Mr. Boswell.
James Boswell.
Another early member of the club, whom I think we should have liked to see making his way with a very assured step into the Turk's Head, of a Monday or a Friday, was James Boswell, Esquire.[7] It is a household name now, and will remain so for years to come by reason of the extraordinary life which he wrote, of his master and patron, Dr. Johnson. Yet it was only a year or so before the formation of the club that this jaunty Scotch gentleman, son of a laird, and of vast assurance—having been a tuft-hunter from his youth—caught his first sight of the great Doctor, in the little shop of Davies the bookseller; and the great man had given a snubbing, then and there, to the pert, but always obsequious Boswell; the future biographer, however, digested excellently well provision of that sort, and I think the Doctor had always a tenderness for those who took his flagellations without complaint. Certain it is that there grew up thereafter an intimacy between the two, which is one of the most curious things in the history of English Men of Letters. I know that hard things are said of Mr. Boswell, and that every tyro in criticism loves to have a blow at the well-fed arrogance of the man. Macaulay has specially given him a grievous black-eye; but Macaulay—particularly in those early review papers—was apt to let his exuberant and cumulative rhetoric carry him up to a climacteric which the ladder of his facts would scantly reach. To be sure Boswell was a toady; but rather from veneration of those he worshipped than desire of personal advancement; he was an arrant tuft-hunter, thereby enlarging the sphere of his observations; but he was fairly up in classical studies; had large fund of information; was sufficiently well-bred (indeed, in contrast with the Doctor, I think we may say excellently well-bred); he rarely, if ever, said malicious things, though often impertinent ones; his conundrums again and again gave a new turn to dull talk; and he had a way, which some even more stolid people possess in our time, of baiting conversation by interposing irrelevant matter, with an air of innocence that captivates; then there was the pleasant conceit of the man—full-fed, sleek, and shining out all over him—over his face, and his erect but somewhat paunchy figure; all which qualities were contributory to the humor and fulness and charm of that famous biography which we can read backward or forward—in the morning or at night—by the chapter or by the page—with our pipe or without it—with our knitting or without it—and always with an amazed and delighted sense that the dear, old, clumsy, gray-stockinged, snuff-ridden Doctor has come to life once more, and is toddling along our streets, belching out his wit and wrath, and leaning on the arm of the ever-ready and most excellent and obsequious James Boswell, Esquire.
Such a book is not to be sneered at, nor the writer of it; perhaps we think it would be easy for us or anybody to write such another, if we would only forget conventionalisms and have the courage of our impressions; but if we made trial, I daresay we should find that to forget conventionalisms is just what we can't and do not know how to do; and so our impressions get bundled into the swathings of an ambitious rhetoric which spoils our chances and vulgarizes effort. I do not say Boswell was a very high-toned man or a very capable man in most directions; but he did have the art of easy narrative to a most uncommon degree; and did clearly perceive and apprehend just those points and qualities which go to make portraiture complete and satisfying.[8] I do not believe that he stupidly blundered into doing his biographic work well; stupid blundering never did and never could accomplish work that will meet acceptance by the intelligence of the world.
Gibbon.
Edward Gibbon.
I come now to speak of a more respectable personage—one of whom you have often heard, and whose resounding periods, full of Roman History you will most surely have read; I mean Edward Gibbon[9]—not an original member of the club, but elected at an early day. His life has great interest. He was the sole survivor of seven children; his father being a Member of Parliament—very reputable, but very inefficient. There were fears that his famous son would be a cripple for life, so weakly was he, and so ill put together; but growing stronger, he went to Oxford; was there for only a short time; did not love Oxford then, or ever; inclined to theologic inquiry and became Romanist; which so angered his father that he sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland, to be re-converted under the Calvinist teachers of that region to Protestantism. This in due time came about; and it was perhaps by a sort of compensating mental retaliation for this topsy-turvy condition of his youth that he assumed and cultivated the pugnacious indifference to religion which so marked all his later years and much of his work. He had his love passages, too, there upon the beautiful borders of Lake Geneva; a certain Mademoiselle Curchod, daughter of a Protestant clergyman, lived near by; and with her the future historian read poetry, read philosophy, read the skies and the mountains, discoursed upon the conjugation of verbs, and upon conjugalities of other sorts; but this the English father disapproved as much as he had disapproved of Romanism; and by reason of this—as Gibbon tells us, in his delightful autobiography—that "sweet dream came to an end." It is true the French biographers[10] put a rather different phase upon the story, and represent that while Mademoiselle respected young Mr. Gibbon very much, she could not return his ardor. Two colors, I have observed, are very commonly given to any sudden interruption of such festivities.
Mademoiselle, however, did not pine in single blessedness; she had a career before her. She became in a few years the distinguished wife of Necker, the great finance minister of France in the days immediately preceding the Revolution, and the mother of a still more famous daughter—that Mme. de Stael who wrote Corinne.
Though Gibbon lived and died a bachelor, he always maintained friendly relations with his old flame Mme. Necker, being frequently a guest at her elegant Paris home; and she, on at least one occasion, a guest of the historian in London. It was in the year 1774—ten years after its foundation, that Gibbon was elected member of the Literary Club; he being then in his thirty-seventh year and well known for his wide learning and his conversational powers. He was recognized as an author, too, of critical acumen, and great range of language; some of his earlier treatises were written in French, which he knew as well as English; German he never knew; but the first volume of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not appear until the year 1776—a good tag for that great American date! That first volume made a prodigious surprise, and immense applause. Poor Hume[11] (whose story waits), struggling with the mortal disease which was to carry him off in that year, wrote his praises from Edinburgh. Horace Walpole, who had the vanity of professing to know everybody worth knowing, says, "I am astonished; I know the man a little; I could not believe it was in him; I must get to know him better."
Yet Gibbon was not a modest man in the ordinary sense; never, except when—very rarely—warmed into a colloquial display of his extraordinary learning, did he impress a stranger with any sense of his power. He was short and corpulent; had a waddling walk and puffy cheeks and a weak double chin; with very much in his general aspect and manner to explain the miscarriage of his love-affair, and nothing at all to explain the Decline of the Roman Empire. Withal, he was obsequious, studiously courteous; had ready smiles at command; had a mincing manner; his wig was always in order, and so was his flowered waistcoat; and he tapped his snuff-box with an easy dégagé air, that gave no warrant for anything more than an agreeable titillation of the nerves. But if an opening came for a thrust of his cumulated learning in establishing some historic point in dispute, it poured out with a gush, authority upon authority, citation on citation, as full and impetuous and unlooked for as a great spring flood.
He went over to Paris with his honors fresh upon him; was cordially received there; the Necker influence, and his familiarity with French, standing him in good stead. He affected a certain style too. "I have," he says, "two footmen in handsome liveries behind my coach, and my apartment is hung with damask." He loved such display, though only the hired luxury of a hotel. He had never a taste for the simpler enjoyments of English country life; never mounted a horse and scorned partridge shooting or angling. In a letter to a friend he says, "Never pretend to allure me by painting in odious colors the dust of London. I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald, it is to visit you, and not your trees."
It does not appear that he went frequently to the Turk's-Head Club. The brusquerie of Johnson would have grated on him—grated on him in more senses than one, we suspect; and the gruff Doctor would have scorned his dilettanteism as much as his scepticism. Gibbon took kindly, though, to Goldsmith; but he hated Boswell honestly, and Boswell honestly hated back.[12]
His letters were never strong or bright, nor were his occasional literary criticisms either acute or profound; all his great powers were kept in reserve for his magnum opus—the History. For the quietude he thought necessary to its completion he went again to the home of his youth at Lausanne, and there, in sight of that wondrous panorama of lake and mountain, upon a site where now stands the Hotel Gibbon,[13] and a few acacia trees under which the historian meditated, the great work was brought to completion—a great work then, and a great work now, measured by what standard we will. To say that one approaches the accuracy of Gibbon is to exhaust praise; to say that one surpasses him in reach of learning is to deal in hyperbole. Even the historian, Dr. Freeman, who, I think, did much prefer saying a critical thing to saying a pleasant thing, testified that—"He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside, nor threatened to set aside." Modern high critics sneer at his large, ceremonious manner; Ruskin pronounces "his English the worst ever written by an educated Englishman"[14] (the same Ruskin who found a "mass of errors" under the sunshine of Claude). But let us remember what burden of knowledge those grandiloquent sentences of Gibbon had to carry; what reach of empire they had to cover! Here be no pigmies, predicating the outcome of little factions, no discourse about the smallness of word-meanings; but vast populations are arrayed under our eye. We cannot talk of the stars in their courses as we talk of the will-o'-wisps of politicians. Rome marching to its dissolution, with captive nations in its trail,[15] must put a lofty strain upon the page that records her downfall.
Through all, this corpulent, learned, dainty, keen-eyed, indefatigable little man, is cool—over cool; he has no enthusiasms but the enthusiasm of knowing things. No wrongs that he records seem to chafe him; his blood has no boiling-point; his love no flame; his indignation no scorching power. A great, imposing, processional array of sovereigns, armies, nations—of the wise, the vicious, the savage, the learned, the good; but not a figure in it all, however pure or innocent, which kindles his sympathies into a glow; not one so profligate as to make his anger burn; not one so lofty or so true as to give warmth to his expressions of reverence.
Yet notwithstanding, if any of my young readers are projecting the writing of a history, I strongly advise them to avoid the subject of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Oliver Goldsmith.
Oliver Goldsmith.
And now we come to another member of our club, who reaped far fewer of the substantial rewards of life.——Who, with any relish for the beatitudes of letters, has not tender reverence for the memory of Goldsmith? He was the youngest member of the club at its start, and yet the thirty-four years he then counted had been full of change and adventure: he had wandered away early from the beautiful paternal home of Lissoy in Ireland; had studied in Scotland and in Leyden; had idled in both; had been vagrant over Europe; had tried medicine, tried flute-playing, tried school-keeping, tried proof-reading for the old shopkeeper, Samuel Richardson, and had finally landed in a court not far from Johnson's, where he did work for the booksellers. Amongst this work were certain essays which attracted the old Doctor's attention by their rare literary qualities; and the old gentleman had befriended the author—all the more when he found him a man who did not befriend himself; and who, if he had only sixpence in his pocket (and he was not apt to have more), would give the half of it to a beggar. A little over-love for wine, too—when the chance of a tavern dinner came to him—was another weakness which the great Doctor knew how to pardon; and so Goldsmith became one of the original clubmen; Reynolds, with all his courtly ceremony, growing to love the man; so did Burke; but Boswell was always a little jealous of him, and Goldsmith caught at any occasion for giving a good slap to that sleek self-consequence which shone out all over Boswell—even to his knee-buckles and his silken hose. I do not suppose that Goldsmith contributed much to the weightier debates of the club, and can imagine him sulking somewhat if he found no good opening in the troubled waters in which to feather his dainty oar. Again there was an awkwardness, partly self-consciousness, partly organic tremor, which put him at bad odds in promiscuous talk; to say nothing of the irascibility which he had not learned to control, and which sometimes put a stammer to the tongue; hence, Boswell says, "poorest of talkers;" but around in his chambers, with one or two sympathetic listeners only, and perhaps a bottle of Canary flanking him, and with a topic started that chimed with the emotional nature of the man, and I am sure he would have talked out a whole chapter of a new Vicar of Wakefield.
But whatever the tongue might do, there was no doubt about the pen; we find him even undertaking discourses upon Animated Nature, and history—of Greece or of Rome. Has he then the plodding faculty, and is he a man of research? No; but he has the aptitude to seize upon the plums in the researches of others, and embody them in the amber of his language. He poaches all over the fields of history and science, and bags the bright-winged birds which the compilers have never seen, or which, if seen, they have classed with the gray and the dun of the sparrows. His poetry, when he makes it, may not have so much of polished clang and witty jingle as the verse of Pope; it may lack the great ground-swell of rhythmic cadence which belongs to Johnson; but—somewhere between the lines, and subtly pervading every pause and flow—there is a tenderness, a suave, poetic perfume, a caressing touch of both mind and heart which we cannot describe—nor forget.
Of the original club-men, Goldsmith[16] died first, in 1774, at Brick-court in the Temple; he was forty-five years old, and yielded to a quick, sharp illness at the last, into which all the worries of a much worried life seemed to crowd him. He had been plotting new works, and a new life too; a getting away (if it might be) from the smirch that hung about him in the Temple corridors, out to the Edgware farmery, where primroses and hedges grew, and where there was a scent upon the air, of that old country home of Lissoy:
"I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,
Amidst those humble bowers to lay me down;
To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting by repose.
I still had hopes, for pride attends me still,
Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill;
Around my fire an evening group to draw
And tell of all I felt and all I saw.
And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from which at first he flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return, and die at home at last."
A stolid physician, called in consultation in those last days, and seeing his disordered state, asked, "If his mind was at ease?" Mind at ease! Surely a rasping question to put to a man whose pulse is thumping toward the hundreds, whose purse is empty, plans broken up, credit gone, debts crowding him at every point, pains racking him, and the grimy Fleet Prison close by, throwing its shadow straight across his path. No, his mind is not at ease; and the pulse does gallop faster and faster, and harder and harder to the end; when, let us hope—ease did come, and—God willing—"Rest for the weary."
The Thrales and the End.
Meantime Dr. Johnson has been withdrawing somewhat from his old regular attendance upon the club. New men have come in, of whiggish tendencies; he hears things he does not like to hear; the Americans are at last making a fight of it; he is a heavier walker than once; besides which his increased revenue has perhaps made him a little more free of the Mitre tavern than of old; then he has made the acquaintance of Mr. Thrale and of Mrs. Thrale—an every-way memorable acquaintance for him. Mr. Thrale is a wealthy brewer, one while Member of Parliament—his works standing on the ground in Southwark now held by Barclay & Perkins, some of whose dependencies cover the site of that Globe Theatre where William Shakespeare was sometime actor and shareholder. Withal, Mr. Thrale is a most generous, sound-headed, practical, kindly man, without being very acute, or cultured, or any way accomplished. Mrs. Thrale, however, has her literary qualities; can jingle a little of not inharmonious verse of her own; reads omnivorously; is apt in French or Latin; is full of esprit and liveliness, and is not without a certain charm of person. She is small indeed, but with striking features and picturesque; easily gracious at her table; witty, headstrong, arch, proud of association with the great Dr. Johnson; really having strong friendship for him; enduring his rudenesses; yielding to him in very much, but not so submissive as to take his opinion (or that of any other man) about whether she should or should not marry Signor Piozzi, when afterward she came to be a widow. In fact, she had in fine development the very womanly way—of having her own way.
The Thrales owned a delightful country place at Streatham, a pleasant drive out from the city, down through Southwark and Brixton and on the road to Croydon; and there Johnson went again and again: Mr. Thrale was so kind, and Mrs. Thrale so engaging. At last they put at his service a complete apartment, where he could, on his blue days, growl to his liking. Who can say what might have been the career of the great lexicographer if he had fallen into such downy quarters in his callow days; should we have had the Dictionary? Surely never the life of Savage, with its personal piquancy, and possibly never the Boswelliana.
Tour to the Hebrides.
But Johnson was not wholly idle; neither the luxuries of Streatham, nor the chink of his pension money, could stay the unrest of his mind: he writes dedications for other people—shoals of them; he re-edits twice over the great Dictionary; publishes The False Alarm; completes his Lives of the Poets; and in the interim—between visits to Oxford, Brighton, and Lichfield—he makes that famous trip, with Boswell, to Scotland and the Hebrides; and never, I think, was so unimportant a journey so known of men. Every smart boy in every American school, knows now what puddings he ate, and about the cudgel that he carried, and the boiled mutton that was set before him. The bare mention of these things brings back a relishy smack of the whole story of the journey. Is it for the literary quality of the book which describes it? Is it for our interest in the great, nettlesome, ponderous traveller; or is it by reason of a sneaking fondness we all have for the perennial stream of Boswell's gossip? I cannot tell, for one: I do not puzzle with the question; but I enjoy.
Last days of Johnson.
In the year 1779 his old friend Garrick died,—leaving nearly a million of dollars, which came to him by that stage following and thrift which had so worried the orthodox and respectable brother Peter of the wine-shop. The interesting Mrs. Garrick came, after a time, to a lively widowhood on the Adelphi Terrace—looking out over what is now the London Embankment, and with such friends as Miss Hannah More, and "Evelina" Burney, and the old wheezing Doctor himself, to cheer her loneliness and share her luxurious dinners. The year after, in 1780, Topham Beauclerk died; and so that other bright light in the Turks-Head Club is dashed forever.
These, things may well have put new wrinkles in the old Doctor's visage; but he still keeps good courage; works in his spasmodic way;—dines with the printer Strahan; dines at the Mitre; dines at Streatham; coquettes, in his lumbering way, with Mrs. Thrale, and goes home to the fogs and grime of Bolt Court.
Shall I quote from a letter to the last-named lady, dating in the year 1780?
"How do you think I live? On Thursday I dined with Hamilton and went thence to Mrs. Ord. On Friday at the Reynolds'—on Sunday at Dr. Burney's with the two sweets [daughters of Mrs. T.] from Kensington; on Monday with Reynolds; to-day with Mr. Langton; to-morrow with the Bishop of St. Asaph. I not only scour the town from day to day, but many visitors come to me in the morning, so that my work [Lives of the Poets] makes little progress.
"You are at all places of high resort, and bring home hearts by dozens, while I am seeking for something to say of men about whom I know nothing but their verses.... Congreve, whom I despatched at the Borough, is one of the best of the little lives: but then I had the benefit of your conversation."
This is very well for a plethoric old gentleman of seventy-one. The next year, 1781, his friend and patron Mr. Thrale died. This loss was a grievous one for Johnson. He had relished his kindliness and his large, practical sagacity: indeed I think he had relished in him the lack of that literary talk and allusion which so many of his acquaintances thought it necessary to throw out as bait for the Leviathan. But was the Doctor to enjoy still the delights of that Streatham retreat? It is certain that a year did not pass before there was much gossip, in neighboring gossiping circles, that associated the name of Johnson with the clever and wealthy widow, as a possible successor to Mr. Thrale. I do not think any such gossips of the male kind ever ventured within easy reach of the Doctor's oaken cudgel. There is no evidence that any thought of such alliance ever came into Johnson's mind; but I do think he had sometimes regaled himself with the hope of a certain kindly protectorate over the luxuries and the mistress of Streatham, which would keep all its old charms open to him, and permit of a fatherly dalliance with the family there. It appeared, however, that the clever lady had other views; and did marry three years after—very much to the disgust of her children—Signor Piozzi, a musician of very fair reputation; did live a happy enough life with him; did publish a book or two full of sparkle and many errors, and some mischievously strong cuts at people she disliked; did live thereafter to a great old age, and carried roses in her cheeks amongst the eighties; though I think these roses came from the apothecaries. She was always fond of decoration.
In 1783 the Doctor had a stroke of paralysis, from which, however, he rallied and was himself once more—dining with Dilly, with Reynolds, at the Mitre too, with Boswell; he even projects new work—suggests the formation of another club in the city, and more within reach: So tenaciously do we cling, and so hopefully do we keep plotting! Finally in June, 1784, he takes his last dinner at the old club; Reynolds and Burke and Langton and Boswell are there, with others he does not know so well; he is feeble at this sitting and ill at ease; clouds gathering over him, from which, however, there flashes out from time to time a blaze of his old wit.
Thereafter, it is mostly Bolt-court—poor blind Miss Williams gone, by this time, and also the sorry physician who had been long a pensioner on him, and whose nostrums he had taken out of charity. Of all the faces that once welcomed him there in their way, only his black man Francis left.
Langton comes to see him; and Reynolds comes bringing more cheer, though the ear trumpet is awkward for the sick man; Burke comes and shows all the melting tenderness of a woman; Boswell, too—before he goes north—bounces in and out, his conceit and assurance mollified and decently draped by the sorrow that hung over him. Little Miss Burney rushes in to the ante-room and stays there hours, hoping some shortest last interview with the great man who had said kindly things to her—never thinking that he could not relish her gossippy prattle about the court, and the royal George, now that a great, swift tide was lifting him into the presence of another king.
Death of Johnson.
The old superstitious awe and dread of death, which had belonged to him throughout life, disappeared in these latter days, and the gloom—with its teasing vampires—was rarefied into a certain celestial haze that hung over him tenderly. He did not excitedly wrestle with the awful possibilities the change might bring, nor work himself into any craze of pious exhilaration to bridge the gap; but was restful as a babe at last, and so was led away tranquilly, by his own child-like trust, over the threshold of the mysteries we must all confront.
[1] See note, Hill's Boswell, p. 304, vol. i.
[2] Blackfriars was not built until 1769, and the old Westminster in 1750.
[3] Pension granted, 1762: Rasselas published, 1759.
[4] Joshua Reynolds, b. 1723; d. 1792. His Discourses published, 1771. Life by Leslie, 1867.
[5] It is from this latter gentleman—whom I had the good fortune to meet in the course of his visit to this country—that my information in regard to the latter status of the club is derived.
[6] Edmund Burke, b. 1729; d. 1797. Editions of his works are various. Best life of him is by John Morley (1867).
[7] B. 1740; d. 1795.
[8] There is, to be sure, a great deal of what the natural reserve of most men would lead them to withhold. But if this "free-telling" does add some of the finer lights and most artistic touches to his picture, and if he perceives this to be so (and have we any right to assume the contrary?) shall we not credit it rightly to his book-making art and commend it accordingly?
That his gentlemanly reserves are not of a pronounced sort may count against the delicacy of his nature, but not necessarily against his capacity as a literary artist.
[9] Edward Gibbon, b. 1737; d. 1794. Dr. Milman's is the standard edition of his History. Bowdler's edition (1825) is noticeable for its expurgations. The work, through its translations, holds as large a place in the historic curriculum of French, Italian, and German students, as in that of English-speaking nations.
[10] Biographie Universale; Article Necker (Mme. Necker, née Susanne Curchod).
[11] Hume's first volume of English History appeared in 1754—just twenty-two years before the Decline and Fall. Hume was about twenty-six years Gibbon's senior.
[12] Boswell says in his Diary (1779): "Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me."
[13] The old house has wholly disappeared; the hotel covers a portion of Gibbon's garden.
[14] Letter in the Pall Mall Gazette in relation to Sir John Lubbock's "List of Hundred Best Books." Reprinted in Critic (American) of March 20, 1886.
[15] See, for instance, account of Julian's march, and of the taking of Constantinople.
[16] Oliver Goldsmith, b. 1728; d. 1774. Fullest and best Life, that of John Forster.
We parted company, in our last chapter, with Dr. Johnson, of whose work and career every educated person should know; we parted company also, with that more lovable, though less important man, Dr. Goldsmith—of whom it would have been easy and pleasant to talk by the hour; we all know him so well; we all would have wished him so well—if wishes could have counted. And as we sidle into the Poets' corner of Westminster Abbey—on whatever visit we make there—we put a friendly eagerness into our search for the medallion effigy of Goldsmith over the door, which we do not put into our search for a great many entombed under much greater show of marble. But Goldsmith's bones do not lie in the Abbey; he was buried somewhere under the wing of the Old Temple Church—the particular locality being subject of much doubt; while the memorial statue of Johnson—his body lying in Westminster—must be sought for, still farther down in the city, under the arches of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Garrick has what we might almost call melodramatic monument among the marbles of the Poets' corner; Reynolds has abiding memorials in the dashes of mellowed coloring and in the tender graces of those cherished portraits, some of which belong to every considerable gallery of England; Burke and Gibbon lie in quiet country places—the first near to his old home of Beaconsfield; and the historian among those southern downs of Sussex which look upon the Channel waters; his books may never have touched us to tenderness; but he bows his way out of our presence, with the grandest history belonging to the eighteenth century for a memorial.
A Scottish Historian.
David Hume.
We must not forget that hard-headed man who wrote Hume's History of England, who was born twenty-two years before the historian of Rome, and died in the year in which Gibbon was reaping his first rewards. He[1] was a sceptic too of even more aggressive type than Gibbon—was, like him, somewhat ungainly in person, and though of larger build and of coarser mould, possessed a cheery good humor, and a bright colloquial wit which made him sure of good friends and many. Like Gibbon he lived and died a bachelor: like him, he leaned toward continental ways of living, and like him garnered some of his highest honors in France. Of course you know his History of England—where it begins, where it ends—but we do not press examination on these points. In most editions you will find—(it should be found in all)—among the foreleaves, a short autobiographic sketch, written in his most neat, perspicuous, and engaging manner, which is well worth the close attention of every reader, even if he do not wade through the royal extensions of the History. You will learn there that David Hume was born in that pleasant border land of Scotland which is watered by the Tweed, the Yarrow, and the Teviot—where we found the poet Thomson. North of his boyish home stretched Lammermoor, and westward within easy tramping distance lay Lauderdale; but in that day these names had not been illuminated by a touch of the magician's wand, nor was his mind ever keenly alive to the beauties of landscape. Hume's childhood knew only great stretches of brown heather, bounded by bare bluish-gray heights, with the waves of the German Sea pounding on the rocky, desolate shores—where stands the ruin of Fast Castle, the original of "Wolf's Crag" of the Master of Ravenswood.
You will learn further from that precious bit of autobiography—which he calls with a naïve directness, "My Own Life"—that he was younger son of a good family; that he came to fairish education thereabout, and in Edinboro'; that his family would have pushed him to the study of law; but he—loving philosophy and literature better, and in search of some method of increasing his means for their pursuit—wandered southward to study business in the city of Bristol. This was a place of much greater commercial importance, relatively, then than now: but Bristol merchandizing presently disgusts him; and husbanding carefully his small moneys, he goes across the Channel—to study philosophy, while practising the economies of French provincial life in a small town of central France. A few years thereafter he prints his first book in London on Human Nature; and he says it fell "dead-born" from the press; but he is still sanguine and cheery; writes other essays after his return from France—hovering between Edinboro' and his old Berwickshire home; studying Greek the while, and for a year serving, as secretary, the crazy Marquis of Annandale. Shortly thereafter (1746) began his official connection with the General St. Clair, involving a new and pleasanter experience of European life. On his return, after three years, he goes to cover again in his old Berwickshire home, where he elaborates the Political Discourses—setting forth those broad views of trade and commerce, which came to larger illustration later, under the pen of his good friend Adam Smith.[2]
Hume's England.
In 1751 he removed from country to town—the true scene he says "for a man of letters," and established himself in a small flat of one of those lofty houses which still look down over the New City and the valley gardens, and lived there comfortably—with his sister for help mate—on some £50 a year. He tried vainly for a professorship in one of the Scottish universities, but was counted too unsafe a man. As Custodian of the Advocates' Library of Edinboro', a place which he secured shortly after—largely through the influence of lady friends—he came to that familiar fellowship with books which prompted him to the making of his History of England. He does not begin at the beginning: he tells of the Stuarts first; then goes back to the Tudors; and then back of these to the dull (dull to him and dull to us) Anglo-saxon start point: Stubbs and Freeman had not in that day made their explorative forays and set up their scaffoldings.
Hume's ambition was high and sensitive: he was intensely disappointed with the reception of the earlier volumes of his history. "I was discouraged," he says, "and had not the war been at that time breaking out between France and England, I had certainly retired to some provincial town of the former kingdom, have changed my name, and never more have returned to my native country."
But his writings had qualities which were sure in the end to provoke the reading and discussion of them by thoughtful men and women. He is known wider than he thinks; his books have been translated; Montesquieu has corresponded with him; so has a certain Mme. de Boufflers—a pet of the Paris salons—who has written gushingly of her admiration; and the stolid, good-humored, cool-blooded Hume has responded in his awkward manner; other missives, with growing confidences have passed; she always clever, and witty and full of adulation; and he clumsy and clever, and with such tenderness as an elephant might show toward a gazelle. And the shining side of life opens bewitchingly upon him when he goes to Paris in 1763 as an attaché to the Embassy of Lord Hertford.
Hume in Paris.
In place of Scotch kerseys, his square, massive figure is set off with the golden broidery of a diplomat. His reputation as a philosopher and as a historian had been confirmed by all the literary magnates of Paris; and the queens of society in that gay capital, Mme. de Boufflers among them, pounced upon the big Scotch David, to be led away through the pretty martyrdoms of the salon. And he bore it bravely; he had feared, indeed, that his inaptitudes and inexperience would have made such a life irksome to one of his quiet habits; but he good-humoredly and complacently accepted the sacrifice and came to love the intoxicating incense. Sterne, who happened in Paris in those days, says that Hume was the lion of the city; no assemblage was complete without his presence. Yet he did not lose his cool philosophic poise. He carried his good humor everywhere, and an indifference that made him engaging; if arrows of Cupid were launched at him, they did not pierce through the wrappings of his thick Scotch phlegm.
Mme. d'Épinay tells a good story of these times about his taking part in some tableau where he was to personate an Eastern sovereign, seated between two beautiful Circassian damsels, to whom he was expected to show devotional assiduities of speech. But the frigid philosopher, banked in between those feminine piles of silk and jewels, only rubs his hands, slaps his knees, purses up his mouth, and says over and over, in his inconsequent French,—"Eh bien, Mesdemoiselles, vous voilà! vous voilà donc! Eh bien, nous voici!" Whereat we may be sure that his pretty companions let fall slily a disparaging "qu'il est béte!"—As if the man who had traced to their ultimate issues the subtleties of the Principles of Morals could parry and thrust with the pretty conversational foils of a Pompadour!
David Hume.
It chanced that by the unexpected withdrawal of Lord Hertford, Hume was for a time chief of the Embassy, and for the first and last time (in so full a sense) did a historian of England thus become British Ambassador to the Court of France. But Hume does not love the English or England; he resents their neglect of him; he never forgets that he is a Scotsman; it twangs in his speech; it twangs louder in his heart; he would like to live in that pleasant country of France:—"They are all kind to me here," he says; "but not one of a thousand in all England would care a penny's worth if I broke my neck to-morrow." And though his reputation is now largely upon the growth at home, still he is not pleasantly lié with the masters. Somewhat later, when by another unexpected good turn he is made Under-Secretary of State and has official position in London, he writes to Dr. Blair, of Edinboro', who has offered to give him a letter to Bishop Percy—"I thank you, but it would be impracticable for me to cultivate his friendship, as men of letters have here no place of rendezvous; and are indeed sunk and forgot in the general torrent of the world." And yet this was at a date (1763), when the Turk's Head gathering was all alive, when Sterne had recently published the last volume of his Tristram; when poor Smollett[3] (of Roderick Random fame) has won success by a flimsy, but popular continuation of Hume's History; when the Vicar of Wakefield was fresh (though as yet unprinted); when Mason and Gray and Warburton and Johnson were all sounding their trumpets. With such feelings of alienation it is not strange that Hume did not nestle into the hearts of great Londoners as he had nestled into the good-will of Parisians.
Under the influences of Mme. de Boufflers he tried to make a home in England for that strange creature, Rousseau, who had become an exile, and who brought with him—to the torment of Hume—all his eccentricities, his peevishness, his inhuman vanities, his abnormal sensitiveness, his wild jealousies, and his exaltations of genius. These things work a rupture between the two in the end—as they should and ought to do,—and the next good sight we have of the Scotch philosopher is in a new home of his own (1772), which he has built in the new part of Edinboro'. Twenty odd years before he had lived in the old city on an income of £50 a year; and now he lives in the new with an income of £1,000 a year. In the old times he had hardly secured place as Custodian of the mouldy Library of the Advocates; now he is the marked potentate in the literary world of Scotland. Stanch Presbyterians do indeed look at him askance, and shake their heads at his uncanny beliefs, or rather lack of beliefs. Old nurses put hobgoblin wings upon him to frighten good children; but he has stanch, loving friends among the best and the clearest sighted. Dr. Blair is his friend; excellent Dr. Robertson is his friend; his good nature, his kindness of heart, his rectitude of life, his intellectual charities, won even those who shuddered at his disbeliefs; that sceptical miasma—born in his blood—and harmful to many (as it was to himself), seemed to lose its malarious taint in the large, free, intellectual atmosphere in which the philosopher lived. Honest doubts were then, and always will be, better than dishonest beliefs; just as honest beliefs are a thousand fold better than dishonest doubts.
Death of Hume.
It was in our year of 1776—when his reputation was brightening and widening month by month, that David Hume, the author of the first scholarly History of England, died, and was buried on a shoulder of the Calton Hill, from which one may look eastward across the valley (where lies Holyrood Palace) to the Salisbury Crags on the left and to the Castle Rock on the right.
It is probable that his History will long hold place on our library shelves; its style might almost be counted a model historic style—if we were to have models (of which the wisdom is doubtful). It is clear, it is precise, it is perspicuous, it is neat to a fault. It might almost be called a reticent style, in its neglect of those wrappings of wordy illustration and amplification which so many historians employ. He makes us see his meaning as if we looked through crystal; and if the crystal is toned by his prejudices—as it is and very largely—it is altogether free from the impertinent decorative arabesques of the rhetorician. Many of the periods of which he gives the record, have had new light thrown upon them by the searching inquiries of late days. Old reputations with which he dealt reverently have suffered collapse; political horizons which were limited and gave smallness consequence, have widened; but for good, straightforward, lucid, logical setting forth of the main facts of which he undertook the record, Hume will long remain the reference book. There will be never a time when lovers of good literature will not be attracted by his pathetic picture of the career of Charles I.; and never a time when the judicious reader will accept it as altogether worthy of trust.
The life of the historian—by Dr. Huxley—is rather a history of his philosophy than of his life; in which the eminent scientist—with due apology for intrusion upon literary ground—sets his logic to an easy canter all around the soberer paces of the great Scotch charger—showing nice agreement in the paces of the two, and commending and illustrating the metaphysics of the Historian, with a pretty fanfaronade of Exposition and Applause.