Theological Essays and Other Papers Volume II Part 10

NOTE 2.

And by the way, as to servants, a great man may offend in two ways: either by treating his servants himself superciliously, or secondly, which is quite reconcilable with the most paternal behavior on his own part, by suffering them to treat the public superciliously. Accordingly, all novelists who happen to have no acquaintance with the realities of life as it now exists, especially therefore rustic Scotch novelists, describe the servants of n.o.blemen as 'insolent and pampered menials.'

But, on the contrary, at no houses whatever are persons of doubtful appearance and anomalous costume, sure of more respectful attention than at those of the great feudal aristocracy. At a merchant's or a banker's house, it is odds but the porter or the footman will govern himself in his behavior by his own private construction of the case, which (as to foreigners) is pretty sure to be wrong. But in London, at a n.o.bleman's door, the servants show, by the readiness of their civilities to all such questionable comers, that they have taken their lessons from a higher source than their own inexperience or unlearned fancies.

NOTE 3.

'_Cape of Storms_,' which should _primae facie_ be the Cape of Terrors.

But it bears a deep allegoric sense to the bold wrestler with such terrors, that in English, and at length to all the world, this Cape of Terrors has transfigured itself into the Cape of _Good Hope_.

NOTE 4.

'_Heraldic solemnities_'-- 'Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare; Since seldom coming in the long year set, Like precious stones they thinly placed are, Or captain jewels in the carcanet.'

_Shakspeare, 52d Sonnet_.

NOTE 5.

'_I give and I bequeath, old Euclio said_'--and the ridiculous story of the dying epicure insisting upon having his luxurious dish brought back to his death-bed (for why not? since at any rate, eating or not eating, he was doomed to die) are amongst the lowest rubbish of jest-books--having done duty for the Christian and the Pagan worlds through a course of eighteen centuries. Not to linger upon the nursery silliness that could swallow the legend of epicureanism surviving up to the very brink of the grave, and when even the hypocrisy of _medical_ hope had ceased to flatter, what a cruel memento of the infirmity charged upon himself was Pope preparing whilst he intended nothing worse than a falsehood! He meant only to tell a lie; naturally, perhaps, saying to himself, What's one lie more or less? And behold, if his friends are to be believed, he was unconsciously writing a sort of hieroglyphic epitaph for his own tomb-stone. Dr. Johnson's taste for petty gossip was so keen, that I distrust all his anecdotes. That Pope killed himself by potted lampreys, which he had dressed with his own hands, I greatly doubt; but if anything inclines me to believe it, chiefly it is the fury of his invectives against epicures and gluttons.

What most of all he attacked as a moralist was the particular vice which most of all besieged him.

NOTE 6.

Upon this principle I doubt not that we should interpret the sayings attributed to the seven wise men of Greece. If we regard them as insulated aphorisms, they strike us all as mere impertinences; for by what right is some one prudential admonition separarately illuminated and left as a solemn legacy to all posterity in slight of others equally cogent? For instance, _Meden agan_--nothing in excess--is a maxim not to be neglected, but still not ent.i.tled to the exclusive homage which is implied in its present acceptation. The mistake, meantime, I believe to be, not in the Grecian pleiad of sages, but in ourselves, who have falsely apprehended them. The man, for instance (Bias was it, or who?), who left me this old saw about excess, did not mean to bias me in favor of that one moral caution; this would have argued a craze in favor of one element amongst many. What he meant was, to indicate the _radix_ out of which his particular system was expanded. It was the key-note out of which, under the laws of thorough-ba.s.s, were generated the whole chord and its affinities. Whilst the whole evolution of the system was in lively remembrance, there needed no more than this short-hand memento for recalling it. But now, when the lapse of time has left the little maxim stranded on a sh.o.r.e of wrecks, naturally it happens that what was in old days the keystone of an arch has come to be compounded with its superfluous rubbish.

NOTE 7.

It is no matter of wonder or complaint that a paper written by a correspondent a distance of four hundred miles, or something more, from the press, requiring, therefore, a _diaulos_ of above eight hundred miles for every letter and its answer, a distance which becomes strictly infinite in the case when the correspondent sends no answer at all, should exhibit some press errors. These, having now done their worst, I will not vex the reader or the compositor by recalling. Only with respect to one, viz., the word _genuine_, which is twice printed for the true word _generic_, I make an exception, as it defeats the meaning in a way that may have perplexed a painstaking reader. Such readers are rare, and deserve encouragement. [The same _diaulos_ which Mr. De Quincey laments is also the cause of his present paper appearing incomplete. It will be resumed in the next number.--Ed.]

NOTE 8.

'_The two brilliant poets._' As regards Horace, it is scarcely worth while to direct the reader's attention upon inconsistency of this imaginary defiance to philosophic authority with his profession elsewhere of allegiance to Epicurus; for had it even been possible to direct the poet's own attention upon it, the same spirit of frank simplicity which has converted his very cowardice, his unmitigated cowardice (_relicta non bene parmula_), into one of those amiable and winning frailties which, once having come to know it, on no account could we consent to forego--would have reconciled us all by some inimitable picturesqueness of candor to inconsistency the most shocking as to the fulfilment of some great moral obligation; just as from the brute restiveness of a word (Equotutic.u.m), that positively would not come into the harness of hexameter verse, he has extracted a gay, laughing _alias_ (viz., '_versu quod dicere non est_'); a pleasantry which is nowhere so well paralleled as by Southey's on the name of Admiral Tchichakoff:--

'A name which you all must know very well, Which n.o.body can speak, and n.o.body can spell.'

Vain would it be to fasten any blame upon a poet armed with such heaven-born playfulness that upon a verbal defect he raises a triumph of art, and upon a personal defect raises a perpetual memento of smiling and affectionate forgiveness. We 'condone' his cowardice, to use language of Doctors' Commons, many times over, before we know whether he would have cared for our condonation; and protest our unanimous belief, that, if he did run away from battle, he ran no faster than a gentleman ought to run. In fact, his character would have wanted its amiable unity had he _not_ been a coward, or had he _not_ been a rake.

Vain were it to level reproaches at _him_, for whom all reproaches become only occasions of further and surplus honor. But, in fact, for any serious purposes of Horace, philosophy was not wanted. Some slight pretence of that kind served to throw a shade of pensiveness over his convivial revels, and thus to rescue them from the taint of plebeian grossness. So far, and no farther, a slight coloring of philosophy was needed for his moral musings. But Pope's case is different. The moral breathings of Horace are natural exhalations rising spontaneously from the heart under the ordinary gleams of chance and change in the human things that lay around him. But Pope is more ambitious. He is not content with _borrowing_ from philosophy the grace of a pa.s.sing sanction or countersign, but undertakes to _lend_ her a systematic coherency of development, and sometimes even a fundamental basis. In his 'Essay on Man,' his morals connect themselves with metaphysics. The metaphysics had been gathered together in his chance eclectic rambles amongst books of philosophy, such as Montaigne, Charron, and latterly amongst the fossil rubbish and _debris_ of Bayle's Dictionary. Much also had been suggested to his piercing intellect in conversation, especially with Lord Bolingbroke; but not so exclusively by any means with _him_ as the calumniators of Pope would have us suppose. Adopt he did from all quarters, but Pope was not the man servilely to beg or to steal. It was indispensable to his own comfort that he should at least understand the meaning of what he took from others, though seldom indeed he understood its wider relations, or pursued its ultimate consequences. Hence came anguish and horror upon Pope in his latter days, such as rarely can have visited any but the deathbed of some memorable criminal. To have rejected the _verba magistri_ might seem well, it might look promising, as all _real_ freedom is promising, for the interests of truth; but he forgot that, in rejecting the master, he had also rejected the doctrine--the guiding principle--the unity of direction secured for the inquirer by the master's particular system with its deep internal cohesion. Coming upon his own distracted choice of principles from opposite angles and lines of direction, he found that what once and under one aspect had seemed to him a guiding light, and one of the buoys for narrowing the uncertainties of a difficult navigation, absolutely under another aspect, differently approached and differently a.s.sociated, did the treacherous office of a _spanselled_ horse, as in past days upon the Cornish and the South Irish coast it was employed--expressly for showing false signals, and leading right amongst breakers. That _hortus siccus_ of pet notions, which had won Pope's fancy in their insulated and separate existence, when brought together as parts and elements of the same system in the elaborate and haughty 'Essay on Man,' absolutely refused to cohere. No doctoring, no darning, could disguise their essential inter-repulsion. Dismal rents, chasms, hiatuses, gaped and grinned in a theory whose very office and arrogant pretension had been to harmonize the dislocated face of nature, and to do _that_ in the way of justification for G.o.d which G.o.d had forgotten to do for himself. How if an enemy should come, and fill up these ugly chasms with some poisonous fungus of a nature to spread the dry rot through the main timbers of the vessel? And, in fact, such an enemy _did_ come. This enemy spread dismay through Pope's heart. Pope found himself suddenly shown up as an anti-social monster, as an incendiary, as a disorganizer of man's most aspiring hopes. 'O Heavens! What is to be done? what _can_ be done?' he cried out. 'When I wrote that pa.s.sage, which now seems so wicked, certainly I meant something very good; or, if I didn't, at any rate I meant to mean it.'

The case was singular; if no friend of the author's could offer a decent account of its meaning, to a certainty the author could _not_.

Luckily, however, there are two ways of filling up chasms; and Warburton, who had reasons best known to himself for cultivating Pope's favor, besides considerable practice during his youth in a special pleader's office, took the desperate case in hand. He caulked the chasms with philosophic oak.u.m, he 'payed' them with dialectic pitch, he sheathed them with copper and bra.s.s by means of audacious dogmatism and insolent quibbles, until the enemy seemed to have been silenced, and the vessel righted so far as to float. The result, however, as a permanent result, was this--that the demurs which had once been raised (however feebly pressed) against the poem, considered in the light of a system compatible with religion, settled upon it permanently as a sullen cloud of suspicion that a century has not availed to dissipate.

NOTE 9.

'_The most interesting person of the Alcibiades cla.s.s._' But it is thoroughly characteristic of Pope, that the one solitary trait in the Duke's career which interested _him_, was the fact that a man so familiar with voluptuous splendor should have died on a flock-bed patched with straw. How advantageously does Dryden come forward on this occasion! _He_, as Mr. Bayes, had some bitter wrongs to avenge; and he was left at liberty to execute this revenge after his own heart, for he survived the Duke by a dozen years. Yet he took no revenge at all. _He_, with natural goodness and magnanimity, declined to kick the dead lion. And in the memorable lines, all alive and trembling with impa.s.sioned insight into the demoniac versatility of the Duke's character, how generously does he forbear every expression of scorn, and cover the man's frailties with a mantle of comprehensive apology, and, in fact, the true apology, by gathering them together, one and all, as the united results of some secret nympholepsy, or some sacred Pythian inspiration:--

'Blest madman! that could every hour employ In something new to wish or to enjoy;

Now all for rhyming, wenching, fiddling, drinking; Beside ten thousand freaks that died in thinking'

Strangely enough, the only Duke of Buckingham that interested Pope was not the Villiers that so profoundly interested Dryden and his own generation, but in every sense a mock Duke of Buckingham, a pantomimic duke, that is known only for having built a palace as fine as gilt gingerbread, and for having built a pauper poem. Some time after the death of the Villiers duke, and the consequent extinction of the t.i.tle, Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave, obtained a patent creating him, not Duke of Buckingham, but by a p.a.w.nbroker's dodge, devised between himself and his attorney, Duke of Buckingham_shire_; the ostensible reason for which, as alleged by himself, was, that he apprehended some lurking claim to the old t.i.tle that might come forward to his own confusion at a future time, and in that case he was ready with this demur: 'You mistake, I am not _ham_, but ham_shire_.' Such was _his_ account of the matter. Mine is different: I tell the reason thus. He had known the Villiers of old, he knew well how that lubricated gladiator had defied all the powers of Chancery and the Privy Council, for months after months, once to get a 'grip' of him, or a hawk over him. It was the old familiar case of trying to catch a pig (but in this instance a wild boar of the forest) whose tail has been soaped. (See _Lord Clarendon_, not his History but his Life.) What the Birmingham duke therefore really feared was, that the worst room, the tawdry curtains, the flock-bed, &c., were all a pyramid of lies; that the Villiers had _not_ been thrown; had probably _not_ died at all; but was only 'trying it on,' in readiness for a great demonstration against himself; and that, in case the t.i.tle of Buckingham were ever finally given away, the Villiers would be heard clattering on horseback up the grand staircase of the new-built Buckingham House, like the marble statue in 'Don Juan,' with a double commission against the false duke and the Government as joint-traders in stolen goods. But if Pope were callous to the splendor of the true Buckingham, what was it that drew him to the false one? Pope must have been well aware that, amongst all the poetic triflers of the day, there was not one more ripe for the 'Dunciad.' Like the jaws of the hungry grave (_Acherontis avari_), the 'Dunciad' yawned for him, whilst yet only in dim conception as a remote possibility. He was, besides, the most vain-glorious of men; and, being anxious above all things to connect himself with the blood royal, he had conceived the presumptuous thought of wooing Queen Anne (then the unmarried Princess Anne). Being rejected, of course, rather than have no connection at all with royalty, he transferred his courtship to a young lady born on the wrong side of the blanket, namely, the daughter of James II. by Miss Sedley. Her he married, and they reigned together in great pomp over Buckingham House. But how should this have attracted Pope? The fact, I fear is, that Pope admired him, in spite of his verses, as a man rich and prosperous. One morning, in some of his own verses, he lodged a compliment to the Duke as a poet and a critic: immediately the Duke was down upon him with an answering salute of twenty-one guns, and ever afterwards they were friends. But I repeat that, in Pope's own judgment, nine out of ten who found their way into that great _menagerie_ of the 'Dunciad,' had not by half so well established their right of entrance as the Duke.

NOTE 10.

Even this is open to demur. The Roman literature during the main Punic War with Hannibal, though unavoidably reached by some slight influence from the literature of Greece, was rich in native power and raciness.

Left to itself, and less disturbed by direct imitation applied to foreign models, the Roman literature would probably have taken a wider compa.s.s, and fulfilled a n.o.bler destiny.

NOTE 11.

'_Joan of Arc's execution_'--viz., not by any English, but virtually by a French tribunal, as _now_, at last, is satisfactorily established by the recent publication, at Paris, of the judicial process itself in its full official records.

NOTE 12.

The notes are _now_ (_i. e._, in all modern editions) a.s.signed to their separate authors; though not always in a way to prevent doubts. For instance, Roscoe's notes, except that they are always distinguished by kindness and good sense, are indicated only by the _absence_ of any distinguishing signature. But in the early editions great carelessness prevailed as to this point, and, sometimes, intentional dissimulation.

NOTE 13.

Which was probably not of French origin. Thomas-a-Kempis, Gerson, and others, have had the credit of it; but the point is still doubtful.

When I say that it was _extensively_ diffused, naturally I mean so far as it was possible before the invention of printing. One generation after Agincourt this invention was beginning to move, after which--that is, in two generations--the multiplication of copies, and even of separate editions and separate translations, ran beyond all power of registration. It is one amongst the wonders of the world; and the reason I have formerly explained. Froissart belongs to the courts of England and of Burgundy much more than to that of France.

NOTE 14.

Hardi, it is scarcely necessary to mention; as he never became a _power_ even in France, and _out_ of France was quite unknown. He coincided in point of time, I believe, most nearly with Francis Beaumont.

NOTE 15.

Italian, Spanish, and finally German poetry have in succession exercised some slight influence, more or less, over our English poetry. But I have formerly endeavored to show that it is something worse than a mere historical blunder, that, in fact, it involves a gross misconception and a confusion in the understanding, to suppose that there ever has been what has been called a _French school_ in our literature, unless it is supposed that the unimpa.s.sioned understanding, or the understanding speaking' in a minor key of pa.s.sion, is a French invention.