Part 4

From the summer of 1727 until the spring of 1728 there is no extant correspondence either with Percival or “Tom Prior” to throw light on his movements. In February, 1728, he was still in London, but he “hoped to set out for Dublin in March, and to America in May.” There is a mystery about this visit to Dublin. “I propose to set out for Dublin about a month hence,” he writes to “dear Tom,” “but of this you must not give the least intimation to anybody. It is of all things my earnest desire (and for very good reasons) not to have it known that I am in Dublin. Speak not, therefore, one syllable of it to any mortal whatsoever. When I formerly desired you to take a place for me near the town, you gave out that you were looking for a retired lodging for a friend of yours; upon which everybody surmised me to be the person. I must beg you not to act in the like manner now, but to take for me an entire house in your own name, and as for yourself; for, all things considered, I am determined upon a whole house, with no mortal in it but a maid of your own putting, who is to look on herself as your servant. Let there be two bed-chambers: one for you, another for me; and, as you like, you may ever and anon lie there. I would have the house, with necessary furniture, taken by the month (or otherwise, as you can), for I propose staying not beyond that time; and yet perhaps I may. Take it as soon as possible.... Let me entreat you to say nothing of this to anybody, but to do the thing directly.... I would of all things ... have a proper place in a retired situation, where I may have access to fields and sweet air provided against the moment I arrive. I am inclined to think one may be better concealed in the outermost skirt of the suburbs, than in the country or within the town.... A house quite detached in the country I should have no objection to, provided you judge that I shall not be liable to discovery in it. The place called Bermuda I am utterly against. Dear Tom, do this matter cleanly and cleverly, without waiting for further advice.... To the person from whom you hire it (whom alone I would have you speak of it to) it will not seem strange you should at this time of the year be desirous, for your own convenience or health, to have a place in a free and open air.” This mysterious letter was written in April. From April till September Berkeley again disappears. There is in all this a curious secretiveness of which one has repeated examples in his life. Whether he went to Dublin in that spring, or why he wanted to go, does not appear.

But in September he emerges unexpectedly at Gravesend, newly married, and ready to sail for Rhode Island, “in a ship of 250 tons which he had hired.” The marriage, according to Stock, took place on August 1, whether in Ireland or in England I cannot tell. The lady was Anne, daughter of John Forster, late Chief Justice, and then Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. She shared his fortune when he was about to engage in the most romantic, and ideally the grandest, Christian mission of the eighteenth century. According to tradition she was a devoutly religious mystic: Fénelon and Madame Guyon were among her favourites. “I chose her,” he tells Lord Percival, “for her qualities of mind and her unaffected inclination to books. She goes with great thankfulness, to live a plain farmer’s life, and wear stuff of her own spinning. I have presented her with a spinning-wheel.” A letter to Prior, dated “Gravesend September 5, 1728,” thus describes the little party on the eve of their departure:—“To-morrow, with God’s blessing, I set sail for Rhode Island, with my wife and a friend of hers, my Lady Handcock’s daughter, who bears us company. I am married since I saw you to Miss Forster, whose humour and turn of mind pleases me beyond anything that I know in her whole sex. Mr. James(15), Mr. Dalton, and Mr. Smibert(16) go with us on this voyage. We are now all together at Gravesend, and are engaged in one view.” We are further told(17) that they carried stores and goods to a great value, and that the Dean “embarked 20,000 books, besides what the two gentlemen carried. They sailed in September for Rhode Island, where the Dean intends to winter, and to purchase an estate, in order to settle a correspondence and trade between that island and Bermudas.” Berkeley was in his forty-fourth year, when, full of glowing visions of Christian Empire in the West, “Time’s noblest offspring,” he left England, on his way to Bermuda, with the promise of Sir Robert Walpole that he should receive the promised grant after he had made an investment. He bought land in America, but he never reached Bermuda.

Towards the end of January, in 1729, the little party, in the “hired ship of 250 tons,” made their appearance in Narragansett Bay, on the western side of Rhode Island. “Blundering about the ocean,” they had touched at Virginia on the way, whence a correspondent, sceptical of the enterprise, informs Lord Percival that the Dean “had dined with the Governor, and visited our College,” but thinks that “when the Dean comes to put his visionary scheme into practice, he will find it no better than a religious frenzy,” and that “he is as much a Don Quixote in zeal as that renowned knight was in chivalry. I wish the good Dean may not find out at last that Waller really kidnapt him over to Bermuda, and that the project he has been drawn into may not prove in every point of it poetical.”

We have a picture of the landing at Newport, on a winter day early in 1729. “Yesterday arrived here Dean Berkeley of Londonderry, in a pretty large ship. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant manner. ’Tis said he proposes to tarry here with his family about three months(18).” Newport was then a flourishing town, nearly a century old, an emporium of American commerce, in those days the rival of Boston and New York. He was “never more agreeably surprised,” he says, than “at the size of the town and harbour.” Around him was some of the softest rural and grandest ocean scenery in the world, which had fresh charms even for one whose boyhood was spent in the valley of the Nore, who had lingered in the Bay of Naples, and wandered in Inarime and among the mountains of Sicily. He was seventy miles from Boston, and about as far from Newhaven and Yale College. A range of hills crosses the centre of the island, whence meadows slope to the rocky shore. The Gulf Stream tempers the surrounding sea. “The people,” he tells Percival, “are industrious; and though less orthodox have not less virtue, and I am sure they have more regularity, than those I left in Europe. They are indeed a strange medley of different persuasions.” The gentry retained the customs of the squires in England: tradition tells of a cheerful society: the fox chase, with hounds and horses, was a favourite recreation. The society, for so remote a region, was well informed. The family libraries and pictures which remain argue culture and refinement. Smibert, the artist of the missionary party, who had moved to Boston, soon found employment in America, and his pictures still adorn houses in Rhode Island(19).

The Dean and his young wife lived in Newport for some months after their arrival. Mr. Honeyman, a missionary of the English Society, had been placed there, in Trinity Church, in 1704. The church is still a conspicuous object from the harbour. Berkeley preached in it three days after his arrival, and occasionally afterwards. Notes of his sermons are included in this edition among his Miscellaneous Works.

In the summer of 1729 he moved from Newport to a quiet valley in the interior of the island, where he bought a farm, and built a house. In this island-home, named Whitehall, he lived for more than two years—years of domestic happiness, and of resumed study, much interrupted since he left Dublin in 1713. The house may still be seen, a little aside from the road that runs eastward from Newport, about three miles from the town. It is built of wood. The south-west room was probably the library. The ocean is seen in the distance, while orchards and groves offer the shade and silence which soothed the thinker in his recluse life. No invitations of the three companions of his voyage(20), who had migrated to Boston, could allure him from this retreat, where he diverted his anxieties about Bermuda by the thoughts which found expression in the dialogues of _Alciphron_, redolent of Rhode Island and the invigorating breezes of its ocean shore. Tradition tells that much of _Alciphron_ was the issue of meditation in the open air, at a favourite retreat, beneath the Hanging Rocks, which commands an extensive view of the beach and the ocean; and the chair in which he sat in this alcove is still preserved with veneration.

While Berkeley loved domestic quiet at Whitehall(21) and the “still air of delightful studies,” he mixed occasionally in the society of Newport. He found it not uncongenial, and soon after he was settled at Whitehall he led the way in forming a club, which held occasional meetings, the germ of the Redwood Library, still a useful Newport institution. His own house was a place of meeting for the New England missionaries.

Whitehall, Berkeley’s Residence in Rhode Island

Soon after his arrival in Rhode Island, Berkeley was visited by the Reverend Samuel Johnson, missionary at Stratford, an acute and independent thinker, one of the two contemporary representatives of philosophy in America. The other was Jonathan Edwards, at that time Congregational minister at Northampton on the Connecticut river. They had both adopted a conception of the meaning and office of the material world in the economy of existence that was in many respects similar to Berkeley’s(22). It seems that Berkeley’s book of _Principles_ had before this fallen into Johnson’s hands. He hastened to visit the author when he heard of his arrival. A succession of visits and a life-long correspondence followed. The “non-existence of Matter,” interpreted as a whimsical and even insane paradox, was found by Johnson to mean the absence of unrealisable Substance behind the real material world that is presented to our senses, and of unrealisable Power in the successive sense-presented appearances of which alone we are percipient. He came to see the real existence of the things of sense in the constant order of the data of sense, through which we gain our knowledge of the existence of our fellow men, and of the omnipresent constant Providence of God; whose Ideas are the true archetypes of the visible world. He adopted and applied this conception with a lucidity and force which give him a high place among American thinkers.

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All the while a cloud darkened the recluse life at Whitehall. In June, 1729, Berkeley explains to Percival the circumstances and secrecy of his departure from England:—

“Before I left England I was reduced to a difficult situation. Had I continued there, the report would have obtained (which I had found beginning to spread) that I had dropped the design, after it had cost me and my friends so much trouble and expense. On the other hand, if I had taken leave of my friends, even those who assisted and approved my undertaking would have condemned my coming abroad before the King’s bounty was received. This obliged me to come away in the private manner that I did, and to run the risque of a tedious winter voyage. Nothing less would have convinced the world that I was in earnest, after the report I knew was growing to the contrary.”

Months passed, and Walpole’s promise was still unfulfilled. “I wait here,” he tells Lord Percival in March, 1730, “with all the anxiety that attends suspense, until I know what I can depend upon, or what course I am to take. On the one hand I have no notion that the Court would put what men call a _bite_ upon a poor clergyman, who depended upon charters, grants, votes, and the like engagements. On the other hand, I see nothing done towards payment of the money.” Later on he writes—“As for the raillery of European wits, I should not mind it, if I saw my College go on and prosper; but I must own the disappointments I have met with in this particular have nearly touched me, not without affecting my health and spirits. If the founding a College for the spread of religion and learning in America had been a foolish project, it cannot be supposed the Court, the Ministers, and the Parliament would have given such public encouragement to it; and if, after all that encouragement, they who engaged to endow and protect it let it drop, the disappointment indeed may be to me, but the censure, I think, will light elsewhere.”

The suspense was at last ended. Gibson, the Bishop of London, pressed Walpole for a final answer. “If,” he replied, “you put this question to me as a Minister, I must, and can, assure you that the money shall most undoubtedly be paid, as soon as suits with public convenience; but if you ask me as a friend, whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America expecting the payment of twenty thousand pounds, I advise him by all means to return home to Europe, and to give up his present expectations.” It was thus that in 1731 the Prime Minister of England crushed the project conceived ten years before, and to which the intervening period had, under his encouragement, been devoted by the projector with a singular enthusiasm.

Berkeley’s Alcove, Rhode Island

A few months after this heavy blow, Berkeley, with his wife, and Henry their infant child, bade farewell to the island home. They sailed from Boston in the late autumn of 1731, and in the following February we find them in London. Thus ended the romantic episode of Rhode Island, with its ideal of Christian civilisation, which so moves the heart and touches the imagination in our retrospect of the eighteenth century. Of all who have ever landed on the American shore, none was ever moved by a purer and more self-sacrificing spirit. America still acknowledges that by Berkeley’s visit on this mission it has been invested with the halo of an illustrious name, and associated with religious devotion to a magnificent ideal, even if it was sought to be realised by impracticable means. To reform the New World, and mankind at last, by a College on an island in the Atlantic, six hundred miles from America, the Indians whom it was intended to civilise being mostly in the interior of the continent, and none in Bermuda, was not unnaturally considered Quixotic; and that it was at first supported by the British Court and Parliament is a wonderful tribute to the persuasive genius of the projector. Perhaps he was too much influenced by Lord Percival’s idea, that it could not be realised by private benevolence, without the intervention of the Crown. But the indirect influence of Berkeley’s American inspiration is apparent in many ways in the intellectual and spiritual life of that great continent, during the last century and a half, especially by the impulse given to academical education. It is the testimony of an American author that, “by methods different from those intended by Berkeley, and in ways more manifold than even he could have dreamed, he has since accomplished, and through all coming time, by a thousand ineffaceable influences, he will continue to accomplish, some portion at least of the results which he had aimed at in the founding of his university. It is the old story over again; the tragedy of a Providence wiser than man’s foresight; God giving the victory to His faithful servant even through the bitterness of overruling him and defeating him(23).” American Empire, as we now see it with its boundless beneficent influence, is at least an imperfect realisation of Berkeley’s dream.

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Berkeley’s head quarters were in London, in Green Street, for more than two years after the return to England in the beginning of 1732. Extant correspondence with Lord Percival ends in Rhode Island, and our picture of the two years in London is faintly formed by letters to Prior and Johnson. These speak of ill-health, and breathe a less sanguine spirit. The brilliant social life of former visits was less attractive now, even if old friends had remained. But Swift had quitted England for ever, and Steele had followed Addison to the grave. Gay, the common friend of Berkeley and Pope, died soon after the return from Rhode Island, and Arbuthnot was approaching his end at Hampstead. Samuel Clarke had passed away when Berkeley was at Whitehall; but Seeker now held the rectory of St. James’s, and Butler was in studious retirement on the Wear; while Pope was at Twickenham, publishing his _Essay on Man_, receiving visits from Bolingbroke, or visiting Lord Bathurst at Cirencester Park. Queen Caroline, too, was holding her receptions at Kensington; but “those who imagine (as you write),” he tells Prior in January, 1734, “that I have been making my court here all this time, would never believe (what is most true) that I have not been at the Court or at the Minister’s but once these seven years. The care of my health and the love of retirement have prevailed over whatsoever ambition might have come to my share.” There is a hint of a visit to Oxford, at Commemoration in 1733, when his friend Seeker received the honorary degree.

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Soon after he had settled in London, the fruit of his studies in Rhode Island was given to the world in the Seven Dialogues of _Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher_. Here the philosophical inspiration of his early years is directed to sustain faith in Divine Moral Order, and in the Christian Revelation. _Alciphron_ is the longest, and in literary form perhaps the most finished of his works, unsurpassed in lively strokes of irony and satire. Yet if it is to be regarded as a philosophical justification of religion, as against modern agnosticism, one may incline to the judgment of Mr. Leslie Stephen, that it is “the least admirable of all its author’s admirable works.” As we have seen, the sect of free-thinkers was early the object of Berkeley’s ridicule and sarcasm. They claimed for themselves wide intellectual vision, yet they were blind to the deep realities of the universe; they took exclusive credit for freedom of thought, although their thinking was confined within the narrow compass of our data in sense. The book of _Principles_, the _Dialogues_, and the _De Motu_ of his early years, were designed to bring into clear light the absolute dependence of the world that is presented to our senses on Omnipresent Spirit; and the necessary subjection of all changes in our surroundings to the immediate agency or providence of God. Boasted “free-thinking” was really a narrow atheism, so he believed, in which meaningless Matter usurped the place that belonged in reason to God, and he employed reason to disclose Omnipotent Intelligence in and behind the phenomena that are presented to the senses in impotent natural sequence.

The causes of the widespread moral corruption of the Old World, which had moved Berkeley so profoundly, seem to have been pondered anew during his recluse life in Rhode Island. The decline of morals was explained by the deification of Matter: consequent life of sensuous pleasure accounted for decay of religion. That vice is hurtful was argued by free-thinkers like Mandeville to be a vulgar error, and a fallacious demonstration was offered of its utility. That virtue is intrinsically beautiful was taught by Shaftesbury; but Berkeley judged the abstract beauty, with which “minute philosophers” were contented, unfit to move ordinary human beings to self-sacrificing action; for this involves devotion to a Perfect Person by whom goodness is finally distributed. Religion alone inspires the larger and higher life, in presenting distributive justice personified on the throne of the universe, instead of abstract virtue.

The turning-point in _Alciphron_ is in man’s vision of God. This is pressed in the Fourth Dialogue. The free-thinker asserts that “the notion of a Deity, or some invisible power, is of all prejudices the most unconquerable; the most signal example of belief without reason for believing.” He demands proof—“such proof as every man of sense requires of a matter of fact.... Should a man ask, why I believe there is a king of Great Britain? I might answer, Because I had seen him. Or a king of Spain? Because I had seen those who saw him. But as for this King of kings, I neither saw Him myself, nor any one else that ever did see Him.” To which Euphranor replies, “What if it should appear that God really speaks to man; would this content you? What if it shall appear plainly that God speaks to men by the intervention and use of arbitrary, outward, sensible signs, having no resemblance or necessary connexion with the things they stand for and suggest; if it shall appear that, by innumerable combinations of these signs, an endless variety of things is discovered and made known to us; and that we are thereby instructed or informed in their different natures; that we are taught and admonished what to shun and what to pursue; and are directed how to regulate our motions, and how to act with respect to things distant from us, as well in time as place: will this content you?” Euphranor accordingly proceeds to shew that Visible Nature is a Language, in which the Universal Power that is continually at work is speaking to us all, in a way similar to that in which our fellow men speak to us; so that we have as much (even more) reason to believe in the existence of the Universal Person who is the Speaker, as we have to believe in the existence of persons around us; who become known to us, when they too employ sense-symbols, in the words and actions by which we discover that we are not alone in the universe. For men are really living spirits: their _bodies_ are only the sign of their spiritual personality. And it is so with God, who is also revealed in the visible world as a Spirit. “In a strict sense,” says Euphranor, “I do not see Alciphron, but only such visible signs and tokens as suggest and infer the being of that invisible thinking principle or soul. Even so, in the self-same manner, it seems to me that, though I cannot with eyes of flesh behold the invisible God, yet I do, in the strictest sense, behold and perceive, by all my senses, such signs and tokens ... as suggest, indicate, and demonstrate an invisible God as certainly, and with the same evidence, at least, as any other signs, perceived by sense, do suggest to me the existence of _your_ soul, spirit, or thinking principle; which I am convinced of only by a few signs or effects, and the motions of one small organised body; whereas I do, at all times, and in all places, perceive sensible signs which evince the being of God.” In short, God is the living Soul of the Universe; as you and I are the living souls that keep our bodies and their organs in significant motion. We can interpret the character of God in the history of the universe, even as we can interpret the character of our neighbour by observing his words and outward actions.

This overwhelmed Alciphron. “You stare to find that God is not far from any one of us, and that in Him we live and move and have our being,” rejoins Euphranor. “You who, in the beginning of this conference, thought it strange that God should leave Himself without a witness, do now think it strange the witness should be so full and clear.” “I must own I do,” was the reply. “I never imagined it could be pretended that we saw God with our fleshly eyes, as plain as we see any human person whatsoever, and that He daily speaks to our senses in a manifest and clear dialect.”