There is nothing in Roscoe or Mrs. Hemans (local bards) one half so fine. Long may librarians live and flourish! May their salaries increase, if not by leaps and bounds, yet in steady proportions. Yet will they do well to remember that books are not everything.
That dreary morass, that Serbonian bog, the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, has been lately lit up as by the flickering light of a will-o'-the-wisp, by the almost simultaneous publication of an imaginary charge delivered to an equally imaginary jury by a judge of no less eminence than the late Lord Penzance (that tough Erastian) and of the still bolder jeu d'esprit, A Report of the Trial of an Issue in Westminster Hall, June 20, 1627, which is the work of the unbridled fancy of His Honour Judge Willis, late Treasurer of the Inner Temple, and a man most intimately acquainted with the literature of the seventeenth century.
Neither production of these playful lawyers, clothed though they be in the garb of judicial procedure, is in the least likely to impress the lay mind with that sense of 'impartiality' or 'indifference' which is supposed to be an attribute of justice, or, indeed, with anything save the unfitness of the machinery of an action at law for the determination of any matter which invokes the canons of criticism and demands the arbitrament of a well-informed and lively taste.
Lord Penzance, who favours the Baconians, made no pretence of impartiality, and says outright in his preface that his readers 'must not expect to find in these pages an equal and impartial leaning of the judge alternately to the case of both parties, as would, I hope, be found in any judicial summing-up of the evidence in a real judicial inquiry.' And, he adds, 'the form of a summing-up is only adopted for convenience, but it is in truth very little short of an argument for the plaintiffs, i.e., the Baconians.'
Why any man, judge or no judge, who wished to prepare an argument on one side of a question should think fit to cast that argument for convenience' sake in the form of a judicial summing-up of both sides is, and must remain, a puzzle.
Judge Willis, who is a Shakespearean, bold and unabashed, is not content with a mere summing-up, but, with a gravity and wealth of detail worthy of De Foe, has presented us with what purports to be a verbatim report of so much of the proceedings in a suit of Hall v. Russell as were concerned with the trial before a jury of the simple issue—whether William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, 'the testator in the cause of Hall v. Russell,' was the author of the plays in the Folio of 1623. We are favoured with the names of counsel employed, who snarl at one another with such startling verisimilitude, whilst the remarks that fall from the bench do so with such naturalness, that it is perhaps not surprising, or any very severe reflection upon his literary esprit, that a member of the Bar, having heard Judge Willis deliver his lecture in the Inner Temple Hall, repaired next day to the library to study at his leisure the hitherto unnoted case of Hall v. Russell. Ten witnesses are put in the box to prove the affirmative—that Shakespeare was the author of the plays. Mr. Blount and M. Jaggard, the publishers of the Folio, give a most satisfactory account of the somewhat crucial point—how they came by the manuscripts, with all the amendments and corrections, and pass lightly over the fact that those manuscripts had disappeared. 'Rare Ben Jonson' in the witness-box is a masterpiece of dramatic invention; he demolishes Bacon's advocate with magnificent vitality. John Selden makes a stately witness, and Francis Meres a very useful one. Generally speaking, the weakest part in these interesting proceedings is the cross-examination. I have heard the learned judge do better in old days. No witnesses are called for the Baconians, though all the writings of the great philosopher were put in for what they were worth. The Lord Chief Justice, who seems to have been a friend of Shakespeare's, sums up dead in his favour, and the jury (with whose names we are not supplied, which is a pity—Bunyan or De Foe would have given them to us), after a short absence, a quarter of an hour, return a Shakespearean verdict, which of course ought by rights to make the whole question res judicata.
But it has done nothing of the kind. Could we really ask Blount and Jaggard how they came by the manuscripts, and who made the corrections, and did we believe their replies, why, then a stray Baconian here and there might reluctantly abandon his strange fancy; but as Hall v. Russell is Judge Willis's joke, it will convert no Baconians any more than Dean Sherlock's once celebrated Trial of the Witnesses compels belief in the Resurrection.
The question in reality is a compound one. Did Shakespeare write the plays? If yes, the matter is at rest. If no—who did? If an author can be found—Bacon or anyone else—well and good. If no author can be found—Anon. wrote them—a conclusion which need terrify no one, since the plays would still remain within our reach, and William Shakespeare, apart from the plays, is very little to anybody who has not written his life.
But this is not the form the controversy has assumed. The anti-Shakespeareans are to a man Baconians, and fondly imagine that if only Will Shakespeare were put out of the way their man must step into the vacant throne. Lord Penzance in charging his jury told them that those of their number 'who had studied the writings of Bacon' and were 'keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers' would probably have 'no difficulty,' if once satisfied that the author they were seeking after was not Shakespeare, in finding as a fact that he was Bacon. But suppose James Spedding had been on that jury, and, rising in his place, had spoken as follows:
'My Lord,—If any man has ever studied the writings of Bacon, I have. For twenty-five years I have done little else. If any man is keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers, I am that man. I am also deeply read in the plays attributed to Shakespeare, and I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever was the real author, it was not Bacon.'
That this is exactly what Spedding would have said we know from the letter he wrote on the subject to Mr. Holmes, reprinted in Essays and Discussions, and it completely upsets the whole scheme of arrangement of Lord Penzance's summing-up, which proceeds on the easy footing that the more difficulties you throw in Shakespeare's path the smoother becomes Bacon's.
That there are difficulties in Shakespeare's path, some things very hard to explain, must be admitted. Lord Penzance makes the most of these. It is, indeed, a most extraordinary thing that anybody should have had the mother-wit to write the plays traditionally assigned to Shakespeare. Where did he get it from? How on earth did the plays get themselves written? Where, when, and how did the author pick up his multifarious learnings? Lord Penzance, good, honest man, is simply staggered by the extent of the play-wright's information. The plays, so he says, 'teem with erudition,' and can only have been written by someone who had the classics at his finger-ends, modern languages on the tip of his tongue—by someone who had travelled far and read deeply; and, above all, by a man who had spent at least a year in a conveyancer's chambers! And yet, when this has been said, would Lord Penzance have added that the style and character of the playwright is the style and character of a really learned man of his period! Can anything less like such a style be imagined? Once genius is granted, heaven-born genius, a mother-wit beyond the dreams of fancy, and then plain humdrum men, ordinary judicial intelligences, will do well to be on their guard against it. 'Beware—beware! he is fooling thee.' Shakespeare's genius has simply befooled Lord Penzance. Seafaring men, after reading The Tempest, are ready to maintain that its author must have been for at least a year before the mast. As for Shakespeare's law, which has taken in so many matter-of-fact practitioners, one can now refer to Ben Jonson's evidence in Hall v. Russell, where that great dramatist has no difficulty in showing that if none but a lawyer could have written Shakespeare's plays, a lawyer alone could have preached Thomas Adams's sermons. Judge Willis's profound knowledge of sound old divinity has served him here in good stead. The fact is it is simply impossible to exaggerate the quick-wittedness and light-heartedness of a great literary genius. The absorbing power, the lightning-like faculty of apprehension, the instant recognition of the uses to which any fact or fancy can be put, the infinite number and delicacy of the mental feelers, thrust out in all directions, which belong to the creative brain and keep it in tremulous and restless activity, are quite enough so to differentiate the possessor of these endowments from his fellow mortals as to make comparison impossible. Shakespeare the actor was by the common consent of his enemies one of the deftest fellows that ever made use of other men's materials—'Convey, the wise it call.' I will again quote Spedding:
'If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar or a man of science, neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained scholarship or scientific education. Given the faculties, you will find that all the acquired knowledge, art, and dexterity which the Shakespearean plays imply were easily attainable by a man who was labouring in his vocation and had nothing else to do.'
I greatly prefer this cool judgment of a scholar deeply read in Elizabethan lore to Lord Penzance's heated and almost breathless admiration for the 'teeming erudition' of the plays.
Lord Penzance likewise displays a very creditable non-acquaintance with the disposition of authors one to another. He is quite shocked at the callousness of Shakespeare's contemporaries to Shakespeare if he were indeed the author of the Quartos which bore his name in his lifetime. But as it cannot be suggested that in, say, 1600 it was generally known that Shakespeare was not the author of these plays, it is hard to see how his contemporaries can be acquitted of indifference to his prodigious superiority over themselves. Authors, however, never take this view. Shakespeare's contemporaries thought him a mighty clever fellow and no more. Why, even Wordsworth was well persuaded he could write like Shakespeare had he been so minded. Mr. Arnold remained all his life honestly indifferent to and sceptical about the fame of both Tennyson and Browning. Great living lawyers and doctors do not invariably idolize each other, nor do the lawyers and doctors in a small way of business always speak well of those in a big way. The poets and learned critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Dryden, Pope, Johnson—looked upon Shakespeare with an indulgent eye, as a great but irregular genius, after much the same fashion as did the old sea-dogs of Nelson's day regard the hero of Trafalgar. 'Do not criticise him too harshly,' said Lord St. Vincent; 'there can only be one Nelson.'
These are not the real difficulties, though they seem to have pressed somewhat heavily on Lord Penzance.
The circumstances attendant upon the publication of the Folio of 1623 are undoubtedly puzzling. Shakespeare died in 1616, leaving behind him more than forty plays circulating in London and more or less associated with his name. His will, a most elaborate document, does not contain a single reference to his literary life or labours. Seven years after his death the Folio appears, which contains twenty-six plays out of the odd forty just referred to, and ten extra plays which had never before been in print, and about six of which there is a very scanty Shakespearean tradition. Of the twenty-six old plays, seventeen had been printed in small Quartos, possibly surreptitiously, in Shakespeare's lifetime, but the Folio does not reprint from these Quartos, but from enlarged, amended, and enormously improved copies. Messrs. Heminge and Condell, the editor of this priceless treasure, the First Folio, wrote a long-winded dedication to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, which contains but one pertinent passage, in which they ask their readers to believe that it had been the office of the editors to collect and publish the author's 'mere writings,' he being dead, and to offer them, not 'maimed and deformed,' in surreptitious and stolen copies, but 'cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, who as he was a happie imitator of Nature was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.'
From whose custody did those 'papers' come? Where had they been all the seven years? Of what did they consist? If in truth unblotted, all the seventeen Quartos as well as the new plays must have been printed from fair manuscript copies. From whom were these unblotted copies received, and what became of them? The silence of these players is irritating and perplexing,—though, possibly, the explanation of the mystery, were it forthcoming, would be, as often happens, of the simplest. It may be that these unblotted copies were in the theatre library all the time.
Whether these interrogatories, now unanswerable, raise doubts in the mind of sufficient potency to destroy the tradition of centuries, and to prevent us from sharing the conviction of Milton, of Dryden, of Pope, and Johnson that Shakespeare was the author of Shakespeare's plays must be left for individual consideration. But, however destructive these doubts may prove, they do not go a yard of the way to let in Bacon.
Once more I will quote Spedding, for he, of all the moderns, by virtue of his taste and devouring studies, is the best qualified to speak:
'Aristotle was an extraordinary man. Plato was an extraordinary man. That two men each severally so extraordinary should have been living at the same time in the same place was a very extraordinary thing. But would it diminish the wonder to suppose the two to be one? So I say of Bacon and Shakespeare. That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Shakespeare should exist is extraordinary. That a human being possessed of the necessary faculties to make Bacon should exist is extraordinary. That two such human beings should have been living in London at the same time was more extraordinary still. But that one man should have existed possessing the faculties and opportunities necessary to make both would have been the most extraordinary thing of all' (see Spedding's Essays and Discussions, 1879, pp. 371, 372).
'Great writers, especially being contemporary, have many features in common, but if they are really great writers they write naturally, and nature is always individual. I doubt whether there are five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several styles and practised in such observations' (Ibid., p. 373).
To anyone blessed or cursed with an ironical humour the troublesome history of the Church of England since the Reformation cannot fail to be an endless source of delight. It really is exciting. Just a little more of Calvin and of Beza, half a dozen words here, or Cranmer's pencil through a single phrase elsewhere; a 'quantum suff.' of the men 'that allowed no Eucharistic sacrifice,' and away must have gone beyond recall the possibility of the Laudian revival and all that still appertains thereunto. We must have lost the 'primitive' men, the Kens, the Wilsons, the Knoxes, the Kebles, the Puseys. On the other hand, but for the unfaltering language of the Articles, the hearty tone of the Homilies, and the agreeable readiness of both sides to curse the Italian impudence of the Bishop of Rome and all his 'detestable enormities,' our Anglican Church history could never have been enriched with the names or sweetened by the memories of the Romaines, the Flavels, the Venns, the Simeons, and of many thousand unnamed saints who finished their course in the fervent faith of Evangelicalism. But on what a thread it has always hung! An ill-considered Act of Parliament, an amendment hastily accepted by a pestered layman at midnight, a decision in a court of law, a Jerusalem Bishoprick, a passage in an early Father, an ancient heresy restudied, and off to Rome goes a Newman or a Manning, whilst a Baptist Noel finds his less romantic refuge in Protestant Dissent. Schism is for ever in the air. Disruption a lively possibility. It has always been a ticklish business belonging to the Church of England, unless you can muster up enough courage to be a frank Erastian, and on the rare occasions when you attend your parish church handle the Book of Common Prayer with all the reverence due to a schedule to an Act of Parliament.
Among the many noticeable humours of the present situation is the tone adopted by an average Churchman like Canon Overton to the Non-Jurors. When the late Mr. Lathbury published his admirable History of the Non-Jurors, 1 he had to prepare himself for a very different public of Churchmen and Churchwomen than will turn over Canon Overton's agreeable pages. 2 In 1845 the average Churchman, after he had conquered the serious initial difficulty of comprehending the Non-Juror's position, was only too apt to consider him a fool for his pains. 'It has been the custom,' wrote Mr. Lathbury, 'to speak of the Non-Jurors as a set of unreasonable men, and should I succeed in any measure in correcting those erroneous impressions, I shall feel that my labour has not been in vain.' But in 1902, as Canon Overton is ready enough to perceive, 'their position is a little better understood.' The well-nigh 'fools' are all but 'confessors.'
The early history of the Non-Jurors is as fascinating and as fruitful as their later history is dull, melancholy, and disappointing.
Nobody will deny that the Bishops, clergy, and laity of the Church of England who refused to take the oaths to William and Mary and George I., when tendered to them, were amply justified in the Court of Conscience. They were ridiculed by the politicians of the day for their supersensitiveness; but what were they to do? If they took the oaths, they apostalized from the faith they had once professed.
Before the Revolution it was the faith of all High Churchmen—part of the deposition they had to guard—that the doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience was Gospel truth, primitive doctrine, and a chief 'characteristic' of the Anglican Church.
The saintly John Kettlewell, in his tractate, Christianity: a Doctrine of the Cross, or Passive Obedience under any Pretended Invasion of Legal Rights and Liberties (1696), makes this perfectly plain; and when Ken came to compose his famous will, wherein he declared that he died in the Communion of the Church of England, 'as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross,' the good Bishop did not mean what many a pious soul in later days has been edified by thinking he did mean, the doctrine of the Atonement, but that of passive obedience, which was the Non-Juror's cross.
It is sad to think a doctrine dear to so many saintly men, maintained with an erudition so vast and exemplified by sacrifices so great, should have disappeared in the vortex of present-day conflict. It may some day reappear in Convocation. Kettlewell, who was a precise writer and accurate thinker, defined sovereignty as supremacy. 'Kings,' he said, 'can be no longer sovereigns, but subjects, if they have any superiors'; and he points out with much acumen that the best security under a sovereign 'which sovereignty allows' is that the Kings and Ministers are accountable and liable for breach of law as well as others. Kettlewell, had he lived long enough, might have come to transfer his idea of sovereignty to Kings, Lords, and Commons speaking through an Act of Parliament, and if so, he would have urged active obedience to its enactments, when not contrary to conscience, and passive obedience if they were so contrary. Therefore, were he alive to-day, and did he think it contrary to conscience (as he easily might) to pay a school-rate for an 'undenominational' school, he would not draw a cheque for the amount, but neither would he punch the bailiff's head who came to seize his furniture. Kettlewell's treatise is well worth reading. Its last paragraph is most spirited.
There could be no doubt about it. The High Church party were bound hand and foot to the doctrine of the Cross—i.e., passive obedience to the Lord's Anointed. Whoever else might actively resist or forsake the King, they could not without apostasy. But the Revolution of 1688 was not content to pierce the High Churchmen through one hand. Not only did the Revolution require the Church to forswear its King, but also to see its spiritual fathers deprived and intruders set in their places without even the semblance of any spiritual authority. If it was hard to have James II. a fugitive in foreign lands and Dutch William in Whitehall, it was perhaps even harder to see Sancroft expelled from Lambeth, and the Erastian and latitudinarian Tillotson, who was prepared to sacrifice even episcopacy for peace, usurping the title of Archbishop of Canterbury. After all, no man, not even a Churchman, can serve two masters. The loyalty of a High Churchman to the throne is always subject to his loyalty to the Church, and at the Revolution he was wounded in both houses.
When Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, and established what was then unblushingly called 'the new religion,' the whole Anglican Hierarchy, with the paltry exception of the Bishop of Llandaff, refused the oaths of supremacy, and were superseded. In a little more than 100 years the Protestant Bench was bombarded with a heart-searching oath—this time of allegiance. Opinion was divided; the point was not so clear as in 1559. The Archbishop of York and his brethren of London, Lincoln, Bristol, Winchester, Rochester, Llandaff and St. Asaph, Carlisle and St. David's, swore to bear true allegiance to Their Majesties King William and Queen Mary. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester, Norwich, Peterborough, Worcester, Chichester, and Chester refused to swear anything of the kind, and were consequently, in pursuance of the terms of an Act of Parliament, and of an Act of Parliament only, deprived of their ecclesiastical preferments. They thus became the first Non-Jurors, and were long, except two who died before actual sentence of exclusion, affectionately known and piously venerated in all High Church homes as 'the Deprived Fathers.'
Who can doubt that they were right, holding the faith they did? Yet Englishmen do not take kindly to martyrdom, and some of the Bishops were strangely puzzled. The excellent Ken, who, like Keble, was an Englishman first and a Catholic afterwards (in other words, no true Catholic at all), when told that James was ready to give Ireland to France, as nearly as possible conformed, so angry was he with the Lord's Anointed; and even the fiery Leslie, one of our most agreeable writers, was always ready to forgive those pious, peaceful souls who thought it no sin, though great sorrow, to comply with the demands of Caesar, but still managed to retain their old Church and King principles. Leslie reserved his wrath for the Tillotsons and the Tenisons and the Burnets, who first, to use his own words, swallowed 'the morsels of usurpation' and then dressed them up 'with all the gaudy and ridiculous flourishes that an Apostate eloquence can put upon them.'
The early Non-Jurors included among their number a very large proportion of holy, learned, and primitive-minded men. At least 400 of the general body of the clergy refused the oaths and accepted for themselves and those dependent on them lives of poverty and seclusion. They were from the beginning an unpopular body. They were not Puritans, they were not Deists, they were not Presbyterians, they would not go to their parish churches; and yet they vehemently objected to being called Papists. What troublesome people! Five of the deprived fathers, including the Primate, had known what it was, when they defied their Sovereign, to be the idols of the mob; but when they adhered to his fallen cause they were deprived of their sees, and sent packing from their palaces without a single growl of popular discontent. Oblivion was their portion, even as it was of their Roman Catholic predecessors at the time of the Reformation.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, when turned out of Lambeth by a judgment of the Court of King's Bench to make way for Tillotson, retired to his native village in Fressingfield, where he did not attend the parish church, nor would allow any but non-juring clergy to perform Divine service in his presence. Dr. Sancroft (who was a book-lover, and had 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?
1 A History of the Non-Jurors. By Thomas Lathbury. London: Pickering, 1845.
2 The Non-Jurors. By J.H. Overton, D.D. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1902, 16s.
'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. 1
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 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 manières nobles et aisées, la tournure d'un homme de condition, le ton de la bonne compagnie, les grâces le je ne scais quoi qui plaît,' 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 £1,575. 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.'
1 Published by Methuen and Co. in 2 vols.
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 £4 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 £4 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 Miscellanies1 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.'
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."'