The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9780674733848

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THE

THEOPHRASTAN CHARACTER

LONDON : G E O F F R E Y OXFORD

CUMBERLEDGE

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

THE

THEOPHRASTAN CHARACTER IN

ENGLAND το

1642 BENJAMIN

BOYCE

W I T H T H E ASSISTANCE OF NOTES BY CHESTER NOYES GREENOUGH

HARVARD

UNIVERSITY

CAMBRIDGE,

PRESS

MASSACHUSETTS 1947

COPYRIGHT, BY

THE

PRESIDENT

I947

AND FELLOWS

OF

HARVARD

P R I N T E D IN T H E UNITED STATES OF

COLLEGE

AMERICA

TO

D. M. G. Β.

PREFACE tudents of English literature may be glad to know something more about the Character. As a literary form giving easy hospitality not only to humorous and acute observation of human nature but also to wit, imagination, and as nice shaping as any pattern of prose, the Character delighted a generation reared in the humane tradition, and it may still give pleasure. What has been attempted in the following pages is not an enticing display of Theophrastan dishes (though the Character lends itself naturally to anthologists), but a study of the literary progress and especially the technique of the form in the years before the Civil Wars shook the aging culture of England and, incidentally, turned to the hard use of national controversy the small art of the Character. The study begins necessarily with Theophrastus. It comes to an end in 1642, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily. Yet in the period of fifty years after 1592 a literary species had its full growth. What came later, the sketches of the pamphleteers, historians, and periodical writers, of Butler and Dryden and Addison and Johnson and Thackeray—this is another story, a sequel in which Theophrastus becomes almost a minor figure. The first story must come first.

S

At the time of his death in 1938 Professor Chester Noyes Greenough, whose interest in Character-writing was well known, had assembled an extensive bibliography and index of Characters and had laid out a plan for a comprehensive history of the Character in English literature. Happily the bibliography was almost in final form; it has been edited and seen through the press by J . Milton French (A Bibliography of the Theofhrastan Character in English, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947). Of the history, unfortunately, only a few paragraphs of an introductory section were written, and though a great body vii

PREFACE

of miscellaneous notes had accumulated, they indicate that most of the matter of the discussion was to come from Mr. Greenough's well-stocked mind. When in very generous fashion Mrs. Greenough suggested that I take the notes to do with as I could, I supposed that I should have the benefit of his fine feeling for literature and his gift of phrase. Instead I have found the notes chiefly—and immeasurably—useful as a guide for reading, in secondary material as well as in the Characters themselves. T h e jottings on Hall, Overbury, and Earle, however, went beyond bibliography into biography and analysis. Many another note served to suggest a line of attack, and I have made one or two levies upon Mr. Greenough's unpublished Harvard dissertation on Character-writing. Those who remember Mr. Greenough's lectures will be sorry to learn that not a sentence in the book came from his pen. T h e principal point at which I have departed from the implications of his outline (other than in a free modification of the order and dimensions of his scheme) is that of definition. Mr. Greenough's tendency, proper in a pioneer, was inclusive and broad; mine, whether properly or not, has been, in view of the work of Gwendolen Murphy, Richard Aldington, D. Nichol Smith, W . J. Paylor, E. N. S. Thompson, E. C. Baldwin, Harold Osborne, and others, exclusive and analytical. T o keep the discussion within bounds I have usually related things to the model of Theophrastus and to the three best English Character-writers, Hall, Overbury, and Earle. Although I am no longer able to say of many pages whether more of the responsibility is Mr. Greenough's or mine, the critical judgments, though of course shaped by the impression Mr. Greenough's lectures on the Character made on me some years before I began the study, are in a more immediate sense largely my own. In the quotation of early texts my practice has been to use viii

PREFACE

u and ν in the modern way and to fill out contractions. T h e spelling of the titles of individual Characters has regularly been modernized. Unless otherwise specified, the place of publication of books mentioned is London. Scattered among the notes in Mr. Greenough's boxes were communications of many helpful varieties from his colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere and also from his students. I share the gratitude he unquestionably felt for such aid. In the proper places I have acknowledged several particular debts, but there are probably others that have gone unrecorded. T h e presence among the notes of many in Mrs. Greenough's hand attest part of the help she gave, especially in the British Museum and the Huntington Library. For myself I must express thanks also to Mr. Karl Pfitzer, Mr. Joseph Scott, and Mr. Bary Wingersky for assistance in matters Greek and Latin; to Miss Audra Royse for unfailing care in the preparation of the typescript; to the staffs of the Harvard and Huntington libraries for innumerable kindnesses; to Professor William A. Jackson for permission to quote from manuscripts in the Houghton Library; and, most of all, to Mrs. Greenough and Professors Douglas Bush, William H. Irving, and Hyder E. Rollins for a critical reading of the entire manuscript. My greatest debt, other than that recorded in the title page, is inscribed in the dedication. Β. B.

T h e University of Nebraska December 18, 1946

ix

CONTENTS

I.

T H E CHARACTERS OF THEOPHRASTUS

II.

T H E CHARACTER AND CLASSICAL RHETORIC

III.

T H E NATIVE BACKGROUND OF CHARACTER-

3 .

.

WRITING IV.

53

JOSEPH HALL'S CHARACTERS OF VERTUES AND VICES

V. VI.

VII.

122

T H E OVERBURIAN CHARACTERS T H E THEORY AND T H E VOGUE OF T H E CHARACTER: FROM CASAUBON T O EARLE .

136

.

IX.

152

T H E CHARACTER IN RELATION TO T H E ESSAY AND T H E SERMON

VIII.

11

190

T H E MAIN CHARACTER-BOOKS AFTER OVERBURY

220

OUTLYING TERRITORY: LATE CHARACTERS, BIOGRAPHY, AND T H E DRAMA

287

THE

THEOPHRASTAN CHARACTER

I

THE CHARACTERS OF THEOPHRASTUS irtue is not loved enough nor vice sufficiently detested because both are not seen. T h e Character, said Joseph Hall, strips both naked, with nothing left them but bare presence to plead for affection. Sir Thomas Overbury or one of the "learned Gentlemen his friends" defined the Character as wit's descant on any plainsong, a definition we might illustrate with Overbury's describing an "Affected Traveler" as one who "hath taken paines to bee ridiculous, and hath seen more then he hath perceived" or with John Earle's identification of a "Plain Country Fellow" as one who manures his ground well but lets himself lie fallow and untilled. But there was more to the seventeenthcentury Character than epigram. The whole figure had to be built around a kernel, leaf upon leaf artfully chosen and judiciously placed, keeping always the same center but perpetually turning the thing around for a view from another side. T h e method, though not difficult, was important, and epigram was a last elegance, the gilt upon the carving, which not everyone could achieve and which no one should use continuously. The originator of the method and the artist who employed it with so acute a sense of design that he did not need the tint of ingenious phrasing was the Greek, Theophrastus. T h e Characters were written by Theophrastus, whose real name was Tyrtamus, 1 somewhere near the year 319 B. c. when 'Most of our information about Theophrastus comes from Diogenes Laertius (V, 36-57), who as he lived in the third century after Christ can hardly be an infallible authority. Many of the doubtful points are considered in Octave Navarre's Caractères de Théofhraste Commentaire (Paris, 1924).

3

THE THEOPHRASTAN CHARACTER

he was about fifty. A universal genius, he contained in one person the man of affairs, the speaker of pithy sentences, the devoted pupil (first of Plato, then of Aristotle), the splendid teacher (drawing as many as two thousand students to his lectures), the head of a school (he succeeded his master in the Peripatetic Academy) ; and he wrote treatises on botany, rhetoric, mathematics, love, epilepsy, physics, comedy, the sea, animals that bite or gnaw, mines, winds, music, smells, astronomy, politics, dizziness, and innumerable other subjects. T h e little set of Characters, thirty in number, are full of the most exact knowledge, seemingly, of the habits of common types of men, types not restricted to Athens though Athens is frequently mentioned in their description. Just where this contribution to knowledge belongs—in the department of rhetoric or ethics or politics or psychology or dinner-table recreation—has been seriously canvassed. Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Hall were very much drawn to the statement in the dedicatory proem that Theophrastus described good kinds of men as well as the bad. But only the Characters of bad types have survived, and modern scholars have doubted the authenticity of the proem. Devoted to the memory of Theophrastus and also to the cause of religion and morality, Hall worked out a way of presenting admirable types. But frail and wicked men are always more interesting. It is the Characters of bad types that flourished in the seventeenth century, and it is the method of Theophrastus with which the long line of Character-books started out. T h e technique of Theophrastus, then, we must first examine. Though no one followed it exactly (seventeenth-century taste was too baroque for that), no one produced a genuine, finished Character-book until Theophastus' method was brought to attention. Of varying length but all brief (averaging perhaps three hundred words in a literal English translation), the Characters 4

T H E CHARACTERS OF

THEOPHRASTUS

of Theophrastus attempt to sketch the typical manifestations in human nature of some one quality of character. T o the modern reader the aspects of character chosen may sometimes seem rather more psychological than moral; as a result, Theophrastus often strikes one as being merely an amused observer of men rather than a moralist or reformer. Certainly the spirit of comedy lurks in his pages. But if we adopt the Aristotelian doctrine, as of course Theophrastus did, that virtue is a mean between two extremes of conduct and that the extremes are vices (though not, indeed, all equally reprehensible), we shall see the propriety in the label given these pieces by Diogenes Laertius— Ethical Characters (T|9U«H χα