The Bibliotaph Part 7

Was ever suitor in this fas.h.i.+on rejected! It makes one think of some of the pa.s.sages in the _History of John Buncle_, where the hero pours out a torrent of pa.s.sionate phrases, and the 'glorious' Miss Noel, in reply, begs that they may take up some rational topic of conversation; for example, what is _his_ view of that opinion which ascribes 'primaevity and sacred prerogatives' to the Hebrew language.

But Philautus does not break his heart over Camilla's rejection. He is consoled with the love of another fair maiden, marries her, and settles in England. Euphues goes back to Athens, and presently retires to the country, where he follows the calling of one whose profession is melancholy. Like most hermits of culture, he leaves his address with his banker. We a.s.sume this, for he was very rich; it is not difficult to be a hermit on a large income. The book closes with a section called 'Euphues Gla.s.se for Europe,' a thirty-page panegyric on England and the Queen.

They say that this novel was very popular, and certain causes of its popularity are not difficult to come at. A large measure of the success that _Euphues_ had is due to the commonplaceness of its observations. It abounds in proverbs and copy-book wisdom. In this respect it is as homely as an almanac. John Lyly had a great store of 'miscellany thoughts,' and he cheerfully parted with them. His book succeeded as Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ and Watts' _On the Mind_ succeeded. People believed that they were getting ideas, and people like what they suppose to be ideas if no great effort is required in the getting of them. It is astonis.h.i.+ng how often the world needs to be advised of the brevity of time. Yet every person who can wade in the shallows of his own mind and not wet his shoe-tops finds a sweet melancholy and a stimulating freshness in the thought that time is short. John Lyly said, 'There is nothing more swifter than time, nothing more sweeter,'--and countless Elizabethan gentlemen and ladies underscored that sentence, or transferred it to their commonplace books,--if they had such painful aids to culture,--and were comforted and edified by the discovery that brilliant John Lyly had made. This glib command of the matter-of-course, with a ready use of the proverb and the 'old said saw,' is a marked characteristic of the work. It emphasizes the youth of its author. We learn what could not have been new even in 1579, that 'in misery it is a great comfort to have a companion;' that 'a new broom sweepeth clean;' that 'delays breed dangers;' that 'nothing is so perilous as procrastination;' that 'a burnt child dreadeth the fire;' that it is well not to make comparisons 'lest comparisons should seem odious;' that 'it is too late to shut the stable door when the steed is stolen;' that 'many things fall between the cup and the lip;' and that 'marriages are made in heaven, though consummated on earth.' With these old friends come others, not altogether familiar of countenance, and quaintly archaic in their dress: 'It must be a wily mouse that shall breed in the cat's ear;' 'It is a mad hare that will be caught with a tabor, and a foolish bird that stayeth the laying salt on her tail, and a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon.' Lyly would sometimes translate a proverb; he does not tell us that fine words b.u.t.ter no parsnips, but says, 'Fair words fat few,'--which is delightfully alliterative, but hardly to be accounted an improvement. Expressions that are surprisingly modern turn up now and then. One American street urchin taunts another by telling him that he doesn't know enough to come in when it rains. The saying is at least three hundred years old, for Lyly says, in a dyspeptic moment, 'So much wit is sufficient for a woman as when she is in the rain can warn her to come out of it.'

Another cause of the popularity of _Euphues_ is its sermonizing. The world loves to hear good advice. The world is not nervously anxious to follow the advice, but it understands the edification that comes by preaching. With many persons, to have heard a sermon is almost equivalent to having practiced the virtues taught in the sermon.

Churches are generally accepted as evidences of civilization. A man who is exploiting the interests of a new Western town will invariably tell you that it has so many churches. Also, an opera-house. The English world above all other worlds loves to hear good advice.

England is the natural home of the sermon. Jusserand notes, almost with wonder, that in the annual statistics of the London publishers the highest numbers indicate the output of sermons and theological works. Then come novels. John Lyly was ingenious; he combined good advice and storytelling. Not skillfully, hiding the sermon amid lively talk and adventure, but blazoning the fact that he was going to moralize as long as he would. He shows no timidity, even declares upon one of his t.i.tle-pages that in this volume 'there is small offense by lightness given to the wise, and less occasion of looseness proffered to the wanton.' Such courage in this day would be apt seriously to injure the sale of a novel. Did not Ruskin declare that Miss Edgeworth had made virtue so obnoxious that since her time one hardly dared express the slightest bias in favor of the Ten Commandments? Lyly knew the public for which he acted as literary caterer. They liked sermons, and sermons they should have. Nearly every character in the book preaches, and Euphues is the most gifted of them all. Even that old gentleman of Naples who came first to Euphues because his heart bled to see so n.o.ble a youth given to loose living has the tables turned upon him, for Euphues preaches to the preacher upon the sovereign duty of resignation to the will of G.o.d.

A noteworthy characteristic is the frequency of Lyly's cla.s.sical allusions. If the only definition of pedantry be 'vain and ostentatious display of learning,' I question if we may dismiss Lyly's wealth of cla.s.sical lore with the word 'pedantry.' He was fresh from his university life. If he studied at all when he was at Oxford, he must have studied Latin and Greek, for after these literatures little else was studied. Young men and their staid tutors were compelled to know ancient history and mythology. Like Heine, they may have taken a 'real delight in the mob of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses who ran so jolly naked about the world.' In the first three pages of the _Anatomy of Wit_ there are twenty cla.s.sical names, ten of them coupled each with an allusion. n.o.body begins a speech without a reference of this nature within calling distance. Euphues and Philautus fill their talk with evidences of a cla.s.sical training. The ladies are provided with apt remarks drawn from the experiences of Helen, of Cornelia, of Venus, of Diana, and Vesta. Even the master of the s.h.i.+p which conveyed Euphues from Naples to England declaims about Ulysses and Julius Caesar. This naturally destroys all dramatic effect. Everybody speaks Euphuism, though cla.s.sical allusion alone is not essentially Euphuistic. John Lyly would be the last man to merit any portion of that fine praise bestowed by Hazlitt upon Shakespeare when he said that Shakespeare's genius 'consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose.' Lyly's genius was the opposite of this; it consisted in the faculty of transforming everybody into a reduplication of himself. There is no change in style when the narrative parts end and the dialogue begins. All the persons of the drama utter one strange tongue. They are no better than the characters in a Punch and Judy show, where one concealed manipulator furnishes voice for each of the figures. But in Lyly's novel there is not even an attempt at the most rudimentary ventriloquism.

What makes the book still less a reflection of life is that the speakers indulge in interminably long harangues. No man (unless he were a Coleridge) would be tolerated who talked in society at such inordinate length. When the characters can't talk to one another they retire to their chambers and declaim to themselves. They polish their language with the same care, open the cla.s.sical dictionary, and have at themselves in good set terms. Philautus, inflamed with love of Camilla, goes to his room and p.r.o.nounces a ten-minute discourse on the pangs of love, having only himself for auditor. They are amazingly patient under the verbal inflictions of one another. Euphues, angry with Philautus for having allowed himself to fall in love, takes him to task in a single speech containing four thousand words. If Lyly had set out with the end in view of constructing a story by putting into it alone 'what is not life,' his product would have been what we find it now. One could easily believe the whole affair to have been intended for a tremendous joke were it not that the tone is so serious. We are accustomed to think of youth as light-hearted: but look at a serious child,--there is nothing more serious in the world.

Lyly was twenty-six years when he first published. Much of the seriousness in his romance is the burden of twenty-six years'

experience of life, a burden greater perhaps than he ever afterward carried.

Being, as we take it, an unmarried man, Lyly gives directions for managing a wife. He believes in the wholesome doctrine that a man should select his own wife. 'Made marriages by friends' are dangerous.

'I had as lief another should take measure by his back of my apparel as appoint what wife I shall have by his mind.' He prefers in a wife 'beauty before riches, and virtue before blood.' He holds to the radical English doctrine of wifely submission; there is no swerving from the position that the man is the woman's 'earthly master,'[2] but in taming a wife no violence is to be employed. Wives are to be subdued with kindness. 'If their husbands with great threatenings, with jars, with brawls, seek to make them tractable, or bend their knees, the more stiff they make them in the joints, the oftener they go about by force to rule them, the more froward they find them; but using mild words, gentle persuasions, familiar counsel, entreaty, submission, they shall not only make them to bow their knees, but to hold up their hands, not only cause them to honor them, but to stand in awe of them.' By such methods will that supremest good of an English home be brought about, namely, that the wife shall stand in awe of her husband.

[2] Lady Burton's Dedication of her husband's biography,--'To my earthly master,' etc.

The young author admits that some wives have the domineering instinct, and that way danger lies. A man must look out for himself. If he is not to make a slave of his wife, he is also not to be too submissive; 'that will cause her to disdain thee.' Moreover, he must have an eye to the expenditure. She may keep the keys, but he will control the pocket-book. The model wife in Ecclesiastes had greater privileges; she could not only consider a piece of ground, but she could buy it if she liked it. Not so this well-trained wife of Lyly's novel. 'Let all the keys hang at her girdle, but the purse at thine, so shalt thou know what thou dost spend, and how she can spare.' But in setting forth his theory for being happy though married, Lyly, methinks, preaches a dangerous doctrine in this respect: he hints at the possibility of a man's wanting, in vulgar parlance, to go on a spree, expresses no question as to the propriety of his so doing, but says that if a man does let himself loose in this fas.h.i.+on his wife must not know it. 'Imitate the kings of Persia, who when they were given to riot kept no company with their wives, but when they used good order had their queens even at the table.' In short, the wife was to duplicate the moods of her husband. 'Thou must be a gla.s.s to thy wife, for in thy face must she see her own; for if when thou laughest she weep, when thou mournest she giggle, the one is a manifest sign she delighteth in others, the other a token she despiseth thee.' John Lyly was a wise youth. He struck the keynote of the mode in which most incompatible marriages are played when he said that it was a bad sign if one's wife giggled when one was disposed to be melancholy.

An interesting study is the author's att.i.tude toward foreign travel.

It would appear to have been the fas.h.i.+on of the time to indulge in much invective against foreign travel, but nevertheless--to travel.

Many men believed with young Valentine that 'home keeping youth have ever homely wits,' while others were rather of Ascham's mind when he said, 'I was once in Italy, but I thank G.o.d my stay there was only nine days.' Lyly came of a nation of travelers. Then as now it was true that there was no accessible spot of the globe upon which the Englishman had not set his foot. Nomadic England went abroad; sedentary England stayed at home to rail at him for so doing. Aside from that prejudice which declared that all foreigners were fools, there was a well-founded objection to the sort of traveling usually described as seeing the world. Young men went upon the continent to see questionable forms of pleasure, perhaps to practice them. Whether justly or not, common report named Italy as the higher school of pleasurable vices, and Naples as the city where one's doctorate was to be obtained. Gluttony and licentiousness are the sins of Naples.

Eubulus tells Euphues that in that city are those who 'sleep with meat in their mouths, with sin in their hearts, and with shame in their houses.' There is no limit to the inconveniences of traveling. 'Thou must have the back of an a.s.s to bear all, and the snout of a swine to say nothing.... Travelers must sleep with their eyes open lest they be slain in their beds, and wake with their eyes shut lest they be suspected by their looks.' Journeys by the fireside are better. 'If thou covet to travel strange countries, search the maps, there shalt thou see much with great pleasure and small pains, if to be conversant in all courts, read histories, where thou shalt understand both what the men have been and what their manners are, and methinketh there must be much delight where there is no danger.' Perhaps Lyly intended to condemn traveling with character unformed. A boy returned with more vices than he went forth with pence, and was able to sin both by experience and authority. Lest he should be thought to speak with uncertain voice upon this matter Lyly gives Euphues a story to tell in which the chief character describes the effect of traveling upon himself. 'There was no crime so barbarous, no murder so b.l.o.o.d.y, no oath so blasphemous, no vice so execrable, but that I could readily recite where I learned it, and by rote repeat the peculiar crime of every particular country, city, town, village, house, or chamber.'

Here, indeed, is no lack of plain speech.

In the section called 'Euphues and his Ephoebus' twenty-nine pages are devoted to the question of the education of youth. It is largely taken from Plutarch. Some of the points are these: that a mother shall herself nurse her child, that the child shall be early framed to manners, 'for as the steele is imprinted in the soft waxe, so learning is engraven in ye minde of an young Impe.' He is not to hear 'fonde fables or filthy tales.' He is to learn to p.r.o.nounce distinctly and to be kept from 'barbarous talk,' that is, no dialect and no slang. He is to become expert in martial affairs, in shooting and darting, and he must hunt and hawk for his 'honest recreation.' If he will not study, he is not to be 'scourged with stripes, but threatened with words, not _dulled with blows_, like servants, the which, the more they are beaten the better they bear it, and the less they care for it.' In taking this position Lyly is said to be only following Ascham. Ascham was not the first in his own time to preach such doctrine. Forty years before the publication of _The Schoolmaster_, Sir Thomas Elyot, in his book called _The Governour_, raised his voice against the barbarity of teachers 'by whom the wits of children be dulled,'--almost the very words of John Lyly.

_Euphues_, besides being a treatise on love and education, is a sort of Tudor tract upon animated nature. It should be a source of joy unspeakable to the general reader if only for what it teaches him in the way of natural history. How much of what is most gravely stated here did John Lyly actually believe? It is easy to grant so orthodox a statement of physical fact as that 'the Sunne doth harden the durte, and melte the waxe;' but ere the sentence be finished, the author calls upon us to believe that 'Perfumes doth refresh the Dove and kill the Betill.' The same reckless extravagance of remark is to be noted whenever bird, beast, or reptile is mentioned. The crocodile of Shakespeare's time must have been a very contortionist among beasts, for, says Lyly, 'when one approacheth neere unto him, [he] gathereth up himselfe into the roundnesse of a ball, but running from him, stretcheth himselfe into the length of a tree.' Perhaps the fame of this creature's powers grew in the transmission of the narrative from the banks of the Nile to the banks of the Thames. The ostrich was human in its vanity according to Lyly; men and women sometimes pull out their white hairs, but 'the Estritch, that taketh the greatest pride in her feathers, picketh some of the worst out and burneth them.' Nay, more than that, being in 'great haste she p.r.i.c.keth none but hirselfe which causeth hir to runne when she would rest.' We shall presently expect to hear that ostriches wear boots by the straps of which they lift themselves over ten-foot woven-wire fences. But Lyly used the conventional natural history that was at hand, and troubled himself in no respect to inquire about its truth or falsity.

There is yet another cause of the popularity of this book in its own time, which has been too little emphasized. It is that trumpet blast of patriotism with which the volume ends. We feel, as we read the thirty pages devoted to the praise of England and the Queen, that this is right, fitting, artistic, and we hope that it is tolerably sincere.

Flattery came easily to men in those days, and there was small hope of advancement for one who did not master the art. But there is a glow of earnestness in these paragraphs rather convincing to the skeptic. Nor would the book be complete without this eulogy. We have had everything else; a story for who wanted a story, theories upon the education of children, a body of mythological divinity, a discussion of methods of public speaking, advice for men who are about to marry, a theological sparring match, in which a man of straw is set up to be knocked down, and _is_ knocked down, a thousand ill.u.s.trations of wit and curious reading, and now, as a thing that all men could understand, the author tells Englishmen of their own good fortune in being Englishmen, and is finely outspoken in praise of what he calls 'the blessed Island.'

This is an old-fas.h.i.+oned vein, to be sure,--the _ad captandum_ trick of a popular orator bent upon making a success. It is not looked upon in all places with approval. 'Our unrivaled prosperity' was a phrase which greatly irritated Matthew Arnold. Here in America, are we not taught by a highly fastidious journal that we may be patriotic if we choose, but we must be careful how we let people know it? We mustn't make a fuss about it. We mustn't be blatant. The star-spangled banner on the public schools is at best a cheap and vulgar expression of patriotism. But somehow even this sort of patriotism goes with the people, and perhaps these instincts of the common folk are not entirely to be despised. Many a reader of _Euphues_, who cared but little for its elaborated style, who was not moved by its orthodoxy, who didn't read books simply because they were fas.h.i.+onable, must have felt his pulse stirred by Lyly's chant of England's greatness. For Euphues is John Lyly, and John Lyly's creed was substantially that of the well-known hero of a now forgotten comic opera, 'I am an Englishman.'

In the thin disguise of the chief character of his story the author describes the happy island, its brave gentlemen and rich merchants, its fair ladies and its n.o.ble Queen. The glories of London, which he calls the storehouse and mart of all Europe, and the excellence of English universities, 'out of which do daily proceed men of great wisdom,' are alike celebrated. England's material wealth in mines and quarries is amply set forth, also the fine qualities of the breed of cattle, and the virtues of English spaniels, hounds, and mastiffs; for these const.i.tute a sort of good that all could appreciate. He is satirical at the expense of his countrymen's dress,--'there is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancie of attire,'--but praises their silence and gravity at their meals. They have wise ministers in the court, and devout guardians of the true religion and of the church. 'O thrice happy England, where such councilors are, where such people live, where such virtue springeth.'

In the paragraphs relating to the queen, Lyly grows positively eloquent. He praises her matchless beauty, her mercy, patience, and moderation, and emphasizes the fact of her virginity to a degree that would have satisfied the imperial votaress herself if but once she had considered her admirer's words: 'O fortunate England that hath such a Queen; ungratefull, if thou pray not for her; wicked, if thou do not love her; miserable, if thou lose her.' He calls down Heaven's blessings upon her that she may be 'triumphant in victories like the Palm tree, fruitful in her age like the Vine, in all ages prosperous, to all men gracious, in all places glorious: so that there be no end of her praise, until the end of all flesh.'

With pa.s.sages such as these, this interesting book draws to a conclusion. A most singular and original book, worthy to be read, unless, indeed, the reading of these out-of-the-way volumes were found to encroach upon time belonging by right of eminent intellectual domain to Chaucer and to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Milton. That _Euphues_ is in no exact sense a novel admits of little question. It is also a brilliant ill.u.s.tration of how not to write English.

Nevertheless it is very amusing, and its disappearance would be a misfortune, since it would eclipse the innocent gayety of many a man who loves to bask in that golden suns.h.i.+ne which streams from the pages of old English books.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FAIR-MINDED MAN

It is by no means necessary that one be a man of letters in order to write a good book. Some very admirable books have been written by men who gave no especial thought to literature as an art. They wrote because they were so fortunate as to find themselves in possession of ideas, and not because they had determined to become authors.

Literature as such implies sophistication, and people who devote themselves to literature do so from a variety of motives. But these writers of whom I now speak have a less complex thought back of their work. They do not, for example, propose pleasure to the reader as an object in writing. Their aim is single. They recount an experience, or plead a cause. Literature with them is always a means to an end. They are like pedestrians who never look upon walking as other than a rational process for reaching a given place. It does not occur to them that walking makes for health and pleasure, and that it is also an exercise for displaying a graceful carriage, the set of the shoulders, the poise of the head.

To be sure one runs the risk of being deceived in this matter. The actress who plays the part of an unaffected young girl, for aught that the spectator knows to the contrary may be a p.r.o.nounced woman of the world. Not every author who says to the public 'excuse my untaught manner' is on this account to be regarded as a literary ingenu. His simplicity awakens distrust. The fact that he professes to be a layman is a reason for suspecting him. He is probably an adept, a master of the wiles by which readers are snared.

But aside from the cases in which deception is practiced, or at least attempted, there is in the world a respectable body of literature which is not the work of literary men. Its chief characteristic is sincerity. The writers of these books are so busy in telling the truth that they have no time to think of literature.

Among the more readable of these pieces is that unpretentious volume in which Dr. Joseph Priestley relates the story of his life. For in cla.s.sing this book with the writings of authors who are not men of letters one surely does not go wide of the mark. There is a sense in which it is entirely proper to say that Priestley was not a literary man. He produced twenty-five volumes of 'works,' but they were for use rather than for art. He wrote on science, on grammar, on theology, on law. He published controversial tracts: 'Did So-and-So believe so-and-so or something quite different?' and then a discussion of the 'grounds' of this belief. He made 'rejoinders,' 'defenses,'

'animadversions,' and printed the details of his _Experiments on Different Kinds of Air_. This is distinctly uninviting. Let me propose an off-hand test by which to determine whether or no a given book is literature. _Can you imagine Charles Lamb in the act of reading that book?_ If you can; it's literature; if you can't, it isn't. I find it difficult to conceive of Charles Lamb as mentally immersed in the _Letter to an Anti-paedobaptist_ or the _Doctrine of Phlogiston Established_, but it is natural to think of him turning the pages of Priestley's Memoir, reading each page with honest satisfaction and p.r.o.nouncing the volume to be worthy the t.i.tle of A BOOK.

It is a plain unvarnished tale and entirely innocent of those arts by the practice of which authors please their public. There is no eloquence, no rhetoric, no fine writing of any sort. The two or three really dramatic events in Priestley's career are not handled with a view to producing dramatic effect. There are places where the author might easily have become impa.s.sioned. But he did not become impa.s.sioned. Not a few paragraphs contain unwritten poems. The simple-hearted Priestley was unconscious of this, or if conscious, then too modest to make capital of it. He had never aspired to the reputation of a clever writer, but rather of a useful one. His aim was quite as simple when he wrote the Memoir as when he wrote his various philosophical reports. He never deviated into brilliancy. He set down plain statements about events which had happened to him, and people whom he had known. Nevertheless the narrative is charming, and the reasons of its charm are in part these:--

In the first place the book belongs to that department of literature known as autobiography. Autobiography has peculiar virtues. The poorest of it is not without some flavor of life, and at its best it is transcendent. A notable value lies in its power to stimulate. This power is very marked in Priestley's case, where the self-delineated portrait is of a man who met and overcame enormous difficulties. He knew poverty and calumny, both brutal things. He had a thorn in the flesh,--for so he himself characterized that impediment in his speech which he tried more or less unsuccessfully all his life to cure. He found his scientific usefulness impaired by religious and political antagonisms. He tasted the bitterness of mob violence; his house was sacked, his philosophical instruments destroyed, his ma.n.u.scripts and books scattered along the highway. But as he looked back upon these things he was not moved to impatience. There is a high serenity in his narrative as becomes a man who has learned to distinguish between the ephemeral and the permanent elements of life.

Yet it is not impossible that autobiography of this sort has an effect the reverse of stimulating upon some people. It is pleasanter to read of heroes than to be a hero oneself. The story of conquest is inspiring, but the actual process is apt to be tedious. One's nerves are tuned to a fine energy in reading of Priestley's efforts to accomplish a given task. 'I spent the latter part of every week with Mr. Thomas, a Baptist minister, ... who had no liberal education. Him I instructed in Hebrew, and by that means made myself a considerable proficient in that language. At the same time I learned Chaldee and Syriac and just began to read Arabic' This seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process.

Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. Priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. The man was never afraid of work. Take as an ill.u.s.tration his experience in keeping school.

He had p.r.o.nounced objections to this business, and he registered his protest. But suppose the alternative is to teach school or to starve.

A man will then teach school. I don't know that this was quite the situation in which Priestley found himself, though he needed money. He may have hesitated to enter a profession which in his time required a more extensive muscular equipment than he was able to furnish. The old English schoolmasters were 'bruisers.' They had thick skins, hard heads, and solid fists. The symbols of their office were a Greek grammar and a flexible rod. They were skillful either with the book or the birch. It has taken many years to convince the world that the short road to the moods and tenses does not necessarily lie through the valley of the shadow of flogging. Perhaps Priestley objected to school-mastering because it was laborious. It was indeed laborious as he practiced it. One marvels at his endurance. His school consisted of about thirty boys, and he had a separate room for about half-a-dozen young ladies. 'Thus I was employed from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, without any interval except one hour for dinner; and I never gave a holiday on any consideration, the red letter days excepted. Immediately after this employment in my own school-rooms I went to teach in the family of Mr. Tomkinson, an eminent attorney, ... and here I continued until seven in the evening.' Twelve consecutive hours of teaching, less one hour for dinner! It was hardly necessary for Priestley to add that he had 'but little leisure for reading.'

He laid up no money from teaching, but like a true man of genius spent it upon books, a small air-pump, an electrical machine. By training his advanced pupils to manipulate these he 'extended the reputation'

of his school. This was playing at science. Several years were yet to elapse before he should acquire fame as an original investigator.

This autobiography is valuable because it ill.u.s.trates the events of a remarkable time. He who cares about the history of theological opinion, the history of chemical science, the history of liberty, will read these pages with keen interest. Priestley was active in each of these fields. Men famous for their connection with the great movements of the period were among his friends and acquaintance. He knew Franklin and Richard Price. John Canton, who was the first man in England to verify Franklin's experiments, was a friend of Priestley.

So too were Smeaton the engineer, James Watt, Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood, and Erasmus Darwin. He knew Kippis, Lardner, Parr, and had met Porson and Dr. Johnson. His closest friend for many years was Theophilus Lindsey. One might also mention the great Lavoisier, Magellan the Jesuit philosopher, and a dozen other scientific, ecclesiastical, and political celebrities. The Memoir, however, is almost as remarkable for what it does not tell concerning these people as for what it does. Priestley was not anecdotal. And he is only a little less reticent about himself than he is about others. He does indeed describe his early struggles as a dissenting minister, but the reader would like a little more expansiveness in the account of his friends.h.i.+ps and his chemical discoveries. These discoveries were made during the time that he was minister at the Mill-hill Chapel, Leeds.

Here he began the serious study of chemistry. And that without training in the science as it was then understood. At Warrington he had heard a series of chemical lectures by Dr. Turner of Liverpool, a gentleman whom Americans ought to regard with amused interest, for he was the man who congratulated his fellows in a Liverpool debating society that while they had just lost the _terra firma_ of thirteen colonies in America, they had gained, under the generals.h.i.+p of Dr.

Herschel, a _terra incognita_ of much greater extent _in nubibus_.

Priestley not only began his experiments without any great store of knowledge, but also without apparatus save what he devised for himself of the cheapest materials. In 1772 he published his first important scientific tract, 'a small pamphlet on the method of impregnating water with fixed air.' For this he received the Copley medal from the Royal Society. On the first of August, 1774, he discovered oxygen.

n.o.body in Leeds troubled particularly to inquire what this dissenting minister was about with his vials and tubes, his mice and his plants.

Priestley says that the only person who took 'much interest' was Mr.

Hey, a surgeon. Mr. Hey was a 'zealous Methodist' and wrote answers to Priestley's theological papers. Arminian and Socinian were at peace if science was the theme. When Priestley departed from Leeds, Hey begged of him the 'earthen trough' in which all his experiments had been made. This earthen trough was nothing more nor less than a washtub of the sort in common local use. So independent is genius of the elaborate appliances with which talent must produce results.

The discoveries brought fame, especially upon the Continent, and led Lord Shelburne to invite Priestley to become his 'literary companion.'

Dr. Price was the intermediary in effecting this arrangement.

Priestley's nominal post was that of 'librarian,' and he now and then officiated as experimentalist extraordinary before Lord Shelburne's guests. The compensation was not illiberal, and the relation seems to have been as free from degrading elements as such relations can be.

Priestley was not a sycophant even in the day when men of genius thought it no great sin to give flattery in exchange for dinners. It was never his habit to burn incense before the great simply because the great liked the smell of incense and were accustomed to it. On the other hand, Shelburne appears to have treated the philosopher with kindness and delicacy, and the situation was not without difficulties for his lords.h.i.+p.

Among obvious advantages which Priestley derived from this residence were freedom from financial worry, time for writing and experimenting, a tour on the Continent, and the privilege of spending the winter season of each year in London.

It was during these London visits that he renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Franklin. They were members of a club of 'philosophical gentlemen' which met at stated times at the London Coffee House, Ludgate Hill. There were few days upon which the Father of Pneumatic Chemistry and the Father of Electrical Science did not meet. When their talk was not of dephlogisticated air and like matters it was pretty certain to be political. The war between England and America was imminent. Franklin dreaded it. He often said to Priestley that 'if the difference should come to an open rupture, it would be a war of _ten years_, and he should not live to see the end of it.' He had no doubt as to the issue. 'The English may take all our great towns, but that will not give them possession of the country,' he used to say.

Franklin's last day in England was given to Priestley. The two friends spent much of the time in reading American newspapers, especially accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in America, and as Franklin read the addresses to the inhabitants of Boston, from the places in the neighborhood, 'the tears trickled down his cheeks.' He wrote to Priestley from Philadelphia just a month after the battle of Lexington, briefly describing that lively episode, and mentioning his pleasant six weeks voyage with weather 'so moderate that a London wherry might have accompanied us all the way.' At the close of his letter he says: 'In coming over I made a valuable philosophical discovery, which I shall communicate to you when I can get a little time. At present I am extremely hurried.' In October of that year, 1775, Franklin wrote to Priestley about the state of affairs in America. His letter contains one pa.s.sage which can hardly be hackneyed from over-quotation. Franklin wants Priestley to tell 'our dear good friend,' Dr. Price, that America is 'determined and unanimous.' 'Britain at the expense of three millions has killed 150 yankees this campaign, which is 20,000 l. a head; and at Bunker's Hill, she gained a mile of ground, all of which she lost again, by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time 60,000 children have been born in America.' From these data Dr. Price is to calculate 'the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer the whole of our territory.' Then the letter closes with greetings 'to the club of honest whigs at the London Coffee House.'

Seven years later Franklin's heart was still faithful to the club. He writes to Priestley from France: 'I love you as much as ever, and I love all the honest souls that meet at the London Coffee House.... I labor for peace with more earnestness that I may again be happy in your sweet society.' Franklin thought that war was folly. In a letter to Dr. Price, he speaks of the great improvements in natural philosophy, and then says: 'There is one improvement in moral philosophy which I wish to see: the discovery of a plan that would induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first cutting one another's throats.'

Priestley lamented that a man of Franklin's character and influence 'should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers.' Franklin acknowledged that he had not given much attention to the evidences of Christianity, and asked Priestley to recommend some 'treatises' on the subject 'but not of great length.' Priestley suggested certain chapters of Hartley's _Observations on Man_, and also what he himself had written on the subject in his _Inst.i.tutes of Natural and Revealed Religion_. Franklin had promised to read whatever books his friend might advise and give his 'sentiments on them.' 'But the American war breaking out soon after, I do not believe,' says Priestley, 'that he ever found himself sufficiently at leisure for the discussion.'

Priestley valued his own scientific reputation not a little for the weight it gave, among skeptics, to his arguments in support of his religious belief. He found that all the philosophers in Paris were unbelievers. They looked at him with mild astonishment when they learned that he was not of the same mind. They may even have thought him a phenomenon which required scientific investigation. 'As I chose on all occasions to appear as a Christian, I was told by some of them that I was the only person they had ever met with, of whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed to believe Christianity.' Priestley began to question them as to what they supposed Christianity was, and with the usual result,--they were not posted on the subject.

In 1780 Priestley went to Birmingham. In the summer of 1791 occurred that remarkable riot, perhaps the most dramatic event in the philosopher's not unpicturesque career. This storm had long been gathering, and when it broke, the princ.i.p.al victim of its anger was, I verily believe, more astonished than frightened. The Dissenters were making unusual efforts to have some of their civil disabilities removed. Feeling against them was especially bitter. In Birmingham this hostility was intensified by the public discourses of Mr. Madan, 'the most respectable clergyman of the town,' says Priestley. He published 'a very inflammatory sermon ... inveighing against the Dissenters in general, and myself in particular.' Priestley made a defense under the t.i.tle of _Familiar Letters to the Inhabitants of Birmingham_. This produced a 'reply' from Madan, and 'other letters'