Anthony Wood and Locke—Milton and Sprat—Burnet and his History—Prior and Addison—Swift and Steele—Wagstaffe and Steele—Steele and Addison—Hooke and Middleton—Gilbert Wakefield—Marvel and Milton—Clarendon and May.
Voltaire, in his letters on our nation, has hit off a marked feature in our national physiognomy. “So violent did I find parties in London, that I was assured by several that the Duke of Marlborough was a coward, and Mr. Pope a fool.”
A foreigner indeed could hardly expect that in collecting the characters of English authors by English authors (a labour which has long afforded me pleasure often interrupted by indignation)—in a word, that a class of literary history should turn out a collection of personal quarrels. Would not this modern Baillet, in his new Jugemens des Sçavans, so ingeniously inquisitive but so infinitely confused, require to be initiated into the mysteries of that spirit of party peculiar to our free country!
All that boiling rancour which sputters against the thoughts, the style, the taste, the moral character of an author, is often nothing more than practising what, to give it a name, we may call Political Criticism in Literature; where an author’s literary character is attacked solely from the accidental circumstance of his differing in opinion from his critics on subjects unconnected with the topics he treats of.
Could Anthony Wood, had he not been influenced by this political criticism, have sent down Locke to us as “a man of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never contented, prating and troublesome?”[338] But Locke was the antagonist of Filmer, that advocate of arbitrary power; and Locke is 424 described “as bred under a fanatical tutor,” and when in Holland, as one of those who under the Earl of Shaftesbury “stuck close to him when discarded, and carried on the trade of faction beyond and within the seas several years after.” In the great original genius, born, like Bacon and Newton, to create a new era in the history of the human mind, this political literary critic, who was not always deficient in his perceptions of genius, could only discover “a trader in faction,” though in his honesty he acknowledges him to be “a noted writer.”
A more illustrious instance of party-spirit operating against works of genius is presented to us in the awful character of Milton. From earliest youth to latest age endowed with all the characteristics of genius; fervent with all the inspirations of study; in all changes still the same great literary character as Velleius Paterculus writes of one of his heroes—“Aliquando fortunâ, semper animo maximus:” while in his own day, foreigners, who usually anticipate posterity, were inquiring after Milton, it is known how utterly disregarded he lived at home. The divine author of the “Paradise Lost” was always connected with the man for whom a reward was offered in the London Gazette. But in their triumph, the lovers of monarchy missed their greater glory, in not separating for ever the republican Secretary of State from the rival of Homer.
That the genius of Milton pined away in solitude, and that all the consolations of fame were denied him during his life, from this political criticism on his works, is generally known; but not perhaps that this spirit propagated itself far beyond the poet’s tomb. I give a remarkable instance. Bishop Sprat, who surely was capable of feeling the poetry of Milton, yet from political antipathy retained such an abhorrence of his name, that when the writer of the Latin Inscription on the poet John Philips, in describing his versification, applied to it the term Miltono, Sprat ordered it to be erased, as 425 polluting a monument raised in a church.[339] A mere critical opinion on versification was thus sacrificed to political feeling:—a stream indeed which in its course has hardly yet worked itself clear. It could only have been the strong political feeling of Warton which could have induced him to censure the prose of Milton with such asperity, while he closed his critical eyes on its resplendent passages, which certainly he wanted not the taste to feel,—for he caught in his own pages, occasionally, some of the reflected warmth. This feeling took full possession of the mind of Johnson, who, with all the rage of political criticism on subjects of literature, has condemned the finest works of Milton, and in one of his terrible paroxysms has demonstrated that the Samson Agonistes is “a tragedy which ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded.” Had not Johnson’s religious feelings fortunately interposed between Milton and his “Paradise,” we should have wanted the present noble effusion of his criticism; any other Epic by Milton 426 had probably sunk beneath his vigorous sophistry, and his tasteless sarcasm. Lauder’s attack on Milton was hardily projected, on a prospect of encouragement, from this political criticism on the literary character of Milton; and he succeeded as long as he could preserve the decency of the delusion.
The Spirit of Party has touched with its plague-spot the character of Burnet; it has mildewed the page of a powerful mind, and tainted by its suspicions, its rumours, and its censures, his probity as a man. Can we forbear listening to all the vociferations which faction has thrown out? Do we not fear to trust ourselves amid the multiplicity of his facts? And when we are familiarised with the variety of his historical portraits, are we not startled when it is suggested that “they are tinged with his own passions and his own weaknesses?” Burnet has indeed made “his humble appeal to the great God of Truth” that he has given it as fully as he could find it; and he has expressed his abhorrence of “a lie in history,” so much greater a sin than a lie in common discourse, from its lasting and universal nature. Yet these hallowing protestations have not saved him! A cloud of witnesses, from different motives, have risen up to attaint his veracity and his candour; while all the Tory wits have ridiculed his style, impatiently inaccurate, and uncouthly negligent, and would sink his vigour and ardour, while they expose the meanness and poverty of his genius. Thus the literary and the moral character of no ordinary author have fallen a victim to party-feeling.[340]
But this victim to political criticism on literature was himself criminal, and has wreaked his own party feelings on the Papist Dryden, and the Tory Prior; Dryden he calls, in the 428 most unguarded language, “a monster of immodesty and impurity of all sorts.” There had been a literary quarrel between Dryden and Burnet respecting a translation of Varillas’ “History of Heresies;” Burnet had ruined the credit of the papistical author while Dryden was busied on the translation; and as Burnet says, “he has wreaked his malice on me for spoiling his three months’ labour.” In return, he kindly informs Dryden, alluding to his poem of “The Hind and the Panther,” “that he is the author of the worst poem the age has produced;” and that as for “his morals, it is scarce possible to grow a worse man than he was”—a personal style not to be permitted in any controversy, but to bring this passion on the hallowed ground of history, was not “casting away his shoe” in the presence of the divinity of truth.[341] It could only have been the spirit of party which 429 induced Burnet, in his History, to mention with contempt and pretended ignorance so fine a genius as “one Prior, who had been Jersey’s secretary.” It was the same party-feeling in the Tory Prior, in his elegant “Alma,” where he has interwoven so graceful a wreath for Pope, that could sneer at the fine soliloquy of the Roman Cato of the Whig Addison: