There is less room for divergence of judgment on the question of the way in which Mr. Jones has revealed the moral and social characteristics of his hero. Here he could hardly be excessive. The amiability, the ruggedness, the nervous instability, the obstinacy as of a rock, the tenderness and the sardonic bitterness which made up so strange an amalgam, are all frankly revealed. It is for us to arrange them, if we can, into a consistent portrait of a most inconsistent figure. Here is, taken at random, an entry of Butler's own, which gives a good example of several of his characteristics:
17th April 1895. I travelled from Patros to Athens with a young Turk, about thirty years old, and his dog—an English terrier. We were alone in the carriage the greater part of the time, and I suppose the poor dog was bored; at any rate, after a while, he made up to me. He licked me all over my face, and then began to pretend that my coat pocket had got a rat in it which he must catch. I was so flattered at being made up to by anyone or anything who seemed to tell me I was a nice person, that I let him go on and hunt for rats all over me, till at last his master interposed in beautiful English, and then we talked. He was a Secretary to the Turkish Legation, and was very clever and nice.
The incident could hardly be more trifling, but it is inimitably told; and it reveals not merely a mastery of minute description, but the self-tormenting temperament of a man of extraordinary talent who, for some unfathomable reason, though love was in his heart, was for ever out of harmony with the world, and suspicious of those whom he would fain have ingratiated. Those are the main lineaments which Mr. Festing Jones's biography reveals, and they are those of a miniaturist touching his ivory with a fastidious brush, and of a "born orphan" who could not find a home in the wilderness of jarring humanity.
A NOTE ON CONGREVE
CONGREVE'S principal Continental critic has remarked that literary history has behaved towards him in a very stepmotherly fashion (sehr stiefmütterlich). There is no other English poet of equal rank of the last two centuries and a half whose biography has been so persistently neglected. When, in 1888, I wrote my Life of Congreve I had had no predecessor since John Oldmixon, masquerading under the pseudonym of "Charles Wilson," published that farrago of lies and nonsense which he called Memoirs of The Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve, Esq., in 1730. In this kingdom of the blind, however one-eyed, I continue to be king, since in the thirty-three years succeeding the issue of my biography no one has essayed to do better what I did as well as I could. The only exception is the William Congreve, sein Leben und seine Lustspiele, published in 1897 by Dr. D. Schmid, who was, I believe, and perhaps still is, a professor in the University of Graz in Austria. I darted, full of anticipation, to the perusal of Dr. Schmid's volume, but was completely disappointed. He reposes upon me with a touching uniformity; he quotes me incessantly and with courteous acknowledgment; but I am unable to discover in his whole monograph one grain of fact, or correction of fact, not known to me in 1888.
In spite of this, I have always believed that someone with more patience and skill than I possess would be able to add much to our knowledge of a man who lived with the Pope and Swift and Addison of whom we know so much. The late George A. Aitken, who seemed to carry about with him a set of Röntgen rays which he applied to the members of the Age of Anne, would have been the man to do it. Not very long before his lamented death I urged the task upon Aitken; but his mind was set on other things, on Prior in particular. I do not know why it is that Congreve, one of the great dramatists of the world, perhaps our greatest social playwright, seems to lack personal attractiveness. It is a scandal that he has never been edited. His plays are frequently, but always imperfectly, reprinted, and without any editorial care. I was rejoiced to see that Mr. Montague Summers, than whom no one living is more competent to carry out such a labour, proposed to edit Congreve's plays. But even he did not intend to include the poems, the novel, or the letters; and I have heard no more of his project. To the book collector the folio publications of Congreve in verse are precious and amusing, but they have never attracted the notice of a bibliographer. Scholarship has, indeed, been stiefmütterlich towards Congreve, as the Austrian critic said.
My excuse for recalling this subject is the fact that I am able, through the kindness of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, to announce the existence of a work by Congreve hitherto unknown and unsuspected in its original form. In the matchless library of Mr. Wise there lurks an anonymous quarto of which the complete title is: "An Impossible Thing. A Tale. London: Printed: And Sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, MDCCXX." This was shown by Mr. Wise to several of our best authorities, who combined in the conjecture that it must be a hitherto unknown work by Prior. Yet since the poet's death—and this shows how little anybody reads Congreve—the contents of Mr. Wise's quarto have appeared in each successive edition of the Poems. But before this was perceived the truth had dawned upon Mr. Wise, who, turning over the Historical Account of the English Poets, a publication by Curll in 1720, found that the following entry occurs in the "Corrigenda":
Mr. Congreve. This Gentleman has lately oblig'd us with two Tales from Fontaine, entitled,
I. The Impossible Thing.
II. The Man That lost his Heifer.
These form his pamphlet of the same year, 1720. When Mr. Wise was kind enough to point this out to me it was only left for me to add that the anonymous Historical Account was the work of Giles Jacob, the friend whose notes on Congreve's life form the nucleus of all we know about him. Thus the authorship of the two poems was proved. And it was only after that proof that I turned to the index of the old editions and found there the two poems, lurking unsuspected. I blush to recall the painful incident.