Part 3

These quotations have no very unfamiliar sound, nor much flavour of archaism about them. And there are many more, surprisingly free from conceits or other oddities, if we reflect that the book was written before Dryden was born, or modern prose with its precision and balance even thought of.

There is one very distinguishing mark set on Earle's characters, the profundity of the analysis that accompanies the sketch. He lets us know not only what the grave divine or the staid man looks like, but why they are what they are, and all this without turning his sketch into an essay. This mistake Bishop Hall is inclined to make, and Butler actually makes. The author of Hudibras, it seems, would have been too fortunate had he known where his own happiness lay--to wit in that "sting" of verse, which Cowper says prose neither has nor can have.

When one compares the essay in its beginnings with the essay as we know it to-day, it is not difficult to understand the change of form in the character sketch. "The Character of a Trimmer" is a very powerful piece of writing, containing some very fine things, but Halifax could not make of it that finished piece of brevity which it would have become in Earle's hands. Latin criticism has the right word for his work--"densus." We could not pack the thinking closer if we wished. And yet if we do not care to reason a type out, there are pictures enough unspoilt by commentary. Earle has some of that delightful suddenness of illustration which Selden makes so captivating in his Table-Talk. At once we are made to see likeness or unlikeness, we hear no comment on it; since the artist desires no more moral than is to be looked for in his art.

When on the other hand Earle makes more of the reason of the thing, he is literally "swift and sententious"--he never takes the opportunity to draw us into an instructive disquisition, or to assume airs of profundity. And his passing hint as to the cause of what we see no more injures any picture he may draw than Coleridge's prose argument at the side of the page destroys the imaginative spectacle in the Ancient Mariner.

Earle, it has been said, "is not so thoroughly at home with men of all sorts and conditions as Overbury, who had probably seen far more of the world." However relatively true this may be, Earle's book [published 1628] gives evidence of an experience of men as wide as it is intimate--an experience little short of marvellous in a resident Fellow of twenty-seven, whose younger years were chiefly distinguished for "oratory, poetry, and witty fancies." (Perhaps his youth may account for some of that excessive severity in handling follies which is occasionally noticeable.) The article in the "Dictionary of National Biography" gives a somewhat different impression of Earle as an observer. "The sketches throw," it says, "the greatest light upon the social condition of the time." Now this is not possible for anyone to achieve whose vision requires "the spectacles of books"; though with such help it is doubtless possible to extend and improve on the observations of others, with human nature as a constant quantity. But to be at home with one's contemporaries and to record one's intimacy means to see with the eye as well as the mind. The slow inductive method of personal contact is indispensable; and no reasoning from first principles, no assimilating of secondhand experience, with whatever touches of genius, can be mistaken for it.

It is not likely that the Registrar's house (his father's house) at York added much to Earle's sketch-book; and we have to fall back on what Clarendon says of his delightful conversation, and by implication, of his delight in it. In the society of a University and in the life of a University town there would be presented to an observer of his exceptional penetration enough of the fusion or confusion of classes to furnish the analytical powers with a tolerably wide field.

And Earle does not suffer by comparison with his rivals. "The concise narrative manner" of Theophrastus, though in its way as humorously informing as we find Plautus and Terence, and as we should have found the New Comedy which they copied, leaves us a little cold from the looseness or the connexion in the quasi-narrative: we rise a little unsatisfied from the ingenious banquet of conversational scraps; we desire more. Overbury, again, says less than Earle, and is more artificial in saying it. Butler and Bishop Hall too directly suggest the essay and the sermon. In no one of them is brevity so obviously the soul of wit as it is in Earle; no one of them is so humorously thoughtful, so lucid in conception, so striking in phrase.

When one has reckoned up all these gifts, and all that his friends and contemporaries said of him, and remember also who and what these friends were, one is not startled by the eulogistic epitaph in Merton College Chapel; these words are as moving as they are strong:

Si nomen ejus necdum suboleat, Lector, Nomen ejus ut pretiosa unguenta; Johannes Earle Eboracensis.

But his own choicer Latin in the epitaph he wrote for the learned Peter Heylin would serve no less well for himself; and the beautiful brevity of its closing cadences has so much of the distinction of his English, and puts so forcibly what Earle deserves to have said of him, that it may fitly be the last word here:

Plura ejusmodi meditanti mors indixit silentium: ut sileatur efficere non potest.

S.T.I.

Clifton, May, 1896.

FOOTNOTES:

It came out in 1811. Forty-four years afterwards he wrote that in his interleaved copy the list of Seventeenth Century Characters had increased fourfold--good evidence of his affection for and interest in Earle's Characters. Yet he despaired of anyone republishing a book so "common and unimportant" (??). (See Arber's reprint of Earle.) It is to the credit of Bristol that this pessimism has not been justified.

Since writing this preface I have added a small supplementary appendix; but there is nothing in it to require much qualification of the opinion here expressed. It was hardly possible, as I gather, for Bliss to have known of the Durham MS.

Mr. John Morley has called Pattison's standard "the highest of our time." Bliss's conception of an editor's duties is well illustrated in the note on p. 73.

"Varium ac multiplicem expetens cultum deus."--Mori Utopia Lib. II.

Vol. iii., pp. 153 and 154.

Were the unorthodox opinions of Hobbes known to his friends as early as 1647? If so, Earle could hardly have been very curious in scenting out heresy, for Clarendon hopes Earle's intercession may secure for him a book of Hobbes's. (See letters of Clarendon in Supplementary Appendix.)

Professor Jebb, in his edition of The Characters of Theophrastus. I rejoice to see that Professor Jebb assigns Earle a place of far more distinction than is implied in the measured tribute of Hallam. His preface furnishes lovers of Earle with just those reasoned opinions with which instinctive attraction desires to justify itself; and I take this opportunity of acknowledging my great obligations to it.

Hallam. The same tone is taken in the article on Earle in the "Encyclopædia Britannica."

Mr. Bridges indeed, ("Achilles in Scyros"), finds that this character has been always with us, and gives it a place in the Heroic Age. The passage has almost the note of Troilus and Cressida:--

"My invitation, Sir, Was but my seal of full denial, a challenge For honor's eye not to be taken up. Your master hath slipped in manners."

We may compare Matthew Arnold's travelling companion ("Essays in Criticism," 1st Edition, Preface), who was so nervous about railway murders, and who refused to be consoled by being reminded that though the worst should happen, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street, and that he would not be missed: "the great mundane movement would still go on!"

Chaucer could hardly have been well-known in 1811, or Dr. Bliss would scarcely have quoted in full the most familiar character in his Prologue; but I could not find courage to excise, or lay a profane hand on any of his notes.

It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that no disrespect is intended to the Author of the "Ring and the Book"; but it would be difficult to find another poet who has had so many of the equivocal tributes of fashion.

Sir Thomas Browne, "Christian Morals."