I
Coste and the English Writers
One of the letters printed below tells how Coste came to know Locke. "Speaking of that doctor (Drelincourt), I must say I have had the occasion to write to a famous English physician named Locke, of whom you have so often heard me speak. Yesterday I received a book with which he had been kind enough to present me. I shall thank him at the earliest opportunity." It appears that the success attending the operation performed by Locke on the first Earl of Shaftesbury in 1668 was not to be eclipsed by the publication of the Essay. Contemporaries spoke in the same breath of Locke and Sydenham as great physicians.
Into Coste's life at Oates we can get only a few glimpses, just some recollections jotted down long after Locke's death. Thus, on 8th January 1740, Coste wrote to La Motte, the "Dutch journalist," to complain about the "cape" with which the engraver had adorned Locke's portrait, heading an edition of the Traité de l'Education. Locke, he said, had never been a physician. "He could not bear being called a doctor. King William gave him the title and Mr. Locke begged an English lord to tell the King that the title was not his."
The anecdote clears up the mystery contained in a letter of Bayle. In the first edition of the famous Dictionary (1698) Bayle had mentioned "Doctor" Locke. For Bayle as for every one in Holland who remembered the first Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke was a celebrated physician. Locke corrected the mistake, probably through the medium of Coste; but Bayle failed to understand. "I am very sorry," he answered, "that he has taken so ill the granting of a title which will do him no harm in any reader's mind."[283] Bayle was not aware that Locke had been denied in 1666 his doctorship by the hostile Oxford authorities. Locke's behaviour is a characteristic instance of hard-dying resentment.
In February 1705, there had appeared in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, an "éloge" or kind of obituary notice on Locke.[284] After a short account of the philosopher's life, followed some details on his character, among which it may be read that he was impatient of contradiction and easily roused to anger. "In general, it must be owned, he was naturally somewhat choleric. But his anger never lasted long. If he retained any resentment, it was against himself for having given way to so ridiculous a passion; which, as he used to say, may do a great deal of harm, but never yet did the least good. He would often blame himself for this weakness." The following passage in one of Coste's letters may serve to illustrate that general statement: "I remember that conversing one day with Mr. Locke, the discourse happening to light upon innate ideas, I ventured this objection: what must we think of birds such as the goldfinch that, hatched in the parents' nest, will fly away at last into the open in quest of food without either parent taking the least care, and that, a year later, know very well where and how to find and select the material necessary for building a nest, which proves to be made and fitted up with as much or more art than the one in which they were hatched? Whence have come the ideas of those materials and the art of building a nest with them? To which Mr. Locke bluntly replied: 'I did not write my book to explain the actions of dumb creatures!' The answer is very good and the title of the book 'Philosophical Essay Concerning Human Understanding' shows it to be relevant." By the way, in alluding to the strange workings of heredity, Coste had come unawares upon the strongest argument in favour of innate ideas.
After Locke's death, a quarrel broke out among his friends. Anthony Collins, the free-thinker, loth to admit of a single objection to his master's theory such as he conceived it to be, thought that both Le Clerc and Coste were pursuing a deliberate plan of disparagement and resolved to denounce them publicly. In 1720, one of his dependents, the refugee Desmaizeaux, published a volume of Locke's posthumous works, prefaced with an attack on Coste. Le Clerc, whose explanation had been accepted, was spared.[285] "M. Coste," wrote Desmaizeaux, "in several writings, and in his common conversation throughout France, Holland, and England, has aspersed and blackened the memory of Mr. Locke, in those very respects wherein he was his panegyrist before."[286] No trace remains of the written strictures. A hitherto unpublished letter explains and justifies Collins' resentment. Reviewing a pamphlet of one Carroll against Locke, the Catholic Journal de Trévoux happened to say: "Such is the idea entertained in England about Mr. Locke whom a Letter written to Abbé Dauxi by Mr. De La Coste charges us with slandering. The printed letter has been circulated in Paris.... We are pleased to see English writers judge their countrymen in the same way as ourselves. Perhaps the exaggerated praise that M. Le Clerc heaps upon his friend Mr. Locke, is a more decisive proof that we have found out the latter's impiety."[287] On receiving the review, Coste indignantly denied having written the Letter to Abbé Dauxi. The attitude of the Trévoux reviewers he failed to understand. "Their synopsis of the Essay appeared to me very good, as far as I remember, and Mr. Locke, to whom I read it, was pretty well satisfied."[288] To show that his feelings toward his patron were unchanged, Coste reprinted his "éloge" in the second edition of his translation of the Essay (1729), adding these words: "If my voice is useless to the glory of Locke, it will serve at least to witness that having seen and admired his fine qualities, it was a pleasure for me to perpetuate their memory."
In Coste's papers information abounds on the corrections he made to the several editions of his translation of Locke. It would be an invidious task to transcribe the long lists of errata that he sends to faithful La Motte, who seems to supervise the work of the press, but it may prove interesting to know the names of great people on the Continent who are to receive presentation copies of the Essay. They are "the nuntio in Brussels, the Duchesse du Maine, M. Rémond in Paris, Abbé Salier, sub-librarian to the King."[289] In 1737, he mentions the success of the Thoughts concerning Education, reprinted in Rouen, upon the fourth Dutch edition. But the Reasonableness of Christianity fell dead from the press, the Paris booksellers not having a single copy in 1739.
On the spread of Locke's ideas on the Continent, Coste's letters bear out the evidence to be gathered elsewhere, notably from the Desmaizeaux papers in the British Museum. While the Thoughts concerning Education and the Essay were eagerly read, no one seemed to care about the social compact theory, toleration, or latitudinarian theology. As early as August 1700, Bernard writes to Desmaizeaux from the Hague that "Mr. Locke's book in French sells marvellously well." In 1707, according to Mrs. Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury's wife, the Essay was extensively read in Brussels.[290] In 1721, Veissière informed Desmaizeaux that he had presented the chancellor in Paris with "a miscellaneous collection of pieces of Look, in English," and received profuse thanks. The same year, another correspondent from Paris congratulated Desmaizeaux upon the publication of "M. Look's" posthumous works, and begged for information on the meaning of the words gravitation and attraction, "the English language," he added, "not being quite unknown to me." This, of course, was before Voltaire had "discovered" either Locke or Newton and summed up for the benefit of his countrymen their respective contributions to the advancement of anti-clericalism and free thought.
But it must be borne in mind that Peter Coste was not entirely engrossed in translations of Locke. One day, he gave La Motte his appreciation on Richard Cumberland's De legibus naturæ disquisitio philosophica "written in so rude a style one does not know whether it be Latin or English.... Those defects," he added, "have disappeared from Barbeyrac's translation." But an "English gentleman, a friend of Mr. Locke, with whom he studied in the same college at Oxford," has undertaken to publish an abridged edition "ampler than the original one and still less readable."
At another time, Coste was interested in a less serious book, Richardson's Pamela. The famous novel had just appeared unsigned. With Southern rashness, Coste met the difficulty of authorship with a wild guess. "I heard about Pamela in Paris, but I never read even a word of the book." However, he knows who wrote it, "'Tis M. Bernard, the son of our friend (the editor of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres) and minister to a French Church in London. I know it as a fact. The success of the work caused no doubt the author to let out the secret, which he had kept at first by publishing his work in English."[291] The eagerness with which these cosmopolitan writers seize upon any successful book, is both amusing and instructive.
To one of his correspondents Coste wrote about the same time: "I am, have been, and will remain all my life, to all appearances, in continual torment." It was a weary old man who talked on in that way. Fortune had ceased to smile. Now let us turn to another scene: Peter Coste, in all the confident strength of early manhood, is writing a series of letters of love which the author of Pamela would have surely appreciated.