The Fool of Quality: or, The History of Henry Earl of Moreland.

by Henry Brooke

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The Irish writer, Henry Brooke, published his first novel, The Fool of Quality, or, the History of Henry Earl of Moreland 1765 (in Ireland) and 1770, when he was in his sixties. He was influenced by popularity of Samuel Richardson’s novels of sensibility and sentimentalism, Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded (1740)and Clarissa (1748). Richardson’s originality was that “his themes were always the practical dilemmas of conduct and the formation of an estimable personality. Sensibility was invaluable as an endowment conducive to virtue; it is only by refining our perceptions and cultivating the utmost responsiveness to feeling that we attain the delicate balance and perfect control of our inner selves.” The novel, set in England at the end of the seventeenth century, is structured around Mr. Fenton’s moral and religious education of his nephew, Harry, the future Earl of Moreland. Harry learns what is truly wise and truly foolish through the stories of others and from his own experiences.

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A short biography of Henry Brooke by the Rev. Charles Kingsley[1]

It is not easy to draw a trustworthy picture of Henry Brooke (c. 1703–1783). The materials for it which remain are very scanty. Only four years after his death, in 1783—so had the memory of a once famous personage faded from men’s minds—it was very difficult to get details of his early life. He had lived too long—too long, if not for the education which great joys and great sorrows give, at least for happiness and for fame. The pupil of Swift and Pope; the friend of Lyttleton and Chatham; the darling of the Prince of Wales; beau, swordsman, wit, poet, courtier; the minion once of fortune, yet unspoilt by all her caresses, had long been known to Irishmen only as the saintly recluse of Longfield; and latterly as an impoverished old man, fading away by the quiet euthanasia of a second childhood, with one sweet daughter — the only surviving child of twenty-two — clinging to him, and yet supporting him, as ivy the mouldering wall. She was the child of his old age, “remembering nothing of her father,” says a biographer, “previous to his retirement from the world: and knowing little of him, save that he bore the infirmities and misfortunes of his declining years with the heroism of true Christianity, and that he was possessed of virtues and feelings which shone forth to the last moment of his life, unimpaired by the distractions of pain, and unshaken amid the ruins of genius.”

So says the biographer of 1787, in the ambitious style of those days; but doubtless with perfect truth. Yet neither he, nor any other biographer with whom I am acquainted, give any details of the real character, the inner life, of the man. One longs, but longs almost in vain, for any scrap of diary, private meditation, even familiar letter, from one who had seen, read, and above all suffered, so much and so variously. But with the exception of half-a-dozen letters, nothing of the kind seems to exist. His inner life can only be guessed at; and all that is known of his outer life has been compressed into one short article in the Dublin University Magazine for February, 1852, full of good writing and of good feeling. Its author is a descendant of Henry Brooke; and to him I am bound to offer my thanks for the assistance which he has given me toward this preface.

One would be glad, too, (if physiognomy be, as some hold, a key to character,) of some trustworthy description or portrait of his outward man; to have known even the colour of his eyes and hair: but this, too, is not to be had. Some Irish friend describes him in terms general enough; as, when young, “fresh looking, slenderly formed, and exceedingly graceful. He had an oval face, ruddy complexion, and large soft eyes, full of fire. He was of great personal courage, but never known to offend any man. He was an excellent swordsman, and could dance with much grace.” There are certainly notes here of that heroical temperament, softened withal by delicate sensibility, which shows forth in every line of his writings. And there is another sketch of him, in 1775, which gives the same notion: — “He was drest in a long blue cloak, with a wig that fell down his shoulders; a little man, as neat as wax-work, with an oval face, ruddy complexion, large eyes, full of fire. In short, he is like a picture mellowed by time.” There is a drawing of him which seems to be the same as that prefixed to his poems. If this, and the still finer head on the title-page of Brookiana,[2] be trustworthy, the face must have been one of a very delicate and regular beauty. The large soft eye, the globular under-eyelid, the finely arched eyebrow (all notes of a sweet and rich, yet over-sensitive nature), are very remarkable. There is a certain grace and alertness, too, about the figure, which agrees with the story of his having been a good dancer and swordsman. But on the type of brain, and even of the masque, it is very difficult to pronounce. He was born c. 1703, in the house of Rantavan, county Cavan. His father was a wealthy and worthy parson; his mother a Digby, a woman of sense and of good family, of whom Swift (stopping at Rantavan on his way to Sheridan at Quilca) was said to stand more in awe than of most country ladies.

The boy was sent to school to one Felix Somerford, for whose poetry and love-making (unfortunate) vide Brookiana; who was of opinion that “Nature intended that the child should act some great part on the theatre of human life,” so sweet-natured, so greedy of learning was he. And no doubt Henry Brooke was a precocious child. At eight years old a fellow scholar brought him an ode to the moon, which broke off with the line—

“Ah, why doth Phoebe love to shine by night?”

Under which Henry wrote at once:—

“Because the sex looks best by candlelight.”

Smart enough, considering his years, and the fashion of the time; and afterwards, when he was sent to Dr. Sheridan’s school in Dublin, he gave fresh proofs of this rhyming power. There are three of them in Brookiana, with a theme or two, full of grace and fire.

While he was at college, Swift prophesied wonders of him — only “regretting that his talent pointed towards poetry, which of all pursuits was most unprofitable.” The Dean, says Brookiana, when he saw how thoroughly modest and unpretending he was, “never asked his opinion of any matter which was beyond his power, or which might embarrass him.” The artless vivacity and sweetness of the lad seems to have softened even that cruel heart. It utterly captivated, in the next few years, men of equal talent and of more humanity. When he went to study law in London, in 1724, he became at once the pet of Pope and Lyttleton; and one of the few really important things in Brookiana are a few letters selected from a correspondence between Brooke and Pope, which lasted for many years. Brooke, in one of them written in 1739, is very solicitous about Pope’s religious tenets, having heard it insinuated that he “had too much wit to be a man of religion, and too much refinement to be that trifling thing called a Christian:” which Pope answers satisfactorily enough, sending him a “vindication of the Essay on Man from the aspersions and mistakes of Mr. Crousaz;” and saying, for himself, that he “sincerely worships God, believes in his revelations, resigns to his dispensations, loves all his creatures, is in charity with all denominations of Christians, however violently they treat each other, and detests none so much as that profligate race who would loosen the bands of morality, either under the pretence of religion or free thinking. I hate no man as a man, but I hate vice in any man; I hate no sect, but I hate uncharitableness in any sect. This much I say, merely in compliance with your desire that I should say something of myself”—a confession of faith which will not surprise the few who still consider (with Henry Brooke) the Essay on Man to be one of the noblest didactic poems in the English language.

In London he studied law, and enjoyed such society as Pope, Lyttleton, and Swift could give him. But these studies, however, and this society were quaintly enough interrupted. He was recalled to Ireland by a dying aunt, to become guardian of her child, a beautiful little girl of twelve—Catherine Meares of Meares Court, of a good old Westmeath house. He put her, wisely enough, to a boarding-school in Dublin; and within two years, not quite so wisely, married her secretly. Yet, neither the heavens nor his family seem to have been very wroth with the folly. The marriage was as happy a one as this earth ever saw; the parents—Irish people not holding the tenets of Malthus — could not find it in their hearts to scold so pretty a pair of turtles, and simply re-married them, and left them to reap the awful fruits of their own folly in the form of a child per year. On which matter, doubtless, much unwisdom has been, and will be, talked in commonplaces which every one can supply for himself. But it is worth while to clear one’s mind of cant, if it be only to judge Henry Brooke fairly for five minutes, and to disentangle from each other some of the many unsound objections which, as usual, are supposed to make one sound one. It is wrong to marry secretly. True. But which is worse? to marry secretly, or to be vicious secretly, with the vast majority of young men? If Brooke is to be judged for doing what his parents disapproved, then he is less, and not more guilty, than three young men out of four—unless parents would really prefer ten years of vice for their sons, to the evils of an early marriage. And the truth is, that parents—the average religious parents, as well as others—do prefer the vice to the marriage; silence their consciences mean while (with an hypocrisy as sad as ludicrous) by asking no questions, lest they should discover—what they perfectly well know of already; and so lose, for the ten most important years of the youth’s life, all moral influence, all mutual confidence, if not all mutual respect.

“But early marriages are so imprudent.” Which would have been most imprudent for Henry Brooke—To run the chance, as three out of four run, of destroying both body and soul in hell, and bringing to a late marriage the dregs alike of his constitution and his heart, or of beginning life on a somewhat smaller yearly income? Of course, if a man’s life consists in the abundance of the things which he possesses, Brooke was the more imprudent of the two; but one strong authority, at least, may be quoted against that universally received canon. Henry Brooke’s life consisted in his lofty moral standard, altogether heroical and godlike; in his delicate sensibility (quite different from sensitiveness, child of vanity and ill-temper); in his chivalrous respect for woman; in his strong trust in mankind; in his pitiful yearning, as of a saving angel, over all sin and sorrow; in his fresh and full manhood, most genial and yet most pure; in those very virtues, to tell the ugly truth, which are most crushed and blunted in young men. Surely one has a right to look for somewhat of the cause of such, in the broad fact that those ten years which of all others are apt to be the most brutalizing, Brooke passed in pure and happy wedlock. What if the imprudence of his early marriage did cause the child-wife to have a few more children? One may boldly answer, firstly, “What matter?” and secondly, “I do not believe the fact, any more than I do certain Malthusian statements anent such matters, which require a complete re-examination, and that by men who know at least a little both of physiology and of human nature.” Be that as it may, the beautiful little child-wife brought him three children before she was eighteen, and Brooke, in search of some more royal road to a competent income than the study of the law offered, went a second time to London and his great friends.

There he wrote and published, under the eye of Pope, his poem of Universal Beauty, (1728) a sort of “Bridgewater Treatise in rhyme,” as it has been happily called. What sort of theodicy is to be expected from a man of twenty-nine, may be easily guessed. It is, as perhaps it should be, ambitious, dogmatic, troubling the reader much with anacolutha, and forced constructions, which darken the sense: a fault easily pardoned when one perceives that it is caused not by haste or vagueness, but by too earnest attempts to compress more into words than words will carry, and to increase the specific gravity at the expense of transparency. Noticeable throughout is that Platonic and realist method of thought in which he persisted throughout life, almost alone in his generation, and which now and then leads him, young as he is, to very noble glimpses into the secrets of nature, as in these lines; a fair specimen both of his style and his philosophy:—

“Emergent from the deep view nature’s face,

And o’er the surface deepest wisdom trace;

The verdurous beauties charm our cherished eyes—

But who’ll unfold the root from whence they rise?

Infinity within the sprouting bower!

Next to ænigma in Almighty Power;

Who only could infinitude confine,

And dwell immense within the minim shrine;

The eternal species in an instant mould,

And endless worlds in seeming atoms hold.

Plant within plant, and seed enfolding seed,

For ever—to end never—still proceed;

In forms complete, essentially retain

The future semen, alimental grain;

And these again, the tree, the trunk, the root,

The plant, the leaf, the blossom, and the fruit;

Again the fruit and flower the seed enclose,

Again the seed perpetuated grows,

And beauty to perennial ages flows.”

Whatever opinion a public accustomed to a very different style of verse may form of these, yet they will find many noble passages both of poetry and of theology in this poem; passages which justify the high expectations which Pope had formed of his pupil and the honour which he is said to have done to Brooke, in retouching and even inserting many lines. Indeed, Pope’s influence is plain throughout, and the pupil has been imitating the manly terseness, though he has failed of the calm stateliness of his great, though now half-forgotten, master.

Shortly after the publication of this poem, he seems to have returned to Ireland; and eight years, of which no record seems to remain, he spent in Dublin as a chamber counsel, not without success; and to have worked for eight years at so uncongenial a business, in the very heyday, too, of his youth and ambition, will redeem him somewhat from that imputation of want of perseverance which is often urged against him. Let him have the credit of having given the law a fair trial. His reasons for throwing up his profession are easily guessed. The delays and chicaneries of courts in the 18th century are well known. Henry Brooke’s judgment of them may be read at large in the Fool of Quality. The Irish Bar, too, was not in his days distinguished for morality; and one may well conceive that Brooke, especially as a professed Liberal, found it difficult enough to earn his bread, and yet remain an honest man.

No wonder, then, that we find him in 1736 back again in London. He was welcomed there by Pope and Lord Lyttleton. Pitt (Lord Chatham) introduced him to the Prince of Wales, who “caressed him,” say the biographers, “with great familiarity, and presented him with many elegant and valuable tokens of friendship — china, books, paintings, &c.” What more could man need, in days when nothing was to be gained without a patron? Unfortunately for Brooke’s final success in the world, his patron, the Prince, was in opposition, and, as Brooke conceived, in his headlong chivalrous Irish way, an oppressed hero, the martyr of his own virtues; and he therefore “must needs, if he has a chance, openly espouse his patron’s quarrel, and thunder forth his wrongs to the world.” Not so insane a purpose as it looks at first sight; for while the Ministry practically consisted of Walpole, the Court, and the two Newcastles, the Opposition numbered in the House, Pitt, Chesterfield, Carteret, Wyndham, Pultney, Argyle, and, in a word, the strongest men in England; and outside the House, as skirmishers of the pen, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Glover. So that, even from a worldly point of view, it was no unwise step in young Brooke to bring out at Drury Lane his tragedy of Gustavus Vasa,[3] full of patriotisms, heroisms, death to tyrants, indefeasible rights of freemen, and other commonplaces, at which we can afford to sneer now superciliously, it being not only the propensity but the right of humanity to kick down the stool by which it has climbed.

The play itself is good enough; its style that of the time; its characters not so much human beings as vehicles for virtuous or vicious sentiments. If Trollio, the courtier Archbishop of Upsal, be really meant for Walpole, he will stand equally well for any ancient rascal. The only touch of what we now call human nature (in plain words, of casuistry) is to be found in the once famous scene in which the tyrant tries to treat Gustavus’ resolve by the threat of murdering his mother and sister. In it there is real dramatic power, superior, I should say, to that of any English tragedian of the 18th century, and sufficient to redeem the play from utter dreariness, in the eyes of a generation which has learnt that old Swedes did not think, talk, and act half like Frenchmen, half like antique Romans. But the real worth of the play lay, and lies still, in the loftiness of its sentiments. Those were times in which men were coarser and more ignorant, but yet heartier and healthier than now. Those “intricacies of the human heart,” which (as unravelled either by profligate Frenchmen or pious Englishwomen) are now in such high and all but sole demand, were then looked on chiefly as indigestions of the human stomach, or other physical organs; and the public wanted, over and above the perennial subject of love, some talk at least about valour, patriotism, loyalty, chivalry, generosity, the protection of the oppressed, the vindication of the innocent, and other like matters, which are now banished alike from pulpit and from stage, and only call forth applause (so I am informed) from the sluts and roughs in the gallery of the Victoria theatre. In that theatre, but nowhere else in London, Gustavus Vasa (so do times change) might still be a taking play.[4]

It took in Brooke’s time, but in a fashion very different from that which he expected. After being accepted at Drury Lane, rehearsed for five weeks, and carried safely through all the troubles of the green room, it was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, on account of its political tendency.

Such silly tyranny bore such fruit as we have seen it bear in our own days. If the world might not see, at least the world could read. Brooke published the play in self-defence, and sold four thousand at five shillings each. The Prince sent him a hundred guineas. Chesterfield took forty copies, Dr. Johnson published (what I am ashamed to say I have not seen) an ironic “Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, from the malicious aspersions of Mr. Brooke, author of Gustavus Vasa; “and Brooke gained a complete triumph, and a thousand guineas into the bargain; took a villa at Twickenham, close to Pope’s, sent to Ireland for his family and his wife, who (so the Prince proposed) was to be fostermother to the yet unborn George III., and set up in life, at the age of thirty-three, as a distinguished literary character, with all that he needed both of “praise and pudding.”

If the charming and successful Irishman had but prospered thenceforth, as most men prosper in the world, then we should have had another great literary personage, possibly another great parliamentary orator: but we should not have had The Fool of Quality, and Ireland probably would not have had the man Henry Brooke. A course of chastening sorrow was appointed for this man, all the more long and bitter, perhaps, because he was so dear to Heaven. “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,” was the law ages since, and will be, perhaps, until the end.[5] At least, it was so with Henry Brooke. Far from poets and courtiers, and all that was beginning to intoxicate (as it must have intoxicated) his noble heart, he must sit through long years of ever-growing poverty and loneliness, watching the corpses of his dead children, dead joys, dead hopes, till he has learnt the golden secret, and literary fame, and all fame which men can give, lies far behind him and below him, for the glittering, poisonous earth-fog which it is, and his purified spirit rises into those pure heights which he only saw afar off, when he wrote his “Universal Beauty.” He shall return to his first love: but he shall return by a strait gate and a narrow way.

In 1740, in the very heyday of his success, he is taken alarmingly ill. He must try his pure native air of Rantavan; and he tries it, and recovers. Once well again, he will of course return to London; all his great friends expect him. To their astonishment he sells off his furniture at Twickenham, rids himself of his villa, and stays at home.

“His wife,” say the biographers, “was afraid lest his zeal for the Prince should get him into trouble.” That may have been the argument which she used in words: but what good woman has not dumb instincts and forecastings deeper and wider than her arguments? There may have been many reasons (and yet none of them dishonourable to Brooke) for withdrawing the most charming of husbands from a frivolous and profligate city, especially when that husband’s purse had a perennial tendency to empty as fast as it filled. At least Henry Brooke was true lover and wise man enough to obey; to give up London, fame and fashion; and in the society of a woman whom he had loved from childhood, and at whose death, at last, he pined away, henceforth to “drink water out of his own spring;” and a nobler act of self-renunciation one seldom meets with. It stamps the man at once as what he was; pure, wise, and good.

His great friends, and the Prince among them, wrote to him in his retirement, letters which are said to have perished in some fire. He published, too, from time to time, a paraphrase of “The Man of Law’s Tale,” for Ogle’s Chaucer, which we shall not prefer to the original. The Earl of Westmoreland, a tragedy, was performed at Dublin, as good as other tragedies of the day. For several years, indeed, his hankering for the stage continued, to the scandal of some of his biographers; one of whom, Mr. Richard Ryan, a Romish compiler of Lives of Irish Worthies, thus vents his (or his Methodist informer’s) respectability on the matter:—

“During the greater part of his life his religious opinions approached to what are called Methodistical, yet he uniformly supported the stage: nevertheless, it is certain he lived more consistently than he wrote. No day passed in which he did not collect his family to prayer, and read and expounded the Scriptures to them with a clearness and fervency edifying and interesting.” A strange phenomenon must Henry Brooke have been, throughout his life, to bigots and precisians of all denominations. I have not had the pleasure of reading Mr. Richard Ryan’s biography, a misfortune which is much softened to me by the perusal of this quotation from it. Doubtless Brooke’s Methodist friends, had they and not high heaven, had the making of Henry Brooke, would have treated him after the same Procrustean method as John Wesley treated the Fool of Quality, which he purged of such passages as were not to his mind, and then republished during the author’s lifetime, as the History of Harry, Earl of Moreland, a plan which was so completely successful, that country Wesleyans still believe their great prophet to have been himself the author of the book.

In 1745, Chesterfield came to Ireland as Viceroy: and though Brooke (who was of an independence of spirit too rare in Ireland then) “was among the last to pay his respects to him,” he was appointed barrack-master of Mullingar, with a salary worth a clear £400 a year. A rational Irishman of those days would have pocketed his money, and held his tongue: but Brooke must needs, with that foolish honesty which always hampered him, thoroughly work out the history of these and other Irish barracks, their jobbery, peculation, and what not, and throw the whole into a satirical pamphlet, The Secret History and Memoirs of the Barracks of Ireland; thereby putting a sufficiently wet blanket upon any chance of future government preferment. That year saw the publication of his Farmer’s Letters, written in the expectation of a revolt of the Irish Roman Catholics. They excited much attention at the time, but were denounced by some for their supposed severity. In nothing, I may say here, does Brooke show more in advance of his generation, than in his opinions as to the right method of governing the Irish Catholics, opinions which have been since, when all but too late, universally accepted and acted on.

In 1747, he wrote four poems for Moore’s Fables for the Female Sex, one at least of which, “The Sparrow and the Dove,” is a beautiful reflection of his own pure wedded life: but, indeed, Henry Brooke is never more noble, not even when he talks theology, than when he speaks of woman.

Two years after, we find him “solicited by a large body of the independent electors of Dublin to stand for that city,” and declining—as one would have expected him—because there was another candidate in the field, who was not only (what he was not) an “excelling trader,” but had “an acknowledged superiority in every other merit.”

Garrick, about this time, “offered him a shilling a line for everything he would write for the stage, provided he wrote for him alone.” Brooke refused, as a man who did not choose to sell his brains to any master; and a coolness ensued between them. Garrick was not the only man, it seems, whom he offended by that independence of spirit; which, however softened by his natural sweetness, must have been galling to all greedy, vain, or supercilious men. Johnson, though he tried to be fair to him, and vindicated his Gustavus Vasa in public, could not conceal his dislike of a man who was certainly his superior in intellect, who had no inclination to bow down and worship, when worship was rudely demanded; whose grace and courtesy must have seemed to the great bear mere foppishness; and whose liberal opinions (persisted in throughout life) must have been shocking to the Toryism of Johnson’s later years. His silly parody on a fine line in Gustavus,—

“Who rules o’er freemen should himself be free,”

is well enough known:

“Who drives fat oxen should himself he fat,”

answered Johnson, laughing (he only knew why) at the sentiment. That here was a quarrel between them, there seems to be no doubt; and to it is attributed Johnson’s omission of his name from the lives of the English poets. His descendant says (Dublin University Magazine) that the traditionary story in their family as to the cause of quarrel bears so heavily on Johnson’s manner, and is so flattering to the courtesy of the poet, that he would prefer not to write it down. Why so? One would be glad of any fresh anecdote, either of Brooke or Johnson: but, be the story true or false, there was most probably a natural antagonism between the two worthies; in character, as between a delicate and a coarse nature; and in intellect, as between nominalist and realist, — those two world-wide types of human brain which have quarrelled since the creation, and will quarrel till the day of judgment.

Mean while all went smoothly at Rantavan. Henry’s brother, Robert, who was as fond of painting as he of poets, lived with him; both of them in easy circumstances, and both with children (as is fit in the prolific air of Erin) innumerable. Strange to say, the two families did not quarrel. “The house,” writes some one, “is a little paradise, the abode of peace and love.”

After a while, however, the storms began to burst. Henry’s children began to die one after the other, and with death came (we are not told how) poverty. The family estate had to be mortgaged and sold. Henry, having paid his debts, hired Daisy Park, in County Kildare; his brother took a house near him. There the one lived by his paintings, the other by his barrack master’s place, and by Whig political tracts, which, though they sold, seem to have satisfied neither party. The Catholics could not like an adorer of the “great and good King William;” the Protestants, one who preached common mercy and justice to the Catholics, and exposed the suicidal folly of preventing them, by penal laws, from improving their own lands, or developing the resources of their country. Of his “Trial of the Roman Catholics,” all I can say is, that the extracts from it in Brookiana are full of sound wisdom, both moral and political; and, as far as it goes, advocates nothing but the very policy which all are now agreed to pursue toward the Celtic race.

About this time some of Brooke’s relations were making large fortunes in India; and one of them, Colonel Robert Brooke, who seems to have been a noble character, and a good soldier, sent home to his father and uncle 13,000l. especially to redeem the mortgage on the Cavan property. Brooke did so, and built a lodge thereon, calling it Longfield, or Corfoddy. Here he gave himself up to agricultural speculations; drained a lake, and got a bog instead; experimented on water-power and drainage, and sank a great deal of money; as many another honest gentleman has done, who has dared to tamper with that stubborn dame, Mother Earth, without being bred to the manner.

However, if he wasted much money, he wasted it honourably and usefully. “Vast sums of money must have passed through his hands,” says one reporter in Brookiana. But they passed at least into the pockets of the starving Irish, in the form not only of alms, which he gave but too lavishly and carelessly, but of employment, of new cottages, new gardens, and a general increase of civilization, physical and moral. No doubt, his dreams were wider than his success. “Would you believe,” asks one, “that Henry Brooke would quit the sweet vales of Daisy Park, to pass the evening of his life at the foot of a barren mountain in Corfoddy, or Longfield, as he calls it, in the wildest part of the county? Yet he is as philosophical as poetical, and as cheerful as ever. He was born in a desert, and to a desert he has returned. And yet in his imagination, he has already ploughed the one-half of the land; sprinkled the country all round with snug cottages; already he thinks he hears the clack of the busy mill, and the sound of the anvil. To do him justice, however, he has already built a house of lime and stone, two stories high, with glass windows too, which never fail to attract the gaze and admiration of the solitary passenger.”

The secret charm of Longfield was, perhaps, that it was his own: but there is many a man in Ireland and elsewhere who would have rested in the mere sense of possession, without considering himself bound to live on his own estate. But perhaps Brooke was too conscientious, as well as too kind-hearted a man, to leave the wild Irish of Corfoddy to shift for themselves, and so (though the place could not but be a sad and humbling one to him, for only half a mile of was the old “House of Rantavan,” where he was born, now passed into other hands) he would go and live and die among his own people, and see what could be done for them; and not altogether in vain, to judge from another report written some ten years later:—

“When I came within six or seven miles of Mr. Brooke’s, I was afraid I should mistake the way in such a wild part of the county, so that I asked almost every one I met, — man, woman, and child, ‘Is this the way to Corfoddy?’ Every one knew Mr. Brooke, every one praised him, and wished he might live for ever.

“As I knew that the author of Gustavus Vasa had written a great deal in praise of agriculture, I expected of course, as I approached his house, that it would be bosomed high in tufted trees” (a most Irish expectation, seeing that the said house had only been built a dozen years). “But I was never so disappointed in my life—not a tree on the whole road, not a hedge to be seen, and the way so bad, that I am sure it must be impassable in the winter. His house stands on a barren spot, and the only improvement I could see, a little garden in the front, shaded with a few half-starved elms, that seem rather to have been planted by chance than design.” This hardly agrees with the account of the Dublin University Magazine, that the roofless ruins of his labourers’ cottages still stand, and that his hydraulic works were at one time so extensive, as to frighten the millers on the Blackwater into a deputation to Lord Headfort, entreating that Mr. Brooke might not turn the course of the whole river; to which Lord Headfort answered, “That they had nothing to fear from Mr. Brooke. That he should be sorry to meddle with that gentleman.” The disappointed tourist, however, finds hospitality and an excellent library, and at last Mr. and Mrs. Brooke. His sketch of the old man has been already given; the childwife, alas! worn out by bearing and losing children, is quite emaciated, and so feeble she can hardly walk across the room. “I never saw so affectionate a husband, and so tender a father. Our conversation at dinner turned on the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. You would really think that Mr. Brooke was talking of his own children, they were all so dear to him. He prayed for them, and blessed them over and over again, with tears in his eyes.” (He was so tender-hearted, they say, that Mrs. Brooke was always afraid to tell him of the death of a neighbouring cottager.) “That evening we walked into the garden. His favourite flowers were those that were planted by the hands of his wife and daughter. I was astonished at his skill in botany. He dwelt on the virtues of the meanest weeds, and then launched out into such a panegyric on vegetable diet, that he almost made me a Pythagorean. We came to a little gurgling stream Mr. Brooke (who was from youth a fine Italian scholar) gazed on it for some moments, and then repeated these lines out of Metastasio: —

‘Copre in van le basse arène

Picciol rio col velo ondòso,

Che rivèla in fondo algòso

La chiarezza dell’ umòr.’”[6]

***

“And Noah was a just man, and perfect in his generations; and Noah walked with God.” Even such was Henry Brooke, though, like Noah, he saw cause to be deeply dissatisfied with the state of the world around him, and gave much excellent advice in his time, for which he was only laughed at. Surely the thousands (probably exaggerated by the ardent imagination of the Milesian,) which are said to have passed through his hands, were not altogether ill-spent (of squandering there is no proof), if they had bought that which is above all price, the love and prayers of every human being round; if they had gone to soften and develop the humanity of those poor savage oppressed Celts. Had the money been invested in business, and lost (as men of business now-a-days are wont to lose), in the normal and respectable way of bankruptcy, no one would have thought the worse of him. And surely Henry Brooke, like every man in a free country, had a right to spend his money as seemed best to him. When he owed he paid, though it cost him great sacrifices; he had to the last enough whereon to live honoured, and to die happy; and what does man want more? There always have been, and there always will be, those who having food and raiment, fitted at least for their station, are therewith content, because they prefer the making of human characters, their own and others, to the making of money; and find that one human brain cannot attend to both occupations at once. Of such was Henry Brooke.

Of his later publications I shall say but little: a clever political opera of his, Jack the Giant-queller, was acted in Dublin as early as 1748, full if not of humour, still of fluent Irish wit, thrown into comic songs, of his usual lofty morality. The censor of the Dublin stage, to do him justice, must have been far more liberal than the English Lord Chamberlain, or the Giant-queller would have been a co-martyr with Gustavus Vasa. There are several more tragedies and comedies from his pen, seemingly first printed in 1778, when he had ceased to write, and a novel, Juliet Grenville, or the History of the Human Heart, published 1774, in which his biographers only see “the ruins of genius.”

Of his last years, which were spent in Dublin with his only surviving daughter no record remains. Mrs. Brooke died in 1772, and a very dear daughter just before her. His only surviving son, Arthur, was serving in the army in Canada, and he was left alone with Charlotte, now the only girl, an accomplished woman of genius, and author of the earliest translations of Irish poetry. From the time of his wife’s death he shut himself up from the world, and was thought by many to be dead. He went after a while to Dublin, where (so Charlotte Brooke told Maria Edgeworth) he used, instead of walking up and down his room composing, to sit for hours gazing into vacancy; and died peacefully in 1783, aged eighty years — as he lived, a philosopher, a gentleman, and a Christian.

But of all his works, the Fool of Quality was the best, the most characteristic, and possibly the most precious in his eyes. He spent several years over it. The first volumes were published in 1766, when he was sixty years old; the fifth not till 1770. In it we have the whole man: the education of an ideal nobleman by an ideal merchant-prince has given him room for all his speculations on theology, political economy, the relations of sex and family, and the training, moral and physical, of a Christian gentleman; and to them plot and probability are too often sacrificed. Its pathos is, perhaps, of too healthy and simple a kind to be considered very touching by a public whose taste has been palled by the “aesthetic brandy and cayenne” of French novels: John Wesley’s opinion of it was, that it was “one of the most beautiful pictures that ever was drawn in the world; the strokes are so delicately fine, the touches so easy, natural, and affecting, that I know not who can survey it with tearless eyes, unless he has a heart of stone.”

Nevertheless, overmuch striving for pathos is the defect of the book. The characters in it, in proportion as they are meant to be good, are gifted with a passionate and tearful sensibility, which is rather French or Irish than English, and which will irritate, if not disgust, many whose Teutonic temperament leads them to pride themselves rather on the repression than the expression of emotion, and to believe (and not untruly) that feelings are silent in proportion to their depth. But it should be recollected that this extreme sensibility was a part of Brooke’s own character; that each man’s ideal must be, more or less, the transfiguration of that which he finds in himself; and that he was honest and rational in believing that his sensibility, just as much as any other property of his humanity, when purified from selfishness (which was in his ethics the only method of perfection), could be made as noble, fair, and useful, as any other faculty which God had given.

The fifth volume, seemingly published in 1770, is certainly inferior to the rest, and without seeing in it, as some have done, only “the magnificent ruins of genius,” one may judge from it that his noble intellect was failing rapidly, even before that loss of his wife which gave the death-blow alike to heart and brain.

Nevertheless, even in it are deep and beautiful thoughts, on theology and political economy; and in his decadence, Henry Brooke is still in advance of his age, preaching truths which are now accepted by most educated Englishmen, and other truths which will be accepted by them ere long. Nevertheless, that “Good wine needs no bush,” is an old proverb; one so true, that the fact of this book needing a preface, will possibly create a prejudice in the eyes of many.[7]

The book, it will be said, is not yet a hundred years old; if therefore it had been of real value, it would not have so soon lost its popularity. Surely, some intrinsic defect in it has caused it to be not undeservedly forgotten. And if an average reader deigned to open the book, he would probably find in the first hundred pages quite enough to justify to himself his prejudice. The cause of its failure, he would say, is patent. The plot is extravagant as well as ill-woven, and broken, besides, by episodes as extravagant as itself. The morality is Quixotic, and practically impossible. The sermonizing, whether theological or social, is equally clumsy and obtrusive. Without artistic method, without knowledge of human nature and the real world, the book can never have touched many hearts, and can touch none now.

To all which it may be answered, that if the form of fiction now popular is the only right form; — if artistic method consists merely in dramatic unity of interest, in weaving a plot which shall keep the reader expectant and amused, without demanding of him even a moment’s reflection; — if knowledge of human nature is to signify merely its everyday and pettiest passions, failings, motives; — if, in a word, the canons which are necessary for a successful stage play are also to limit fiction of every kind: — then this book, as a fiction, is a very bad one, and its editors must succumb to the too probable verdict of an age which seems determined that art shall confine itself more and more exclusively to the trivial, the temporary, and the vulgar; which has made up its mind to have its novels written by young ladies, and its pictures painted by pre-Raphaelites; and in which ideal art, whether in fiction or in painting, seems steadily dying out — perhaps for want of that very realistic tone of thought which is to be found in Henry Brooke.

If, again, theology, properly so called, is to be henceforth an extinct science; — if nothing can be known of God’s character, even from the person of Jesus Christ, save that he will doom to endless torture the vast majority of the human race, while he has made, for the purpose of delivering a very small minority, a certain highly artificial arrangement, to be explained by no human notions of justice or of love; — if the divine morality be utterly different from the ideal of human morality; — if generosity, magnanimity, chivalry — all which seems most divine in man — is to have no likeness in God, no place in the service of God; — if the motives of religion are to be confined henceforth to the most selfish of human hopes, and the basest of human fears; — then, indeed, all the seemingly noble teaching of this book, however much it may seem to reflect the life of Christ, or the teaching of St. Paul, is superfluous; and its diatribes may be passed over as impertinent interferences with the dramatic unity of the plot.

But if an ideal does exist of the human soul as of the human body; — if it be good to recollect that ideal now and then, and to compare what man is with what man might be; — if the heroic literature of every nation, and above all these, the New Testament itself, are witnesses for that spiritual ideal, just as Greek statuary and the paintings of the great Italian masters are witnesses for the physical ideal; — if that ideal, though impossible with man, be possible with God, and therefore the goal toward which every man should tend, even though he come short of it: — then it may be allowable for some at least among the writers of fiction to set forth that ideal, and the author of the Fool of Quality may be just as truly a novelist in his own way, as the authoress of Queechy and the Wide Wide World.[8] There are those, indeed, still left on earth who believe the contemplation of the actual (easy and amusing as it is) to be pernicious to most men without a continual remembrance of the ideal; who would not put into young hands even that Shakspeare who tells them what men are, without giving them, as a corrective, the Spenser and the Milton who tell them what men might be; who would even (theological questions apart) recommend to the philosophical student of mere human nature the four Gospels rather than Balzac. But such are, doubtless, as Henry Brooke was, dreamers and idealists.

And if, again, a theology be possible, and an anthropology not contradictory to, but founded on, that theology; — if the old Catholic dogma that the Son of Man was the likeness of his Father’s glory, and the express image of his person, may be believed still (as it is by a lingering few among Christians), in any honest and literal practical sense; — if that be true which Mr. J. Stuart Mill says in his late grand Essay upon Liberty, that “our popular religious ethics, by holding out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life, fall far below the best of the ancients, and do what they can to give to human morality an essentially selfish character;” — if by (as Mr. Mill says) “discarding those so-called secular standards, derived from Greek and Roman writers, which heretofore co-existed with and supplemented ethics” (which should be called not Christian, but monastic, and the “secular” correctives of which still remain, thank God, in the teaching of our public schools, and of our two great universities), “receiving some of its spirit, and infusing into it some of theirs, there is even now resulting a low, abject, servile type of character, which, submit itself as it may to what it deems the Supreme will, is incapable of rising to or sympathizing in the conception of Supreme goodness:” — if this, or half of this, be true, then it may be worth while for earnest men to consider well if these seemingly impertinent sermonizings of Henry Brooke be not needed now-a-days: even though he dares to tell his reader, and indeed to take as his text throughout the book, that “all virtues, even justice itself, are merely different forms of benevolence,” and that “ benevolence produces and constitutes the heaven or beatitude of God himself. He is no other than an infinite and eternal Good Will. Benevolence must, therefore, constitute the beatitude or heaven of all dependent beings.”

It may be well, too, to see how, in his eyes, it was not only right and useful, but possible likewise for a British nobleman of the 17th century to copy God who made him; how, in enforcing that dream of his, he did not disdain to use those apologues and maxims of wise old heathens, which will live, we may hope, as long as an English school and an English scholar exist on earth; — how his conception of the ideal of humanity, because it is founded on the belief that that ideal is the very image of God, is neither “low, abject, nor servile,” but altogether chivalrous and heroic; — and lastly how, in his eyes, the humblest resignation and the loftiest aspiration are so far from being contradictory virtues, that it is only (so he holds) by rising to the “conception of the Supreme goodness” that man can attain “submission to the Supreme will.” And when the reader has considered this, and more which he may find in this book, he will irritate himself no more about defects of outward method, but will be content to let the author teach his own lesson in his own way, trusting (and he will not trust in vain) that each seeming interruption is but a step forward in the moral process at which the author aims; and that there is full and conscious consistency in Mr. Brooke’s method, whether or not there be dramatic unity in his plot. By that time also one may hope the earnest reader will have begun to guess at the causes which have made this book forgotten for a while; and perhaps to find them not in its defects but in its excellencies; in its deep and grand ethics, in its broad and genial humanity, in the divine value which it attaches to the relations of husband and wife, father and child; and to the utter absence both of that sentimentalism and that superstition which have been alternately debauching of late years the minds of the young. And if he shall have arrived at this discovery, he will be able possibly to regard at least with patience those who are rash enough to affirm that they have learnt from this book more which is pure, sacred, and eternal, than from any which has been published since Spenser’s Fairy Queen.

So go forth once more, brave book, as God shall speed thee; and wherever thou meetest, whether in peasant or in peer, with a royal heart, tender and true, magnanimous and chivalrous, enter in and dwell there; and help its owner to become (as thou canst help him) a Man, a Christian, and a Gentleman, as Henry Brooke was before him.

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[1] The Rev. Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), a Church of England minister, was a novelist, a historian, and university professor. Perhaps his most well-known works are the novel, Westward Ho! and the children’s book, The Water-Babies.

[2] Wilson, Charles Henry. Brookiana. 2 vols. London: Richard Phillips, 1804, a memoir of Henry Brooke with anecdotes, correspondence and a selection of his writings.

[3] The full title, Gustavus Vasa, the Deliverer of his Country, a Tragedy,written in 1739, concerns the struggles of Sweden for independence from Denmark.

[4] a taking play: “a slice of life artistically staged.” See Edgar Saltus, “Our American Dramatists, An Apology” The Theatre, November 1901.

[5] Hebrews 12:6.

[6] “In vain the rivulet covers the humble sands with its undulating veil, while the transparency of the water shows its weedy bed.” Artaxerxes, Act III, Scene II, libretto by Pietro Metastasio (1729).

[7] “Good wine needs no bush.”: Anything that is good does not need advertising. In this case, this book can stand on its own without a preface. In the past, a tavern would depict an ivy bush on its sign to indicate that wine was available within.

[8] Writing under the penname “Elizabeth Wetherell,” Susan Warner (1819–1885) was a famous American novelist known for her depiction of rural life and moral teachings. Her Christian novel The Wide, Wide World (1850) was nearly as famous as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.