1731-32.

DEFOE AND GAY.

3

While all ages and descriptions of people,' says Charles Lamb, hang delighted over the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and will continue to do so, we trust, while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer-four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation. 'Roxana,'' Singleton,' 'Moll Flanders,'' Colonel Jack,' are all genuine offsprings of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of Defoe. Even an unpractised midwife would swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them. They are, in their way, as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm (that has bewitched the world) of the striking solitary situation.' Defoe died in poverty and solitude -'alone, with his glory.' It is perhaps not uninteresting to note that in the same month of the same year, 1731, on April 8, 'Mrs. Elizabeth Cromwell, daughter of Richard Cromwell, the Protector, and grand-daughter of Oliver Cromwell, died at her house in Bedford Row, in the eighty-second year of her age.'

The death of Gay followed not long after that of Defoe. The versatile author of 'The Beggars' Opera' had been sinking for some years into a condition of almost unrelieved despondency. He had had some disappointments, and he was sensitive, and took them too much to heart. He had had brilliant successes, and he had devoted friends, but a slight failure was more to him than a great success, and what he re

garded as the falling away of one friend was for the time of more account to him than the steady and faithful friendship of many men and women. Shortly before his death he wrote: 'I desire, my dear Mr. Pope, whom I love as my own soul, if you survive me, as you certainly will, if a stone should mark the place of my grave, see these words put upon it :

Life is a jest and all things show it:

I thought so once, but now I know it.'

Gay died in the house of his friends, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, on December 4, 1732. He was buried near the tomb of Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, and a monument was set up to his memory, bearing on it Pope's famous epitaph which contains the line, 'In wit a man, simplicity a child.' Gay is but little known to the present generation. Young people or old people do not read his fables any more—those fables which Rousseau thought worthy of special discussion in his great treatise on Education. The gallant Captain Macheath swaggers and sings across the operatic stage no longer, nor are tears shed now for pretty Polly Peachum's troubles. Yet every day some one quotes from Gay and does not know what he is quoting from.

Walpole was not magnanimous towards enemies who had still the power to do him harm. When the enemy could hurt him no longer, Walpole felt anger no longer; but it was not his humour to spare any man who stood in his way and resisted him. If he was not magnanimous, at least he did not affect magnanimity. He did not pretend to regard with

contempt or indifference men whom in his heart he believed to be formidable opponents. It was a tribute to the capacity of a public man to be disliked by Walpole; a still higher tribute to be dreaded by him. One of the men whom the great Minister was now beginning to hold in serious dislike and dread was Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield. Born in 1694, Chesterfield was still what would be called in political life a young man; he was not quite forty. He had led a varied and somewhat eccentric career. His father, a morose man, had a coldness for him; young Stanhope, according to his own account, was an absolute pedant at the university. When I talked my best I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but the ancients had common sense, that the classics contained everything that was either necessary, useful, or ornamental to me; . . . and I was not even without thoughts of wearing the toga virilis of the Romans instead of the vulgar and illiberal dress of the moderns.' Later he had been a devotee of fashion and the gambling table; was a man of fashion and a gambler still. He had travelled; had seen and studied life in many countries and cities and courts; had seen and studied many phases of life. He professed to be dissipated and even licentious; but he had an ambitious and a daring spirit. He well knew his own great gifts, and he knew also and frankly recognised the defects of character and temperament which were likely to neutralise their in

fluence. If he entered the House of Commons before the legal age, if for long he preferred pleasure to politics, he was determined to make a mark in the political world. We shall see much of Chesterfield in the course of this history; we shall see how utterly unjust and absurd is the common censure which sets him down as a literary and political fribble; we shall see that his speeches were so good that Horace Walpole declares that the finest speech he ever listened to was one of Chesterfield's; we shall see how bold he could be, and what an enlightened judgment he could bring to bear on the most difficult political questions; we shall see how near he went to genuine political greatness.

It is not easy to form a secure opinion as to the real character of Chesterfield. If one is to believe the accounts of some of the contemporaries who came closest to him and ought to have known him best, Chesterfield had scarcely one great or good quality of heart. His intellect no one disputed, but no one seems to have believed that he had any savour of truth or honour or virtue. Hervey, who was fond of beating out fancies fine, is at much pains to compare and contrast Chesterfield with Scarborough and Carteret. Thus, while Lord Scarborough was always searching after truth, loving it and adhering to it, Chesterfield and Carteret were both of them most abominably given to fable, and both of them often unnecessarily and consequently indiscreetly so; 'for whoever would lie usefully should lie seldom.' Lord Scarborough had understanding, with judgment and

1733.

you

CHESTERFIELD PAINTED BY HERVEY.

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without wit; Lord Chesterfield a speculative head, with wit and without judgment. Lord Scarborough had honour and principle, while Chesterfield and Carteret treated all principles of honesty and integrity with such open contempt that they seemed to think the appearance of these qualities would be of as little use to them as the reality. In short, Lord Scarborough was an honest, prudent man, capable of being a good friend, while Lord Chesterfield and Carteret were dishonest, imprudent creatures, whose principles practically told all their acquaintance, 'If do not behave to me like knaves, I shall either distrust you as hypocrites or laugh at you as fools.' We have said already in this history that a reader who wishes to form an estimate of the character of Lord Hervey will have to strike a sort of balance for himself between the extravagant censure flung at him by his enemies and the extravagant praise blown to him by his friends. But we find no such occasion or opportunity for striking a balance in the case of Lord Chesterfield. All the testimony goes the one way. What do we hear of him? That he was dwarfish; that he was hideously ugly; that he was all but deformed; that he was utterly unprincipled, vain, false, treacherous, and cruel; that he had not the slightest faith in the honour of men or the virtue of women; that he was silly enough to believe himself, with all his personal defects, actually irresistible to the most gifted and beautiful woman, and that he was mendacious enough to proclaim himself the successful lover of women who would not have given ear to his love