Part 2
No less pious a railway director than Sir Edward Watkin once prefaced an oration to the shareholders of one of his numerous undertakings by expressing, in broken accents, the wish that ‘He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb might deal gently with illustrious personages in their present grievous affliction.’ The wish was a kind one, and is only referred to here as an illustration of the amazing skill of the author of the phrase quoted in so catching the tone, temper, and style of King James’s version, that the words occur to the feeling mind as naturally as any in Holy Writ as the best expression of a sorrowful emotion.
The phrase itself is, indeed, an excellent example of Sterne’s genius for pathos. No one knew better than he how to drive words home. George Herbert, in his selection of ‘Outlandish Proverbs,’ to which he subsequently gave the alternate title ‘Jacula Prudentum,’ has the following: ‘To a close-shorn sheep God gives Wind by measure’; but this proverb in that wording would never have succeeded in making the chairman of a railway company believe he had read it somewhere in the Bible. It is the same thought, but the words which convey it stop far short of the heart. A close-shorn sheep will not brook comparison with Sterne’s ‘shorn lamb’; whilst the tender, compassionate, beneficent ‘God tempers the wind’ makes the original ‘God gives wind by measure’ wear the harsh aspect of a wholly unnecessary infliction.
Sterne is our best example of the plagiarist whom none dare make ashamed. He robbed other men’s orchards with both hands; and yet no more original writer than he ever went to press in these isles.
He has been dogged, of course; but, as was befitting in his case, it has been done pleasantly. Sterne’s detective was the excellent Dr. Ferriar, of Manchester, whose ‘Illustrations of Sterne,’ first published in 1798, were written at an earlier date for the edification of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Those were pleasant days, when men of reading were content to give their best thoughts first to their friends and then--ten years afterwards--to the public.
Dr. Ferriar’s book is worthy of its subject. The motto on the title-page is delightfully chosen. It is taken from the opening paragraph of Lord Shaftesbury’s ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’: ‘Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who for the common benefit of his fellow-Authors introduced the ingenious way of MISCELLANEOUS WRITING.’ Here Dr. Ferriar stopped; but I will add the next sentence: ‘It must be owned that since this happy method was established the Harvest of Wit has been more plentiful and the Labourers more in number than heretofore.’ Wisely, indeed, did Charles Lamb declare Shaftesbury was not too genteel for him. No pleasanter penance for random thinking can be devised than spending an afternoon turning over Shaftesbury’s three volumes and trying to discover how near he ever did come to saying that ‘Ridicule was the test of truth.’
Dr. Ferriar’s happy motto puts the reader in a sweet temper to start with, for he sees at once that the author is no pedantic, soured churl, but a good fellow who is going to make a little sport with a celebrated wit, and show you how a genius fills his larder.
The first thing that strikes you in reading Dr. Ferriar’s book is the marvellous skill with which Sterne has created his own atmosphere and characters, in spite of the fact that some of the most characteristic remarks of his characters are, in the language of the Old Bailey, ‘stolen goods.’ ‘“There is no cause but one,” replied my Uncle Toby, “why one man’s nose is longer than another’s, but because God pleases to have it so.” “That is Grangousier’s solution,” said my father. “’Tis he,” continued my Uncle Toby, looking up and not regarding my father’s interruption, “who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms and proportions and for such ends as is agreeable to His infinite wisdom.”’
‘“Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh”; and if those are not the words of my Uncle Toby, it is idle to believe in anything’: and yet we read in Rabelais--as, indeed, Sterne suggests to us we should--‘“Pourquoi,” dit Gargantua, “est-ce que frère Jean a si beau nez?” “Parce,” répondit Grangousier, “qu’ainsi Dieu l’a voulu, lequel nous fait en telle forme et à telle fin selon son divin arbitre, que fait un potier ses vaisseaux.”’
To create a character and to be able to put in his mouth borrowed words which yet shall quiver with his personality is the supreme triumph of the greatest ‘miscellaneous writer’ who ever lived.
Dr. Ferriar’s book, after all, but establishes this: that the only author whom Sterne really pillaged is Burton, of the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ a now well-known writer, but who in Sterne’s time, despite Dr. Johnson’s partiality, appears to have been neglected. Sir Walter Scott, an excellent authority on such a point, says, in his ‘Life of Sterne,’ that Dr. Ferriar’s essay raised the ‘“Anatomy of Melancholy” to double price in the book market.’
Sir Walter is unusually hard upon Sterne in this matter of the ‘Anatomy.’ But different men, different methods. Sir Walter had his own way of cribbing. Sterne’s humorous conception of the character of the elder Shandy required copious illustration from learned sources, and a whole host of examples and whimsicalities, which it would have passed the wit of man to invent for himself. He found these things to his hand in Burton, and, like our first parent, ‘he scrupled not to eat.’ It is not easy to exaggerate the extent of his plunder. The well-known chapter with its refrain, ‘The Lady Baussiere rode on,’ and the chapter on the death of Brother Bobby, are almost, though not altogether, pure Burton.
The general effect of it all is to raise your opinion immensely--of Burton. As for your opinion of Sterne as a man of conduct, is it worth while having one? It is a poor business bludgeoning men who bore the brunt of life a long century ago, and whose sole concern now with the world is to delight it. Laurence Sterne is not standing for Parliament. ‘Eliza’ has been dead a dozen decades. Nobody covers his sins under the cloak of this particular parson. Our sole business is with ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘The Sentimental Journey’; and if these books are not matters for congratulation and joy, then the pleasures of literature are all fudge, and the whole thing a got-up job of ‘The Trade’ and the hungry crew who go buzzing about it.
Mr. Traill concludes his pleasant ‘Life of Sterne’ in a gloomy vein, which I cannot for the life of me understand. He says: ‘The fate of Richardson might seem to be close behind him’ (Sterne). Even the fate of ‘Clarissa’ is no hard one. She still numbers good intellects, and bears her century lightly. Diderot, as Mr. Traill reminds us, praised her outrageously--but Mr. Ruskin is not far behind; and from Diderot to Ruskin is a good ‘drive.’ But ‘Tristram’ is a very different thing from ‘Clarissa.’ I should have said, without hesitation, that it was one of the most popular books in the language. Go where you will amongst men--old and young, undergraduates at the Universities, readers in our great cities, old fellows in the country, judges, doctors, barristers--if they have any tincture of literature about them, they all know their ‘Shandy’ at least as well as their ‘Pickwick.’ What more can be expected? ‘True Shandeism,’ its author declares, ‘think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs.’ I will be bound to say Sterne made more people laugh in 1893 than in any previous year; and, what is more, he will go on doing it--‘“that is, if it please God,” said my Uncle Toby.’
DR. JOHNSON.
Dr. Johnson’s massive shade cannot complain of this generation. We are not all of us--or, indeed, many of us--much after his mind, but, for all that, we worship his memory. Editions of Boswell, old or new, are on every shelf; but more than this, there is a healthy and commendable disposition to recognise that great, surpassingly great, as are the merits of Boswell, still there is such a thing as a detached and separate Johnson.
It is a good thing every now and again to get rid of Boswell. It is a little ungrateful, but we have Johnson’s authority for the statement that we hate our benefactors. After all, even had there been no Boswell, there would have been a Johnson. I will always stick to it that Hawkins’s Life is a most readable book. Dr. Birkbeck Hill stands a good chance of being hated some day. We owed him a debt of gratitude already. He has lately added to it by publishing at the Clarendon Press, in two stately volumes, uniform with his great edition of the Life, the ‘Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.’
For a lazy man who loathed writing Dr. Johnson did not do badly--his letters to Mrs. Thrale exceed three hundred. It is not known that he ever wrote a letter to Burke. I cannot quite jump with the humour of Dr. Hill’s comment on this fact. He observes: ‘So far as we know, he did not write a single letter to Edward Burke--he wrote more than three hundred to the wife of a Southwark brewer.’ What has the beer got to do with it? and why drag in Southwark? Every man knows, without being told, why Johnson wrote three hundred letters to Mrs. Thrale; and as for his not writing to Burke, it is notorious that the Doctor never could be got to write to anybody for information.
Dr. Hill’s two volumes are as delightful books as ever issued from the press. In them Dr. Johnson is to be seen in every aspect of his character, whilst a complete study may be made from them of the enormous versatility of his style. It is hard to say what one admires most--the ardour of his affection, the piety of his nature, the friendliness of his disposition, the playfulness of his humour, or his love of learning and of letters.
What strikes one perhaps most, if you assume a merely critical attitude, is the glorious ease and aptitude of his quotations from ancient and modern writings. Of pedantry there is not a trace. Nothing is forced or dragged in. It is all, apparently, simply inevitable. You do not exclaim as you read, ‘What a memory the fellow has!’ but merely, ‘How charming it all is!’
It is not difficult to construct from these two volumes alone the gospel--the familiar, the noble gospel according to Dr. Johnson. It reads somewhat as follows:
‘Your father begot you and your mother bore you. Honour them both. Husbands, be faithful to your wives. Wives, forgive your husbands’ unfaithfulness--once. No grown man who is dependent on the will, that is the whim, of another can be happy, and life without enjoyment is intolerable gloom. Therefore, as money means independence and enjoyment, get money, and having got it keep it. A spendthrift is a fool.
‘Clear your mind of cant and never debauch your understanding. The only liberty worth turning out into the street for, is the liberty to do what you like in your own house and to say what you like in your own inn. All work is bondage.
‘Never get excited about causes you do not understand, or about people you have never seen. Keep Corsica out of your head.
‘Life is a struggle with either poverty or ennui; but it is better to be rich than to be poor. Death is a terrible thing to face. The man who says he is not afraid of it lies. Yet, as murderers have met it bravely on the scaffold, when the time comes so perhaps may I. In the meantime I am horribly afraid. The future is dark. I should like more evidence of the immortality of the soul.
‘There is great solace in talk. We--you and I--are shipwrecked on a wave-swept rock. At any moment one or other of us, perhaps both, may be carried out to sea and lost. For the time being we have a modicum of light and warmth, of meat and drink. Let us constitute ourselves a club, stretch out our legs and talk. We have minds, memories, varied experiences, different opinions. Sir, let us talk, not as men who mock at fate, not with coarse speech or foul tongue, but with a manly mixture of the gloom that admits the inevitable, and the merriment that observes the incongruous. Thus talking we shall learn to love one another, not sentimentally but fundamentally.
‘Cultivate your mind, if you happen to have one. Care greatly for books and literature. Venerate poor scholars, but don’t shout for “Wilkes and Liberty!” The one is a whoremonger, the other a flatulency.
‘If any tyrant prevents your goings out and your comings in, fill your pockets with large stones and kill him as he passes. Then go home and think no more about it. Never theorize about Revolution. Finally, pay your score at your club and your final debt to Nature generously and without casting the account too narrowly. Don’t be a prig like Sir John Hawkins, or your own enemy like Bozzy, or a Whig like Burke, or a vile wretch like Rousseau, or pretend to be an atheist like Hume, but be a good fellow, and don’t insist upon being remembered more than a month after you are dead.’
This is but the First Lesson. To compose the Second would be a more difficult task and must not be here attempted. These two volumes of Dr. Hill are endless in their variety. Johnson was gloomy enough, and many of his letters may well move you to tears, but his was ever a human gloom. The year before his death he writes to Mrs. Thrale:
‘The black dog I hope always to resist and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. The neighbourhood is impoverished. I had once Richardson and Lawrence in my reach. Mrs. Allen is dead. My house has lost Levet, a man who took interest in everything and therefore ready at conversation. Mrs. Williams is so weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is solitary--the black dog waits to share it; from breakfast to dinner he continues barking, except that Dr. Brocklesby for a little keeps him at a distance. Dinner with a sick woman you may venture to suppose not much better than solitary. After dinner, what remains but to count the clock and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect? Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this? If I were a little richer I would perhaps take some cheerful female into the house.’
It is a melancholy picture, but the ‘cheerful female’ shoots a ray of light across the gloom. Everyone should add these two volumes to his library, and if he has not a library, let him begin making one with them.
RICHARD CUMBERLAND.
‘He has written comedies at which we have cried and tragedies at which we have laughed; he has composed indecent novels and religious epics; he has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by writing his own life and the private history of his acquaintances.’ Of whom is this a portrait, and who is the limner? What are the names of the comedies and the tragedies and the novels thus highly recommended to the curious reader? These are questions, I flatter myself, wholly devoid of public interest.
The quotation is from a review in the _Quarterly_, written by Sir Walter Scott, of old Richard Cumberland’s last novel, ‘John de Lancaster,’ published in 1809, when its author, ‘the Terence of England,’ was well-nigh eighty years of age. The passage is a fierce one, but Scott’s good-nature was proof against everything but affectation. No man minded a bad novel less than the author of ‘Guy Mannering’ and ‘The Heart of Midlothian.’ I am certain he could have pulled Bishop Thirlwall through ‘The Wide, Wide World,’ in the middle of which, for some unaccountable reason, that great novel-reading prelate stuck fast. But an author had only to pooh-pooh the public taste, to sneer at popularity, to discourse solemnly on his function as a teacher of his age and master of his craft, to make Sir Walter show his teeth, and his fangs were formidable; and the storm of his wrath all the more tremendous because bursting from a clear sky.
I will quote a few words from the passage in ‘John de Lancaster’ which made Scott so angry, and which he pronounced a doleful lamentation over the ‘praise and pudding which Cumberland alleges have been gobbled up by his contemporaries’:
‘If in the course of my literary labours I had been less studious to adhere to nature and simplicity, I am perfectly convinced I should have stood higher in estimation with the purchasers of copyright, and probably have been read and patronized by my contemporaries in the proportion of ten to one.’
It seems a harmless kind of bleat after all, but it was enough to sting Scott to fury, and make him fall upon the old man in a manner somewhat too savage and tartarly. Some years later, and after Cumberland was dead, Sir Walter wrote a sketch of his life in the vein we are better accustomed to associate with the name of Scott.
Cumberland was a voluminous author, having written two epics, thirty-eight dramatic pieces, including a revised version of ‘Timon of Athens’--of which Horace Walpole said, ‘he has caught the manners and diction of the original so exactly that I think it is full as bad a play as it was before he corrected it’--a score or two of fugitive poetical compositions, including some verses to Dr. James, whose powders played almost as large a part in the lives of men of that time as Garrick himself, numerous prose publications and three novels, ‘Arundel,’ ‘Henry,’ and ‘John de Lancaster.’ Of the novels, ‘Henry’ is the one to which Sir Walter’s epitaph is least inapplicable--but Cumberland meant no harm. Were I to be discovered on Primrose Hill, or any other eminence, reading ‘Henry,’ I should blush no deeper than if the book had been ‘David Grieve.’
Cumberland has, of course, no place in men’s memories by virtue of his plays, poems, or novels. Even the catholic Chambers gives no extracts from Cumberland in the ‘Encyclopedia.’ What keeps him for ever alive is--first, his place in Goldsmith’s great poem, ‘Retaliation’; secondly, his memoirs, to which Sir Walter refers so unkindly; and thirdly, the tradition--the well-supported tradition--that he was the original ‘Sir Fretful Plagiary.’
On this last point we have the authority of Croker, and there is none better for anything disagreeable. Croker says he knew Cumberland well for the last dozen years of his life, and that to his last day he resembled ‘Sir Fretful.’
The Memoirs were first published in 1806, in a splendidly printed quarto. The author wanted money badly, and Lackington’s house gave him £500 for his manuscript. It is an excellent book. I do not quarrel with Mr. Leslie Stephen’s description of it in the ‘National Dictionary of Biography’: ‘A very loose book, dateless, inaccurate, but with interesting accounts of men of note.’ All I mean by excellent is excellent to read. The Memoirs touch upon many points of interest. Cumberland was born in the Master’s Lodge, at Trinity, Cambridge, in the Judge’s Chamber--a room hung round with portraits of ‘hanging judges’ in their official robes,and where a great Anglican divine and preacher told me he had once passed a sleepless night, so scared was he by these sinful emblems of human justice. There is an admirable account in Cumberland’s Memoirs of his maternal grandfather, the famous Richard Bentley, and of the Vice-Master, Dr. Walker, fit to be read along with De Quincey’s spirited essay on the same subject. Then the scene is shifted to Dublin Castle, where Cumberland was Ulster-Secretary when Halifax was Lord-Lieutenant, and Single-speech Hamilton had acquired by purchase (for a brief season) the brains of Edmund Burke. There is a wonderful sketch of Bubb Dodington and his villa ‘La Trappe,’ on the banks of the Thames, whither one fair evening Wedderburn brought Mrs. Haughton in a hackney-coach. You read of Dr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith, of Garrick and Foote, and participate in the bustle and malice of the play-house. Unluckily, Cumberland was sent to Spain on a mission, and came home with a grievance. This part is dull, but in all other respects the Memoirs are good to read.
Cumberland’s father, who became an Irish bishop, is depicted by his son as a most pleasing character; and no doubt of his having been so would ever have entered a head always disposed to think well of fathers had not my copy of the Memoirs been annotated throughout in the nervous, scholarly hand of a long-previous owner who, for some reason or another, hated the Cumberlands, the Whig clergy, and the Irish people with a hatred which found ample room and verge enough in the spacious margins of the Memoirs.
I print one only of these splenetic notes:
‘I forget whether I have noticed this elsewhere, therefore I will make sure. In the novel “Arundel,” Cumberland has drawn an exact picture of himself as secretary to Halifax, and has made the father of the hero a clergyman and a keen electioneerer--the vilest character in fiction. The laborious exculpation of Parson Cumberland in these Memoirs does not wipe out the scandal of such a picture. In spite of all he says, we cannot help suspecting that Parson Cumberland and Joseph Arundel had a likeness. N.B.--In both novels (_i.e._, “Arundel” and “Henry”) the portrait of a modern clergyman is too true. But it is strange that Cumberland, thus hankering after the Church, should have volunteered two such characters as Joseph Arundel and Claypole.’
‘Whispering tongues can poison truth,’ and a persistent annotator who writes a legible hand is not easily shaken off.
Perhaps the best story in the book is the one about which there is most doubt. I refer to the well-known and often-quoted account of the first night of ‘She Stoops to Conquer,’ and of the famous band of _claqueurs_ who early took their places, determined to see the play through. Cumberland tells the story with the irresistible verve of falsehood--of the early dinner at the ‘Shakespeare Tavern,’ ‘where Samuel Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life and soul of the corps’; of the guests assembled, including Fitzherbert (who had committed suicide at an earlier date), of the adjournment to the theatre with Adam Drummond of amiable memory, who ‘was gifted by Nature with the most sonorous and at the same time the most contagious laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs. The neighing of the horse of the son of Hystaspes was a whisper to it; the whole thunder of the theatre could not drown it’; and on the story rolls.
It has to be given up. There was a dinner, but it is doubtful whether Cumberland was at it; and as for the proceedings at the theatre, others who were there have pronounced Cumberland’s story a bit of _blague_. According to the newspapers of the day, Cumberland, instead of sitting by Drummond’s side and telling him when to laugh in his peculiar manner, was visibly chagrined by the success of the piece, and as wretched as any man could well be. But Adam Drummond must have been a reality. His laugh still echoes in one’s ears.
ALEXANDER KNOX AND THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
Amongst the many _bizarre_ things that attended the events which led up to the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, was the circumstance that Lord Castlereagh’s private secretary during the period should have been that Mr. Alexander Knox whose Remains in four rather doleful volumes were once cherished by a certain school of theologians.