Microcosmography Part 1

Microcosmography.

by John Earle.

PREFACE.

It may be reasonably asked why Dr. Bliss's[A] edition of the Microcosmography should require a preface, and the answer is that it does not require one. It would be difficult to have a more scholarly, more adequate, more self-sufficing edition of a favourite book. Almost everything that helps the elucidation of the text, almost everything about Bishop Earle that could heighten our affection for him (there is nothing known to his disparagement) is to be found here.[B] And affection for the editor is conciliated by the way. It is not only his standard of equipment that secures this--a standard that might have satisfied Mark Pattison[C]--but also the painstaking love revealed in it, which, like every other true love, whether of men or books, will not give of that which costs it nothing. And, as a further t.i.tle to our regard, Dr. Bliss is amusing at his own expense, and compares himself to Earle's "critic,"

who swells books into folios with his comments. Not that this humorous self-depreciation is to be pressed; for, unlike that critic, he is no "troublesome vexer of the dead."

But though there is no need of a preface, I have two excuses for writing one.

The first is that I was asked to do it by my friend Mr. Frank George, of Bristol, who wished to see the book reprinted; and the second is the old _professio pietatis_, which seemed to Tacitus a sufficient defence of the Agricola, and may perhaps be allowed to serve humbler people as well. What Earle says of men is no less true of books: "Acquaintance is the first draught of a friend. Men take a degree in our respect till at last they wholly possess us;" and the history of this possession must, in every case, have a sort of interest, as long as it is not carried to the point of demanding from others the superlatives we permit to ourselves. It is sufficiently common for people to like the same book for different reasons; and where an author has a secure place in English literature, his shade, like the deity of Utopia, may be best pleased with a manifold and various wors.h.i.+p.[D]

The character of Earle, as drawn by Clarendon, is itself a guarantee for his studies of character; and the fact that Lord Falkland was his chosen friend is evidence of his possessing something of that sweet reasonableness of temper for which his host was so remarkable. "He was very dear" (we are told) "to the Lord Falkland, with whom he spent as much time as he could make his own." Indeed, "Mr. Earles would frequently profess that he had got more useful learning by his conversation at Tew than he had at Oxford." Of Earle's conversation Clarendon says that it was "so pleasant and delightful, so very innocent and so very facetious, that no man's company was more desired and more loved." Walton, too, tells us of his "innocent wisdom and sanctified learning"; and another witness speaks of his "charitable heart," an epithet which is n.o.bly borne out by the correspondence between himself and Baxter printed in this volume.

This is no superfluous citation of testimony. Without it we might, perhaps, have suspected, though not, I think, legitimately, something almost of a cynical spirit in the severity of the punishment which he deals out to the various disguises of vice and imposture, and in the pitiless nakedness in which he leaves them. But there are even stronger reasons for recalling contemporary verdicts p.r.o.nounced on Earle as a man.

Hallam, in the "Literature of Europe,"[E] has a short notice of him, and though it shews some appreciation of his ability, it contains a very unworthy aspersion on his character. "The chapter on the sceptic," he says, "is witty, but an insult to the honest searcher after truth, which could only have come from one that was content to take up his own opinions for ease or profit." If we accept all that is said of Earle's piety and devotion, and give its proper weight to the very significant epithet "innocent," used both by Walton and Clarendon, we shall, I think, be slow to suspect his motive in attacking the sceptic. The honest doubter, it must be remembered, was not the familiar--much less the fas.h.i.+onable--figure he has become since, and it is very certain that Earle described one type of sceptic both of his day and our own. That his sketch may have done injustice to other types is likely enough; but that is no reason for calling in question the sincerity of his opinions, or attributing an interested orthodoxy to one whom Bunyan might have christened Mr. Singleheart. The piety of the 17th Century was not disposed to be gentle to sceptics. Even Bacon's enlightenment allows itself harsher language on such subjects than any to be found in Earle. "None do refuse to believe in a G.o.d save those for _whom it maketh that there were no G.o.d_." And if Bacon is not thought a satisfactory witness, we have an unimpeachable one very much nearer to our time. Dr. Johnson's occasional strictures on sceptics are well-known, but his reputation for honest thinking has never been impaired by their severity. Earle knew what charity was, as the Baxter correspondence shows, and he has exposed in one of his characters "the faith that has no room for it"; and if his own faith needed further enlargement in the case of a sceptic,[F] some enlargement of Hallam's charity might also have been looked for in dealing with the earnestness of a militant piety.

The character-sketch is naturally a thing of limited scope. "Fine portraiture,"[G] it has been said, "is not possible under such conditions as it imposes. The traits, common to a cla.s.s, cannot at the same time be the accurate and intimate likeness of an individual. For this, a simple enumeration of actions which such and such a man will do, is not enough. A novelist takes a long series of connected actions, and even then he has to interpret, to review from time to time whole stages of development." All this is, no doubt, true, but the character-writers differ to a remarkable extent in their individualising power--some of them achieving a high degree of success, as is subsequently admitted in the case of Thackeray by the writer just quoted. It may be noticed too, by the way, that great novelists are not always equally successful in the character-sketch. One is reminded of Johnson's phrase about Milton's inability "to carve heads upon cherry stones" when one thinks of "Theophrastus Such" on the one hand, and the almost unique position of George Eliot as a novelist on the other. Less successful as she often is in lightness of touch when she has to pause and interpret her story, she had not prepared us for such a complete exhaustion of power as her attempt in this branch of literature (apparently of the same genus, almost of the same species, as the novel) reveals to her disappointed admirers. It may, at any rate, be said that her failure is an instructive lesson in the literary division of labour, and that these studies require a peculiar delicacy of organisation in the observer, as well as a special gift of exposition.

"Dolus latet in generalibus" is a salutary warning, but the character-writers, as a whole, have in most instances got creditably out of the snare, while Earle, I think, has achieved something more. Besides his humour and acuteness, besides even his profundity, I find in him an exceptional power of individualizing. "The contemplative man," for instance, belongs to a small cla.s.s at all times; but it is only an individual we have known, and known at rare intervals, of whose Wordsworthian temper we are able to say that "Nature asks his approbation as it were of her works and variety." Again, "the grave divine, who is not yet dean or canon, though his life is our religion's best apology," reads throughout like a personal experience. I at least so read it, or I should not have borrowed from Earle for the dedication which stands at the head of this preface. Yet such identifications are usually reserved for the great novelist, whose highest art, as Macaulay says, is to "make the inventions of one man seem like the recollections of another."

Some of Earle's readers appear to be chiefly impressed with his book as furnis.h.i.+ng "a picturesque idea of a period now remote, and as possessing much of the affected quaintness of its age."[H] The picturesqueness I find, and a good deal of quaintness; but the total impression is that of a man who has got beyond words, ancient or modern, in his studies of human nature--of one who, whether

"invectively he pierceth through The body of the country, city, court;"

or is "anatomizing the wise man's folly," is as instructive a moralist in the end of the nineteenth century as in the beginning of the seventeenth.

This, in a sense, is true of all great moralists, but the distinction of Earle, as I understand it, is that his characters are so often really people of our own day, with idiosyncracies that seem almost more applicable to our own age than to his.

Society is almost a technical term to-day, susceptible, one would have said, of refinements of difference infinitely more various than anything that could have existed more than two hundred years ago; yet one cannot but feel that this observer would have been fully equal to drawing our microcosm as well as his own. Earle's is a penetrating observation which is always fresh--so fresh that no archaism of phrase in him, and no cheery optimism in ourselves, can disguise the fact that it is our weaknesses he is probing, our motives he is discovering.

There are still with us "those well-behaved ghosts aeneas met with--friends to talk with, and men to look on, but if he grasped them but air"--those shadowy creatures that "wonder at your ill-breeding,[I] that cannot distinguish between what is spoken and what is meant."

We are no strangers to "the fas.h.i.+onable respect which loves not deeper mutualities, but though exceeding kind and friendly at your first acquaintance, is at the twentieth meeting but friendly still"; or to that similar temper which "nothing so much puts out as to trespa.s.s against the genteel way." And, to go a stage lower, the formal man still survives, whose "face is in so good a frame because he is not disjointed with other meditations--who hath staid in the world to fill a number; and when he is gone there wants one and there's an end."[J] He, to be sure, has no conversation, and that is his discretion--but others display then as now a bolder discretion, and in their talk "fly for sanctuary rather to nonsense which few descry, than to nothing which all."

But literary conversation is not forgotten. It may be a stretch beyond the power of a latter-day imagination to fancy a visitor proposing to fascinate his company by some "scatterings of Seneca and Tacitus," or even to think ourselves back to a time when these "were good for all occasions." Yet, those who say "Chaucer[K] for our money above all our English poets because the voice has gone so," (or had we better subst.i.tute Browning?),[L] are still common enough examples of those who desire to acquire inexpensively the reputation of good taste.

And there is another variety of modern artificiality which is not spared in this book. For the many forms of busy idleness, the wors.h.i.+p of organisation and system, and all the other hindrances to life properly so-called, which it has been the cherished labour of this age to multiply, Earle would have had no reserve of patience. "The dull physician," we are told, has no leisure _to be idle_, that is, to study.

"The grave divine," who has "studied to make his shoulders sufficient for his burden, comes not up thrice a week into his pulpit because _he would not be idle_"; whereas the commendation of the young raw preacher is that "he speaks without book, and, indeed, he was never used to it."

We may justly boast of the superior humanity of our century; but few would deny that the elaborate apparatus of modern philanthropy has too often become an end in itself, and absorption in it a serious detriment to any worthy preparation for the work of edifying. In the absence of leisure pulpits will hardly furnish us with that "sincere erudition which can send us clear and pure away unto a virtuous and happy life."[M] Nor is such a loss compensated by an endless succession of services or even a whole street of committee-rooms.

One would not, however, wish to rest in negations or dwell in the last resort on Earle's critical att.i.tude. One feels that the delightful house at Tew did not spend all or even its best strength on criticism. Earle may have there pursued the method of verification and studied his characters in the flesh. Perhaps he saw there "the staid man," and duly appraised this specimen of "nature's geometry";[N] while his obvious gifts as a rational peace-maker, if not much needed in such a company, would not be overlooked by Lord Falkland. "The good old man," too is a portrait so strongly individualized that I cannot help thinking some very personal experience went to the making of it--experience of a sort that was sure to be revived at Tew, where "so good a relick of the old times" was not likely to be wanting. It was a house, at any rate, for the "modest man" to whom, as to the poet Cowper, public appearances were so many penances; for though the world may not agree with Earle as to the degree in which this quality sets off a man, there is no question of Lord Falkland's welcome of the modest man, even if that grave divine "Mr. Earles," did not point out this diffident guest as one who "had a piece of singularity," and, for all his modesty, "scorned something."

And, as "the most polite and _accurate_ men of the University of Oxford"[O] were to be met with at Tew, we may further hope that Earle there watched the social mellowing of the "downright scholar whose mind was too much taken up with his mind,"[P] and strove to carry out his own recommendation, "practising him in men, and brus.h.i.+ng him over with good company."

Symposium is a word that has been much abused and vulgarised of late, but something like its true Platonic sense must have been realised by the company at Lord Falkland's, as they "examined and refined those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation":[Q] for a more Platonic programme it would be difficult to conceive. The pattern of the ideal republic is, we know, laid up somewhere in the heavens; but the republic of letters so far as it was represented, must have been as near the ideal in that house as it ever was on earth.

And in this ideal one of Earle's characters already mentioned was not only a natural but a necessary element. "The contemplative man" is solitary, we are told, in company, but he would not be so in this company. "Outward show, the stream, the people," were not taken seriously at Lord Falkland's; and the man who "can spell heaven out of earth" would be the centre of a rare group--men upon whose fresh and eager appet.i.tes conversation that was "mysterious and inward" could not easily pall.

Bishop Berkeley is one of the very few men who could answer with any plausibility to this last character of Earle's. But the marvellous amenity of his social gifts brings him a little closer to the kindly race of men than Earle thinks is usual with the contemplative student. In every other point it is an accurate piece of portraiture.[R] Nature might well ask approbation of her works and variety from a man who was ever feeding his n.o.ble curiosity and never satisfying it. He, too, made a "ladder of his observations to climb to G.o.d." He, too, was "free from vice, because he had no occasion to employ it." "Such gifts," said the turbulent Bishop Atterbury of him, "I did not think had been the portion of any but angels." After this it is no hyperbole to say, as Earle does of the contemplative man, "He has learnt all can here be taught him, and comes now to heaven to see more."

Though Clarendon does full justice to Earle's personal charm, he uses the epithets "sharp and witty" to describe his published "discourses"; and the piercing severity of his wit is ill.u.s.trated everywhere in this book. It is clear, however, from the sympathetic sketches that Earle's was no _nil admirari_ doctrine, and that while he saw grave need on all hands for men to clear their mind of cant, and their company of those who live by it, he had great store of affection for all that is n.o.ble or n.o.ble in the making.

The "modest man" and the high-spirited man" are opposite types, but there is in both the worthy pursuit and the high ideal. Moreover, the second of those characters reveals a power of pathos which Earle might have developed with more opportunity.[S] "The child" whom "his father has writ as his own little story" is another indication of the same mood.

These sketches are full of suggestive melancholy--not the melancholy of the misanthrope, but the true melancholy--the melancholy of Virgil--_Invalidus etiamque tremens etiam inscius aevi._[T]

There is another character drawn with a most incisive pathos, though less _Virgilian_[U] in its tone.

The poor man, "with whom even those that are not friends _for ends_ love not a dearness," and who, "with a great deal of virtue, obtains of himself not to hate men," is a pathetic figure, but he is something more. He is a sermon on human weakness, not drawn as some Iago might have drawn it with exultant mockery, but with the painful unflinching veracity of one who is ashamed of himself and of his kind. When one thinks how often this weakness is spoken of as if it were peculiar to the moneyed cla.s.s or to the uneducated, and how many people whom one knows act and think as if poverty were a vice if not a crime, though they shrink from avowing it, so unqualified an exposure indicates a conscience of no common sensitiveness.

Earle's wit and humour are deadly weapons, and it must be said that the trades and professions are treated with scant indulgence. He can even leave a mark like that of Junius when he has a mind. Thus the dull physician is present at "some desperate recovery, and is slandered with it, though he be guiltless"; and the attorney does not fear doomsday because "he hopes he has a trick to reverse judgment!"

But though one would not ask on behalf of impostors or scoundrels for suspension of sentence, one does wish for more than a single picture of the young man "who sins to better his understanding." The companions.h.i.+p of one who by his 34th year "had so much dispatched the business of life that the oldest rarely attain to that knowledge and the youngest enter not the world with more innocence,"[V] might have induced Earle to pourtray more than the weaknesses of immature manhood.

We could not, however, have missed this or the other pictures of characterless persons whether young or "having attained no proficiency by their stay in the world." Inexperience may fail to recognise them and suffer for it; or the gilding of rank and fas.h.i.+on may win for such persons a name in society above that which they deserve, and the moralist is bound to unmask them. These studies nevertheless are somewhat sombre;[W] and there is something much lighter and pleasanter in his presentation of some not unfamiliar phases of manners. There is the self-complacency that deals with itself like a "truant reader skipping over the harsh places"; the frank discourtesy that finds something vicious in the conventions and "circ.u.mstance" of good breeding; the patronising insolence[X] that "with much ado seems to recover your name"; the egoism of discontent that "has an accustomed tenderness not to be crossed in its fancy"; or lastly, that affectation of reticence which is as modern as anything in the book, though its ill.u.s.trations look so remote. Where we meet with such a temper, Earle's is still the right method--"we must deal with such a man as we do with Hebrew letters, spell him backwards and read him!"

Despite all this searching a.n.a.lysis and the biting wit which accompanies it, I cannot think the epithet cynical, which I have heard ascribed to Earle, is defensible. There is a vast difference between recognising our frailty which is a fact, and insisting that our nature is made up of nothing else, which is not a fact. The severe critic and the cynic differ chiefly in this: the first reports distressing facts, the second invents disgraceful fictions; the one distrusts, the other insults our common nature; and in doing justice to the possibilities of that nature, no one has gone further than Earle in his "contemplative man."

Something may be said of Earle's style before this introduction is brought to an end.

I do not think it is uniformly conspicuous[Y] for quaintness, or that there is much that can be called affectation; though occasionally an excess of brevity has proved too tempting, or the desire to individualize runs away with him.

The following pa.s.sages, taken at random from the Characters, seem to contain phrases that we should be well content to use to-day if we had thought of them.

_He sighs to see what innocence he hath outlived._

_We look on old age for his sake as a more reverent thing._

_He has still something to distinguish him from a gentleman, though his doublet cost more._

_It is discourtesy in you to believe him._

_An extraordinary man in ordinary things._

_His businesses with his friends are to visit them._

_The main ambition of his life is not to be discredited._

_He preaches heresy if it comes in his way, though with a mind I must needs say very orthodox._

These quotations have no very unfamiliar sound, nor much flavour of archaism about them. And there are many more, surprisingly free from conceits or other oddities, if we reflect that the book was written before Dryden was born, or modern prose with its precision and balance even thought of.

There is one very distinguis.h.i.+ng mark set on Earle's characters, the profundity of the a.n.a.lysis that accompanies the sketch. He lets us know not only what the grave divine or the staid man looks like, but why they are what they are, and all this without turning his sketch into an essay.

This mistake Bishop Hall is inclined to make, and Butler actually makes.

The author of Hudibras, it seems, would have been too fortunate had he known where his own happiness lay--to wit in that "sting" of verse, which Cowper says prose neither has nor can have.