After long and importunate knocking at the door, Covid has finally got into the house this week: Joan first on Thursday, followed by me on Friday. And for me prudence dictated hospitalization—again. I must repeat the shopworn advice: do not, under any circumstances, grow old. Wearing the bottoms of your trousers rolled will be the least of your problems. After brief respiratory drama countered by brief medical wizardry, I was back to “normal Covid,” which seems to mean feeling sort of lousy and flu-like. But once you are in the Medical Maw, you’re in until some mysterious authority decides that you are out. The varieties of infantilization are many. I suppose a man of my age ought to make the most of the opportunity to revisit childhood, and I am trying to adapt.
Leaving the house in a rush, I grabbed up only a note pad and a couple of books, one of which is a true Golden Oldie, volume 788 of the old Everyman’s Library: two philological books by Richard Chevenix Trench. These are On the Study of Words (1851) and English Past and Present (1855) here republished under a single cover in, I believe, 1927. The editor, George Sampson, makes a virtue of their obsolescence…“In short, Trench’s two most famous books, like the Odyssey, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise Lost, are out of date…”. And the books were indeed famous, commanding a significant popular audience and earning their spot in Everyman’s Library. There is an oft-cited quotation from Goldsmith, perhaps his only oft-cited quotation, in which an amiable character in The Vicar of Wakefield says this: “I love everything that is old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines”. This pretty well expresses my own temperament. For me the category of old books by no means excludes works of scholarship. Few if any works of scholarship are entirely without error; and most probably soon become hopelessly outdated. But is there anyone with a lively mind who will not find nourishment for it in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Darwin’s Origin of Species?
Trench was a pre-Darwinian Anglican clergyman who lived long enough to see most of his cherished ideas overthrown or abandoned. His work in history and philology is not infrequently errant. It is no less brilliant and rewarding for all of that. We shall not scorn Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne because it is not Audubon’s Birds of America or scorn Audubon’s own writings because they are not the latest publication of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Trench and Gilbert White, men of very different temperament and social prominence, exemplify a major phenomenon in British cultural history that deserves an ambitious study of its own. I am thinking of the remarkable contribution in practically all fields of study in history, literature, and the natural sciences made by members of the Anglican clergy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One might even conclude that these men were rather underemployed in their officially pastoral vocations. White was a modest country parson. Trench held several important ecclesiastical positions, including that of a major prelate (Archbishop of Dublin). Both were of course “amateurs” in the fields for which they are still remembered today. It is perhaps difficult for us to believe that there was in Victorian England a club of amateur philologists with cultural clout (the Philological Society), but there was, and Trench joined it in 1857. He made an immediate impact by delivering a paper on “Some Deficiencies of Our English Dictionaries” and then, in another meeting, offering the proposal that the Society sponsor a new and improved one. This can rightly be regarded as the originating moment of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, usually called the Oxford English Dictionary or OED. Trench thought of himself chiefly as a theologian and a poet; but his copious poetry now goes unread, and his theological tomes mainly gather dust. Yet he deserves to be held in memory as an originating force of the greatest dictionary the world has yet known—and the author of two still engaging books about our mother tongue.
St. Patrick’s, one of two Anglican cathedrals in Dublin, has a rich literary, scholarly, and cultural history of its own. Jonathan Swift among the most important writers in the traditional literary canon and one of the world’s greatest satirists, ordained a priest in 1695, was the Dean of Saint Patrick’s from 1713 to 1745—the period that saw the appearance of his best-known works, including the most famous, Gulliver’s Travels. But my personal favorite among the Victorian Anglo-Irish clerical celebrities is someone very few people have ever heard of: Archbishop Richard Whately, who was Trench’s immediate predecessor, and who died in office in 1863. Whately was a serious intellectual and philosopher whose writings on logic and rhetoric are still in use today. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
Oriel College, Oxford, where Whately was first a student and then a teacher, played an important role in English ecclesiastical history as the center of the so-called Oxford Movement, in which Cardinal Newman, recently canonized a Roman Catholic saint, also played a major role. Whately, though friendly with many of its leaders, was not sympathetic with its High Church or “ritualist” tendencies. He belonged to an intellectual circle called the “Noetics,” which would seem to mean something like “the brilliant and witty ones.” He battled against the infidelity of contemporary Continental theological literature not by being medieval but by being funny. The attack on the veracity of the gospel miracles, often explicit in the (then) new German biblical criticism, had been anticipated in Britain by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1748. Hume’s argument, at heart, is based in the theory of probabilities. Is it more probable that a man walked on water or that there is a mistaken or, worse, a fraudulent report that a man walked on water? In the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two of the nineteenth, the most famous man in the European world was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was a colossus, his rise, rule, and fall a vibrant epic. But Whately, using Hume’s genre of argumentation as regards the gospels, “demonstrated” that it was impossible to be confident of the truth of any of his reported exploits, or indeed of his very existence. Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the most widely read pamphlets in literary history, enjoyed a runaway success in 1819 and repeated reprintings in the decades thereafter. We lack reliable evidence as to what Napoleon Bonaparte, who was of course still alive in 1819, though rather isolated, made of the work. Historical Doubts is a very droll production—if only you are into what Victorian clerics thought was drollery. The cogent theological argument comes as a bonus.
It is well known that the hospital is no place for a sick person. One needs a little extra help to get through the experience. Reading some engrossing pages by one scholarly archbishop and simply thinking about the humorously trenchant pages of another got me through my most recent experience. Not to mention another blog essay.
