Part 19

Once, indeed, (but it is not till he has reached the third and last division of the essay) he screws up his courage so high as to question it concerning its name; and the result of his inquiry is this: he finds that to fourteen of the books attributed to Aristotle, which it seems had no general title, Andronicus Rhodius, who edited them, prefixed the words, ta meta ta physica, that is, the books placed posterior to the physics; either because, in the order of the former arrangement they happened to be so placed, or because the editor meant that they should be studied, next after the physics. And this, he concludes, is said to be the origin of the word metaphysic. This is not very satisfactory; and if the reader thinks so, he will perhaps, be glad to hear those who, having dealt longer in the black art, are more likely to be conjurors in it. Harris, who had given so many years of his life to the study of Aristotle, tells us, that "Metaphysics are properly conversant about primary and internal causes."[1] "Those things which are first to nature, are not first to man. Nature begins from causes, and thence descends to effects. Human perceptions first open upon effects, and thence by slow degrees ascend to causes."[2]

His own definition might have been enough to satisfy him that it was something very harmless about which he had so much alarmed himself. Still he proceeds to impute to it I know not what mischief; till at last, in a paroxysm of indignation, he exclaims, "Exult, O metaphysic, at the consummation of thy glories. More thou canst not hope, more thou canst not desire. Fall down, ye mortals, and acknowledge the stupendous blessing."

About Aristotle himself, he is scarce in less perplexity. He sets out by defining truth according to Aristotle's description of it in these fourteen dreaded books of his metaphysics. Again he tells us, "he is most admired by those who best understand him;" and once more refers us to these fourteen books. But afterwards it would seem as if he had not himself read them; for speaking of _metaphysics_, he calls it that which Aristotle is said to have called theology, and the first philosophy: whereas Aristotle has explicitly called it so in these fourteen books;[3] and when he is recommending the study of the ancients, he adds; "Of Aristotle, I say nothing. We are assured by those who have read his works, that no one ever understood human nature better than he." What are we to infer from this, but that he had not himself read them? For his distinction between common sense and reason, on which all his theory depends, he sends the reader to the fourth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and to the first of his latter Analytics; and yet somewhere else he speaks of these as the most worthless of Aristotle's writings. As for Plato, who on such a subject might have come in for some consideration, we are told that he was as much a rhetorician as a philosopher; and this, I think, is nearly all we hear of him.

Beattie is among the philosophers what the Quaker is among religious sectaries. The [Greek: koinos nous], or common sense, is the spirit whose illapses he sits down and waits for, and by whose whispers alone he expects to be made wise. It has sometimes prompted him well; for there are admirable passages in the Essay. The whole train of his argument, or rather his invective, in the second part, against the sceptics, is irresistible.

Scalda ogni fredda lingua ardente voglia, E di sterili fa l'alme feconde. Ne mai deriva altronde Soave finme d'eloquenza rara.--_Celio Magno_.

"What comes from the heart, that alone goes to the heart," says a great writer of our own day;[4] and there are few instances of this more convincing than the vehemence with which Beattie dissipates the reveries of Berkeley, and refutes the absurdities of Hume.

In the second edition, (1771) speaking of those writers of genius, to whom he would send the student away from the metaphysicians, he confined himself to Shakespeare, Bacon, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Few will think that other names might not well have replaced the last of these. In the fourth edition, we find Johnson added to the list. This compliment met with a handsome requital; for Johnson, soon after, having occasion to speak of Beattie, in his Life of Gray, called him a poet, a philosopher, and a good man.

In his Essay, he comforts himself with the belief "that he had enabled every person of common sense to defeat the more important fallacies of the sceptical metaphysicians, even though he should not possess acuteness, or metaphysical knowledge, sufficient to qualify him for a logical refutation of them." It is lamentable to see at how great a cost to himself he had furnished every person of common sense with these weapons of proof. In a letter to Sir William Forbes, written not long after, he makes the following remarkable confession. "How much my mind has been injured by certain speculations, you will partly guess when I tell you a fact that is now unknown to all the world, that since the Essay on Truth was printed in quarto, in the summer of 1776, I have never dared to read it over. I durst not even read the sheets, and see whether there were any errors in the print, and was obliged to get a friend to do that office for me."

As he proceeded, he seems to have become more afraid of the faculty of reason. In the second edition he had said, "Did not our moral feelings, in concert with what our reason discovers of the Deity, evidence the _necessity_ of a future state, _in vain should we pretend_ to judge rationally of that revelation by which life and immortality have been brought to light." In the edition of 1776, he softened down this assertion so much, as almost to deprive it of meaning. "Did not our moral feelings, in concert with what reason discovers of the Deity, evidence the _probability_ of a future state, and that it is necessary to the full vindication of the divine government, _we should be much less qualified_ than we now are to judge rationally of that revelation by which life and immortality have been brought to light." There was surely nothing, except perhaps the word _necessity_, that was objectionable in the proposition as it first stood.

It may be remarked of his prose style in general, that it is not free from that constraint which he, with much candour, admitted was to be found in the writings of his countrymen.

Of his critical works, I have seen only those appended to the edition of his Essay, in 1776. Though not deficient in acuteness, they have not learning or elegance enough to make one desirous of seeing more. His remarks on the characters in Homer are, I think, the best part of them. He sometimes talks of what he probably knew little about; as when he tells us that "he had never been able to discover anything in Aristophanes that might not he consigned to eternal oblivion, without the least detriment to literature;" that "his wit and humour are now become almost invisible, and seem never to have been very conspicuous;" with more that is equally absurd, to the same purpose.

The few of his poems which he thought worthy of being selected from the rest, and of being delivered to posterity, have many readers, to whom perhaps one recommendation of them is that they are few. They have, however, and deservedly, some admirers of a better stamp. They soothe the mind with indistinct conceptions of something better than is met with in ordinary life. The first book of the Minstrel, the most considerable amongst them, describes with much fervour the enthusiasm of a boy "smit with the love of song," and wakened to a sense of rapture by all that is most grand or lovely in the external appearances of nature. It is evident that the poet had felt much of what he describes, and he therefore makes his hearers feel it. Yet at times, it must be owned, he seems as if he were lashing himself into a state of artificial emotion, as in the following lines:

O! Nature, how in every charm supreme! Whose votaries feast on raptures ever new! O! for the voice and fire of seraphim, To sing thy glories with devotion due!

We hear, indeed, too often of "nature's charms."

Even here he cannot let the metaphysicians rest. They are, in his mind, the grievance that is most to be complained of in this "vale of tears."

There was one other thing that Beattie detested nearly as much as "metaphysic lore." It was the crowing of a cock. This antipathy he contrived to express in the Minstrel, and the reader is startled by the expression of it, as by something out of its place.

Of the stanza beginning, "O, how canst thou renounce," Gray told him that it was, of all others, his favourite; that it was true poetry; that it was inspiration; and, if I am not mistaken, it is related of Bishop Porteus, that when he was once with Beattie, looking down on a magnificent country that lay in prospect before them, he broke out with much delight into the repetition of it. Gray objected to one word, _garniture_, "as suggesting an idea of dress, and what was worse, of French dress;" and the author tried, but tried in vain, to substitute another. It would, perhaps, be impossible to find a better for the place in which it stands. There is no ground of censure which a writer should admit with more caution, than that a particular word or phrase happens to suggest a ludicrous or unsuitable image to the mind of another person. Few probably would have thought of French dress on this occasion: and to some, a passage in our translation of the Bible might have occurred, where it is said, that "the Lord _garnished_ the heavens." Another of Gray's criticisms fell on the word "infuriate," as being a new one, although, as Sir William Forbes remarks, it is found not only in Thomson's Seasons, but in the Paradise Lost.

The second book of the Minstrel is not so pleasant as it is good. The stripling wanders to the habitation of a hermit, who has a harp, not a very usual companion for a hermit, to amuse his solitude; and who directs him what studies to pursue. The youth is pleased with no historian except Plutarch. He reads Homer and Virgil, and learns to mend his song, and the poet would have told us how he learnt to sing still better, if sorrow for the death of a friend had not put a period to his own labours. The poem thus comes abruptly to an end; and we are not much concerned that there is no more of it. His first intention was to have engaged the Minstrel in some adventure of importance, through which it may be doubted whether he could well have conducted him; for he has not shewn much skill in the narrative part of the poem.

The other little piece, called the Hermit, begins with a sweet strain, which always dwells on the ear, and which makes us expect that something equally sweet is to follow. This hermit too has his "harp symphonious." He makes the same complaint, and finds the same comfort for it, as Edwin had done in the first book of the Minstrel. Both are the Christian's comment on a well-known passage in the Idyllium of Moschus, on the death of Bion. Of his Ode on Lord Hay's Birth-day, Gray's opinion, however favourable, is not much beyond the truth; that the diction is easy and noble; the texture of the thoughts lyric, and the versification harmonious; to which he adds, "that the panegyric has nothing mean in it."

The Ode to Hope looks like one of Blair's Sermons cast into a lyrical mould.

There is, I believe, no allusion to any particular place that was familiar to him, throughout his poems. The description of the owl in the lines entitled Retirement, he used to say, was drawn from nature. It has more that appearance than any thing else he has written, and pleases accordingly.

Between his systems in poetry and philosophy, some exchange might have been made with advantage to each. In the former, he counted general ideas for nearly all in all. (_See his Essay on Poetry and Music,_ p. 431.) In the latter, he had not learnt to generalize at all; but would have rested merely in fact and experience.

FOOTNOTES [1] Philosophical Arrangements, c. xvii. p. 409, 8vo. ed. [2] Hermes, p. 9, 8vo. ed. The same writer again thus defines the word. "By the most excellent science is meant the science of causes, and, above all others, of causes efficient and final, as these necessarily imply pervading reason and superintending wisdom. This science as men were naturally led to it from the contemplation of effects, which effects were the tribe of beings natural or physical, was, from being thus subsequent to those physical inquiries, called metaphysical; but with a view to itself, and the transcendant eminence of its object was more properly called [Greek: hae protae philosophia], the first Philosophy." Three treatises (in a note), p. 365. Ibid.--See also Mr. Coleridge's Friend, vol. i. p. 309. [3] Metaph. I. vi. c. I. [4] Mr. Coleridge.

* * * * *

WILLIAM HAYLEY.

The most remarkable incidents in Hayley's Life are to be collected from his Memoirs of himself, edited by his friend the Rev. Dr. Johnson, better known as the favourite kinsman of Cowper. The Memoirs, though somewhat more copious than many readers might have wished them, are yet far from being devoid of entertainment to the lovers of literary biography.

William Hayley was born at Chichester, on the 29th of October, 1745. His father was a private gentleman, son of one Dean of Chichester, and nephew to another. Having enriched himself by an union with the daughter of an opulent merchant, who died without leaving him any children, he married for his second wife, Mary, a daughter of Colonel Yates, a representative in Parliament for the city of Chichester, the mother of the poet.

His father dying when he was three years old, and his only brother soon after, William became the sole care of a discreet and affectionate woman. A similar lot will be found to have influenced the earlier years of many who have been most distinguished for their virtues or abilities in after life. He was taught to read by three sisters, of the name of Russell, who kept a girls' school at Chichester; and pleased himself by relating that, when in his 63rd year, he presented to one of them, who still continued in the same employment with her faculties unimpaired, a recent edition of his Triumphs of Temper. His first instructor in the learned languages was a master in the same city, who appeared to be so incompetent to the task he had undertaken, that Mrs. Hayley removed her son to the school of a Mr. Woodeson, at Kingston. He had not been long here, when he was seized with a violent fit of illness, which obliged his mother, who had now fixed her residence in London, to take him home, after having nursed him for some weeks at Kingston, with little hopes of life. Of the anxiety with which she watched over him, he has left the following pathetic memorial in his Essay on Epic Poetry.

Thou tender saint, to whom he owes much more Than ever child to parent owed before, In life's first season, when the fever's flame Shrunk to deformity his shrivel'd frame, And turn'd each fairer image in his brain To blank confusion and her crazy train, 'Twas thine, with constant love, through lingering years, To bathe thy idiot orphan with thy tears; Day after day, and night succeeding night, To turn incessant to the hideous sight, And frequent watch, if haply at thy view Departed reason might not dawn anew.

The first sign he gave of returning intellect, was an exclamation on seeing a hare run across the road as they were taking an airing in Richmond park. On his recovery, his mother provided him a private tutor in Greek and Latin, of the name of Ayles, formerly a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; while she herself, and his nurse, a faithful servant in the family for more than fifty years, encouraged his early propensity for English literature; the former by reading to him and the other by making him recite passages out of tragedies, of which the good woman was passionately fond.

In August, 1757, his mother placed him at Eton where he remained about six years, at the end of which time he was removed to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Like many others, he acknowledges the illusion of considering our school-boy days as the happiest of life. The infirmities, which his sickness had brought on, made him extremely sensible to the jibes and rough treatment of the bigger boys, and the accidental neglect of a Greek lesson exposed him to a flogging which he never quite forgave. One of his tutors at Eton was Dr. Roberts, author of Judah Restored, a poem, in which the numbers of the Paradise Lost are happily imitated. By him, the young scholar was confirmed in that love of composing verse which he could trace hack to his ninth year. There is little promise in the specimens he gives of his earlier attempts. His English ode on the birth of the present King, inserted in the Cambridge collection, is an indifferent performance, even for a boy. At the university, he describes himself to have studied diligently, to have given many of his hours to drawing and painting, and to have formed friendships which were dissolved only by death. On Thornton, a member of the same hall, the most favoured of these associates, whom he lost when a young man, he wrote an elegy, which is one of the best of his works. With him he improved himself in the Spanish and Italian languages, the latter of which they studied under Isola, a teacher at Cambridge, afterwards creditably known by an edition of the Gerusalemme Liberata. Hayley entered his name at the Middle Temple on the 13th of June, 1766, and in the following year quitted Cambridge without a degree. He now made some ineffectual attempts towards fixing his choice of a profession in life; but at last poetry, and especially the drama, were suffered to engross him. In October, 1769, he married Eliza, the daughter of Dr. Ball, Dean of Chichester. This lady had been the confidant of his attachment to another. The match was on his part entered on rather from disappointment than love; and was made contrary to the advice of his surviving parent, who represented to him the danger there was lest his wife should inherit an incurable insanity under which her mother long laboured. Many years after, he put her away, fancying himself no longer able to endure a waywardness of temper, which, as he thought, amounted nearly to the calamity that had been apprehended. In the summer of 1774, he retired with his wife and mother from Great Queen-street, where they had hitherto resided, to his paternal estate at Eartham in Sussex; but in the ensuing winter his mother went back to London for medical advice and there died.

He had endeavoured, but in vain, to bring several of his tragedies on the stage. Garrick, with some hollow compliments, rejected one, called the Afflicted Father, of which the story appears to have been too shocking for representation. It was that a father had supplied his son, under sentence of death, with poison, and when too late found that he was pardoned. Another called the Syrian Queen, which he had imitated from the Rodogune of Corneille, was refused with more sincerity by Colman. A third met no better reception from Harris. "Persuaded," as he says, "by his own sensations that he had a considerable portion of native poetic fire in his mind, he resolved to display it in a composition less subject to the caprice of managers, yet more arduous in its execution. In short, he determined to begin an epic poem." He chose for his subject the extorting of Magna Charta from King John. The death of his friend Thornton in 1780, who had watched the progress of this essay with much solicitude for its success, chiefly induced him to relinquish a design, which was in truth ill fitted to his powers. In the Essay on Epic Poetry, he recommended it to Mason, who was not much better able to accomplish it than himself. I am unwilling to detain my reader by an account of the numerous poems, which he either did not complete or did not commit to the press. His unpublished verses, as he told me a few years before his death, amounted to six times the number of those in print.

His first publication was the Epistle on Painting to Romney, in 1778. The two next in the following year were anonymous, the one A Congratulatory Epistle to Admiral Keppel on his Acquittal; the other An Essay on the Ancient Greek Model (as he called it) to Bishop Lowth, remonstrating against the contention which the bishop had entered into with Warburton, and which he thought unworthy so excellent a prelate. In 1780, he produced besides the Verses on the death of Mr. Thornton, an Ode to Howard, and the Epistles on History addressed to Gibbon, which gained him the intimacy of the historian and the philanthropist. The success of these works encouraged him to project the Triumphs of Temper, the most popular of all his poems, which he published in 1781. The next year saw the publication of his Essay on Epic Poetry; in the notes to which he introduced much information on the poetry of Italy and Spain, then less known among us than at present; and he endeavoured to rouse the spirits of Wright the painter at Derby, by an ode, which was printed for private circulation. In 1784, he published a volume of plays, consisting of tragedies and comedies, the latter of which were in rhyme. The gratification of seeing his dramas represented on the stage, which he had before solicited in vain, was now offered by Colman, who proposed through the author's bookseller to bring out a tragedy and comedy, Lord Russell, and The Two Connoisseurs, at the Haymarket. "A comedy in rhyme," the manager observed, "was a bold attempt; but when so well executed as in the present instance, he thought, would be received with favour, especially on a stage of a genius somewhat similar to that of a private theatre for which it was professedly written." Both tragedy and comedy were well received, but with so little emolument to the poet, that he had to pay for his own seat at the representation. Marcella, the other tragedy, was also acted, in 1789, when it was condemned at one house, and in three nights after applauded at the other. The author accounted for this whimsical change of fortune by supposing the piece to have been played only on a few hours' preparation by the manager at Drury-Lane, in order to get the start of Harris and prevent his success by having the play damned before it appeared on his theatre.

Hayley was, however, now in great favour with the public; the first edition of his plays was sold in a fortnight; and through the intervention of his friend Thomas Payne, the bookseller, he re-purchased for 500_l._ from Dodsley the copyright of all he had written. It would have been well if his poetical career had closed here; for whatever he did afterwards in this way met either with disregard or contempt. Such was the fate of a Poem on the Anniversary of the Revolution in 1788; of an imitation of a German opera, called the Trial of the Rovers, which he sold to Harris for 100_l._ but which failed at Covent-Garden in 1789; of Eudora, a tragedy, acted with no better success in 1790; of the National Advocates, intended to commemorate the triumph of Erksine in his defence of Horne Tooke in 1795; of an Elegy on Sir William Jones in the same year; of an Essay on Sculpture in 1800; of Ballads on Animals, the most empty of his productions that I have seen, in 1802; of the Triumphs of Music in 1804; of Stanzas to the Patriots in Spain in 1808; and of another volume of plays in 1811.