No More Learning

It was he who first
defined the relation of poetry to the imagination, and attempted a
classification of the arts and sciences based on the divisions of the
mind, according to which poetry bears the same relation to the
imaginative faculty that history and philosophy bear, respectively,
17-2


## p. 260 (#276) ############################################

260 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
to memory and reason. The Spaniard Huarte, in his Examen de
Ingenios, had already classified sciences and arts in a similar way,
and Bacon adopted this foreign system. But, in elaborating it, he
gave it a significance for criticism as well as for philosophy; and
his classification became a more or less permanent possession of
English thought and taste. Within the scope of the imagination,
he included allegorical poetry; and, to his rationalising mind, this
seemed the highest expression of poetic genius. He finds no
difficulty in justifying this inclusion, though his conception of the
imagination as a transformation of the realities of life into forms
more sympathetic to the human mind, as external nature idealised,
forces him to separate the lyric from truly imaginative poetry
and to place it with rhetoric and philosophy.
All this may seem to have little to do with the actual progress
of criticism ; but it must be remembered that the critics of the
preceding age had not thus definitely connected literature with
the mental faculty that creates it, and that Bacon, in doing
this, is a herald of the attitude of Hobbes and his successors.
It is by his conception of literary history, however, that he has
made his most important contribution. Just as literature was
regarded as a product of the imagination, and not merely as
something interesting in itself and by itself separate from the
mind of man, so, here, he conceives of it as baving certain external
relations with the age in which it is produced, not a thing in vacuo
but something expressive of the Zeitgeist, of which he was the first
to have a fairly adequate conception. Yet, with all these ideas
about the place of poetry in the scheme of the sciences and the
meaning and function of literary history, Bacon has given us very
few concrete judgments in respect to literature that are of any
considerable value. His method of interpreting poetry is either
through allegory, as in The Wisdom of the Ancients and elsewhere,
where poetic truth becomes merely a symbol of moral truth, or
through history, where a record of external changes in style and
in manner passes for criticism, without for a moment grappling
with the secret of an author's power or charm. His influence, both
by his specific achievements and by his general theory, was in the
direction of rationalism and science; yet he was an Elizabethan, and
touched by the romantic longings of his time. His statement that
art becomes more delightful when 'strangeness is added to beauty'
foreshadows Pater's definition of romanticism, and his assertion
that art works by felicity not by rule' places him in opposition to
the whole tendency of criticism in the century that was to follow.
>
6


## p. 261 (#277) ############################################

Jonson as a Critic
261
It was his contemporary Jonson, in fact, who first made this
conception of 'rule' native to English thought. In the prologue
of Volpone, he boasts that he has followed all the laws of refined
comedy,
As best Criticks have designed;
The lawes of time, place, persons he observeth,
From no needfull rule he swerveth;
and it was his critical function throughout his life to make
Englishmen realise that literary creation is not determined by
individual whim, but by an external and ideal order given by
literary tradition, and not to be swerved from without the sacrifice
of art. This was the chief influence which he exerted on his
younger contemporaries; and, in Jonsonus Virbius, the monument
of verse reared to his memory, John Cleiveland could say that it
was Jonson
Who first reform'd our Stage with justest Lawes,
And was the first best Judge in your own Cause;
Who, when his Actors trembled for Applause,
Could with a noble Confidence preferre
His own, by right, to a whole Theater,
From Principles which he knew could not erre.
‘Laws' and 'principles which could not err' first entered English
criticism through the agency of Jonson. It is true that Sidney, in
his Defence of Poesie, had espoused the three unities, on the
authority both of Aristotle and of 'common reason,' and it was
from Sidney that Jonson may have derived his original impetus
toward the acceptance of the classical tradition. Sidney's con-
ception of the high dignity of poetry, of dramatic form and of
humours in comedy are all to be found in the early writings of
Jonson; and, though this early glow of Elizabethan fervour cooled
with age, in the prefaces, prologues and epilogues of his plays,
in epigrams and poems, he continued to expound the message of
order in literature, of classical form, of the tempered spirit as
opposed to boisterous energy and emphasis. He took counsel
with the Latin rhetoricians, with Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Pliny,
Petronius and, later, with the humanists of the continent, Erasmus,
Daniel Heinsius, Justus Lipsius and Julius Caesar Scaliger. The
star of scholarship in criticism was passing northward from Italy to
Holland; and the deliberate and moderate classicism of the Dutch
Latinists, their reasonableness and common sense, made a deep
appeal to Jonson. Though his own classicism became more and more
rigid, he never failed to echo their assertion of the ‘liberty of poets
and their conception of the classics as 'guides, not commanders. '


## p. 262 (#278) ############################################

262 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
The chief result of these studies, and the chief monument of
Jonson as a critic, is to be found in his Timber or Discoveries,
published, posthumously, in 1641. It is a commonplace book,
certainly not intended for publication in its present form, and,
possibly, never intended for publication at all. Certainly, not one
of the utterances which it contains in respect to poetry and poetic
criticism is the result of Jonson's own thought. Recent scholarship
has been able to trace nearly every one of its famous passages to
some contemporary or classical origin, and it is fair to assume that
the slight remnant is equally unoriginal'.
If it were our purpose to judge Jonson as a literary artist, this
would be of slight consequence, for the artist may consider the
world as all before him where to choose, and may demand that we
consider not whence he has borrowed his materials but what he
has done with them. The critic's case is different. We have a
right to expect of him that he shall have reflected on literature;
that, out of the ideas of others, he shall mould ideas which shall
seem as if they were his own. Jonson has translated his originals
verbatim, and has not added a single idea that was not already
full-grown in them. If we were merely studying the taste of the
dramatist Jonson, all this would have high interest for us; but
it would be idle to dispute that Jonson the critic suffers from
the discovery. The 'constant good sense, occasional felicity of
expression, conscientious and logical intensity of application or
devotion to every point of the subject handled or attempted,'
which Swinburne found in the critical portions of Discoveries, are
virtues that must be credited to Jonson's originals rather than to
Jonson himself.
Yet, though Dryden's statement that 'there are few serious
thoughts which are new in’ Jonson has proved truer with time,
this did not affect the influence of his selective translation on the
age that was to follow; and Dryden himself could say that, in
Discoveries, 'we have as many and profitable rules for perfecting
the stage as any wherewith the French can furnish us. As an
influence, Jonson remains what he was ; as an original critic, he
indubitably loses in prestige. His influence was immediately
exerted on the younger men about him; some of its results may
be observed, for example, in the comments on poets and prosemen
in Bolton's Hypercritica; and, even now, the tremendous effects of
this influence on restoration poetry and criticism are only partly
comprehended. It was due to him that the pregnant utterances
1 See ante, vols. iv, pp. 348, 524, and vi, pp. 8, 9.
6


## p. 263 (#279) ############################################

New Elements
263
of post-classic rhetoricians and the lucid and rational classicism of
Dutch scholars became part and parcel of English thought.
Despite changes of taste, a number of Elizabethan survivals
may be found in the very heart of this period. The chapter on
poetry in Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1622) forms a kind of
text-book borrowed from Puttenham and Scaliger. The chapter
begins with a long and enthusiastic defence of poetry and a
rhapsody on its history, quite in the Elizabethan manner, and this
is followed by a brief survey of Latin and English poetry; but
Peacham has nothing to say concerning the Latin poets that had
not already been uttered by Scaliger, and nothing concerning the
English poets that had not been said by Puttenham. In similar
manner, Sir William Alexander, in his Anacrisis (1634 ? ), reverts to
the tradition of Sidney's Defence of Poesie, and summarises the
taste begun with Arcadia and culminating, after his own day, in
the heroic romances. Yet, even here, the new ideals of Caroline
taste are beginning to assert themselves. Not only is modern poetry
summed up in the prose romances, not only are Tasso and Sidney,
Vergil and Lucan, his idols, but a comparison of poetry to a formal
garden stands side by side with an attack on Scaliger and a defence
of poetic freedom. Balzac's letters and the writings of other men
of the new French school furnish us with the models of his style,
and we are here on the threshold of D'Avenant's preface to
Gondibert in manner and feeling. A new and tentative classicism
was struggling through the ordeal of preciosité. To this period,
too, belongs Suckling's Sessions of the Poets, with its casual and
ironical judgments of some of his contemporaries; and a few minor
essays of like character illustrate similar tendencies of the time.
In the next decade or two, the results of contact with France
appear, also, in the new theory and practice of translation and in
the critical trend toward simplicity in style. In France, a number
of brilliant translators were adapting the classics to the taste of
their countrymen. Of these, Perrot d'Ablancourt was the chief
exemplar, and the prefaces of his numerous translations enunciate
most clearly this new philosophy of paraphrase. 'I do not always
limit myself to the words or even to the thoughts of this author'
he
says,
in his version of Lucian, 'but, mindful solely of his purpose,
I accommodate it to the French air and manner'; and, in his
complete version of Tacitus, he goes so far as to say that an
injustice is done to a translation by comparing it with its original.
When this theory reached England, it came into contact with the
Jonsonian tradition of literal translation, and, for some time, these


## p. 264 (#280) ############################################

264 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
two schools existed side by side. Cowley, in the preface to his
Pindaric Odes, claims for himself the credit of having introduced
the new way into England; his biographer Sprat assumes that
Cowley was not the first to recommend it, but insists that he was
one of the first to practise it. The acknowledged herald of the
new method was Sir John Denham, in the well known verses
prefixed to Fansbawe's version of Il Pastor Fido (1647):
That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word by word and line by line . . .
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
To make Translations and Translators too;
They but preserve the Ashes, Thou the Flame,
True to his sense but truer to his fame.
Nine years later, Denham restated the argument in the prose
preface to his Essay on Translation, which had been begun much
earlier and which is one of the first English, attempts to put the
theory of loose paraphrase into practice.
The critical trend toward simplicity, which, also, received an
impetus from French influence, was especially directed to the
elimination of the conceits of the metaphysical school and the
current perversions of poetry and prose. That school had not had
any adequate expression in English criticism, just as the Eliza-
bethan drama was really without its true critical expounders and
defenders; but Henry Reynolds's Mythomystes (1632) illustrates
the perverse effect of the school in the realms of criticism. In this
work, the friend of Drayton and translator of Tasso's Aminta has
systematically applied Neoplatonism to the interpretation of
poetry. Bacon had already indicated the road, but Reynolds
follows it into a tropical forest of strange fancies. The cabalists
and neoplatonists, Philo and Reuchlin, but especially Pico della
Mirandola and Alessandro Farra, here find an English voice.
Mythomystes has another historical interest in its relation to the con-
troversy respecting ancients and moderns. It professes to contain
a brief for the ancients; but it argues their claims on grounds
utterly repugnant to neo-classicism, not their superior portrayal of
the fundamentals of human nature, but their defter manipulation
of the cabalistic mysteries. For Bacon, allegorical interpretation
seemed to furnish an opportunity for the scientific explanation of
poetry ; Reynolds's method implies the negation of science. It was
against such perversities of taste as these that the new exponents
of simplicity now directed sporadic attacks; but no systematic
expression of this new movement is to be found at this period, and
it did not gain real headway until the age of Dryden.


## p. 265 (#281) ############################################

Milton and Hobbes
265
6
The critical position of Milton, who began to write about this
time, has been defined by himself. In the treatise Of Education
(1644), he commits himself unequivocally to the tradition of 'that
sublime art' which is taught 'in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace,
and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and
others'; and to the tradition of renascence criticism he remained
faithful throughout his life. In the preface to Samson Agonistes
(1671), this attitude remains unmodified except by an occasional
touch of puritan conscience; even the somewhat earlier attack
on rime he inherited from Trissino and Tolomei. In the judgment
of literature, he has little to offer save a venomous onslaught on
Hall's satires (referring, especially, to the cacophonous 'pace of the
verse' and to the 'poorness and frigidity' of the imagery), and
contemptuous allusions to Sidney's Arcadia and Shakespeare's
Richard III. But his conception of the imagination as that which
alone makes literature vital, his veneration for the poet's con-
secrated office, his passionate defence of literary freedom, his ideas
concerning the spiritual unity of poetry and religion, were heritages
which he passed on to the critics of the following age; and, in-
directly at least, he helped to fructify not only poetry but criticism
as well, through the agency of such men as Edward Phillips,
Dennis and the two Wartons.
Bacon, as we have seen, gave poetry a definite place in a
scheme of the arts and sciences; he referred it to the imagination,
and used this term to explain the idealising process by which
poetry transforms the materials of life into forms of art. But he
did not attempt to analyse this process, or to explain the sources
and mutual relations of the various functions of the mind. This
is the peculiar work of Hobbes. The critics of the sixteenth
century had dealt with literature as an external phenomenon ;
they isolated the work of art from its position in space and time,
and from its relation to the mind which created it. This generalisa-
tion does not imply that the historical sense did not make itself
felt in some literary controversies, or that such words as 'wit,
'fancy,' 'imagination and the like do not occasionally and casually
occur in criticism; the Spanish critic Rengifo, for example, asserts
a vehement imagination, furor poeticus and agudeza de ingenio
to be essentials of the poet. But such words as these are casual
and unreasoned; they are not analysed; they remain, one might
say, abstract virtues of the poet, and are not brought into funda-
mental relation with the work of art itself. The concrete work
is tested in vacuo, and the critic is concerned with its unity,
>


## p. 266 (#282) ############################################

266 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
6
a
probability, regularity, harmony and the like. The seventeenth
century first attempted to deal accurately with the relation between
the creative mind and the work of art; it began to analyse the
content of such terms as 'wit,''fancy' and 'taste. ' Hobbes is here
a pioneer; he left an impress on critical terminology, and his
psychology became the groundwork of restoration criticism.
The relation of Descartes to French classicism suggests the
position of Hobbes in Stewart England.
Hobbes's theory of poetry is a logical result of his philosophy
of mind. For him, a mechanical universe continues to make itself
felt on the tabula rasa of the human mind; these impressions the
mind retains, arranges and combines. "Time and Education' (as
he puts it briefly, in popular fashion, in the letter to D'Avenant pre-
fixed to Gondibert) 'begets experience; Experience begets Memory;
Memory begets Judgement and Fancy; Judgement begets the
strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem. '
Here, ‘fancy' and 'judgment,' like Bacon’s ‘imagination,' are mental
processes which re-arrange the materials of experience into forms
of art; but, for Hobbes, the imaginative process is no longer
sufficient or even vital; fancy furnishes the 'ornaments,' and
judgment the strength and structure of poetry. His distinction
between the two became a commonplace of criticism in the period
of classicism : 'wit,' the current term for fancy, denotes quickness
of mind in seeing the resemblances between disparate objects;
judgment, or reason, finds differences in objects apparently similar.
This distinction had been suggested by the Italians of the later
renascence, and had been more clearly indicated, as a difference
in human temperament, by Bacon; but, with Hobbes, who first
gave it precision, it became part and parcel of English thought,
and was adopted by Robert Boyle, Locke, Temple, Addison and
others, until Harris pointed out that a distinction of this sort
would place Euclid's Geometry among the supreme works of fancy.
The French had realised the critical significance of the antithesis
for some time, but they never formulated it so clearly as this.
Throughout the second half of the century, in both countries, the
terms wit' and `judgment' were placed in a sort of conventional
opposition, like the doctrina and eloquentia of the humanists, and
the clash resounds through neo-classical criticism.
Hobbes's distinction of the poetic genres is the logical outcome
of his philosophy. He conceives of them as conditioned by the
divisions of the external world-heroic, comic and pastoral, corre-
sponding to court, city and country-and man simply arranges


## p. 267 (#283) ############################################

The New Aesthetic
267
>
9
what nature gives in forms of his own speech, narrative or dramatic.
The poetry of the court thus assumes the form of epic or tragedy;
the poetry of the city, satire or comedy; the poetry of the country,
bucolics or pastoral comedy. Here, there is no place for lyrical
forms; they are 'but essayes and parts of an entire poem. Bacon
had set the example for this indifference, and, later, Temple followed
in the path of Hobbes. Nor is there any place for didactic or
descriptive verse, for the subject of poetry is not natural science
or moral theory, but the manners of men,' presented in the guise
of lifelike fiction. The exclusion of didactic verse is Aristotelian,
and had furnished the subject for infinite controversy in the
renascence; but the seventeenth century tended more and more
to follow Roman practice rather than Aristotelian precept in this
respect. Yet Hobbes's 'manners of men' fails to suggest that the
whole content of human life (in its inner as well as its outer
manifestations) is the theme of poetry, and is Horatian rather than
Aristotelian.
The theme of poetry, then, is the manners of men ; its method
is that of verisimilitude, or resemblance to the actual conditions
of life; and Hobbes's scorn for ghosts and magic is the natural
outcome of this insistence on vraisemblance. From acquaintance
with the manners of men, rather than from books, the poet is to
obtain the elements of style, or 'expression. ' To know human
nature well, to retain images of it in the memory that are distinct
and clear, are the sources of perspicuity and propriety of style, and
of 'decorum’ in character-drawing; to know much of it is the
source of variety and novelty of expression. Hobbes's aesthetic is
consistent and logical throughout, the first of its kind in English
literature.
When he wields this body of theory in the concrete field of
criticism, his discretion fails.
A quarter of a century intervened
between the publication of his letter to D'Avenant (1650) and the
preface to his translation of Homer (1675), but the theory has not
fundamentally changed. Edward Phillips preferred the latter
because of the bias and friendly compliment of the former, and,
certainly, Hobbes's judgment of Gondibert and of Howard's British
Princes must be approached with at least as much caution as the
flattering dedications of the period. In the later preface, he
justifies his taste by the preference of Homer to both Vergil and
Lucan. He formulates seven 'virtues of the epic-in diction,
style, imagery, plot, elevation of fancy (which, he says, is usually
overestimated as a virtue of poetry), the amplitude of the subject
6


## p. 268 (#284) ############################################

268 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
and the justice and impartiality of the poet—and he then compares
Homer with Vergil and Lucan in respect to these essential quali-
ties. Dryden complains that Hobbes 'begins the praise of Homer
where he should have ended it,' meaning that Hobbes first considers
the choice of words and the harmony of numbers instead of the
design, the manners and the thoughts; and it is true that he also
fails to express several of the other main tendencies of neo-
classicism. Unlike his more orthodox contemporaries, he does
not give to the logical structure of a poem the same sort of exagge-
rated importance that the theorists of art for art's sake have given
to the externals of style ; he cares nothing for the rules which the
French had inherited from the Italians; he has serious doubts
about a fixed standard of taste. The method of comparison which
he urges was to have an important bearing on the progress of
criticism. This was a conventional exercise from the time of
Scaliger to that of Rapin, but Hobbes's way of basing his judg-
ments on general qualities of style and content is an advance
on theirs. The method was adopted by Rymer in his preface to
Rapin (1674); and it was from Hobbes, also, that Rymer acquired,
especially later, something of the same external and mechanical
outlook on life, the same political philosophy and spirit of con-
formity, the same clangour of style, the same magisterial attitude,
and that intellectual arrogance which made Dryden compare the
sage of Malmesbury with Lucretius.
D'Avenant's long preface to Gondibert (1650) is a dilution of the
aesthetic theory of Hobbes, but Tasso's discourses on the epic and
Chapelain's preface to Marino's Adone, doubtless, served as his
models. Nothing could differ more widely than the prose styles
of the two men; the style of Hobbes foreshadows Rymer, while
Cowley and D'Avenant prepare the way for Dryden and Temple.
Of the four men who associated themselves with the composition of
Gondibert in Paris, Hobbes was sixty-two years of age, D'Avenant
and Waller forty-four and Cowley thirty-two; obviously, the eldest
of these was less likely than the others to succumb to the influences
of French taste. The heroic poem (like the pastoral, an artificial
product of the later renascence) was in the air in Paris at that
time. Chapelain had been at work on La Pucelle for nearly
fifteen years, Lemoyne on his Saint Louis somewhat less; and
D'Avenant's preface bears a remarkable resemblance to those which
were soon to precede these and many other French epics in the
dozen years that followed. The spirit with which they worked
explains that of D'Avenant. It explains his conception of epic
a


## p. 269 (#285) ############################################

D'Avenant and Cowley
269
>
>
6
practice as a merely mechanical consequence of epic theory; it
explains how experience of human nature, which Hobbes con-
sidered essential to the writing of great poetry, tends to limit
itself to 'conversation’; it explains the talk about nature,' which
was to be more and more fundamental for English criticism, and
the attack on 'conceits,' one of the first of its kind in our language.
The concetti of the Italians had lost ground in France for some
time; D'Avenant was a pioneer in a campaign that, thenceforth,
was sustained without a break in England. In both countries, there
had been a metaphysical school of poetry; but only in Italy did the
principles of the school receive a critical formulation; and neither
England nor France had any contemporary equivalent for such im-
portant works as Tesauro's Cannocchiale Aristotelico or Pellegrini's
Fonti dell Ingegno. D'Avenant himself shows his natural leanings
toward the older school in his conception of poetry as a presenta-
tion of truth 'through unfrequented and new ways, and from the
most remote Shades, by representing Nature, though not in an
affected, yet in an unusual dress. ' This is Bacon’s ‘strangeness
added to beauty,' and is far from the principle of Pope's 'what oft
was thought but ne'er so well expressed. ' The defence of the
stanza form, the confused conception of 'wit;' the insistence on
religion as well as nature and reason as the basis of poetry, all
suggest D'Avenant's place in this transitional period of English
criticism.
Cowley, the junior of D'Avenant by a dozen years, occupies
a similar position. The influence of his poetry on contemporary
taste was powerful; but taste does not become criticism until it
has received reasoned expression. His keenest intellectual powers
expressed themselves, however, in his verse; in his prose, he aimed
rather at charm and clarity, after the fashion of the new standards
of France: here, his critical opinions are casual and fragmentary,
and, unlike Milton's, they explain the externals rather than the
essence of his own poetic practice. His chief critical utterances
are contained in the 1656 edition of his poems, both in the general
preface and in the notes to Davideis. This preface contains a
passage acknowledging the triumph of the commonwealth which
he omitted from later editions, and for which his first biographer
apologises at some length. The spirit of the commonwealth ex-
hibits itself in the insistence that poets should avoid obscenity
and profaneness, and in the impassioned defence of Biblical material
for modern poetry. In the decade which opens with D'Avenant's
preface to Gondibert (in which the Christian epic had been


## p. 270 (#286) ############################################

270 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
defended), heroic poems, sacred and profane, were coming forth
from French presses with the speed of the modern novel; Mambrun
had published his treatise De Poemate Epico; and Desmarets
de Saint-Sorlin inaugurated his long campaign in favour of the
merveilleux chrétien. Cowley does not accept
Cowley does not accept their moralistic
theory; for him, as for Waller, 'to communicate delight to others
is the main end of Poesie,' and a soul 'filled with bright and
delightful Idæas' the fountain of poetic creation. In charming
prose, he has paraphrased Ovid's complaint that poetry will not
bear fruit in a troubled mind or body, and he has extended the
principle to the influence of climate and of a 'warlike, various,
and a tragical age,' which is best to write of, but worst to write
in': this is the logical outcome of Hobbes's psychology. His later
work connects itself largely with the foundation and progress of
the Royal Society, and, through it, with the Baconian tradition;
and he played so important a part (if we may believe Evelyn) in
the attempt of the Society to organise a literary academy for the
refinement of English, that, at his death, the whole scheme was
dropped.
The influence of Hobbes's political philosophy on Restoration
thought and conduct is well known; his outlook on life, and, more
especially, the psychology by which it is explained, were scarcely
less influential in the domain of letters. Tempered and refined by
the social and literary influences proceeding from France, they
became, in the hands of younger men (not least of all in Cowley's
Odes), instruments of power. No member of this group accepts
an absolute standard of taste; they do not yield a complete sub-
servience to classical authority or to the pseudo-classical rules;
the rationalistic temper has not, as yet, flooded criticism to the
exclusion of all imaginative elements. They logically connect the
critical activity of the first and the second Caroline periods; and
Dryden begins his work at the point where D'Avenant and Cowley
leave off.
It will be noticed that most of these critics concern themselves
with literary principles, and only on occasion (and with doubtful
success) enter the field of critical judgment. But, even here, some
progress may be observed. In the censure' of authors, the
Elizabethans had seldom gone beyond the repetition of a few
traditional phrases. Impassioned on the subject of poetry in
general, its antiquity, its dignity, its beauty, they became timid
and reserved so soon as they faced the concrete problem which
every critic must face in the individual poet or the individual
6


## p. 271 (#287) ############################################

The Roll-Call
271
a
poem. Their method, for the most part, was the method of the
'roll-call,' a catalogue of poets, in which one name follows another,
each with its tag of critical comment. These comments are limited
by a narrow range of critical terminology, a few words of praise or
blame, some commonplace, some more highly coloured, and the
judgments that they express are those of a well established literary
tradition or of the common opinion of their time. The first ex-
tended critique in English seems to be that which Sidney, in his
Defence of Poesie, devotes to the tragedy of Gorboduc; here, for
the first time, critical principles are applied systematically to a
work of English literature. Yet, Sidney has little to say of Gorboduc
except that it has ignored the dramatic unities; he has few terms
with which to express its positive qualities, its special beauties or
defects, and no method of summing up the general effect in the
form of literary portraiture or appreciation. In the case of other
works, he adheres to the method of the roll-call. 'I account the
Mirrour of Magistrates meetely furnished of beautiful parts; and
in the Earle of Surries Liricks many things tasting of a noble birth,
and worthy of a noble minde. '
This is the staple of his judgment of authors. Nor do his
contemporaries and his successors stray beyond the range of the
roll-call. Of the seventy-four chapters of Puttenham's Arte of
English Poesie, which attempts to cover the whole field of poetical
criticism, a single chapter is devoted to a 'censure' of the English
poets; and here we are told that ‘for dittie and amourous ode
I finde Sir Walter Rawleyghs vayne most loftie, insolent, and
passionate; Maister Edward Dyar, for elegy most sweet, solempne,
and of high conceit; Gascon, for a good meeter and for a plentifull
vayne,’ etc. This is a typical example of roll-call criticism, the
most primitive form of literary characterisation ; literary history,
unguided by any organic principle, is as yet unable to express
itself save by adding name to name and epithet to epithet.
Harington, it is true, argues against the charge that 'Ariosto
wanteth art,' and repeats some of the commonplaces of Italian
criticism; but, for the rest, he is limited to disjointed and in-
temperate eulogy, the same incense that Sidney burnt at the
altar of Vergil. It is tradition and not criticism which speaks in
both. As they approach the poets of their own tongue, even more
as they approach their own time, they lose their certainty of
utterance; they have no terminology to give precision to their
vague impressions; they have no form or method which gives
unity or logic to their disjointed thoughts. It is at this point that
>
6


## p. 272 (#288) ############################################

272
Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
Jonson enters the field. It is not merely that he makes Quintilian
and Scaliger native to English criticism, by translating or para-
phrasing their ideas in a language both sane and robust; but,
under their guidance, he attempts the literary ‘portrait. ' Yet,
note how cautiously he works this new vein. The brief note on
Shakespeare in Discoveries is made up of classical echoes; and
the masterly portrait of Bacon as an orator follows, almost word
for word, the elder Seneca's description of Severus Cassius. Such
a portrait was as yet impossible in English, and, not unwisely,
Jonson leans heavily on Roman crutches. But it is in the famous
lines to Shakespeare that he is at his best, for the uplift of verse
has helped him to sureness and swiftness of speech. This is the
first adequate tribute to a great English poet; this, and the portrait
of Bacon, are the first of their kind in English.
The first training in adequate characterisation of the poets
seems, then, to have been given (however tentatively) by Jonson,
and it was certainly among his own disciples that literary por-
traiture first began to flourish. Verse rather than prose was
the surer vehicle, and the chief training ground seems to have
been the commendatory verses prefixed to plays and poems.
Those, for example, that appeared in Jonsonus Virbius (1638),
or in the 1647 folio of Beaumont and Fletcher, contain some
of the most acute criticism of the first half of the seventeenth
century, amid much that is the merest distortion of ingenious
eulogy. But what is new (and effective for criticism) in them is
the complete realisation of a great literary background. Shake-
speare, Fletcher, Jonson, Spenser, had imposed themselves on
criticism; and criticism grew rich (as it always does) by accepting
and passing these great poets as current coin of the realm. There
was a more or less serious attempt to understand them, to appraise
them, to express their significance; they jostled one another in
every discussion; and it was the most natural thing in the world
to compare and contrast them. It is this comparative criticism
which is employed to good use in these commendatory verses.
A few lines from Cartwright's tribute to Fletcher will illustrate the
acuteness of some of this criticism:
Jonson hath writ things lasting and divine,
Yet his love-scenes, Fletcher, compard to thine,
Are cold and frosty, and express love so,
As heat with ice, or warm fires mix'd with snow . . .
Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies
l' the ladies' questions and the fools' replies;


## p. 273 (#289) ############################################

Literary Appreciation
273
Old-fashion'd wit, which walk'd from town to town
In turn'd hose, which our fathers call'd the clown,
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call,
And which made bawdry pass for comical.
a
6
Yet, elsewhere, for the most part, critics continued to follow the
roll-call; and even Jonson, here bookish rather than critical, uses
it in a brief note on the chief writers of English prose (embedded
in the borrowed material of Discoveries) and in other places. His
curt dicta in conversation with Drummond seem almost typical
of the method of contemporary criticism; and, despite all the
changes of time, this method retained its vogue up to the middle
of the century. Peacham, Bolton, Drayton, Alexander, Reynolds,
Suckling, all employ it, though some of them have amplified its
narrow scope or transformed it even in using it. Bolton, in Hyper-
critica (1618 ? ), gives a catalogue of bis favourite poets in crabbed
prose; Drayton, in the Epistle to Henry Reynolds, of Poets and
Poesy (1627), strings together a necklace of famous names on a
silken thread of verse. Drayton's comments are brief, but often
singularly appropriate and just; some of them have remained
memorable utterances of poetic criticism, as in the lines on the
'fine madness' of Marlowe and the kinship of his genius with the
'brave translunary things' of the first poets. But, after all, they
retain the marks of the roll-call; singly, as it were, they are
mere obiter dicta, like Jonson's conversations with Drummond,
utterances oracular and compact; together, they have no other
framework than that furnished by the familiar epistle in verse.
Neither singly nor jointly do they give any consistent criticism
of poets or poetry.
In Reynolds's Mythomystes, there is a serious attempt to arrive
at some consistency in the criticism of poetry by means of a
systematic interpretation of its content. But the allegorical
method, complicated here by an admixture of Neoplatonism and
cabalism, though it may offer opportunities for subtle interpretation
of mythological or mystical poetry, fails to explain most of the
moderns; and, in his brief introductory survey of modern poetry,
Reynolds does not divest himself of the cataloguing spirit of his
predecessors.
Though efforts to enrich the content and amplify the scope
of the roll-call failed, an attempt to bind its disjecta membra
into some kind of unity may be said to have succeeded temporarily.
As the Italians had bound their novelle together by an artificial
framework, so critics adopted a device from classical mythology to
18
E. L. VII.
CH. XI.


## p. 274 (#290) ############################################

274 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
perform a similar function. This new framework makes of the
term roll-call no longer a metaphor but a poetic fact. In Suck-
ling's Sessions of the Poets (1637? ), the poets of the time are
represented as claimants for the laureateship at the court of Apollo;
each argues his claims, and hears them discussed by his fellows;
until, finally, Apollo decides in favour of a rich alderman whose
money makes up for his lack of skill. The discussion is rather
personal than literary, the talk of a coterie of artists and wits, and
is interesting as indicating the flavour of literary discussion during
the first Caroline period, much as the conversations of Jonson and
Drummond shed light on Jacobean taste. Yet, even here, not
much has been added since Jonson's day, for lady Would-be, in
the third act of Volpone, anticipates, by more than thirty years,
the very note of Suckling's criticism, in such lines as these:
Hee (Guarini] has so moderne and facile a veine,
Fitting the time, and catching the court-eare;
Your Petrarch is more passionate, yet hee
In dayes of sonnetting trusted 'hem [i. e. plagiarists) with much;
Dante is hard, and few can understand him;
But for a desperate wit, there's Aretine!
Only his pictures are a little obscene.
The Italian poet Caporali, taking a hint from Lucian, had first
systematically used mythological allegory for the purpose of literary
criticism or satire; and, in Spain, Cervantes had followed his
example in the Voyage to Parnassus. But it was the Italian
proseman Boccalini who, in his Ragguagli di Parnaso, gave
European prestige to this form; his work was translated and
imitated in all the languages of Europe; and, in England, besides
Suckling, Sheppard's Socratic Session, or the Arraignment and
Conviction of Julius Scaliger (1651) and Wither's(? ) Great Assises
holden in Parnassus (1645) illustrate the character of its influence.
This framework transfigures the dead bones of the old roll-call,
and, in Suckling and others, gives wit and fancy an opportunity to
enliven the casual utterances of criticism.
As we follow the course of the seventeenth century, we note
that the tags which follow the names of the roll-call develop in
amplitude. They still remain more or less conventional, but they
have been extended from a brief clause or a succession of adjectives
to sentences and paragraphs. Thus, D'Avenant, in a page or two,
traces the growth of epic poetry from Homer to Spenser, devoting
to each poet a paragraph of his own; and though, for example,
that on Spenser merely objects to the 'obsolete language,' the


## p. 275 (#291) ############################################

The Old and the New
275
unlucky choice of the stanza' and the allegory, critical utterance
has become more facile and self-expressive, has, in fact, developed
a manner of its own. But it was not until the age of Dryden that
the roll-call disappears entirely, and is displaced by the critical
study of a poet and his work. The critique of The Silent Woman,
the literary portraits of Jonson, Shakespeare and Fletcher, in An
Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), mark a new stage in the growth
of English criticism. The commendatory verses of many poets,
the new aesthetic of Hobbes, the prose style of Cowley and
D'Avenant, and many tentatives in the art of character-writing
have made such things possible; but it is the discours and examens
of Corneille (1660) that furnished Dryden with his true models.
With Dryden, then, the intensive study of works of literature
begins, and displaces the mere tags and epithets of the older
criticism. But literary history was not born in England for an-
other quarter of a century; and, in Rymer's View of Tragedy
(1693), despite an exaggerated animus against Elizabethan tragedy,
real learning was placed at the service of criticism, and the first
connected account of the rise of modern literatures attempted.
The critical literature of the first half of the century is interest-
ing, therefore, for its direction, rather than for any accomplishment
of its own. It revolutionised aesthetic principles, but accomplished
little or nothing in the field of concrete criticism. It did not
adequately explain or appraise the works of the great poets and
playwrights of the Elizabethan age. Englishmen were slowly
beginning to realise the greatness of their literary past, but
criticism did little to direct or encourage this new taste. The
playwrights themselves scattered comments on their own art
throughout their plays, and the modern scholar may arrange
these isolated utterances at his pleasure into a unified code; yet,
no critic of this age brought order and meaning out of the chaos
of hints and hopes, and the romantic drama remained without
its thoroughgoing exponents or analysts. New ideas in respect
to poetry were, indeed, being developed. But, though Jonson
elaborated a classical point of view and Hobbes a new aesthetic,
these ideas were not consistently or intelligently applied to the
literary heritage of the English people. Not until after the
.
restoration was the clash of romantic and classical achievement
truly apprehended, and its meaning analysed and explained.
a
18-2


## p. 276 (#292) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
HOBBES AND CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
THE philosophical writings which belong to the period following
Bacon's death show but slight traces of Bacon's influence. His
genius was recognised, and he was quoted, now and again, on special
points; but his leading doctrines were generally ignored. No new
logic appeared on the lines described in his Novum Organum.
The writers of logical treatises followed the traditional scholastic
method, or adopted the modifications of it introduced by Ramus.
Even Milton's logic, which is founded on that of Ramus, pays no
attention to the Baconian revolution. It is worthy of note that, in
the middle of the sixteenth century, a beginning had been made at
writing works on logic in English. In 1552, Thomas Wilson pub-
lished The Rule of Reason, conteining the arte of logique. The
innovation was not without danger at the time, if it be true that his
publication on this subject in a vulgar tongue led to the author's
imprisonment by the inquisition at Rome. His example was
followed, in safer circumstances, by Ralph Lever, who, in his Arte
of Reason rightly termed Witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue
and dispute (1573), not only wrote in English, but used words of
English derivation in place of the traditional terminology-foreset
and backset for 'subject' and 'predicate,' inholder and inbeer for
‘substance’and 'accident,' saywhat for 'definition' and so on. This
attempt was never taken seriously; and a considerable time had
to elapse before English became the usual language for books
on logic. In the seventeenth century, as well as in the sixteenth,
the demands of the universities made the use of Latin almost
essential for the purpose. The work of Richard Crakanthorp,
Logicae libri quinque de Praedicabilibus (1622), was one of the
best known of these text-books. The question of method, which
had ruled the thought of Bacon, was less prominent in the English
philosophy of the following period and did not lead to any new
work of importance.


## p. 277 (#293) ############################################

Fotherby and Hakewill
277
Religion is as powerful a stimulus to philosophical thought as
science is, and it is apt to lead more directly to the study of ultimate
problems. It was the chief interest in the speculative writings of
Herbert of Cherbury, and the same interest is even more directly
obvious in other writings. In 1599, Sir John Davies had published
his philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum, in which a view of the
nature of the soul and arguments for its immortality are 'ex-
pounded in two elegies. ' Utilising Platonic, as well as Aristotelian,
ideas, the author worked out a spiritual philosophy in which the
soul is regarded as akin to the universal order,
For Nature in man's heart her lawes doth pen;
Prescribing truth to wit, and good to will,
Which doe accuse, or else excuse all men,
For every thought or practise, good or ill:
and, therefore, the soul can find no true satisfaction in earthly
things:
Wit, seeking Truth, from cause to cause ascends,
And never rests till it the first attaine:
Will, seeking Good, finds many middle ends,
But never stayes, till it the last doe gaine.
The same influence led to work of a philosophical kind among
theologians, usually conveyed in a scholastic manner. In his
Atheomastix (1622), Martin Fotherby, bishop of Salisbury, relied
chiefly on St Thomas Aquinas in his demonstration of the being of
God, and maintained that there is a 'natural prenotion' that there
is a God. The work of George Hakewill, archdeacon of Surrey,
entitled An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence
of God (1627), touches on philosophy without being genuinely philo-
sophical in character. Bacon is referred to for his ‘noble and
worthy endeavour. . . so to mix and temper practice and speculation
together, that they may march hand in hand'; but his new method
is not spoken of, though both Ramus and Lully are referred to in
the section on advances in logic. Nor does the discussion on truth
contain any observations beyond the ordinary commonplaces: it does
not show any knowledge of Herbert of Cherbury's enquiry, and can
hardly have suggested ideas to lord Brooke. The real importance
of the book lies in the fact that the author's eyes are turned to the
future, not to the past. It is an elaborate argument against the
view that the history of the world is a record of deterioration from
an earlier golden age. As described on the title-page, it is 'an
examination and censure of the common error touching nature's
perpetual and universal decay. '
a


## p. 278 (#294) ############################################

278 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
Much more important is the work of lord Brooke, in whom the
puritan temper was combined with the mystic. Robert Greville,
cousin and adopted son of Fulke Greville, first lord Brooke, was
born in 1608, and entered parliament in 1628. In the civil war,
he acted as a general of the parliamentary army, gained the victory
of Kineton in 1642, took Stratford-on-Avon in February 1643 and
was killed at the attack on Lichfield a few weeks later. He was an
ardent puritan, and, in 1641, wrote A Discourse opening the nature
of that Episcopacie which is exercised in England, aimed at the
political power of the bishops. In the same year was published
his philosophical work The Nature of Truth. In this work, he
refuses to distinguish between philosophy and theology. What
is true philosophy but divinity ? ' he asks, and if it be not true, it
is not philosophy. He appeals to reason and reflection alone for
an answer to his question; but his method differs from that of
Herbert of Cherbury in dealing with the same subject: it is less
logical and thorough, and more mystical. He had 'dived deep,' his
editor says, “into prophetic mysteries. ' He was also well read in
,
speculative, especially Neoplatonic, writings. The revival of
Platonism had already affected English literature; its influence
may be seen in the works of Sir Thomas More, and in Davies's
Nosce Teipsum, and it had coloured the Aristotelianism of Everard
Digby; but Brooke was the first Englishman to present in an
original treatise the fundamental ideas which, later in the same
century, bore riper fruit in the works of the Cambridge Platonists.
The two doctrines of the unity of reality and the emanation of all
things from God rule his thought; and he thinks that difficulties
about truth are solved when we see that the understanding, the
soul, light and truth are all one : 'all being is but one emanation
from above, diversified only in our apprehension. Faith and
reason differ in degree only, not in nature; knowledge and affec-
tion are but several shapes under which truth is present to our
view: 'what good we know, we are; our act of understanding
being an act of union. ' The author goes on to explain that all the
diversities of things-even space and time themselves—are without
reality and are only appearances to our apprehension. The whole
physical world, accordingly, is merely phenomenal; in it, there is
no true being, nor are there any true causes, though it is allow-
able, 'when you see some things precede others,' to 'call the one a
cause the other an effect. ' In these expressions have been found
anticipations of the idealism of Berkeley and of Hume's theory of
causation. In presenting his doctrine, Brooke wrote like a seer,


## p. 279 (#295) ############################################

Nathanael Culverwel
279
>
rather than as a logician who has tested its consistency and
adequacy. But he had the seer's vision, and the vision gave him
courage, ‘for if we knew this truth,' he says,
that all things are one, how cheerfully, with what modest courage, should we
undertake any action, reincounter any occurrence, knowing that that distinc-
tion of misery and happiness, which now 80 perplexeth us, has no being
except in the brain.
Nathanael Culverwel, fellow of Emmanuel college, Cambridge
(B. A. 1636), was thrown among the group of men who afterwards
became famous as the Cambridge Platonists. Whichcote and
Cudworth (both, originally, of Emmanuel), and Henry More of
Christ's college, were his contemporaries. But he can hardly be
counted as belonging to the group. He was not a Platonist.
Unlike More, he would not come to terms with the doctrine of the
pre-existence of souls, and he even rejected the theory of ideas.
The mysticism of lord Brooke was, also, alien to him ; he had no
sympathy with the union of contradictories; and he quotes with
approval the criticism of Brooke published, in 1643, by John
Wallis, under the title Truth tried. Nor can Culverwel be
described as a "latitude man. He remained constant to Cal-
vinism, and, on the whole, to the puritan spirit. But he was far
removed from the extremists of his party, of whom he writes that
'if you do but offer to make a syllogism, they will straightway cry
it down for carnal learning. The purpose of his book Of the Light
of Nature (published, posthumously, in 1652) is to show the true
relation between faith and reason: 'to give faith her full scope
and latitude, and to give reason also her just bounds and limits.
This,' he says, 'is the first-born, but the other has the blessing.
Two propositions sum up his doctrine:
(1) That all the moral law is founded in natural and common light, in the
light of reason; and (2) That there is nothing in the mysteries of the gospel
contrary to the light of reason.
The law of nature belongs to reason, not to sense, and is essential
to a rational creature. The voice of reason promulgates the law;
but its obligation and binding virtue rest
partly in the excellency and equity of the commands themselves; but they
principally depend upon the sovereignty and authority of God himself, thus
contriving and commanding the welfare of His creature, and advancing a
rational nature to the just perfection of its being.
As Aquinas holds, the law of nature is a copy of the eternal law,
and 'this eternal law is not really distinguished from God himself. '
This view of the laws of nature is not altogether new, even in
>


## p. 280 (#296) ############################################

280 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
English. Hooker had already given classical expression to a
doctrine essentially the same and drawn from similar sources. But
no one had a clearer view than Culverwel of the essence of the
doctrine. He never inclines to the theory that all knowledge
arises out of sensation, and yet he never lapses into mysticism.
His theory is a pure and elevated rationalism, though he holds
that our reason needs illumination from the fuller light of faith.
His style is worthy of the subject, if, perhaps, too full of learned
references and, occasionally, oratorical; and it is hardly too much
to say of the book that “it is almost a poem in its grandeur
and harmony of conception, and the lyrical enthusiasm with which
it chants the praise of reason? '
The doctrine of a law of nature was commonly relied upon by
the more philosophical writers who dealt with the details of moral
duty. Among the moralists of this class may be reckoned William
Perkins, author of Armilla aurea (1590) (Englished as A Golden
Chaine, 1600), and of The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience
(1608); William Ames, a Calvinistic theologian, who wrote De
Conscientia et ejus jure vel casibus (1630); and Robert Sanderson,
bishop of Lincoln, who wrote not only a Latin compendium of
logic (Oxford, 1615), but many works besides, including De
juramenti promissorii obligatione (1647), and De obligatione
conscientiae. The former of these is said to have been trans-
lated into English by king Charles during his imprisonment.
Joseph Hall, bishop of Norwich and satirist, was the author of
Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) and of Decisions of diverse
Practicall cases of Conscience (1649). But the greatest work of
the kind in English, and, perhaps, the greatest treatise on
casuistry ever written by a protestant theologian, is the Ductor
Dubitantium of Jeremy Taylor (1660). Publishing shortly after
the restoration, and dedicating his book to the king, the author
rejoices that ‘now our duty stands on the sunny side. ' He pro-
fesses to open out a way untrodden before. He will not collect
individual cases of conscience, for they are infinite; but he seeks
to provide a 'general instrument of moral theology, by the rules
and measures of which the guides of souls may determine the
particulars that shall be brought before them. ' The work opens
with a description of conscience as a reflection of the divine law-
'the brightness and splendour of the eternal light, a spotless
mirror of the divine majesty, and the image of the goodness of
Tulloch, J. , Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seven-
teenth Century, vol. II, p. 411.


## p. 281 (#297) ############################################

John Selden
281
God. ' It proceeds to describe the characteristics of individual
consciences when brought into contact with the problems of
conduct; it passes on to an enquiry into the nature of law in
general, and of particular laws, divine and human; and it closes
with a discussion of the nature and causes of good and evil. The
whole forms a comprehensive treatise on Christian ethics, based,
undoubtedly, on traditional scholastic doctrines, but holding firmly
to the inwardness of morality, and illustrated by an extraordinary
wealth of concrete examples.
It is only to a small extent that the writings of John Selden,
historian, jurist and political writer, fall within the scope of this
chapter. His treatise De Dis Syris (1617), his Historie of Tithes
(1618) and most of his other works lie beyond its range. But, in
his treatment of the law of nature, he enters upon topics which are
common to him and the philosophers. In his Mare Clausum (1635),
he maintains two propositions against Grotius : first, that, by the
law of nature, the sea is not common to all men, but is capable of
private sovereignty or proprietorship, equally with the earth; and,
secondly, that the king of Great Britain is sovereign of the sur-
rounding seas, as an individual and perpetual appanage of the
British empire. As was usual in his day and for long afterwards,
he identified the law of nature with international law. This
identification is seen in the title of his work De jure naturali et
gentium justa disciplinam Hebraeorum (1640). But here he has
in view not the law or custom which regulates the relation of state
to state, but the natural or moral law which is common to all men
independently of positive enactment divine or human. With the
wealth of learning in which he was without a rival in his day, he
traces the opinions of the Jews on the subject of moral obligation,
and, at the same time, brings out his own view of the law of nature.
He holds, with most jurists, that law requires an authority to pre-
scribe it, and that, therefore, reason cannot be the source of law.
At the same time, he allows that God has imprinted certain moral
rules in the minds of all men.
Speculation on these and kindred topics was soon to enter
upon a new stage under the impulse derived from the original
mind of Hobbes. Before his work is dealt with, two other writers
may be mentioned. Sir Kenelm Digby, remarkable in many
departments of life and letters, was, also, a philosopher, and wrote
a treatise on the immortality of the soul (1644). In 1655, Thomas
Stanley, well known as a classical scholar, published the first
History of Philosophy written in the English language.


## p. 282 (#298) ############################################

282 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
Thomas Hobbes was born at Westport, adjoining Malmesbury
in Wiltshire, on 5 April 1588. His father, the vicar of the
parish, says Aubrey,
was one of the ignorant Sir Johns of Queen Elizabeth's time, could only read
the prayers of the church and the homilies, and valued not learning, as
not knowing the sweetness of it.
His mother came of yeoman stock. Of her, we know nothing
beyond the story of her dread of the Spanish Armada; the air was
full of rumours of its approach; and her terror led to the premature
birth of her second son. As he put it long afterwards, “she brought
forth twins-myself and fear. The expression is significant, used,
as it was, when he could look back on more than eighty years of
life, begun amidst the terror of invasion and afterwards harassed
by civil war and unstable government. To seek peace and follow
it became, in his view, the fundamental law of nature; and the
philosopher was himself (to use his own phrase) a ‘man of feminine
courage. The first of all that fled at the threat of civil war, he was
afterwards quick to return when the French government seemed
likely to offer less protection than the commonwealth. But the
importance of these events for his life and doctrine has sometimes
been exaggerated. He had passed his fiftieth year before the
threat of danger touched him, and, by that time, he had already
completed a work which contains, in outline, the essential features
of his philosophy. Throughout the long years of preparation
which fitted him to take his place among the greatest of modern
philosophers, Hobbes led a sheltered and leisured life, and it is not
to be supposed that dreams of the Armada disturbed his quiet.
His education was provided for by an uncle, a solid tradesman and
alderman of Malmesbury. He was already a good Latin and
Greek scholar when, not yet fifteen, he was sent to Magdalen hall,
Oxford. The studies of the university were then at a low ebb;
and no subsequent reforms affected his low opinion of them. Yet
he seems to have learned the logic and physics of Aristotle, as
they were then taught, though he preferred to‘lie gaping on maps
at the stationers' shops. On leaving Oxford, in 1608, he became
companion to the eldest son of lord Cavendish of Hardwicke (after-
wards created earl of Devonshire), and his connection with the
Cavendish family lasted (although not without interruptions) till
his death. Through this connection, he gained security and leisure
for his own work, opportunities of travel and ready admission to
the society of statesmen and scholars.
Three times in his life, Hobbes travelled on the continent with
a


## p. 283 (#299) ############################################

Thomas Hobbes
283
a
a pupil. His first journey was begun in 1610, and in it he visited
France, Germany and Italy, learning the French and Italian
languages, and gaining experience, but not yet conscious of his
life's work. On his return the date is uncertain), he settled down
with his young lord at Hardwick and in London. His secretarial
duties were light, and he set himself to become a scholar; with the
society and books at his command, he did not 'need the university'
(he said); he read the historians and poets both Greek and Latin,
and taught himself a clear and accurate Latin style. To these studies,
his first published work bears witness—an English translation of
Thucydides, sent to press in 1628, but completed some years
earlier. To this period, also, belongs his acquaintance with Bacon,
Herbert of Cherbury, Ben Jonson and other leading men of the
time. Of his association with Bacon (probably sometime in the
years between 1621 and 1626), we know little beyond what Aubrey
tells us—that he translated some of Bacon's essays into Latin, that,
on occasion, he would attend with ink and paper and set down
Bacon's thoughts when he contemplated and dictated 'in his
delicious walks at Gorhambury' and that his lordship would often
say that he better liked Mr Hobbes's taking his thoughts, than
any of the others, because he understood what he wrote. There
is no evidence, however, that their discourse turned on strictly
philosophical questions; nor does it appear that philosophical
interest had, as yet, become dominant in Hobbes's mind; certainly,
he was never a pupil of Bacon; and it is an error to attempt, as
has sometimes been done, to affiliate his philosophy to the Baconian.
They agreed in their opposition to medievalism, and both attempted
to elaborate a comprehensive scheme; the vague term 'empirical'
may, also, be applied to both; but Hobbes set small store by
experiment, and his system differed fundamentally from Bacon's
in method, temper and scope. One important point only was
common to both—their acceptance of the mechanical theory; and,
for this theory, there is ample evidence, external as well as internal,
that Hobbes was directly indebted not to Bacon but to Galileo.
Hobbes's master and friend died in 1628, two years after the
death of the first earl; his son and successor was a boy of eleven ;
his widow did not need the services of a secretary; and, for a time,
there was no place in the household for Hobbes. In 1629, he left for
the continent again with a new pupil, returning from this second
journey in 1631 to take charge of the young earl's education. Little
is known of his travels, but this period of his life is remarkable for
1 English Works, ed. Molesworth, vol. 1v, pp. 436–7; vol. VII, p. 117.


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284 Hobbes and Contemporary Philosophy
two things—his introduction to the study of geometry, and his first
effort towards a philosophy. As regards the former, there is no
reason for doubting Aubrey's story, which throws light both on his
early education and on the controversies of his later years.
He was forty years old before he looked on geometry, which happened
accidentally; being in a gentleman's library in . . . Euclid's Elements lay
open, and it was the 47 prop. lib. 1. So he reads the proposition, ‘By G
says he, 'this is impossible! ' So he reads the demonstration of it, which
referred him back to another, which also he read, et sic deinceps, that at last
he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with
geometry.
About this time also, or soon afterwards, his philosophical views
began to take shape. Among his manuscripts, there is a Short
Tract on First Principles', which has been conjectured to belong
to the year 1630 and cannot have been much later. It shows the
author so much impressed by his reading of Euclid as to adopt the
geometrical form (soon afterwards used by Descartes) for the
expression of his argument. It shows, further, that he had already
fixed on the conception of motion as fundamental for the explana-
tion of things, but, also, that he had not yet relinquished the
scholastic doctrine of species in explaining action and perception.
When Hobbes made his third visit to the continent, which
lasted from 1634 to 1637 and on which he was accompanied by the
young earl of Devonshire, he is found taking his place among
philosophers. At Paris, he was an intimate of Mersenne, who
was the centre of a scientific circle that included Descartes and
Gassendi; and, at Florence, he held discourse with Galileo. There
is an earlier record, in January 1633, of Hobbes searching the
shops in London for a copy of Galileo's Dialogue, and searching
vainly, as the small supply had been sold out. And now he seems
to have arrived at the view that not only is motion the fundamental
conception for explaining the physical world, but that man and
society also can be explained on the same mechanical theory.
After his return to England, he wrote, with a view to publication,
a sketch of his new theory, to which he gave the title Elements of
Law natural and politic. The physical doctrine of which he had
taken firm hold lies at the basis of this work, but it deals in detail
only with the mind of man and the principles of social order.