Curiosities of Literature Volume Ii Part 38

Resnel. Warburton_. _Good sense. Luxurious--felicities of language. Wall_. _Loved labour--always poetry in his head_.

_Extreme sensibility. Ill-health, headaches_. _He never laughed_. _No conversation_. _No writings against Swift_.

Parasitical epithets. Six lines of Iliad.[264] _He used to set down what occurred of thoughts--a line--a couplet._ The humorous lines end sinner. Prunello.[265] First line made for the sound, or v. versa. Foul lines in Jervas. _More notices of books early than late_.

DUNCIAD.

The line on Phillips borrowed from another poem. Pope did not increase the difficulties of writing. _Poetaepulorum_.

MODERN LITERATURE--BAYLE'S CRITICAL DICTIONARY

A new edition of Bayle in France is an event in literary history which could not have been easily predicted. Every work which creates an epoch in literature is one of the great monuments of the human mind; and Bayle may be considered as the father of literary curiosity, and of modern literature. Much has been alleged against our author: yet let us be careful to preserve what is precious. Bayle is the inventor of a work which dignified a collection of facts const.i.tuting his text, by the argumentative powers and the copious ill.u.s.trations which charm us in his diversified commentary. Conducting the humble pursuits of an Aulus Gellius and an Athenaeus with a high spirit, he showed us the _philosophy of Books_, and communicated to such limited researches a value which they had otherwise not possessed.

This was introducing a study perfectly distinct from what is pre-eminently distinguished as "cla.s.sical learning," and the subjects which had usually entered into philological pursuits. Ancient literature, from century to century, had const.i.tuted the sole labours of the learned; and "variae lectiones" were long their pride and their reward. Latin was the literary language of Europe. The vernacular idiom in Italy was held in such contempt that their youths were not suffered to read Italian books, their native productions. Varchi tells a curious anecdote of his father sending him to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his inveterate pa.s.sion for reading Italian books! Dante was reproached by the Italians for composing in his mother-tongue, still expressed by the degrading designation of _il volgare_, which the "resolute" John Florio renders "to make common;" and to translate was contemptuously called _volgarizzare_. Petrarch rested his fame on his Latin poetry, and called his Italian _nugellas vulgares_! With us Roger Ascham was the first who boldly avowed "_To speak as the common people_, to think as wise men;" yet, so late as the time of Bacon, this great man did not consider his "Moral Essays" as likely to last in the moveable sands of a modern language, for he has anxiously had them sculptured in the marble of ancient Rome. Yet what had the great ancients themselves done, but trusted to their own _volgare_? The Greeks, the finest and most original writers of the ancients, observes Adam Ferguson, "were unacquainted with every language but their own; and if they became learned, it was only by studying what they themselves had produced."

During fourteen centuries, whatever lay out of the pale of cla.s.sical learning was condemned as barbarism; in the meanwhile, however, amidst this barbarism, another literature was insensibly creating itself in Europe. Every people, in the gradual accessions of their vernacular genius, discovered a new sort of knowledge, one which more deeply interested their feelings and the times, reflecting the image, not of the Greeks and the Latins, but of themselves! A spirit of inquiry, originating in events which had never reached the ancient world, and the same refined taste in the arts of composition caught from the models of antiquity, at length raised up rivals, who competed with the great ancients themselves; and modern literature now occupies a s.p.a.ce which appears as immensity, compared with the narrow and the imperfect limits of the ancient. A complete collection of cla.s.sical works, all the bees of antiquity, may be hived in a gla.s.s-case; but those we should find only the milk and honey of our youth; to obtain the substantial nourishment of European knowledge, a library of ten thousand volumes will not avail nor satisfy our inquiries, nor supply our researches even on a single topic!

Let not, however, the votaries of ancient literature dread its neglect, nor be over-jealous of their younger and Gothic sister. The existence of their favourite study is secured, as well by its own imperishable claims, as by the stationary inst.i.tutions of Europe. But one of those silent revolutions in the intellectual history of mankind, which are not so obvious as those in their political state, seems now fully accomplished. The very term "cla.s.sical," so long limited to the ancient authors, is now equally applicable to the most elegant writers of every literary people; and although Latin and Greek were long characterised as "the learned languages," yet we cannot in truth any longer concede that those are the most learned who are "inter Graecos Graecissimi, inter Latinos Latinissimi," any more than we can reject from the cla.s.s of "the learned," those great writers, whose scholars.h.i.+p in the ancient cla.s.sics may he very indifferent. The modern languages now have also become learned ones, when he who writes in them is imbued with their respective learning. He is a "learned" writer who has embraced most knowledge on the particular subject of his investigation, as he is a "cla.s.sical" one who composes with the greatest elegance. Sir David Dalrymple dedicates his "Memorials relating to the History of Britain" to the Earl of Hardwicke, whom he styles, with equal happiness and propriety, "Learned in British History." "Scholars.h.i.+p" has. .h.i.therto been a term reserved for the adept in ancient literature, whatever may be the mediocrity of his intellect; but the honourable distinction must be extended to all great writers in modern literature, if we would not confound the natural sense and propriety of things.

Modern literature may, perhaps, still be discriminated from the ancient, by a term it began to be called by at the Reformation, that of "the New Learning." Without supplanting the ancient, the modern must grow up with it; the farther we advance in society, it will more deeply occupy our interests; and it has already proved what Bacon, casting his philosophical views retrospectively and prospectively, has observed, "that Time is the greatest of innovators."

When Bayle projected his "Critical Dictionary," he probably had no idea that he was about effecting a revolution in our libraries, and founding a new province in the dominion of human knowledge; creative genius often is itself the creature of its own age: it is but that reaction of public opinion, which is generally the forerunner of some critical change, or which calls forth some want which sooner or later will be supplied. The predisposition for the various but neglected literature, and the curious but the scattered knowledge of the moderns, which had long been increasing, with the speculative turn of inquiry, prevailed in Europe when Bayle took his pen to give the thing itself a name and an existence. But the great authors of modern Europe were not consecrated beings, like the ancients, and their volumes were not read from the chairs of universities; yet the new interests which had arisen in society, the new modes of human life, the new spread of knowledge, the curiosity after even the little things which concern us, the revelations of secret history, and the state-papers which have sometimes escaped from national archives, the philosophical spirit which was hastening its steps and raising up new systems of thinking; all alike required research and criticism, inquiry and discussion. Bayle had first studied his own age before he gave the public his great work.

"If Bayle," says Gibbon, "wrote his Dictionary to empty the various collections he had made, without any particular design, he could not have chosen a better plan. It permitted him everything, and obliged him to nothing. By the double freedom of a dictionary and of notes, he could pitch on what articles he pleased, and say what he pleased in those articles."

"_Jacta est alea!_" exclaimed Bayle, on the publication of his Dictionary, as yet dubious of the extraordinary enterprise; perhaps, while going on with the work, he knew not at times whither he was directing his course; but we must think that in his own mind he counted on something which might have been difficult even for Bayle himself to have developed. The author of the "Critical Dictionary" had produced a voluminous labour, which, to all appearance, could only rank him among compilers and reviewers, for his work is formed of such materials as they might use. He had never studied any science; he confessed that he could never demonstrate the first problem in Euclid, and to his last day ridiculed that sort of evidence called mathematical demonstration. He had but little taste for cla.s.sical learning, for he quotes the Latin writers curiously, not elegantly; and there is reason to suspect that he had entirely neglected the Greek. Even the erudition of antiquity usually reached him by the ready medium of some German commentator. His multifarious reading was chiefly confined to the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With such deficiencies in his literary character, Bayle could not reasonably expect to obtain pre-eminence in any single pursuit. Hitherto his writings had not extricated him from the secondary ranks of literature, where he found a rival at every step; and without his great work, the name of Bayle at this moment had been buried among his controversialists, the rabid Jurieu, the cloudy Jacquelot, and the envious Le Clerc; to these, indeed, he sacrificed too many of his valuable days, and was still answering them at the hour of his death. Such was the cloudy horizon of that bright fame which was to rise over Europe! Bayle, intent on escaping from all beaten tracks, while the very materials he used promised no novelty, for all his knowledge was drawn from old books, opened an eccentric route, where at least he could encounter no parallel; Bayle felt that if he could not stand alone, he would only have been an equal by the side of another. Experience had more than once taught this mortifying lesson; but he was blest with the genius which could stamp an inimitable originality on a folio.

This originality seems to have been obtained in this manner. The exhausted topics of cla.s.sical literature he resigned as a province not adapted to an ambitious genius; sciences he rarely touched on, and hardly ever without betraying superficial knowledge, and involving himself in absurdity: but in the history of men, in penetrating the motives of their conduct, in clearing up obscure circ.u.mstances, in detecting the strong and the weak parts of him whom he was trying, and in the cross-examination of the numerous witnesses he summoned, he a.s.sumed at once the judge and the advocate! Books are for him pictures of men's inventions, and the histories of their thoughts; any book, whatever be its quality, must be considered as an experiment of the human mind.

In controversies, in which he was so ambidextrous--in the progress of the human mind, in which he was so philosophical--furnished, too, by his h.o.a.rding curiosity with an immense acc.u.mulation, of details,--skilful in the art of detecting falsehoods amidst truths, and weighing probability against uncertainty--holding together the chain of argument from its first principles to its remotest consequence--Bayle stands among those masters of the human intellect who taught us to think, and also to unthink! All, indeed, is a collection of researches and of reasonings: he had the art of melting down his curious quotations with his own subtile ideas. He collects everything; if truths, they enter into his history; if fictions, into discussions; he places the secret by the side of the public story; opinion is balanced against opinion: if his arguments grow tedious, a lucky anecdote or an enlivening tale relieves the folio page; and knowing the infirmity of our nature, he picks up trivial things to amuse us, while he is grasping the most abstract and ponderous. Human nature in her s.h.i.+fting scenery, and the human mind in its eccentric directions, open on his view; so that an unknown person, or a worthless book, are equally objects for his speculation with the most eminent--they alike curiously instruct. Such were the materials, and such the genius of the man, whose folios, which seem destined for the retired few, lie open on our parlour tables. The men of genius of his age studied them for instruction, the men of the world for their amus.e.m.e.nt. Amidst the ma.s.s of facts which he has collected, and the enlarged views of human nature which his philosophical spirit has combined with his researches, Bayle may be called the Shakspeare of dictionary makers; a sort of chimerical being, whose existence was not imagined to be possible before the time of Bayle.

But his errors are voluminous as his genius! and what do apologies avail? Apologies only account for the evil which they cannot alter!

Bayle is reproached for carrying his speculations too far into the wilds of scepticism--he wrote in distempered times; he was witnessing the _dragonades_ and the _revocations_ of the Romish church; and he lived amidst the Reformed, or the French prophets, as we called them when they came over to us, and in whom Sir Isaac Newton more than half believed.

These testify that they had heard angels singing in the air, while our philosopher was convinced that he was living among men for whom no angel would sing! Bayle had left persecutors to fly to fanatics, both equally appealing to the Gospel, but alike untouched by its blessedness! His impurities were a taste inherited from his favourite old writers, whose _navete_ seemed to sport with the grossness which it touched, and neither in France nor at home had the age then attained to our moral delicacy: Bayle himself was a man without pa.s.sions! His trivial matters were an author's compliance with his bookseller's taste, which is always that of the public. His scepticism is said to have thrown everything into disorder. Is it a more positive evil to doubt than to dogmatise?

Even Aristotle often pauses with a qualified _perhaps_, and the egotist Cicero with a modest _it seems to me_. Bayle's scepticism has been useful in history, and has often shown how facts universally believed are doubtful, and sometimes must be false. Bayle, it is said, is perpetually contradicting himself; but a sceptic must doubt his doubts; he places the antidote close to the poison, and lays the sheath by the sword. Bayle has himself described one of those self-tormenting and many-headed sceptics by a very n.o.ble figure, "He was a hydra who was perpetually tearing himself."

The time has now come when Bayle may instruct without danger. We have pa.s.sed the ordeals he had to go through; we must now consider him as the historian of our thoughts as well as of our actions; he dispenses the literary stores of the moderns, in that vast repository of their wisdom and their follies, which, by its originality of design, has made him an author common to all Europe. Nowhere shall we find a rival for Bayle!

and hardly even an imitator! He compared himself, for his power of raising up, or dispelling objections and doubts, to "the cloud-compelling Jove." The great Leibnitz, who was himself a lover of his _varia eruditio_, applied a line of Virgil to Bayle, characterising his luminous and elevated genius:--

Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.

Beneath his feet he views the clouds and stars!

CHARACTERISTICS OF BAYLE.

To know Bayle as a man, we must not study him in the folio Life of Des Maizeaux, whose laborious pencil, without colour and without expression, loses, in its indistinctness, the individualising strokes of the portrait. Look for Bayle in his "Letters," those true chronicles of a literary man, when they record his own pursuits.

The personal character of Bayle was unblemished even by calumny; his executor, Basnage, never could mention him without tears! With simplicity which approached to an infantine nature, but with the fort.i.tude of a stoic, our literary philosopher, from his earliest days, dedicated himself to literature; the great sacrifice consisted of those two main objects of human pursuits, fortune and a family. Many an ascetic, who has headed an order, has not so religiously abstained from all worldly interests; yet let us not imagine that there was a sullenness in his stoicism,--an icy misanthropy, which shuts up the heart from its ebb and flow. His domestic affections through life were fervid. When his mother desired to receive his portrait, he opened for her a picture of his heart! Early in life the mind of Bayle was strengthening itself by a philosophical resignation to all human events!

"I am indeed of a disposition neither to fear bad fortune nor to have very ardent desires for good. Yet I lose this steadiness and indifference when I reflect that your love to me makes you feel for everything that happens to me. It is therefore from the consideration that my misfortunes would be a torment to you, that I wish to be happy; and when I think that my happiness would be all your joy, I should lament that my bad fortune should continue to persecute me; though, as to my own particular interest, I dare promise to myself that I shall never be very much affected by it."

An instance occurred of those social affections in which a stoic is sometimes supposed to be deficient, which might have afforded a beautiful ill.u.s.tration to one of our most elegant poets. The remembrance of the happy moments which Bayle spent when young on the borders of the river Auriege, a short distance from his native town of Carlat, where he had been sent to recover from a fever occasioned by an excessive indulgence in reading, induced him many years afterwards to devote an article to it in his "Critical Dictionary," for the sake of quoting the poet who had celebrated this obscure river. It was a "Pleasure of Memory!" a tender a.s.sociation of domestic feeling!

The first step which Bayle took in life is remarkable. He changed his religion and became a catholic. A year afterwards he returned to the creed of his fathers. Posterity might not have known the story, had it not been recorded in his Diary. The circ.u.mstance is thus curiously stated:--

BAYLE'S DIARY.

Years of the Years Christian of my aera age.

1669. Tues., Mar. 19. 22. I changed my religion--next day I resumed the study of logic.

1670. Aug. 20. 23. I returned to the reformed religion, and made a private abjuration of the Romish religion, in the hands of four ministers.

His brother was one of these ministers; while a catholic, Bayle had attempted to convert him, by a letter long enough to evince his sincerity; but without his subscription we should not have ascribed it to Bayle.

For this vacillation in his religion has Bayle endured bitter censure.

Gibbon, who himself changed his about the same "year of his age," and for as short a period, sarcastically observes of the first entry, that "Bayle should have finished his logic before he changed his religion."

It may be retorted, that when he had learnt to reason, he renounced Catholicism. The true fact is, that when Bayle had only studied a few months at college, some books of controversial divinity by the catholics offered many a specious argument against the reformed doctrines. A young student was easily entangled in the nets of the Jesuits. But their pa.s.sive obedience, and their transubstantiation, and other stuff woven in their looms, soon enabled such a man as Bayle to recover his senses.

The promises and the caresses of the wily Jesuits were rejected; and the gush of tears of the brothers, on his return to the religion of his fathers, is one of the most pathetic incidents of domestic life.

Bayle was willing to become an expatriated man; to study, from the love of study, in poverty and honour! It happens sometimes that great men are criminated for their n.o.blest deeds by both parties.

When his great work appeared, the adversaries of Bayle reproached him with haste, while the author expressed his astonishment at his slowness.

At first, "The Critical Dictionary," consisting only of two folios, was finished in little more than four years; but in the life of Bayle this was equivalent to a treble amount with men of ordinary application.

Bayle even calculated the time of his headaches: "My megrims would have left me had it been in my power to have lived without study; by them I lose many days in every month." The fact is, that Bayle had entirely given up every sort of recreation except that delicious inebriation of his faculties, as we may term it for those who know what it is, which he drew from his books. We have his avowal: "Public amus.e.m.e.nts, games, country jaunts, morning visits, and other recreations necessary to many students, as they tell us, were none of my business. I wasted no time on them, nor in any domestic cares,--never soliciting for preferment, nor busied in any other way. I have been happily delivered from many occupations which were not suitable to my humour; and I have enjoyed the greatest and the most charming leisure that a man of letters could desire. By such means an author makes a great progress in a few years."

Bayle, at Rotterdam, was appointed to a professors.h.i.+p of philosophy and history; the salary was a competence to his frugal life, and enabled him to publish his celebrated Review, which he dedicates "to the glory of the city," for _illa n.o.bis haec otia fecit_.

After this grateful acknowledgment, he was unexpectedly deprived of the professors.h.i.+p. The secret history is curious. After a tedious war, some one amused the world by a chimerical "Project of Peace," which was much against the wishes and the designs of our William the Third. Jurieu, the head of the Reformed party in Holland, a man of heated fancies, persuaded William's party that this book was a part of a secret cabal in Europe, raised by Louis the Fourteenth against William the Third; and accused Bayle as the author and promoter of this political confederacy.

The magistrates, who were the creatures of William, dismissed Bayle without alleging any reason. To an ordinary philosopher it would have seemed hard to lose his salary because his antagonist was one

Whose sword is sharper than his pen.

Bayle only rejoiced at this emanc.i.p.ation, and quietly returned to his Dictionary. His feelings on this occasion he has himself perpetuated.

"The sweetness and repose I find in the studies in which I have engaged myself, and which are my delight, will induce me to remain in this city, if I am allowed to continue in it, at least till the printing of my Dictionary is finished; for my presence is absolutely necessary in the place where it is printed. I am no lover of money, nor of honours, and would not accept of any invitation should it be made to me; nor am I fond of the disputes, and cabals, and professorial snarlings which reign in all our academies: _Canam mihi et Musis_." He was indeed so charmed by quiet and independence, that he was continually refusing the most magnificent offers of patronage, from Count Guiscard, the French amba.s.sador; but particularly from our English n.o.bility. The Earls of Shaftesbury, of Albemarle, and of Huntingdon tried every solicitation to win him over to reside with them as their friend; and too nice a sense of honour induced Bayle to refuse the Duke of Shrewsbury's gift of two hundred guineas for the dedication of his Dictionary. "I have so often ridiculed dedications that I must not risk any," was the reply of our philosopher.

The only complaint which escaped from Bayle was the want of books; an evil particularly felt during his writing the "Critical Dictionary;" a work which should have been composed not distant from the shelves of a public library. Men of cla.s.sical attainments, who are studying about twenty authors, and chiefly for their style, can form no conception of the state of famine to which an "h.e.l.luo librorum" is too often reduced in the new sort of study which Bayle founded. Taste when once obtained may be said to be no acquiring faculty, and must remain stationary; but knowledge is of perpetual growth, and has infinite demands. Taste, like an artificial ca.n.a.l, winds through a beautiful country; but its borders are confined, and its term is limited. Knowledge navigates the ocean, and is perpetually on voyages of discovery. Bayle often grieves over the scarcity, or the want of books, by which he was compelled to leave many things uncertain, or to take them at second-hand; but he lived to discover that trusting to the reports of others was too often suffering the blind to lead the blind. It was this circ.u.mstance which induced Bayle to declare, that some works cannot be written in the country, and that the metropolis only can supply the wants of the literary man.

Plutarch has made a similar confession; and the elder Pliny, who had not so many volumes to turn over as a modern, was sensible to the want of books, for he acknowledges that there was no book so bad by which we might not profit.

Bayle's peculiar vein of research and skill in discussion first appeared in his "Pensees sur la Comete." In December, 1680, a comet had appeared, and the public yet trembled at a portentous meteor, which they still imagined was connected with some forthcoming and terrible event!

Persons as curious as they were terrified teased Bayle by their inquiries, but resisted all his arguments. They found many things more than arguments in his amusing volumes: "I am not one of the authors by profession," says Bayle, in giving an account of the method he meant to pursue, "who follow a series of views; who first project their subject, then divide it into books and chapters, and who only choose to work on the ideas they have planned. I for my part give up all claims to authors.h.i.+p, and shall chain myself to no such servitude. I cannot meditate with much regularity on one subject; I am too fond of change. I often wander from the subject, and jump into places of which it might be difficult to guess the way out; so that I shall make a learned doctor who looks for method quite impatient with me." The work is indeed full of curiosities and anecdotes, with many critical ones concerning history. At first it found an easy entrance into France, as a simple account of comets; but when it was discovered that Bayle's comet had a number of fiery tales concerning the French and the Austrians, it soon became as terrific as the comet itself, and was prohibited!