A History of English Literature by George Saintsbury (e novels for free .txt) 📕

Against one great writer of the time, however, no such charge can be justly brought. Although much attention has recently been given to the philosophical opinions of Hobbes, since the unjust prejudice against his religious and political ideas wore away, and since the complete edition of his writings published at last in 1843 by Sir William Molesworth made him accessible, the extraordinary merits of his style have on the whole had rather less than justice done to them. He was in many ways a very singular person. Born at Malmesbury in the year of the Armada, he was educated at Oxford, and early in the seventeenth century was appointed tutor to the eldest son of Lord Hardwick, afterwards Earl of Devonshire. For full seventy years he was on and off in the service of the Cavendish family; but sometimes acted as tutor to others, and both in that capacity and for other reasons lived long abroad. In his earlier manhood he was much in the society of Bacon, Jonson, and the literary folk of the English capital; and later he was equally familiar with the society (rather scientific than literary) of Paris. In 1647 he was appointed mathematical tutor to the Prince of Wales; but his mathematics were not his most fortunate acquirement, and they involved him in long and acrimonious disputes with Wallis and others—disputes, it may be said, where Hobbes was quite wrong. The publication of his philosophical treatises, and especially of the Leviathan, brought him into very bad odour, not merely on political grounds (which, so long as the Commonwealth lasted, would not have been surprising), but for religious reasons; and during the last years of his life, and for long afterwards, "Hobbist" was, certainly with very little warrant from his writings, used as a kind of polite equivalent for atheist. He was pensioned after the Restoration, and the protection of the king and the Earl of Devonshire kept him scatheless, if ever there was any real danger. Hobbes, however, was a timid and very much self-centred person, always fancying that plots were being laid against him. He died at the great age of ninety-two.

This long life was wholly taken up with study, but did not produce a very large amount of original composition. It is true that his collected works fill sixteen volumes; but they are loosely printed, and much space is occupied with diagrams, indices, and such like things, while a very large proportion of the matter appears twice over, in Latin and in English. In the latter case Hobbes usually wrote first in Latin, and was not always his own translator; but it would appear that he generally revised the work, though he neither succeeded in obliterating nor perhaps attempted to obliterate the marks of the original vehicle. His earliest publication was a singularly vigorous, if not always scholastically exact, translation of Thucydides into English, which appeared in 1629. Thirteen years later he published in Paris the De Cive, which was shortly followed by the treatise on Human Nature and the De Corpore Politico. The latter of these was to a great extent worked up in the famous Leviathan, or the Matter, Power, and Form of a Commonwealth, which appeared in 1651. The important De Corpore, which corresponds to the Leviathan on the philosophical side, appeared in Latin in 1655, in English next year. Besides minor works, Hobbes employed his old age on a translation of Homer into verse, and on a sketch of the Civil Wars called Behemoth.

His verse is a mere curiosity, though a considerable curiosity. The chief of it (the translation of Homer written in the quatrain, which his friend Davenant's Gondibert had made popular) is completely lacking in poetical quality, of which, perhaps, no man ever had less than Hobbes; and it is written on a bad model. But it has so much of the nervous bull-dog strength which, in literature if not in life, was Hobbes's main characteristic, that it is sometimes both a truer and a better representative of the original than some very mellifluous and elegant renderings. It is as a prose writer, however, that Hobbes made, and that he will keep, his fame. With his principles in the various branches of philosophy we have little or nothing to do. In choosing them he manifested, no doubt, something of the same defiance of authority, and the same self-willed preference for his own not too well-educated opinion, which brought him to grief in his encounter with Wallis. But when he had once left his starting points, his sureness of reasoning, his extreme perspicacity, and the unerring clearness and certainty with which he kept before him, and expressed exactly what he meant, made him at once one of the greatest thinkers and one of the greatest writers of England. Hobbes never "pays himself with words," never evades a difficulty by becoming obscure, never meanders on in the graceful allusive fashion of many philosophers,—a fashion for which the prevalent faults of style were singularly convenient in his time. He has no ornament, he does not seem to aim at anything more than the simplest and most straightforward presentation of his views. But this very aim, assisted by his practice in writing the terse and clear, if not very elegant, Latin which was the universal language of the literary Europe of his time, suffices to preserve him from most of the current sins. Moreover, it is fair to remember that, though the last to die, he was the first to be born of the authors mentioned in this chapter, and that he may be supposed, late as he wrote, to have formed his style before the period of Jacobean and Caroline luxuriance.

Almost any one of Hobbes's books would suffice to illustrate his style; but the short and interesting treatise on Human Nature, perhaps, shows it at its best. The author's exceptional clearness may be assisted by his lavish use of italics; but it is not necessary to read far in order to see that it is in reality quite independent of any clumsy mechanical device. The crabbed but sharply outlined style, the terse phrasing, the independence of all after-thoughts and tackings-on, manifest themselves at once to any careful observer. Here for instance is a passage, perhaps his finest, on Love, followed by a political extract from another work:—