Symposium is a word that has been much abused and vulgarised of late, but something like its true Platonic sense must have been realised by the company at Lord Falkland's, as they "examined and refined those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation":[Q] for a more Platonic programme it would be difficult to conceive. The pattern of the ideal republic is, we know, laid up somewhere in the heavens; but the republic of letters so far as it was represented, must have been as near the ideal in that house as it ever was on earth. And in this ideal one of Earle's characters already mentioned was not only a natural but a necessary element. "The contemplative man" is solitary, we are told, in company, but he would not be so in this company. "Outward show, the stream, the people," were not taken seriously at Lord Falkland's; and the man who "can spell heaven out of earth" would be the centre of a rare group—men upon whose fresh and eager appetites conversation that was "mysterious and inward" could not easily pall.
Bishop Berkeley is one of the very few men who could answer with any plausibility to this last character of Earle's. But the marvellous amenity of his social gifts brings him a little closer to the kindly race of men than Earle thinks is usual with the contemplative student. In every other point it is an accurate piece of portraiture.[R] Nature might well ask approbation of her works and variety from a man who was ever feeding his noble curiosity and never satisfying it. He, too, made a "ladder of his observations to climb to God." He, too, was "free from vice, because he had no occasion to employ it." "Such gifts," said the turbulent Bishop Atterbury of him, "I did not think had been the portion of any but angels." After this it is no hyperbole to say, as Earle does of the contemplative man, "He has learnt all can here be taught him, and comes now to heaven to see more."
Though Clarendon does full justice to Earle's personal charm, he uses the epithets "sharp and witty" to describe his published "discourses"; and the piercing severity of his wit is illustrated everywhere in this book. It is clear, however, from the sympathetic sketches that Earle's was no nil admirari doctrine, and that while he saw grave need on all hands for men to clear their mind of cant, and their company of those who live by it, he had great store of affection for all that is noble or noble in the making.
The "modest man" and the high-spirited man" are opposite types, but there is in both the worthy pursuit and the high ideal. Moreover, the second of those characters reveals a power of pathos which Earle might have developed with more opportunity.[S] "The child" whom "his father has writ as his own little story" is another indication of the same mood.
These sketches are full of suggestive melancholy—not the melancholy of the misanthrope, but the true melancholy—the melancholy of Virgil—Invalidus etiamque tremens etiam inscius aevi.[T]
There is another character drawn with a most incisive pathos, though less Virgilian[U] in its tone.
The poor man, "with whom even those that are not friends for ends love not a dearness," and who, "with a great deal of virtue, obtains of himself not to hate men," is a pathetic figure, but he is something more. He is a sermon on human weakness, not drawn as some Iago might have drawn it with exultant mockery, but with the painful unflinching veracity of one who is ashamed of himself and of his kind. When one thinks how often this weakness is spoken of as if it were peculiar to the moneyed class or to the uneducated, and how many people whom one knows act and think as if poverty were a vice if not a crime, though they shrink from avowing it, so unqualified an exposure indicates a conscience of no common sensitiveness.
Earle's wit and humour are deadly weapons, and it must be said that the trades and professions are treated with scant indulgence. He can even leave a mark like that of Junius when he has a mind. Thus the dull physician is present at "some desperate recovery, and is slandered with it, though he be guiltless"; and the attorney does not fear doomsday because "he hopes he has a trick to reverse judgment!"
But though one would not ask on behalf of impostors or scoundrels for suspension of sentence, one does wish for more than a single picture of the young man "who sins to better his understanding." The companionship of one who by his 34th year "had so much dispatched the business of life that the oldest rarely attain to that knowledge and the youngest enter not the world with more innocence,"[V] might have induced Earle to pourtray more than the weaknesses of immature manhood.
We could not, however, have missed this or the other pictures of characterless persons whether young or "having attained no proficiency by their stay in the world." Inexperience may fail to recognise them and suffer for it; or the gilding of rank and fashion may win for such persons a name in society above that which they deserve, and the moralist is bound to unmask them. These studies nevertheless are somewhat sombre;[W] and there is something much lighter and pleasanter in his presentation of some not unfamiliar phases of manners. There is the self-complacency that deals with itself like a "truant reader skipping over the harsh places"; the frank discourtesy that finds something vicious in the conventions and "circumstance" of good breeding; the patronising insolence[X] that "with much ado seems to recover your name"; the egoism of discontent that "has an accustomed tenderness not to be crossed in its fancy"; or lastly, that affectation of reticence which is as modern as anything in the book, though its illustrations look so remote. Where we meet with such a temper, Earle's is still the right method—"we must deal with such a man as we do with Hebrew letters, spell him backwards and read him!"