinding Cowper unjust, for
Johnson's Toryism long antedated his pension; but he makes it up
in his general comment: 'I am very much the biographer's humble
admirer. His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expres-
sion, secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a pene-
trating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the
popular opinion when it is erroneous: and this he does with the
boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time,
with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ
from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judg-
ment.'
Cowper read the poems of Burns, 'and though they be written
in a language that is new to me, and many of them on subjects much
inferior to the author's ability, I think them on the whole a very
extraordinary production. He is I believe the only poet these king-
doms have produced in the lower rank of life since Shakespeare
(I should rather say since Prior), who need not be indebted for
any part of his praise to a charitable consideration of his origin,
and the disadvantages under which he has laboured.'
Cowper is severe on the faults of Pope's translation of Homer:
'Metaphors of which Homer never dreamt, which he did not seek,
and which probably he would have disdained if he had found, fol-
low each other like the sliding pictures in a show-box. Homer is,
on occasions that call for such a style, the easiest and most familiar
of all writers,' whereas Pope 'takes the most religious care that he
shall everywhere strut in buckram. The speeches of his heroes are
often animated to a degree that Pope no doubt accounted unman-
nerly and rude, for he has reduced numbers of them ... to the
perfect standard of French good-breeding.'
Sometimes on serious topics he strikes a deeper note. 'If a great
man struggling with misfortunes is a noble object, a little man
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HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
that despises them is no contemptible one; and this is all the
philosophy I have in the world at present." 'If you hear ballads
sung in the streets on the hardships of the negroes in the islands,
they are probably mine. It must be an honour to any man to have
given a stroke to that chain, however feeble . . . Woe be to ns,
if we refuse the poor captives the redress to which they have so
clear a right and prove ourselves in the sight of God and men in-
different to all considerations but those of gain.'
And sometimes we hear the melancholy undertones to his light-
ness. 'If I trifle, and merely trifle, it is because I am reduced to it
by necessity a melancholy, that nothing else so effectually dis-
perses, engages me sometimes in the arduous task of being merry
by force. And, strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines
I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and, but for
that saddest mood, perhaps had never been written at all.' And,
leaving Olney for Weston Underwood, he wrote, 'I could not help
giving a last look at my old prison and its precincts; and though I
cannot easily account for it, having been miserable there so many
years, felt something like a heartache when I took my last leave of
a scene, that certainly in itself had nothing to engage affection. But
I recollected that I had once been happy there, and could not,
without tears in my eyes, bid adieu to a place in which God had so
often found me ... What consequences are to attend our removal,
God only knows. I know well that it is not in situation to effect a
cure of melancholy like mine.'
Within a few days, though, we find him writing more cheer-
fully about their new home, that 'if it is not an hermitage, at least
it is a much better thing; and you must always understand, my
dear, that when poets talk of cottages, hermitages, and such like
things, they mean a house with six sashes in front, two comfortable
parlours, a smart staircase, and. three bedrooms of convenient di-
mensions; in short, exactly such a house as this.' The shadow
hovered, but there were long days of light ahead. Let us leave him
before the time of utter darkness.
It is a little hard to make comparisons between letter-writers
because our judgments of letters, to a much larger degree than our
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
judgments of books, are liable to be a subjective matter, depending
on our liking or antagonism to the personality displayed in them.
The author of a novel may only now and then force us to be aware
of his personality, and we may not make the critical effort to dis-
cern the personality that is implied in his work. But in the letter
it confronts us on every page, or, if it does not, that is even worse.
Absence of personality certainly means a bad letter, we may
agree. By the mysterious chemistry of repulsion or attraction, how-
ever, the very character that warms one reader to affection and
admiration may enrage another. The rollicking absurdities and
punsome humours of Charles Lamb, which have endeared him to
many, left Carlyle certain that he was c in some considerable degree
insane': a 'pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom-
fool,' Vitty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners.' This
judgment in itself has humor, for there were those who remarked
of Carlyle that 'if he spoke English and attended to the rules of good
breeding, his charm for the mass of his admirers would disappear.'
The question, then, should not be so much whether we like the
personality revealed as how clearly and interestingly it is revealed.
Naturally even the realization of the danger cannot altogether
banish it. If we dislike a personality very much indeed, we may
make ourselves feel that it does not interest us, when in fact it inter-
ests us to the point of rage. It is possible, however, by trying hard,
to allow as much as we can for such a tendency. If, so determined,
we examine these letter-writers, what shall we decide? Of them all,
Chesterfield is, in the superficial sense, the least intimate. He is never
less than in court dress, and with only so much, sometimes, not of
informality but of a polite likeness of informality, as to show that
he is himself completely at ease. There is never a moment of triv-
iality or relaxation, nothing merely frivolous or for amusement
only; all the wit is put to service. No doubts or self-questionings
ever for a moment appear, for all have been magisterially settled
years ago. High, polished, assured, invulnerable: if he is these things
to his son, we may be certain that the manner never grew more
unbending. We have so sharply etched an image of Chesterfield
because he was concerned to score again and again those outlines
that he considered important.
Lady Mary's letters, save for many of those early ones to Edward
Wortley Montagu and some of those to her daughter, have almost
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HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
the same degree of reserve. Whatever hesitancies or tremors there
may have been in her we do not know; it is the social image of the
well-informed and shrewd lady that we have before us. Her wit,
her cynicism, her worldly wisdom, her judgment, are all there, and
many polite assurances of esteem and friendship; but little heartfelt
warmth and as little violent hate, although sometimes a touch of
cerebral malice. The stronger feelings seem to have been under-
neath, but they hardly move the surface of the letters,
Madame de $6vigne\ on the other hand, below the smooth surface
of her style, has always the movement of personal feeling. And it is
not formality of phrasing that makes the difference, for her most
polished sentences are pellucid to sentiment. Her mind was perhaps
not so strong and positive as that of Lady Mary, but it was exquisite
in the discrimination and analysis of feeling. She was ever using it
for such delicate operations; and it is for this reason that we seem
to know her more intimately than it is possible to know Mary
Wordey Montagu.
To a much slighter degree Walpole is also a less intimate writer
than those who remain for our consideration. He is witty and enter-
taining nearly always, but we might find as much exhilaration, and
often of the same kind, in reading the comedies of Congreve or
the essays of Addison or the Philosophical Dictionary of Voltaire.
It is a wonderful thing to be so copiously amusing and interesting,
but Walpole wrote letters that were both these to so many people
that it is hardly to be wondered if sometimes the tone of intimacy
grew faint. Only to a very few is there any true unveiling. In Gray
and Cowper, however, we find the personal touch everywhere.
Both maintain the decent reserve that is needful to save the feelings
of their friends from being harrowed in times of disturbance, Gray
even more than Cowper; but in each there is a transparency that
leaves even the most trivial sentiment clear to the reader.
None of our writers is lacking in real spontaneity, although it
takes different forms, from the elaborate stateliness of Lord Chester-
field to the 'divine chit-chat' of Cowper. In Lady Mary the choice
of subject and the manipulation of ideas, especially of ideas of wit,
seem at times to be just a little dictated by the effort to make the
impression produced. I do not mean that she does not make it, but
that her effort to do so is visible. In Chesterfield long practice has
obviously made it completely spontaneous to write in a manner
2OI
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
that in others would be formal and even forced. Walpole ingeni-
ously combines the rhythm and tone of conversational speech with
just enough of formal structure to give spice to a manner of perfect
ease. Gray, at his most happy, is almost as good in this way; but
sometimes, especially in his more critical utterance, his sentences
become a little wrought. Of the clarity and ease of Cowper I have
already said enough: although Coleridge's phrase, 'divine chit-chat,'
was applied to his poetry, it is the perfect description for the letters
a*, well.
Even the few quotations from the letters with which this section
has been illustrated will establish beyond any possibility of doubt
the richness of the letter as a self-portrayal of character. It would
be hard for a biographer to give a clearer and more brilliant image
of a human being than these six writers have given of themselves,
and no biography of them could be successful that did not draw
heavily on their letters for light and shadow. Biography, indeed, of
Walpole and Cowper has been a sort of marginal commentary on
their letters; stray facts and explanatory notes have been added,
missing links have been supplied in those places where the subject
was misinformed, uninformed, or too reticent to write himself, and
inferences or psychological interpretations drawn from the evi-
dence: but their main outlines are forever contained in the letters.
Equally rich are these letters for understanding the history of
the times their writers lived in. Only a historian of the most tran-
scendent genius could throw so clear and searching a light on the
reign of Louis XIV as we may glean from a reflective reading of
Madame de Sevigne, the Memoirs of the Due de Saint-Simon, and
the Letters of Pascal. And the sensitive heart of Madame de Sevigne,
murmuring in the midst of the gilded salons and the marble foun-
tains in their alleys of cypress, is no less illuminating than the Duke's
withering rancor or the lonely agonies of the philosopher. In Eng-
land the sharpness and intelligence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
throws an arid light on many features of her pragmatic age.
Lady Mary really belonged in many ways to the period of Queen
Anne, but she lived, busy, energetic, gossiping, traveling, and
reading, into a later day. In it, Lord Chesterfield, if not so prominent
in politics as he had desired to be, was a conspicuous because a
representative figure. He epitomized a kind of ideal; he was the
figure that many wished to be. Just as Castiglione's Book of the
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HEYDAY OF THE LETTER-WRITERS
Courtier had symbolized the ideal Renaissance aspiration of the
gentleman, with his star-ranging desire to be versed in everything,
from swordsmanship to poetry and musicand as Sir Philip Sidney
had represented almost the attainment of that ideal for his Eliza-
bethan contemporaries, so that Spenser had enshrined him in The
Faerie Queens as Sir Caiidore, the perfect courteous knight-so
Chesterfield represents what the serious judgment of his age ad-
mired. In him the wit and grace that the English nobility had
brought over from France with Charles IFs restoration had lost
their frivolity and vice, and become the instruments of serious pur-
pose, the tools for carving out a career. Without a trace of the
Utopian and visionary (as there had been in the lofty ambitions of
the Renaissance) he set up a clear and unsentimental picture of
attainable ends: not contemptuous of virtue, but aiming only at the
practical. The sanity and balance, the coolness and steadiness of
aim, the lack of poetry and the enthronement of reason that marked
the age are given a corporeal form in the Earl of Chesterfield.
The second half of the century in all its changing colors and
excitements is no less clearly mirrored in our later three letter-
writers. For fifty years the world of fashion, the theatre, war and
politics, literature, gossip and scandal, the fine arts, scintillates in
the pages of Horace Walpole's airy monologues. His gaiety, so-
phistication, worldliness, and dilettantism, and the dislike for 'en-
thusiasm' he shared with Gibbon and most of his educated
contemporaries, the contempt for the visionary and the imaginative:
in all he is characteristic of his age. And he is characteristic too of its
first reachings-out after those very elements of romance it so ro-
bustly despised, in the fantastic gingerbread of Strawberry Hill and
in the supernatural machinery of The Castle of Otranto with its
mediaeval trappings.
The breath of the Middle Ages stirred in Gray, also, as we have
seen; and a love for the awful, frightening grandeur of the Alps.
The balanced judgment of the age he tempered with deep feeling,
though pensive and restrained; he melted away the frozen glitter of
its wit and let it grow humane.
In Cowper too some of the same mingling of elements can be
seen. If all his critical judgments still partake of the dogmas of
classicism, the emotional tone is again and again that of a new age.
The enjoyment of fresh country sights and sounds, the wit which
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
is playfulness rather than satire, the brooding melancholy, the
passionate sympathizing with the sorrowing or oppressed, the long-
ing for escape to 'a lodge in some vast wilderness' where his ear and
heart may be no longer pained by the cruelty of 'man's obdurate
heart*: both in his poetry and his letters these sentiments constantly
appear. In such feelings Cowper is aware of the great outer world
stretching beyond the horizons of Olney and Weston Underwood.
They appear and disappear amid the daily hues of rural life. Bright
and sober by turns, these letters are water-colors transparent with
the essence of those remotest backwaters that, as much as Walpole's
swarming London, were the reality of changing England.
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EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
VII
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
The Doctor as Biographer
WE HAVE already heard Cowper engaged in reading Johnson's
Lives of the Poets, subscribe himself Very much the
biographer's humble admirer.' His admiration of Johnson's critical
dicta, to be sure, was somewhat tempered by indignation at the
treatment of Milton, and by a number of other judgments with
which he did not agree. But the sharpness of the characterization
excited his enthusiasm. 'What vanity, what petulance in Pope! How
painfully sensible of censure, and yet how restless in provocation!
To what mean artifices could Addison stoop, in the hope of in-
juring the reputation of his friend! Savage, how sordidly vicious, and
the more condemned for the pains that are taken to palliate his
vices . . . What a sycophant to the public taste was Dryden;
sinning against his feelings, lewd in his writings, though chaste in
his conversation.'
Aliveness and vigor coursed through the pages of the book that
could arouse such feeling comment. And, indeed, to the modern
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
reader, the sinewy quality of Johnson's mind is one of the strongest
enjoyments provided in the Lives of the Poets; we read as much to
taste the character of Johnson as to learn the characters of Waller,
Dryden, Prior, and Pope. His judgments we read with interest
sometimes because they are so penetrating and sometimes because
they are Johnson's. For, although Johnson was occasionally prej-
udiced to the degree of being fantastic, he was never merely absurd.
Within even his most violent oddities there is some core of sense
or reason, or, at the least, of mental power. These qualities he ap-
plied as successfully to the characters of the poets he deals with as
to their muse. The result is a work bristling with trenchant and
revealing comments on almost every page.
The Lives of the Poets is, of course, not pure biography, but
biography alternating with and partly existing for the sake of
literary criticism. Its fifty-two narratives, indeed, some of them
running to over a hundred pages and a number to only three or
four, Johnson originally wrote as introductions to a publisher's
collected edition of the major English poets.
The art of biography, nevertheless, fascinated him, and he had
given it much thought. Insatiably curious always about the strange
manifestations of human character, he seized avidly on any trivial
detail that could throw light on individual personality, and he had
little interest in Theophrastian generalizations. In his passion for
psychologizing, he was always turning human qualities inside out,
testing them, analyzing. Mere surfaces never satisfied him; he must
always probe for what they meant within. This tendency led him
to realize that the biographer must often 'pass slightly over those
performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness' and
'lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute
details of daily life . . . Thus, Sallust, the great master of nature,
has not forgot in his account of Catiline, to remark, that his walk
was now quick, and again slow, as an indication of a mind moving
with violent commotion.'
He realized the truth of Plutarch's observation that 'a short
saying, or a jest,' may 'distinguish a person's real character more
than the greatest sieges or the most important battles.' He noted
that we may sometimes learn more of a man from 'a short conversa-
tion with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied nar-
rative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral.' But to
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EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
these perceptions Johnson added another quality of historic Im-
portance: an aversion to panegyric. In this he cut straight through
a quarrel that recurred frequently in the nineteenth century and
that still turns up today. For him truth was a passion; and the
truth about a human being could never be unadulterated praise.
Essential truth was a necessary quality in any story whatsoever.
*A story is a picture either of an individual or of human nature in
general. If it is false, it is a picture of nothing.' The biography must
be, therefore, so far as we can make it so, absolutely and uncon-
ditionally true.
Johnson was no painstaking grabber, to be sure, in 'the rubbish
of antiquity.' He worked, he has recorded, *in my usual way t dila-
torily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and
haste.' He wrote out of a full mind, a retentive memory that had
gathered and stored a tremendous mass of floating tradition, but for
all the mechanical labor of verification and settlement of details he
had small respect. 'To adjust the minute events of literary history
is tedious and troublesome': he refused to be bothered with it. Such
activities required 'no great force of understanding,' but were the
drudgery of a literary termite.
The truth Johnson believed in was truth in spirit and in all larger
outlines. He believed in consequence that we may not rightly con-
ceal even the blemishes. 'There are many who think it an act of
piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, even when they
can no longer suffer by their detection. We therefore see whole
ranks of characters adorned with uniform panegyric and not to be
known from one another but by extrinsic and casual circumstances.'
No duty to the dead can justify suppression of the truth: 'If we
owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect
to be laid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.' Palliation of the
evils in a man's behavior our knowledge of the circumstances may
lead to our making, but if we cannot persuade ourselves to tell the
whole truth about him as we know it, we have no right to publish
his biography.
These, then, are the principles and the character on which John-
son's biography are founded, insistence on truth, on vivid detail,
on psychological insight. We may see how he exemplified them in
his work.
The Life of Savage was composed long before the others as a
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
separate work in 1744, and only later included in the larger scheme.
It has a special character, for Savage was not a man of amiable
disposition or of admirable character, but he had befriended John-
son when the latter was young, and loyalty was one of Johnson's
strong traits. He told Boswell in his old age of another such, 'He
was a vicious man, but very kind to me. If you call a dog "Hervey,"
I shall love him.' A conflict between truth and loyalty was set:
there were ways in which Savage had been grossly ill-used by those
who should have befriended him, and yet his own conduct was so
very bad that perhaps it made understandable their reluctance to
help him. Johnson's essential honesty is nowhere more tried than
in his dealing with his friend's career.
Richard Savage claimed to be the illegitimate son of Anne
Countess of Macclefield by the Earl Rivers. According to him the
lady had formerly admitted and then decided to deny their rela-
tionship, and had only with reluctance paid for his early education
in penurious surroundings. The relentless antagonism of this parent,
indeed, would impress us as an invention of Savage's, if it were not
clear that Johnson, who was not a credulous man, continued in
later years to believe in it. Defrauded of his father's intention of
providing for him by a lying tale of the mother's, Savage was for a
time befriended by Sir Richard Steele and then estranged through
the malice of a talebearer. Subsequently he drifted into a career of
precarious authorship.
But misfortune still pursued him. In a cofTee-Jiouse brawl a man
was killed, and Savage was accused of his death. 'The witnesses
which appeared against him,' Johnson writes, 'were ... a common
strumpet, a woman by whom strumpets were entertained, and a
man by whom they were supported; and the character of Savage
was by several persons of distinction asserted to be that of a modest,
inoffensive man, not inclined to broils or to insolence, and who had,
to that time, been only known for his misfortunes and his wit.' The
judge, however, was prejudiced, and, according to Savage, ha-
rangued the court against him: 'Gentlemen of the jury, you are to
consider that Mr Savage is a very great man, a much greater man
than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he wears very fine clothes,
much finer clothes than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he
has abundance of money in his pocket, much more money than you
or I, gentlemen of the jury; but, gentlemen of the jury, is it not a
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EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that Mr Savage should
therefore kill you or me, gentlemen of the jury?' Whether he was
guilty or no, this dispassionate handling of his trial resulted in a
conviction.
He was pardoned, however, by the intercession of Queen Caro-
line. For a while Lord Tyrconncl became his patron, but Savage~
the *modest' and 'inoffensive' introduced riotous companions to his
Lordship's wine-cellar and sold books stamped with his arms, IE
being usual with Mr Savage, when he wanted a small sum, to take
his books to the pawnbroker/
Generous and compassionate as Johnson tells us he was by nature,
it was his unfortunate habit to make too free with the possessions
of his friends. Favors he asked of them 'without the least submission
or apparent consciousness of dependence,' and looked *upon a com-
pliance with his request' as no great obligation; 'but a refusal was
resented by him as an affront, or complained of as an Injury; nor
did he readily reconcile himself to those who . . . gave him after-
wards any intimation that they expected to be repaid/ As a house-
guest he 'would prolong his conversation till midnight, without
considering that business might require his friend's application in
the morning;' but, once in bed, it was equally difficult to arouse
him for dinner.
Of traits like these Lord Tyrconnel ultimately tired. Though
there must, Johnson says, have been intimations of 'coldness, peev-
ishness, or neglect' for some time before the break, 'everyone that
knew Savage will readily believe that to him it was sudden as a
stroke of thunder that though he might have transiently suspected
it, he had never suffered any thought so unpleasing to sink into his*
mind.' In the few strokes of this characterization almost the whole
man is palpable.
Various projects for improving his circumstances occupied him,
but he was unable to direct his own conduct *an irregular and
dissipated life made him the skve of every passion/ 'By imputing
none of his miseries to himself, he ... was never made wiser by
his sufferings, nor preserved by one misfortune from falling into
another. He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps
on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least
forgetting it, to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness which
xvere dancing before him; and willingly turned his eyes from the
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
light of reason, when it would have discovered the illusion, and
shown him, what he never wished to see, his real estate.' He sank
lower and lower, and died ultimately of a fever in a debtors' prison.
'His mind was in an uncommon degree vigorous and active.' 'His
judgment was eminently exact both with regard to writings and to
men' although he never arrived at a realization of how men would
respond te his own insolencies and aggressions. His manner was
ingratiating, and to this fact much of the forbearance of others may
be laid. 'He was never vehement or loud, but at once modest and
easy, open and respectful . . .' 'He was compassionate . . . but
when he was provoked (and very small offences were sufficient to
provoke him), he would prosecute his revenge with the utmost
acrimony . . . His friendship was therefore of little value . . .'
But his abilities were better than either his fortune or his capacity
for discipline; and his faults 'were not easily to be avoided by a
great mind, irritated by perpetual hardships . . .' A wise man
would not 'presume to say,' Johnson concludes, * "Had I been in
Savage's condition, I should have lived or written better than
Savage." '
Such are the main outlines of his characterization. The qualities
in it that tend to produce compassion are the numerous instances
that are given of the ways in which Savage's hopes were disap-
pointed, his schemes balked of success, or his friends and protectors
disgusted with him. However justified their conduct, the steadily
increasing burden of misery is affecting. The tone is one of phil-
osophic generalization, which by weighing and explaining seems to
extenuate without denying the vices which are plainly stated. So
judicious, in fact, is this tone that we may need a little reflection to
realize that, for all his brilliance and specious charm, Savage was
an ingrate and a dissipated scoundrel. But the sympathy of his
friend, although it weights the style, never impairs the rightness of
the judgment. Johnson's gentleness of feeling leads neither to the
hiding of a single harsh fact nor to the slightest unbending of his
rigid morality.
I have examined the Life of Savage in some detail because it is
a crucial test of Johnson's devotion to truth in biography. If there
was ever any temptation for him to soften the truth it was in deal-
ing with Savage. Against the temptations of antagonism, however,
although he tried to be on his guard, it was difficult for him to be
2*2
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
altogether proof. There were few poets more calculated to
him to rage than Milton. Johnson was a devout believer In the
Church of England, and Milton had been an independent who ac-
tacked the bishops of that Church; Johnson was a Tory and a
Royalist, and Milton had fustified the beheading of a king
memory Johnson revered. Johnson's literary taste was strongly
classical and 'correct 1 ; Milton had wrested the genius of Engfisii
into a highly individual idiom and even syntax of his own. On all
these counts Johnson was prejudiced against Milton, and he seldom
misses an opportunity for laying open his defects.
Milton had found it unbecoming that men designed for orders
should act in loose comedies, 'writhing and unboning their clergy
limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculos, buffoons,
and bawds . . .' 'This is sufficiently peevish,* Johnson comments^
'in a man who . . . relates with great luxuriance the compensation
which the pleasures of the theatre afford him. Plays were therefore
only criminal when they were acted by academics.' This outburst
overlooks the fact that Milton's condemnation is of their acting in
certain kinds of performance; and surely what it may be permissible
to see it may not be fitting that one in a position of moral respon-
sibility present.
For Milton's republicanism Johnson can find no explanation but
'an envious hatred of greatness,' (ignoring Milton's loyalty to
Cromwell), 'a sullen desire of independence,* a 'petulance impatient
of control,' and a 'pride disadainful of superiority.' 'It has been ob-
served,' Johnson goes on ironically, 'that they who most loudly
clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it'; and he finds in
Milton's writings 'something like a Turkish contempt for females,*
and accuses him of being 'severe and arbitrary' with his daughters
that they 'might not break the ranks.' And, indeed, though there
is some exaggeration in the conclusion that 'He thought women
made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion,' the para-
doxical accusation is not entirely unfounded.
Vanity and frugality in bestowing praise are also scored against
Milton: He 'considered his mention of a name as ... a certain
preservative from oblivion;' and 'scarcely any man ever wrote so
much, and praised so few.' It becomes, however, almost ludicrous
to behold the Doctor belaboring Milton for returning home at the
beginning of the Parliamentary struggle and setting up a school.
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ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
*Let not our veneration of Milton forbid us to look with some
degree of merriment ... on the man who hastens home because
his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and, when he
reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a
private boarding-school.'
And then, conscious that his antagonism has carried him too far,
but unable to persuade himself to cancel the sentence, he adds that
there is no need to 'excuse an act which no wise man will consider
as in itself disgraceful. His father was alive; his allowance was not
ample; and he supplied its deficiencies by an honest and useful em-
ployment.' 'Milton was not a man who could become mean by a
mean employment.' If Milton's needs forced him to supplement his
allowance, there is nothing so laughable in Vapouring away his
patriotism* in earning a living instead of perishing in public spirit.
Johnson could not resist the fling; he could repair it, however, and
he did so. His basic honesty conquered again, and he gives us the
means of seeing through his own misrepresentation.
In his flashes of description he limns character again and again
by the tersest of means. Addison, at the first production of Cato,
'frighted lest he be thought a promoter of insurrection,' and
wandering 'through the whole exhibition behind the scenes with
restless and unappeasable solicitude'; Pope, who would have men
believe that it diverted him to be satirized by others, reading a
pamphlet by Colley Gbber, 'his features written with anguish';
Swift's reply to an angry accusation of being the author of a certain
lampoon: 'Mr Bettesworth, I was in my youth acquainted with
great lawyers, who, knowing my disposition to satire, advised me
that if any scoundrel or blockhead whom I had lampooned should
ask, "Are you the author of this paper?" I should tell him that I
was not the author; and therefore I tell you, Mr Bettesworth, that
1 am not the author of these lines'what a flood of light each of
these small episodes pours on the man of whom it is told!
And Johnson does not do this once, he does it repeatedly. There
is Addison's calm arrogance in explaining his unreadiness in con-
versational wit by the remark that 'he could draw bills for a thou-
sand pounds, though he had not a guinea in his pocket.' There is
the witty story of Prior at the Paris opera silencing his enthusiastic
companion who had persisted in singing with the performer: the
poet 'fell to railing at the performer with all the terms of reproach
214
EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY
he could collect,' till the Frenchman was moved to
'I know,' said Prior, *mais II ehante si haut, que je ne
entendre.' There is the picture of the unfortunate Gay, to
read his tragedy The Captives before the Princess of Wales, and so
nervous with reverence that, advancing to her he 'stumbled ac i
stool, and falling forwards threw down a weighty Japan screen, 11
Not only the episodes, but the formal characterizations and the
intimate details of the habits, physical idiosyncrasies, and appear-
ance of his subjects are admirable. Pope's spider-like shape, 'protu-
berant behind and before,' his thin legs, which he enlarged 'with
three pairs of stockings . . . drawn on and off by the maid/ his
bodice of stiff canvas, without which he could barely hold himself
erect, his extreme sensibility to cold, which forced him to wear a
fur doublet under his shirt: how vividly Johnson makes us see die
distorted and pathetic figure, humanized by the brilliance of the
animated and glowing eyes! The deathbed scene is painted circum-
stantially, with its blurring of his vision and his plaint of 'inability
to think.' 'Bolingbroke sometimes wept over him in this state of
helpless decay, and being told' that during the intervals of delirium
Pope 'was always saying something kind either of his present or
absent friends, and that his humanity seemed to have survived his
understanding, answered, "It has so." ... At another time he said,
"I have known Pope these thirty years, and value myself more in
his friendship than" his grief then suppressed his voice.'
Johnson's comments on his subjects are often witty and pene-
trating. Pope had been obliged to construct a subterranean passage
to a garden across a public road, and had proceeded to decorate
its walls and call it a grotto. 'A grotto is not often the wish or
pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit
than exclude the sun-, but Pope's excavation was requisite as an
entrance to his garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their
defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity
produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.'
His characterization of the metaphysical poets, in the biography
of Cowley, is famous: 'If ... that be considered as wit which
is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon
its first production, acknowledged to be just; ... to wit of this
kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are
often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither
215
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed
them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of ingenuity
they were found . . . The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by
violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations,
comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subt-
lety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement
dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom
pleased.'
The paragraphs that follow go on to redress the balance of these
vigorous antitheses which, by themselves, would constitute a some-
what biased description of the poetical achievements of Donne,
Herbert, Vaughan, or Crashaw. His comparison of Pope and Dry-
den is equally famous and much more penetrating: Dryden's mind,
he says, had a larger range, and his education was superior; 'Dry-
den knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local
manners.' 'Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities,
and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation;
Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the
roller.' Of genius, with some hesitation he decides that Dryden had
more, but not that Pope had .only a little; and if Dryden 'has
brighter paragraphs, he has not better poems.' Dryden's composi-
tion was hasty and careless; Pope's slow and cautious, accumulating
'all that study might produce or chance might supply. If the flights
of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing.
If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's the heat is more
regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope
never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment,
and Pope with perpetual delight.' No more brilliant words have
ever been written on this subject.
Both in the biographical and the critical parts of his work in
the Lives of the Poets, Johnson shows himself easily equal to nearly
all the demands the subjects make upon him. There were places,
among the very minor figures, where neither his interest nor the
information he presents is great, but in almost every important
instance his ability rises to the occasion.
Johnson's work, furthermore, is a magnificent anticipation of a
kind of biography that, especially in recent years, has become of
increasing importance. This is the critical biography, by now al-
most a separate genre, which centers its attention on the develop-
216
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
rnent of a man's artistic career. Sometimes, like Mr Van Wyck
Brooks' study of Mark Twain, it may employ a psychoanalytic
method; sometimes, like that of Mr Bernard De Voro, It may be
sociological and deny the psychoanalytic. Again, like Mr Newton
Arvin's Hawthorne^ it may fuse both methods But In any case,
the primary emphasis is not upon the man as man, but upon the
man as literary artist. His career is examined to see how It explains
the artist, and the elucidation and evaluation of his work is die
central aim. Now, in a less formal way, these are certainly dominant
among Johnson's purposes. Anecdotes there are, introduced for
their own sakes, but mostly in revealing the character of their sub-
ject they also illuminate the poet. And nearly always the biogra-
phies build up to and support the critical observations with which
they conclude.
All the major qualifications of the biographer Johnson had in
an eminent degree. He was honest. With some effort he could hold
his prejudices within bounds. He had enormous grasp and powers
of memory. His judgment was strong, clear, and decided. He had
reflected on the principles of biography and knew his own mind
about it. His powers of construction were marked. He possessed
psychological insight and a flair for the revealing trait or episode.
With all these abilities of the biographer, Johnson, if he had tried,
might have written formal biography of the highest eminence. Even
in the short and hastily written Lives of the Poets he is always in-
teresting and often richly rewarding.
The Mystery of Mr Boswell
When James Boswell was presented to Dr Johnson, he was a
young man of twenty-three and the distinguished writer was al-
ready fifty-four. Boswell has described the meeting himself. It took
place in the back parlor of Mr Thomas Davies, a bookseller. 'I was
much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of
which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell where I come
from." "From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr Johnson,"
said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." I
am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as a light pleasantry
to soothe and conciliate him, and not as a humiliating abasement at
the expense of my country. But ... he seized the expression "come
217
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
from Scotland," which I used in the sense of being of that country;
and retorted, "That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your
countrymen cannot help." This stroke stunned me . . .'
The episode is characteristic of both men. There is the ele-
phantine and crushing pleasantry of Johnson, which, without being
really conclusive, is delivered with the force of a detonation. There
is the absurdity of Boswell, no less exquisite in his assurance to the
reader that he menat no disloyalty to the land of his birth than
in the feeble effort to ingratiate Johnson. His triumph, however,
tickled the Doctor a good deal, and Boswell ultimately encouraged
himself enough to wait on him at his home. So the celebrated
friendship began which lasted for the remaining twenty-one years
of the older man's life, and which enabled Boswell to write his
monumental work.
Johnson's life not only supplied Boswell with the materials of
his biography, -his example supplied a suggestion of the method
and his writings and conversation provided instructive rules and
principles. In the very opening pages of the Life, Boswell quotes
those generalizations of Johnson on the art of biography that I have
included in the preceding section of this chapter. Several passages
in the Life record sayings of Johnson on the subject, and there
can hardly be much doubt that Johnson developed the theme on
occasions that Boswell may not have written down. Johnson's
appetite for episode and character was insatiable. 'I love anecdotes,'
he remarked to Boswell at Edinburgh, and he was forever telling or
listening to them. He had read a good deal of BoswelTs Journal
of a Tour to the Hebrides, in which Boswell essayed the method
later used in the Life, and had given Boswell the benefits of his
criticism. Boswell was no fool; he had profited by much specula-
tion on all these points.
For the controlling design of his work he had gone thus to
Johnson's own rule and example. Gathered within the firm sweep
of the plan we find a circle of further merits. The use of letters
and original documents which the complaisance of Boswell led
him to attribute to Mason, in his Life of Gray, had of course been
seen before; for example, in Walton's Lives. The conversational
anecdote we find in Spence giving brilliance to the circle of Alexan-
der Pope; but Johnson's remarkable powers as a talker and Bos-
well's unusual memory for the very idiom and manner of his friend
218
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
enable the Life of Johnson to outshine by far anything of the
ever attempted. His style, finally, without being or
ular, Is easy, flowing, and unobtrusive. Indeed, Boswelfs style is
deceptive, for it has no flowers of rhetoric, and is still singularly
fitted to its purposes, amazingly just in its choice of the word that
will be found quietly right, and sometimes exceedingly subtle in
its use of suggestion or insinuation.
Boswell was no fool, I have said, and yet perhaps this statement
needs to be amplified. For to many he has seemed an eccentric and
a buffoon, whose success might be explained on the ground of mere
luck: the luck of having an acute verbal memory, and the luck
of association with a man whose conversation was a rich expression
of his personality. Macaulay regarded him as a fool. Air Harold
Nicolson, while laboring his silliness and his lack of dignity, decides
that he was neither a fool nor a genius; but maintains the odd thesis
that biography 'does not require genius; it requires only a peculiar
form of talent.' The distinctions between these two indefinable I
am unable to appreciate.
Lytton Strachey, with more ingenuity, concludes that BoswclTs
snobbery, his absence of personal pride and shame, his unconven-
tionality, his asininity-that these qualities were precisely necessary
to the achievement of his work. 'Boswell triumphed,' he writes, 'by
dint of abandoning himself, through fifty years, to his instincts.'
If he had not been a snob, he would not have attached himself
or tried to attach himself-successively to Paoli, Wilkes, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Lord Chatham, and a host of others. If he had
had either pride or shame he could not have endured the personal
humiliations so often inflicted on him by the sharp rebukes of John-
son and could not have persuaded himself to reveal those shameful
scenes to his readers. If his mind had not possessed a certain freedom
from convention, an unusual flexibility of opinion, that pleased Dr
Johnson's own vigorous contempt of cant, that old lion might not
have been able to bear with his vices and absurdities. Add all these
things together, Strachey concludes, and you have the nature
uniquely necessary to BoswelTs unique performance.
The paradox is attractive, and yet is it true? Can a great literary
achievement be explained as the fortuitous result of a happy com-
bination of vices? Professor Walter Raleigh thought otherwise:
'The accident which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Bos-
219
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
well,' he admits, 'is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good
fortune in literary history.' But then 'Boswell was a man of genius;
the idle paradox which represents him in the likeness of a lucky
dunce was never tenable by serious criticism. . . He had simplicity,
csndour, fervour, a warmly affectionate nature, a quick intelligence,
and a passion for telling all that he knew.' And for Sir James
Stephen, Boswell was 'the prince of biographers,' and 'a man of
true genius however coarse his feelings and however flagrant his
self-conceit.'
Now it certainly cannot be denied that Boswell was often silly,
and that he had all the other vices attributed to him, and nearly
all of them in ludicrous and sometimes contemptible ways. He was
a drunkard, a wastrel, and a libertine. In vain he tried to reform,
taking under 'a venerable yew' an oath to abstain, to limit himself
to four glasses of wine at dinner and a pint afterwards. His number-
less and preposterous love-affairs are solemnly narrated in his letters
to his friend Temple, who was a quiet Devonshire clergyman. 'One
progresses with marvellous exhilaration,' says Mr Strachey, 'from
Miss W t ("just such a young lady as I could wish for the partner
of my soul") to Zelide ("upon my soul, Temple, I must have her"),
and so to the Signora, and the Moffat woman ("can I do better
than keep a dear infidel for my hours of Paphian bliss?"), and the
Princess ("here every flower is united"), . . . and La Belle Irlan-
daise ("just sixteen, formed like a Grecian nymph, with the sweet-
est countenance, full of sensibility, accomplished, with a Dublin
education"), and Mrs Boswell ("I am fully sensible of my happiness
in being married to so excellent a woman"), and Miss Silverton
("in the fly with me, an amiable creature who has been in France.
T can unite little fondnesses with perfect conjugal love"), and Miss
Bagnal ("a Ranelagh girl, but of excellent principles, in so much
that she reads prayers to the servants in her father's family, every
evening. 'Let me see such a woman,' cried I") . . . and but the
catalogue is endless.' His health grew enfeebled, his wife died, his
estates melted away, his drunkenness became confirmed, his humili-
ations piled up. But he had been the friend of Paoli and of Dr John-
son; he had the most extraordinary confidence that the biography
of his great friend would make his reputation. Through poverty
and drunkenness he toiled on. Seven years after Johnson's death
the task was accomplished. He survived its completion four years.
220
EIGHTEENTH CEXTUftY
But if Boswel! was sensual, drunken,
to maudlin self-pity and melancholy, he had other qualities without
which he would not for long have been tolerated in the Johnson
circle. Indeed, the man who could draw Rousseau into a correspond-
ence, make a friend of Paoli, and obtain the affection of Johnson B
by those very facts proclaimed a man of mark Boswell fitted weH
into the 'Literary Club,* even though he tells us he was almost
blackballed at first. The only one of its members who did not like
him a dislike that was reciprocated was Gibbon, Boswell was
what Johnson called a 'clubbable' man, a man easy and pleasant to
be with, either alone or in a group. It was a quality Johnson, who
hated loneliness, prized highly.
He was free from conventional opinions, in some ways even more
so than Johnson himself. One of Johnson's favorite injunctions was,
'Free your mind of cant, Sir,' -do not repose in merely conven-
tional authority, but strive to pierce to the bottom of things with
your reason. With few was it so seldom needful to shout that com-
mand as with Boswell. *You and I,' Johnson commended him, 'do
not talk from books.'
He had a tremendous zest for life, always enthusiastic, always
interested, willing to canvas and discuss any subject, willing to
conceive any hypothesis, able, in the fantasy of his imagination,
to propound even absurdities and nonsense. The aliveness of Bos-
well's intelligence is everywhere in his books, even when he is being
a clown. And although as a lawyer he let his practice fall to pieces,
and idled away his time in London, of his literary industry there
can be no question. There he worked with an earnestness and a
sense of form that placed his biography in the supreme rank it
occupies.
Eighteenth Century Lion
BoswelFs Life of Johnson has sometimes been dismissed as no
more than a mosaic of quotations fitted together in date order,
achieving no form, and presenting of its central figure a charac-
terization either blurred or contradictory. But BoswelTs own state-
ment that he made a choice of the most illuminating out of vast ac-
cumulations of materials is substantiated by recent scholarship; and
those who find contradictions in Johnson beyond what we should
normally expect in a man are guilty of incomprehension. Any man
221
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
of whose conversation so much was recorded would be bound to
present some contradictions, and to have said some things he did
not really mean. Johnson himself confessed, 'Nobody, at times,
talks more laxly than I do.' But the bulk of Johnson's opinions are
consistent and solid. A modern reader may disagree with them, but
if he examines them with any effort at understanding he can hardly
find them eccentric, prejudiced, or absurd, as they have often been
accused of being. To do so is to show lack of historical imagina-
tion.
Johnson was a Tory. Toryism has gone out of fashion since the
eighteenth century, but its philosophy is not therefore completely
unsound. A Tory is simply a person who believes that the bad in
human nature is held down (even to the degree it is) by such un-
certain restraints that he thinks it wiser to accept a certain number
of evils in our institutions than through change to risk overthrow-
ing the habits of discipline. The evils of mechanical adjustment
that develop from time to time, institutions themselves have been
devised to deal with, and their authority should not be impaired
by what the Tory would consider a flighty-minded tinkering with
their operations. Only when all the resources of the accumulated
wisdom and tradition of civilization have been drained and proved
fruitless will he approve a very careful innovation. Violent and
hasty changes release the most destructive passions, and Dr Johnson,
had he lived until the French Revolution, would have pointed with
triumphant indignation to its excesses as a vindication of his position.
Now obviously much can be said for these contentions, and indeed
the chief question is to exactly what degree the normal course of
people's behavior may be unsettled by a proposed change, and at
exactly what point an evil becomes so vicious that humanity de-
mands risking the change. The answer must be different at different
times, but it is not an answer easily arrived at.
Such was Johnson's Toryism. He thought there was very little
reason to prefer one set of institutions to another, but that settled
institutions were a necessity. 'I would not give half a guinea,' he
said, 'to live under one form of government rather than another
. . . If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they
will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature
against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of govern-
ment.' He lived himself under a monarchy, and thought the mon-
222
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
archy should be retained; had he lived in a republic it would no
less have engaged his defense. Degrees of merit in governments
he thought very slight. Political events in his own time drew from
him a comment on the lack of superiority in public life, AH govern-
ments, he thought were apt to be administered in a muddling way
by the venal or incompetent. The only real test of a good govern-
ment was the degree of solicitude ic displayed for the poor.
For social position he had little respect. Dukes might be,
often were, blockheads; character and sense might be found in the
lowest ranks. But it was better for society that a duke should re-
**
main a duke and a porter a porter than that any attempt be made to
upset things by levelling ranks. Besides this, he disbelieved in the
sincerity of 'levellers.' He had proposed to a democratic lady who
tried to argue him into a belief in equality that she allow her foot-
man to join them at dinner: 'She has never liked me since. Sir, your
levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot
bear levelling up to themselves. They would all have some people
under them; why not then have some people above them?*
Again, marriage, as an institution, he approved of, but the details
were less important than that the contract have an understood
meaning and responsibility. 'I believe marriages would in general be
as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the lord
chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circum-
stances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.' Edu-
cation based on arousing competitive passions he strongly disap-
proved; 'by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you
lay the foundations of lasting mischief in people's characters. Super-
iority should proceed from enthusiasm for the thing done, not from
a mean desire to humble others.
We may not agree with all or even many of these views. But they
are not merely absurd, and they are completely consistent with
each other.
Johnson's religion firmly supported his social opinions. He was
a devout member of the Church of England. He believed in original
sin, and that belief reinforced his conviction that it was dangerous
to tamper with the restraints that held man's lower nature in
check. There was an underlying sadness in his heart of which his
sad philosophy was a true expression. He prized his own life little,
but he feared death; his deep consciousness of the sinfulness of the
223
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
human, heart made the after-life he believed in a thing of dread. 'His
thoughts upon this awful change,' Boswell says, 'were in general
fall of dismal apprehensions. His mind resembled the vast amphi-
theatre, the Coliseum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgment,
which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that,
like the wild beasts of the arena, were all around in cells, ready to be
let out upon him. After a conflict he drives them back into their
dens; but not killing them they were still assailing him.'
Like the elder Mill, however, he believed that life was a poor
thing at best. 'Man never is, but always to be blest,' he quoted Pope;
and asserted that 'happiness was very rare in human life.' Asked if
a man was not sometimes happy in the present, he replied, 'Never,
but when he is drunk.' He disliked those who asserted that they
were happy. 'It was all cant? he would cry; 'the dog knows he is
miserable all the time.' To a friend whose wife's sister had sup-
ported the statement that she was happy, he replied, 'If your sister-
in-law is really the contented being she professes herself, Sir, her
life gives the lie to every research of humanity; for she is happy
without health, without beauty, without money, and without under-
standing.'
Perhaps it was this underlying melancholy that made Johnson
so avid for company. He was unhappy alone, and would stay up
for hours postponing the time of parting. 'Sir,' he told Boswell,
'I am obliged to any man who visits me.' Under the stimulus of
companionship, his vigor of mind sustained him, controversy kept
him active, his native gusto awoke. For, although he was sad, he
had also a tremendous zest for experience; in spite of some infirmi-
ties his physical vitality was enormous; instinct made him savor
the richness of enjoyment.
A mere scene of bustling activity pleased him, and he and Bos-
well united in extolling the cheerfulness of Fleet Street, although
Johnson felt that 'the full tide of human existence is at Charing
Cross.' The infinitely varied stimuli of the metropolis made him feel
that it was the only great school of life, the only environment for
a man of intellectual activity. 'When a man is tired of London, he
is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.' And
to Boswell's provocative remark, "Sometimes I have been in the
humour of wishing to retire to a desert,' Johnson flashed back
sarcastically, 'Sir, you have desert enough in Scotland.'
224
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY APOGEE
All manifestations of life in a rich and copious form pleaded Kim.
He ate greedily and with immense relish, and 'he talked of good
eating with uncommon satisfaction.' "Some people," 1 he remarked,
'have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind,
what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and
very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who d>ej not mind his
belly will hardly mind anything else*' Once when he and Boswell
were sculling on the Thames and treated to a shower of Billings-
gate from some boatmen, Johnson enjoyed their hearty vituperation,
and gave them back oath for oath. No less did he enjoy the humors
of human nature. Remarking to a lady once that he had known all
the wits from Mrs Montague to Bet Flint, and learning that she
had not heard of the latter, he described her: *Oh, a fine character,
madam; she was habitually a slut and a drunkard, and occasionally
a thief and a harlot.'
His vitality showed itself most in his delight in argument. He
hated self-deception and intellectual dishonesty, and his arguments
were usually directed against those tendencies in his opponents.
The Arcadian romanticizing of the wild life of the Indian, for ex-
ample, which was fashionable in his day, filled him with disgust.
A gentleman quoted with approval the following reflection: 'Here
am I, free and urirestrained, amid the rude magnificence of Nature,
with this Indian woman by my side, and this gun, with which I
can procure food when I want it: what more can be desired for
human happiness?' Johnson: 'Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be im-
posed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish.
If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, Here am I with
this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?'
Vulgar notions repeated by rote annoyed him. 'My dear friend,'
he would say, 'clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other
people do; you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your humble servant."
You are not his most humble servant. You may say, "These are bad
times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.'* You
don't mind the times. You tell a man. "I am sorry you had such
bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet"
You don't care sixpence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk
in this manner; it is the mode of talking in society; but don't think
foolishly.'
The effort to separate conventional opinion, from sense occupied
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
much of his attention. People expressed horror at gambling; John-
son: 'Depend upon it, Sir, this is mere talk. Who is ruined by-
gaming? You will not find six instances in an age. There is a strange
rout made about deep play; whereas you have many more people
ruined by adventurous trade, and yet do not hear such an outcry
against it.' He would not bear with any attempt to put an amiable
face on human selfishness. 'The Irish,' he said, 'are a fair people;
they never speak well of one another.' 'To act from pure benevo-
lence is not possible to finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled
with vanity, interest, or some other motive.'
When Johnson thought people were wrong-headedly opposing
him, he was apt to carry rudeness to a fantastic degree. To a gentle-
man who said he could not understand one of Johnson's arguments,
he replied, *I can provide you with an argument, Sir; but I cannot
provide you with an understanding.' He would cut people short
with 'You don't see your way through the question, Sir,' 'I per-
ceive you are a vile Whig, Sir.' Commenting to Boswell once that
they had enjoyed a rousing discussion the previous night, he was
answered, 'Yes, Sir, you tossed and gored several people.' And to a
rather foolish remark of Boswell's about Pope's Dunciad, he ex-
claimed, 'It was worth while being a dunce then. Ah, Sir, hadst
thou lived in those days!'
There are occasional examples of credulity to be found in John-
son, but they are very few. The often-quoted hearsay opinion that
swallows 'conglobulate together, by flying round and round and
then all in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed
of a river' is balanced in the same conversation by his skepticism
about the common belief that the scorpion commits suicide. His
disposition to suspend judgment about the Cock-lane ghost im-
posture has been unfairly quoted against him, for Johnson there
was merely of opinion that there had not been enough decisive
evidence about apparitions in general to deny this one a priori; and
he later detected the cheat himself.
But, although Johnson was severe in his denunciations of error,
he voiced them without real indignation unless there was intention
to deceive. It was customary with him to say, 'Sir, he lies.' Truth
was so devious and hard to discover that it was a natural thing
for a man to lie often in his account of things. But when the lie
was made deliberately and with knowledge that it was falsehood,
226
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
then Johnson roared, *Sir, he lies, and he knows that he ie&.*
Although he was harsh to those who ventured to controvert
him, he was tender and affectionate to his friends. He never forgot
a kindness; we have already heard his gratitude to the memory of
Hervey. Though easily angered, he was readily brought to forgive-
ness by a few words of contrition; and when reflection convinced
him that he was the offender he was not slow to make amends. The
stout, redfaced, and middle-aged wife, who had seemed absurd to
his friends, he loved with the sincerest devotion and mourned after
her death for the remainder of his life. Bosweli quotes a praver
found after Johnson's own decease: 'O Lord! Governor of heaven
and earth, in whose hands are embodied and departed spirits, if thou
hast ordained the souls of the dead to minister to the living, and
appointed my departed wife to have the care of me, grant that 1
may enjoy the good effects of her attention and ministration,
whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams, or in any other
manner agreeable to thy government. Forgive my presumption, en-
lighten my ignorance, and however meaner agents are employed,
grant me the blessed influences of thy Holy Spirit, through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen'
Such are the leading outlines of the character Bosweli presents
to us. Of the more obvious physical characteristics, the rolling and
puffing figure, the snortings and noises, the slovenliness, the con-
vulsive movements, it is hardly necessary to speak: they have been
canvassed by all commentators from Macauiay to the present. It
is enough to remark that by an adroit insertion of bits of descrip-
tion from time to time, by dropping a word here and there about
his manner, his gait, his intonations, or way of pronouncing his
words, Bosweli makes us as vividly aware of the outward man and
his oddities as we are of his inward disposition. The minute pic-
torical touches by which our overwhelrning consciousness of John-
son's physical presence is implanted in us are among the most subtle
and brilliant in BoswelTs whole technique.
And Bosweli is dramatic, too. With so slight variations in John-
son's fortunes to narrate (for Bosweli met him when he was already
old and famous, and the bulk of his book deals with the later years),
Bosweli makes capital of the slightest things. Johnson does not all
ac once become clear to us, but disengages himself from the vague
and reverential image of 'the Sage' only little by little, as skilfully
227
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
embedded details make their contributions, Johnson's horror of
death, for example, tempered by his religious faith, Boswell does
not generalize upon until there have been several conversations in
which Johnson expresses the utmost agitation at the continuance of
the subject. His oddities, like the collection of orange peel (the pur-
pose of which he refused to divulge) and his superstitious touching
of lamp-posts, are introduced casually before they are made the
basis of comment. And equally skilful is Boswell's use of Johnson's
friends and acquaintances, and Johnson's tilts with them, to achieve
miniature dramas.
His description of Goldsmith sulking on a sofa, pretending to be
uninterested while Johnson related what had passed during his
meeting with George III is one of these. Goldsmith refused to be
curious, Johnson went on; presently Goldsmith became ashamed
of his jealousy, and sprang up: 'Well, you acquitted yourself in this
conversation better than I should have done,' he burst out; 'for I
should have bowed and stammered through the whole of it.' Deeply
fond of his older friend as Goldsmith was, Johnson's greater con-
versational talents often roused in him a peevish resentment.
Sometimes, however, Goldsmith scored a victory, notably on the
occasion when Johnson laughed at his analysis of how to write
good animal fables. The little fishes, he had said, who petitioned
Jupiter to be changed into birds should be made to 'talk like little
fishes.' Observing Johnson shaking his sides, he exclaimed, 'Why, Dr
Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think: for if you were to
make little fishes talk, they would talk like WHALES.'
One of the most dramatic of Boswell's stories is that of how
he brought Johnson and Wilkes together. Wilkes had had a stormy
political career; his election to Parliament as member for Middlesex
had been three times annulled, and Johnson had called him 'a re-
tailer of sedition and obscenity.' Aware that if he had asked, 'Sir,
will you dine in company with Jack Wilkes?' Johnson would have
flown into a passion and answered, 'Dine with Jack Wilkes, Sir!
Pd as soon dine with Jack Ketch,' Boswell bided his time, and con-
veyed an invitation from Mr Dolly the bookseller to dine with him
on Wednesday next. Johnson: 'Sir, I am obliged to Mr Dilly. I will
wait upon him--'
'Provided, Sir, I suppose,' Boswell interrupted, 'that the company
which he is to have is agreeable to you?'
228
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
What do you mean, Sir? What do you me for? Do
think I am so ignorant of the world as to prescribe to a
what company he is to have at his table?" Boswcll innocently sug-
gested that Mr Dilly might possibly have 'some of what he tils
patriotic friends with him.*
'Well, Sir, and what then? What care / for his patriotic friends?
PohP
*I should not be surprised to find Jack Wilkes there.'
'And if Jack Wilkes should be there, what is that to me, Sir?
My dear friend, let us have no more of this. I am sorry to be
angry with you; but really it is treating me very strangely to talk
to me as if I could not meet any company whatever . . '
The evening arrived. One of the guests was Mr Arthur Lee, who
'could not but be very obnoxious to Johnson, for he was not only
a patriot^ but an American? 'Too, too, too,' Johnson made one of
his habitual mutterings under his breath. 'And who is that gentle-
man in lace?'
*Mr Wilkes, Sir.'
'This information,' Boswell tells us, 'confounded him still more,'
and he took up a book and pretended to read it in order to com-
pose his feelings.
Dinner was announced; Wilkes sat by Johnson's side, and over-
whelmed him with civilities. He helped him to some fine veal.
'Pray give me leave, Sir It is better here A little of the brown-
Some fat, Sir A little of the stuffing Some gravy . . .'
'Sir; sir; I am obliged to you Sir,' cried Johnson, bowing, and
turning his head to him. And by the end of the meal Johnson and
Wilkes were such friends that they joined to make teasing jokes
about Scotland at Boswell's expense.
This anecdote is a notable instance of Boswell's skill in bringing
out character as well as of his use of suspense. It brings into one
climactic flash, as many lesser moments that have preceded it have
made ready for his doing, the statement that Johnson was not always
free from 'the spirit of contradiction.' It has been glimpsed some-
times in Johnson's repartee, and now and then in his fractiousness
in argument; here it achieves the prominence of an entire little
story, with preparation, conflict, uncertainty of outcome, and d6-
nouement.
One more quotation I cannot refrain from giving, the innocent
229
MIGHTY TORRENT
of a Mr Edwards, an old fellow-collegian of Johnson's.
They hail not seen each other since 1729; in the meanwhile Johnson
old and famous. The two elderly men sat exchanging
reminiscences, and Edwards said, 'You are a philosopher, Dr John-
son. I have tried tew in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't
know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.'
Flemish Portrait
Never has a man in his very habit and daily appearance been
rendered more vividly or more fully than Johnson in Boswell's
pages. Boswell had in'deed not only written what he claimed, one
of the roost entertaining books in the world; he had portrayed a liv-
ing man in living words. The achievement, as I have already pointed
out, was no accident, but the result of forethought, labor, and
skill The method, although not original in any one detail,
was startlingly original in totality, and Boswell knew it to be so.
*It appears to me,* he wrote, 'that mine is the best plan of biography
that can be conceived; for my readers will as near as may be ac-
company Johnson in his progress, and, as it were, see each scene as
it happened.* And that is exactly what he gives us: a series of brilliant
pictures, so well colored, with the highlights and shadows so skil-
fully arranged, that, flashing them before us in rapid succession,
he gives us the illusion of actual presence and movement.
Instead of melting down my materials into one mass, and con-
stantly speaking in my own person, [he writes] ... I produce,
wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters, or conver-
sation, being convinced that this method is more lively, and will
make my readers better acquainted with him, than even most of those
were who actually knew him, but could know him only partially;
whereas here there is an accumulation of intelligence from various
points, by which his character is more fully understood and ap-
preciated.
Indeed, I cannot conceive a more perfect method of writing any
man's life than not only relating all the most important events of
it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said,
and thought ... I will venture to say that he will be seen in this
work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.
And he will be seen as he really was, for I profess to write, not
Ms panegyric, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great
and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect.
To be is he was, is l trs v
nma in this of but in every be
as well as light, aacl I faSsi I do
fa rec6iiHBetiie4 both by b and fa*
What I consider the peculiar of tfts
Si, the quantity k contains of Johnson's . .
I am fully aware of the objections may be tft its*
minuteness on oeeatiww of my of
tkm, and how happily k is for die petty of
by men of perfieM and fancy; few 1
remain firm and confident in my opinion, are
frequently characterisk, and always to
a distinguished man. I am therefore any-
tiling, however slight, which my Ilriis friend it
his wh3e to egress, with any degree of point, . . .
Out of the vast bulk of his materials Boswell painstakingly pre-
served, pieced, and arranged the extracts from Johnson's journal*,
his letters, his conversation all that had "any degree of point 1
skilfully interlarding them with remarks and reminiscences by others
thereby showing his subject from varying points of view and
with differing perspectives and molded them all into a structure
with his own lucid narrative and often wonderfully revealing com-
ment. His task was no slight one. It was not merely that his infor-
mation was so copious as to require a mind with unusual powers
of synthesis to draw from it any living and unified picture. His in-
formation was rich and full in an embarrassingly spotty way, and
discouragingly scant in others. Out of the seventy-five years of
Johnson's life, Boswell knew by personal acquaintance less than a
third. During their twenty-one years of friendship Boswell spent
a total of only 276 days with Johnson, scattered over various times
of which the longest consecutive period was probably their tour
together in Scotland.
How has Boswell managed to give us the feeling in his book of
knowing Johnson by spending long periods of time month after
month in his company? How are we prevented from feeling the
blanks when Boswell is away and cannot give us those snortings and
bludgeonings of conversation we know the man by? How are we
made almost unaware of the discrepancy between "the bulk of the
material dealing with Johnson's comfortable old age and the paucity
of that concerned with his years of struggle, discouragement, and
231
ONF MIGHTY TORRENT
poverty* Hw* has Bnwclt managed > to weight his picture for us
that our image of Johnson is never that of the thin, proud, hungry,
and jnnmsc ynitng publisher's hack; hut the Johnson he knew by
Mghr: the hcavy-scc old man in his dusty and wrinkled clothes, with
his woollen stockings, his rolling figure the strange combination he
made of the venerable and the grotesque?
Nor .ire these discrepancies merely imaginary. To the first fifty-
four years of Johnson's life-the period preceding their acquain-
tancc Boswell devoted only one-fifth his entire book, The re-
*
maining one-third of Johnson's life occupies four-fifths of the biog-
raphy, largely these startling proportions are concealed by the
adroitness with which Boswell gradually exchanges one scale of
treatment for another. For the early years of Johnson's life he had
littk material. But he not only had fuller information from Johnson's
own lips as he drew nearer to the time he knew himself, he obtained
reminiscences from others. He inserted a larger and larger propor-
tion of anecdote, of reminiscence, of quotations from letters, as he
came to that day in 1763 when he was drinking tea in Mr Davies's
back parlour and the great man made entrance. And so artistically
did he blend the two parts of his narrative into each other that we
hardly notice at what point anecdotes and conversation begin to
be reported, hardly notice when it begins to be Boswell himself who
was present and reports them. There we are at the Mitre or the
Club, with Goldsmith sulking or Mr Gibbon rapping his snuffbox,
and the peremptory sage shouting 'Clear your mind of cant, Sir!*
And we are only dimly aware of the starveling blackbrowed
youngster in the background as an occasional explanation of the
sad, courageous, and lovable old bully Boswell has given us.
In somewhat the same way Boswell has masked the hiatuses when
he was in Scotland struggling with his uncongenial duties at the
bar, trying to conciliate his father, the old Laird of Auchinleck,
trying to show how sensible he was of his 'happiness in being mar-
ried to so excellent a woman' as Mrs Boswell. There are letters
tltat Johnson wrote to him and to others, extracts from Johnson's
journal, reports of his sayings and doings gleaned from Kemble,
Goldsmith, Betmet Langtpn, and Dr Burney; and presently the
Doctor and Bozzy axe rolling down Fleet Street together again, ex-
claiming on its wonderful animation, or discussing the engaging
topic of gentlewomen in liquor. The absence has been managed so
231
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
well and unobtrusively that ue are hardly aware it ha*
On the marvelous skill uith which Boswcll convey* the
of purely intellectual struggles* the violences of controversy, I
already commented. What is even more is the
liveliness of a very lively book Is for the most by
means alone, We can see this all the more clearly, if we
BosweH's book with some other great life-narratives. Take Ixxrk-
C 1
hart's pathetic story, for example, of the riches and of
Scott and the sad aftermath of the Ballantyne failure; or Trevelyan's
portrayal of Macaulay as the Fairy-Tale Prince from
triumph to triumph. Against the tale of marvellous success
can place only his Flemish painting of an old man living on a
moderate pension and talking day after day among his boon com-
panions and admirers. The hardship?; and desperate struggles were
over by the time Boswell knew him; and although he was Diction-
ary Johnson, the Grand Cham of English Literature, his success
had never been so widespread nor so brilliant as either Scott's or
Macaulay's was to be. Against the clouding mind, the loneliness,
and the broken hopes of Scott's last days Boswell has only the image
of a man whose labors are nearly done, drinking tea in a comfortable
haven at last. But Boswell is still the most entertaining of all biogra-
phers. His lively mind flashes light even within his subject, and gives
his portrayal the excitement of exploration. The massive streogdi,
poise, and sanity of the Doctor's mind make his life great and pro-
found; and, through Boswell, we know no one in the past more
completely and livingly than we know Dr Johnson,
ROMANTIC
VIII
ROMANTIC LETTER-WRITERS
Journey to the Inner World
THE awareness of man moves between the inner world of
feeling and imagination and an outer world of material things
and observation. Peering into the dark abyss of the human heart,
through mists and shadow-shapes, we find revealed regions of hor-
ror and mystery and realms of serene luminosity, breathing essences
moving between the darkness and the light. But turning from that
inner world, which is sometimes so clear and again so nebulous, our
physical eyes see trees and mountains, houses and busy thorough-
fares and factories, truckdrivers and motion-picture sirens. To our
ears there come the sounds of human voices, brass-bands, and rumb-
ling trains many things that seem to be objective facts, existing
quite independently of whether we are there to notice them or not,
that seem in no way affected by the inner world.
In reality these two worlds are probably continuous, interming-
ling with each other. The world of material fact often appears to
mold the events of the inner world, and those inward essences that
237
OMF MIGHTY TORRES
are pin of ourselves to color and shape our vision of the physical
universe. We know time* when one or the other seems to predom-
inate in us. There are people in whom one seems to have the as-
ccndent. And there have been ages when mostly one seemed upper-
IWttt.
The elements in mankind arc too intricately blended for any age
ever to be all of A piece, any more than any single human being
i< so completely unified in character as to have no conflicts, no
wanderings of purpose, no uncertitudes within himself. But as we
gather together all we know of Pertctean Athens, or the Roman
republic, or Rome in the days of the Empire, or the France of Louis
XIV, ic seems to us that in each certain qualities are outstanding,
that they group themselves into an approximate unity, and we
feel able to say, The Athenian, the Roman, or the Frenchman of
those times was like that?
In such ways the eighteenth century has come to figure in our
minds as the Age of Reason, and the earlier decades of the century
that followed as the Age of Romanticism. And if we examine these
terms a little more carefully we will see that they correspond to say-
ing that in the former period men emphasized more the influence
and importance of the outer world, and that in the latter they felt
with renewed force the authority of the inner.
The eighteenth century, Preserved Smith has said, was the period
of prose; but he might have added that within it was germinating
a renewal of poetry. Not that there was no poetry written in the
eighteenth century. Its poetry, however, was subjected to the
genius of prose. Its taste demanded that poetry should exhibit clever-
ness, reflective powers, ingenuity, or common sense; that it should
be restrained and held in check by the intellect, and follow those
rules of construction and treatment that were prescribed by the
intelligent suffrage of the informed. If we analyze these require-
ments, they will tell us much more of the eighteenth century than
what its poetry was like, for its poetry was a brilliant miniature of
it? entire globe.
We have seen how such diverse men as Gibbon and Walpole
agreed in finding that 'enthusiasm' left a wry taste in their mouths.
Enthusiasm is the opposite of restraint; and much in eighteenth
century ideals was founded on restraint. Restraint meant the sub-
ordination of the individual to society, and restraint meant the rule
ROMANTIC
of the emotions by the of Order.
everything in its and as it to do in
the physical world; order: everything
sharply outlined and understood in the work! as Every-
thing subject to law, and law completely to the
These were the eighteenth century's
The universe of Newton was a machine in
bodies following the fixed laws of attraction in the
vsstness of space with clockwork precision. Once set in in
the remote backward and abysm of time a
# C$ a/ w
cept which the mind did not have to cootempbte-they roll
on forever with no unwelcome attention from their Creator. The
laws of physics and chemistry showed a pleasing capacity for
stated in mathematical terms, and doubtless even those realms of
knowledge that had not yet been reduced to formulae so eighteenth
century optimism flattered itself would ultimately become so.
Locke's analysis made the mind into a blank tablet etched with the
impressions of experience. Anticipating the genius of the century,
Newton and Leibniz tinkered with the notion of a mechanical lan-
guage that would make the operations of thought automatic and
arrive at new discoveries by pure mampulation. of its elements.
The study of comparative religion resulted from an effort to find
the common elements of 'natural* religion in all religions, what the
enquiring mind could arrive at for itself without die dubious aid
of revelation. Such study led to a growing temper of skepticism
and of antagonism to any unscientific emphasis on miracles. Ulti-
mately the clergy themselves began to soft-pedal the miraculow
and to devote themselves more and more to making of religion a
scheme of intelligible morals. And to a considerable extent, per-
haps, even the humanitarian passion that began to protest vigorously
against injustice and exploitation, the sufferings of the poor and the
cruelties of slavery, may be traced to an impatience with the unin-
telligence of a social order that made so many suffer, and to an
ex hypothesi elaboration of doctrines about the nature of man and
the origin of human society. Progress seemed so glowing an ideal
to the Encyclopaedists because it was illogical that Man should
continue to be tyrannized over by the superstitious heritage of the
Dark Ages.
But if reason so dazzled the minds of the eighteenth century
MIGHTY TORRENT
tail followers, it alone was the only excuse for
differing from nc*s fellow-men. The light of reason was available
to ail alike; if MMIIC cowered or with morose obstinacy chose to re-
in darkness that was their own fault, for the demonstration
thcv closed their minds to could have convinced them. The truth
was the same for .ill men. Ignorance might blind them or interest
them to deny it; the new enlightenment would gradually change
all that. For a man to differ in his essential values, however, from
the community was either presumptuous or deranged. Crotchets,
enthusiasms, eccentricitiesall departures from the common
of the community were despised and derided. The common
seme of the community -the sense that was common to the com-
munitygoverned all; the man of sense conformed to that govern-
ance eicept when he believed he could prove it contrary to reason;
even then, he often conformed unless it seemed a matter of un-
principle. There were the laws of motion, the laws of
logic, the laws of good breeding, the laws of poetry and art: all
well-nigh equal in authority.
Skich was the eighteenth century world we have been sampling.
In the clear and somewhat hard intelligence of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu; in the urbanity, grace, and conformity that Chester-
field mingled with well-concealed contempt; in the coolness, de-
tachment, and irony of Gibbon; in the acrid wit of Swift; in the
robust and sturdy penetration (for all his oddities) of Johnson;
in the clear, cheerful, and limited horizon of Gbber; in Walpole's
gaiety, sophistication, and dilettantism: in all of these we have differ-
ent facets of the same world. Even if they did not often mention
the same names and events it would not be hard to discern that
they have many more things in common, even when they sneer at
each other, than they have in common with the age that follows.
Chesterfield and Johnson would have been equally blind to the light
that never was on sea or land; Pope and Gbber would have cared
equally little where Alph, the sacred river, ran; Swift and Lady
Mary would both have been incredulous if told, Truth is Beauty'
K 'all ye need to know.'
The eighteenth century world is very clear and well-defined.
There are few or no uncertain boundaries or dark corners; every-
thing is spread before one in an uncolored cerebral light. All is
neat and tidy; mystery and wonder have been shown out at the back
240
ROMANTIC
door, and the dntwing-rootre and
periwigged facts Out In the to tic sure,
there are Mohawks and voune bloods out ?be of noc-
W fcJ & I, V V
nimal travelers for sport; traitors are ct the
and highwaymen hang from the gallows; in the
Barbadocs, noble statesmen flee to France when
ing with the Pretender, and government is die monopoly of a privi-
leged class wrangling with each other over the Bill de-
tails are no more mysterious than the others; they are of the
prosaic and expected nature of things. To Lord and to
Pope, to Prior and to Horace Walpoie, there was at ill
strange about the world; it was charming, it was it was
ridiculous, and it was just what one might have expected.'
Their world is all wonderfully clear and orderly, but after a
time there it begins to seem a bit limited and close. There are no
vistas, no distant horizons. We are hemmed in by the external pres-
sure of people and cities and systems. Men began to find its air
somewhat stifling, and longed for the desert air and the dark un-
ftfthomed caves of ocean. Out of that longing the Romantic revolt
was born.
Even before the end of the century the change was making itself
felt in queer stirrings among those who were otherwise its charac-
teristic children. The strange edifice that Horace Walpoie erected
at Strawberry Hill, with its turrets, its vaulting, and is ginger-
bread, although it was only a bastard-Gothic, showed that the word
Gothic was ceasing to be an epithet of scorn and disgust The
Middle Ages, indeed, were undergoing a metamorphosis in men's
judgments; their barbarism was assuming glamor, and taking on the
gallant colors of the Crusades, prancing steeds, courtly knights,
and jousts at arms. Bishop Percy collected popular ballads; Chatter-
ton and Macpherson forged ancient fragments; Gray studied the
relics of Erse, and Welsh, and Icelandic bards, and used in his own
poems their tales of old savage exploits. The Castle of Otranto drew
a scene full of the mediaeval trappings of romance: portcullises,
battlemented towers, dungeon keeps, windy corridors, ghosts and
gloomy chapels. The dust of the Dark Ages, even in such papier-
mach presentments, came to life again in wild and irregular pas-
sions; and its breath was strangely sweet in the lungs of those who
had choked over the aridity of common sense.
241
0\"E MIGHTY TORRENT
The search for distant horizons ventured into the past and the
supematunK and began preying into realms remote from the op
prt*\jvc society of man. Nature had long been for men only a
painted backdrop against which was enacted the much more im-
portant drum of mankind. When nature was domesticated into
clipped hedges and garden paths, pollarded trees, flowers in geo-
metrical beds, terraces and fountains with jets, it might be praised
and admired: it was but a symbol the more of how man dominated
the world. And in the orbits of the planets, the precession of the
equinoxes, the rotations of the celestial globe, there were to be
seen again on a tremendous scale the reign of law and reason.
But in between the scale of the garden sundial and the solar
system nature assumed other forms not so easily assimilable to con-
trol and order. There were tempests, strewing wreckage and death,
with lash of seething water; and mountains ribbed in ice, mist en-
shrouded, howled around by savage gales, *horrours & terrours on
all sides.* These monstrous and unsubduable things, for most of the
century, had been uncouth and disgusting. Their wildness was
menacing, and lay outside the safe realms of control. Journeys over
the Alps were told in terms of discomfort, revulsion, and horror.
Only as the century moves on, and the longing for the unknown
rises in men's hearts do we find some realization of grandeur and
stark beauty in the craggy forms. The Sublime appears in criticism,
and there is enjoyment of the picturesque. The mind retires to dis-
tant huts on rainy slopes and gazes over the intervening vale at
'hamlets brown and dim-discovered spires' and watches twilight
draw over all her 'gradual dusky veil.' On the eve of the nineteenth
century Wordsworth's Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey pro-
claim Nature 'the guide, the guardian of all my moral being,' and
finds there
a motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought.
And rolls through all things.
Nature thus became for the Romantic Period an awe-inspiring
manifestation of the vast and mysterious forces of the world. The
Unknown lured without and within. The water like a witch's oils
burned blue and green and white around the marooned bark of the
Ancient Mariner, the blue and green mountains of ice growled like
242
ROMANTIC
In a swound the of WJ^FS hat
were only signs and symbols of the
his heart. The universe of infinite and liy even
in the misty depths of the spirit of in the wary,
fa the mca&ureless caverns of those Xanadu* tell
pleasure domes and caves of ice dwell? The
reasserted its sway. Imagination .'which Coleridge
from Fancy) held the key to the absolute. Veux-tu le
monde? Feniie tes yeiix, Rosetnonde!
Thus for the Romanticist the values of the Age of
O
became inverted. Fancv, the faculty for or
* / 33 7 iw&
applying superficial decoration m the known, WIN a
of the intellect. Only by plunging Into the deep well of intuition*
where the transmutations of association took place, could Imagina-
tion discover the verities of existence. All knowledge melts into the
unknownOmnia exeunt in mysterium; but introspection
plumb the depths.
And so the individual becomes the lawgiver for society. The
Romanticist looked into his own. heart and found there die intui-
tions of truth. Where society stood in the way or failed to conform
to his vision, society was wrong, and he, the seer, was there to set
it right. There was small need of argument, as there had been in the
previous era, for it was not by syllogisms that one found revelation
but by the insight of the creating imagination. Sympathy and pity
and indignation the individual found in his heart when he surveyed
oppression and suffering; they burst from him in blasts of anger
or despair. The Classicist had tried to condemn where he disap-
proved by appealing to the suffrage of thinldng mankind. The
Romanticist fiercely told the world that it was wrong.
In summing up thus the development from the middle of the
eighteenth century through the earlier decades of the nineteenth,
I am of course speaking in parables. Only the outstanding spirits
thought and felt so; the sturdy, beef-eating tradesmen, the party
politicians, farmers and yokels and factory-owners, constables and
merchants, went on living and acting in their average-stupid, aver-
age-kindly, and average-selfish way. But Godwin's noble worship
cf justice inspired a Shelley; Wordsworth spoke his grave and lofty
sentences; Byron's burning soul now flamed in humane indignation
and now darkened in pride or guilty shame; Coleridge voyaged on
243
MIGHTY TORRENT
seas of idealism; Keats struggled to understand 'the love of
ami ill"; many others joined the great adventure, The spirit
of an age is in Irs grandest attainments as well as in its meanest.
Slowly Mmwu'hat of the fervor of the leaders made its way down
into the other ranks of society, and took shape as humanitarianism,
reform, love of nature, the breaking of old molds of habit and
custom.
Individualism took uglier shapes too. As kisser-fake it enslaved
thousands to noisome and life-breaking toil in hideous factories.
Under a battle-cry of liberalism, money bought the votes and
packed the legislatures. In the old regime there had been misery
enough for those who never glimpsed the gold and red salons where
their betters drank, listened to the harpsichord, gambled, conversed,
and bowed. But at least some in those salons had been aristocrats
responsive to the tradition of signorial responsibility. The new dis-
pensation of Manchester and Birmingham let loose a horde of ra-
ptcious money-grabbers who had no tradition and recognized no
law except the law of Devil take the hindmost. The feudal system,
as, even after the Revolution of 1688, it had lingered on through
the eighteenth century, had retained evils enough; but they did
not compare with the evils that attended the birth of democracy
and Industrialism. Although individualism had nobler forms as well,
it brought a spawn of foul things with it, of which those that have
been mentioned were only the most widespread.
The Romantic revolt against the immediate past was, even more
than most periods, one of transition. The old synthesis was crumb-
ling, no new one had as yet received even a clear outline. The
appeal to the emotions, of which Rousseau had been the prophet,
emphasizing the inner world of the spirit, and denying the rule of
external law, whether of the reason or of the community that
appeal had results its pleaders never foresaw. They bruised them-
selves against the world, and wounded and even destroyed others
in the course of the changes they were partly instruments in bring-
ing about. The inner world of feeling and imagination transformed
the world of material things.
Anger and Pride
Wordsworth and Coleridge were the two great forerunners of
revolt. Both had been filled with enthusiasm by the outbreak of
244
ROMANTIC LETTERWmiTERS
the French Revolution, which seemed 10 them to protnise freedons
for the spirit of man from all the tyrannies of tradition and custom
and fusty-dusty delving in the dry sands of argumentation. It was
not until years later that they gradually retreated to intricately
qualified and rationalized Toryisms.
Meanwhile they blew a magical wind of release over the hunwn
spirit. Wordsworth's great philosophic poem The Prthtttt and hi*
lyrics are really his autobiography, exploring with wonderful
delicacy and insight the development of his own character, and
tracing the influences of awe and reverence and beauty evoked by
the elemental forces of nature upon his strong and sensitive nature.
Some of the mistiest chambers of the human soul became luminous
beneath his serene and penetrating gaze.
The world of Coleridge was the world of magic and enchant-
ment, the realms in which the spirit seems enclosed by enchantment,
held in by webs and mists grown strong as iron. The caverns
measureless to man where the will was held imprisoned helpless,
the spell of evil that muted the tongue of Christabel, the wicked
whisper that turned the heart of the Ancient Mariner as dry as
dust and the spring of love that at last gushed through his heart,
the mysteries that lurked in the deep well of the unconscious-
he struggled painfully through them, for he had been imprisoned
by them all.
Lord Byron, like Wordsworth, has written his best autobiography
in his poems. Through Childe Harold, Ijaa, The Corsair, Manfred*
and Cotn t the same figure moves always under different names and
always basically the same. Sometimes on die green reaches of the
ocean, tossed hike its flying spray, wild as its howling storms; some-
times in lonely deserts carrying a heart arid as their burning sands;
then high among the crags and precipices of glacier-girded moun-
tains, with a pride as stony and frozen and lofty as their peaks; or
hiding a dark and mysterious sense of guilt in the desolution and
blackness of dense forests.
These heroes of Byron's, with their terrible arrogance, their high
scorn of humanity, their tortured nobility and despair, their broken
grandeur and inward stain, are Byron's portrait of himself, hi them
intellectual eminence and moral greatness of character have some-
how been warped and tarnished, whether through some internal
blemish spreading within them or through contagion from an evil
ONE MIGHTY TORRES
world without is never made plain. Potentially highest, they are
mmt sinful; they All bear the brand of Gain. Self-exiled to far-off
solitude*, they stand aloof, scorning and deriding the world from
whence they are e.v>t away, hating aU its evil, and scourging its evil
in themselves. Perhaps in a nobler world they would be among the
noblest, but this world can give them only corruption or banish-
nicnr.
Such is the Byronic hero, and the outlines of his character are
aJLso the formula for Byronism, which may be defined as disillusion
turned upon itself within. The Byronic character speedily dis-
cerns the selfishness and vice that permeate society. He has in
himself enough of good to scorn and hate the ill; but not enough
to forgive it. He repays the world for disillusion with contempt
and cynicism.
Unhappily for his complacency he cannot stop there. For intel-
ligence as well as potential good exists in him. Intelligence ferrets
out and forces on hts awareness the very evils he has loathed in
*
the outer world coiled like serpents in his own heart. He refused
to forgive the world; justice now forbids that he forgive himself.
Hatred turns inward, gnawing. Pride and humiliation wrestle bit-
terly with each other. Ultimately in cynicism and a kind of de-
spair, the Byronic man turns erratic. Generous impulses still arise
in him, and lead to noble action, movements of love and sacrifice,
admiration of the best. They are corroded by self-indulgence, im-
patience, suspicion, rage. Capable of highest things in flashes, he
is capable of meanest depths. Digust and self-disgust turn every-
thing he tastes to Dead Sea fruit.
In Byron himself high animal spirits and piercing wit even to the
end sustained and enlivened experience. Bitter were the depths, but
desire still flared high, and ambition, and the savor of seeing clearly
and describing with acid brilliance. To the end he enjoyed the pos-
session of a healthy body, plunging into the iciest currents and
swimming for hours; he still enjoyed eating and dressing well. He
enjoyed feeling cynical about the conquests made by his handsome
person and engaging address; he enjoyed despising his own prestige.
The swift movements of his mind were sources of pleasure. As long
as a vice or an absurdity could be made fantastically ridiculous or
exploded in some sharp epigram, there was relish to life: just to
feel his faculties so alive and vigorous with him. If Byron had lost
246
ROMANTIC
the joy of satire and become merely rni&tnthropk, despair would
have been dark indeed.
Byron's sensibility was romantic; his wit derived from the eight-
eenth century. Even in one of his earliest letters, written when
he was twenty, we find him using the balanced antithesis and the
dry cerebral statement as a means of gaining his effects; and the
tone of jesting self-scorn he assumes is prophetic: "I once thought
myself a philosopher, and talked nonsense with great decorum; I
defied pain, and preached op equanimity. For some time this did
very well, for no one was in pain for me but my friends, and
none lost their patience but my hearers. At last, a. fall from a horse
convinced me bodily suffering was an evil; and the worst of an
argument overset my maxims and my temper at the same moment:
so I quitted Zeno for Aristippus, and conceive that pleasure con-
stitutes the ro jcoAov!* We can see him delighting in his own
emancipation in his first letters from the Near East: 'I see not much
difference between ourselves and the Turks, save that we have fore-
skins and they have none . . . that they have long dresses* and we
short, and that we talk much, and they little. They are a sensible
people.'
That delight in his own wit, despite all other disappointments,
he carried with him to the end. His poems were composed to bursts
of enjoyable inspiration, written at top speed. *You ask me,* be
wrote to Murray in 1819, *for the plan of Donny Johnny: 1 ' (notice
the almost affectionate gaiety of the diminutive for his tide) 'I
have no plan; I had no plan; but I had or have materials; though
if, like Tony Lumpkin, I am "to be snubbed so when I am in spirits"
the poem will be naught, and the poet turn serious again. If it don't
take, I will leave it off where it is, with all due respect to the
Public; but if continued, it must be in my own way. You might as
well make Hamlet (or Diggory) act mad in a strait waistcoat as
trammel my buffoonery, if I am to be a buffoon: their gestures
and thoughts would only be pitiably absurd and ludicrously con-
strained. Why, Man, the Soul of such writing is its license; at least
the liberty of that licence . . , You are too earnest and eager
about a work never intended to be serious. Do you suppose that
I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle? a play-
ful satire, with as little poetry as could be helped, was what I
meant: and as to the indecency, do, pray, read in Boswell what
247
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT
the moralist, says of Prior and Paulo Purgante.' 1
Like representative young men of his generation, Byron was
by a radical, or, at least, a reformer. The bad mixture
of In him led htm to those of plebeian birth when he
'above their stations* but he had an even greater con-
rcrnr* for a brainless lout if he chanced to be a lord. In the early
iiivs, we find him sympathizing with the rebellion of peasants and
factory operatives against their oppressors; and even, in a speech
delivered In the House of Lords, defending the riots in which
manual laborers smashed the machines that were destroying their
livelihood.
I consider the manufacturers, fhc wrote Lord Holland-meaning
who did the work of manufacturing in the mills] as a much
injured body 01 men, sacrificed to the views of certain individuals,
who have enriched themselves by three practices which have deprived
the frameworkers of employment. For instance; by die adoption of a
certain kind of frame, one man performs the work of seven six are
thus thrown oat of business. Bat k is to be observed that the work
thus ckwe is far inferior in quality, hardly marketable at home, and
harried over with a view to exportation. Surely, my Lord, however
we may rejoice in any improvement in the arts which may be bene-
ficial to mankind, we roast not allow mankind to be sacrificed to
improvements in mechanism. The maintenance and well-doing of the
industrious poor is an object of greater consequence to the com-
munity than the enrichment of a few monopolists ... I have seen
the state of these miserable men, and it is a disgrace to a civilized
country. Their excesses may be condemned, but cannot be subject of
wonder.
His liberalism did not prevent his being dazzled by the glamor
of Napoleon. When that corsair of genius made himself Emperor,
Beethoven in a rage tore up the page on which his Eroica had been
dedicated to the First Consul, but many others were blinded by
his energy and fascination. And especially when all the nations of
Europe were banded against him, there were isolated spirits who
admired his courage in the uneven struggle, and who 'hoped he
would winat least beat back the invaders.'
But even this hero, for Byron, turned to an idol with feet of clay.
To be overcome would have had grandeur but to abdicate! { Na-
1 There is nothing in Prior that will excite to lewdness. If Lord Ha2es
thinks there is, he must be more combustible than other people.*
ROMANTIC
poleon Buonaparte has the of the
well." Methinks Sylla did better; for he and la
the height of his sway, red with the slaughter of his
instance of glorious contempt of the record,
did well too-Amurath not amiss, had he but a
derviseCharles the Fifth but so sohut Napoleon > all
What! wait till they were in Ms capital, and talk of hfe readi-
ness to give up what is already gone!! "What art
thou what holy cheat?" *$dcath! Dkmysius at Corinth y a
king to this. The "Isle of Elba" to retire to!' Once
hollowness stood exposed.
Many dark and scandalous half-hints have
Byron's amatory career, from Lady Caroline Iamb's entry in tier
diary on first seeing him, 'Mad, bad, and dangerous to know/ to
the efforts of various kindly biographers to fasten the imputation
of incest upon him. The secret causes of the separation from Lady
Byron, little more than a year after their marriage, aggravated such
efforts; and even in his own day Byron was accused of *every
monstrous vice.' What the facts were that made reconciliation
impossible, whether mere incompatibility or suspicions of insanity,
are unknown, but their very ambiguity has vastly whetted die tec
of psychoanalysts. The fantastic nature of Caroline Lamb should,
however, have expunged her testimony from the record. Her career
before and after her acquaintance with Byron, the almost unbalanced
character of her caprices, the wild absurdity of that entry in her
diary and the pertinacity with which she then pursued and threw
herself into the arms of the fascinating fatality; all should make It
clear that any testimony from her was completely unreliable.
Byron yielded to Lady Caroline's importunities, but then found
her extravagant behavior highly embarrassing. Her mother implored
her to leave London, Byron was appealed to by Lady Melbourne
to break off the affair. They brought the pressure of circumstance
to bear on Lady Caroline, and a letter Byron wrote her is evidence
of a kindliness that could soften farewell with affection and with
the pretence that she had herself responded to a call of duty; 'God
Icnows, I wish you happy, and when I quit you, or rather you,
from a sense of duty to your husband and mother, quit me, you
shall acknowledge the truth of what I again promise and vow, that
no other in word or deed, shall ever hold die place in rny affections,
2 49
OWE MIGHTY TORRENT
which is and shall be* twwt sacred to you, tall I am nothing. I
ncvtr knew till f&tf moment the madness of my dearest and most
beloved friend ... Do you think now I am cold and tf TZ and
*r*fj*# Will even otbm think so? Will your mother ever-that
mother to whom we must indeed sacrifice much, more, much more
on my port than she shall ever know or can imagine? "Promise not
ts> love you!" ah, Caroline, it Is past promising.'
But women pursued the man, and he found it difficult to resist
them, dare Qairmont wrote him, confessing herself in love with
him, called at his rooms, pursued him abroad. We find him writing
Iiis half-sister, Augusta Leigh, that *as to all these "mistresses," Lord
help me-I have had but one. Now don't scold; but what could I
do?-a foolish girl, in spite of all I could say or do, would come
after me, or rather went before for I found her here-and I have
had all the pkgue possible to persuade her to go back again; but
at last she went. Now, dearest, I do most truly tell thee, that I
could not help this, that I did all I could to prevent 
