Henry Brooke, dramatist and novelist, was born in 1708, at Rantavan, County Cavan, the son of a wealthy clergyman. In 1720 he entered Trinity College, Dublin; in 1724 went to study law in London, where he became the chosen friend of Pope and Lyttelton; in 1728 married his cousin and ward, a girl of fifteen; in 1740 returned in ill health to Rantavan, and in 1745 was made barrackmaster of Mullingar, a post worth £400 a year. He died in Dublin, 10 October, 1783. His poem, “Universal Beauty” (1735), is supposed to have suggested Erasmus Darwin’s “Botanic Garden.” “Gustavus Vasa” (1739), the acting of which was prohibited at Drury Lane, was afterwards produced in Dublin as the “Patriot.” The sonorous eloquence of his plays has not saved them from oblivion; and his novel, “The Fool of Quality” (5 vols. 1766), is the sole survivor of his numerous works.
Personal
The accounts of his private circumstances, in that kingdom, are given rather confusedly by his biographers; but it appears, upon the whole, that they were unfortunate. He supported an only brother in his house, with a family as numerous as his own; and ruined himself by his generosity. At last the loss of his wife, after a union of fifty years, the death of many of his children, and his other misfortunes, overwhelmed his intellect. Of this imbecility there were indeed some manifestations in the latest productions of his pen.
The pupil of Swift and Pope; the friend of Lyttelton 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, he had long been known to Irishmen only as the saintly recluse of Longfield.
A pure and noble-minded Christian gentleman, he lived in the world but not of it. Surrounded by its attractions, versed in its accomplishments, his heart was ever most faithful to his divine Master. It is almost hard to realise, knowing what court and city manners were in the reigns of the first two Georges, that he could have preserved his life so untainted and true.
A visitor to Brooke in 1775 described him as “dressed in a long blue cloak, with a wig that fell down his shoulders. He was a little man, neat as wax-work, with an oval face, ruddy complexion, and large eyes full of fire.” Brooke sank into a state of mental depression on the deaths of his wife and of his children, of whom the sole survivor (out of a family of twenty-two) was his daughter Charlotte, who devoted herself entirely to him. Disease and grief rendered him at times incapable of mental or physical exertion.
Universal Beauty, 1735
Having paid another visit to London, he renewed his acquaintance with Pope; and, with his encouragement, published his poem, entitled, “Universal Beauty.” This poem forms a curious, but unacknowledged prototype of Darwin’s “Botanic Garden.” It has a resemblance to that work, in manner, in scientific spirit, and in volant geographical allusion, too striking to be supposed accidental; although Darwin has gone beyond his original, in prominent and ostentatious imagery.
A brilliant but obscure metaphysical and scientific poem, entitled “Universal Beauty,” was published in no less than six anonymous folio instalments in the course of 1735, and is now very rarely met with complete. It was from the pen of an Irish squire, Henry Brooke (1703–1783), long afterwards author of an unimportant sentimental novel, “The Fool of Quality.” His poem deserves attention. It is written in very musical couplets, with, however, too frequent indulgence in the alexandrine. It is manifestly inspired by the optimistic philosophy of Shaftsbury…. Brooke never fulfilled the promise of this remarkable first poem.
Worth notice, though it has been too highly praised.
The Fool of Quality, 1766
But the greatest excellence of all is that it continually strikes at the heart. It perpetually aims at inspiring and increasing every right affection; at the instilling gratitude to God and benevolence to man. And it does this not by dull, dry, tedious precepts, but by the liveliest examples that can be imagined; by setting before your eyes one of the most beautiful pictures that ever was drawn in the world. The strokes of this are so delicately fine, the touches so easy, natural and affecting, that I know not who could survey it with tearless eyes, unless he had a heart of stone. I recommend it, therefore, to all those who are already, or desire to be, lovers of God and man.
That best of religious romances, the “Fool of Quality.” The piety there is at once most deep and most benign. There is much, indeed of elegant mysticism, but all evidently most heartfelt and sincere. The yearnings of the soul after universal good and intimate communion with the divine nature were never more nobly shown. The author is most prodigal of his intellectual wealth, “his bounty is as boundless as the sea, his love as deep.” He gives to his chief characters riches endless as the spiritual stores of his own heart. It is, indeed, only the last which gives value to the first in his writings. It is easy to endow men with millions on paper, and to make them willing to scatter them among the wretched; but it is the corresponding bounty and exuberance of the author’s soul, which here makes the money sterling, and the charity divine. The hero of this romance always appears to our imagination like a radiant vision encircled with celestial glories. The stories introduced in it are delightful exceptions to the usual rule by which such incidental tales are properly regarded as impertinent intrusions.
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.”
A book I remember as among my father’s loves—one of the few novels in our old library at Stockbridge. How well do I remember the five duodecimo volumes, in their dark leather bindings. The favourite books of that time stand around the chambers of memory, each a shrine. In this there is much wit and pathos, nature and wisdom (nature is wisdom when it is evolved from the human heart and from life). The style seems to me admirable—something in the fashion of the quaint old coats of our grandfathers, fashioned for ease and use, and of the best broadcloth garnished with velvet. It seems to me an admirable book might be made out of it for children, and I have a great mind to try my hand at it. It might, perhaps, flatter a little too much the dynasties of the present day, the young usurpers of their father’s thrones.
A more horribly dull and tedious book it was never my misfortune to read; and as a fiction, or a story, or a work of art, it is beneath criticism…. I willingly rank myself among the average readers as regards my estimate of the book, and can only wonder at Mr. Kingsley having taken the trouble to republish it, and still more at the praise which he lavishes upon it. It is made up of dull sermons and dull disquisitions on morality and the British Constitution, with an absurd attempt at a story, in which it is impossible to take interest, running through it.
Brooke’s intellectual genealogy seems to be traceable to Behmen on the one hand and to Rousseau on the other; whilst a curious strain of Irish eccentricity runs through the whole, tempered by touches of the grace and tenderness of his greater countryman Goldsmith. The book resembles in some respects the friend of our infancy, “Sanford and Merton,” though in that excellent performance the Rousseau element is not tempered by any theological admixture. Such performances indicate a current of vague feeling in search of some mode of utterance less constrained than that sanctioned by the practice of the Pope school, but equally ready to flow along the channels marked by Wesley or by Rousseau.
His “Earl of Moreland,” or “Fool of Quality,” in five volumes, is over-long and over-exuberant, not in length only, but in fancy and expression. But it is full of noble thoughts—for which the education of an ideal nobleman gives ample scope—in morals, politics, and theology.
The author has so many interests, such width of mind, so keen a desire to further a vast variety of political and social reforms, that his story is completely overlaid by moral digressions; he is so occupied in works of public benevolence that he starves his child.
