“Rehearsal Transprosed,” p. 45.
The late Gilbert Wakefield is an instance where the political and theological opinions of a recluse student tainted his pure literary works. Condemned as an enraged Jacobin by those who were Unitarians in politics, and rejected because he was a Unitarian in religion by the orthodox, poor Wakefield’s literary labours were usually reduced to the value of waste-paper. We smile, but half in sorrow, in reading a letter, where he says, “I meditate a beginning, during the winter, of my criticisms on all the ancient Greek and Latin authors, by small piecemeals, on the cheapest possible paper, and at the least possible expense of printing. As I can never do more than barely indemnify myself, I shall print only 250 copies.” He half-ruined himself by his splendid edition of Lucretius, which could never obtain even common patronage from the opulent friends of classical literature. Since his death it has been reprinted, and is no doubt now a marketable article for the bookseller; so that if some authors are not successful for themselves, it is a comfort to think how useful, in a variety of shapes, they are made so to others. Even Gilbert’s “contracted scheme of publication” he was compelled to abandon! Yet the classic erudition of Wakefield was confessed, and is still remembered. No one will doubt that we have lost a valuable addition to our critical stores by this literary persecution, were it only in the present instance; but examples are too numerous!
Shaftesbury has thrown out, on this head, some important truths:—“If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously, they will do it ironically. If they find it dangerous to do so, they will then redouble their disguise, invoke themselves into mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood. The persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery.”—Vol. i. p. 71. The subject of our present inquiry is a very remarkable instance of “involving himself into mysteriousness.” To this cause we owe the strong raillery of Marvell; the cloudy “Oracles of Reason” of Blount; and the formidable, though gross burlesque, of Hickeringill, the rector of All-Saints, in Colchester. “Of him (says the editor of his collected works, 1716), the greatest writers of our times trembled at his pen; and as great a genius as Sir Roger L’Estrange’s was, it submitted to his superior way of reasoning”—that is, to a most extraordinary burlesque spirit in politics and religion. But even he who made others tremble felt the terrors he inflicted; for he complains that “some who have thought his pen too sharp and smart, those who have been galled, sore men where the skin’s off, have long lain to catch for somewhat to accuse me—upon such touchy subjects, a man had need have the dexterity to split a hair, to handle them pertinently, usefully, and yet safely and warily.”—Such men, however, cannot avoid their fate: they will be persecuted, however they succeed in “splitting a hair;” and it is then they have recourse to the most absurd subterfuges, to which our Hobbes was compelled. Thus also it happened to Woolston, who wrote in a ludicrous way “Blasphemies” against the miracles of Christ; calling them “tales and rodomontados.” He rested his defence on this subterfuge, that “it was meant to place the Christian religion on a better footing,” &c. But the Court answered, that “if the author of a treasonable libel should write at the conclusion, God save the king! it would not excuse him.”
The moral axiom of Solon “Know thyself” (Nosce teipsum), applied by the ancient sage as a corrective for our own pride and vanity, Hobbes contracts into a narrow principle, when, in his introduction to “The Leviathan,” he would infer that, by this self-inspection, we are enabled to determine on the thoughts and passions of other men; and thus he would make the taste, the feelings, the experience of the individual decide for all mankind. This simple error has produced all the dogmas of cynicism; for the cynic is one whose insulated feelings, being all of the selfish kind, can imagine no other stirrer of even our best affections, and strains even our loftiest virtues into pitiful motives. Two noble authors, men of the most dignified feelings, have protested against this principle. Lord Shaftesbury keenly touches the characters of Hobbes and Rochester:—“Sudden courage, says our modern philosopher (Hobbes), is anger. If so, courage, considered as constant, and belonging to a character, must, in his account, be defined constant anger, or anger constantly recurring. All men, says a witty poet (Rochester), would be cowards, if they durst: that the poet and the philosopher both were cowards, may be yielded, perhaps, without dispute! they may have spoken the best of their knowledge.”—Shaftesbury, vol. i. p. 119.
With an heroic spirit, that virtuous statesman, Lord Clarendon, rejects the degrading notion of Hobbes. When he looked into his own breast, he found that courage was a real virtue, which had induced him, had it been necessary, to have shed his blood as a patriot. But death, in the judgment of Hobbes, was the most terrible event, and to be avoided by any means. Lord Clarendon draws a parallel between a “man of courage” and one of the disciples of Hobbes, “brought to die together, by a judgment they cannot avoid.” “How comes it to pass, that one of these undergoes death, with no other concernment than as if he were going any other journey; and the other with such confusion and trembling, that he is even without life before he dies; if it were true that all men fear alike upon the like occasion?”—Survey of the Leviathan, p. 14.