II.
Samuel Johnson.
We could scarcely understand how Dr. Johnson gained his immense influence and acknowledged chiefship in literature if we had only his works of various kinds before us. But he had a friend and biographer, James Boswell, Esq. (younger of Auchinleck in Ayrshire), and "Bozzy," by showing Johnson as he was and talked, explains his supremacy. In an age when classical learning counted for something, Johnson was, especially in Roman literature, vastly learned. In a time when people who could tear themselves from cards, took little exercise, but sat and talked, over wine or over tea, or as they slowly sauntered, Johnson was probably the best and certainly the best reported of the talkers. While politicians like Burke, and painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds, and musicians like Burney (Fanny Burney\'s father), were men of letters, critics, talkers, a scholar and author who could talk like Johnson was certain of his reward, was sure to be at the front. Though he confessed himself not specially partial to clean linen; though he did not eat in a neat and cleanly fashion; though he had the strange tricks which we know so well; though if his pistol missed fire in argument he knocked you down with the butt; though he had curious prejudices, was at heart a Jacobite, and could be extremely rude, yet the excellence of his heart, his large sagacity, his immense knowledge and readiness, his humour, all of him that is immortally delightful to read about in Boswell\'s Life, won his forgiveness and his welcome from the most refined of men and women.[Pg 472] He thought himself a lady\'s man, he said, and a man of the world, and he was thoroughly a man\'s man, with heart, and tongue, and hands, if that were necessary.
As a playwriter, he had not great success, and his friend Goldsmith\'s comedies keep the stage, unlike Johnson\'s tragedy. Johnson\'s tale "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," has wisdom and humour enough, "wit enough to keep it sweet," but it never did nor ever can share the popularity of Goldsmith\'s "Vicar of Wakefield".
Johnson\'s essays, in "The Rambler" and "The Idler," may still be but are seldom read: they are far less alive than the essays of Addison and Steele, and are weighed down by the ponderous harmonies of the Latinised style.
Of his books, "The Lives of the Poets," written in his old age, are, to some, we may hope to many, readers, entrancing. Here we find the Johnson of conversation. He is not, indeed, a scientific biographer, a searcher among old letters and old records. But his memory was rich in anecdotes of the half century before his own; his style contains many a humorous comment, and his criticism is often acute, and always honest, and unaffectedly tinged, especially when he writes of the republican and puritan Milton, or of the dainty, yet, in poetry, revolutionary Gray, with all the literary and political prejudices that gave salt to his conversation. There may have been more enlightened critics, but none was ever more entertaining.
If his literary biographies are not of the most exact, they are occasionally minute enough. "Pope\'s weakness was so great, that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman (of Twickenham) who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them." Again, "Pope once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry". In his "Life of Swift" Johnson is by no means friendly, and publishes an anecdote which was indignantly denied. His life of his friend, Richard Savage, a most detestable person, is an example of Johnson\'s loyalty and tolerance. Supposing that Savage was the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, and was persecuted by her with incredible cruelty, yet his conduct in most ways was detestable, though Johnson, who candidly narrates the facts, good-humouredly condones[Pg 473] them. The conversation of Savage must, apparently, have won the heart of "the great Lexicographer". Even the Dictionary of the Doctor contains several of his good sayings, and perhaps the learning and persevering industry which Johnson displayed as a "drudge" increased his reputation, and won for him friends and admirers, as much as his more literary works.
The outlines of his life are too well known to need more than a brief summary. His family was matter of interest to the Highlanders when he visited them, was he a MacIan of Glencoe or a Johnston of the Border? He was born at Lichfield (18 September, 1709), his father was a bookseller. His Oxford career, at Pembroke College, was embittered by poverty, but he retained a great affection for his college and University, which delighted to honour him. He kept a school without much profit, and, coming to London with Garrick in 1737, lived the life of Grub Street, doing translations, writing for Cave\'s "Gentleman\'s Magazine," compiling parliamentary debates in which he "took care not to let the Whig dogs have the best of it". Of his doings in 1745 Boswell could learn nothing, and there was a fancy that he was inclined to take part in what he called "a gallant enterprise," that of Prince Charles.
His "London," an imitation of Juvenal, was well thought of by Pope, and Scott took more pleasure in no modern poem than in Johnson\'s manly, resolute, and mournful "Vanity of Human Wishes," also based on Juvenal\'s satire (1749). The "Rambler" and "Idler," were his next works (with the Dictionary), and in 1759 he rapidly wrote "Rasselas," to pay the expenses of his mother\'s funeral. In 1762 he accepted, from a King who "gloried in the name of Briton," a pension of ￡300 yearly. He lived much, after this date, at the house of Mrs. Thrale and her husband, "my Master" as she called him, the rich brewer. Here he was happy in the society of many wits, of the beautiful Sophy Streatfield, "with nose and notions à la Grecque," and of Fanny Burney, blessed in the success of "Evelina". Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney have left many reminiscences of him which complete the account by his young Scottish adorer and butt, Boswell.
Johnson founded the Club, and such was his influence that[Pg 474] the Club did not blackball Bozzy. With him Johnson made his difficult journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; so happily described both by Boswell and himself; stayed at Dunvegan Castle, was entertained by Flora Macdonald, met a learned minister in Skye who was a sceptic about Homer, inquired into the Second Sight; stayed at Inveraray Castle with the Duke of Argyll; and at St. Andrews was told that at Oxford they had nothing like the St. Andrews University Library. On hearing this Dr. Johnson, for once, made no reply.
His "Lives of the Poets" was written in 1779-1781, when he was 70 years of age and more. His cruel last illness was nobly borne; he died on 13 December, 1784, one of the best, greatest, wisest, and most humorous of Englishmen.
His "Lives," and the Life of him are among the works which time cannot stale; read ten times over they please the more, and more excellencies are discovered. No man of times past is known so well, and none was so well worth knowing. His critical tastes and rules are not ours, and perhaps even in his own day were falling out of fashion; but they are none the less historically valuable.
Oliver Goldsmith.
Dr. Johnson carried all his set with him into renown, and though Oliver Goldsmith was a writer of versatile and charming genius, but for his friendship with Johnson he would have been much less successful in life, and less well loved and remembered after his death.
Like several great writers born in Ireland, Goldsmith was of an English family, but they had been so long settled in Ireland that they had become "more Irish than the Irish". Goldsmith\'s father had the care of Protestant souls at Pallasmore, County Longford, where (10 November, 1728) the poet was born. The father obtained a cure worth more than the "forty pounds a year" at Lissoy in West Meath, and Lissoy contributes some features to the Auburn of the "Deserted Village," an ideal village, in an ideal state of desertion. His father, according to Goldsmith\'s poetry and prose, was a most excellent man; more capable of teaching[Pg 475] his family how to spend large fortunes in benevolence than how to earn a maintenance,
More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.
He was the generous host of "all the vagrant train," of "the long-remembered beggar," an Irish Edie Ochiltree, of "the ruined spendthrift," who "claimed kindred," and came to "scorn," and of "the broken soldier".
Careless their merits or their faults to scan
His pity gave ere charity began.
This pity was Goldsmith\'s own characteristic. When an exceedingly poor scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, his feats of charity matched those of St. Francis or St. Martin of Tours. He is said to have given away his blanket, and slept in the ticking of his bed.
A love of fine clothes was no less part of his nature than love of his neighbours, while he liked "the cards," and the bowl and tavern talk. He took his bachelor\'s degree in February, 1749: idled away a year or two at home, learned to play the flute, failed to take holy orders, and, as a medical student, went to Edinburgh University (1752-1754) lived on the benevolence of an uncle, Contarine, and, on his way to Leyden, was taken in the company of five or six Scottish gentlemen in French service, who had been recruiting for King Louis in the Highlands. Alan Breck may have been in this adventure. Throughout 1755-1756, Goldsmith roamed about the Continent, supporting himself by his flute, and entertained by the hospitality of the Universities.
"Sir," said Johnson, "he disputed his way through Europe," as the Admirable Crichton had done, a hundred and seventy years earlier. At Padua, it is thought, if anywhere, he obtained his Doctor\'s degree: his adventures later gave him materials for essays, for the wandering scholar in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and for his poem, "The Traveller". "He was making himself all the time."
Returning to England in 1756, he lived as an usher in a small school; as a corrector for the press; as a kind of indentured reviewer and general hack to Griffiths the publisher; failed to pass as a naval surgeon; wrote with Smollett\'s literary gang, conducted[Pg 476] a weekly booklet or magazine, "The Bee," for a few numbers (1759); and published "An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe". He was much more successful (1760) with letters in "The Public Ledger," in the assumed character of a Chinese visitor to London.
In the former work Goldsmith complains that young genius effervesces at college and is unrewarded, while dull plodders fatten. "The link" between "the great" and the literary "now seems entirely broken". "An author" is a thing only to be laughed at. "His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company." Indeed Goldsmith\'s person was quaint, his attire, when in funds, was that of the bird of paradise; while his wit flowed from his pen, not from his tongue; his repartee was not ready; eager he was but apparently absent-minded in company. As for the publisher, "it is his interest to allow as little as possible for writing, and of the author to write as much as possible". Writers for the stage suffer from the competition of the dead. Like two or three men of genius of our day, Goldsmith asks "who will deliver us from Shakespeare?" from "these pieces of forced humour, far-fetched conceit, and unnatural hyperbole which have been ascribed to Shakespeare." Here is scepticism! Managers make new authors wait some years before giving their plays a chance: a malady most incident to managers; and Garrick believed that he was attacked.
The not unnatural acrimony of a neglected man appears in some of the Chinese Letters (published in book form as "The Citizen of the World"), notably in the visit to Westminster Abbey. Goldsmith had a spite against the patronage, given to the art of painting, and made his Chinaman share it. The same critic looks on Sterne\'s "Tristram Shandy" as a lewd compound of pertness, vanity, and obscene buffoonery.
The Chinaman also attacked the brutality of the criminal law (that of his own country being so mild), and generally inveighed against the state of society. The Letters are an unflattering picture of the times. By 1761 Johnson had made the acquaintance of Goldsmith, and henceforth Goldsmith had not to complain of neglect from wits and authors. In 1764 he published his moral[Pg 477] and contemplative poem "The Traveller"; with his "Deserted Village" it is perhaps the last good thing of the old school of poems in rhymed heroic couplets. The dedicatory preface to the author\'s brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, tells us that, as society becomes refined, painting and music "offer the feeble mind a less laborious entertainment" than poetry, which they supplant, while "what criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric Odes, anapests (sic) and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it!"
Goldsmith, in social matters rather a Socialist, is, in poetry, opposing the slowly dawning freedom, and upholding the school of Pope. But there is, in both of his longer poems, a kind of softness in the versification, and of sincerity in the sentiments and descriptions of Nature, which we miss in Pope, while each piece, as the man said of "Hamlet," "is made up of quotations," of lines which live in many memories like household words. The pictures of the parish clergyman, of the schoolmaster, of the harmless old rustic ale-house, in the "Deserted Village," may be called imperishable; and Goldsmith cries "back to the land" and denounces "landlordism," and forced migration to North America,
Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey.
Goldsmith, in fact, never revisited "the decent church," "the hawthorn bush," the harmless pot-house, and other scenes of his infancy: in his poem he blends an ideal Irish with an ideal English village, and ascribes the result to a tyrannical, landlord with admirable pathetic success.
Of his other poems "The Haunch of Venison," imitated from Horace, and the witty and kind raillery of "Retaliation," in which his pen supplies the wit that often failed his tongue in the wit-combats of "the Club," are both in "anapests" and are the most important. The "Lament for Madame Blaise" is a lively adaptation from the French, and the "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" is a most vivacious piece. As a ballad "Edwin and Angelina," though popular, is too unballad-like.
The works on which Goldsmith\'s fame depends are not his[Pg 478] essays, histories, or view of "Animated Nature," genially unscientific, but his "Vicar of Wakefield" (written earlier, but sold by Johnson for while Goldsmith was in a sponging house in 1764), and his two plays "The Good Natured Man," and "She Stoops to Conquer" (1768, 1773).
"The Vicar of Wakefield" drew the highest possible praise from Goethe, and the most furious of attacks from the critical pen of Mark Twain. Nobody says that it shines in construction, but its humour and sweetness, the goodness, the simplicity, the true wisdom, and the learned foibles of the Vicar, with the humours of his wife, daughters, and wandering scholar son, an usher, a dweller in Grub Street, make "The Vicar of Wakefield" a book to be read once a year. "Finding that the best things had not been said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new... the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes, nothing at all, sir." In the son\'s narrative Goldsmith has his usual flout at art and amateurs of art, and Pietro Perugino.
The plays are too well known for comment, with Croaker and Lofty, the Bailiffs, Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle, the revellers at the Three Pigeons, and young Marlow, they are at least as familiar on the amateur as on the professional boards. They brought to Goldsmith fame, some money and more credit, but he was still a drudge, still working for booksellers, and deep in debt, when his death on 4 April, 1774, made Reynolds for once lay down his brush, saddened the Club, and filled the stairs of his chambers in Brick Court with poor weeping women to whom he had been kind,—their only friend. "Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," wrote Johnson in his epitaph, adding a new phrase to Latin proverbial philosophy.[1]
Edmund Burke.
"It seems probable," says Burke\'s biographer, Lord Morley, "that Burke will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years" (from 1899) "than he has been within the whole of the last eighty." Yet we do not find many[Pg 479] references to Burke, who, living, speaking, and writing through some thirty years of discontents and revolutions (the American and the French) and bringing to problems like our own a masculine judgment, and a lucid and energetic style, might seem worthy of general study.
In a sketch of the history of literature space for the works of Burke, saturated with politics as they are, and only to be understood in the light of ample historical knowledge, cannot be provided. The speeches of most successful orators are brilliant, and persuasive for the hour, with crowds who wish to be persuaded. The speeches of Burke are sometimes, when his pity and indignation are stirred (as by the fate of Marie Antoinette, or the alleged infamies of Warren Hastings), rich in floral components, in impassioned rhetoric. But, as a rule, his best orations required to be read if they were to be appreciated; they are too full of thought and knowledge and too logically built to be generally effective at the moment.
Whatever our political opinions may be, we cannot but find Burke\'s "Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies" (22 March, 1775) a very great and noble literary work. For its purpose it was futile; fierce peoples are not to be guided by all the eloquence and all the wisdom of the wise. "We are called upon, as it were by a superior warning Voice, again to attend to America; to attend to the whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual degree of care and calmness. Surely it is an awful subject; or there is none so on this side of the grave."
It was an awful subject; but it was also a party question. Knowledge, care, and calmness were, therefore, put out of action. On an infamous proposal to "reduce the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies" by proclaiming the freedom of the black slaves and raising a servile war, Burke said: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?"—the[Pg 480] Slave Trade. The idea of sending, in the same ship, samples of fresh "black ivory" and a proclamation of freedom for all blacks, not unreasonably seemed absurd, to Burke.
This speech, so moving to the reader, is said to have driven members out of the House; the gestures of the orator being clumsy, his tones harsh, and his delivery hasty. Johnson said that his wit was "blunt"; Goldsmith, on the other hand, that he "cut blocks with a razor". He "to party gave up what was meant for mankind," but, save through party, mankind is not to be helped by the politicians.
To glance at the main facts of Burke\'s life, he appears to have been, as far as his name shows, of Norman but long Hibernicised stock on his father\'s side; of native Irish blood on that of his mother, a Miss Nagle, a Catholic. He was born in Dublin, apparently on 12 January, 1729. His father was a solicitor. After two years at a small school kept by a learned Quaker, Burke went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he showed eager intellectual appetites, without paying much heed to the academic round of studies. In 1750 he went to London, to the Middle Temple, and studied law, but did not practise. In 1755 his father cut off his allowance, in 1756 he married. He cannot have made money by his "Vindication of Natural Society" (1756), written in the rhetorical manner of Bolingbroke. The book is an ironical reply to Bolingbroke\'s argument for "natural" against "revealed" religion. Transfer the view to society: our religion may have its anomalies, yet our society has far more and worse. Do you propose, therefore, to return to "natural society"? "Natural" society was then supposed by the wise and learned to be a happy go-as-you-please innocent communism. In fact, if savage society be "natural" society it is emmeshed in the strangest and most artificial, cruel, and filthy set of laws and customs: the marriage laws, when carried (as they sometimes are) to their logical conclusion, make marriage impossible! All this was not understood, but Burke, while arguing against a sudden and violent break-up of society, did perceive and state brilliantly, the glaring injustices of our society, as Goldsmith did in "The Deserted Village".
Burke\'s "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas[Pg 481] of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1756) is a study in the science of "?sthetics," a science which, if it has reached no very conspicuous results, is now pursued with instruments and by a method not extant in Burke\'s day. He only sought for "the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". He went into the psychology of pain and pleasure, and found Beauty to be "some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses". But what is the quality and why does it automatically produce the effect? The qualities which automatically excite in the mind the apperception of the beautiful are comparatively small, smooth, varied without angularity, delicate, and in colour clear and bright, but not strong or glaring. But a mountain, or fire, is beautiful yet—does not present the six qualities. Consequently we must not call a huge rough mountain beautiful but sublime.
Burke does not pretend to know "the ultimate cause" of the emotions produced in the mind, and he censures the daring of Sir Isaac Newton in accounting for things by Ether. But Ether seems to prosper in modern scientific thought.
We cannot follow Burke into metaphysics, but the ordinary reader may test, by experience, his description of a lover in the presence of the beloved. "As far as I could observe," says Burke, "the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the Object; the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly by the side." Thus it seems probable "that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system". On the other hand, the Sublime ought to string up the solids, and we do hear of sublime objects which "petrify" the percipient. Burke sought, at all events, for the answer to his problem in the nature of man, in psychology.
The nature of Burke\'s financial resources, beyond what he made by writing in the new "Annual Register" (1759,—a hundred a year from Dodsley the publisher) is as mysterious as the address of his fellow-countryman, The Mulligan, in Thackeray\'s book. In 1759 the so-called "Single Speech Hamilton" employed him; in[Pg 482] 1761 he went to Ireland with Hamilton, who was secretary to Lord Halifax. Hamilton treated him badly, and in 1765 he became secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, entered Parliament as member for Wendover, a pocket borough, made his mark at once; wrote "Observations on the Present State of the Nation" (1769), and the admirable "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," a book always in season. How Burke, in 1768, contrived to buy Beaconsfield in Bucks (￡22,000) and to live at a rate of ￡2500 a year, the rental being ￡500, is a mystery deeper than that of "The Man in the Iron Mask". Apparently there was a suffering Marquis in the background: at least Burke owed large sums to Lord Rockingham, who forgave the debt. No discreditable source of Burke\'s fairy gold can be conjectured or conceived, as Goldsmith said he was
Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit,
"too nice" meaning "too scrupulous".
Burke did not hold office, save for one year (1782-1783). Though a Whig and a "Pro-American," Burke never liked, never approved of the French Revolution. Early in 1790, he spoke in Parliament, breaking away from those enthusiasts for Liberty in her wildest mood, Fox and Sheridan.
His "Reflections on the French Revolution" (1790) had a large sale and wide influence. People will judge Burke\'s influence, conduct and eloquence, at this time, in accordance with their politics and prejudices; his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," and other work of his last years cannot be discussed without partisanship. He died on 9 July, 1797. "The age of chivalry is gone," is one of Burke\'s best-remembered phrases. When was there an age of chivalry? If no swords leaped from their sheaths for Marie Antoinette, in 1793, not one was drawn for Jeanne d\'Arc in 1431, not one for Mary Stuart in 1587.
The Revival of the Ballad.
Throughout the eighteenth century, despite the dominance of Pope and his followers, and the poetry of the Town; despite the sturdy resistance of Johnson; despite Goldsmith\'s complaints against Odes and "anapests" and "blank verse" and "happy[Pg 483] negligence," there were streams of tendency making for literary freedom. Addison had lovingly praised both the blank verse of Milton, and the purely popular art of the ancient ballads. Men were beginning to look back with personal interest at antiquity; not only at Spenser, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but at all the art and poetry of times past. As early as 1706-1711 Watson\'s "Choice Collection" of old Scottish poems was published: and Allan Ramsay gave old things mixed with new in his "Evergreen," and "Tea Table Miscellany" between 1724 and 1727; others appeared in d\'Urfey\'s "Pills to Purge Melancholy" (1719), others in "Old Ballads" (1723).
We have seen the antiquarianism of Gray, in his translations from the Norse, and his interest in Macpherson\'s so-called "Ossian" (1760-1763). Though there was no written Highland epic in existence, there were, and are, "Ossianic ballads" in Gaelic, late popular survivals of Irish poetry. Working in his own way on these, and on prose legends, apparently, Macpherson led men\'s fancies back to the racing "sounds" of the north; back to the Highland beliefs that had already fascinated Collins; and emancipated poetry from the chatter of the coffee-house and the tavern. The charlatanism of Macpherson disgusted Johnson; any one could write Ossianisms, he said, who abandoned his mind to it, but Macpherson, at least, pleased thousands, including so enthusiastic a student of Homer as Napoleon Bonaparte, and stimulated Gaelic researches.
In 1765 the publication of an old and famous manuscript folio by Bishop Percy ("The Reliques") not only gave a new and popular source of pleasure in ballads and old relics, but caused a noisy controversy, which, again, led to close research. Percy "restored," altered, added to, and omitted from his materials as taste and fancy prompted; arousing the wrath of the crabbed antiquary, Joseph Ritson, who denied that the manuscript folio existed. Had Percy published it as it stood (which............