Page images
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

knows the man himself, and possibly the sense of Dr. Trench's personal goodness, which is never absent when reading him, may prejudice me. But I regard his two volumes, Westminster Abbey Sermons' and 'Sermons preached in Dublin,' as the very model of what such compositions ought to be, -refined and pure in diction, but not so polished as to take all the force out of them, full of thought and suggestion, arranged in such a way that the hearer follows without difficulty, and takes in the points as they are unrolled one after the other, and the whole pervaded by an earnestness and reality sure to impress. Patristic, no doubt, with here and there a bit of mediæval fancy such as sober taste might lead us to avoid, but by no means marked by allegorical and far-fetched interpretations. Trench had too much common sense, and also too much religious earnestness, to be drawn aside after ornaments of tinsel.

He began his career as a poet, if I am not mistaken, under the editorship of Maurice. The latter in 1840 undertook the editorship of the 'Educational Magazine,' and some of the Poems from Eastern Sources' appear in the first number. His poetry is extremely pleasing, and will probably hold its place in our anthology. To begin with, is it not a merit which in these days should place a poet on a high pinnacle that he is actually intelligible? One would almost imagine from a study of the superior criticism of the nineteenth century that it was a drawback to the greatness of Milton and Pope and Cowper, that after you have read them you actually understand what they mean Of course such a quality may be the result of poverty of ideas; they are naked, therefore you see them. But assuredly unintelligibility does not prove the converse, though we are often requested to think so. Trench was always a passionate admirer of Wordsworth, but his verse is not largely inspired by that admiration. For he was more of a reader than the Lake poet; his

omnivorous and unceasing studies furnished much of his subject-matter; and though his appreciation of natural scenery was strong, his attachment to human life and activity was stronger. The earnest Biblical student was keenly alive to current events, as his poems on the Indian struggles and the Russian war bear witness. It is well known that early in life he formed a scheme with Sterling, Kemble and others, to go to Spain, and fight for its emancipation from the tyranny of Ferdinand the Seventh. It was as wild as Wordsworth's passion for the French Revolution, and as generous in intention. One is not surprised to find him eager on behalf of the Poles, and fierce against the Emperor Nicholas. In fact it is a

characteristic of the man that should be emphatically dwelt upon, this sympathy with the active, busy world, while all through life he loved his library so intensely.

Three elements there were which made him а true poet, fulness of thought, earnestness of sympathy, beauty of expression. His sonnets, which are many in number, will rank high, but there is an exquisite charm about his narrative pieces, such as 'Honor Neale,' which almost deserves a place beside 'Enoch Arden' itself, so fine is it in diction, so full of tenderness. In truth the two authors are not unlike each other in that they possess, with all their gentleness, such strength. One of the biographies of the late Archbishop has mentioned his "grimness" of manner. The expression was not untrue, though even those who only saw him at a distance were able to discern a loving heart beneath. But it was a terrible thing to see him angry. I can remember two unfortunate men at different times breaking down in Greek Testament, and being pulverised by him. I believe they would rather have been in a railway accident than run the risk even of another flash of his eyes.

Probably he was always of a sad temperament constitutionally. At least

his face when in repose indicated as much, and so do his poems, taken as a whole. But he had a keen enough sense of fun. He was a great novel reader, and there are a good many of his bons mots on record. One, which being of a clerical character may be quoted here, comes from Canon Cureton. Mr. Cureton, then rector of St. Margaret's, was to preach in his regular rotation at the Abbey on a certain saint's day. In those days the boys of Westminster School used to attend service on holy days, after which there was a holiday. Mr. Cureton was looking over his sermon at breakfast time, when his son accosted him with much anxiety of manner, "Father, is yours a long sermon to-day?" "No, Jemmy, not very." "But how long? Please tell

me.

"Well, about twenty minutes, I should say, Jemmy. Why are you so anxious?" "Because, father, the boys say they will thrash me infernally if you are more than half an hour!" In the course of the morning Cureton met the Dean and told him. "Dear, dear," responded Trench, with his usual sad, far-off look, "what a pity Wordsworth has no sons in the school." Old worshippers at the Abbey will remember how merciless good Canon Wordsworth was. never got off under an hour, sometimes an hour and a half.

We

The years which he spent as Archbishop of Dublin were years of labour, of anxiety, but not of unhappiness. He knew when he accepted the Irish Primacy that the storm was impending. His melancholy and shyness might have marked him off as one of the most unfit men in the world for such a crisis, but he astonished his friends by his courage, his calmness and wisdom. He did his best to parry the blow, but when it fell he resolutely set to work to preserve the ancient historic traditions of his church, to see that it

remained identical in doctrine and discipline with the church of Jeremy Taylor, of Ussher, of Mant. And all agree that he succeeded; friends and foes honoured him for his steadfastness and moderation, and probably the Irish Church owes more to him than to any man of his time. At length his health failed. He felt that there was no more work left for him to do in Ireland, and he returned to England, to the scenes connected with so many happy years, having realised what he so often expressed in his poetry, that sorrow and anxiety are amongst God's greatest purifiers. So long as he was able, he loved best to be in the Abbey and the precincts, to stroll in the cloisters, to be in the choir at prayers. And ever there was upon his face a sweet and patient gentleness. The last time I saw him he was talking brightly and happily at the door of his publishers. "What an affectionate face the old archbishop has," I said to the head of the firm afterwards. "All the years that we have published for him," was the answer, "he has always been the same, and we have had nothing but consideration from him."

It was wise and thoughtful of Dean Bradley to choose the centre of the nave for his grave. Thirty years ago no attempt had been made to utilise this nave for religious purposes. Sightseers strolled about in it, and gaped admiringly at ugly monuments, and that was all. It was Dean Trench who resolved to use the great space for worship, and in the end of 1857 the experiment was tried. The vast crowds that flock thither show that the experiment succeeded, and the example thus set has since been followed in most of the cathedrals in England. Let those crowds, as Sunday after Sunday they tread the stone that covers him, be his monument.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

ENGLISH prose literature towards the end of the seventeenth century, in the hands of Dryden and Locke, was becoming, as that of France had become at an earlier date, a matter of design and skilled practice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all, correct. Up to that time it had been, on the whole, singularly informal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of what we understand by the "man of letters." Certain great instances there had been of literary structure, or architecture-The Ecclesiastical Polity,' 'The Leviathan' -but for the most part that literature is eminently occasional, closely determined by the eager practical aims of contemporary politics and theology, or else due to a man's own native instinct to speak because he cannot help speaking. Hardly aware of the habit, he likes talking to himself; and when he writes (still in undress) he does but take the "friendly reader" into his confidence. The type of this literature, obviously, is not Locke or Gibbon, but, above all others, Sir Thomas Browne; as Jean Paul is a good instance of it in German literature, always in its developments so much later than the English; and as the best instance of it in French

literature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom indeed, in a great measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists, derive.

It was a result, perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of personal development, which, even in a Roman Catholic, were effects of the Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective," as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne, too, bookish as he really is, claims to give his readers a matter, "not picked

[ocr errors]

from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and tares of his own brain. The faults of such literature are what we all recognise in it: unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack of design; and then, caprice the lack of authority; after the full play of which, there is so much to refresh one in the reasonable transparency of Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classical clearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, and to be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume. But then, in recompense for that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne, for instance, we have in those "quaint" writers, as they themselves understood the term,-coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of their own predilection, provincial or archaic, certainly unfamiliar, and selected without reference to the taste or usages of other people the charm of an absolute sincerity, with all the ingenuous and racy effect of what is circumstantial and peculiar in their growth.

"The whole creation is a mystery and particularly that of man. At the blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare word they started out of nothing. But in the frame of man He played the sensible operator, and seemed not

so much to create as to make him. When He had separated the materials of other creatures, there consequently resulted a form and soul: but having raised the walls of man, He was driven to a second and harder creation-of a substance like Himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul."

There is the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, in exact expression of his mind!-minute and curious in its thinking, but with an effect, on the sudden, of a real sublimity or depth. His style is certainly an unequal one.

It has the monumental aim which charmed, and perhaps influenced, Johnson-a dignity that can be attained only in such mental calm as follows long and learned pondering on the high subjects Browne loves to deal with. It has its garrulity, its various levels of painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together with much to us intolerable, of which he was capable on a lazy summer afternoon down at Norwich. And all is so oddly mixed, showing, in its entire ignorance of self, how much he, and the sort of literature he represents, really stood in need of technique, of a formed taste in literature, of a literary architecture.

And yet perhaps we could hardly wish the result different in him, any more than in the books of Burton and Fuller, or some other similar writers of that age-mental abodes we might liken, after their own manner, to the little old private houses of some historic town grouped about its grand public structures, which, when they have survived at all, posterity is loth to part with. For, in their absolute sincerity, not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves ("the unique peculiarity of the writer's mind" being, as Johnson says of Browne, "faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his work"), but even more than mere professionally instructed writers they belong to, and reflect, the age they lived in. In essentials, of course, even Browne is by no means so unique among his contemporaries, and so singular, as he looks. And then, as the very condition of their work, there is an entire absence of personal restraint in dealing with the public, whose humours they come at last in a great measure to reproduce. To speak more properly, they have no sense of a "public" to deal with at all-only a full confidence in the "friendly reader," as they love to call him. Hence their amazing pleasantry, their indulgence in their own conceits; but hence also those unpremeditated wildflowers of speech we should never have

the good luck to find in any more formal kind of literature.

It is, in truth, to the literary purpose of the humourist, in the oldfashioned sense of the term, that this method of writing naturally allies itself of the humourist to whom all the world is but a spectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that are at all, and whose halfpitying, half-amused sympathy is called out especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in the things or the people around him. Certainly, in an age stirred by great causes, like the age of Browne in England, of Montaigne in France, that is not a type to which one would wish to reduce all men of letters. Still, in an age apt also to become severe, or even cruel (its eager interest in those great causes turning sour on occasion) the character of the humourist may well find its proper influence in that serene power, and the leisure it has for conceiving second thoughts, on the tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the fierce wills around it. Something of such a humourist was Browne -not callous to men and their fortunes; certainly not without opinions of his own about them; and yet, undisturbed by the civil war, by the fall, and then the restoration, of the monarchy, through that long quiet life (ending at last on the day himself had predicted, as if at the moment he had willed) in which "all existence," as he says, "had been but food for contemplation."

Johnson, in beginning his Life of Browne,' remarks that Browne "seems to have had the fortune, common among men of letters, of raising little curiosity after their private life." Whether or not, with the example of Johnson himself before us, we can think just that, it is certain that Browne's works are of a kind to directly stimulate curiosity about himself-about himself, as being manifestly so large a part of those works;

[ocr errors]

and as a matter of fact we know a great deal about his life, uneventful as in truth it was. To himself, indeed, his life at Norwich, as he lets us know, seemed wonderful enough. "Of these wonders," says Johnson, "the view that can now be taken of his life offers no appearance." But 66 we carry with us," as Browne writes, "the wonders we seek without us,' and we may note, on the other hand, a circumstance which his daughter, Mrs. Lyttleton, tell us of his childhood:-"His father used to open his breast when he was asleep, and kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the Holy Ghost would take possession there." It was perhaps because the son inherited an aptitude for a like profound stirring of sentiment in the taking of his life, that uneventful as it was, commonplace as it seemed to Johnson, to Browne himself it was so full of wonders, and so stimulates the curiosity of his more careful reader of to-day. "What influence," says Johnson again, "learning has had on its possessors may be doubtful." Well! the influence of his great learning, of his constant research, on Browne, was its imaginative influence, that it completed his outfit as a poetic visionary, stirring all the strange conceit of his nature to its depths.

[ocr errors]

He himself dwells, in connection with the first publication (extorted by circumstances) of the Religio Medici,' on the natural "inactivity of his disposition;" and he does, as I have said, pass very quietly through an exciting time. Born in the year of the Gunpowder Plot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying souls which, in an age alike of practical and mental confusion, can lay down as by anticipation the bases of reconstruction, like Bacon or Hooker. His mind has much of the perplexity which was part of the atmosphere of the time. Not that he is without his own definite opinions on events. For him, Cromwell is a usurper, the death of Charles an

abominable murder. In spite of what is, perhaps, an affectation of the sceptical mood, he is a Churchman too; one of those who entered fully into the Anglican position, so full of sympathy with those ceremonies and observances which "misguided zeal terms superstition," that there were some Roman Catholics who thought that nothing but custom and education kept him from their communion. At the Restoration he rejoices to see the return of the comely Anglican order in old episcopal Norwich, with its ancient churches; the antiquity, in particular, of the English Church being, characteristically, one of the things he most valued in it, vindicating it, when occasion came, against the "unjust scandal" of those who made that Church a creation of Henry the Eighth. As to Romanists-he makes no scruple to "enter their churches in defect of ours." He cannot laugh at, but rather pities, "the fruitless journeys of pilgrims - for there is something in it of devotion." He could never "hear the Ave Mary! bell without an oraison." At a solemn procession he has "wept abundantly." How English, in truth, all this really is! It reminds one how some of the most popular of English writers, in many a half-conscious expression, have witnessed to a susceptibility in the English mind itself, in spite of the Reformation, to what is affecting in religious ceremony. Only, in religion as in politics, Browne had no turn for disputes; was suspicious of them, indeed; knowing, as he says with true acumen, that " a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender," even in controversies not necessarily maladroit-an image in which we may trace a little contemporary colouring.

[ocr errors]

The Enquiries into Vulgar Errors' was published in the year 1646; a year which found him very hard on "the vulgar." His suspicion in the abstract of what Bacon calls Idola Fori, the Idols of the Market-place takes a special emphasis from the

« PreviousContinue »