Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 64

Those who are conversant in literary history can tell how many works, and some considerable ones, have entirely sprung out of the vengeance of authors. Johnson, to whom the feelings of the race were so well known, has made a curious observation, which none but an author could have made:--"The best advice to authors would be, that they should keep out of the way of one another." He says this in the "Life of Rowe," on the occasion of Addison's Observations on Rowe's Character.

Rowe had expressed his happiness to Pope at Addison's promotion; and Pope, who wished to conciliate Addison towards Rowe, mentioned it, adding, that he believed Rowe was sincere. Addison replied, "That he did not suspect Rowe feigned; but _the levity of his heart is such, that he is struck with any new adventure_: and it would affect him just in the same manner as if he heard I was going to be hanged."

Warburton adds that Pope said he could not deny but Addison understood Rowe well. Such is the fact on which Johnson throws out an admirable observation:--"This censure time has not left us the power of confirming or refuting; but observation daily shows that much stress is not to be laid on hyperbolical accusations and pointed sentences, which even he that utters them desires to be applauded, rather than credited. Addison can hardly be supposed to have meant all that he said. _Few characters can bear the microscopic scrutiny of WIT quickened by ANGER._" I could heap up facts to demonstrate this severe truth. Even of Pope's best friends, some of their severities, if they ever reached him, must have given the pain he often inflicted. His friend Atterbury, to whom he was so partial, dropped an expression, in the heat of conversation, which Pope could never have forgiven; that our poet had "a crooked mind in a crooked body." There was a rumour, after Pope's death, that he had left behind him a satirical "Life of Dean Swift." Let genius, whose faculty detects the foibles of a brother, remember he is a rival, and be a generous one. In that extraordinary morsel of literary history, the "Conversations of Ben Jonson with his friend Drummond of Hawthornden," preserving his opinions of his contemporaries, if I err not in my recollection, I believe that he has not spoken favourably of a single individual!

The personal motives of an author, influencing his literary conduct, have induced him to practise meannesses and subterfuges. One remarkable instance of this nature is that of Sir John Hawkins, who indeed had been hardly used by the caustic pleasantries of George Steevens. Sir John, in his edition of Johnson, with ingenious malice contrived to suppress the acknowledgment made by Johnson to Steevens of his diligence and sagacity, at the close of his preface to Shakspeare. To preserve the panegyric of Steevens mortified Hawkins beyond endurance; yet, to suppress it openly, his character as an editor did not permit. In this dilemma he pretended he reprinted the preface from the edition of 1765; which, as it appeared before Johnson's acquaintance with Steevens, could not contain the tender pa.s.sage. However, this was unluckily discovered to be only a subterfuge, to get rid of the offensive panegyric. On examination, it proved not true; Hawkins did not reprint from this early edition, but from the latest, for all the corrections are inserted in his own. "If Sir John were to be tried at Hicks's Hall (long the seat of that justice's glory), he would be found guilty of _clipping_," archly remarks the periodical critic.

A fierce controversial author may become a dangerous neighbour to another author: a petulant fellow, who does not write, may be a pestilent one; but he who prints a book against us may disturb our life in endless anxieties. There was once a dean who actually teased to death his bishop, wore him out in journeys to London, and at length drained all his faculties--by a literary quarrel from personal motives.

Dr. THOMAS PIERCE, Dean of Sarum--a perpetual controversialist, and to whom it was dangerous to refuse a request, lest it might raise a controversy--wanted a prebend of Dr. WARD, Bishop of Salisbury, for his son Robert. He was refused; and now, studying revenge, he opened a controversy with the bishop, maintaining that the king had the right of bestowing all dignities in all cathedrals in the kingdom, and not the bishops. This required a reply from the bishop, who had been formerly an active controversialist himself. Dean Pierce renewed his attack with a folio volume, ent.i.tled "A Vindication of the King's Sovereign Right, &c.," 1683.--Thus it proceeded, and the web thickened around the bishop in replies and rejoinders. It cost him many tedious journeys to London, through bad roads, fretting at "the King's Sovereign Right" all the way; and, in the words of a witness, "in unseasonable times and weather, that by degrees his spirits were exhausted, his memory quite gone, and he was totally unfitted for business."[431] Such was the fatal disturbance occasioned by Dean Pierce's folio of "The King's Sovereign Right," and his son Bob being left without a prebend!

I shall close this article with a very ludicrous instance of a literary quarrel from personal motives. This piece of secret history had been certainly lost, had not Bishop Lowth condescended to preserve it, considering it as necessary to a.s.sign a sufficient reason for the extraordinary libel it produced.

Bohun, an antiquarian lawyer, in a work ent.i.tled "The English Lawyer,"

in 1732, in ill.u.s.trating the origin of the Act of _Scandalum Magnatum_, which arose in the time of William of Wykeham, the chancellor and bishop of Edward III. and the founder of New College, in Oxford; took that opportunity of committing the very crime on the venerable manes of Wykeham himself. He has painted this great man in the darkest colours. Wykeham is charged with having introduced "Alice Piers, his niece or," &c., for the truth is he was uncertain who she was, to use his peculiar language, "into the king's bosom;" to have joined her in excluding the Black Prince from all power in the state; and he hints at this hero having been poisoned by them; of Wykeham's embezzling a million of the public money, and, when chancellor, of forging an Act of Parliament to indemnify himself, and thus pa.s.sing his own pardon. It is a singularity in this libellous romance, that the contrary of all this only is true. But Bohun has so artfully interwoven his historical patches of misrepresentations, surmises, and fictions, that he succeeded in framing an historical libel.

Not satisfied with this vile tissue, in his own obscure volume, seven years afterwards, being the editor of a work of high reputation, Nathaniel Bacon's "Historical and Political Discourse of the Laws and Government of England," he further satiated his frenzy by contriving to preserve his libel in a work which he was aware would outlive his own.

Whence all this persevering malignity? Why this quarrel of Mr. Bohun, of the Middle Temple, with the long-departed William of Wykeham?

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?

He took all these obscure pains, and was moved with this perpetual rancour against William of Wykeham, merely to mortify the Wykehamists; and slandered their founder, with the idea that the odium might be reflected on New College. Bohun, it seems, had a quarrel with them concerning a lease on which he had advanced money; but the holder had contrived to a.s.sign it to the well-known Eustace Budgell: the college confirmed the a.s.signment. At an interview before the warden, high words had arisen between the parties: the warden withdrew, and the wit gradually shoved the antiquary off the end of the bench on which they were sitting: a blow was struck, and a cane broken. Bohun brought an action, and the Wykehamites travelled down to give bail at Westminster Hall, where the legal quarrel was dropped, and the literary one then began. Who could have imagined that the venerable bishop and chancellor of Edward III. was to be involved in a wretched squabble about a lease with an antiquary and a wit? "Fancying," says Bishop Lowth, "he could inflict on the Society of New College a blow which would affect them more sensibly by wounding the reputation of their founder, he set himself to collect everything he could meet with that was capable of being represented to his discredit, and to improve it with new and horrible calumnies of his own invention." Thus originated this defamatory attack on the character of William of Wykeham! And by arts which active writers may practise, and innocent readers cannot easily suspect, a work of the highest reputation, like that of Nathaniel Bacon's, may be converted into a vehicle of personal malignity, while the author himself disguises his real purpose under the specious appearance of literature! The present case, it must be acknowledged, is peculiar, where a dead person was attacked with a spirit of rancour to which the living only appear subject; but the author was an antiquary, who lived as much with the dead as the living: his personal motive was the same as those already recorded, and here he was acting with a double force on the dead and the living!

But here I stop my hand, my list would else be too complete.

Great names are omitted--Whitaker and Gibbon;[432] Pope and Lord Hervey;[433] Wood and South;[434] Rowe, Mores, and Ames;[435] and George Steevens and Gough.[436]

This chapter is not honourable to authors; but historians are only Lord Chief Justices, who must execute the laws, even on their intimate friends, when standing at the bar. The chapter is not honourable--but it may be useful; and that is a quality not less valuable to the public. It lets in their readers to a kind of knowledge, which opens a necessary comment on certain works, and enlarges our comprehension of their spirit.

If in the heat of controversy authors imprudently attack each other with personalities, they are only scattering mud and hurling stones, and will incur the ridicule or the contempt of those who, unfriendly to the literary character, feel a secret pleasure in its degradation; but let them learn, that to open a literary controversy from mere personal motives; thus to conceal the dagger of private hatred under the mantle of literature, is an expedient of short duration, for the secret history is handed down with the book; and when once the dignity of the author's character sinks in the meanness of his motives, powerful as the work may be, even Genius finds its l.u.s.tre diminished, and Truth itself becomes suspicious.

FOOTNOTES:

[431] Lansdowne MSS. 1042-1316.

[432] GIBBON'S _Miscellaneous Works_, vol. i. 243.

[433] WALPOLE'S _Memoirs_, vol. iii. 40.

[434] The Life of Wood, by GUTCH, vol. i.

[435] NICHOLS'S _Literary Anecdotes_.

[436] "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 303-4.