Best of all, we have the history of that memorable morning when Beauclerk and Langton, having supped together at a city tavern, roused Johnson at three o’clock at his Inner Temple Lane Chambers, and brought him to the door, fearful but aggressive, in his shirt and his little dark wig, and his slippers down at the heels, armed with a poker. “What! and is it YOU? Faith, I’ll have a frisk with you, ye young dogs!” We have visions of the Covent Garden inn, and the great brimming bowl, with Lord Lansdowne’s drinking-song for grace; the hucksters and fruiterers staring at the strange central figure, always sure to gather a mob, even during the moment he would stand by a lady’s coach-door in Fleet Street; the merry boat going its way by oar to Billingsgate, its mad crew bantering the watermen on the river; and two of the roisterers (equally wild, despite a little chronological disparity of thirty years or so) scolding the other for hastening off, on an afternoon appointment, “to dine with wretched unidea’d girls!” What golden vagabondism! “I heard of your frolic t’other night; you’ll be in _The Chronicle_! . . . I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house!” said Garrick. “As for Garrick, sirs,” tittered the pious Johnson aside to his accomplices, “he dare not do such a thing. His wife would not let him!” All this mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor’s heavy life. He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay Heart and Gentle Heart, who drove his own blue-devils away with their idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their idyllic figures.
—“Our day is gone: Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.”
There are gods as good for the after-years; but Odin is down, and his pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] A popular eighteenth-century beverage, composed of wine, orange, and sugar.
[46] Although Langton is recorded on his college books as having given the usual £10 for plate, and also as having paid his caution money in 1757, his name is not down upon the matriculation lists, possibly because he failed to appear at the moment the entries were being made. In what must have been his destined space upon one of the pages, Dr. Ingram made this note: “Q. Num Bennet Langton hic inserendus?”
[47] A boyish fashion of self-entertainment afterwards in great favor with Shelley.
[48] It is a pleasant thing to remember that it was Langton, always an appreciator of Goldsmith’s lovable genius, who suggested “Auburn” as the name for his _Deserted Village_. There is a hamlet called Auborne in Lincolnshire.
[49] Langton’s sisters are generally spoken of as three in number. But Burke’s _History of the Landed Gentry_ mentions but two, Diana and Juliet. There was a younger brother, Ferne, who died in boyhood, and the floral name, not unlike a girl’s, may have been responsible for the confusion.
[50] The fruiterer.
[51] The bookseller’s.
[52] Rochester, in his immortal epigram, had said the same of King Charles II.
[53] This neat descriptive stroke has been attributed also to Richard Paget.
[54] The register of St. George’s betrays a little eager blunder of Lady Di’s which is amusing. When the officiating curate asked her to sign, she wrote “Diana Beauclerk,” and was obliged to cross out the signature—one knows with what a smile and a flush!—and substitute the “Diana Spencer” which stands beside it.
[55] Miss Hawkins says “ten,” and may have had the extra adopted child in mind.
[56] It is a pity he did not live to read the jolly _American Ballad of Bon Gaultier_, which seems to have a sort of muddled clairvoyant knowledge of this transaction:
“Every day the huge Cawana Lifted up its monstrous jaws; And it swallowed Langton Bennet,(!) And digested Rufus Dawes.
“Riled, I ween, was Philip Slingsby Their untimely deaths to hear; For one author owed him money,(!) And the other loved him dear.”
[57] The church has since been “restored,” and the fine epitaph is now (1890) “skyed” on the south wall of the nave.
V
WILLIAM HAZLITT
1778-1830
THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish dissenting minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his obstinacy, his love of inexpedient truth, and his interest in the emancipation and well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in an air of seriousness and integrity, the child of twelve announced by post that he had spent “a very agreeable day” reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley, and hearing two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek signature, in _The Shrewsbury Chronicle_, protesting against sectarian injustice; an infant herald in the great modern movement towards fair play. The roll of the portentous periods must have made his father weep for pride and diversion. William’s young head was full of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, and he had what is the top of luxury for one of his temperament: perfect license of mental growth. Alone with his parents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse), and for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with theories, and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test Act than of his breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into the Unitarian College at Hackney, but eventually broke from his traces, saving his fatherland from the spectacle of a unique theologian. During the year 1795 he saw the pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before his first leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely broodings, his early love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at the Louvre, his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with Coleridge; the country walks, the pages and prints, the glad tears of his youth,—these were the fantastic tutors which formed him; nor had he ever much respect for any other kind of training. The lesson he prized most was the lesson straight from life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the sophism that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and social address, or the search for the secret of honorable power over people, is not in any wise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who was in Hazlitt’s ancestral line, was of this mind: “_Ce qu’on sçait droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les yeulx vers son livre._” Hazlitt insists, too, that learned men are but “the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowledge.” He hated the schoolmaster, and has said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in _The Conversation of Authors_, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His mental nurture was serviceable; it was of his own choosing; it fitted him for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated himself that he did not squander his youth “chopping logic and scouring the heavens.” Hazlitt once entered upon an _Inquiry whether the Fine Arts are promoted by Academies_; the answer, from him, is readily anticipated.
“If arts and schools reply,”
he might have added,—and it is a wonder that he did not,
“Give arts and schools the lie!”
Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous essay on the same topic, and some readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for England, would be in the affirmative, whereas it was no such matter. Now, no man can conceive of Hazlitt presenting both sides of a case so impartially as to be misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pastured, he was not trained; and therefore he would have you and your children’s children scoff at universities. Indeed, though the boy’s lack of discipline told on him all through life, his reader regrets nothing else which a university could have given him, except, perhaps, milder manners. Hazlitt was perfectly aware that he had too little general knowledge; but general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for his self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or two subjects. Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with bluntness, that if he had learned more he would have thought less. (Perhaps he was the friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to improve his originality! He was certainly useful to Elia in delicate and curious ways: a whole vein of rich eccentricity ready for that sweet philosopher’s working.) Hear him pronouncing upon himself at the very end: “I have, then, given proof of some talent and more honesty; if there is haste and want of method, there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust. If I do not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am.” Divorce that remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is no Hazlitt left. He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was, in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive and concrete side of things. He has a fine barbaric cocksureness; he dwells not with althoughs and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr. Saintsbury. “I am not one of those,” he says, concerning Edmund Kean’s first appearance in London, “who, when they see the sun breaking from behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon.” And he takes enormous interest in his own promulgation, because it is inevitably not only what he thinks, but what he has long thought. He delivers an opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.