Microcosmography. Earle John

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      "invectively he pierceth through

      The body of the country, city, court;"

      or is "anatomizing the wise man's folly," is as instructive a moralist in the end of the nineteenth century as in the beginning of the seventeenth. This, in a sense, is true of all great moralists, but the distinction of Earle, as I understand it, is that his characters are so often really people of our own day, with idiosyncracies that seem almost more applicable to our own age than to his.

      Society is almost a technical term to-day, susceptible, one would have said, of refinements of difference infinitely more various than anything that could have existed more than two hundred years ago; yet one cannot but feel that this observer would have been fully equal to drawing our microcosm as well as his own. Earle's is a penetrating observation which is always fresh – so fresh that no archaism of phrase in him, and no cheery optimism in ourselves, can disguise the fact that it is our weaknesses he is probing, our motives he is discovering.

There are still with us "those well-behaved ghosts Æneas met with – friends to talk with, and men to look on, but if he grasped them but air" – those shadowy creatures that "wonder at your ill-breeding,[I] that cannot distinguish between what is spoken and what is meant."

We are no strangers to "the fashionable respect which loves not deeper mutualities, but though exceeding kind and friendly at your first acquaintance, is at the twentieth meeting but friendly still"; or to that similar temper which "nothing so much puts out as to trespass against the genteel way." And, to go a stage lower, the formal man still survives, whose "face is in so good a frame because he is not disjointed with other meditations – who hath staid in the world to fill a number; and when he is gone there wants one and there's an end."[J] He, to be sure, has no conversation, and that is his discretion – but others display then as now a bolder discretion, and in their talk "fly for sanctuary rather to nonsense which few descry, than to nothing which all."

But literary conversation is not forgotten. It may be a stretch beyond the power of a latter-day imagination to fancy a visitor proposing to fascinate his company by some "scatterings of Seneca and Tacitus," or even to think ourselves back to a time when these "were good for all occasions." Yet, those who say "Chaucer[K] for our money above all our English poets because the voice has gone so," (or had we better substitute Browning?),[L] are still common enough examples of those who desire to acquire inexpensively the reputation of good taste.

      And there is another variety of modern artificiality which is not spared in this book. For the many forms of busy idleness, the worship of organisation and system, and all the other hindrances to life properly so-called, which it has been the cherished labour of this age to multiply, Earle would have had no reserve of patience. "The dull physician," we are told, has no leisure to be idle, that is, to study. "The grave divine," who has "studied to make his shoulders sufficient for his burden, comes not up thrice a week into his pulpit because he would not be idle"; whereas the commendation of the young raw preacher is that "he speaks without book, and, indeed, he was never used to it."

We may justly boast of the superior humanity of our century; but few would deny that the elaborate apparatus of modern philanthropy has too often become an end in itself, and absorption in it a serious detriment to any worthy preparation for the work of edifying. In the absence of leisure pulpits will hardly furnish us with that "sincere erudition which can send us clear and pure away unto a virtuous and happy life."[M] Nor is such a loss compensated by an endless succession of services or even a whole street of committee-rooms.

One would not, however, wish to rest in negations or dwell in the last resort on Earle's critical attitude. One feels that the delightful house at Tew did not spend all or even its best strength on criticism. Earle may have there pursued the method of verification and studied his characters in the flesh. Perhaps he saw there "the staid man," and duly appraised this specimen of "nature's geometry";[N] while his obvious gifts as a rational peace-maker, if not much needed in such a company, would not be overlooked by Lord Falkland. "The good old man," too is a portrait so strongly individualized that I cannot help thinking some very personal experience went to the making of it – experience of a sort that was sure to be revived at Tew, where "so good a relick of the old times" was not likely to be wanting. It was a house, at any rate, for the "modest man" to whom, as to the poet Cowper, public appearances were so many penances; for though the world may not agree with Earle as to the degree in which this quality sets off a man, there is no question of Lord Falkland's welcome of the modest man, even if that grave divine "Mr. Earles," did not point out this diffident guest as one who "had a piece of singularity," and, for all his modesty, "scorned something."

And, as "the most polite and accurate men of the University of Oxford"[O] were to be met with at Tew, we may further hope that Earle there watched the social mellowing of the "downright scholar whose mind was too much taken up with his mind,"[P] and strove to carry out his own recommendation, "practising him in men, and brushing him over with good company."

Symposium is a word that has been much abused and vulgarised of late, but something like its true Platonic sense must have been realised by the company at Lord Falkland's, as they "examined and refined those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation":[Q] for a more Platonic programme it would be difficult to conceive. The pattern of the ideal republic is, we know, laid up somewhere in the heavens; but the republic of letters so far as it was represented, must have been as near the ideal in that house as it ever was on earth. And in this ideal one of Earle's characters already mentioned was not only a natural but a necessary element. "The contemplative man" is solitary, we are told, in company, but he would not be so in this company. "Outward show, the stream, the people," were not taken seriously at Lord Falkland's; and the man who "can spell heaven out of earth" would be the centre of a rare group – men upon whose fresh and eager appetites conversation that was "mysterious and inward" could not easily pall.

Bishop Berkeley is one of the very few men who could answer with any plausibility to this last character of Earle's. But the marvellous amenity of his social gifts brings him a little closer to the kindly race of men than Earle thinks is usual with the contemplative student. In every other point it is an accurate piece of portraiture.[R] Nature might well ask approbation of her works and variety from a man who was ever feeding his noble curiosity and never satisfying it. He, too, made a "ladder of his observations to climb to God." He, too, was "free from vice, because he had no occasion to employ it." "Such gifts," said the turbulent Bishop Atterbury of him, "I did not think had been the portion of any but angels." After this it is no hyperbole to say, as Earle does of the contemplative man, "He has learnt all can here be taught him, and comes now to heaven to see more."

      Though Clarendon does full justice to Earle's personal charm, he uses the epithets "sharp and witty" to describe his published "discourses"; and the piercing severity of his wit is illustrated everywhere in this book. It is clear, however, from the sympathetic sketches that Earle's was no nil admirari doctrine, and that while he saw grave need on all hands for men to clear their mind of cant, and their company of those who live by it, he had great store of affection for all that is noble or noble in the making.

The "modest man" and the high-spirited man" are opposite types, but there is in both the worthy pursuit and the high ideal. Moreover, the second of those characters reveals a power of pathos which Earle might have developed with more opportunity.[S] "The child" whom "his father has writ as his own little story" is another indication of the same mood.

These sketches are full of suggestive melancholy – not the melancholy of the misanthrope, but the true melancholy – the melancholy of Virgil —Invalidus etiamque tremens etiam inscius aevi.[T]

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