the Churches within his own dominions; and that he may dispense with ceremonies, or with anything else that is not against the Scriptures, nor against natural equity; and that the consent of the Lords and Commons cannot now give him that power, but declare, for the people, their advice and consent to it. Nor can he be made believe that the safety of a state depends upon the safety of the Church, I mean of the clergy. For neither is a clergy essential to a commonwealth; and those ministers that preached sedition, pretend to be of the clergy, as well as the best. He believes rather that the safety of the Church depends on the safety of the King, and the entireness of the sovereign power; and that the King is no part of the flock of any minister or bishop, no more than the shepherd is of his sheep, but of Christ only; and all the clergy, as well as the people, the King’s flock. Nor can that clamour of his adversaries make Mr. Hobbes think himself a worse Christian than the best of them. And how will you disprove it, either by his disobedience, to the laws _civil_ or _ecclesiastical_, or by any ugly action? Or how will you prove that the obedience, which springs from scorn of injustice, is less acceptable to God, than that which proceeds from fear of punishment, or hope of benefit. Gravity and heaviness of countenance are not so good marks of assurance of God’s favour, as cheerful, charitable, and upright behaviour towards men, which are better signs of religion than the zealous maintaining of controverted doctrines. And therefore I am verily persuaded, it was not his Divinity that displeased you or them, but somewhat else, which you are not willing to pretend. As for your party, that which angered you, I believe, was this passage of his _Leviathan_ (vol. iii. p. 160); _Whereas some men have pretended for their disobedience to their sovereign, a new covenant made, not with men, but with God; this also is unjust. For there is no covenant with God, but by mediation of somebody that represented God’s person; which none doth but God’s lieutenant, who hath the sovereignty under God. But this pretence of covenant with God, is so evident a lie_, (this is it that angered you), _even in the pretenders' own consciences, that it is not only an act of an unjust, but also of a vile and unmanly disposition_.
Besides, his making the King judge of doctrines to be preached or published, hath offended you both; so has also his attributing to the civil sovereign all power _sacerdotal_. But this perhaps may seem hard, when the sovereignty is in a Queen. But it is because you are not subtle enough to perceive, that though _man_ be _male_ and _female_, _authority_ is not. To please neither party is easy; but to please both, unless you could better agree amongst yourselves than you do, is impossible. Your differences have troubled the kingdom, as if you were the houses revived of York and Lancaster. A man would wonder how a little Latin and Greek should work so mightily, when the Scriptures are in English, as that the King and Parliament can hardly keep you quiet, especially in time of danger from abroad. If you will needs quarrel, decide it amongst yourselves, and draw not the people into your parties.
You were angry also for his blaming the scholastical philosophers, and denying such fine things as these: _that the species or apparences of bodies come from the thing we look on, into the eye, and so make us see; and into the understanding, to make us understand; and into the memory, to make us remember: that a body may be just the same it was, and yet bigger or lesser: that eternity is a permanent now_; and the like: and for detecting, further than you thought fit, the fraud of the Roman clergy. Your dislike of his divinity, was the least cause of your calling him atheist. But no more of this now.
The next head of your contumelies is to make him contemptible, and to move Mr. Boyle to pity him. This is a way of railing too much beaten to be thought witty. As for the thing itself, I doubt your intelligence is not good, and that you algebricians, and non-conformists, do but feign it, to comfort one another. For your own part, you contemn him not, or else you did very foolishly to entitle the beginning of your book, _Mr. Hobbes considered_; which argues he is considerable enough to you. Besides, it is no argument of contempt, to spend upon him so many angry lines as would have furnished you with a dozen of sermons. If you had in good earnest despised him, you would have let him alone, as he does Dr. Ward, Mr. Baxter, Pike, and others, that have reviled him as you do. As for his reputation beyond the seas, it fades not yet: and because perhaps you have no means to know it, I will cite you a passage of an Epistle, written by a learned Frenchman to an eminent person in France, a passage not impertinent to the point now in question. It is in a volume of Epistles, the fourth in order, and the words (page 167) concerning chemists, are these: _Truly, Sir, as much as I admire them, when I see them lute an alembic handsomely, filter a liquor, build an athanor, so much I dislike them when I hear them discourse upon the subject of their operations; and yet they think all they do, is nothing in respect of what they say. I wish they would take less pains, and be at less charges; and whilst they wash their hands after their work, they would leave to those that attend to the polishing of their discourse, I mean, the Galileos, the Descarteses, the Hobbeses, the Bacons, and the Gassendis, to reason upon their work, and themselves to hear what the learned and judicious shall tell them, such as are used to discern the differences of things. Quam scit uterque libens censebo exerceat artem._ And more to the same purpose.
What is here said of chymists, is applicable to all other mechanics.
Every man that hath spare money, can get furnaces, and buy coals. Every man that hath spare money, can be at the charge of making great moulds, and hiring workmen to grind their glasses; and so may have the best and greatest telescopes. They can get engines made, and apply them to the stars; recipients made, and try conclusions; but they are never the more philosophers for all this. It is laudable, I confess, to bestow money upon curious or useful delights; but that is none of the praises of a philosopher. And yet, because the multitude cannot judge, they will pass with the unskilful, for skilful in all parts of natural philosophy. And I hear now, that Hugenius and Eustachio Divini are to be tried by their glasses, who is the more skilful in _optics_ of the two; but for my part, before Mr. Hobbes his book _De Homine_ came forth, I never saw any thing written on that subject intelligibly. Do not you tell me now, according to your wonted ingenuity, that I never saw Euclid’s, Vitellio’s, and many other men’s _Optics_; as if I could not distinguish between _geometry_ and _optics_.
So also of all other arts; not every one that brings from beyond seas a new gin, or other jaunty device, is therefore a philosopher. For if you reckon that way, not only apothecaries and gardeners, but many other sorts of workmen, will put in for, and get the prize. Then, when I see the gentlemen of Gresham College apply themselves to the doctrine of motion, (as Mr. Hobbes has done, and will be ready to help them in it, if they please, and so long as they use him civilly,) I will look to know some causes of natural events from them, and their register, and not before: for nature does nothing but by motion.
I hear that the reason given by Mr. Hobbes, why the drop of glass so much wondered at, shivers into so many pieces, by breaking only one small part of it, is approved for probable, and registered in their college. But he has no reason to take it for a favour: because hereafter the invention may be taken, by that means, not for his, but theirs.
To the rest of your calumnies the answers will be short, and such as you might easily have foreseen. And first, for his boasting of his learning, it is well summed up by you in these words: _It was a motion made by one, whom I will not name, that some idle person should read over all his books, and collecting together his arrogant and supercilious speeches, applauding himself, and despising all other men, set them forth in one synopsis, with this title_, Hobbius de se. _What a pretty piece of pageantry this would make, I shall leave to your own thoughts._ Thus say you: now says Mr. Hobbes, or I for him, let your idle person do it, and set down no more than he has written, as high praises as they be, I will promise you he shall acknowledge them under his hand, and be commended for it, and you scorned. A certain Roman senator having propounded something in the assembly of the people, which they misliking made a noise at, boldly bade them hold their peace, and told them he knew better what was good for the commonwealth than all they. And his words are transmitted to us as an argument of his virtue; so much do truth and vanity alter the complexion of self-praise. Besides, you can have very little skill in morality, that cannot see the justice of commending a man’s self, as well as of anything else, in his own defence: and it was want of prudence in you, to constrain him to a thing that would so much displease you. That part of his self-praise which most offends you, is in the end of his _Leviathan_ (page 713), in these words: _Therefore I think it may be profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities, in case they also think so, to whom the judgment of the same belongeth_. Let any man consider the truth of it. Where did those ministers learn their seditious doctrine, and to preach it, but there? Where therefore should preachers learn to teach loyalty, but there? And if your principles produced civil war, must not the contrary principles, which are his, produce peace? And consequently his book, as far as it handles civil doctrine, deserves to be taught there. But when can this be done? When you shall have no longer an army ready to maintain the evil doctrine wherewith you have infected the people. By a ready army, I mean arms, and money, and men enough, though not yet in pay, and put under officers, yet gathered together in one place or city, to be put under officers, armed, and paid on any sudden occasion; such as are the people of a great and populous town. Every great city is as a standing army, which if it be not under the sovereign’s command, the people are miserable; if they be, they may be taught their duties in the Universities safely and easily, and be happy. I never read of any Christian king that was a tyrant, though the best of kings have been called so.
Then for the _morosity_ and _peevishness_ you charge him with, all that know him familiarly, know it is a false accusation. But you mean, it may be, only towards those that argue against his opinion; but neither is that true. When vain and ignorant young scholars, unknown to him before, come to him on purpose to argue with him, and to extort applause for their foolish opinions; and, missing of their end, fall into indiscreet and uncivil expressions, and he then appear not very well contented: it is not his _morosity_, but their _vanity_ that should be blamed. But what humour, if not morosity and peevishness, was that of yours, whom he never had injured, or seen, or heard of, to use toward him such insolent, injurious, and clownish words, as you did in your absurd _Elenchus_?
Was it not impatience of seeing any dissent from you in opinion? Mr. Hobbes has been always far from provoking any man, though when he is provoked, you find his pen as sharp as yours.
Again, when you make his age a reproach to him, and show no cause that might impair the faculties of his mind, but only age, I admire how you saw not that you reproached all old men in the world as much as him, and warranted all young men, at a certain time, which they themselves shall define, to call you _fool_. Your dislike of old age, you have also otherwise sufficiently signified, in venturing so fairly as you have done to escape it. But that is no great matter to one that hath so many marks upon him of much greater reproaches. By Mr. Hobbes his calculation, that derives prudence from experience, and experience from age, you are a very young man; but by your own reckoning, you are older already than Methuselah.
Lastly, who told you that he writ against Mr. Boyle, whom in his writing he never mentioned, and that it was, because Mr. Boyle was acquainted with you? I know the contrary. I have heard him wish it had been some person of lower condition, that had been the author of the doctrine which he opposed, and therefore opposed because it was false, and because his own could not otherwise be defended. But thus much I think is true, that he thought never the better of his judgment, for mistaking you for learned. This is all I thought fit to answer for him and his manners. The rest is of his geometry and philosophy, concerning which, I say only this, that there is too much in your book to be confuted; almost every line may be disproved, or ought to be reprehended. In sum, it is all error and railing, that is, stinking wind; such as a jade lets fly, when he is too hard girt upon a full belly. I have done. I have considered you now, but will not again, whatsoever preferment any of your friends shall procure you.
THE ANSWER OF MR. HOBBES TO SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT’S PREFACE BEFORE GONDIBERT.
THE ANSWER TO THE PREFACE TO GONDIBERT.
SIR, If to commend your poem, I should only say, in general terms, that in the choice of your argument, the disposition of the parts, the maintenance of the characters of your persons, the dignity and vigour of your expression, you have performed all the parts of various experience, ready memory, clear judgment, swift and well-governed fancy: though it were enough for the truth, it were too little for the weight and credit of my testimony. For I lie open to two exceptions, one of an incompetent, the other of a corrupted witness. Incompetent, because I am not a poet; and corrupted with the honour done me by your preface. The former obliges me to say something, by the way, of the nature and differences of poesy.
As philosophers have divided the universe, their subject, into three regions, _celestial_, _aerial_, and _terrestial_; so the poets, whose work it is, by imitating human life, in delightful and measured lines, to avert men from vice, and incline them to virtuous and honourable actions, have lodged themselves in the three regions of mankind, _court_, _city_, and _country_, correspondent, in some proportion, to those three regions of the world. For there is in princes, and men of conspicuous power, anciently called _heroes_, a lustre and influence upon the rest of men, resembling that of the heavens; and an insincereness, inconstancy, and troublesome humour in those that dwell in populous cities, like the mobility, blustering, and impurity of the air; and a plainness, and, though dull, yet a nutritive faculty in rural people, that endures a comparison with the earth they labour.
From hence have proceeded three sorts of poesy, _heroic_, _scommatic_, and _pastoral_. Every one of these is distinguished again in the manner of _representation_; which sometimes is _narrative_, wherein the poet himself relateth; and sometimes _dramatic_, as when the persons are every one adorned and brought upon the theatre, to speak and act their own parts. There is therefore neither more nor less than six sorts of poesy. For the heroic poem narrative, such as is yours, is called an _epic_ poem; the heroic poem dramatic, is _tragedy_. The scommatic narrative is _satire_; dramatic is _comedy_. The pastoral narrative, is called simply _pastoral_, anciently _bucolic_; the same dramatic, _pastoral comedy_. The figure therefore of an epic poem, and of a tragedy, ought to be the same: for they differ no more but in that they are pronounced by one, or many persons; which I insert to justify the figure of yours, consisting of five books divided into songs, or cantos; as five acts divided into scenes, has ever been the approved figure of a tragedy.
They that take for poesy whatsoever is writ in verse, will think this division imperfect, and call in sonnets, epigrams, eclogues, and the like pieces, which are but essays, and parts of an entire poem; and reckon Empedocles and Lucretius, natural philosophers, for poets; and the moral precepts of Phocylides Theognis, and the quatrains of Pybrach, and the history of Lucan, and others of that kind, amongst poems: bestowing on such writers, for honour, the name of poets, rather than of historians or philosophers. But the subject of a poem is the manners of men, not natural causes; manners presented, not dictated; and manners feigned, as the name of poesy imports, not found in men. They that give entrance to fictions writ in prose, err not so much; but they err; for prose requireth delightfulness, not only of fiction, but of style; in which if prose contend with verse, it is with disadvantage and, as it were, on foot against the strength and wings of Pegasus.
For verse amongst the Greeks was appropriated anciently to the service of their Gods, and was the holy style; the style of the oracles; the style of the laws; and the style of the men that publicly recommended to their Gods the vows and thanks of the people, which was done in their holy songs called hymns; and the composers of them were called prophets and priests, before the name of poet was known. When afterwards the majesty of that style was observed, the poets chose it as best becoming their high invention. And for the antiquity of verse, it is greater than the antiquity of letters. For it is certain, Cadmus was the first that from Phœnicia, a country that neighboureth Judea, brought the use of letters into Greece. But the service of the Gods, and the laws, which by measured sounds were easily committed to the memory, had been long time in use before the arrival of Cadmus there.
There is, besides the grace of style, another cause why the ancient poets chose to write in measured language; which is this. Their poems were made at first with intention to have them sung, as well epic as dramatic (which custom hath been long time laid aside, but began to be revived in part, of late years, in Italy,) and could not be made commensurable to the voice or instruments, in prose; the ways and motions whereof are so uncertain and undistinguished, like the way and motion of a ship in the sea, as not only to discompose the best composers, but also to disappoint sometimes the most attentive reader, and put him to hunt counter for the sense. It was therefore necessary for poets in those times to write in verse.
The verse which the Greeks and Latins, considering the nature of their own languages, found by experience most grave, and for an epic poem most decent, was their _hexameter_; a verse limited not only in the length of the line, but also in the quantity of the syllables. Instead of which we use the line of ten syllables, recompensing the neglect of their quantity with the diligence of rhyme. And this measure is so proper to an heroic poem, as without some loss of gravity or dignity, it was never changed. A longer is not far from ill prose; and a shorter, is a kind of whisking, you know, like the unlacing, rather than the singing of a muse. In an epigram or a sonnet, a man may vary his measures, and seek glory from a needless difficulty; as he that contrived verses into the forms of an organ, a hatchet, an egg, an altar, and a pair of wings; but in so great and noble a work as is an epic poem, for a man to obstruct his own way with unprofitable difficulties, is great imprudence. So likewise to choose a needless and difficult correspondence of rhyme, is but a difficult toy, and forces a man sometimes, for the stopping of a chink, to say somewhat he did never think. I cannot therefore but very much approve your _stanza_, wherein the syllables in every verse are ten, and the rhyme alternate.
For the choice of your subject you have sufficiently justified yourself in your preface. But because I have observed in Virgil, that the honour done to Æneas and his companions, has so bright a reflection upon Augustus Cæsar, and other great Romans of that time, as a man may suspect him not constantly possessed with the noble spirit of those his heroes; and I believe you are not acquainted with any great man of the race of Gondibert, I add to your justification the purity of your purpose, in having no other motive of your labour, but to adorn virtue, and procure her lovers; than which there cannot be a worthier design, and more becoming noble poesy.
In that you make so small account of the example of almost all the approved poets, ancient and modern, who thought fit in the beginning, and sometimes also in the progress of their poems, to invoke a Muse, or some other deity, that should dictate to them, or assist them in their writings; they that take not the laws of art, from any reason of their own, but from the fashion of precedent times, will perhaps accuse your singularity. For my part, I neither subscribe to their accusation, nor yet condemn that heathen custom, otherwise than as accessory to their false religion. For their poets were their divines; had the name of prophets; exercised amongst the people a kind of spiritual authority; would be thought to speak by a divine spirit; have their works which they writ in verse (the divine style) pass for the word of God, and not of man, and to be hearkened to with reverence. Do not the divines, excepting the style, do the same, and by us that are of the same religion cannot justly be reprehended for it? Besides, in the use of the spiritual calling of divines, there is danger sometimes to be feared, from want of skill, such as is reported of unskilful conjurers, that mistaking the rites and ceremonious points of their art, call up such spirits, as they cannot at their pleasure allay again; by whom storms are raised, that overthrow buildings, and are the cause of miserable wrecks at sea. Unskilful divines do oftentimes the like; for when they call unseasonably for _zeal_, there appears a spirit of _cruelty_; and by the like error, instead of _truth_, they raise _discord_; instead of _wisdom_, _fraud_; instead of _reformation_, _tumult_; and _controversy_, instead of _religion_. Whereas in the heathen poets, at least in those whose works have lasted to the time we are in, there are none of those indiscretions to be found, that tended to the subversion, or disturbance of the commonwealths wherein they lived. But why a Christian should think it an ornament to his poem, either to profane the true God, or invoke a false one, I can imagine no cause, but a reasonless imitation of custom; of a foolish custom, by which a man enabled to speak wisely from the principles of nature, and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a bagpipe.
Time and education beget experience; experience begets memory; memory begets judgment and fancy; judgment begets the strength and structure, and fancy begets the ornaments of a poem. The ancients therefore fabled not absurdly, in making Memory the mother of the Muses. For memory is the world, though not really, yet so as in a looking-glass, in which the judgment, the severer sister, busieth herself in a grave and rigid examination of all the parts of nature, and in registering by letters their order, causes, uses, differences, and resemblances; whereby the fancy, when any work of art is to be performed, finds her materials at hand and prepared for use, and needs no more than a swift motion over them, that what she wants, and is there to be had, may not lie too long unespied. So that when she seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from heaven to earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter and obscurest places, into the future, and into herself, and all this in a point of time, the voyage is not very great, herself being all she seeks. And her wonderful celerity, consisteth not so much in motion, as in copious imagery discreetly ordered, and perfectly registered in the memory; which most men under the name of philosophy have a glimpse of, and is pretended to by many, that grossly mistaking her, embrace contention in her place. But so far forth as the fancy of man has traced the ways of true philosophy, so far it hath produced very marvellous effects to the benefit of mankind. All that is beautiful or defensible in building; or marvellous in engines and instruments of motion; whatsoever commodity men receive from the observations of the heavens, from the description of the earth, from the account of time, from walking on the seas; and whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the barbarity of the American savages; is the workmanship of fancy, but guided by the precepts of true philosophy. But where these precepts fail, as they have hitherto failed in the doctrine of moral virtue, there the architect Fancy must take the philosopher’s part upon herself. He, therefore, who undertakes an heroic poem, which is to exhibit a venerable and amiable image of heroic virtue, must not only be the poet, to place and connect, but also the philosopher, to furnish and square his matter; that is, to make both body and soul, colour and shadow of his poem out of his own store; which, how well you have performed I am now considering.
Observing how few the persons be you introduce in the beginning, and how in the course of the actions of these, the number increasing, after several confluences, they run all at last into the two principal streams of your poem, _Gondibert and Oswald_, methinks the fable is not much unlike the theatre. For so, from several and far distant sources, do the lesser brooks of Lombardy, flowing into one another, fall all at last into the two main rivers, the Po and the Adige. It hath the same resemblance also with a man’s veins, which proceeding from different parts, after the like concourse, insert themselves at last into the two principal veins of the body. But when I considered that also the actions of men, which singly are inconsiderable, after many conjunctures, grow at last either into one great protecting power, or into two destroying factions, I could not but approve the structure of your poem, which ought to be no other than such as an imitation of human life requireth.
In the streams themselves I find nothing but settled valour, clean honour, calm counsel, learned diversion, and pure love; save only a torrent or two of ambition, which, though a fault, has somewhat heroic in it, and therefore must have place in an heroic poem. To shew the reader in what place he shall find every excellent picture of virtue you have drawn, is too long. And to show him one, is to prejudice the rest; yet I cannot forbear to point him to the description of love in the person of Bertha, in the seventh canto of the second book. There has nothing been said of that subject, neither by the ancient nor modern poets, comparable to it. Poets are painters; I would fain see another painter draw so true, perfect, and natural a love to the life, and make use of nothing but pure lines, without the help of any the least uncomely shadow, as you have done. But let it be read as a piece by itself: for in the almost equal height of the whole, the eminence of parts is lost.
There are some that are not pleased with fiction, unless it be bold; not only to exceed the _work_, but also the _possibility_ of nature; they would have impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, which are easily feigned by them that dare. Against such I defend you, without assenting to those that condemn either Homer or Virgil; by dissenting only from those that think the beauty of a poem consisteth in the exorbitancy of the fiction. For as truth is the bound of historical, so the resemblance of truth is the utmost limit of poetical liberty. In old time amongst the heathen, such strange fictions and metamorphoses were not so remote from the articles of their faith, as they are now from ours, and therefore were not so unpleasant. Beyond the actual works of nature a poet may now go; but beyond the conceived possibility of nature, never. I can allow a geographer to make in the sea, a fish or a ship, which by the scale of his map would be two or three hundred miles long, and think it done for ornament, because it is done without the precincts of his undertaking: but when he paints an elephant so, I presently apprehend it as ignorance, and a plain confession of _terra incognita_.
As the description of great men and great actions is the constant design of a poet; so the descriptions of worthy circumstances are necessary accessions to a poem, and being well performed, are the jewels and most precious ornaments of poesy. Such in Virgil are the funeral games of Anchises, the duel of Æneas and Turnus, &c. And such in yours, are _the Hunting_, _the Battle_, _the City Mourning_, _the Funeral_, _the House of Astragon_, _the Library and the Temple_; equal to his, or those of Homer whom he imitated.
There remains now no more to be considered but the expression, in which consisteth the countenance and colour of a beautiful Muse; and is given her by the poet out of his own provision, or is borrowed from others. That which he hath of his own, is nothing but experience and knowledge of nature, and specially human nature; and is the true and natural colour. But that which is taken out of books, the ordinary boxes of counterfeit complexion, shows well or ill, as it hath more or less resemblance with the natural; and are not to be used without examination unadvisedly. For in him that professes the imitation of nature, as all poets do, what greater fault can there be, than to betray an ignorance of nature in his poem; especially, having a liberty allowed him, if he meet with any thing he cannot master, to leave it out?