Where would we be without literature’s faithful sidekicks? I mean those secondary figures who befriend better-known, more gifted writers, encouraging, perhaps inspiring them. Some are writers themselves, others not. Think of Richard Savage (1697-1743) and Dr. Johnson. Savage was a dissolute minor poet, twelve years Johnson’s senior, who befriended and served (with reservations) as a literary model for the young, provincial, aspiring writer. Johnson wrote Savage’s biography. Boswell -- too great a writer to be labeled a sidekick -- quotes Johnson as saying Savage “could write the Life of a Broomstick.”
Likewise,
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) is an interesting figure whose literary
accomplishments were modest, though he invented the figure of John Bull, the
enduring personification of England. Born in Scotland, he was a mathematician,
doctor, satirist and founding member of the Scriblerus Club, a gathering of Tory
wits that included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Gay. Together, they
eviscerated the hacks of their day.
Arbuthnot helped Swift with ideas for the third voyage in Gulliver’s
Travels, to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan. In
Laputa, where scientists labor to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, he pokes fun
at England’s Royal Society, often the object of contempt among the
Scriblerians. Arbuthnot insisted on not taking credit for his contributions. He
likewise influenced Pope, who wrote in “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”: “O friend!
may each domestic bliss be thine!”
Arbuthnot
survives as a footnote and the author of some pithy lines. In a scholarly
vein, he writes in On the Usefulness of
Mathematical Learning: “Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the
Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.” I plan to share that
with several colleagues at Rice. And this, which sounds as though it had been
written last week: “All political parties die at last of swallowing their own
lies.”
Arbuthnot
died on this date, February 27, in 1735 at age sixty-seven. Speaking of the
eminent writers during Queen Anne’s reign, Johnson told Boswell:
“I think Dr.
Arbuthnot the first man among them. He was the most universal genius, being an
excellent physician, a man of deep learning, and a man of much humour.
1 comment:
One of the hacks the Scriblerus Club eviscerated (or at least cut deep enough) was the adaptor - reputed bowdlerizer - Colley Cibber, who served rather as a gifted secondary figure, keeping Shakespeare on the stage through the eras out of sympathy with his full myriad of speech and act. The adaptations were judicious, playable, powerful, thoroughly stageworthy: a few of Cibber's added lines have even stayed with us as pure Shakespearean.
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