Isaac Watts; his life and writings, his homes and friends

by Edwin Paxton Hood

Has swelled the storm on high,

To waft my boat and me to land,

Or give some angel swift command

To bear the drowning sailor to the sky.”

A work like this would be incomplete if it did not attempt some general estimate, however feeble, of our author’s works, which are, however, so various that it is difficult to bring their relation to their author’s mind beneath one classification. The remark Dr. Jennings made in his funeral sermon is simply just, when he says he “questions whether any author before Dr. Watts ever appeared with a reputation on such a variety of subjects as he has, both as a prose writer and a poet. However,” he adds, “this I may venture to say, there is no man now living of whose works so many have been diffused at home and abroad, which are in such constant use, and translated into such a variety of languages, many of which I doubt not will remain more durable monuments of his great talents than any representation I can make of them, though it were to be graven on pillars of brass. Thus did he shine as an ingenious man and a scholar.”

This circumstance of the variety of his writings constitutes them an element of his character: he was more various than intense, acute rather than profound. There are some of his works upon which we need not permit ourselves to be detained, they illustrate his readiness in turning to every kind of labour which seemed to give the promise of usefulness, for usefulness was evidently in everything the object he set before himself. Regarded by the immense apparatus now at hand for every kind of mental exercise Watts’ labours do some of them seem needless; but regarded from his own age, it appears as if he created, originated, and gave effect to almost every department of religious or improving knowledge. If the reader looks round the literary horizon of that day, he will learn rightly to estimate the benefits conferred by this writer; and these works, the smallest, the most inferior of his mental exercises, were not one of them a mere compilation, they were all the emanations of that perpetually active mind, which, whether the body were well or ill, must be employed for some useful object and end. None of his books were made out of other books, excepting, indeed, so far as almost every volume must imply the knowledge of a subject and the mind of an author; and at the same time it must be said that some of his books for the young have been dropped but not surpassed; they might still furnish the best hints and the best arrangements for obtaining and imparting knowledge.

Being a literary man, Watts falls beneath a class of observations which are not either necessary or applicable in forming an estimate of almost any of his brethren, such as Howe, or Jacomb, or Bradbury, or, indeed, any of the writers of his order or day. The wisdom of his mind was remarkable; it was “a city, built four square.” In this useful purpose, which he ever kept before him, whatever charges may be preferred against him on the score of the indulgence of fancy (and many of his writings reveal how capable he was of such excursions), he kept his mind singularly free from the literary vanities of his times, and his times as singularly illustrate at once the vanity and the glory of literature. If anybody would know what vanities there were, let him take down the volumes of the Athenian Oracle,[48] and he will find few other volumes which will give so lively an impression of the literary folly of those times. Old Samuel Wesley, John Wesley’s father, did not disdain to contribute largely to those pages; they are affluent in absurdities, while they have a show of learned ignorance. Select a few; most of the essays are in the way of question and answer. “Balaam being a Moabite, how could he understand the ass speaking to him in Hebrew? How came the two disciples to know Moses and Elias on the mount? I am resolved to go round the earth on foot; I desire to know whether my head or my feet will travel the most, and how much the one more than the other? Whether or no there is a vacuum? Whether it is more proper to say the soul contains the body, or the body the soul? Whether the quadrature of the circle be possible? Pray, why does a n d not spell t u m? t h e, m e d? etc. etc. Whether Adam was a giant? How a silkworm lives when it has left off eating and is enclosed in its web? Whether it is prudent to live in a room haunted by spirits? Whether, since mermen and mermaids have more of the human shape than other fishes, they may be thought to have more reason? Where extinguished fire goes to? Where was the land of Nod? How is it the spaniel knows its master’s horse? Whether a finite creature is capable of enduring infinite loss?” etc. etc.

These volumes, perhaps, constitute the most amazing collection of nonsense in our own or any other language; nor are they without a certain value as illustrating, not only the time, then in possession of men, but the ridiculous way in which they used it. Of course there are questions, and many of them, of a more grave and serious character, but for the most part they are the very soap-bubbles of the most foppish and foolish imaginations, the most undisciplined and frequently prurient and indecent fancies. The indulgence in these was quite a phase of the intellectual life of the time. A singular chapter in the curiosities of literature and science a reader may find in such volumes as the “Philosophical Conferences of France;”[49] and the vanities of theology were quite equal to the vanities of literature, as may be seen in the innumerable productions of the time.

With a mind so disposed to imaginative excursions, it is quite worthy of notice that Watts preserved a wise balance of all his powers and faculties; he lived on the confines of the age of the wildest mysticism our literature has known. From some words in his works he appears to have been well acquainted with the writings of Henry More, and also to have entertained for them that reverence and respect which assuredly many of them command; but from their singular and erratic fancies he kept himself quite free. Very strange are the matters with which we find these old men entertained themselves, affirming “that God of Himself is a dale of darkness, were it not for the light of the Son;” “that the star-powers are Nature, and the star-circle the mother of all things, from which all is, subsists, and moves;” “that the waters of the world are mad, which makes them rave and run up and down, so as they do in the channels of the earth;” “that they, at last, shall be calcined into crystal;” “that the pure blood in man answers to the element of fire in the great world, his heart to the earth, his mouth to the Arctic pole; and”—but we will not finish this sublime stretch of metaphysical imagination—“that there be two kinds of fires, the one a cold fire and the other hot, and that death is a cold fire;” “that everything has sense, imagination, and a fiducial knowledge of God in it—metals, meteors, and plants not excepted.” Also the like pleasant excursions of fancy are found in “Paracelsus,” as “that the stars are, as it were, the phials, or cucurbits, in which meteorical sal, sulphur, and mercury are contained, and that the winds are made out of these by the ethereal vulcans, are blown forth out of these emunctories, as when a man blows or breathes out of his mouth;” “that the stars are, as it were, the pots in which the archeus, or heavenly vulcan, prepares pluvious matter, which, exhaled from thence, first appears in the form of clouds, and after condenses to rain;” “that hail and snow are the fruits of the stars, proceeding from them as flowers and blossoms from trees;” “that the lightning and thunder are, as it were, the deciduous fruits of the ethereal stars;” “that the stars eat and are nourished,” etc. etc.