The Joy of Reading

chapter eight

…and Revolution

Careful readers will notice the ellipses at the beginning of the title above. And when they do they will recall the ellipses at the end of the title of Chapter 7. And in that case they will put two and two together and recognize that I wish to emphasize the connection between the books that preceded in Chapter 7, and those in Chapter 8. Putting the two abbreviated titles together we arrive at “Reason and Revolution.”

As I noted at the beginning of Chapter 7, those books were productions of an age that could be called Augustan because of the influence of the Roman poets of the Silver Age. The writers in Chapter 8 have not entirely forgotten Horace and his fellow satirists, but they are no longer controlled by the dead hand of the past. In various ways they are rebelling against the influence of the Latin classics and striking out on their own.

This is true both of the literature and the politics of what is now the eighteenth century. John Locke died in 1704, but his influence was felt throughout the hundred years that followed. Bishop Berkeley was fifteen years old in 1700, and all the other authors were born after that date. Several died in the nineteenth century. One, indeed, was born early in that century.

In many ways Locke was the most important figure of the time. First, as an apologist for the Glorious Revolution of 1688; second, as the author of a document that would profoundly influence Thomas Jefferson seventy years later; and third, as the first of the new school of philosophers known as British Empiricists. Rousseau’s influence was nearly as great, and Dr. Johnson ruled the literary world for three decades in the middle of the century. Where Dryden had been the first serious critic of Shakespeare a hundred years before, Johnson reigned supreme as critic and expositor of Shakespeare well into the nineteenth century, although he had died in 1784.

The four poets—Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—represented here had little in common but their commonality was important. They were all rebels against the style of Pope, as it may be called. They wrote not in rhyme but in blank or free verse and chose subjects that were often entirely new. This was especially true of William Blake, who was a genuine revolutionary in poetry and a great seer in all the senses of that word. As you will see in what follows.

JOHN LOCKE

1632–1704

The Second Essay on Civil

Government

A Letter Concerning Toleration

John Locke was born near Bristol in 1632, the son of an attorney who treated the boy with intelligence and great kindness; Locke’s education thus began well, a fact that he confirmed some fifty years later in his fine small book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke attended the Westminster School and Oxford, but, although he remained a fellow there for much of his life, he did not approve of the Scholastic philosophy still taught in Oxford colleges. He decided to study medicine under Robert Boyle and other natural philosophers of the new mode of thinking.

His life was circumscribed, his character mild, and his prospects modest when, in 1666, the great Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the Earl of Shaftesbury) visited Oxford. This was a turning point in Locke’s career. Shaftesbury required minor medical attention, and Locke was introduced by a mutual friend. The two men found they had much in common. Locke spent the next fifteen years in Shaftesbury’s employ, as doctor, secretary, friend, and general counselor. During these years Shaftesbury’s career was meteoric, rising to the position of the king’s First Minister and descending to charges of treason. Locke shared the pleasures and emoluments of his patron’s rise, but managed to avoid the pains of his fall.

A flurry of political activity occurred in 1680 when hints surfaced of a plot to murder Charles II and replace him on the throne by his brother, the future James II, a Roman Catholic. The plot was less important than the reaction to it; Shaftesbury proposed a law excluding Roman Catholics from the succession. Shaftesbury’s opponents immediately countered with arguments in favor of the so-called Divine Right of Kings, which would presumably include the right of the king to adopt any religion he chose. To shore up their side they republished an old book, Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, a vindication of the rights of kings to which no one had paid much attention for forty years. But now everyone was paying attention. Shaftesbury turned to Locke and asked him to help prepare a reply to Filmer. This Locke did, composing two treatises on government, the first a direct reply to and effective demolition of Filmer’s arguments, the second an essay upon civil government from a more general point of view.

The two treatises were completed, though not published, in 1680. But events soon conspired to give them an import and an influence far beyond, it appears, Locke’s original intention. Charles II died in 1685; James II succeeded him. Within a short time his Roman Catholicism was perceived as intolerable by the majority of Britons and active steps began to be taken to remove him from the throne. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the result—glorious primarily because not a drop of blood was spilled, although there was much saber rattling. James abdicated, and William and Mary succeeded him. They were both good Protestants.

Though bloodless, nevertheless this was a real revolution, one of the most important in the history of political liberty, and it required justification. Locke had spent the years after 1680 in Holland, fearful of the king’s vengeance. Now, in the spring of 1689, he returned to England in the same vessel with Queen Mary, bearing his manuscripts. His two treatises were published together at the end of the year, and ever since it has been assumed that they were written to validate a revolution. They were published to do so, at least. “The Second Essay on Civil Government” is about three great ideas: property, government, and revolution. The question that most concerned Locke was: What is the connection between them?

If there is no property, no government is needed. If I possess nothing, what need have I of the machinery of the state: laws and judges, policemen and prisons?

But property exists, says Locke, and it is legitimate. At least it used to be; in the beginning one could easily see its fairness. Now, sometimes, he wonders, as we do today, why some persons should possess so much, others so little.

Government, too, is legitimate, or it can be so. It is so if the governors and the governed agree on the one great thing: that they are in it together. The governors govern for the good of the governed, not their own good only; and the governed are content that it should be thus, for they see justice all around them, and above them, too.

Is revolution ever legitimate? Yes, Locke thunders! When a ruler declares war upon his people and attempts by one means or another to reduce them to slavery, then they have a right to rise up in self-defense. God has given them this right, and no man can take it from them.

That glorious doctrine has been used to justify rebellions other than the one of 1688. Thomas Jefferson read the “Essay,” as did Robespierre, as did Marx, as did Lenin. Ideas, it has been said with some truth, are the rulers of the world.

The sixteenth century had been blasted by religious wars—in Germany, in France, in England, in the Low Countries. Some of these spilled over into the seventeenth century, especially at its dawning; sometimes, however, religion was cited as an excuse for war that was really about other matters. At any rate, it became a prime goal of the seventeenth century to try to deal with the question of religious difference and conflict among religions without war. Probably the most eloquent plea for religious toleration came at the very end of the century. John Locke wrote it first in Latin and published it in Holland during the 1680s, when he was living in that country to avoid the tumultuous events in England at the time—events that led to the revolution of 1688. “A Letter Concerning Toleration” was published by Locke in English during the year of his return to England, 1689. It immediately produced a storm of controversy.

Why? The text seems completely reasonable and completely in line with modern views on the subject. How could Locke have been attacked for writing it; on what grounds could the “Letter” itself have been opposed? Not to know how to answer these questions is to fail to understand two hundred years of European history.

Religion was serious business in the western world until the middle of the nineteenth century. Today there are still many religious people, and church attendance remains high among a number of sects, but religion has ceased to be, for almost all Christians at least, a matter of life and death. The jihad, or holy war, is also a thing of the past—in our part of the world. Such wars persist and continue in other regions of the globe.

As far as we are concerned, is that all to the good? Some religious people would deny this today. If you are not willing to die for your faith, they say, then you do not have much of a faith. Dying for one’s faith is one thing, killing for it is another. Men and women of the sixteenth century were very willing both to die and to kill for their faith. It happened all the time. It did not strike anyone as insane or even unreasonable; in fact, if it did not happen from time to time—if the tree of faith (to paraphrase a famous saying of Thomas Jefferson) was not watered with the blood of the faithful—then, in the opinion of many persons in the sixteenth century, this was cause for alarm. In that case, they would have thought, religion must be in danger of ceasing to be serious business.

Indeed, that is the crux of the matter. If you believe that you possess (or are) an immortal soul; if you believe that your stay on Earth is but a tiny part of time compared to the eternity your soul will endure after death; and if you believe that the character of your faith and the details of your religious observances will determine whether you spend that eternity in bliss or in torment—then religion becomes extremely serious business, more serious than anything else you do or think about. To die in your faith, if you believe that to do so is to gain eternal bliss, is obviously no loss whatsoever compared to living out of it, and losing heaven.

This, however, is to look at religion only from your point of view. There would seem to be two other points of view that should be considered. One is that of another person whose faith differs from your own. For hundreds of years before the time of Locke, but especially during the two centuries or so before he wrote the “Letter Concerning Toleration,” it was easy for men to believe that their faith required them to torment, to kill, to burn at the stake other men—and women—whose faith differed from theirs, by shades of difference that now seem hard to discern. But, we may ask, is any difference, no matter how great, cause enough for burning? A man of the sixteenth century would not even have understood the question. A man of the seventeenth century might have understood it, but he would still have been shocked to hear it asked. Such were the opponents who attacked Locke for his “Letter.”

Finally, there is Locke’s position, or point of view, which is that—he says—of God. He asks: Does the Christian God, the God in Whom we believe, the God of mercy and of love, approve and applaud the actions of those who, “out of a principle of charity, as they pretend, and love to men’s souls … deprive [others] of their estates, maim them with corporal punishments, starve and torment them in noisome prisons, and in the end even take away their lives”? Locke’s answer to this question is strong and clear:

That any man should think fit to cause another man—whose salvation he heartily desires—to expire in torments, and that even in an unconverted state, would, I confess, seem very strange to me, and I think, to any other also. But nobody, surely, will ever believe that such a carriage can proceed from charity, love, or goodwill. If anyone maintain that men ought to be compelled by fire and sword to profess certain doctrines, and conform to this or that exterior worship, without regard had unto their morals; if any endeavour to convert those that are erroneous unto the faith, by forcing them to profess things that they do not believe and allowing them to practise things that the Gospel does not permit, it cannot be doubted indeed but such a one is desirous to have a numerous assembly joined in the same profession with himself; but that he principally intends by those means to compose a truly Christian Church, is altogether incredible.

It is an interesting answer, and a very modern one. Scarcely any Christian today would find fault with it, which is the best proof of Locke’s influence on our minds and ideas. We are almost all Lockians now, in politics and religion.

Is that because he made us what we are, or is it because he could foresee what we would be?

JOHN LOCKE

An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding

GEORGE BERKELEY

1685–1753

The Principles of Human Knowledge

DAVID HUME

1711–1776

An Enquiry Concerning Human

Understanding

The history of philosophy, like the history of many ideas that are very old, reveals a pendulum movement. The bias in philosophy has swung back and forth between two main views of what is, and of how the human mind knows what is. Those are the fundamental questions with which philosophy at all times and places has been concerned.

These two main views have names: Rationalism and Empiricism. To simplify the matter greatly, Empiricists believe that nothing exists that is not at least to some extent perceivable, and that knowledge, at least to a large extent, is about things that are or can be perceived. Rationalists, on the contrary, maintain that real things are ideas and principles, while the phenomenal, perceivable world is merely a reflection of the reality that we do not perceive at all—it is not material—but instead intuit or known with our minds a priori.

The greatest of all Rationalists was Plato; his pupil, Aristotle, was also a Rationalist, but not an extreme one like Plato. With Plato and Aristotle the pendulum swung far toward Rationalism, but it swung back toward Empiricism with the rise to prominence of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, who held that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, or “clean slate,” on which messages are “written” by the senses. Unsophisticated philosophers are usually Empiricists, and the early Christian thinkers were not sophisticated; but Saint Augustine, as a follower of Plato, introduced the Church to the Rationalism that prevailed for nearly a thousand years. The pendulum swung again: Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon were, in their very different ways, Empiricists whose theories were subtle and highly sophisticated. But Rationalism struck back during the early Renaissance with the revival of interest in Plato and especially Aristotle and the dominance of the so-called Scholastic philosophy in schools everywhere in Christendom. Thus, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the pendulum had swung far toward Rationalism—and was ready again to swing the other way.

Descartes, though in many ways a Rationalist, gave the pendulum a strong push, and so did the first of the English Empiricists, Francis Bacon, with his relatively naive insistence that all philosophical study and investigation should be concerned with the secrets of nature, to unlock which would allow man to progress. Thomas Hobbes was in some ways a fervent Empiricist, although he also held some Rationalist views. It remained for John Locke to push the pendulum all the way to the Empiricist side, where it remained for more than a century, thanks to successive pushes given it by Berkeley and Hume. The pendulum swung back again in the nineteenth century under the enormous influence of Kant and, especially, Hegel. We live today in an era of reaction to Hegelianism; Radical or Logical Empiricism is probably the dominant philosophical school of our times. There are signs, however, that the pendulum is beginning to swing again toward Rationalism, and it can be safely predicted that it will do so sooner or later.

A pendulum swings back and forth, hanging from a central point. The central question of philosophy goes something like this: Given that there are real things in the world and minds that both perceive and know them, then what is it that is known? Is it “things themselves” or is it ideas about those things, principles derived or abstracted from those things, that the mind comprehends and about which it reasons?

And if it is the “things themselves” that are actually known by the mind, then what is the relation between the mind and the thing known? Is the thing itself in the mind—or some material shadow or image of it (perhaps made of atoms)? Or does the mind bring to the process of knowing innate or a priori concepts and/or capabilities and/or categories of thought? The above may seem complicated, but really only one question is being asked. How you answer it determines where you stand on the great perennial issue of philosophy.

Locke published his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” shortly after his return to England from his exile in Holland. The year was 1689, which also saw the publication of his two major political works, the “Letter Concerning Toleration” and “The Second Essay on Civil Government.” The two political works occasioned immediate controversy; the philosophical treatise took a while to sink in. Eventually it became the bible of English Empiricists and was accorded a devotion only equaled by the devotion paid to Newton’s achievements in the fields of mathematics and celestial mechanics. The book is gracefully written and is one of the easiest philosophical books to read.

The Irishman George Berkeley (1685–1753) made a considerable career for himself because of his charm and good temper—and also because of his keen intellect. He composed a famous poem, “Westward the course of Empire takes its way”; was a famous bishop; and wrote a famous book, Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), which purported to attack Locke but really advanced his Empiricist views a good distance. It too is easy to read.

The book also occasioned a notorious event in English intellectual history. Berkeley maintained—or seemed to maintain—that the only real “substance” in the world was spiritual, not material. Locke had held that only the perceivable exists, but that the mind adds to its comprehension of perceivable things an innate idea of their materiality. Berkeley countered that he had no sense himself of any such innate idea, and replaced Locke’s concept of “material substance” by a concept of “spiritual substance”; to make a long story short, Berkeley thus maintained that the being of things was supported and maintained by the ever-present mind of God. A conclusion was easy to draw from this—although Berkeley himself did not draw it—to the effect that material things do not exist, and that the world we think we perceive is merely a collection of shades or shadows. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who really knew better, once got into an argument about Berkeley’s views and, to ensure victory, kicked a stone with his foot as hard as he could. Limping down the road, he expostulated: “Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley!”

The Scotsman David Hume completes our triumvirate of British Empiricists. Born in Edinburgh in 1711, Hume was one of the first professional literary men; his essays on political and economic subjects made him famous, and his History of England (1753-61) made him rich—“not only independent but opulent,” as he said himself.

Those works were a great success; his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which he cared about and published in several versions throughout his lifetime, was a great failure. It was indeed a rather frightening book for its time, for Hume’s radical Empiricism led him to the edge of a religious skepticism that was shocking to his contemporaries. He denied that he was not a believing Christian, but his most careful readers thought they knew better, and I think they were right. Hume, in fact, was as close as you please to being the kind of atheist who asks whether the existence of God can be proved, if not in the laboratory, then at least by scientific methods. And if not …

The superbly written Enquiry forms the capstone of the arch begun by Locke. It ends with one of the most passionate paragraphs ever written by a philosopher. Hume has expounded his principles and supposes that they are convincing. He imagines, therefore, a new beginning of philosophy based on his own ideas. To make this new beginning, much of the old underbrush will have to be swept away, including a lot of old, false books. He writes:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

That is wonderful. All philosophers should care as much as Hume did about the truth.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

1712–1778

A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

The Social Contract

At the end of his life Jean-Jacques Rousseau, exiled from all the nations where he had lived and a self-proclaimed citizen of the world, was the most famous man in Europe. And also one of the most feared, by secular and religious leaders alike. His restless, tormented spirit was not to be trusted, they felt, and with good reason. He was a danger to all established institutions, which he would just as soon pull down, they thought, for the pleasure of seeing them fall, as for any real sense of their injustice or corruption. They may have been right about that, too.

Certainly Jean-Jacques, as he was called by both his enemies and his admirers—he had few friends, as such—was one of the unhappiest men who ever lived. His life consisted of a series of failures and disasters; he was only saved, on occasion, by the merciful intercessions of women who were enormously attracted to his dark, haunted soul. Indeed, he was a pure Romantic spirit, but he lived a half-century before such types were appreciated. What is more, he received no credit whatever for having invented the character that made men like Shelley, Byron, and Victor Hugo famous.

Rousseau was born in 1712 in Geneva, then an independent city-state, but he did not stay there, finding its narrow Protestantism admirable in a way but intolerable to his turbulent personality. He lived in France, in Venice (also an independent city-state), and in England, to which, with the help of James Boswell, he journeyed in the company of David Hume—only to quarrel with both of his benefactors within a matter of months. There was no helping this bitter, perverse, ironic, and suspicious man; he turned like a wounded dog on all those who tried to succor him. In 1767, now fifty-five and tired of running, he returned to France. He died in a simple cottage at Ermenonville, near Paris, in 1778. The great of Europe were glad to know him gone, but his cult did not die; for half a century the name Jean-Jacques could strike terror in the breasts of authority and produce frantic excitement in those of young, ambitious men and women.

Rousseau’s literary career began in 1749 at the age of thirty-seven, when he entered a competition proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the subject: “Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or purification of morals?” His essay, attacking civilization as corrupting the goodness of nature, won the prize and brought him his first fame. He gained the attention of Diderot, who was editing L’Encyclopedie; Diderot asked for an article on politics, and Rousseau wrote his Discourse on Political Economy, which first appeared in L’Encyclopedie in 1755. His romantic novel, La Nouvelle Eloise, about a girl brought up in a simple environment, was a great success; he followed it by Emile, a tract disguised as a novel, proposing a system of education based on direct acquaintance with nature, and The Social Contract, both published in 1762. His Confessions did not appear until after his death; they were as shocking as anything he had ever written. In them he spoke of personal matters that no serious writer before him had discussed in print and revealed himself as he really was, both bad and good.

The Academy of Dijon proposed another essay competition in 1755, and Rousseau entered this one, too, with his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The question was, How has a condition of inequality among men come about? Rousseau’s answer was characteristic and similar to the one he had given to the previous question. That is, he changed the question somewhat, to ask how general unhappiness had come about—was this because man was naturally unhappy, or because civilization had made him so?

Leaving aside the assumption, typical of Rousseau, that mankind is generally unhappy, the essay is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the history of eighteenth-century thought. It begins with an account of the state of nature, which, Rousseau candidly admits, “no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist,” and goes on to examine the unhappy series of events—as Rousseau views them—that have led to the present state of mankind.

Rousseau’s concept of the state of nature is quite different from that of the other political philosophers—notably Hobbes and Locke—who had written on the subject. Rousseau sees no reason to agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” nor with Locke that natural man lived in a condition of constant terror of everything that surrounded him. On the contrary, says Rousseau, why should not primitive man in his natural state be considered to have been happy? He had everything he desired—“food, a female, and sleep”—and knew nothing of the further pleasures of life that are the result of progress and man’s perfectibility. And in this happiness, or rather contentment, how could he have been counted unequal to anyone else? Were not all in that condition the same? Apart, of course, from natural differences in strength, size, speed, and the like, which are quite different from “moral or political inequality”; the latter is artificial, that is, manmade and man-maintained. And yet how different is the present condition of mankind!

How did this change come about? Again, says Rousseau, it is because of, and a bitter fruit of, progress and man’s perfectibility.

From the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilized men, and ruined humanity.

How characteristic of Rousseau are those famous sentences! No one could write with such boldness and speed. Their substance is also typical. Rousseau was a deep believer in a Golden Age that was long past. The present, in his view, was—as John Donne had said a century before—“iron, and rusty too!”

Rousseau did not create the cult of the Noble Savage, but he did much to promote and perpetuate it. He was also the leading spokesman of his era for the position that progress is a disaster for mankind. He did not entirely believe that; The Social Contract is in some respects his own answer to the gloomy conclusions of the Discourse on Inequality. But as with everything he wrote, the latter work, within the compass of its few pages, sets forth an extreme position with incomparable force and eloquence. If you disagree with Rousseau about progress you had better start marshaling your arguments, for he is hard to beat. If you agree, you will be amused and delighted to find your own ideas set forth with such ironic brilliance.

Rousseau wrote The Social Contract during the early 1760s, when he was living at Montlouis, near Paris; he had moved there after quarreling, as was his wont, with friends who had provided him with a much more comfortable place to work at the Hermitage. The book was condemned by the parliament of Paris and attacked by Voltaire, who was himself a rebel but not a political one, and its publication led to Rousseau’s exile from France for several years. The book, which is short, like most of his works, was published in 1762. Its brevity is, however, misleading. No one wrote with greater swiftness than did Rousseau. He is able to cover in fifty pages what others had required volumes to treat.

With his accustomed directness, Rousseau tells us in his first sentence what his book is about and what he intends to do in it. “I mean to inquire if,” he says, “in the civil order, there can be any sure and legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and laws as they might be.” Or, to put it another way, as Rousseau does a few lines later, in some of the most famous words ever written in the field of political thought:

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.

Simply as an example of good prose, how could that be improved upon?

One does not read The Social Contract only for its prose style. Rousseau is concerned to ask the great question of political theory and to give a most interesting answer to it. He supposes mankind at a point in its development when the primitive state of nature is no longer sufficient—if, indeed, it ever was—for the satisfaction of its needs. What is required, now, is some kind of aggregated action; men can do together what none can do alone. The problem, however, is to attain the goods of association without giving up all other goods. As Rousseau states it:

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.

This, he adds, is the fundamental problem of which The Social Contract provides the solution.

For Rousseau, the solution lies in the totality of the gift, on the part of all members of the community—all without exception—of their individual power and liberty. The clauses of this contract, he writes, “may be reduced to one—the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community.” This concept is essential because “each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody.” He gains as much as he loses; indeed he gains more, for now he enjoys the combined power of the community, where before he was limited by the narrow extent of his own strength.

HENRY FIELDING

1707–1754

Tom Jones

Henry Fielding suffered much in his life and lived among persons who suffered even more than he. But he hardly ever lost his composure and his cheerfulness, and he spent all of his free time, money, and strength in helping others. The poor of London thought of him as a saint. He was also a great novelist.

Born in 1707 into a noble family tracing its lineage to the Hapsburgs, Fielding spent his youth as such a young man should, attending Eton—where he first learned to love literature—and chasing after pretty girls. When he was twenty-one, however, he learned the melancholy news that his father was no longer able to pay him an allowance. From then on, Fielding was entirely dependent on his own resources.

He resolved to become a writer and in a period of some ten years produced twenty-five mocking comedies for the stage, which gave him a very modest income. But the last of these plays mercilessly satirized the then prime minister, a Whig, who pushed a law through Parliament—in 1737—requiring the licensing of plays. Fielding’s dramatic career thus came to an end. He studied law and tried to make a living as a barrister, but without much success. In 1742 he reached the nadir. His daughter was dying, his wife was very ill, he himself was suffering acutely from gout, and he had no money. In despair, he tried his hand at still another kind of writing and produced Joseph Andrews.

In a sense it was the first English novel; Fielding called it a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose.” Beginning as a satire on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, the story of a girl who fought for her virtue against her employer and ended up marrying him, Joseph Andrews is the story of Pamela’s brother, who resists the advances of his employer, a noble lady. The joke was good for a laugh, and it is remarkable that Fielding was able to be so cheerful about it, given the circumstances.

Actually, in the course of writing the book, he made a discovery of the sort that happens only to the best writers. He found he had a better story at hand in the relationship between Joseph and his friend, Parson Adams, one of the great comic figures in literature. Adams and Joseph travel the roads and byways of England together, and their adventures constitute a masterpiece of ironic social criticism.

Fielding had been considered an enemy by the Whigs, but in 1745 a Tory government came into power and he was adopted as a valuable political ally. He wrote whole issues of newspapers in support of the Tories and was supported financially by them in return. He was also made a London magistrate, and ended up reforming that previously despised office, treating the poor with justice and compassion instead of exploiting them, and devising ways to protect both rich and poor from the depredations of murderers, ruffians, and robbers. All of this kept him extremely busy, but he still had time to write The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. It appeared in 1749, and though it was one of the very first English novels, it remains one of the best. Amelia followed two years later; it is not much read these days. In 1754 Fielding journeyed to Lisbon in search of a cure for his several crippling afflictions. He died in Lisbon a few months after he arrived.

Tom Jones is a foundling. This is a convenient novelistic ploy; the author can conceal until the very end of the book the names of the real parents of his hero. Tom is considered by everyone to be a bastard and hence a man without any prospects. But he is the handsomest young man in England, and charming to boot, and infinitely lovable. He is loved by everyone—except his enemies.

Naturally he has enemies; else there would be no story. For a while his enemies are triumphant, and Tom is forced to flee from the comfortable home where he has been brought up under the kind care of Squire Allworthy, whose name indicates character. Tom sets out, with an imaginary stick over his shoulder to which is attached a handkerchief containing his worldly possessions, to see what the world is made of. He learns a great deal but he is never in any real danger because many women, young and old, adopt him and take him under their wing. Such a charming, handsome young man cannot come to harm in the universe of fiction.

Tom leaves behind him not only Squire Allworthy but also Squire Western, and Squire Western’s family. Squire Western is justly famous; he is the very type of the apoplectic eighteenth-century landed gentry. He is also wonderfully funny, for, no matter how hard he shouts, he is never able to beat down his sister, an unwedded lady who keeps his house. They argue unceasingly, and these arguments are immensely comical. The keynote is established in an early chapter when, in the course of one of the Squire’s tirades, Miss Western has occasion to remind him that she is a woman:

“I do know you are a woman,” cries the squire, “and it’s well for thee that art one; if hadst been a man, I promise thee I had lent thee a flick long ago.”—“Ay, there,” said she, “in that flick lies all your fancied superiority. Your bodies, and not your brains, are stronger than ours. Believe me, it is well for you that you are able to beat us; or, such is the superiority of our understanding, we should make all of you … our slaves.”

The Squire is never able to talk to his sister without nearly frothing at the mouth. They are a wonderful pair, and one regrets that there are not even more of their conversations in the book.

Squire Western also has a daughter, Sophia, the paragon of young ladies, as beautiful as Tom is handsome, as charming and accomplished in her way as he is in his. Of course they fall in love; this is as deliciously inevitable as anything in a novel.

The Squire, however, is inalterably opposed to such a match for his beloved daughter. Sophia therefore has many obstacles to overcome in winning her Tom; to those in her own household are added those erected between them by Tom himself who, partly because he feels guilty about loving Sophia when everyone tells him he should not, falls in love with more than one other girl in the course of his travels.

All comes around in the end, which is also inevitable, but how it comes about I have no intention whatsoever of saying—for what right have I to deprive you of the exquisite pleasure of finding out for yourself?

I do not know of any novel that is more fun to read than Tom Jones. It is funny, touching, sad, and profound. The characters are interesting, the situations believable. The book also is a veritable goldmine of information about life in eighteenth-century England. It was a fascinating time worth knowing about.

Tom Jones consists of eighteen books and some one hundred chapters. Each of the separate Books is introduced by a chat with the reader in the author’s own voice. Fielding talks to us about the story, about the fortunes and misfortunes of the characters, and about other subjects of mutual interest. Such interludes were not uncommon at the time, and usually they can be skipped without loss. Not so with Tom Jones. Fielding’s chats with his readers are almost as entertaining as the story itself. Do not make the mistake of slipping by them.

JAMES BOSWELL

1740–1795

The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D.

James Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1740, the son of the laird of Auchinleck in Ayrshire. The laird was ambitious for his son and wished for him to follow in his footsteps as an advocate, but Boswell disliked school and especially disliked his father’s profession. In 1760 he ran away from his father’s sternness to London and discovered that he much preferred pretty women to the law. He also discovered that he was sensual and attractive to women and so the long series of intrigues and gallantries that filled his life began.

Boswell, now deciding that instead of being a lawyer he would become a soldier, persuaded his father to support him in a military career. But his father would not buy him a commission, and Boswell failed to obtain one in any other way. He ended up being an advocate, and an unhappy one.

On his second visit to London he made the acquaintance of a number of important persons and literary folk, and charmed them all. On May 16, 1763, there occurred the famous meeting with Samuel Johnson, in the back parlor of the bookseller Thomas Davies. Johnson was severe with the young man at first—he was fifty-three, Boswell still only twenty-two—but a firm friendship soon developed between them, one that endured until Johnson’s death in 1784.

James Boswell harbored for years an abiding desire to write the biography of some great man. He seemed to grow in his own estimation when he was in the company of important persons. He had an ability to interest and charm them, and many became his close friends. He also possessed a remarkable memory. He could remember the details of a conversation long after it had occurred, and what is more he had the ability to summarize it so that it read like fiction instead of a mere transcript.

Boswell’s first choice of a subject was the Corsican hero, Pasquale Paoli, whom he visited in the autumn of 1765. Paoli became his fast friend, and Boswell’s first book was about Corsica and Paoli’s efforts to liberate it. The book was a success. But as the friendship with Dr. Johnson developed, Boswell began to realize that here was his perfect subject. The first edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. appeared in 1791, to great acclaim. Boswell saw the second edition through the press in 1793 and was at work on the third when he died in 1795.

Boswell gave his soul to Dr. Johnson, and in return Johnson gave his heart to the strange young Scot. The old man had never had such a friend, at least since Mrs. Johnson’s death. And the famous old man did not mind at all that “Bozzie” was forever challenging him with statements, declarations, and propositions. He was at least half aware that Boswell was taking it all down, composing some sort of record. Others were, too, Johnson knew; but he did not love them the way he did Boswell. There was something very special about Boswell, Dr. Johnson thought, and he was right.

Boswell was also right to choose Samuel Johnson, LL.D., as his subject. Johnson was the most famous literary man in England. He had produced the best dictionary of the English language and also an edition of Shakespeare’s plays that was in every gentleman’s library. He wrote no more these days; he had once said that “No one but a fool writes except for money,” and he had money now, money of his own and money from admiring hosts like the Thrales (Mr. Thrale made beer, and Mrs. Thrale liked having Johnson at her dinner parties). All of his energies—still considerable—were spent on conversation; he was probably the greatest talker in England, and an aggressive talker, too; when he talked for victory, as a later critic said, you had better get out of his way. A young man with a good memory and a knowledge of shorthand would find much usable material if he could manage to spend enough time with Johnson. Boswell found the time, Johnson talked, and the result is a glorious book.

Johnson was a rich biographical subject, and not just because of his famous wit. He was also a very touching human being. Tall, with stooped shoulders and a craggy face scarred by scrofula (a sort of severe acne), he was also awkward in the extreme and possessed by every kind of tic and nervous ailment. At the same time, he was a thoughtful and caring man. He was a really good friend. He supported a household of servants and never complained when they did not serve him. He cared very much for his cat. And he was deeply concerned for his immortal soul.

All of this Boswell knew, and all of it he told. But the most important thing he knew was how to stand out of the spotlight and let Dr. Johnson shine. The best biographers know this, and Boswell was the first modern biographer.

Much has been learned about Dr. Johnson, and our time has witnessed the publication of several fine new biographies of this perennial subject. The publication of Boswell’s diaries, in eighteen volumes (1928–1934), has also taught us much about Boswell. It was customary, until these diaries were discovered—it had been supposed that they were lost—to view Boswell as a fortunate fool, a kind of recording machine who never really understood the meaning of his own words. The diaries show that to be untrue; Boswell was not only a man of complex aspirations but also a superb writer. In fact, his diaries, which constitute almost a complete autobiography, are one of the best examples of that genre.

Nevertheless, in the end it is probably true that the combination of Johnson and Boswell, or Boswell and Johnson, is greater than the sum of its parts. Boswell was fortunate to find Johnson, and Johnson to find Boswell. And we are lucky that they found one another.

The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. is the perfect book to read on a series of winter evenings—throughout an entire winter, perhaps—and a long one at that. It requires patience to read the whole book, but that patience is rewarded. Imagine yourself in London in, say, 1775; you are seated in a drawing room, and there is an excited whisper of anticipation: “Dr. Johnson is coming down!” Sit back and listen … .

ROBERT BURNS

1759–1796

Selected Poems

Robert Burns is the national poet of Scotland. So what else is new, you say. It is not new, but it is remarkable, for no other country has a national poet as Scotland has Burns. Each year his birthday, January 25, is celebrated with rites expressing a fervent and undying love that is associated with no other serious poet anywhere.

Burns was born in 1759 in Ayrshire, in the Lowlands of Scotland. The Highlands are not far away, and Burns often journeyed there in search of adventure, love, and, finally, peace. He received almost no schooling, being instead one of the most successful autodidacts; he read everything he could lay his hands on, which was a lot in eighteenth- century Scotland, a nation that was both literate and proud of its books. He began to write verses when he was about twenty, the time when he also first fell in love. “I never had the least thought,” he wrote, “or inclination of turning Poet till I once got heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, a spontaneous language of my heart.” Some of his poems were in standard English, but many were in the Scottish dialect; in fact, he created a distinctly Scots-English idiom that now seems natural enough but that really did not exist before him. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published at Kilmarnock in 1786, was an immediate success. The world was ready for this farmer and farmer’s son who could either wring or uplift his readers’ hearts with the turn of a phrase.

Literary success meant fame and new friends, but little or no money. Burns already had a family, although he was as yet unmarried. His first illegitimate child had been born in 1785, and in 1786, a month or so before the publication of his book, Jean Armour produced twins. She and Burns were married in 1788, but the burden of his need to support her and her children had become heavy before that. Burns had no other work besides farming—not a lucrative profession in eighteenth-century Scotland. In fact, Robert Burns worked himself to death; he died in 1796, at the early age of thirty-seven, from the effects of too much work in his early years on an inadequate diet.

The last years of Burns’s life were devoted to songs; he is the greatest writer of songs in English, and perhaps in any language. He worked for ten years to collect old songs and to help edit a series of volumes that are unique in English; without those volumes, the heritage of English and Scottish song would be immeasurably poorer. Where the words of an old song survived, he transcribed them. Where a mere fragment existed, he wrote new words. Where only an old tune came down to him, he wrote a new song. If he had not been uncannily in tune with the spirit of Scottish minstrels he would be condemned today for having destroyed an ancient tradition. But instead he saved the tradition and made it richer than it had ever been.

Some recastings of old songs are very famous; for example, “Green Grow the Rashes O” and “A Red, Red Rose.” The most famous of all was not claimed by Burns, although he wrote most of what comes down to us. The chorus that we sing at midnight on New Year’s Eve was traditional, but these lovely verses were written by Burns to accompany the chorus:

We twa hae run about the braes

And pou’d the gowans fine,

But we’ve wandered monie a weary fit

Sin’ auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn

Frae morning sun till dine,

But seas between us braid hae roared

Sin’ auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere,

And gie’s a hand o’ thine,

And we’ll tak a right guid-willie waught For auld lang syne!

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet

For auld lang syne!

Jean Armour, though his wife, was not Burns’s only love. Mary Campbell inspired “Highland Mary,” and Mary Morrison inspired a poem that is named after her:

O Mary, at thy window be,

It is the wish'd, the trysted hour!

Those smiles and glances let me see,

That makes the miser's treasure poor.

O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,

Wha for thy sake wad gladly die?

Or canst thou break that heart of his,

Whase only fault is loving thee?

Probably there were half a dozen others, most of whom were inspirations, too. But one of Burns’ finest poems is not about young love at all, or illegitimate love with all its attractions. In “John Anderson, My Jo,” an aging wife speaks with affectionate sweetness to her equally aging husband.

John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither;

And mony a cantie day, John,

We’ve had wi’ ane anither:

Now we maun totter down, John,

And hand in hand we’ll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo.

There are many other Burns poems and songs that are as good or nearly so: “The Banks o’ Doon,” “Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever,” and “To a Mouse, on Turning Up Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785”:

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,

O what a panic’s in thy breastie!

O Thou need na start awa’ sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

Also, “To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” “Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous,” “Charlie, He’s My Darling,” and (perhaps most famous of all) “A Man’s a Man for A’ That!” We needn’t to stop even there; still to be mentioned are “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” and “Tam o’Shanter,” to say nothing of “Oh, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast,” which he wrote as he lay dying, to the favorite air of the young woman who was nursing him. And indeed there are a hundred more.

WILLIAM BLAKE

1757–1827

Songs of Innocence

Songs of Experience

When William Blake died at the age of seventy in 1827, he was buried in an unmarked grave. This anonymity was symbolic of the loneliness and solitude that had been his lot throughout most of his life. He published several books, but all of them failed with a public that had no conception whatsoever of his greatness, as a poet, as an artist, and as a man; and for nearly a century after his death he was still largely unread and unknown. William Butler Yeats helped to edit an annotated edition of Blake’s major works in 1893, and T.S. Eliot included an essay on Blake in The Sacred Wood (1920) that invited a larger audience than had ever known Blake to appreciate and understand him. The centenary of his death in 1927 brought forth a multitude of articles, critical essays, and editions. Today, Blake is permanently established in the highest pantheon of English poetry.

The reason Blake spoke not to his own age but to an age more than a century after his death is perhaps not far to seek. Blake was a seer—in two senses of the term. First, he possessed what is known as eidetic sight (a very rare quality): sometimes, when he imagined something, he could “see” it posed in front of his eyes, so that he could look at it from one side and another. Perhaps more than one artist has possessed this gift, but even among artists it must be extremely rare, and it is never easily understood. Sometimes possessors of the talent are driven mad by it. Blake was thought to be mad by those of his contemporaries who thought of him at all.

Having the gift of seeing mental images as real entities may or may not be good for an artist; it is probably good for a poet, if he lives in the twentieth century, an age of images and imagism in literature. Unfortunately, it was not good for a poet who was born in 1757 and who lived in an age of rational thought and feeling. Blake’s first book of poems, Songs of Innocence, which he illustrated and printed himself (he was an engraver as well as a watercolorist), and which appeared in 1789, the year of the French Revolution (of which Blake passionately approved), should have provoked the storm of excitement produced by Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which was published nine years later. Songs of Innocence should have, in short, initiated the so-called Romantic period in English poetry. Lyrical Ballads was a collection of poems about a life that most of its readers understood. Its “revolutionary” poems offered thoughtful, even novel comments on that life, and these were appreciated or objected to by readers. But there were readers.

No one read Songs of Innocence because it described, in powerful images, a life that no one understood. It would not be understood for more than a hundred years.

Songs of Innocence presents a kind of dreamlike childhood existence; Songs of Experience, its companion piece, presents poems on many of the same themes that depict the horror of life as it was lived by the poor and the abject, and especially as life was going to be led by thousands, then millions, of the victims of the English Industrial Revolution. For Blake was a seer in this other sense of the word as well; that is, he could foresee the future, could imagine things that had not yet occurred. As a sort of preface to his long poem, Milton, he wrote these famous lines:

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

But in writing them he was not describing anything that had happened yet, or that he had ever seen. He had never been to the not- yet-industrially-blighted north and Midlands of England; he had never seen a factory “manned” (the word carries heavy irony) by women and children, working from sunup to sundown; he had never seen the black smoke filling the sky over Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Yet he did “see” these things, as no other man in his time. It was no wonder that he did not come to be read until a century after his death.

He understood London, as no writer did until Dickens:

I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

“Chartered” means bought and sold; everything in London was for sale, Blake realized; if others had the slightest conception of this fact, they did not understand its implications. Once it had been different, he tells us in Songs of Innocence:

When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still.

These are but snatches, lines, verses from great poems. Read all of the Songs of Innocence and then, when you are feeling strong in spirit, all of the Songs of Experience. Read them in an edition that contains Blake’s own illustrations: these are strange and wonderful, like nothing ever seen. Compare the visions of a past that was once good and beautiful with a present and future that is bad and ugly. And then, when these images are solid in your mind, go on, perhaps, to such prose (or at least prosaic) works as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton, and Jerusalem, despite the fact that these are very difficult to understand without the copious notes of critics and commentators.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

1770–1850

Selected Poems

William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, in the Lake District of England, in 1770, the son of a lawyer. His parents died when he was young, and he was brought up by uncaring relatives. Much alone as a child and young man, he early came to depend upon nature for the solace that human beings provide to others. He attended Cambridge but did not distinguish himself there. From 1790, France was his abiding passion—that, and a young woman, Annette Vallon, whom he met and fell in love with there in 1791. She bore him a daughter in 1792, but he was unable to marry Annette or even to stay in France, partly because of his family’s refusal to provide him any financial assistance, partly because war soon broke out between England and France, to endure, except for one short respite, for more than twenty years (that is, until the Battle of Waterloo finally ended it in 1815). But though he was separated from Annette he never forgot her and was inspired by her to write some of his most beautiful lyrics—for example, “It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free.”

Wordsworth returned to England in 1792 and for several years lived a fitful, undirected life, but he was saved from himself and his own unhappiness in 1795 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he met in that year and who inspired Wordsworth to devote himself exclusively to poetry. For the next three years the two young men were much together, and their friendship was productive for them both. Its first real fruit was the volume called Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1798 and in which the first poem was Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the last Wordsworth’s “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” two veritable treasures of English poetry.

In 1799, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he lived for much of his life, moved into Dove Cottage at Grasmere, ever after sacred to the memory of Wordsworth and the focus of poetic pilgrimages to this day. There Coleridge often visited, and there Wordsworth lived with Dorothy and his wife, Mary Hutchinson, until a growing family forced them all to move to Rydal Mount, where the poet lived until his death in 1850.

After 1805, Wordsworth was never again the same marvelous poet that he had been from the time of the meeting with Coleridge until the cares of ordinary life seemed to change and wear him down. But for that glorious decade he was one of the best poets who ever lived.

In reading Wordsworth, therefore, selection becomes extremely important. But there are further problems with Wordsworth that must be faced by the modern reader before he can be appreciated as he should be.

Wordsworth’s ideas possess a creaky, antique cast, and they are sometimes hard for contemporary readers to accept. Two of his finest longer lyrics, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” and “Ode to Duty,” suffer from the old-fashioned thought that underlies them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with old thoughts. Some old thoughts are a good deal better than some new ones. And the really fundamental ideas behind those two poems, as well as many others by Wordsworth, are not at all antique or useless, although they may indeed be old-fashioned. The trouble is in the presentation of these ideas, which comes down to Wordsworth’s rather bland assumption that his readers—then and now—will all agree with his thinking about them.

The real problem is that when it came to thought, Wordsworth was not first rate. He is a great poet in every other respect: as a versifier he is unequaled; he is voluminous; he is clear; he has many beauties; he is powerful and moving. Lacking, however, a certain power of mind, he cannot be placed in the very first rank of poets, the rank occupied by such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. But he is firmly ensconced in the second rank, just behind them, by virtue of a relatively small number of poems (relatively small in relation to his enormous corpus). And those really must be read.

Take “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” If you have not read this before, you will be astonished at how many quotations derive from it. Which means, of course, that portions of it, individual lines and collections of lines, have become almost a part of the language: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” and so forth.

These famous lines, and others like them, actually get in the way of reading and understanding the poem. It is too easy to gloss over it, swimming with the current of pretty sounds and lovely images, without thinking. But the basic idea here, although creaky, is nevertheless worth serious consideration: the idea that human life is a sad, continuous, and unavoidable falling away from a state of existence that we somehow perceived when we were children but are no longer able to perceive when we grow up:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Those lines are from a different poem, a famous sonnet, but they expressed much the same idea as does the “Ode,” an idea that Wordsworth expressed in other poems, too. When he says it as well as he does in the sonnet, the idea is compelling. We are tempted to say, Yes, that is right, we have; we have given up more than we should. Maybe we did not have to do it, we think. Which is what Wordsworth wanted us to feel.

The famous “Ode to Duty” has the same kind of problems as the “Ode to Immortality”:

Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!

O Duty! if that name thou love,

So it begins, and we may find ourselves being turned off right away. But do go on, do not stop after the first two lines; keep on to the end. The poem has something important to say to us, who may dislike the word “duty” intensely and think it is used by those in authority to gain our unthinking obedience to their commands. (And so it is.) What Wordsworth is saying is that in an uncertain world, dependence on “the genial sense of youth” and “being to myself a guide” have failed him, as they are likely to fail anyone. Having a clear, unwavering signal that we can follow and obey turns out, in the long run, to be better. Call this “duty” if you will, or call it anything else. Without it, life is likely to turn out to be a mess.

Of Wordsworth’s longer poems, “The Prelude,” the first part of an autobiographical “epic of Nature” that he worked on throughout his life, is important, beautiful, and fine. “The Prelude,” besides containing many moving scenes from his childhood and early youth, invokes the basic Wordsworthian ideas about nature and our never-ending quest for a deep relationship to it. By “Nature” you soon realize that he does not mean just trees and rocks and mountains and clouds, but also that natural element in ourselves, with which we must make peace or suffer great ill.

Later parts of this epic, notably “The Excursion,” can be skipped by most readers. Other than the two odes and “The Prelude,” there are a dozen or so wonderful sonnets and a dozen other lyrics that are as good as anything of their kind in the English language, maybe in any language. I have listed some of them below.

Read them, think about them for a while, and then read them again. Try to understand them sympathetically, remembering that Wordsworth was not a major thinker and that he lived a long time ago.

You may like those poems so much that you want to dip into the rest of Wordsworth. One way to begin is to obtain a facsimile copy of Lyrical Ballads and read Wordsworth and Coleridge’s preface and try to see what all the fuss was about.

Then, perhaps, move on to other things. It is, after all, no bad thing to be a Wordsworthian!

Poems of Wordsworth to read first: “The Prelude,” “The Simplon Pass,” “Influence of Natural Objects,” “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” “I Traveled Among Unknown Men,” “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal,” “My Heart Leaps Up,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge: September 3, 1802,” “It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free,” “London 1802,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Ode to Duty,” “The World Is Too Much With Us,” “To Sleep,” “Personal Talk,” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

1772–1834

Selected Poems

The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in almost every way a disaster. He began to use drugs during his early twenties and he became an opium addict. He married the wrong woman, whom he despised and who despised him; but he did not believe in divorce. He was a great dreamer and projector: he loved projects and with his eloquence and charm could gain support for them. But most of his projects did not work out—notably an immense topical encyclopedia, which he called Metropolitana—and he spent much of his last years in bed, mumbling to himself about philosophy.

He knew a great deal about literature, perhaps more than anyone in his time. His collection of essays and reviews, Biographia Literaria, which he published when he was forty-five (in 1817), contained, it has been said, the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.

Unfortunately, the Romantic period was not noted for its criticism or its thought. It was instead an age of noble feelers, not thinkers: Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, Southey—none of them had a really respectable brain in his head.

Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772, the son of a schoolmaster who sent him to Cambridge. From the age of twenty he managed to eke out a meager living writing for newspapers and periodicals. He married in 1795 and immediately regretted doing so, as did his wife. This year also marked the beginning of that single short, glorious period in his life when he enjoyed one inspiring friendship and wrote half a dozen poems that are among the best in English.

The friendship, of course, was with the poet William Wordsworth, two years his senior: Coleridge was twenty-three, Wordsworth twenty-five. For the next two or three years they spent every minute together that they could, hatching plans, talking poetry, and producing a joint volume, Lyrical Ballads (1798), that had a profound influence on the future course of English poetry, its contents being written, they declared in a preface, in “the language of common day” rather than in the stilted poetic diction of the age just past.

Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” in 1797, when he was very much under the sway of his friendship with Wordsworth. He was living at the time in a lonely cottage at Brimstone farm, on the coast of Somerset; he fell asleep, probably drugged, with a copy of Purchas his Pilgrimes, an antique travel book, in his hand. A passage he had been reading told of the building of the Great Khan’s immense pleasure palace at Xanadu. Coleridge awoke and immediately began to write down two or three hundred lines, as he later said, that he was conscious of having composed in his sleep. But he was interrupted by a certain “person from Porlock” who has never been identified, and so “Kubla Khan” remains unfinished to this day. It is probably the best unfinished poem in the language.

“Christabel” was also begun in 1797; it too is unfinished. It is a ballad—not a true ballad, because all such are anonymous—but as like a true ballad as a self-conscious production of a professional poet can be. It is a fine story, as far as it goes, with the stark, tragic character of the old ballads.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which opens Lyrical Ballads, is not only finished, it is perfect. It is full of “quotations”— the verse is magical—but perhaps the best thing about the poem is Coleridge’s restraint in never at any moment saying what it means. He knew well that the old ballads were fine because they simply told their story as directly as possible and let the reader interpret. So with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: instead of meanings there are wonderful images.

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, ” Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

Instead of the cross, the Albatross

About my neck was hung.

A sadder and a wiser man,

He rose the morrow morn.

To have painted those pictures in words makes up for all Coleridge’s failures.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

1743–1826

The Declaration of Independence

Thomas Jefferson was only thirty-two when, in the spring of 1775, he was chosen by the Virginia legislature, sitting as a revolutionary convention in defiance of the royal governor, to be a member of his state’s delegation to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Jefferson’s views had appeared rather radical to his more conservative colleagues back home, but in Philadelphia he came in contact with men from all of the colonies whose ideas about independence from Great Britain paralleled and confirmed his own. As events during the winter of 1775–76 hastened toward what he felt was the inevitable rupture, Jefferson worked steadily and successfully behind the scenes to bring about a unified posture toward the parent country. When, in June 1776, a definitive break seemed imminent, he was asked to join a committee already formed of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to draw up a statement explaining to the world the action should it occur.

Franklin and Adams, although older and politically more experienced, chose Jefferson to produce a draft of a statement, which they would then present—after any necessary changes—to the Continental Congress for approval. In fact, the changes were few, and the Declaration was and is largely the work of Jefferson. The Congress approved it, and it was promulgated and signed by the delegates on July 4, the date that is reckoned as the birthday of the United States as a “separate and equal nation.”

There are three good reasons to read The Declaration of Independence. One is, on the simplest level, patriotic. It behooves all Americans to read the half-dozen founding documents of the republic to which they belong, in order to remind themselves of what it stands for. This would probably be true were the Declaration gibberish.

It is not gibberish, of course. Franklin and Adams were right to choose Jefferson as the author of the piece; his talents uniquely qualified him for the task. Not only was he a graceful and elegant writer but he was also well versed in the literature of political thought. The Declaration is the work of an author who is both a scholar of his subject and a supreme stylist. The combination makes the document enormously effective.

Thus the second reason to read the Declaration is because of what it says not just to Americans but also to everyone who would understand how and why governments are formed among men.

The third reason to read the Declaration is that it is very short—only three pages. This makes it easy to practice a kind of reading that we rarely do even when reading poetry, in which we read something over and over, much of it out loud, listening for nuances of meaning, making absolutely sure we understand the meaning before we go on to the next sentence, asking ourselves the three leading questions that good readers always must ask themselves: What does it say? Is what it says true? and What of it? (That is: What are the main or salient points of the argument? Are the conclusions to which they move logically correct, and do you feel that these are true? And what follows from either your agreement or disagreement?)

Indeed, not all of the Declaration, even though it is only three pages long, need be read in this intensely analytical manner. More than half of the document consists of a list of “injuries and usurpations” by “the present King of Great Britain,” all having, as Jefferson declares, “in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.” Regarding these grievances, which involve matters of fact, you may reserve judgment unless you are yourself a scholar of the Revolutionary Period in American history. Read the list of grievances, assume they are valid, then return to the first page of the Declaration. That is the meat of it; everything else depends on it.

The fundamental doctrine of the right of revolution, or at least of secession from a tyrannical overlord, is based on Jefferson’s (correct) reading of John Locke’s Essay on Civil Government. The doctrine, in a nutshell, holds that a people who are now tyrannized by a government that may once have been legitimate have every right to rebel, or at least secede, in order to protect themselves.

Jefferson could have left it at that; but he did not, and to his ambition we owe some of the most trenchant sentences in the history of political writing. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he wrote. All men are equal; all have natural rights; these include life, liberty, and “the pursuit of happiness”; governments derive their justice from the consent of those who are governed; and when a government ceases to have the consent of the governed it becomes, in the most profound sense, illegitimate. All of this and more is contained in the ringing words of that single first page.

Commentaries many hundreds of pages long have been written about that page and those sharp, memorable sentences. Some day you may wish to read some of the commentators. But do not put off reading the Declaration because you have not read anything about what it means. Jefferson wrote it for everyone, and everyone includes you. He wanted to say something that he hoped everyone would understand and agree with. I think he succeeded.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

1809–1865

The Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a backwoods cabin several miles south of Hodgenville, Kentucky. His mother, described as “stoop-shouldered, thin-breasted, sad”—characteristics that her son inherited—died when the boy was nine. His stepmother, however, was kind to him, sympathizing with his efforts to obtain what small education he received, placing no obstacles in his path even if she could not help him to follow it. He used to walk miles to borrow a book, read it by candlelight, and then walk the same miles back again to return it. Such industry marked all that he did.

He became a lawyer and was soon attracted to politics. His career, of course, is known by everyone: how, after a long series of failures and disappointments, he was nominated by the Republicans for the presidency in the election of 1860, and, in a divided election, was chosen by a minority of the electors. He entered upon his duties as president of the United States in March 1861; three weeks later the Civil War erupted, partly if not wholly because of his enormous unpopularity in the South, where he had been born.

The Civil War was one of the first total wars, waged by both sides with every available resource. The North had more resources, of men and money as well as weapons, and in the end it won. The South had a spirit that for a long time the North could not match, which was why the war lasted four years.

Lincoln, better than anyone, knew what the North needed, which was not only guns but also brave men to fire them, and not just slogans but words full of meaning to inspire the brave men. He sought the brave men and found them, in the persons of Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Sedgwick, and many thousands of lesser-known heroes. He undertook to provide the words himself, and insofar as they served to shape and focus the Union effort, he may be said to have won the war with them. At any rate they were wonderful words, the likes of which no politician has said since, and very few before him.

More than anything else, the words of Lincoln had to do with the legitimacy of the war and with its justice. This question obsessed him, for he knew that he—and millions of his countrymen—could not win the war if they did not think they were in the right. The biggest battle of the war took place at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863. For the first time, the Army of the Potomac met General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and defeated it. President Lincoln was asked to come down to Gettysburg from Washington by train on November 18, 1863, to deliver a few remarks at the dedication of the military cemetery at the site of the battle.

The main speaker of the day, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours. Afterward Lincoln rose and delivered the few brief immortal words that, better than any others, define the American idea of government.

The Gettysburg Address deserves to be read as carefully as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Madison’s Preamble to the Constitution. It refers to those predecessor documents. Four score and seven years before 1863 takes us to the year 1776, the year when “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But could any such nation long endure? That was the question. In particular, could the nation survive the kind of brutal fratricidal war now going on? Lincoln thought it could, said it could, and he persuaded his countrymen that it could.

But they must never, he said, forget what they were fighting for. They would dedicate a cemetery on this day, and remember the brave men, living and dead, who had struggled on this bloody ground. But they must also remember the ideals that had inspired the nation’s fathers. He rededicated himself, and the men and women of his place and time, to a new birth of freedom, and to the proposition that governments of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Address is reprinted in many books, but the best place to read it is standing in the Lincoln Memorial, with the great brooding figure of Lincoln as sculpted by Daniel Chester French rising above you.