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authentic materials for literary history, and if carefully executed, for literary criticism. They preserve, too, a regard for the good and well-tested standard forms of writing, and in themselves require a species of talent that should not be neglected. To declare his principal aims, and explain his chief intentions, thereby giving the reader a proper clue to the argument of the whole work, with a candid and open avowal of deficiencies, is the proper business of a preface, and of a writer of books. To address his friend, or at least the reader, with cordiality or respect, in accordance with the spirit of the production; to bespeak his favorable notice, or seek to avoid unmerited neglect, is the province of the dedication. To accomplish these ends, a recurrence to standard models cannot be hurtful, since there is something of a formal, and, as it were, of artistical etiquette in the matter, and which is not to be lost sight of. The author, who is also a gentleman, and it is the effect of letters to make him such, will certainly endeavor to carry himself with as genteel an air on paper as in company. In every place, he will observe the universal laws of polite regard and the local observances of conventional decorum. One of these is to write a preface to every book he publishes, which should also be accompanied by a dedication. In the first, he addresses the public; and in the last he acknowledges the claims of private affection or personal gratitude, of admiration for talents or virtue in one of the stars of contemporary renown, or of worth and excellence in obscure genius and unobtrusive merit. The preface pleads, apologizes, defends or attacks: the dedication. conciliates and compliments. Let an author be friendless and humble, he still can appeal to the "gentle" reader for sympathy and confidence.

XXIX.

RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY.

We believe Dr. Johnson was the first critic to complain of the “penury” of English biography. It was a complaint that savored more of hastiness and ignorance than the Doctor's contemporary admirers would have been willing to allow any reviewer to discover in him, but still it was such; and now that every pretender to criticism makes it a point to beard the rough but manly old dogmatist, we may allow ourselves the privilege of picking an additional flaw in his critical reputation (almost worn out by repeated attacks). It is certain, for his undoubted vigor and ability, no writer of eminence ever made so many and such gross critical blunders as Doctor Johnson. On real life and domestic morals; the character and manners of the Londoners; the hypocrisies of men of the world; the thin-skinned sentimentalities of pretenders to sentiment and criticism, he exhibited an acuteness of observation, a comprehensiveness of judgment, and pungency of satire, that have never been surpassed. But in the field of literary criticism, requiring finer tact and a nicer perception, the grossness of his senses, no less than the obtuseness of his taste, rendered him unfit, physically and intellectually, to judge of poets and men of fancy.

In the rich territory of old English literature, there is not perhaps, a more fruitful province than that of biography, not only in the classic form of lives, but also memoirs, diaries and autobiography. It is true the lives most generally read at present, were written either during the lifetime or since the death of Johnson; as in the former period the classic lives of Goldsmith and Johnson, and the memoirs of Cumberland,

and from that period to the present day, among heaps of wretched compilations, we must distinguish the first book of the kind in the world, Boswell's Johnson, the learned autobiography of Gibbon, the simple yet fascinating lives of Hume and Franklin, honest self-painters; the classic compendiums of Southey, the lives of Burns by Currie and Lockhart, and the minor sketches of Irving. The latest permanent work of this class is the Memoirs of Leigh Hunt. And yet by far the richest treasures of English biography are to be found among the antiquarian volumes of the old English library. The best of these form a choice list; classic to this day. There are the lives, by Burnet, of Hale and Rochester; the austere, incorruptible judge and pure citizen, and the lively, volatile wit and libertine subsiding into a sober, earnest Christian. Walton's lives are too well known to dilate upon the heroes of them at present; yet what a noble company of poets, divines and Christian gentlemen form the subjects of his volumes-Hooker, and Wotton, and Donne, and Herbert, and Sanderson! Zouch's life of Walton himself is fit to be included as the humble companion of these. Then we have North's life of Lord Guildford, full of lively personal strokes and characters of the great lawyers of the time of Charles II. and James II. Fenton's lives of Milton and Waller-Fell's Hammond, the Fenelon of the royalist divines, and favorite chaplain of Charles I., sharing his imprisonment and dangers. Among the latest of the older lives, Doddridge's Life of Colonel Gardiner, of which we shall say more before we conclude.

The French have the reputation of being the best memoir writers in the world; yet their most courtly wits have not surpassed Hamilton in his pictures of the royal licentiousness of the age of Charles II., and Pepys and Evelyn. The me

moirs of Colonel Hutchinson by his wife, and of Venetia Digby, the beauty of her day, and the popular toast, despite her doubtful reputation, by the quaint fantast Sir Kenelm Digby, are at least a fair match for Bassompiere and Rochefoucauld. And then, as repositories of facts and personal circumstances nowhere else to be learned, we have the elaborate histories of Wood and Fuller, Spence's and Aubrey's anecdotes, and the letter writers, from old Howell himself to Pope and his friends. If such a list looks like "penury," we should like to learn the comparative scale by which “wealth" is to be adjudged.

A fair proportion of the old lives are those of good Christians without pretence, and fine scholars without presumption. Most of them, too, have an additional value as models for conduct: Rochester and Gardiner being the sole instances of men that need repentance," and they both converted in the heyday of the vicious career in which they were embarked.

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So much by way of preface-a long introduction to a brief article. We have selected this topic to point out the prevalent defects, in almost every work of the kind; defects, too, springing from the best of motives, and more easily discovered than corrected. In the best of the old lives we find this ever-recurring defect: a desire to paint in the hero of biography, a perfect man; a tendency to exaggerate individual and particular merits, by the force of contrast with inferior traits in much inferior characters. The writers of lives, in all times, have been too sparing of the shade in their portraits. A profusion of light falling upon the admirable virtues, allows no room for the exhibition of defects. Every trait is heightened; every characteristic marked with an em

phasis seldom found in nature. The subjects of biography, like the heroes of novels, are too often

Faultless monsters whom the world ne'er saw."

This disgusts the thoughtful reader, whether young or old; for the youthful student soon finds these pictures disproved in real life, and the sage knows their unreality while he is perusing the page. In the older lives, in all of those to which we have referred, a saving clause may be inserted, that the subjects of the writers were all of them men of that emnience that either extravagant praise or excessive censure soon corrected itself. For one would report differently of their lives and actions from another, and hence a balance might easily be struck between them. And besides, in extenuation, we may offer the best apology for the biographer, that his hero was often a character so fascinating, viewed as a whole, that it was very excusable to overlook minor errors and petty defects. All of Walton's characters, for instance, inevitably seduce a writer into encomium, when we should be writing impartially; and it is pleasanter, as well as easier, to pen an eulogy rather than a life. This was the fault that Johnson accuses Sprat of falling into,* and a fault more glaring in Mrs. Hutchinson's book than in most of the old lives, and less justifiable, since she wrote the history of her time, as well as the life of her husband.

Doddridge's Life of Colonel Gardiner is a singular specimen of this class of books, of an inferior literary value, compard with the rest, but still excellent. As an example of its class, we will give the reader a summary digest of its contents. The author, a nonconformist divine of considerable reputation, became in the career of his ministry professionally * Life of Cowley.

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