We are too apt, I think, to dismiss this author from our thoughts as a man full only of dreary metaphysic subtleties; and support the belief with the story that our Jonathan Edwards read his treatise on the Human Understanding with great delight at the age of fourteen. Yet Locke, although a man of the keenest and rarest intellect—which almost etherialized his looks—was possessed of a wonderful deal of what he would have called “hard, round-about sense;” indeed it would be quite possible to fill a whole calendar with bits of his printed talk that would be as pitpat and common-sensical as anything in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Moreover, he could, on occasions, tell a neat and droll story, which would set the “table in a roar.”
Some facts in the life of this great thinker and writer are worth our remembering, not only by reason of the fame of his books, but because in all those years whose turbulent rush and corrupting influences have shown themselves in our pages, John Locke lived an upright, manly, self-respecting life, though brought into intimate relations with many most prominent at court. He was born in Western England, north of the Mendip Hills; and after fourteen years of quiet country life, and kind parental training, among the orchard slopes of Somersetshire, went to Westminster School; was many years thereafter at Oxford; studied medicine; met Lord Ashley (afterward the great Shaftesbury—first party-leader in English parliamentary history), who was so taken by the pale, intellectual face of the young Doctor that he carried him off to London, and domiciled him in his great house upon the Strand. There Locke directed the studies of Ashley’s son; and presently—such was my Lord’s confidence in him—was solicited to find a wife for the young gentleman;[94] which he did, to the great acceptance of all parties, by taking him off into Rutlandshire, and introducing him to a pretty daughter of the Earl of Rutland. Fancy the author of an Essay Concerning the Human Understanding setting off in a coach, with six long-tailed Flemish horses, for a four days’ journey into the north of England—with a young scion of the Ashleys—upon such an errand as that! Our doctors in metaphysics do not, I believe, engage in similar service; yet I suppose nice observation would disclose great and curious mental activities in the evolution of such schemes.
The philosopher must have known Dryden, both being early members of the Royal Society; but I have a fancy that Locke was a man who did not—save on rarest occasions—take a pipe and a mug at such a place as Will’s Coffee-house. His tastes led him more to banquets at Exeter House. There was foreign travel, also, in which he accomplished himself in continental languages and socialities; he had offers of diplomatic preferment, but his doubtful health (always making him what over-well people call a fussy man) forbade acceptance; else we might have had in him another Sir William Temple. Shaftesbury interested him in his scheme of new planting the Carolina colony in America; and John Locke drew up rules for its political guidance. Some of these sound very drolly now. Thus—no man was to be a freeman of Carolina unless he acknowledged a God, and agreed that he was to be publicly and solemnly worshipped. The members of one church were not to molest or persecute those of another. Again, “no one shall be permitted to plead before a court of justice for money or reward.” What a howling desert this would make of most of our courts!
Again, he writes with great zest upon the subject of Education, and almost with the warmth of that old Roger Ascham, whose maxims I cited in one of our earlier talks:
“Till you can find a school wherein it is possible for the master to look after the manners of his scholars, and can show as great effects of his care of forming their minds to virtue, and their carriage to good breeding, as of forming their tongues to the learned languages, you must confess that you have a strange value for words, to hazard your sons’ innocence and virtue for a little Greek and Latin.”
And again:
“I know not why anyone should waste his time and beat his head about the Latin grammar, who does not intend to be a critic, or make speeches, and write despatches in it. If his use of it be only to understand some books writ in it without a critical knowledge of the tongue itself, reading alone will attain his end, without charging his mind with the multiplied rules and intricacies of grammar.”…
“If there may be any reasons against children’s making Latin themes at school, I have much more to say and of more weight against their making verses—verses of any sort. For if he has no genius to poetry, ’tis the most unreasonable thing in the world to torment a child and waste his time about that which can never succeed: and if he have a poetic vein—methinks the parents should labor to have it stifled: for if he proves a successful rhymer, and get once the reputation of a wit, I desire it may be considered what company and places he is likely to spend his time in—nay, and his estate too.”
By which I am more than ever convinced that Locke did not sup often with Dryden at “Will’s,” and that you will find no pleasant verselets—look as hard as you may—on a single page of his discourse on the Human Understanding.