designed a binding of his own) died on November 24, 1693, and the epitaph, of his own composition, on his tombstone may still be read with profit by time-servers of all degrees and denominations, cleric and lay, in Parliament and out of it. All the deprived Bishops, so Mr. Lathbury assures us, were in very narrow circumstances, and of Turner, of Ely, Mr. Lathbury very properly writes: ‘This man who, by adhering to the new Sovereign, and taking the oath, might have ended his day amidst an abundance of earthly blessings, was actually sustained in his declining years by the bounty of those who sympathized with him in his distresses.’ Bishop Turner died in 1700.
Despite this distressing and most genuine poverty, the reader of old books will not infrequently come across traces of many happy and well-spent hours during which these poor Non-Jurors managed ‘to fleet the time’ in their own society, for they were, many of them, men of the most varied tastes and endowed with Christian tempers; whilst their writings exhibit, as no other writings of the period do, the saintliness and devotion which are supposed to be among the ‘notes’ of the Catholic Church. Two better men than Kettlewell and Dodwell are nowhere to be found, and as for vigorous writing, where is Charles Leslie to be matched?
So long as the deprived fathers continued to live, the schism–for complete schism it was between ‘the faithful remnant of the Church of England’ and the Established Church–was on firm ground. But what was to happen when the last Bishop died? Dodwell, who, next to Hickes, seems to have dominated the Non-Juring mind, did not wish the schism to continue after the death of the deprived Bishops; for though he admitted that the prayers for the Revolution Sovereigns would be ‘unlawful prayers,’ to which assent could not properly be given, he still thought that communion with the Church of England was possible. Hickes thought otherwise, and Hickes, it must not be forgotten, though only known to the world and even to Non-Jurors generally, as the deprived Dean of Worcester, was in sober truth and reality Bishop of Thetford, having been consecrated a Suffragan Bishop under that title by the deprived Bishops of Norwich, Peterborough, and Ely, at Southgate, in Middlesex, on February 24, 1693, in the Bishop of Peterborough’s lodgings. At the same time the accomplished Thomas Wagstaffe was consecrated Suffragan Bishop of Ipswich, though he continued to earn his living as a physician all the rest of his days.
These were clandestine consecrations, for even so well-tried and whole-hearted a Non-Juror as Thomas Hearne, of Oxford, knew nothing about them, though a great friend of both the new Bishops, until long years had sped. It would be idle at this distance of time, and having regard to the events which have happened since February, 1693, to consider the nice questions how far the Act of Henry VIII. relating to the appointment of suffragans could have any applicability to such consecrations, or what degree of Episcopal authority was thereby conferred, or for how long.
As things turned out, Ken proved the longest liver of the deprived fathers. The good Bishop died at Longleat, one of the few great houses which sheltered Non-Jurors, on March 19, 1711. But before his death he had made cession of his rights to his friend Hooper, who on the violent death of Kidder, the intruding revolution Bishop, had been appointed by Queen Anne, who had wished to reinstate Ken, to Bath and Wells. It was the wish of Ken that the schism should come to an end on his death.
It did nothing of the kind, though some very leading Non-Jurors, including the learned Dodwell and Nelson, rejoined the main body of the Church, saving all just exceptions to the ‘unlawful prayers.’
Bishop Wagstaffe died in 1712, leaving Bishop Hickes alone in his glory, who in 1713, assisted by two Scottish Bishops, consecrated Jeremy Collier, Samuel Hawes, and Nathaniel Spinckes, Bishops of ‘the faithful remnant.’ Hickes died in 1715, and the following year the great and hugely learned Thomas Brett became a Bishop, as also did Henry Gawdy.
Then, alas! arose a schism which rent the faithful remnant in twain. It was about a great subject, the Communion Service. Collier and Brett were in favour of altering the Book of Common Prayer so as to restore it to the First Book of King Edward VI., which provided for (1) The mixed chalice; (2) prayers for the faithful departed; (3) prayer for the descent of the Holy Ghost on the consecrated elements; (4) the Oblatory Prayer, offering the elements to the Father as symbols of His Son’s body and blood. This side of the controversy became known as ‘The Usagers,’ whilst those Non-Jurors, headed by Bishop Spinckes, who held by King Charles’s Prayer-Book, were called ‘the Non-Usagers.’ The discussion lasted long, and was distinguished by immense learning and acumen.
The Usagers may be said to have carried the day, for after the controversy had lasted fourteen years, in 1731 Timothy Mawman was consecrated a Bishop by three Bishops, two of whom were ‘Usagers’ and one a ‘Non-Usager.’ But in the meantime what had become of the congregations committed to their charge? Never large, they had dwindled almost entirely away.
The last regular Bishop was Robert Gordon, who was consecrated in 1741 by Brett, Smith, and Mawman. Gordon, who was an out-and-out Jacobite, died in 1779.
I have not even mentioned the name of perhaps the greatest of the Non-Jurors, William Law, nor that of Carte, an historian, the fruits of whose labour may still be seen in other men’s orchards.
The whole story, were it properly told, would prove how hard it is in a country like England, where nobody really cares about such things, to run a schism. But who knows what may happen to-morrow?
LORD CHESTERFIELD
‘Buy good books and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.’ So wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son, that highly-favoured and much bewritten youth, on March 19, 1750, and his words have been chosen with great cunning by Mr. Charles Strachey as a motto for his new edition of these famous letters.[A]
[Footnote A: Published by Methuen and Co. in 2 vols.]
The quotation is full of the practical wisdom, but is at the same time–so much, at least, an old book-collector may be allowed to say–a little suggestive of the too-well-defined limitations of their writer’s genius and character. Lord Chesterfield is always clear and frequently convincing, yet his wisdom is that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and not only never points in the direction of the Celestial City, but seldom displays sympathy with any generous emotion or liberal taste. Yet as we have nobody like him in the whole body of our literature, we can welcome even another edition–portable, complete, and cheap–of his letters to his son with as much enthusiasm as is compatible with the graces, and with the maxim, so dear to his lordship’s heart, _Nil admirari!_
What, I have often wondered, induced Lord Chesterfield to write this enormously long and troublesome series of letters to a son who was not even his heir? Their sincerity cannot be called in question. William Wilberforce did not more fervently desire the conversion to God of his infant Samuel than apparently did Lord Chesterfield the transformation of his lumpish offspring into ‘the all-accomplished man’ he wished to have him.
‘All this,’ so the father writes in tones of fervent pleading–‘all this you may compass if you please. You have the means, you have the opportunities; employ them, for God’s sake, while you may, and make yourself the all-accomplished man I wish to have you. It entirely depends upon the next two years; they are the decisive ones’ (Letter CLXXVII.).
It is the very language of an evangelical piety applied to the manufacture of a worldling. But what promoted the anxiety? Was it natural affection–a father’s love? If it was, never before or since has that world-wide and homely emotion been so concealed. There is a detestable, a forbidding, an all-pervading harshness of tone throughout this correspondence that seems to banish affection, to murder love. Read Letter CLXXVIII., and judge for yourselves. I will quote a passage:
‘The more I love you now from the good opinion I have of you, the greater will be my indignation if I should have reason to change it. Hitherto you have had every possible proof of my affection, because you have deserved it, but when you cease to deserve it you may expect every possible mark of my resentment. To leave nothing doubtful upon this important point, I will tell you fairly beforehand by what rule I shall judge of your conduct: by Mr. Harte’s account…. If he complains you must be guilty, and I shall not have the least regard for anything you may allege in your own defence.’
Ugh! what a father! Lord Chesterfield despised the Gospels, and made little of St. Paul; yet the New Testament could have taught him something concerning the nature of a father’s love. His language is repulsive, repugnant, and yet how few fathers have taken the trouble to write 400 educational letters of great length to their sons! All one can say is that Chesterfield’s letters are without natural affection:
‘If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, and no man ever loved.’
If affection did not dictate these letters, what did? Could it be ambition? So astute a man as Chesterfield, who was kept well informed as to the impression made by his son, could hardly suppose it likely that the boy would make a name for himself, and thereby confer distinction upon the family of which he was an irregular offshoot. A respectable diplomatic career, with an interval in the House of Commons, was the most that so clear-sighted a man could anticipate for the young Stanhope. Was it literary fame for himself? This, of course, assumes that subsequent publication was contemplated by the writer. The dodges and devices of authors are well-nigh infinite and quite beyond conjecture, and it is, of course, possible that Lord Chesterfield kept copies of these letters, which bear upon their faces evidence of care and elaboration. It is not to be supposed for a moment that he ever forgot he had written them. It is hard to believe he never inquired after them and their whereabouts. Great men have been known to write letters which, though they bore other addresses, were really intended for their biographers. It would not have been surprising if Lord Chesterfield wrote these letters intending some day to publish them, but not only is there no warrant for such an opinion, but the opposite is clearly established. It is, no doubt, odd that the son should have carefully preserved more than 400 letters written to him during a period beginning with his tenderest years and continuing whilst he was travelling on the Continent. It seems almost a miracle. What made the son treasure them so carefully? Did he look forward to being his father’s biographer? Hardly so at the age of ten, or even twenty. Biographies were not then what they have since become. No doubt in the middle of the eighteenth century letters were more treasured than they are to-day, and young Stanhope’s friends may also have thought it wise to encourage him to preserve documentary evidence of the great interest taken in him by his father. None the less, I think the preservation of this correspondence is in the circumstances a most extraordinary though well-established fact.
The son died in 1768 of a dropsy at Avignon, and the news was communicated to the Earl by his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope, of whose existence he was previously unaware. Two grandsons accompanied her. It was a shock; but ‘les manieres nobles et aisees, la tournure d’un homme de condition, le ton de la bonne compagnie, les graces le je ne scais quoi qui plait,’ came to Lord Chesterfield’s assistance, and he received his son’s widow, who was not a pleasing person, and her two boys with kindness and good feeling, and provided for them quite handsomely by his will. The Earl died in 1773, in his seventy-ninth year, and thereupon Mrs. Stanhope, who was in possession of all the original letters addressed to her late husband, carried her wares to market, and made a bargain with Mr. Dodsley for their publication, she to receive L1,575. Mr. Dodsley advertised the forthcoming work, and on that the Earl’s executors, relying upon the well-known case of Pope _v._ Curl, decided by Lord Hardwicke in 1741, filed their bill against Mrs. Stanhope, seeking an injunction to restrain publication. The widow put in her sworn Answer, in which she averred that she had, on more occasions than one, mentioned publication to the Earl, and that he, though recovering from her certain written characters of eminent contemporaries, had seemed quite content to let her do what she liked with the letters, only remarking that there was too much Latin in them. The executors seem to have moved for what is called an interim injunction–that is, an injunction until trial of the cause, and, from the report in _Ambler_, it appears that Lord Apsley (a feeble creature) granted such an injunction, but recommended the executors to permit the publication if, on seeing a copy of the correspondence, they saw no objection to it. In the result the executors gave their consent, and the publication became an authorized one, so much so that Dodsley was able to obtain an interdict in the Scotch Court preventing a certain Scotch bookseller, caller McFarquhar, from reprinting the letters in Edinburgh. Whether the executors believed Mrs. Stanhope’s story, or saw no reason to object to the publication of the letters, I do not know, but it is clear that the opposition was a half-hearted one.
It would be hasty to assume that Lord Chesterfield wrote these letters with any intention of publication, and I am therefore left without being able to suggest any strong reason for their existence. A restless, itching pen, perhaps, accounts for them. Some men find a pleasure in writing, even at great length; others, of whom Carlyle was one, though they hate the labour, are yet compelled by some fierce necessity to blacken paper.
At all events, we have Lord Chesterfield’s letters, and, having them, they will always have readers, for they are readable.
That the letters are full of wit and wisdom and sound advice is certain. Mr. Strachey, in his preface, seems to be under the impression that in the popular estimate Chesterfield is reckoned an elegant trifler, a man of no serious account. What the popular or vulgar estimate of Chesterfield may be it would be hard to determine, nor is it of the least importance, for no one who knows about Lord Chesterfield can possibly entertain any such opinion. How it came about that so able and ambitious a man made so poor a thing out of life, and failed so completely, is puzzling at first, though a little study would, I think, make the reasons of Chesterfield’s failure plain enough.
To prove by extracts from the Letters how wise a man Chesterfield was would be easy, but tiresome; to exhibit him in a repulsive character would be equally easy, but spiteful. I prefer to leave him alone, and to content myself with but one quotation, which has a touch of both wisdom and repulsiveness:
‘Consult your reason betimes. I do not say it will always prove an unerring guide, for human reason is not infallible, but it will prove the least erring guide that you can follow. Books and conversation may assist it, but adopt neither blindly and implicitly; try both by that best rule God has given to direct us–reason. Of all the truths do not decline that of thinking. The host of mankind can hardly be said to think; their prejudices are almost all adoptive; and in general I believe it is better that it should be so, as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated as they are. We have many of these useful prejudices in this country which I should be very sorry to see removed. The good Protestant conviction that the Pope is both Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon is a more effectual preservative against Popery than all the solid and unanswerable arguments of Chillingworth.’
THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND
The ten handsome volumes which the indefatigable and unresting zeal of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, and the high spirit of the Clarendon Press, have edited, arranged, printed, and published for the benefit of the world and the propagation of the Gospel according to Dr. Johnson are pleasant things to look upon. I hope the enterprise has proved remunerative to those concerned, but I doubt it. The parsimony of the public in the matter of books is pitiful. The ordinary purse-carrying Englishman holds in his head a ready-reckoner or scale of charges by which he tests his purchases–so much for a dinner, so much for a bottle of champagne, so much for a trip to Paris, so much for a pair of gloves, and so much for a book. These ten volumes would cost him L4 9s. 3d. ‘Whew! What a price for a book, and where are they to be put, and who is to dust them?’ Idle questions! As for room, a bicycle takes more room than 1,000 books; and as for dust, it is a delusion. You should never dust books. There let it lie until the rare hour arrives when you want to read a particular volume; then warily approach it with a snow-white napkin, take it down from its shelf, and, withdrawing to some back apartment, proceed to cleanse the tome. Dr. Johnson adopted other methods. Every now and again he drew on huge gloves, such as those once worn by hedgers and ditchers, and then, clutching his folios and octavos, he banged and buffeted them together until he was enveloped in a cloud of dust. This violent exercise over, the good doctor restored the volumes, all battered and bruised, to their places, where, of course, the dust resettled itself as speedily as possible.
Dr. Johnson could make books better than anybody, but his notions of dusting them were primitive and erroneous. But the room and the dust are mere subterfuges. The truth is, there is a disinclination to pay L4 9s. 3d. for the ten volumes containing the complete Johnsonian legend. To quarrel with the public is idiotic and most un-Johnsonian. ‘Depend upon it, sir,’ said the Sage, ‘every state of society is as luxurious as it can be.’ We all, a handful of misers excepted, spend more money than we can afford upon luxuries, but what those luxuries are to be is largely determined for us by the fashions of our time. If we do not buy these ten volumes, it is not because we would not like to have them, but because we want the money they cost for something we want more. As for dictating to men how they are to spend their money, it were both a folly and an impertinence.
These ten volumes ended Dr. Hill’s labours as an editor of _Johnson’s Life and Personalia_, but did not leave him free. He had set his mind on an edition of the _Lives of the Poets_. This, to the regret of all who knew him either personally or as a Johnsonian, he did not live to see through the press. But it is soon to appear, and will be a storehouse of anecdote and a miracle of cross-references. A poet who has been dead a century or two is amazing good company–at least, he never fails to be so when Johnson tells us as much of his story as he can remember without undue research, with that irony of his, that vast composure, that humorous perception of the greatness and the littleness of human life, that make the brief records of a Spratt, a Walsh, and a Fenton so divinely entertaining. It is an immense testimony to the healthiness of the Johnsonian atmosphere that Dr. Hill, who breathed it almost exclusively for a quarter of a century and upwards, showed no symptoms either of moral deterioration or physical exhaustion. His appetite to the end was as keen as ever, nor was his temper obviously the worse. The task never became a toil, not even a tease. ‘You have but two subjects,’ said Johnson to Boswell: ‘yourself and myself. I am sick of both.’ Johnson hated to be talked about, or to have it noticed what he ate or what he had on. For a hundred years now last past he has been more talked about and noticed than anybody else. But Dr. Hill never grew sick of Dr. Johnson.
The _Johnsonian Miscellanies_[A] open with the _Prayers and Meditations_, first published by the Rev. Dr. Strahan in 1785. Strahan was the Vicar of Islington, and into his hands at an early hour one morning Dr. Johnson, then approaching his last days, put the papers, ‘with instructions for committing them to the press and with a promise to prepare a sketch of his own life to accompany them.’ This promise the doctor was not able to keep, and shortly after his death his reverend friend published the papers just as they were put into his hands. One wonders he had the heart to do it, but the clerical mind is sometimes strangely insensitive to the privacy of thought. But, as in the case of most indelicate acts, you cannot but be glad the thing was done. The original manuscript is at Pembroke College, Oxford. In these _Prayers and Meditations_ we see an awful figure. The _solitary_ Johnson, perturbed, tortured, oppressed, in distress of body and of mind, full of alarms for the future both in this world and the next, teased by importunate and perplexing thoughts, harassed by morbid infirmities, vexed by idle yet constantly recurring scruples, with an inherited melancholy and a threatened sanity, is a gloomy and even a terrible picture, and forms a striking contrast to the social hero, the triumphant dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame D’Arblay. Yet it is relieved by its inherent humanity, its fellowship and feeling. Dr. Johnson’s piety is delightfully full of human nature–far too full to please the poet Cowper, who wrote of the _Prayers and Meditations_ as follows:
‘If it be fair to judge of a book by an extract, I do not wonder that you were so little edified by Johnson’s Journal. It is even more ridiculous than was poor Rutty’s of flatulent memory. The portion of it given us in this day’s paper contains not one sentiment worth one farthing, except the last, in which he resolves to bind himself with no more unbidden obligations. Poor man! one would think that to pray for his dead wife and to pinch himself with Church fasts had been almost the whole of his religion.’
[Footnote A: Two volumes. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1897.]
It were hateful to pit one man’s religion against another’s, but it is only fair to Dr. Johnson’s religion to remember that, odd compound as it was, it saw him through the long struggle of life, and enabled him to meet the death he so honestly feared like a man and a Christian. The _Prayers and Meditations_ may not be an edifying book in Cowper’s sense of the word; there is nothing triumphant about it; it is full of infirmities and even absurdities; but, for all that, it contains more piety than 10,000 religious biographies. Nor must the evidence it contains of weakness be exaggerated. Beset with infirmities, a lazy dog, as he often declared himself to be, he yet managed to do a thing or two. Here, for example, is an entry:
’29, EASTER EVE (1777).
‘I rose and again prayed with reference to my departed wife. I neither read nor went to church, yet can scarcely tell how I have been hindered. I treated with booksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long.’
Too long, perhaps, for Johnson’s piety, but short enough to enable the booksellers to make an uncommon good bargain for the _Lives of the Poets_. ‘As to the terms,’ writes Mr. Dilly, ‘it was left entirely to the doctor to name his own; he mentioned 200 guineas; it was immediately agreed to.’ The business-like Malone makes the following observation on the transaction: ‘Had he asked 1,000, or even 1,500, guineas the booksellers, who knew the value of his name, would doubtless have readily given it.’ Dr. Johnson, though the son of a bookseller, was the least tradesman-like of authors. The bargain was bad, but the book was good.
A year later we find this record:
‘MONDAY, _April_ 20 (1778).
‘After a good night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose seasonably and prayed, using the collect for yesterday. In reviewing my time from Easter, 1777, I find a very melancholy and shameful blank. So little has been done that days and months are without any trace. My health has, indeed, been very much interrupted. My nights have been commonly not only restless but painful and fatiguing…. I have written a little of the _Lives of the Poets_, I think, with all my usual vigour. I have made sermons, perhaps, as readily as formerly. My memory is less faithful in retaining names, and, I am afraid, in retaining occurrences. Of this vacillation and vagrancy of mind I impute a great part to a fortuitous and unsettled life, and therefore purpose to spend my life with more method.
‘This year the 28th of March passed away without memorial. Poor Tetty, whatever were our faults and failings, we loved each other. I did not forget thee yesterday. Couldst thou have lived! I am now, with the help of God, to begin a new life.’
Dr. Hill prints an interesting letter of Mr. Jowett’s, in which occur the following observations:
‘It is a curious question whether Boswell has unconsciously misrepresented Johnson in any respect. I think, judging from the materials, which are supplied chiefly by himself, that in one respect he has. He has represented him more as a sage and philosopher in his conduct as well as his conversation than he really was, and less as a rollicking “King of Society.” The gravity of Johnson’s own writings tends to confirm this, as I suspect, erroneous impression. His religion was fitful and intermittent; and when once the ice was broken he enjoyed Jack Wilkes, though he refused to shake hands with Hume. I was much struck with a remark of Sir John Hawkins (excuse me if I have mentioned this to you before): “He was the most humorous man I ever knew.”‘
Mr. Jowett’s letter raises some nice points–the Wilkes and Hume point, for example. Dr. Johnson hated both blasphemy and bawd, but he hated blasphemy most. Mr. Jowett shared the doctor’s antipathies, but very likely hated bawd more than he did blasphemy. But, as I have already said, the point is a nice one. To crack jokes with Wilkes at the expense of Boswell and the Scotch seems to me a very different thing from shaking hands with Hume. But, indeed, it is absurd to overlook either Johnson’s melancholy piety or his abounding humour and love of fun and nonsense. His _Prayers and Meditations_ are full of the one, Boswell and Mrs. Thrale and Madame D’Arblay are full of the other. Boswell’s _Johnson_ has superseded the ‘authorized biography’ by Sir John Hawkins, and Dr. Hill did well to include in these _Miscellanies_ Hawkins’ inimitable description of the memorable banquet given at the Devil Tavern, near Temple Bar, in the spring of 1751, to celebrate the publication of Mrs. Charlotte Lennox’s first novel. What delightful revelry! what innocent mirth! prolonged though it was till long after dawn. Poor Mrs. Lennox died in distress in 1804, at the age of eighty-three. Could Johnson but have lived he would have lent her his helping hand. He was no fair-weather friend, but shares with Charles Lamb the honour of being able to unite narrow means and splendid munificence.
I must end with an anecdote:
‘Henderson asked the doctor’s opinion of _Dido_ and its author. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “I never did the man an injury. Yet he would read his tragedy to me.”‘
BOSWELL AS BIOGRAPHER
Boswell’s position in English literature cannot be disputed, nor can he ever be displaced from it. He has written our greatest biography. That is all. Theorize about it as much as you like, account for it how you may, the fact remains. ‘Alone I did it.’ There has been plenty of theorizing. Lord Macaulay took the subject in hand and tossed it up and down for half a dozen pages with a gusto that drove home to many minds the conviction, the strange conviction, that our greatest biography was written by one of the very smallest men that ever lived, ‘a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect’–by a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb; by one ‘who, if he had not been a great fool, would never have been a great writer.’ So far Macaulay, _anno Domini_ 1831, in the vigorous pages of the _Edinburgh Review_. A year later appears in _Fraser’s Magazine_ another theory by another hand, not then famous, Mr. Thomas Carlyle. I own to an inordinate affection for Mr. Carlyle as ‘literary critic’ As philosopher and sage, he has served our turn. We have had the fortune, good or bad, to outlive him; and our sad experience is that death makes a mighty difference to all but the very greatest. The sight of the author of _Sartor Resartus_ in a Chelsea omnibus, the sound of Dr. Newman’s voice preaching to a small congregation in Birmingham, kept alive in our minds the vision of their greatness–it seemed then as if that greatness could know no limit; but no sooner had they gone away, than somehow or another one became conscious of some deficiency in their intellectual positions–the tide of human thought rushed visibly by them, and it became plain that to no other generation would either of these men be what they had been to their own. But Mr. Carlyle as literary critic has a tenacious grasp, and Boswell was a subject made for his hand. ‘Your Scottish laird, says an English naturalist of those days, may be defined as the hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known.’ Carlyle knew the type well enough. His general description of Boswell is savage:
‘Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye, visible, palpable to the dullest. His good qualities, again, belonged not to the time he lived in; were far from common then; indeed, in such a degree were almost unexampled; not recognisable, therefore, by everyone; nay, apt even, so strange had they grown, to be confounded with the very vices they lay contiguous to and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and good liver, gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler, had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced, too, with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much when the tailor by a court suit had made a new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband imprinted “Corsica Boswell” round his hat, and, in short, if you will, lived no day of his life without saying and doing more than one pretentious ineptitude, all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure and scent it from afar, in those big cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more, in that coarsely-protruded shelf mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin; in all this who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough? The underpart of Boswell’s face is of a low, almost brutish character.’
This is character-painting with a vengeance. Portrait of a Scotch laird by the son of a Scotch peasant. Carlyle’s Boswell is to me the very man. If so, Carlyle’s paradox seems as great as Macaulay’s, for though Carlyle does not call Boswell a great fool in plain set terms, he goes very near it. But he keeps open a door through which he effects his escape. Carlyle sees in Bozzy ‘the old reverent feeling of discipleship, in a word, hero-worship.’
‘How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love and the recognition and vision which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and so, little by little, unconsciously works together for us a whole “Johnsoniad”–a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many centuries has been drawn by man of man.’
This I think is a little overdrawn. That Boswell loved Johnson, God forbid I should deny. But that he was inspired only by love to write his life, I gravely question. Boswell was, as Carlyle has said, a greedy man–and especially was he greedy of fame–and he saw in his revered friend a splendid subject for artistic biographic treatment. Here is where both Macaulay and Carlyle are, as I suggest, wrong. Boswell was a fool, but only in the sense in which hundreds of great artists have been fools; on his own lines, and across his own bit of country, he was no fool. He did not accidentally stumble across success, but he deliberately aimed at what he hit. Read his preface and you will discover his method. He was as much an artist as either of his two famous critics. Where Carlyle goes astray is in attributing to discipleship what was mainly due to a dramatic sense. However, theories are no great matter.
Our means of knowledge of James Boswell are derived mainly from himself; he is his own incriminator. In addition to the life there is the Corsican tour, the Hebrides tour, the letters to Erskine and to Temple, and a few insignificant occasional publications in the shape of letters to the people of Scotland, etc. With these before him it is impossible for any biographer to approach Bozzy in a devotional attitude; he was all Carlyle calls him. Our sympathies are with his father, who despised him, and with his son, who was ashamed of him. It is indeed strange to think of him staggering, like the drunkard he was, between these two respectable and even stately figures–the Senator of the Court of Justice and the courtly scholar and antiquary. And yet it is to the drunkard humanity is debtor. Respectability is not everything.
Boswell had many literary projects and ambitions, and never intended to be known merely as the biographer of Johnson. He proposed to write a life of Lord Kames and to compose memoirs of Hume. It seems he did write a life of Sir Robert Sibbald. He had other plans in his head, but dissipation and a steadily increasing drunkenness destroyed them all. As inveterate book-hunter, I confess to a great fancy to lay hands on his _Dorando: A Spanish Tale_, a shilling book published in Edinburgh during the progress of the once famous Douglas case, and ordered to be suppressed as contempt of court after it had been through three editions. It is said, probably hastily, that no copy is known to exist–a dreary fate which, according to Lord Macaulay, might have attended upon the _Life of Johnson_ had the copyright of that work become the property of Boswell’s son, who hated to hear it mentioned. It is not, however, very easy to get rid of any book once it is published, and I do not despair of reading _Dorando_ before I die.
OLD PLEASURE GARDENS[A]
[Footnote A: _Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century_, by Warwick Wroth, F.S.A., assisted by Arthur Edgar Wroth. London: Macmillan and Co.]
This is an honest book, disfigured by no fine writing or woeful attempts to make us dance round may-poles with our ancestors. Terribly is our good language abused by the swell-mob of stylists, for whom it is certainly not enough that Chatham’s language is their mother’s tongue. May the Devil fly away with these artists; though no sooner had he done so than we should be ‘wae’ for auld Nicky-ben. Mr. Wroth, of the British Museum, and his brother, Mr. Arthur Wroth, are above such vulgar pranks, and never strain after the picturesque, but in the plain garb of honest men carry us about to the sixty-four gardens where the eighteenth-century Londoner, his wife and family–the John Gilpins of the day–might take their pleasure either sadly, as indeed best befits our pilgrim state, or uproariously to deaden the ear to the still small voice of conscience–the pangs of slighted love, the law’s delay, the sluggish step of Fortune, the stealthy strides of approaching poverty, or any other of the familiar incidents of our mortal life. The sixty-two illustrations which adorn the book are as honest as the letterpress. There is a most delightful Morland depicting a very stout family indeed regaling itself _sub tegmine fagi_. It is called a ‘Tea Party.’ A voluminous mother holds in her roomy lap a very fat baby, whose back and neck are full upon you as you stare into the picture. And what a jolly back and innocent neck it is! Enough to make every right-minded woman cry out with pleasure. Then there is the highly respectable father stirring his cup and watching with placid content a gentleman in lace and ruffles attending to the wife, whilst the two elder children play with a wheezy dog.
In these pages we can see for ourselves the British public–God rest its soul!–enjoying itself. This honest book is full of _la bourgeoisie_. The rips and the painted ladies occasionally, it is true, make their appearance, but they are reduced to their proper proportions. The Adam and Eve Tea Gardens, St. Pancras, have a somewhat rakish sound, calculated to arrest the jaded attention of the debauchee, but what has Mr. Wroth to tell us about them?
‘About the beginning of the present century it could still be described as an agreeable retreat, “with enchanting prospects”; and the gardens were laid out with arbours, flowers, and shrubs. Cows were kept for making syllabubs, and on summer afternoons a regular company met to play bowls and trap-ball in an adjacent field. One proprietor fitted out a mimic squadron of frigates in the garden, and the long-room was used a good deal for beanfeasts and tea-drinking parties’ (p. 127).
What a pleasant place! Syllabubs! How sweet they sound! Nobody worried then about diphtheria; they only died of it. Mimic frigates, too! What patriotism! These gardens are as much lost as those of the Hesperides. A cemetery swallowed them up–the cemetery which adjoins the old St. Pancras Churchyard. The Tavern, shorn of its amenities, a mere drink-shop, survived as far down the century as 1874, soon after which date it also disappeared. Hornsey Wood House has a name not unknown in the simple annals of tea-drinking. It is now part of Finsbury Park, but in the middle of the last century its long-room ‘on popular holydays, such as Whit Sunday, might be seen crowded as early as nine or ten in the morning with a motley assemblage eating rolls and butter and drinking tea at an extravagant price.’ ‘Hone remembered the old Hornsey Wood House as it stood embowered, and seeming a part of the wood. It was at that time kept by two sisters–Mrs. Lloyd and Mrs. Collier–and these aged dames were usually to be found before their door on a seat between two venerable oaks, wherein swarms of bees hived themselves.’
What a picture is this of these vanished dames! Somewhere, I trust, they are at peace.
‘And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes, Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia,
Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore.’
A more raffish place was the Dog and Duck in St. George’s Fields, which boasted mineral springs, good for gout, stone, king’s evil, sore eyes, and inveterate cancers. Considering its virtue, the water was a cheap liquor, for a dozen bottles could be had at the spa for a shilling. The Dog and Duck, though at last it exhibited depraved tastes, was at one time well conducted. Miss Talbot writes about it to Mrs. Carter, and Dr. Johnson advised his Thralia to try the waters. It was no mean place, but boasted a breakfast-room, a bowling-green, and a swimming-bath 200 feet long and 100 feet (nearly) broad. Mr. Wroth narrates the history of its fall with philosophical composure. In the hands of one Hedger the decencies were disregarded, and thieves made merry where once Miss Talbot sipped bohea. One of its frequenters, Charlotte Shaftoe, is said to have betrayed seven of her intimates to the gallows. Few visitors’ lists could stand such a strain as Miss Shaftoe put upon hers. In 1799 the Dog and Duck was suppressed, and Bethlehem Hospital now reigns in its stead. ‘The Peerless Pool’ has a Stevensonian sound. It was a dangerous pond behind Old Street, long known as ‘The Parlous or Perilous Pond’ ‘because divers youth by swimming therein have been drowned.’ In 1743 a London jeweller called Kemp took it in hand, turned it into a pleasure bath, and renamed it, happily enough, ‘The Peerless Pool.’ It was a fine open-air bath, 170 feet long, more than 100 feet broad, and from 3 to 5 feet deep. ‘It was nearly surrounded by trees, and the descent was by marble steps to a fine gravel bottom, through which the springs that supplied the pool came bubbling up.’ Mr. Kemp likewise constructed a fish-pond. The enterprise met with success, and anglers, bathers, and at due seasons skaters, flocked to ‘The Peerless Pool.’ Hone describes how every Thursday and Saturday the boys from the Bluecoat School were wont to plunge into its depths. You ask its fate. It has been built over. Peerless Street, the second main turning on the left of the City Road just beyond Old Street in coming from the City, is all that is left to remind anyone of the once Parlous Pool, unless, indeed, it still occasionally creeps into a cellar and drowns cockroaches instead of divers youths. The Three Hats, Highbury Barn, Hampstead Wells, are not places to be lightly passed over. In Mr. Wroth’s book you may read about them and trace their fortunes–their fallen fortunes. After all, they have only shared the fate of empires.
Of the most famous London gardens–Marylebone, Ranelagh, and, greatest of them all, Vauxhall–Mr. Wroth writes at, of course, a becoming length. Marylebone Gardens, when at their largest, comprised about 8 acres. Beaumont Street, part of Devonshire Street and of Devonshire Place and Upper Wimpole Street, now occupy their site. Music was the main feature of Marylebone. A band played in the evening. Vocalists at different times drew crowds. Masquerades and fireworks appeared later in the history of the gardens, which usually were open three nights of the week. Dr. Johnson’s turbulent behaviour, on the occasion of one of his frequent visits, will easily be remembered. Marylebone, at no period, says Mr. Wroth, attained the vogue of Ranelagh or the universal popularity of Vauxhall. In 1776 the gardens were closed, and two years later the builders began to lay out streets. Ranelagh is, perhaps, the greatest achievement of the eighteenth century. Its Rotunda, built in 1741, is compared by Mr. Wroth to the reading-room of the British Museum. No need to give its dimensions; only look at the print, and you will understand what Johnson meant when he declared that the _coup d’oeil_ of Ranelagh was the finest thing he had ever seen. The ordinary charge for admission was half a crown, which secured you tea or coffee and bread-and-butter. The gardens were usually open Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the amusements were music, tea-drinking, walking, and talking. Mr. Wroth quotes a Frenchman, who, after visiting Ranelagh in 1800, calls it ‘le plus insipide lieu d’amusement que l’on ait pu imaginer,’ and even hints at Dante’s Purgatory. An earlier victim from Gaul thus records his experience of Ranelagh: ‘On s’ennui avec de la mauvaise musique, du the et du beurre.’ So true is it that the cheerfulness you find anywhere is the cheerfulness you have brought with you. However, despite the Frenchman, good music and singing were at times to be heard at Ranelagh. The nineteenth century would have nothing to do with Ranelagh, and in 1805 it was pulled down. The site now belongs to Chelsea Hospital. Cuper’s Gardens lacked the respectability of Marylebone and the style of Ranelagh, but they had their vogue during the same century. They were finely situated on the south side of the Thames opposite Somerset House. Cuper easily got altered into Cupid; and when on the death of Ephraim Evans in 1740 the business came to be carried on by his widow, a comely dame who knew a thing or two, it proved to be indeed a going concern. But the new Licensing Bill of 1752 destroyed Cupid’s Garden, and Mrs. Evans was left lamenting and wholly uncompensated. Of Vauxhall Mr. Wroth treats at much length, and this part of his book is especially rich in illustrations. Every lover of Old London and old times and old prints should add Mr. Wroth’s book to his library.
OLD BOOKSELLERS
There has just been a small flutter amongst those who used to be called stationers or text-writers in the good old days, before printing was, and when even Peers of the Realm (now so highly educated) could not sign their names, or, at all events, preferred not to do so–booksellers they are now styled–and the question which agitates them is discount. Having mentioned this, one naturally passes on.
No great trade has an obscurer history than the book trade. It seems to lie choked in mountains of dust which it would be suicidal to disturb. Men have lived from time to time of literary skill–Dr. Johnson was one of them–who had knowledge, extensive and peculiar, of the traditions and practices of ‘the trade,’ as it is proudly styled by its votaries; but nobody has ever thought it worth his while to make record of his knowledge, which accordingly perished with him, and is now irrecoverably lost.
In old days booksellers were also publishers, frequently printers, and sometimes paper-makers. Jacob Tonson not only owned Milton’s _Paradise Lost_–for all time, as he fondly thought, for little did he dream of the fierce construction the House of Lords was to put upon the Copyright Act of Queen Anne–not only was Dryden’s publisher, but also kept shop in Chancery Lane, and sold books across the counter. He allowed no discount, but, so we are told, ‘spoke his mind upon all occasions, and flattered no one,’ not even glorious John.
For a long time past the trades of bookselling and book-publishing have been carried on apart. This has doubtless rid booksellers of all the unpopularity which formerly belonged to them in their other capacity. This unpopularity is now heaped as a whole upon the publishers, who certainly need not dread the doom awaiting those of whom the world speaks well.
A tendency of the two trades to grow together again is perhaps noticeable. For my part, I wish they would. Some publishers are already booksellers, but the books they sell are usually only new books. Now it is obvious that the true bookseller sells books both old and new. Some booksellers are occasional publishers. May each usurp–or, rather, reassume–the business of the other, whilst retaining his own!
The world, it must be admitted, owes a great deal of whatever information it possesses about the professions, trades, and occupations practised and carried on in its midst to those who have failed in them. Prosperous men talk ‘shop,’ but seldom write it. The book that tells us most about booksellers and bookselling in bygone days is the work of a crack-brained fellow who published and sold in the reigns of Queen Anne and George I., and died in 1733 in great poverty and obscurity. I refer to John Dunton, whose _Life and Errors_ in the edition in two volumes edited by J.B. Nichols, and published in 1818, is a common book enough in the second-hand shops, and one which may be safely recommended to everyone, except, indeed, to the unfortunate man or woman who is not an adept in the art, craft, or mystery of skipping.
The book will strangely remind the reader of Amory’s _Life of John Buncle_–those queer volumes to which many a reader has been sent by Hazlitt’s intoxicating description of them in his _Round Table_, and a few perhaps by a shy allusion contained in one of the essays of Elia. The real John Dunton has not the boundless spirits of the fictitious John Buncle; but in their religious fervour, their passion for flirtation, their tireless egotism, and their love of character-sketching, they greatly resemble one another.
It is this last characteristic that imparts real value to Dunton’s book, and makes it, despite its verbiage and tortuosity, throb with human interest. For example, he gives us a short sketch of no less than 135 then living London booksellers in this style: ‘Mr. Newton is full of kindness and good-nature. He is affable and courteous in trade, and is none of those men of forty whose religion is yet to chuse, for his mind (like his looks) is serious and grave; and his neighbours tell me his understanding does not improve too fast for his practice, for he is not religious by start or sally, but is well fixed in the faith and practice of a Church of England man–and has a handsome wife into the bargain.’
Most of the 135 booksellers were good men, according to Dunton, but not all. ‘Mr. Lee in Lombard Street. Such a pirate, such a cormorant was never before. Copies, books, men, shops, all was one. He held no propriety right or wrong, good or bad, till at last he began to be known; and the booksellers, not enduring so ill a man among them, spewed him out, and off he marched to Ireland, where he acted as _felonious Lee_ as he did in London. And as Lee lived a thief, so he died a hypocrite; for being asked on his death-bed if he would forgive Mr. C. (that had formerly wronged him), “Yes,” said Lee, “if I die, I forgive him; but if I happen to live, I am resolved to be revenged on him.”‘
The Act of Union destroyed the trade of these pirates, but their felonious editions of eighteenth-century authors still abound. Mr. Gladstone, I need scarcely say, was careful in his Home Rule Bill (which was denounced by thousands who never read a line of it) to withdraw copyright from the scope of action of his proposed Dublin Parliament.
There are nearly eleven hundred brief character-sketches in Dunton’s book, of all sorts and kinds, but with a preference for bookish people, divines, both of the Establishment and out of it, printers and authors. Sometimes, indeed, the description is short enough, and tells one very little. To many readers, references so curt to people of whom they never heard, and whose names are recorded nowhere else, save on their mouldering grave-stones, may seem tedious and trivial, but for others they will have a strange fascination. Here are a few examples:
‘Affable _Wiggins_. His conversation is general but never impertinent.
‘The kind and golden _Venables_. He is so good a man, and so truly charitable, he that will write of him, must still write more.
‘Mr. _Bury_–my old neighbour in Redcross Street. He is a plain honest man, sells the best coffee in all the neighbourhood, and lives in this world like a spiritual stranger and pilgrim in a foreign country.
‘Anabaptist (alias _Elephant_) _Smith_. He was a man of great sincerity and happy contentment in all circumstances of life.’
If an affection for passages of this kind be condemned as trivial, and akin to the sentimentalism of the man in Calverley’s poem who wept over a box labelled ‘This side up,’ I will shelter myself behind Carlyle, who was evidently deeply moved, as his review of Boswell’s Johnson proves, by the life-history of Mr. F. Lewis, ‘of whose birth, death, and whole terrestrial _res gestae_ this only, and, strange enough, this actually, survives–“Sir, he lived in London, and hung loose upon society. _Stat_ PARVI _hominis umbra_.”‘ On that peg Carlyle’s imagination hung a whole biography.
Dunton, who was the son of the Rector of Aston Clinton, was apprenticed, about 1675, to a London bookseller. He had from the beginning a great turn both for religion and love. He, to use his own phrase, ‘sat under the powerful ministry of Mr. Doolittle.’ ‘One Lord’s day, and I remember it with sorrow, I was to hear the Rev. Mr. Doolittle, and it was then and there the beautiful Rachel Seaton gave me that fatal wound.’
The first book Dunton ever printed was by the Rev. Mr. Doolittle, and was of an eminently religious character.
‘One Lord’s Day (and I am very sensible of the sin) I was strolling about just as my fancy led me, and, stepping into Dr. Annesley’s meeting-place–where, instead of engaging my attention to what the Doctor said, I suffered both my mind and eyes to run at random–I soon singled out a young lady that almost charmed me dead; but, having made my inquiries, I found to my sorrow she was pre-engaged.’ However, Dunton was content with the elder sister, one of the three daughters of Dr. Annesley. The one he first saw became the wife of the Reverend Samuel Wesley, and the mother of John and Charles. The third daughter is said to have been married to Daniel De Foe.
As soon as he was out of his apprenticeship, Dunton set up business as a publisher and bookseller. He says grimly enough:
‘A man should be well furnished with an honest policy if he intends to set out to the world nowadays. And this is no less necessary in a bookseller than in any other tradesman, for in that way there are plots and counter-plots, and a whole army of hackney authors that keep their grinders moving by the travail of their pens. These gormandizers will eat you the very life out of a _copy_ so soon as ever it appears, for as the times go, _Original_ and _Abridgement_ are almost reckoned as necessary as man and wife.’
The mischief to which Dunton refers was permitted by the stupidity of the judges, who refused to consider an abridgment of a book any interference with its copyright. Some learned judges have, indeed, held that an abridger is a benefactor, but as his benefactions are not his own, but another’s, a shorter name might be found for him. The law on the subject is still uncertain.
Dunton proceeds: ‘Printing was now the uppermost in my thoughts, and hackney authors began to ply me with _specimens_ as earnestly and with as much passion and concern as the watermen do passengers with _Oars_ and _Scullers_. I had some acquaintance with this generation in my apprenticeship, and had never any warm affection for them, in regard I always thought their great concern lay more in _how much a sheet_, than in any generous respect they bore to the _Commonwealth of Learning_; and indeed the learning itself of these gentlemen lies very often in as little room as their honesty, though they will pretend to have studied for six or seven years in the Bodleian Library, to have turned over the Fathers, and to have read and digested the whole compass both of human and ecclesiastic history, when, alas! they have never been able to understand a single page of St. Cyprian, and cannot tell you whether the Fathers lived before or after Christ.’
Yet of one of this hateful tribe Dunton is able to speak well. He declares Mr. Bradshaw to have been the best accomplished hackney author he ever met with. He pronounces his style incomparably fine. He had quarrelled with him, but none the less he writes: ‘If Mr. Bradshaw is yet alive, I here declare to the world and to him that I freely forgive him what he owes, both in money and books, if he will only be so kind as to make me a visit. But I am afraid the worthy gentleman is dead, for he was wretchedly overrun with melancholy, and the very blackness of it reigned in his countenance. He had certainly performed wonders with his pen, had not his poverty pursued him and almost laid the necessity upon him to be unjust.’
All hackney authors were not poor. Some of the compilers and abridgers made what even now would be considered by popular novelists large sums. Scotsmen were very good at it. Gordon and Campbell became wealthy men. If authors had a turn for politics, Sir Robert Walpole was an excellent paymaster. Arnall, who was bred an attorney, is stated to have been paid L11,000 in four years by the Government for his pamphlets.
‘Come, then, I’ll comply.
Spirit of Arnall, aid me while I lie!’
It cannot have been pleasant to read this, but then Pope belonged to the opposition, and was a friend of Lord Bolingbroke, and would consequently say anything.
There is not a more interesting and artless autobiography to be read than William Hutton’s, the famous bookseller and historian of Birmingham. Hutton has been somewhat absurdly called the English Franklin. He is not in the least like Franklin. He has none of Franklin’s supreme literary skill, and he was a loving, generous, and tender-hearted man, which Franklin certainly was not. Hutton’s first visit to London was paid in 1749. He walked up from Nottingham, spent three days in London, and then walked back to Nottingham. The jaunt, if such an expression is applicable, cost him eleven shillings less fourpence. Yet he paid his way. The only money he spent to gain admission to public places was a penny to see Bedlam.
Interesting, however, as is Hutton’s book, it tells us next to nothing about book-selling, except that in his hands it was a prosperous undertaking.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT COPYRIGHT IN BOOKS
Copyright, which is the exclusive liberty reserved to an author and his assigns of printing or otherwise multiplying copies of his book during certain fixed periods of time, is a right of modern origin.
There is nothing about copyright in Justinian’s compilations.
It is a mistake to suppose that books did not circulate freely in the era of manuscripts. St. Augustine was one of the most popular authors that ever lived. His _City of God_ ran over Europe after a fashion impossible to-day. Thousands of busy hands were employed, year out and year in, making copies for sale of this famous treatise. Yet Augustine had never heard of copyright, and never received a royalty on sales in his life.
The word ‘copyright’ is of purely English origin, and came into existence as follows:
The Stationers’ Company was founded by royal charter in 1556, and from the beginning has kept register-books, wherein, first, by decrees of the Star Chamber, afterwards by orders of the Houses of Parliament, and finally by Act of Parliament, the titles of all publications and reprints have had to be entered prior to publication.
None but booksellers, as publishers were then content to be called, were members of the Stationers’ Company, and by the usage of the Company no entries could be made in their register-books except in the names of members, and thereupon the book referred to in the entry became the ‘copy’ of the member or members who had caused it to be registered.
By virtue of this registration the book became, in the opinion of the Stationers’ Company, the property _in perpetuity_ of the member or members who had effected the registration. This was the ‘right’ of the stationer to his ‘copy.’
Copyright at first is therefore not an author’s, but a bookseller’s copyright. The author had no part or lot in it unless he chanced to be both an author and a bookseller, an unusual combination in early days. The author took his manuscript to a member of the Stationers’ Company, and made the best bargain he could for himself. The stationer, if terms were arrived at, carried off the manuscript to his Company and registered the title in the books, and thereupon became, in his opinion, and in that of his Company, the owner, at common law, in perpetuity of his ‘copy.’
The stationers, having complete control over their register-books, made what entries they chose, and all kinds of books, even Homer and the Classics, became the ‘property’ of its members. The booksellers, nearly all Londoners, respected each other’s ‘copies,’ and jealously guarded access to their registers. From time to time there were sales by auction of a bookseller’s ‘copies,’ but the public–that is, the country booksellers, for there were no other likely buyers–were excluded from the sale-room. A great monopoly was thus created and maintained by the trade. There was never any examination of title to a bookseller’s copy. Every book of repute was supposed to have a bookseller for its owner. Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_ was Mr. Ponder’s copy, Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ Mr. Tonson’s copy, _The Whole Duty of Man_ Mr. Eyre’s copy, and so on. The thing was a corrupt and illegal trade combination.
The expiration of the Licensing Act, and the consequent cessation of the penalties it inflicted upon unlicensed printing, exposed the proprietors of ‘copies’ to an invasion of their rights, real or supposed, and in 1703, and again in 1706 and 1709, they applied to Parliament for a Bill to protect them against the ‘ruin’ with which they alleged themselves to be threatened.[A]
[Footnote A: What the booksellers wanted was not to be left to their common law remedy–_i.e._, an action of trespass on the case–but to be supplied with penalties for infringement, and especially with the right to seize and burn unauthorized editions.]
In 1710 they got what they asked for in the shape of the famous Statute of Queen Anne, the first copyright law in the world. A truly English measure, ill considered and ill drawn, which did the very last thing it was meant to do–viz., destroy the property it was intended to protect.
By this Act, in which the ‘author’ first makes his appearance actually in front of the ‘proprietor,’ it was provided that, _in case of new books_, the author and his assigns should have the sole right of printing them for fourteen years, and if at the end of that time the author was still alive, a second term of fourteen years was conceded. In the case of _existing books_, there was to be but one term–viz., twenty-one years, from August 10, 1710.
Registration at the Stationers’ Company was still required, but nothing was said as to who might make the entries, or into whose names they were to be made.
Then followed the desired penalties for infringement. The booksellers thought the terms of years meant no more than that the penalties were to be limited by way of experiment to those periods.
Many years flew by before the Stationers’ Company discovered the mischief wrought by the statute they had themselves promoted. To cut a long matter short, it was not until 1774 that the House of Lords decided that, whether there ever had been a perpetuity in literary property at common law or not, it was destroyed by the Act of Queen Anne, and that from and after the passing of that law neither author, assignee, nor proprietor of ‘copy’ had any exclusive right of multiplication, save for and during the periods of time the statute created.
It was a splendid fight–a Thirty Years’ War. Great lawyers were fee’d in it; luminous and lengthy judgments were delivered. Mansfield was a booksellers’ man; Thurlow ridiculed the pretensions of the Trade. It can be read about in _Boswell’s Johnson_ and in Campbell’s _Lives of the Lord Chancellors_. The authors stood supinely by, not contributing a farthing towards the expenses. It was a booksellers’ battle, and the booksellers were beaten, as they deserved to be.
All this is past history, in which the modern money-loving, motoring author takes scant pleasure. Things are on a different footing now. The Act of 1842 has extended the statutory periods of protection. The perpetuity craze is over. A right in perpetuity to reprint Frank Fustian’s novel or Tom Tatter’s poem would not add a penny to the present value of the copyright of either of those productions. In business short views must prevail. An author cannot expect to raise money on his hope of immortality. Milton’s publisher, good Mr. Symonds, probably thought, if he thought about it at all, that he was buying _Paradise Lost_ for ever when he registered it as his ‘copy’ in the books of his Company; but into the calculations he made to discover how much he could afford to give the author posterity did not and could not enter. How was Symonds to know that Milton’s fame was to outlive Cleveland’s or Flatman’s?
How many of the books published in 1905 would have any copyright cash value in A.D. 2000? I do not pause for a reply.
The modern author need have no quarrel with the statutory periods fixed by the Act of 1842,[A] though common-sense has long since suggested that a single term, the author’s life and thirty or forty years after, should be substituted for the alternative periods named in the Act.
[Footnote A: Author’s life _plus_ seven years, or forty-two years from date of publication, whichever term is the longer. The great objection to the second term is that an author’s books go out of copyright at different dates, and the earlier editions go out first.]
What the modern author alone desiderates is a big, immediate, and protected market.
The United States of America have been a great disappointment to many an honest British author. In the wicked old days when the States took British books without paying for them they used to take them in large numbers, but now that they have turned honest and passed a law allowing the British author copyright on certain terms, they have in great measure ceased to take; for, by the strangest of coincidences, no sooner were British novels, histories, essays, and the like, protected in America, than there sprang up in the States themselves, novelists, historians, and essayists, not only numerous enough to supply their own home markets, but talented enough to cross the Atlantic in large numbers and challenge us in our own. Such a reward for honesty was not contemplated.
International copyright and the Convention of Berne are things to be proud of and rejoice over. As the first chapter in a Code of Public European Law, they may mark the beginning of a time of settled peace, order, and disarmament, but they have not yet enriched a single author, though hereafter possibly an occasional novelist or play-wright may prosper greatly under their provisions.
The copyright question is now at last really a settled question, save in a single aspect of it. What, if anything, should be done in the case of those authors, few in number, whose literary lives prove longer than the period of statutory protection? Should any distinction in law be struck between a Tennyson and a Tupper? between–But why multiply examples? There is no need to be unnecessarily offensive.
The law and practice of to-day give the meat that remains on the bones of the dead author after the expiration of the statutory period of protection to the Trade. Any publisher who likes to bring out an edition can do so, though by doing so he does not gain any exclusive rights. A brother publisher may compete with him. As a result the public is usually well served with cheap editions of those non-copyright authors whose works are worth reprinting the moment the copyright expires.
Some lovers of justice, however, think that it is unnecessary all at once to endow the Trade with these windfalls, and that if an author’s family, or his or their assignees, were prepared to publish cheap editions immediately after the expiration of the usual period of protection, they ought to be allowed to do so for a further period of, say, forty years. If they failed within a reasonable time either to do so themselves or to arrange for others to do so, this extended period should lapse.
Were this to be the law nobody could say that it was unfair; but it is never likely to be the law. It would take time for discussion, and now there is no time left in which to discuss anything in Parliament. A much-needed Copyright Bill has been in draft for years, has been mentioned in Queen’s and King’s speeches, but it has never been read even a first time. If it ever is read a first time, its only chance of becoming law will be if it is taken in a lump, as it stands, without consideration or amendment. To such a pass has legislation been reduced in this country!
This draft Bill does not contain any provision for specially protecting the families of authors whose works long outlive their mortal lives. It makes no invidious distinctions. It leaves all the authors to hang together, the quick and the dead. Perhaps this is the better way.
HANNAH MORE ONCE MORE
I have been told by more than one correspondent, and not always in words of urbanity, that I owe an apology to the manes of Miss Hannah More, whose works I once purchased in nineteen volumes for 8s. 6d., and about whom in consequence I wrote a page some ten years ago.[A]
[Footnote A: See _Collected Essays_, ii. 255.]
To be accused of rudeness to a lady who exchanged witticisms with Dr. Johnson, soothed the widowed heart of Mrs. Garrick, directed the early studies of Macaulay, and in the spring of 1815 presented a small copy of her _Sacred Dramas_ to Mr. Gladstone, is no light matter. To libel the dead is, I know, not actionable–indeed, it is impossible; but evil-speaking, lying, and slandering are canonical offences from which the obligation to refrain knows no limits of time or place.
I have often felt uneasy on this score, and never had the courage, until this very evening, to read over again what in the irritation of the moment I had been tempted to say about Miss Hannah More, after the outlay upon her writings already mentioned. Eight shillings and sixpence is, indeed, no great sum, but nineteen octavo volumes are a good many books. Yet Richardson is in nineteen volumes in Mangin’s edition, and Swift is in nineteen volumes in Scott’s edition, and glorious John Dryden lacks but a volume to make a third example. True enough; yet it will, I think, be granted me that you must be very fond of an author, male or female, if nineteen octavo volumes, all his or hers, are not a little irritating and provocative of temper. Think of the room they take! As for selling them, it is not so easy to sell nineteen volumes of a stone-dead author, particularly if you live three miles from a railway-station and do not keep a trap. Elia, the gentle Elia, as it is the idiotic fashion to call a writer who could handle his ‘maulies’ in a fray as well as Hazlitt himself, has told us how he could never see well-bound books he did not care about, but he longed to strip them so that he might warm his ragged veterans in their spoils. My copy of _Hannah More_ was in full calf, but never once did it occur to me–though I, too, have many a poor author with hardly a shirt to his back shivering in the dark corners of the library–to strip her of her warm clothing. And yet I had to do something, and quickly too, for sorely needed was Miss More’s shelf. So I buried the nineteen volumes in the garden. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ said I cheerfully, stamping them down.
This has hardly proved to be the case, for though Hannah More is incapable of a literary resurrection, and no one of her nineteen volumes has ever haunted my pillow, exclaiming,
‘Think how thou stab’dst me in my prime of youth,’
nevertheless, I have not been able to get quite rid of an uneasy feeling that I was rude to her ten years ago in print–not, indeed, so rude as was her revered friend Dr. Johnson 126 years ago to her face; but then, I have not the courage to creep under the gabardine of our great Moralist.
When, accordingly, I saw on the counters of the trade the daintiest of volumes, hailing, too, from the United States, entitled _Hannah More_,[A] and perceived that it was a short biography and appreciation of the lady on my mind, I recognised that my penitential hour had at last come. I took the little book home with me, and sat down to read, determined to do justice and more than justice to the once celebrated mistress of Cowslip Green and Barley Wood.
[Footnote A: _Hannah More_, by Marian Harland. New York and London: G.P. Putnam.]
Miss Harland’s preface is most engaging. She reminds a married sister how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to ‘bound sermons and semi-detached tracts,’ was enlivened by the _Works of Hannah More_. She proceeds as follows:
‘At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by the touch and the breath of fifty odd years. They belonged to the dear old home library…. The leaves of the book I held fell apart at _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_.’
I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words made me:
‘The usher took six hasty strides As smit with sudden pain.’
I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding, their full calf. Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.
Circumstances alter cases. Miss Harland thinks that if the life of Charlotte Bronte’s mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ might have grown up more like Hannah More than she actually did. Perhaps so. As I say, circumstances alter cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home library, I might have read _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_ and _The Search after Happiness_ of a Sunday, and found solace therein. But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained page of Mrs. Sherwood’s _Tales from the Church Catechism_, and, ‘more curious sport than that,’ the _Bible in Spain_ of the never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.
What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland’s enthusiasm for Hannah More’s writings is that it expires with the preface. _There_, indeed, it glows with a beautiful light:
‘And _The Search after Happiness!_ You cannot have forgotten all of the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals flung down by the warm wind.’
This passage lets us into the secret. I suspect in sober truth both Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in _The Search after Happiness_, but what they have never forgotten, what they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head:
‘As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees Which grew by our youth’s home, the waving mass Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew, The morning swallows with their songs like words– All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.’
Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous _Pauline_. The same note is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the following simple strain of William Allingham:
‘Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond;
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
How little a thing
To remember for years–
To remember with tears!’
If this be so–and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that so it is?–it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More’s books, and from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting. Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to say nothing of a reader.
‘Such books as Miss More’s,’ she says, ‘would to-day in America fall from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion, creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a bubble in mid-Atlantic.’
And again:
‘That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest contemporaries.’
However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude to this excellent lady.
I confess I never liked her love story. Anything more cold-blooded I never read. I am not going to repeat it. Why should I? It is told at length in Miss More’s authorized biography in four volumes by William Roberts, Esq. I saw a copy yesterday exposed for sale in New Oxford Street, price 1s. Miss Harland also tells the tale, not without chuckling. I refer the curious to her pages.
Then there are those who can never get rid of the impression that Hannah More ‘fagged’ her four sisters mercilessly; but who can tell? Some people like being fagged.
Precisely _when_ Miss More bade farewell to what in later life she was fond of calling her gay days, when she wrote dull plays and went to stupid Sunday parties, one finds it hard to discover, but at no time did it ever come home to her that she needed repentance herself. She seems always thinking of the sins and shortcomings of her neighbours, rich and poor. Sometimes, indeed, when deluged with flattery, she would intimate that she was a miserable sinner, but that is not what I mean. She concerned herself greatly with the manners of the great, and deplored their cards and fashionable falsehoods. John Newton, captain as he had been of a slaver, saw the futility of such pin-pricks:
‘The fashionable world,’ so he wrote to Miss More, ‘by their numbers form a phalanx not easily impressible, and their habits of life are as armour of proof which renders them not easily vulnerable. Neither the rude club of a boisterous Reformer nor the pointed, delicate weapons of the authoress before me can overthrow or rout them.’
But Miss More never forgot to lecture the rich or to patronize the poor.
_Coelebs in Search of a Wife_ is an impossible book, and I do not believe Miss Harland has read it; but as for the famous _Shepherd_, we are never allowed to forget how Mr. Wilberforce declared a few years before his death, to the admiration of the religious world, that he would rather present himself in heaven with _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_ in his hand than with–what think you?–_Peveril of the Peak_! The bare notion of such a proceeding on anybody’s part is enough to strike one dumb with what would be horror, did not amazement swallow up every other feeling. What rank Arminianism! I am sure the last notion that ever would have entered the head of Sir Walter was to take _Peveril_ to heaven.
But whatever may be thought of the respective merits of Miss More’s nineteen volumes and Sir Walter’s ninety-eight, there is no doubt that Barley Wood was as much infested with visitors as ever was Abbotsford. Eighty a week!
‘From twelve o’clock until three each day a constant stream of carriages and pedestrians filled the evergreen bordered avenue leading from the Wrington village road.’
Among them came Lady Gladstone and W.E.G., aged six, the latter carrying away with him the _Sacred Dramas_, to be preserved during a long life.
Miss More was a vivacious and agreeable talker, who certainly failed to do herself justice with her pen. Her health was never good, yet, as she survived thirty-five of her prescribing physicians, her vitality must have been great. Her face in Opie’s portrait is very pleasant. If I was rude to her ten years ago, I apologize and withdraw; but as for her books, I shall leave them where they are–buried in a cliff facing due north, with nothing between them and the Pole but leagues upon leagues of a wind-swept ocean.
ARTHUR YOUNG
The name of Arthur Young is a familiar one to all readers of that history which begins with the forebodings of the French Revolution. Thousands of us learnt to be interested in him as the ‘good Arthur,’ ‘the excellent Arthur,’ of Thomas Carlyle, a writer who had the art of making not only his own narrative, but the sources of it, attractive. Even ‘Carrion-Heath,’ in the famous introductory chapter to the _Cromwell_, is invested with a kind of charm, whilst in the stormy firmament of the _French Revolution_ the star of Arthur Young twinkles with a mild effulgency. The autobiography of such a man could hardly fail to be interesting.[A] The ‘good Arthur’ was born in 1741, the younger son of a small ‘squarson’ who inherited from his father the manor of Bradfield Combust, in Suffolk, but held the living of Thames Ditton. Here he made the acquaintance of the Onslow family, and Speaker Onslow was one of Arthur’s godfathers. The Rev. Dr. Young died in 1759, much in debt. The Bradfield property had been settled for life on his wife, who had brought her husband some fortune, and to the manor-house she retired to economize.
[Footnote A: _The Autobiography of Arthur Young_. Edited by M. Betham Edwards. Smith, Elder and Co.]
Arthur’s education had been muddled; and an attempt to make a merchant of him having fallen through, he found himself, on his father’s death, aged eighteen, ‘without education, profession, or employment,’ and his whole fortune, during his mother’s life, consisting of a copyhold farm of 20 acres, producing as many pounds. In these circumstances, to think of literature was well-nigh inevitable, and, in 1762, the autobiography tells us:
‘I set on foot a periodical publication, entitled the _Universal Museum_, which came out monthly, printed with glorious imprudence on my own account. I waited on Dr. Johnson, who was sitting by the fire so half-dressed and slovenly a figure as to make me stare at him. I stated my plan, and begged that he would favour me with a paper once a month, offering at the same time any remuneration that he might name.’
Here we see dimly prefigured a modern editor prematurely soliciting the support of Great Names. But the Cham of literature, himself the son of a bookseller, would have none of it.
‘”No, sir,” he replied; “such a work would be sure to fail if the booksellers have not the property, and you will lose a great deal of money by it.”
‘”Certainly, sir,” I said, “if I am not fortunate enough to induce authors of real talent to contribute.”
‘”No, sir, you are mistaken; such authors will not support such a work, nor will you persuade them to write in it. You will purchase disappointment by the loss of your money, and I advise you by all means to give up the plan.”
‘Somebody was introduced, and I took my leave.’
The _Universal Museum_, none the less, appeared, but after five numbers Young ‘procured a meeting of ten or a dozen booksellers, and had the luck and address to persuade them to take the whole scheme upon themselves.’ He then calmly adds, ‘I believe no success ever attended it.’ It was, indeed, 100 years before its time. Literature abandoned, Young took one of his mother’s farms. ‘I had no more idea of farming than of physic or divinity,’ nor did he, man of European reputation as a farmer though he soon became, ever make farming pay. He had an itching pen, and after four years’ farming (1763-1766) he published the result of his experience. Never, surely, before has an author spoken of his first-born as in the autobiography Young speaks of this publication:
‘And the circumstance which perhaps of all others in my life I most deeply regretted and considered as a sin of the blackest dye was the publishing of my experience during these four years, which, speaking as a farmer, was nothing but ignorance, folly, presumption, and rascality.’
None the less, it was writing this rascally book that seems to have given him the idea of those agricultural tours which were to make his name famous throughout the world. His Southern tour was in 1767, his Northern in 1768, and his Eastern in 1770. The subject he specially illuminated in these epoch-making books was the rotation of crops, though he occasionally diverged upon deep-ploughing and kindred themes. The tours excited, for the first time, the agricultural spirit of Great Britain, and their author almost at once became a celebrated man.
In 1765 Young married the wrong woman, and started upon a career of profound matrimonial discomfort, and even misery; a blunt, truthful writer, he makes no bones about it. It was an unhappy marriage from its beginning in 1765 to its end in 1815. Young himself, though by no means vivacious in this autobiography, where he frankly complains of himself as having no more wit than a fig, was a very popular person with all classes and both sexes. He was an enormous diner-out, and his authority as an agriculturist, united to his undeniable charm as a companion, threw open to him all the great places in the country. But his finances were a perpetual trouble. On carrot seeds and cabbages he was an authority, but from 1766-1775 his income never exceeded L300 a year. He had an excellent mother, whom he dearly loved, and who with the characteristic bluntness of the family bade him think less about carrots and more about his Creator. ‘You may call all this rubbish if you please, but a time will come when you will be convinced whose notions are rubbish, yours or mine.’ And the old lady was quite right, as mothers so frequently turn out to be. In 1778 Young went over to Ireland as agent to Lord Kingsborough. He got L500 down, and was to have an annual salary of L500 and a house. Young soon got to work, and became anxious to persuade his employer to let his lands direct to the occupying cottar, and so get rid of the middlemen. This did not suit a certain Major Thornhill, a relative and leaseholder, and thereupon a pretty plot was hatched. Lady K. had a Catholic governess, a Miss Crosby, upon whom it was thought my lord occasionally cast the eye of partiality, whilst Arthur himself got on very well with her ladyship, who was heard to pronounce him to be, as he was, ‘one of the most lively, agreeable fellows.’ Out of these materials the Major and his helpmeet concocted a double plot–namely, to make the lord jealous of the steward, and the lady jealous of the governess, and to cause both lord and lady respectively to believe that the steward was deeply engaged both in abetting the amour of the lord and the governess, and in prosecuting his own amour with the lady. The result was that both governess and steward got notice to quit; but–and this is very Irish–both went off with life annuities, the governess with one of L50 per annum, and the steward with one of L72, and, what is still more odd, we find Young at the end of his life in receipt of his annuity. They were an expensive couple, these two.
In 1780 Young published his _Irish Tour_, which was immediately successful and popular in both kingdoms. In it he attacked the bounty paid on the land-carriage of corn to Dublin. The bounty was, in the session of Parliament next after the publication of Young’s book, reduced by one-half, and soon given up entirely. Young maintains that this saved Ireland L80,000 a year. Nobody seems to have said ‘Thank you.’
In May, 1783, was born the child ‘Bobbin,’ whose death, fourteen years later, was to change the current of Young’s life. The following year Arthur Young paid his first visit to France, confining himself, however, to Calais and its neighbourhood, and in the same year his mother died, and, by an arrangement with his eldest brother, ‘this patch of landed property,’ as Young calls Bradfield, descended upon him. His first famous journey in France was made between May and November, 1787, and cost the marvellously small sum of L118 15s. 2d. His second and third French journeys were made in July, 1788, and in June, 1789. The third was the longest, and extended into 1790. Three years later Young was appointed, by Pitt, Secretary of the then Board of Agriculture. A melancholy account is given by Young of a visit he paid Burke at Gregory’s in 1796. Young drove there in the chariot of his fussy chief, Sir John Sinclair, to discover what Burke’s intentions might be as to an intended publication of his relating to the price of labour. The account, which occupies four pages, is too long for quotation. It concludes thus:
‘I am glad once more to have seen and conversed with the man who I hold to possess the greatest and most brilliant gifts of any penman of the age in which he lived. Whose conversation has often fascinated me, whose eloquence has charmed; whose writings have delighted and instructed the world; whose name will without question descend to the latest posterity. But to behold so great a genius, so deepened with melancholy, stooping with infirmity of body, feeling the anguish of a lacerated mind, and sinking to the grave under accumulated misery–to see all this in a character I venerate, and apparently without resource or comfort, wounded every feeling of my soul, and I left him the next day almost as low-spirited as himself.’
But Young himself was soon to pass into the same Valley of the Shadow, not so much of Death as of Joyless Life. His beloved and idolized Bobbin died on July 14, 1797. She seems to have been a wise little maiden, to whom her father wrote most affectionate letters, full of rather unsuitable details, political and financial and otherwise, and not scrupling to speak of the child’s mother in a disagreeable manner. Bobbin replies with delightful composure to these worrying letters:
‘I have just got six of the most beautiful little rabbits you ever saw; they skip about so prettily you can’t think, and I shall have some more in a few weeks. Having had so much physic, I am right down tired of it. I take it still twice a day–my appetite is better. What can you mind politics so for? I don’t think about them.–Well, good-bye, and believe me, dear papa, your dutiful Daughter.’
After poor little Bobbin’s death, it happened to Arthur Young even as his mother foretold. Carrots and crops and farming tours hastily retreat, and we find the eminent agriculturist busying himself, with the same seriousness and good faith he had devoted to the rotation of the crops, with the sermons and treatises of Clarke and Jortin and Secker and Tillotson, etc., and all to discover what had become of his dear little Bobbin. His outlook upon the world was changed–the great parties at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him differently; the huge irreligion of the world filled him as for the first time with amazement and horror:
‘How few years are passed since I should have pushed on eagerly to Woburn! This time twelve months I dined with the Duke on Sunday–the party not very numerous, but chiefly of rank–the entertainment more splendid than usual there. He expects me to-day, but I have more pleasure in resting, going twice to church, and eating a morsel of cold lamb at a very humble inn, than partaking of gaiety and dissipation at a great table which might as well be spread for a company of heathens as English lords and men of fashion.’
It is all mighty fine calling this religious hypochondria and depression of spirits. It is one of the facts of life. Young stuck to his post, and did his work, and quarrelled with his wife to the end, or nearly so. He cannot have been so lively and agreeable a companion as of old, for we find him in November, 1806, at Euston, endeavouring to impress on the Duke of Grafton that by his tenets he had placed himself entirely under the covenant of works, and that he must be tried for them, and that ‘I would not be in such a situation for ten thousand worlds. He was mild and more patient than I expected.’ Perhaps, after all, Carlyle was not so far wrong when he praised our aristocracy for their ‘politeness.’ In 1808 Young became blind. In 1815 his wife died. In 1820 he died himself, leaving behind him seven packets of manuscript and twelve folio volumes of correspondence.
Young’s great work, _Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789, undertaken more particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France_, published in 1792, is one of those books which will always be a great favourite with somebody. It will outlive eloquence and outstay philosophy. It contains some famous passages.
THOMAS PAINE
Proverbs are said to be but half-truths, but ‘give a dog a bad name and hang him’ is a saying almost as veracious as it is felicitous; and to no one can it possibly be applied with greater force than to Thomas Paine, the rebellious staymaker, the bankrupt tobacconist, the amazing author of _Common-sense_, _The Rights of Man_, and _The Age of Reason_.
Until quite recently Tom Paine lay without the pale of toleration. No circle of liberality was constructed wide enough to include him. Even the scouted Unitarian scouted Thomas. He was ‘the infamous Paine,’ ‘the vulgar atheist.’ Whenever mentioned in pious discourse it was but to be waved on one side as thus: ‘No one of my hearers is likely to be led astray by the scurrilous blasphemies of Paine.’
I can well remember when an asserted intimacy with the writings of Paine marked a man from his fellows and invested him in children’s minds with a horrid fascination. The writings themselves were only to be seen in bookshops of evil reputation, and, when hastily turned over with furtive glances, proved to be printed in small type and on villainous paper. For a boy to have bought them and taken them inside a decent home would have been to run the risk of fierce wrath in this life and the threat of it in the next. If ever there was a hung dog, his name was Tom Paine.
But History is, as we know, for ever revising her records. None of her judgments are final. A life of Thomas Paine, in two portly and well-printed volumes, with gilt tops, wide margins, spare leaves at the end, and all the other signs and tokens of literary respectability, has lately appeared. No President, no Prime Minister–nay, no Bishop or Moderator–need hope to have his memoirs printed in better style than are these of Thomas Paine, by Mr. Moncure D. Conway. Were any additional proof required of the complete resuscitation of Paine’s reputation, it might be found in the fact that his life _is_ in two volumes, though it would have been far better told in one.
Mr. Conway believes implicitly in Paine–not merely in his virtue and intelligence, but that he was a truly great man, who played a great part in human affairs. He will no more admit that Paine was a busybody, inflated with conceit and with a strong dash of insolence, than he will that Thomas was a drunkard. That Paine’s speech was undoubtedly plain and his nose undeniably red is as far as Mr. Conway will go. If we are to follow the biographer the whole way, we must not only unhang the dog, but give him sepulture amongst the sceptred Sovereigns who rule us from their urns.
Thomas Paine was born at Thetford, in Norfolk, in January, 1737, and sailed for America in 1774, then being thirty-seven years of age. Up to this date he was a rank failure. His trade was staymaking, but he had tried his hand at many things. He was twice an Excise officer, but was twice dismissed the service, the first time for falsely pretending to have made certain inspections which, in fact, he had not made, and the second time for carrying on business in an excisable article–tobacco, to wit–without the leave of the Board. Paine had married the tobacconist’s business, but neither the marriage nor the business prospered; the second was sold by auction, and the first terminated by mutual consent.
Mr. Conway labours over these early days of his hero very much, but he can make nothing of them. Paine was an Excise officer at Lewes, where, so Mr. Conway reminds us, ‘seven centuries before Paine opened his office in Lewes, came Harold’s son, possibly to take charge of the Excise as established by Edward the Confessor, just deceased.’ This device of biographers is a little stale. The Confessor was guiltless of the Excise.
Paine’s going to America was due to Benjamin Franklin, who made Paine’s acquaintance in London, and, having the wit to see his ability, recommended him ‘as a clerk or assistant-tutor in a school or assistant-surveyor.’ Thus armed, Paine made his appearance in Philadelphia, where he at once obtained employment as editor of an intended periodical called the _Pennsylvanian Magazine or American Museum_, the first number of which appeared in January, 1775. Never was anything luckier. Paine was, without knowing it, a born journalist. His capacity for writing on the spur of the moment was endless, and his delight in doing so boundless. He had no difficulty for ‘copy’, though in those days contributors were few. He needed no contributors. He was ‘Atlanticus’; he was ‘Vox Populi’; he was ‘Aesop.’ The unsigned articles were also mostly his. Having at last, after many adventures and false starts, found his vocation, Paine stuck to it. He spent the rest of his days with a pen in his hand, scribbling his advice and obtruding his counsel on men and nations. Both were usually of excellent quality.
Paine was also happy in the moment of his arrival in America. The War of Independence was imminent, and in April, 1775, occurred ‘the massacre of Lexington.’ The Colonists were angry, but puzzled. They hardly knew what they wanted. They lacked a definite opinion to entertain and a cry to asseverate. Paine had no doubts. He hated British institutions with all the hatred of a civil servant who has had ‘the sack.’
In January, 1776, he published his pamphlet _Common-sense_, which must be ranked with the most famous pamphlets ever written. It is difficult to wade through now, but even _The Conduct of the Allies_ is not easy reading, and yet between Paine and Swift there is a great gulf fixed. The keynote of _Common-sense_ was separation once and for ever, and the establishment of a great Republic of the West. It hit between wind and water, had a great sale, and made its author a personage and, in his own opinion, a divinity.
Paine now became the penman of the rebels. His series of manifestoes, entitled _The Crisis_, were widely read and carried healing on their wings, and in 1777 he was elected Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs. Charles Lamb once declared that Rousseau was a good enough Jesus Christ for the French, and he was capable of declaring Tom Paine a good enough Milton for the Yankees. However that may be, Paine was an indefatigable and useful public servant. He was a bad gauger for King George, but he was an admirable scribe for a revolution conducted on constitutional principles.
To follow his history through the war would be tedious. What Washington and Jefferson really thought of him we shall never know. He was never mercenary, but his pride was wounded that so little recognition of his astounding services was forthcoming. The ingratitude of Kings was a commonplace; the ingratitude of peoples an unpleasing novelty. But Washington bestirred himself at last, and Paine was voted an estate of 277 acres, more or less, and a sum of money. This was in 1784.
Three years afterwards Thomas visited England, where he kept good company and was very usefully employed engineering, for which excellent pursuit he would appear to have had great natural aptitude. Blackfriars Bridge had just tumbled down, and it was Paine’s laudable ambition to build its successor in iron. But the Bastille fell down as well as Blackfriars Bridge, and was too much for Paine. As Mr. Conway beautifully puts it: ‘But again the Cause arose before him; he must part from all–patent interests, literary leisure, fine society–and take the hand of Liberty undowered, but as yet unstained. He must beat his bridge-iron into a key that shall unlock the British Bastille, whose walls he sees steadily closing around the people.’ ‘Miching mallecho–this means mischief;’ and so it proved.
Burke is responsible for the _Rights of Man_. This splendid sentimentalist published his _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ in November, 1790. Paine immediately sat down in the Angel, Islington, and began his reply. He was not unqualified to answer Burke; he had fought a good fight between the years 1775 and 1784. Mr. Conway has some ground for his epigram, ‘where Burke had dabbled, Paine had dived.’ There is nothing in the _Rights of Man_ which would now frighten, though some of its expressions might still shock, a lady-in-waiting; but to profess Republicanism in 1791 was no joke, and the book was proclaimed and Paine prosecuted. Acting upon the advice of William Blake (the truly sublime), Paine escaped to France, where he was elected by three departments to a seat in the Convention, and in that Convention he sat from September, 1792, to December, 1793, when he was found quarters in the Luxembourg Prison.
This invitation to foreigners to take part in the conduct of the French Revolution was surely one of the oddest things that ever happened, but Paine thought it natural enough so far, at least, as he was concerned. He could not speak a word of French, and all his harangues had to be translated and read to the Convention by a secretary, whilst Thomas stood smirking in the Tribune. His behaviour throughout was most creditable to him. He acted with the Girondists, and strongly opposed and voted against the murder of the King. His notion of a revolution was one by pamphlet, and he shrank from deeds of blood. His whole position was false and ridiculous. He really counted for nothing. The members of the Convention grew tired of his doctrinaire harangues, which, in fact, bored them not a little; but they respected his enthusiasm and the part he had played in America, whither they would gladly he had returned. Who put him in prison is a mystery. Mr. Conway thinks it was the American Minister in Paris, Gouverneur Morris. He escaped the guillotine, and was set free after ten months’ confinement.
All this time Washington had not moved a finger in behalf of the author of _Common-sense_ and _The Crisis_. Amongst Paine’s papers this epigram was found:
‘ADVICE TO THE STATUARY WHO IS TO EXECUTE THE STATUE OF WASHINGTON.
Take from the mine the coldest, hardest stone; It needs no fashion–it is Washington. But if you chisel, let the stroke be rude, And on his heart engrave–“Ingratitude.”‘
This is hard hitting.
So far we have only had the Republican Paine, the outlaw Paine; the atheist Paine has not appeared. He did so in the _Age of Reason_, first published in 1794-1795. The object of this book was religious. Paine was a vehement believer in God and in the Divine government of the world, but he was not, to put it mildly, a Bible Christian. Nobody now is ever likely to read the _Age of Reason_ for instruction or amusement. Who now reads even Mr. Greg’s _Creed of Christendom_, which is in effect, though not in substance, the same kind of book? Paine was a coarse writer, without refinement of nature, and he used brutal expressions and hurled his vulgar words about in a manner certain to displease. Still, despite it all, the _Age of Reason_ is a religious book, though a singularly unattractive one.
Paine remained in France advocating all kinds of things, including a descent on England, the abduction of the Royal Family, and a Free Constitution. Napoleon sought him out, and assured him that he (Napoleon) slept with the _Rights of Man_ under his pillow. Paine believed him.
In 1802 Paine returned to America, after fifteen years’ absence.
‘Thou stricken friend of man,’ exclaims Mr. Conway in a fine passage, ‘who hast appealed from the God of Wrath to the God of Humanity, see in the distance that Maryland coast which early voyagers called Avalon, and sing again your song when first stepping on that shore twenty-seven years ago.’
The rest of Paine’s life was spent in America without distinction or much happiness. He continued writing to the last, and died bravely on the morning of June 8, 1809.
The Americans did not appreciate Paine’s theology, and in 1819 allowed Cobbett to carry the bones of the author of _Common-sense_ to England, where–‘as rare things will,’ so, at least, Mr. Browning sings–they vanished. Nobody knows what has become of them.
As a writer Paine has no merits of a lasting character, but he had a marvellous journalistic knack for inventing names and headings. He is believed to have concocted the two phrases ‘The United States of America’ and ‘The Religion of Humanity.’ Considering how little he had read, his discourses on the theory of government are wonderful, and his views generally were almost invariably liberal, sensible, and humane. What ruined him was an intolerable self-conceit, which led him to believe that his own productions superseded those of other men. He knew off by heart, and was fond of repeating, his own _Common-sense_ and the _Rights of Man_. He was destitute of the spirit of research, and was wholly without one shred of humility. He was an oddity, a character, but he never took the first step towards becoming a great man.
CHARLES BRADLAUGH[A]
[Footnote A: _Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work_. By his daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner. Two vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894.]
Mr. Bradlaugh was a noticeable man, and his life, even though it appears in the unwelcome but familiar shape of two octavo volumes, is a noticeable book. It is useless to argue with biographers; they, at all events, are neither utilitarians nor opportunists, but idealists pure and simple. What is the good of reminding them, being so majestical, of Guizot’s pertinent remark, ‘that if a book is unreadable it will not be read,’ or of the older saying, ‘A great book is a great evil’? for all such observations they simply put on one side as being, perhaps, true for others, but not for them. Had _Mr. Bradlaugh’s Life_ been just half the size it would have had, at least, twice as many readers.
The pity is all the greater because Mrs. Bonner has really performed a difficult task after a noble fashion and in a truly pious spirit. Her father’s life was a melancholy one, and it became her duty as his biographer to break a silence on painful subjects about which he had preferred to say nothing. His reticence was a manly reticence; though a highly sensitive mortal, he preferred to put up with calumny rather than lay bare family sorrows and shame. His daughter, though compelled to break this silence, has done so in a manner full of dignity and feeling. The ruffians who in times past slandered the moral character of Bradlaugh will not probably read his life, nor, if they did, would they repent of their baseness. The willingness to believe everything evil of an adversary is incurable, springing as it does from a habit of mind. It was well said by Mr. Mill: ‘I have learned from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result.’ Now that Mr. Bradlaugh is dead, no purpose is served by repeating false accusations as to his treatment of his wife, or of his pious brother, or as to his disregard of family ties; but the next atheist who crops up must not expect any more generous treatment than Bradlaugh received from that particularly odious class of persons of whom it has been wittily said that so great is their zeal for religion, they have never time to say their prayers.
Mr. Bradlaugh will, I suppose, be hereafter described in the dictionaries of biography as ‘Freethinker and Politician.’ Of the politician there is here no need to speak. He was a Radical of the old-fashioned type. When he first stood for Northampton in 1868, his election address was made up of tempting dishes, which afterwards composed Mr. Chamberlain’s famous but unauthorized programme of 1885, with minority representation thrown in. Unpopular thinkers who have been pelted with stones by Christians, slightly the worse for liquor, are apt to think well of minorities. Mr. Bradlaugh’s Radicalism had an individualistic flavour. He thought well of thrift, thereby incurring censure. Mr. Bradlaugh’s politics are familiar enough. What about his freethinking? English freethinkers may be divided into two classes–those who have been educated and those who have had to educate themselves. The former class might apply to their own case the language once employed by Dr. Newman to describe himself and his brethren of the Oratory:
‘We have been nourished for the greater part of our lives in the bosom of the great schools and universities of Protestant England; we have been the foster foster-sons of the Edwards and Henries, the Wykehams and Wolseys, of whom Englishmen are wont to make so much; we have grown up amid hundreds of contemporaries, scattered at present all over the country in those special ranks of society which are the very walk of a member of the legislature.’
These first-class free-thinkers have an excellent time of it, and, to use a fashionable phrase, ‘do themselves very well indeed.’ They move freely in society; their books lie on every table; they hob-a-nob with Bishops; and when they come to die, their orthodox relations gather round them, and lay them in the earth ‘in the sure and certain hope’–so, at least, priestly lips are found willing to assert–‘of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ And yet there was not a dogma of the Christian faith in which they were in a position to profess their belief.
The free-thinkers of the second class, poor fellows! have hitherto led very different lives. Their foster-parents have been poverty and hardship; their school education has usually terminated at eleven; all their lives they have been desperately poor; alone, unaided, they have been left to fight the battle of a Free Press.