CHAPTER XV.
Remarks on costume and manners in the time of Anne—Literary men, their habits and station in society—The system of patronage—Its effects in degrading the moral character of writers—In producing not only flattery, but slander—Mrs. De la Rivière Manley—Dr. Drake—Prior—Congreve.
The manners and spirit of the period of which we treat are so fully exemplified in those periodical publications of the day, which are in the hands of every English reader, that no digression for the purpose of illustrating the mode of social life, with which we are all so familiar, appears necessary. With the costumes of the fashionable world, the pages of the “Tatler,” “Spectator,” and other works, have rendered us intimately acquainted. It is sufficient to remark, that in this last respect the customs which prevailed in the reign of William were but slightly varied when Steel and Addison handed them down to fame. Formality of manner, and decorum in dress, had already succeeded the negligence and indelicacy of the preceding century. Still there were gross absurdities creeping into vogue. As we have ever borrowed the most startling extravagances from the French, so we owed to Louis the Fourteenth the long reign of perukes, in the adoption of which we were servile copyists, until good sense drove out those disfiguring encumbrances, and left mankind free to breathe and to move untrammelled. When Anne reigned, many lived, more especially amongst the sons of the aristocracy, who could scarcely remember to have worn their own locks. Boys were quickly disguised in flowing curls—the higher the rank, the greater the profusion. Thence they rose to the dignity of a scratch for their undress, and to that of the waving flaxen peruke, called by a wag, “the silver fleece.” White wigs, frosted with powder, had succeeded the dark curling perukes which were in vogue in the reign of Charles the Second; and the use of powder had become lamentably universal. For this extravagance outraged nature was indebted, also, to that most artificial of human beings, Louis the Fourteenth, whose very statues were laden with enormous wigs; and the monarch himself wore one even in bed.[[486]]
William the Third seldom varied his dress; but, after the accession of Anne, female extravagance and male absurdity rose to their climax. Whilst the summit of each exquisite courtier was crowned with a flowing peruke, redolent of perfume, and replete with powder, on the which sat a small cocked-hat, his nether proportions were mounted aloft on high heels, affixed to varnished and stiffened boots, or to shoes garnished with large buckles. The costume of the present court dress, with its accompaniments of plain cravats and lace ruffles, completes the picture.
The ladies of the court of Anne were befitting partners for such objects. Their hair was curled and frizzed, and in the early part of the eighteenth century it rose high, surmounted by a sort of veil or lappet, but diminished to a small caul with two lappets, termed a mob. Raised heels continued in vogue to a very late period; whilst hoops, in Anne’s time, were in their infancy, commencing in what was then called a “commode,” which gently raised and set out the flowing train. In this respect our fair ancestresses resembled our modern ladies; but in one essential point they differed greatly. Modesty of attire, brought into public estimation by the example of their truly respectable Queen, was uniformly studied; and the loose and indelicate style in which Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Peter Lely painted the female aristocracy, was to be seen no more. With some deviations, the commendable practice of being adequately clothed, continued until after the time of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits bear out the fact, that decency of apparel in his days, as it had been in those before him, distinguished a gentlewoman from a female of loose character. Unhappily for the nineteenth century, this distinction is now thoughtlessly abandoned.
Concerning the immorality of our forefathers, many hints must necessarily, in the course of this work, escape, without any intention of enlarging upon so disagreeable a subject. There is little doubt but that the free strictures of the public press, conjoined with the influence and example of the court, served greatly to check the misrule and reckless profligacy which, even in the sober days of William, had been accounted spirited and fashionable by the young nobility and their sycophants. The “Hectors,” a species of the bravo genus, were the illustrious predecessors of the “Mohawks,”[[487]] whose inglorious courses have been the subjects of so much admirable satire from Addison,[[488]] and who have gradually subsided into a description of creature less dangerous, though perhaps equally reprehensible and offensive. The female portion of the community, among the higher ranks, are described by a contemporary writer to have been the slaves of punctilio and ceremony, and to have sat, in all the stateliness of their costume, “silent as statues”[[489]] in the company of men,—amongst whom alone cultivation of the intellect, in those days, had become general.
No sooner was a settled monarchy established, and the country relieved from the dreaded dangers of a second civil war, than literature revived, and resumed the flourishing aspect, though not the sound and vigorous condition, to which, in the days of Elizabeth, it had happily attained. The impoverished state of a great portion of the country, and the decay of many ancient and once wealthy families, rendered the pursuit of literature essential as a profession to those who preferred walking in the paths of science, or following the footsteps of the Muses, to the perilous duties of a soldier, or to the service of a church torn by contentions, and threatened with hourly destruction.
The profession of letters is supposed to have been at its height of prosperity during the middle and latter part of the reign of Anne. Some unpleasant peculiarities, however, attended its exercise. Since those days, the extension of education, and the general taste for knowledge which has consequently been diffused, have gradually effected a considerable change in the position of literary men. The lettered and the scientific are now able to rise to fame independent of individual patronage, excepting in instances of extreme poverty, by which the exertions are either shackled or turned into different and inferior channels.
In the times of Anne, that approbation of literary merit which is necessary to its existence, and which gradually swells into an universal tribute to genius, originated with the higher orders of society, or, at least, if unparticipated by them, languished and died away. In our own days, on the contrary, it is the testimony of the middle classes to merits which they are now qualified to discern, and the gratification which they manifest in the productions of the lettered world, which lead the way to what is vaguely called popularity. It is not easy to define the causes of this remarkable change in one part of our social economy.
From the exclusive enjoyment of the privileges of education, which were confined to the higher classes, and by them only moderately enjoyed, arose the system of patronage which, for nearly a century, regulated the commonwealth of letters. The benefits conferred proceeded solely from the nobility and richer gentry, amongst whom literature and the arts found that protection which is now derived from the common tribute of mankind. No distinction was accounted greater, among the nobility, than the power, and disposition, to reward literary merit. To be a patron of the learned, to protect, with more effectual aids than mere empty commendations, some one, if not several, of the needy wits who came to the metropolis on speculation, was as essential a line of conduct to any young nobleman who aspired to fashionable distinction, as it is now to belong to a certain order of society, or to possess the attributes, without which gentlemen, in every age, must sooner or later sink in the estimation of their own class. There were few of the stately halls and pleasure saloons of the noblemen of that time, in which some learned dependent was not to be seen, sharing the festivities, and enhancing the social pleasures of the liberal patron, whom he failed not to repay in sonorous verse, or with dedications in prose, of lofty phraseology. The old system of remunerating dedications by sums of money, unhesitatingly offered and unblushingly received, prevailed even until the close of the eighteenth century. More solid advantages were also derived to the fortunate literati by patronage. The celebrated St. Evremond took his seat at Devonshire-house, pensioned by its high-minded and noble owner, and experienced such liberality in England, that he declined returning to France, even when not only permitted, but encouraged to dwell in his native country. Dryden had his Buckingham and his Ormonde, ducal patrons with whom he lived on terms of familiarity; and Congreve had friends no less elevated in rank, the Dukes of Marlborough and of Newcastle. Halifax, as we have seen, was “fed with dedications,” by Steele and others. Gay had his Queensberry, in whose stately abode he was absolutely domesticated. Innumerable other instances might be adduced.
The notorious fact, that whilst the middling and lower classes were generally indifferent to literature, the gay and the great mingled some attentions to it with all their daily frivolities and nightly revelries, may be accounted for, in the beginning of the last century, by the distinctions of Cavalier and Roundhead being not as yet wholly obsolete: the spirit, though not the form, of these distinctions remained. Before the civil wars, and as long as the Stuarts ruled, taste, fancy, wit, the culture of letters, and the patronage of the arts, were cherished by the highly-horn and the well-bred, the more that they were avoided by the Puritans, as temptations to forget the grand business of life. The young nobleman who had not some small amount of poetical fame, amplified into extraordinary fecundity of genius by the gratitude of poorer and wittier men, seemed to the world scarcely to have fulfilled his destiny, as a man born to all the luxuries of praise and fame. The commotions of the second James’s reign, and the indifference of his grave successor to the interests of learning, checked, but did not annihilate the notion, that to nobility some exhibition of literary taste, and an extensive appreciation of it in others, were essential attributes.
The effect of this prevailing fashion of patronage on the one side, and of dependence on the other, was not to destroy our literature, assuredly, for never were its shoots so abundant, nor its blossoms so fair, as in the famed Augustan age; but whilst it called forth imaginative minds, and rendered the pursuit of letters a profession worthy of the name, in so far as emoluments might be procured, it debased the moral character of men in proportion as it rendered their intellectual powers marketable to the rich and the powerful. Adulation became a trade; and when such base commodity was found to be in request, slander was soon perceived to be no less profitable to him who sped the arrow of calumny which flieth by night, or the pestilence of destruction by day.
Indelicacy, and its consequence, immorality, being likewise acceptable, in an age when a father could jest with his son on the success of that son’s amours,[[490]] the taste of the lofty and luxurious patron was even consulted by writers whose nobleness of thought and elevation of fancy might have led the world to expect better fruits from the growth of their own untrammelled inclinations. Hence that mixture of “dissolute licentiousness and abject adulation,” of which Johnson too justly accuses Dryden; but from which our older poets, the pure and exalted Milton, and his inimitable predecessors, Shakspeare, Cowley, Spenser, were nobly exempt. The merriment, and the adulation of Dry den were, as Johnson also remarks, “artificial and constrained, the effects of study and meditation,—his trade, rather than his pleasure;” and the same may, with reverence, be observed of the prince of flatterers, the great, the little, the powerful, the weak, the satirical, the fawning Alexander Pope.
The system of patronage called into being another class of writers, who also “traded in corruption.” These were the political pamphleteers of the day, a paid regiment, in which, to the disgrace of the sex, a female author, unparalleled in any day for the power of invention, or rather of perversion, received no slight encouragement in her gross and horrible attacks upon personal character, from the most eminent in rank and in intellect among the party by whom her services were hired.
Mrs. de la Rivière Manley, or Rivella as she was figuratively called, the pupil, in her early days, of the infamous Madame Mazarin, and the confidante of the scarcely less infamous Duchess of Cleveland, was the disseminator, if not the originator, of those calumnies which party spirit chose to affix to the characters of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and of the latter in conjunction with Lord Godolphin. Her own history, translated from the French, and supposed in the narrative to be communicated by Louis Duc d’Aumont, ambassador in England, in 1712, to his friend General Tidcomb, whilst taking the air in Somerset-house garden, is said, by its dreadful details, sufficiently to prepare those who are condemned to read it, for the subsequent works of this wretched woman. Of these, the most popular were her “Atalantis,” the “History of Prince Mirabel’s (Marlborough’s) Infancy, Rise, and Disgrace, collected from the Memoirs of a Courtier lately deceased,” and the “Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians,”[[491]] first published and inserted among the State Tracts by Dean Swift, in 1715.[[492]] This patronage on the part of Swift, which scarcely excites our wonder in the clergyman who could remodel and publish the “Tale of a Tub,” ceased only with the life of the abandoned Rivella, which closed at an advanced age, in 1724.
Dr. James Drake, the author of “The Memorial of the Church of England,” was a man of liberal education and of considerable attainments, which, unhappily for him, were applied to serve political rancour, instead of being confined to the medical profession, of which he was a member. Dr. Drake was a native of Cambridge, a Master of Arts in that university, and fellow both of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society. Yet he found it more profitable, notwithstanding the patronage of Sir Thomas Millington, to devote his talents to the service of booksellers, who quickly appreciated his powers of invective and ridicule. It was disappointment on not being made one of the commissioners of the sick and wounded, which induced Drake, after successive publications, to publish the “Memorial,” in conjunction with Mr. Poley, the member for Ipswich. In this production, after referring to the death of King William, Drake comments upon the “numerous, corrupt, and licentious party throughout the nation, from which the House of Commons was sometimes not free,” who might “entertain hopes, from the advantage of being at the helm, and the assistance of their rabble, to have put into practice their own schemes, and to have given us a new model of government of their own projection,” and “to have mounted their own beast, the rabble, and driven the sober part of the nation like cattle before them.” That this was no conjecture was proved, the author stated, by the conduct of the party to the Queen, towards whom, “not contented with showing her a constant neglect and slight themselves, they also instructed their whole party to treat her with disrespect and slight. They were busy to traduce her with false and scandalous aspersions; and so far they carried the affront, as to make her at one time almost the common subject of the tittle-tattle of every coffee-house and drawing-room, which they promoted with as much zeal, application, and venom, as if a bill of exclusion had been then on the anvil, and these were the introductory ceremonies.”[[493]]
Lord Godolphin, and certain other of the ministry, were so much scandalized at these comments, that they represented to Queen Anne that the publication was an insult to her honour, and prevailed upon her Majesty to address both Houses upon the subject, in the Parliament which met October 27th, 1705. Accordingly, after a long debate, “it was voted that the church was not in danger,” and her Majesty was entreated to punish the authors of the “Memorial.” The printer was accordingly taken into custody, and, being examined before one of the secretaries of state, deposed that the manuscript of the “Memorial” was brought to him by a lady in a mask, accompanied by another lady barefaced, who, together, stipulated to have two hundred and fifty copies printed, which were delivered to four porters sent by the parties who brought the “Memorial.” But although the lady without a mask and three of the porters were found, Dr. Drake remained undiscovered; and the indignant ministry were obliged to convict him upon another publication.
Drake was the editor of a newspaper, entitled “The Mercurius Politicus,” for which he was prosecuted in the Queen’s Bench in the ensuing year, but acquitted upon a flaw in the information, the word NOR being inserted in the written information, and, in the libel given in evidence, the word NOT. Eventually the prosecution killed Drake, for the anxieties attending it, and the ill usage of some of his party, brought on a fever of which he died, bitterly exclaiming against the severity of his enemies. Thus speedily were extinguished an energetic spirit, and abilities adapted to higher purposes than those to which they were applied. Besides displaying in his writings great command of language, Dr. Drake possessed a well-stored and philosophic mind. Amid historical, political, and even dramatic works, he published a “New System of Anatomy,” which met with deserved praise and success.[[494]]
It would require a work of some extent to describe the innumerable productions of the day in which the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, under fictitious names, were alternately defamed and defended. The authors of these productions came forth like bats and owls, in the twilight and in darkness, when the political day of the great Colossus, as the Duke was called, and of “Queen Sarah,” was overcast by the shades of night. They were for the most part answered, and they cannot, on the whole, be said to have affixed any stain upon the memory of the great hero, or on the more faulty conduct of the imperious favourite, whom they assaulted generally in the grossest manner, and with invective rather than facts.[[495]]
Attacks so violent as these soon pass out of remembrance, consumed in their own heat; for it is only the wary and well-directed operations of a cautious hand that wound, and injure, and endure. Already had the Duke, and Duchess, and their party a powerful, though latent foe, who, in the retirement of an Irish parsonage, divided his days between the gentler arts of deluding the affections, and alternately beguiling and breaking the hearts, of weak, but fondly disinterested women; and of advancing the cause of the church,—if those efforts could be called advancement, which disseminated immorality, whilst they advocated the constitution of the hierarchy. Jonathan Swift, by all accounts the least lovable, and yet the most dangerous, of mankind, was at this time nominally a Whig, but a disappointed Whig, in his inert and chrysalis state, awaiting only the necessary change to become a Tory. Brought up in dependence, and his deportment as a “fine gentleman spoiled,” as he declared, by a subservience half affectionate, half abject, towards his great patron, Sir William Temple,[[496]] the arbitrary, sarcastic, and selfish spirit of this most able, but most unhappy man, grew under the check of adversity, which cannot soften all natures. He was a tyrant,—from the domestic cruelty of forcing a guest to eat asparagus in King William’s way,[[497]] to the monstrous ingratitude, indelicacy, and perfidy of influencing his supposed wife, the beautiful, the devoted Stella, to bear the imputed ignominy of being his mistress. He was a timeserver, as selfish men may be expected to become; and a calumniator, from the same narrow principles of self-advancement. Swift, at this period, was living in the unrestrained enjoyment of the attachment with which he had inspired the unhappy Stella, then scarcely twenty years of age, in all the bloom of that beauty of form and face which were destined to fade beneath the pressure of suspense, expectation, disappointment, and despair. Already had the moral profligate, if we may so call him, secured his Stella from the addresses of a respectable clergyman, who had applied to Swift in the capacity of the lady’s guardian, acting in which office Swift had demanded such unreasonable terms of settlement, that the honest lover was unable to accede to them.[[498]] This love of evasion, this mixture of moderation with passion, of prudence with grasping desires, marked the political, as well as the personal character of Swift. Generally speaking, the high churchmen of those days were Tories, and the low churchmen Whigs. It is not easy to say why, except for the purposes of party, this should be the case; nor can we reasonably justify a suspicion that an ardent promoter of the principles of the Revolution, like Swift, could not be equally sincere in his ultra notions of liberty, and in his vehement advocacy of the high church cause. His subsequent abandonment of the Whig party confirms the uncomfortable and foreboding feelings with which we behold him, in one poem extolling the constancy of Archbishop Sancroft, who refused the oaths to William and Mary,[[499]] and, in another, on the burning of Whitehall,[[500]] declaring that nothing could purify that ancient palace, after the residence of the Stuarts. Speaking of James the Second—
“He’s gone—the rank infection still remains;
Which to repel requires eternal pains:
No force to cleanse it can a river draw,
Nor Hercules could do’t, nor great Nassau.”[[501]]
It was not difficult to predict that Swift would be one of the first to lend his too powerful aid to darken the portraits of the Whigs, when any future cloud should throw a gloom over those services and talents which he once magnified and extolled.
The advocate of Somers, and of Halifax, Oxford, and Portland, in 1701, Swift had now become the friend of Addison, Steele, Arbuthnot, and other noted men, whom he met at Button’s coffee-house, and to whom, not knowing his rare talents, nor hearing him at first even utter a syllable, they gave the name of “the mad parson.” The appearance of the “Tale of a Tub,” in 1704, published in spite of his intimacy with the little knot of friends, called “Addison’s senate,” in order to benefit the interests of the high church party, by exposing the errors and corruptions of Popery, concentrated the good-will of the Tory chiefs, who could not be blind to the powerful assistance of one who could aid them with the engine of ridicule. But, in giving to the world this production, Swift proved himself to be, like many unprincipled men, near-sighted, and destroyed all hopes of that high preferment to which he aspired. Although the “Tale of a Tub” has since been claimed, but with no certainty, as the original idea of Somers,[[502]] and although it was, at the time of its publication, imputed to a pedantic and simple cousin of Swift, the real author was tolerably well surmised, and eventually ascertained.[[503]]
The real lovers of religion, and the sincere adherents of the Church of England, were shocked and disgusted by this celebrated satire, and Queen Anne could never be prevailed upon to bestow on the author the preferment which he panted to obtain, by fair, or, if these were inexpedient, by any means.
If other statements are to be credited, one who held a high place in her Majesty’s confidence was the original framer of the bold composition.
Whether this conjecture be true or not, there is abundant reason to conclude that Swift enriched the original design by the effusions of his surpassing wit, to which he sacrificed the all important considerations of character. It was not long before he gave proofs, that if he were not the sole author of the “Tale of a Tub,” he was fully capable of being so, by his Letter on the “Relaxation of the Sacramental Text,” which he also endeavoured, but vainly, to conceal.[[504]] But it was at a later period that Swift began that series of attacks upon the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and on their party, in his papers in the “Examiner,” a periodical paper set on foot by himself, Dr. Atterbury, St. John, Prior, Dr. Frend, and other Tory writers, after the administration had passed from the hands of Godolphin and Marlborough into those of Harley and his party. To this powerful production, sustained with an apparent calmness and exactness of statement, which gave indescribable effect to its bitter remarks and searching analyses, the Duchess of Marlborough was indebted for much of her unpopularity, and Harley for a considerable proportion of his influence over the public mind.[[505]] The portion of the papers for which Swift was solely responsible, are acknowledged to be greatly superior to the subsequent essays. Swift himself prophesied the inferiority. Upon the publication of number forty-four, which was the last he wrote, he intimated to his friends that the rest would be “trash for the future;” and the subsequent papers were, he says, “written by some under-spur leathers in the city, and were designed merely as proper returns to those Grub-street invectives which were thrown out against the (Tory) administration by the authors of the ‘Medley’ and the ‘Englishman,’ and some other abusive detracting papers of the like stamp.”
The result fully bore out this prediction; and the “Examiner,” of all the attacks which were made upon the Marlborough party and their friends, the most obnoxious to them, and beneficial to their enemies, soon sank in reputation, and altogether ceased. But its disparaging effects upon those whom it assailed were long experienced; and the party which this celebrated publication attacked, never recovered the popularity and stability which it first undermined.