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DE LIBRIS PROSE &VERSE
BY AUSTIN DOBSON
Vt Mel Os, sic Cor Melos afficit, &reficit. Deuteromelia.
A mixture of a Song doth ever adde Pleasure. BACON (
adapted).
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1908
Copyright 1908 by The Macmillan Company
LECTOR BENEVOLE!—FOR SO
THEY USED TO CALL YOU, YEARS AGO,—
I CAN'T PRETEND TO MAKE YOU READ
THE PAGES THAT TO THIS SUCCEED;
NOR COULD I—IF I WOULD—EXCUSE
THE WAYWARD PROMPTINGS OF THE MUSE
AT WHOSE COMMAND I WROTE THEM DOWN.
I HAVE NO HOPE TO “PLEASE THE TOWN.”
I DID BUT THINK SOME FRIENDLY SOUL
(NOT ILL-ADVISED, UPON THE WHOLE!)
MIGHT LIKE THEM; AND “TO INTERPOSE
A LITTLE EASE,” BETWEEN THE PROSE,
SLIPPED IN THE SCRAPS OF VERSE, THAT THUS
THINGS MIGHT BE LESS MONOTONOUS.
THEN, LECTOR, BE BENEVOLUS!
[The Author desires to express his thanks to Lord Northcliffe,
Messrs.
Macmillan and Co., Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., Mr. William
Heinemann,
and Messrs. Virtue and Co., for kind permission to reprint those
pieces
in this volume concerning which no specific arrangements were made
on
their first appearance in type.]
New books can have few associations. They may reach us on the best
deckle-edged Whatman paper, in the newest types of famous presses,
with
backs of embossed vellum, with tasteful tasselled strings,—and yet
be
no more to us than the constrained and uneasy acquaintances of
yesterday. Friends they may become to-morrow, the day
after,—perhaps
“hunc in annum et plures” But for the time being they have neither
part
nor lot in our past of retrospect and suggestion. Of what we were,
of
what we like or liked, they know nothing; and we—if that be
possible—know even less of them. Whether familiarity will breed
contempt, or whether they will come home to our business and
bosom,—these are things that lie on the lap of the Fates.
But it is to be observed that the associations of old books, as of
new
books, are not always exclusively connected with their text or
format,—are sometimes, as a matter of fact, independent of both.
Often
they are memorable to us by length of tenure, by propinquity,—even
by
their patience under neglect. We may never read them; and yet by
reason
of some wholly external and accidental characteristic, it would be
a
wrench to part with them if the moment of separation—the
inevitable
hour—should arrive at last. Here, to give an instance in point, is
a
stained and battered French folio, with patched corners,—Mons. N.
Renouard's translation of the Metamorphoses d'Ovide, 1637, “
enrichies
de figures a chacune Fable” (very odd figures some of them
are!) and to
be bought “chez Pierre Billaine, rue Sainct Iacques, a la
Bonne-Foy,
deuant S. Yues.” It has held no honoured place upon the
shelves; it has
even resided au rez-de-chaussee,—that is to say, upon the floor;
but it
is not less dear,—not less desirable. For at the back of the
“Dedication to the King” (Lewis XIII. to wit), is scrawled in a
slanting, irregular hand: “Pour mademoiselle de mons Son tres
humble et
tres obeissant Serviteur St. Andre.” Between the fourth and
fifth word,
some one, in a smaller writing of later date, has added “par
“ and
after “St. Andre,” the signature “Vandeuvre.” In these
irrelevant (and
unsolicited) interpolations, I take no interest. But who was Mlle.
de
Mons? As Frederick Locker sings:
Did She live yesterday or ages back?
What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?
And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black,
Poor little Head! that long has done with aching![1]
“Ages back” she certainly did not live, for the book is
dated “1637,”
and “yesterday” is absurd. But that her eyes were bright,—nay,
that
they were particularly lively and vivacious, even as they are in
the
sanguine sketches of Antoine Watteau a hundred years afterwards, I
am
“confidous”—as Mrs. Slipslop would say. For my theory (in reality
a
foregone conclusion which I shrink from dispersing by any practical
resolvent) is, that Mile. de Mons was some delightful
seventeenth—century French child, to whom the big volume had been
presented as a picture-book. I can imagine the alert,
strait-corseted
little figure, with ribboned hair, eagerly craning across the tall
folio; and following curiously with her finger the legends under
the
copper “figures,”—“Narcisse en fleur,” “Ascalaphe en hibou,”
“Jason
endormant le dragon,”—and so forth, with much the same wonder that
the
Sinne-Beelden of Jacob Cats must have stirred in the little
Dutchwomen
of Middelburg. There can be no Mlle. de Mons but this,—and for me
she
can never grow old!
Note:
[1] This quatrain has the distinction of having been touched upon
by
Thackeray. When Mr. Locker's manuscript went to the Cornhill
Magazine
in 1860, it ran thus:
Did she live yesterday, or ages sped?
What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?
And were your ringlets fair? Poor little head!
—Poor little heart! that long has done with aching.
Sometimes it comes to pass that the association is of a more
far-fetched
and fanciful kind. In the great Ovid it lies in an inscription: in
my
next case it is “another-guess” matter. The folio this time is the
Sylva Sylvarum of the “Right Hon. Francis Lo. Verulam.
Viscount St.
Alban,” of whom some people still prefer to speak as Lord Bacon.
'Tis
only the “sixt Edition”; but it was to be bought at the Great
Turk's
Head, “next to the Mytre Tauerne” (not the modern pretender, be it
observed!), which is in itself a feature of interest. A former
possessor, from his notes, appears to have been largely preoccupied
with
that ignoble clinging to life which so exercised Matthew Arnold,
for
they relate chiefly to laxative simples for medicine; and he
comforts
himself, in April, 1695, by transcribing Bacon's reflection that “a
Life
led in Religion and in Holy Exercises” conduces to
longevity,—an
aphorism which, however useful as an argument for length of days,
is a
rather remote reason for religion. But what to me is always most
seductive in the book is, that to this edition (not copy, of
course) of
1651 Master Izaak Walton, when he came, in his Compleat Angler
of
1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the transmission of
sound
under water, and the ages of carp and pike, must probably have
referred.
He often mentions “Sir Francis Bacon's” History of Life and
Death,
which is included in the volume. No doubt it would be more
reasonable
and more “congruous” that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. But
there
it is. That illogical “succession of ideas” which puzzled my Uncle
Toby,
invariably recalls to me, not the imposing folio to be purchased
“next
to the Mytre Tauerne” in Fleet Street, but the unpretentious
eighteenpenny octavo which, two years later, was on sale at Richard
Marriot's in St. Dunstan's churchyard hard by, and did no more than
borrow its erudition from the riches of the Baconian storehouse.
Life, and its prolongation, is again the theme of the next book
(also
mentioned, by the way, in Walton) which I take up, though unhappily
it
has no inscription. It is a little old calf-clad copy of Lewis
Cornaro's
Sure and Certain Methods of attaining a Long and Healthful Life, 4th
ed., 24mo, 1727; and was bought at the Bewick sale of February,
1884, as
having once belonged to Robert Elliot Bewick, only son of the
famous old
Newcastle wood-engraver. As will be shown later, it is easy to be
misled
in these matters, but I cannot help believing that this volume,
which
looks as if it had been re-bound, is the one Thomas Bewick mentions
in
his Memoir as having been his companion in those speculative
wanderings over the Town Moor or the Elswick Fields, when, as an
apprentice, he planned his future a la Franklin, and devised
schemes
for his conduct in life. In attaining Cornaro's tale of years he
did not
succeed; though he seems to have faithfully practised the periods
of
abstinence enjoined (but probably not observed) by another of the
“noble
Venetian's” professed admirers, Mr. Addison of the Spectator.
If I have admitted a momentary misgiving as to the authenticity of
the
foregoing relic of the “father of white line,” there can be none
about
the next item to which I now come. Once, on a Westminster
bookstall,
long since disappeared, I found a copy of a seventh edition of the
Pursuits of Literature of T.J. Mathias, Queen Charlotte's
Treasurer's
Clerk. Brutally cut down by the binder, that durus arator
had
unexpectedly spared a solitary page for its manuscript comment,
which
was thoughtfully turned up and folded in. It was a note to this
couplet
in Mathias, his Dialogue II.:—
From Bewick's magick wood throw borrow'd rays
O'er many a page in gorgeous Bulmer's blaze,—
“gorgeous Bulmer” (the epithet is over-coloured!) being the William
Bulmer who, in 1795, issued the Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell. “I"
(says the writer of the note) “was chiefly instrumental to this
ingenious artist's [Bewick's] excellence in this art. I first
initiated
his master, Mr. Ra. Beilby (of Newcastle) into the art, and his
first
essay was the execution of the cuts in my Treatise on Mensuration,
printed in 4to, 1770. Soon after I recommended the same artist to
execute the cuts to Dr. Horsley's edition of the works of Newton.
Accordingly Mr. B. had the job, who put them into the hands of his
assistant, Mr. Bewick, who executed them as his first work in wood,
and
that in a most elegant manner, tho' spoiled in the printing by John
Nichols, the Black-letter printer. C.H. 1798.”
“C.H.” is Dr. Charles Hutton, the Woolwich mathematician. His note
is a
little in the vaunting vein of that “founder of fortun's,” the
excellent
Uncle Pumblechook of Great Expectations, for his services
scarcely
amounted to “initiating” Bewick or his master into the art of
engraving
on wood. Moreover, his memory must have failed him, for Bewick, and
not
Beilby, did the majority of the cuts to the Mensuration,
including a
much-praised diagram of the tower of St. Nicholas Church at
Newcastle,
afterwards a familiar object in the younger man's designs and
tail-pieces. Be this as it may, Dr. Hutton's note was surely worth
rescuing from the ruthless binder's plough.
Between the work of Thomas Bewick and the work of Samuel Pepys, it
is
idle to attempt any ingenious connecting link, save the fact that
they
both wrote autobiographically. The “Pepys” in question here,
however, is
not the famous Diary, but the Secretary to the Admiralty's
“only other
acknowledged work,” namely, the privately printed Memoires
Relating to
the State of the Royal Navy of England, for Ten Years, 1690;
and this
copy may undoubtedly lay claim to exceptional interest. For not
only
does it comprise those manuscript corrections in the author's
handwriting, which Dr. Tanner reproduced in his excellent Clarendon
Press reprint of last year, but it includes the two portrait plates
by
Robert White after Kneller. The larger is bound in as a
frontispiece;
the smaller (the ex-libris) is inserted at the beginning. The main
attraction of the book to me, however, is its previous owners—one
especially. My immediate predecessor was a well-known collector,
Professor Edward Solly, at whose sale in 1886 I bought it; and he
in his
turn had acquired it in 1877, at Dr. Rimbault's sale. Probably what
drew
us all to the little volume was not so much its disclosure of the
lamentable state of the Caroline navy, and of the monstrous
toadstools
that flourished so freely in the ill-ventilated holds of His
Majesty's
ships-of-war, as the fact that it had once belonged to that brave
old
philanthropist, Captain Thomas Coram of the Foundling Hospital. To
him
it was presented in March, 1724, by one C. Jackson; and he
afterwards
handed it on to a Mr. Mills. Pasted at the end is Coram's autograph
letter, dated “June 10th, 1746.” “To Mr. Mills These. Worthy Sir I
happend to find among my few Books, Mr. Pepys his memoires, w'ch I
thought might be acceptable to you &therefore pray you to accept of
it.
I am w'th much Respect Sir your most humble Ser't. THOMAS CORAM.”
At the Foundling Hospital is a magnificent full-length of Coram,
with
curling white locks and kindly, weather-beaten face, from the brush
of
his friend and admirer, William Hogarth. It is to Hogarth and his
fellow-Governor at the Foundling, John Wilkes, that my next jotting
relates. These strange colleagues in charity afterwards—as is well
known—quarrelled bitterly over politics. Hogarth caricatured
Wilkes in
the Times: Wilkes replied by a North Briton article
(No. 17) so
scurrilous and malignant that Hogarth was stung into rejoining with
that
famous squint-eyed semblance of his former crony, which has handed
him
down to posterity more securely than the portraits of Zoffany and
Earlom. Wilkes's action upon this was to reprint his article with
the
addition of a bulbous-nosed woodcut of Hogarth “from the Life.”
These
facts lent interest to an entry which for years had been familiar
to me
in the Sale Catalogue of Mr. H.P. Standly, and which ran thus: “The
NORTH BRITON, No. 17, with a PORTRAIT of HOGARTH in WOOD; and a
severe
critique on some of his works: in Ireland's handwriting is the
following—'This paper was given to me by Mrs. Hogarth, Aug.
1782, and
is the identical North Briton purchased by Hogarth, and carried in
his
pocket many days to show his friends.'“ The Ireland referred to
(as
will presently appear) was Samuel Ireland of the Graphic
Illustrations. When, in 1892, dispersed items of the famous
Joly
collection began to appear sporadically in the second-hand
catalogues, I
found in that of a well-known London bookseller an entry plainly
describing this one, and proclaiming that it came “from the
celebrated
collection of Mr. Standly, of St. Neots.” Unfortunately, the scrap
of
paper connecting it with Mrs. Hogarth's present to Ireland had been
destroyed. Nevertheless, I secured my prize, had it fittingly bound
up
with the original number which accompanied it; and here and there,
in
writing about Hogarth, bragged consequentially about my fortunate
acquisition. Then came a day—a day to be marked with a black
stone!—when in the British Museum Print Room, and looking through
the
”—Collection,” for the moment deposited there, I came upon
another
copy of the North Briton, bearing in Samuel Ireland's
writing a
notification to the effect that it was the Identical No. 17, etc.,
etc.
Now which is the right one? Is either the right one? I inspect mine
distrustfully. It is soiled, and has evidently been folded; it is
scribbled with calculations; it has all the aspect of a
venerable
vetuste. That it came from the Standly collection, I am
convinced. But
that other pretender in the (now dispersed) ”—Collection”? And was
not Samuel Ireland (nomen invisum!) the, if not fraudulent,
at least
too-credulous father of one William Henry Ireland, who, at
eighteen,
wrote Vortigern and Rowena, and palmed it off as genuine
Shakespeare?
I fear me—I much fear me—that, in the words of the American
showman,
I have been “weeping over the wrong grave.”
To prolong these vagrant adversaria would not be difficult. Here,
for
example, dated 1779, are the Coplas of the poet Don Jorge
Manrique,
which, having no Spanish, I am constrained to study in the
renderings of
Longfellow. Don Jorge was a Spaniard of the Spaniards, Commendador
of
Montizon, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Captain of a company in
the
Guards of Castile, and withal a valiant soldado, who died of
a wound
received in battle. But the attraction of my volume is, that, at
the
foot of the title-page, in beautiful neat script, appear the words,
“Robert Southey. Paris. 17 May 1817,”—being the year in which
Southey
stayed at Como with Walter Savage Landor. Here are the Works
of
mock-heroic John Philips, 1720, whose Blenheim the Tories
pitted
against Addison's Campaign, and whose Splendid Shilling
still shines
lucidly among eighteenth-century parodies. This copy bears—also on
the
title-page—the autograph of James Thomson, not yet the author of
The
Seasons; and includes the book-plate of Lord
Prestongrange,—that
“Lord Advocate Grant” of whom you may read in the Kidnapped
of
“R.L.S.” Here again is an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's
Lectures on
the English Comic Writers, annotated copiously in MS. by a
contemporary
reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s
cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and “ille-isms"
generally, seem to
have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately insular bull.
“A
very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, and Prejudiced Writer” is his
uncomplimentary addition to the author's name. Then here is
Cunningham's
Goldsmith of 1854, vol. i., castigated with equal energy by
that
Alaric Alexander Watts,[2] of whose egregious strictures upon
Wordsworth
we read not long since in the Cornhill Magazine, and who
will not
allow Goldsmith to say, in the Haunch of Venison, “the
porter and
eatables followed behind.” “They could scarcely have followed
before,”—he objects, in the very accents of Boeotia. Nor will he
pass
“the hollow-sounding bittern” of the Deserted Village. A
barrel may
sound hollow, but not a bird—this wiseacre acquaints us.
Note:
[2] So he was christened. But Lockhart chose to insist that his
second pre-name should properly be “Attila,” and thenceforth he was
spoken of in this way.
Had the gifted author of Lyrics of the Heart never heard of
rhetorical
figures? But he is not Goldsmith's only hyper-critic. Charles Fox,
who
admired The Traveller, thought Olivia's famous song in the
Vicar
“foolish,” and added that “folly” was a bad rhyme to
“melancholy.”[3] He
must have forgotten Milton's:—
Bird that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musicall, most melancholy!
Or he might have gone to the other camp, and remembered Pope on
Mrs.
Howard:—
Not warp'd by Passion, aw'd by Rumour,
Not grave thro' Pride,, or gay thro' Folly,
An equal Mixture of good Humour,
And sensible soft Melancholy.
Note:
[3] Recollections, by Samuel Rogers, 2nd ed., 1859, 43.
“Jamais les arbres verts n'ont essaye d'etre bleus.”—
THEOPHILE GAUTIER.
“A new Review!” You make me tremble
(Though as to that, I can dissemble
Till I hear more). But is it “new”?
And will it be a real Review?—
I mean, a Court wherein the scales
Weigh equally both him that fails,
And him that hits the mark?—a place
Where the accus'd can plead his case,
If wrong'd? All this I need to know
Before I (arrogant!) say “Go.”
“We, that are very old” (the phrase
Is STEELE'S, not mine!), in former days,
Have seen so many “new Reviews"
Arise, arraign, absolve, abuse;—
Proclaim their mission to the top
(Where there's still room!), then slowly drop,
Shrink down, fade out, and sans preferment,
Depart to their obscure interment;—
We should be pardon'd if we doubt
That a new venture can hold out.
It will, you say. Then don't be “new”;
Be “old.” The Old is still the True.
Nature (said GAUTIER) never tries
To alter her accustom'd dyes;
And all your novelties at best
Are ancient puppets, newly drest.
What you must do, is not to shrink
From speaking out the thing you think;
And blaming where 'tis right to blame,
Despite tradition and a Name.
Yet don't expand a trifling blot,
Or ban the book for what it's not
(That is the poor device of those
Who cavil where they can't oppose!);
Moreover (this is very old!),
Be courteous—even when you scold!
Blame I put first, but not at heart.
You must give Praise the foremost part;—
Praise that to those who write is breath
Of Life, if just; if unjust, Death.
Praise then the things that men revere;
Praise what they love, not what they fear;
Praise too the young; praise those who try;
Praise those who fail, but by and by
May do good work. Those who succeed,
You'll praise perforce,—so there's no need
To speak of that. And as to each,
See you keep measure in your speech;—
See that your praise be so exprest
That the best man shall get the best;
Nor fail of the fit word you meant
Because your epithets are spent.
Remember that our language gives
No limitless superlatives;
And SHAKESPEARE, HOMER, should have more
Than the last knocker at the door!
“We, that are very old!”—May this
Excuse the hint you find amiss.
My thoughts, I feel, are what to-day
Men call vieux jeu. Well!—“let them say.”
The Old, at least, we know: the New
(A changing Shape that all pursue!)
Has been,—may be, a fraud.
—But there!
Wind to your sail! Vogue la galere!
Were you to inquire respectfully of the infallible critic (if such
indeed there be!) for the source of the aphorism, “Music has charms
to
soothe a savage beast,” he would probably “down” you contemptuously
in
the Johnsonian fashion by replying that you had “just enough of
learning
to misquote”;—that the last word was notoriously “breast” and not
“beast”;—and that the line, as Macaulay's, and every Board
School-boy
besides must be abundantly aware, is to be found in Congreve's
tragedy
of The Mourning Bride. But he would be wrong; and, in fact,
would only
be confirming the real author's contention that “Sure, of all
blockheads, Scholars are the worst.” For, whether connected
with
Congreve or not, the words are correctly given; and they occur in
the
Rev. James Bramston's satire, The Man of Taste, 1733,
running in a
couplet as follows:—
Musick has charms to sooth a savage beast,
And therefore proper at a Sheriff's feast.
Moreover, according to the handbooks, this is not the only passage
from
a rather obscure original which has held its own. “Without
black-velvet-britches, what is man?”—is another (a speculation
which
might have commended itself to Don Quixote);[4] while The Art of
Politicks, also by Bramston, contains a third:—
What's not destroy'd by Time's devouring Hand?
Where's Troy, and where's the May-Pole in the
Strand?
Polonius would perhaps object against a “devouring hand.” But the
survival of—at least—three fairly current citations from a
practically
forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a
few
words upon the writer himself, and his chief performance in verse.
The Rev. James Bramston was born in 1694 or 1695 at Skreens, near
Chelmsford, in Essex, his father, Francis Bramston, being the
fourth son
of Sir Moundeford Bramston, Master in Chancery, whose father again
was
Sir John Bramston, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench,
generally
known as “the elder.”[5]James Bramston was admitted to Westminster
School in 1708. In 1713 he became a scholar at Christ Church,
Oxford,
proceeding B.A. in 1717, and M.A. in 1720. In 1723 he was made
Vicar of
Lurgashall, and in 1725 of Harting, both of which Sussex livings he
held
until his death in March 1744, ten weeks before the death of Pope.
His
first published verses (1715) were on Dr. Radcliffe. In 1729 he
printed
The Art of Politicks, one of the many contemporary
imitations of the
Ars Poetica; and in 1733 The Man of Taste. He also
wrote a mediocre
variation on the Splendid Shilling of John Philips, entitled
The
Crooked Sixpence, 1743. Beyond a statement in Dallaway's
Sussex that
“he [Bramston] was a man of original humour, the fame and proofs of
whose colloquial wit are still remembered”; and the supplementary
information that, as incumbent of Lurgashall, he received an annual
modus of a fat buck and doe from the neighbouring Park of
Petworth,
nothing more seems to have been recorded of him.
Notes:
[4] Whose grand tenue or holiday wear—Cervantes tells
us—was “a
doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to
match.” (ch. 1).
[5] Sir John Bramston, the younger, was the author of the “watery
incoherent Autobiography”—as Carlyle calls it—published by
the Camden
Society in 1845.
The Crooked Sixpence is, at best, an imitation of an
imitation; and as
a Miltonic pastiche does not excel that of Philips, or rival
the more
serious Lewesdon Hill of Crowe. The Art of Politicks,
in its turn,
would need a fairly long commentary to make what is only moderately
interesting moderately intelligible, while eighteenth-century
copies of
Horace's letter to the Pisos are “plentiful as blackberries.” But
The
Man of Taste, based, as it is, on the presentment of a never
extinct
type, the connoisseur against nature, is still worthy of passing
notice.
In the sub-title of the poem, it is declared to be “Occasion'd by
an
Epistle of Mr. Pope's on that Subject” [i.e. “Taste"]. This was
what is
now known as No. 4 of the Moral Essays, “On the Use of
Riches.” But
its first title In 1731 was “Of Taste”; and this was subsequently
altered to “Of False Taste.” It was addressed to Pope's friend,
Richard
Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of “Timon's Villa,”
employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous
magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke
of
Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's
epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The
Man of
Taste, William Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal
antipathy,
promptly attacked Pope, Burlington, and his own bete noire,
Burlington's architect, William Kent. Pope, to whom Burlington acts
as
hodman, is depicted whitewashing Burlington Gate, Piccadilly, which
is
labelled “Taste,” and over which rises Kent's statue, subserviently
supported at the angles of the pediment by Raphael and
Michelangelo. In
his task, the poet, a deformed figure in a tye-wig, bountifully
bespatters the passers-by, particularly the chariot of the Duke of
Chandos. The satire was not very brilliant or ingenious; but its
meaning
was clear. Pope was prudent enough to make no reply; though, as Mr.
G.S.
Layard shows in his Suppressed Plates, it seems that the
print was, or
was sought to be, called in by those concerned. Bramston's poem,
which
succeeded in 1733, does not enter into the quarrel, it may be
because of
the anger aroused by the pictorial reply. But if—as announced on
its
title-page,—it was suggested by Pope's epistle, it would also seem
to
have borrowed its name from Hogarth's caricature.
It was first issued in folio by Pope's publisher, Lawton Gilliver
of
Fleet Street, and has a frontispiece engraved by Gerard
Vandergucht.
This depicts a wide-skirted, effeminate-looking personage, carrying
a
long cane with a head fantastically carved, and surrounded by
various
objects of art. In the background rises what is apparently intended
for
the temple of a formal garden; and behind this again, a winged ass
capers skittishly upon the summit of Mount Helicon. As might be
anticipated, the poem is in the heroic measure of Pope. But though
many
of its couplets are compact and pointed, Bramston has not yet
learned
from his model the art of varying his pausation, and the period
closes
his second line with the monotony of a minute gun. Another defect,
noticed by Warton, is that the speaker throughout is made to
profess the
errors satirised, and to be the unabashed mouthpiece of his own
fatuity,
“Mine,” say the concluding lines,—
Mine are the gallant Schemes of Politesse,
For books, and buildings, politicks, and dress.
This is True Taste, and whoso likes it not,
Is blockhead, coxcomb, puppy, fool, and sot.
One is insensibly reminded of a quotation from P.L. Courier, made
in the
Cornhill many years since by the once famous “Jacob Omnium"
when
replying controversially to the author of Ionica, “Je
vois”—says
Courier, after recapitulating a string of abusive epithets hurled
at him
by his opponent—“je vois ce qu'il veut dire: il entend que lui
et moi
sont d'avis different; et c'est la sa maniere de s'exprimer.”
It was
also the manner of our Man of Taste.
The second line of the above quotation from Bramston gives us four
of
the things upon which his hero lays down the law. Let us see what
he
says about literature. As a professing critic he prefers books
with notes:—
Tho' Blackmore's works my soul with raptures fill,
With notes by Bently they'd be better still.
Swift he detests—not of course for detestable qualities, but
because he
is so universally admired. In poetry he holds by rhyme as opposed
to
blank verse:—
Verse without rhyme I never could endure,
Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure.
To him as Nature, when he ceas'd to see,
Milton's an universal Blank to me ...
Thompson [sic] write blank, but know that for that
reason
These lines shall live, when thine are out of season.
Rhyme binds and beautifies the Poet's lays
As London Ladies owe their shape to stays.
In this the Man of Taste is obviously following the reigning
fashion.
But if we may assume Bramston himself to approve what his hero
condemns,
he must have been in advance of his age, for blank verse had but
sparse
advocates at this time, or for some time to come. Neither Gray, nor
Johnson, nor Goldsmith were ever reconciled to what the last of
them
styles “this unharmonious measure.” Goldsmith, in particular, would
probably have been in exact agreement with the couplet as to the
controlling powers of rhyme. “If rhymes, therefore,” he writes, in
the
Enquiry into Polite Learning,[6] “be more difficult [than
blank
verse], for that very reason, I would have our poets write in
rhyme.
Such a restriction upon the thought of a good poet, often lifts and
encreases the vehemence of every sentiment; for fancy, like a
fountain,
plays highest by diminishing the aperture.”[7]
Notes:
[6] Ed. 1759, p. 151.
[7] Montaigne has a somewhat similar illustration: “As Cleanthes
The
Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is said, that as the
voice
being forciblie pent in the narrow gullet of a trumpet, at last
issueth
forth more strong and shriller, so me seemes, that a sentence
cunningly
and closely couched in measure-keeping Posie, darts it selfe forth
more
furiously, and wounds me even to the quicke”.
(Essayes, bk. i. ch. xxv. (Florio's translation).
The Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is Colley Cibber,
who,
however, deserves the laurel he wears, not for The Careless
Husband,
his best comedy, but for his Epilogues and other Plays.
It pleases me, that Pope unlaurell'd goes,
While Cibber wears the Bays for Play-house Prose,
So Britain's Monarch once uncover'd sate,
While Bradshaw bully'd in a broad-brimmed hat,—
a reminiscence of King Charles's trial which might have been added
to
Bramston stock quotations. The productions of “Curll's chaste
press” are
also this connoisseur's favourite reading,—the lives of players in
particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds set forth in
Carlyie's
essay on Scott.[8] Among these the memoirs of Cibber's “Lady Betty
Modish,” Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in Westminster
Abbey, are not obscurely indicated.
Note:
[8] “It has been said. 'There are no English lives worth reading
except
those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden
Respectability
good-day.'“
In morals our friend—as might be expected circa l730—is a
Freethinker and Deist. Tindal is his text-book: his breviary the
Fable
of the Bees;—
T' Improve In Morals Mandevil I read,
And Tyndal's Scruples are my settled Creed.
I travell'd early, and I soon saw through
Religion all, e'er I was twenty-two.
Shame, Pain, or Poverty shall I endure,
When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,
Self-murder is an honourable way.
As Pasaran directs I'd end my life,
And kill myself, my daughter, and my wife.
He would, of course, have done nothing of the kind; nor, for the
matter
of that, did his Piedmontese preceptor.[9]
Note:
[9] Count Passeran was a freethinking nobleman who wrote A
Philosophical Discourse on Death, in which he defended suicide,
though
he refrained from resorting to it himself. Pope refers to him in
the
Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue i. 124:—
If Blount despatch'd himself, he play'd the man,
And so may'st thou, illustrious Passeran!
Nil admirari is the motto of the Man of Taste in Building,
where he is
naturally at home. He can see no symmetry in the Banqueting House,
or in
St. Paul's Covent Garden, or even in St. Paul's itself.
Sure wretched Wren was taught by bungling Jones,
To murder mortar, and disfigure stones!
“Substantial” Vanbrugh he likes-=chiefly because his work would
make
“such noble ruins.” Cost is his sole criterion, and here he, too,
seems
to glance obliquely at Canons:—
Dorick, Ionick, shall not there be found,
But it shall cost me threescore thousand pound.
But this was moderate, as the Edgware “folly” reached L250,000. In
Gardening he follows the latest whim for landscape. Here is his
burlesque of the principles of Bridgeman and Batty Langley:—
Does it not merit the beholder's praise,
What's high to sink? and what is low to raise?
Slopes shall ascend where once a green-house stood,
And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood.
Let misers dread the hoarded gold to waste,
Expence and alteration show a Taste.
As a connoisseur of Painting this enlightened virtuoso is given
over to
Hogarth's hated dealers in the Black Masters:—
In curious paintings I'm exceeding nice,
And know their several beauties by their Price.
Auctions and Sales I constantly attend,
But chuse my pictures by a skilful Friend,
Originals and copies much the same,
The picture's value is the painter's name.[10]
Of Sculpture he says—
In spite of Addison and ancient Rome,
Sir Cloudesly Shovel's is my fav'rite tomb.[11]
How oft have I with admiration stood,
To view some City-magistrate in wood?
I gaze with pleasure on a Lord May'r's head
Cast with propriety in gilded lead,—
the allusion being obviously to Cheere's manufactory of such
popular
garden decorations at Hyde Park Corner.
Notes:
[10]: See post, “M. Ronquet on the Arts,” p. 51.
[11]: “Sir Cloudesly Shovel's Monument has very often given
me great
Offence: Instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the
distinguishing Character of that plain, gallant Man, he is
represented
on his Tomb [in Westminster Abbey] by the Figure of a Beau, dressed
in a
long Perriwig, and reposing himself upon Velvet Cushions under a
Canopy
of State” (Spectator, March 30, 1711).
In Coins and Medals, true to his instinct for liking the worst the
best,
he prefers the modern to the antique. In Music, with Hogarth's Rake
two
years later, he is all for that “Dagon of the nobility and gentry,”
imported song:—
Without Italian, or without an ear,
To Bononcini's musick I adhere;—
though he confesses to a partiality for the bagpipe on the ground
that
your true Briton “loves a grumbling noise,” and he favours organs
and
the popular oratorios. But his “top talent is a bill of fare”:—
Sir Loins and rumps of beef offend my eyes,[12]
Pleas'd with frogs fricass[e]ed, and coxcomb-pies.
Dishes I chuse though little, yet genteel,
Snails[13] the first course, and Peepers[14] crown
the meal.
Pigs heads with hair on, much my fancy please,
I love young colly-flowers if stew'd in cheese,
And give ten guineas for a pint of peas!
No tatling servants to my table come,
My Grace is Silence, and my waiter Dumb.
He is not without his aspirations.
Could I the priviledge of Peer procure,
The rich I'd bully, and oppress the poor.
To give is wrong, but it is wronger still,
On any terms to pay a tradesman's bill.
I'd make the insolent Mechanicks stay,
And keep my ready-money all for play.
I'd try if any pleasure could be found
In tossing-up for twenty thousand pound.
Had I whole Counties, I to White's would go,
And set lands, woods, and rivers at a throw.
But should I meet with an unlucky run,
And at a throw be gloriously undone;
My debts of honour I'd discharge the first,
Let all my lawful creditors be curst.
Notes:
[12] As they did those of Goldsmith's “Beau Tibbs.” “I hate your
immense loads of meat ... extreme disgusting to those who are in
the
least acquainted with high life” (Citizen of the World,
1762, i.
241).
[13]: The edible or Roman snail (Helix pomatia) is still
known to continental cuisines—and gipsy camps. It was introduced
into
England as an epicure's dish in the seventeenth century.
[14]: Young chickens.
Here he perfectly exemplifies that connexion between
connoisseurship and
play which Fielding discovers in Book xiii. of Tom Jones.[15] An
anecdote of C.J. Fox aptly exhibits the final couplet in action,
and
proves that fifty years later, at least, the same convenient code
was in
operation. Fox once won about eight thousand pounds at cards.
Thereupon
an eager creditor promptly presented himself, and pressed for
payment.
“Impossible, Sir,” replied Fox,” I must first discharge my debts of
honour.” The creditor expostulated. “Well, Sir, give me your bond.”
The
bond was delivered to Fox, who tore it up and flung the pieces into
the
fire. “Now, Sir,” said he, “my debt to you is a debt of honour,”
and
immediately paid him.[16]
Notes:
[15] “But the science of gaming is that which above all others
employs their thoughts [i.e. the thoughts of the 'young gentlemen
of our
times']. These are the studies of their graver hours, while for
their
amusements they have the vast circle of connoisseurship, painting,
music, statuary, and natural philosophy, or rather unnatural, which
deals in the wonderful, and knows nothing of nature, except her
monsters
and imperfections” (ch. v.).
[16] Table Talk of Samuel Rogers [by Dyce], 1856, p. 73.
But we must abridge our levies on Pope's imitator. In Dress the Man
of
Taste's aim seems to have been to emulate his own footman, and at
this
point comes in the already quoted reference to velvet
“inexpressibles”—(a word which, the reader may be interested to
learn,
is as old as 1793). His “pleasures,” as might be expected, like
those of
Goldsmith's Switzers, “are but low”—
To boon companions I my time would give,
With players, pimps, and parasites I'd live.
I would with Jockeys from Newmarket dine,
And to Rough-riders give my choicest wine ...
My ev'nings all I would with sharpers spend,
And make the Thief-catcher my bosom friend.
In Fig, the Prize-fighter, by day delight,
And sup with Colly Cibber ev'ry night.
At which point—and probably in his cups—we leave our misguided
fine
gentleman of 1733, doubtless a fair sample of many of his class
under
the second George, and not wholly unknown under that monarch's
successors—even to this hour. Le jour va passer; mais la folie
ne
passera pas!
A parting quotation may serve to illustrate one of those changes of
pronunciation which have taken place in so many English words.
Speaking
of his villa, or country-box, the Man of Taste says—
Pots o'er the door I'll place like Cits balconies,
Which Bently calls the Gardens of Adonis.
To make this a peg for a dissertation on the jars of lettuce and
fennel
grown by the Greeks for the annual Adonis festivals, is needless.
But it
may be noted that Bramston, with those of his day,—Swift
excepted,—scans the “o” in balcony long, a practice which
continued far
into the nineteenth century. “Contemplate,” said Rogers, “is bad
enough;
but balcony makes me sick.”[17] And even in 1857, two years after
Rogers's death, the late Frederick Locker, writing of Piccadilly,
speaks of “Old Q's” well-known window in that thoroughfare as
“Primrose balcony.”
Note:
[17:]_Table Talk, 1856, p. 248.
(Whose name is Amanda.)
With Apologies to the Shade of Christopher Marlowe.
Come live with me and be my Dear;
And till that happy bond shall lapse,
I'll set your Poutings in Brevier,[l8]
Your Praises in the largest CAPS.
There's Diamond—'tis for your Eyes;
There's Ruby—that will match your Lips;
Pearl, for your Teeth; and Minion-size.
To suit your dainty Finger-tips.
In Nonpareil I'll put your Face;
In Rubric shall your Blushes rise;
There is no Bourgeois in your Case;
Your Form can never need “Revise.”
Your Cheek seems “Ready for the Press”;
Your Laugh as Clarendon is clear;
There's more distinction in your Dress
Than in the oldest Elzevir.
So with me live, and with me die;
And may no “FINIS” e'er intrude
To break into mere “Printers' Pie“
The Type of our Beatitude!
(ERRATUM.—If my suit you flout,
And choose some happier Youth to wed,
'Tis but to cross AMANDA out,
And read another name instead.)
Note:
[18] “Pronounced Bre-veer” (Printers' Vocabulary).
M. Rouquet's book is a rare duodecimo of some two hundred pages,
bound
in sheep, which, in the copy before us, has reached that particular
stage of disintegration when the scarfskin, without much
persuasion,
peels away in long strips. Its title is—L'Etat des Arts, en
Angleterre. Par M. Rouquet, de l'Academie Royale de Peinture &de
Sculpture; and it is “imprime a Paris” though it was to
be obtained
from John Nourse, “Libraire dans le Strand, proche
Temple-barr”—a
well-known importer of foreign books, and one of Henry Fielding's
publishers. The date is 1755, being the twenty-eighth year of the
reign
of His Majesty King George the Second—a reign not generally
regarded as
favourable to art of any kind. In what month of 1755 the little
volume
was first put forth does not appear; but it must have been before
October, when Nourse issued an English version. There is a
dedication,
in the approved French fashion, to the Marquis de Marigny, “
Directeur Ordonnateur General de ses Batimens, Jardins, Arts, Academies
Manufactures” to Lewis the Fifteenth, above which is a delicate
headpiece by M. Charles-Nicolas Cochin (the greatest of the
family),
where a couple of that artist's well-nourished amorini,
insecurely
attached to festoons, distribute palms and laurels in vacuity under
a
coroneted oval displaying fishes. For Monsieur Abel-Francois
Poisson,
Marquis de Marigny et de Menars, was the younger brother of
Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the celebrated Marquise de Pompadour.
Cochin's etching is dated “1754”; and the “Approbation” at the end
of
the volume bears his signature in his capacity of Censeur.
Of the “M. Rouquet” of the title-page biography tells us little;
but it
may be well, before speaking of his book, to bring that little
together.
He was a Swiss Protestant of French extraction, born at Geneva in
1702.
His Christian names were Jean-Andre; and he had come to England
from his
native land towards the close of the reign of George the First.
Many of
his restless compatriots also sought these favoured shores.
Labelye, who
rose from a barber's shop to be the architect of London Bridge;
Liotard,
once regarded as a rival of Reynolds; Michael Moser, eventually
Keeper
of the Royal Academy, had all migrated from the “stormy mansions"
where,
in the words of Goldsmith's philosophic Wanderer—
Winter ling'ring chills the lap of May.
Like Moser, Rouquet was a chaser and an enameller. He lodged on the
south side of Leicester Fields, in a house afterwards the residence
of
another Switzer of the same craft, that miserable Theodore
Gardelle, who
in 1761 murdered his landlady, Mrs. King. Of Rouquet's activities
as an
artist in England there are scant particulars. The ordinary
authorities
affirm that he imitated and rivalled the popular miniaturist and
enameller, Christian Zincke, who retired from practice in 1746; and
he
is loosely described as “the companion of Hogarth, Garrick, Foote,
and
the wits of the day.” Of his relations with Foote and Garrick there
is
scant record; but with Hogarth, his near neighbour in the Fields,
he was
certainly well acquainted, since in 1746 he prepared explanations
in
French for a number of Hogarth's prints. These took the form of
letters
to a friend at Paris, and are supposed to have been, if not
actually
inspired, at least approved by the painter. They usually
accompanied all
the sets of Hogarth's engravings which went abroad; and, according
to
George Steevens, it was Hogarth's intention ultimately to have them
translated and enlarged. Rouquet followed these a little later by a
separate description of “The March to Finchley,” designed specially
for
the edification of Marshal Foucquet de Belle-Isle, who, when the
former
letters had been written, was a prisoner of war at Windsor. In a
brief
introduction to this last, the author, hitherto unnamed, is spoken
of as
“Mr. Rouquet, connu par ses Outrages d'Email.”
After thirty years' sojourn in this country, Rouquet transferred
himself
to Paris. At what precise date he did this is not stated, but by a
letter to Hogarth from the French capital, printed by John Ireland,
the
original of which is in the British Museum, he was there, and had
been
there several months, in March 1753. The letter gives a highly
favourable account of its writer's fortunes. Business is “coming in
very
smartly,” he says. He has been excellently received, and is
“perpetualy
imploy'd.” There is far more encouragement for modern enterprise in
Paris than there is in London; and some of his utterances must have
rejoiced the soul of his correspondent. As this, for instance—“The
humbug virtu is much more out of fashon here than in
England, free
thinking upon that &other topicks is more common here than amongst
you
if possible, old pictures &old stories fare's alike, a dark picture
is
become a damn'd picture.” On this account, he inquires anxiously as
to
the publication of his friend's forthcoming Analysis; he has
been
raising expectations about it, and he wishes to be the first to
introduce it into France. From other sources we learn that (perhaps
owing to his relations with Belle-Isle, who had been released in
1745)
he had been taken up by Marigny, and also by Cochin, then keeper of
the
King's Drawings, and soon to be Secretary to the Academy, of which
Rouquet himself, by express order of Lewis the Fifteenth, was made
a
member. Finally, as in the case of Cochin, apartments were assigned
to
him in the Louvre. Whether he ever returned to this country is
doubtful;
but, as we have seen, the Etat des Arts was printed at Paris
in 1755.
That it was suggested—or “commanded”—by Mme. de Pompadour's
connoisseur brother, to whom it was inscribed, is a not
unreasonable
supposition.
In any case, M. Rouquet's definition of the “Arts” is a generous
one,
almost as wide as Marigny's powers, already sufficiently set forth
at
the outset of this paper. For not only—as in duty bound—does he
treat
of Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and Engraving, but he also has
chapters on Printing, Porcelain, Gold-and Silver-smiths' Work,
Jewelry,
Music, Declamation, Auctions, Shop-fronts, Cooking, and even on
Medicine
and Surgery. Oddly enough, he says nothing of one notable art with
which
Marigny was especially identified, that “art of creating
landscape”—as
Walpole happily calls Gardening—which, in this not very “shining
period,” entered upon a fresh development under Bridgeman and
William
Kent. Although primarily a Londoner, one would think that M.
Rouquet
must certainly have had some experience, if not of the efforts of
the
innovators, at least of the very Batavian performances of Messrs.
London
and Wise of Brompton; or that he should have found at Nonsuch or
Theobalds—at Moor Park or Hampton Court—the pretext for some of
his
pages—if only to ridicule those “verdant sculptures” at which
Pope, who
played no small part in the new movement, had laughed in the
Guardian;
or those fantastic “coats of arms and mottoes in yew, box and
holly"
over which Walpole also made merry long after in the famous essay
so
neatly done into French by his friend the Duc de Nivernais. M.
Rouquet's
curious reticence in this matter cannot have been owing to any
consideration for Hogarth's old enemy, William Kent, for Kent had
been
dead seven years when the Etat des Arts made its appearance.
If, for lack of space, we elect to pass by certain preliminary
reflections which the Monthly Review rather unkindly
dismisses as a
“tedious jumble,” M. Rouquet's first subject is History Painting, a
branch of the art which, under George the Second, attained to no
great
excellence. For this M. Rouquet gives three main reasons, the first
being that afterwards advanced by Hogarth and Reynolds,
namely,—the
practical exclusion, in Protestant countries, of pictures from
churches.
A second cause was the restriction of chamber decorations to
portraits
and engravings; and a third, the craze of the connoisseur for
Hogarth's
hated “Black Masters,” the productions of defunct foreigners. And
this
naturally brings about the following digression, quite in Hogarth's
own
way, against that contemporary charlatan, the
picture-dealer:—“English
painters have an obstacle to overcome, which equally impedes the
progress of their talents and of their fortune. They have to
contend
with a class of men whose business it is to sell pictures; and as,
for
these persons, traffic in the works of living, and above all of
native
artists, would be impossible, they make a point of decrying them,
and,
as far as they can, of confirming amateurs with whom they have to
deal
in the ridiculous idea that the older a picture is the more
valuable it
becomes. See, say they (speaking of some modern effort), it still
shines
with that ignoble freshness which is to be found in nature; Time
will
have to indue it with his learned smoke—with that sacred cloud
which
must some day hide it from the profane eyes of the vulgar in order
to
reveal to the initiated alone the mysterious beauties of a
venerable
antiquity.”
These words are quite in the spirit of Hogarth's later “Time
smoking a
Picture.” As a matter of fact, they are reproduced almost textually
from
the writer's letter of five years earlier on the “March to
Finchley.” To
return, however, to History Painting. According to Rouquet, its
leading
exponent[19] under George the Second was Francis Hayman of the
“large
noses and shambling legs,” now known chiefly as a crony of Hogarth,
and
a facile but ineffectual illustrator of Shakespeare and Cervantes.
In
1754, however, his pictures of See-Saw, Hot Cockles, Blind Man's
Buff,
and the like, for the supper-boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, with
Sayer's
prints therefrom, had made his name familiar, although he had not
yet
painted those more elaborate compositions in the large room next
the
rotunda, over which Fanny Burney's “Holborn Beau,” Mr, Smith, comes
to
such terrible grief in ch. xlvi. of Evelina. But he had
contributed a
“Finding of Moses” to the New Foundling Hospital, which is still to
be
seen in the Court Room there, in company with three other pictures
executed concurrently for the remaining compartments, Joseph
Highmore's
“Hagar and Ishmael,” James Wills's “Suffer little Children,” and
Hogarth's “Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter”—the best of the
four,
as well as the most successful of Hogarth's historical pieces. All
these, then recently installed, are mentioned by Rouquet.
Note:
[19] This is confirmed by Arthur Murphy: “Every Thing is put out
of Hand by this excellent Artist with the utmost Grace and
Delicacy, and
his History-Pieces have, besides their beautiful Colouring, the
most
lively Expression of Character” (Gray's Inn Journal, February
9, 1754).
It will be observed that he says nothing about Hogarth's earlier
and
more ambitious efforts in the “Grand Style,” the “Pool of Bethesda"
and
the “Good Samaritan” at St. Bartholomew's, nor of the “Paul before
Felix,” also lately added to Lincoln's Inn Hall—omissions which
must
have sadly exercised the “author” of those monumental works when he
came
to read his Swiss friend's little treatise. Nor, for the matter of
that,
does M. Rouquet, when he treats of portrait, refer to Hogarth's
masterpiece in this kind, the full-length of Captain Coram at the
Foundling. On the other hand, he says a great deal about Hogarth
which
has no very obvious connection with History Painting. He discusses
the
Analysis and the serpentine Line of Beauty with far more
insight than
many of its author's contemporaries; refers feelingly to the Act by
which in 1735 the painter had so effectively cornered the pirates;
and
finally defines his satirical pictures succinctly as follows:—“M.
Hogarth has given to England a new class of pictures. They contain
a
great number of figures, usually seven or eight inches high. These
remarkable performances are, strictly speaking, the history of
certain
vices, to a foreign eye often a little overcharged, but always full
of
wit and novelty. He understands in his compositions how to make
pleasant
pretext for satirising the ridiculous and the vicious, by firm and
significant strokes, all of which are prompted by a lively, fertile
and
judicious imagination.”
From History Painting to Portrait in Oil, the title given by M.
Rouquet
to his next chapter, transition is easy. Some of the artists
mentioned
above were also portrait painters. Besides Captain Coram, for
example,
Hogarth had already executed that admirable likeness of himself
which is
now at Trafalgar Square, and which Rouquet must often have seen in
its
home at Leicester Fields. Highmore too had certainly at this date
painted more than one successful portrait of Samuel Richardson, the
novelist; and even Hayman had made essay in this direction with the
picture of Lord Orford, now in the National Portrait Gallery. A
good
many of the painters of the last reign must also, during Rouquet's
residence in England, have been alive and active, e.g.
Jervas, Dahl,
Aikman, Thornhill and Richardson. But M. Rouquet devotes most of
his
pages in this respect to Kneller, whose not altogether beneficent
influence long survived him. Strangely enough, Rouquet does not
mention
that egregious and fashionable face-painter, Sir Joshua's master,
Thomas
Hudson, whose “fair tied-wigs, blue velvet coats, and white satin
waistcoats” (all executed by his assistants) reigned undisputed
until he
was eclipsed by his greater pupil. The two artists in portraiture
selected by Rouquet for special notice are Allan Ramsay and the
younger
Vanloo (Jean Baptiste). Both were no doubt far above their
predecessors;
but Ramsay would specially appeal to Rouquet by his continental
training, and Vanloo by his French manner and the superior variety
of
his attitudes.[20] The only other name Rouquet recalls is that of
the
drapery-painter Joseph Vanhaken; and we suspect it is to Rouquet
that we
owe the pleasant anecdote of the two painters who, for the sum of
L800 a
year, pre-empted his exclusive and inestimable services, to the
wholesale discomfiture of their brethren of the brush. The rest
shall be
told in Rouquet's words:—“The best [artists] were no longer able
to
paint a hand, a coat, a background; they were forced to learn,
which
meant additional labour—what a misfortune! Henceforth there
arrived no
more to Vanhaken from different quarters of London, nor by coach
from
the most remote towns of England, canvases of all sizes, where one
or
more heads were painted, under which the painter who forwarded them
had
been careful to add, pleasantly enough, the description of the
figures,
stout or slim, great or small, which were to be appended. Nothing
could
be more absurd than this arrangement; but it would exist still—if
Vanhaken existed.”[21]
Note:
[20] Another French writer, the Abbe le Blanc, gives a depressing
account
of English portraits before Vanloo came to England: “At some
distance one
might easily mistake a dozen of them for twelve copies of the same
original.
Some have the head turned to the left, others to the right; and
this is the
most sensible difference to be observed between them. Moreover,
excepting
the face, you find in all the same neck, the same arms, the same
flesh, the
same attitude; and to say all, you observe no more life than design
in
those pretended portraits. Properly speaking, they [the artists]
are not
painters, they know how to lay colours on the canvas; but they know
not how
to animate it” (Letters on the English and French Nations, 1747, i. 160).
[21] He died in 1749.]
“La peinture a l'huile, C'est bien difficile; Mais c'est
beaucoup plus
beau Que la peinture a l'eau.” About la peinture a l'eau, M. Rouquet
says very little, in all probability because the English Water
Colour
School, which, with the advance of topographic art, grew so rapidly
in
the second half of the century, was yet to come. He refers,
however,
with approval to the gouaches of Joseph Goupy, Lady
Burlington's
drawing-master, perhaps better known to posterity by his (or her
ladyship's) caricature of Handel as the “Charming Brute.”
(Caricature,
by the way, is a branch of Georgian Art which M. Rouquet neglects.)
As
regards landscape and animal painting, he “abides in generalities”;
but
he must have been acquainted with the sea pieces of Monamy, and
Hogarth's and Walpole's friend Samuel Scott; and should, one would
think, have known of the horses and dogs of Wootton and Seymour.
Upon
Enamel he might be expected to enlarge, although he mentions but
one
master, his own model, Zincke, who carried the art of portrait in
this
way much farther than any predecessor. Moreover, like Petitot, he
made
discoveries which he was wise enough to keep to himself.
“It is most humiliating,” says Rouquet, “for the genius of painting
that
it can sometimes exist alone. M. Zincke left no pupil.” Seeing that
Rouquet is also accused of jealously guarding his own contributions
to
the perfection of his art, the words are—as Diderot
says—remarkable.
With Sculpture, chiefly employed at this date for mortuary
purposes, he
has less opportunity of being indefinite, since there were but
three
notabilities, Scheemakers, Rysbrack, and Roubillac,—all
foreigners. Of
these Scheemakers, whom Chesterfield regarded as a mere
stone-cutter,
and who did the Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, is certainly the
least
considerable. Next come Rysbrack, whom Walpole and Rouquet would
put
highest, the latter apparently because Rysbrack had been spoken of
contemptuously by the Abbe le Blanc. But the first is assuredly
Roubillac, whose monument to Mrs. Nightingale, however, belongs to
a
later date than the Etat des Arts, though he had already
achieved the
masterly figure of Eloquence on the Argyll monument. The only other
sculptor referred to by Rouquet is Gabriel Cibber, whose statues of
Madness and Melancholy, long at Bedlam, and now at South
Kensington,
certainly deserve his praise. But Cibber died in 1700, and belongs
to
the Caroline epoch. He no doubt owes his place in the Etat des
Arts to
the fact that he had been abused in the already-mentioned
Letters on
the English and French Nations.
At this point we may turn M. Rouquet's pages more rapidly. It is
not
necessary to linger over his account of Silk Stuffs, more excellent
in
his opinion by their material than their make up. Under Medallists
he
commends the clever medals of great men by his compatriot, Anthony
Dassier; under Printing he refers to that liberty of the Press
which, in
England, amounted to impunity. “A few too thinly disguised
blasphemies;
a few too rash reflections upon the Government, a few defamatory
libels—are the sole things which, at the present time, are not
allowed.” And this brings about the following lively and very
accurate
description of the eighteenth-century newspaper:—“One of the most
notable peculiarities which liberty of the Press produces in
England, is
the swarm of fugitive sheets and half-sheets which one sees break
forth
every morning, except Sunday, covering all the coffee-house tables.
Twenty of these different papers, under different titles, appear
each
day; some contain a moral or philosophical discourse; the majority
of
the rest offer political, and frequently seditious, comments on
some
party question. In them is to be found the news of Europe, England,
London, and the day before. Their authors profess to be familiar
with
the most secret deliberations of the Cabinet, which they make
public. If
a fire occurs in a chimney or elsewhere; if a theft or a murder has
taken place; if any one commits suicide from ennui or
despair, the
public is informed thereof on the morning after with the utmost
amount
of detail. After these articles come advertisements of all sorts,
and in
very great numbers. In addition to those of different things which
it is
desired to let, sell or purchase, there are some that are amusing.
If a
man's wife runs away he declares that he will not be liable for any
debts she may contract; and as a matter of fact, this precaution,
according to the custom of the country, is essential if he desires
to
secure himself from doing so. He threatens with all the rigour of
the
law those who dare to give his wife an asylum. Another publishes
the
particulars of his fortune, his age and his position, and adds that
he
is prepared to unite himself to any woman whose circumstances are
such
as he requires and describes; he further gives the address where
communications must be sent for the negotiation and conclusion of
the
business. There are other notices which describe a woman who has
been
seen at the play or elsewhere, and announces that some one has
determined to marry her. If any one has a dream which seems to him
to
predict that a certain number will be lucky in the lottery, he
proclaims
that fact, and offers a consideration to the possessor of the
number if
he cares to dispose of it.”
After these come the advertisements of the Quack Doctors. Of the
account
of belles-lettres in 1754, two years after Amelia and in the
actual
year of Sir Charles Grandison, M. Rouquet's report is not
flattering:—“The presses of England, made celebrated by so many
masterpieces of wit and science, now scarcely print anything but
miserable and insipid romances, repulsive volumes, frigid and
tedious
letters, where the most tasteless puerility passes for wit and
genius,
and an inflamed imagination exerts itself under the pretext of
forming
manners.” It is possible that the last lines are aimed at
Richardson;
certainly they describe the post-Richardsonian novel. But that the
passage does not in any part refer to Fielding is clear from the
fact
that the writer presently praises Joseph Andrews, coupling
it with
Gil Blas.
Mezzotint, Gem-cutting, Chasing (which serves to bring in M.
Rouquet's
countryman, Moser), Jewelry, China, (i.e. Chelsea ware) are
all
successfully treated with more or less minuteness, while, under
Architecture, are described the eighteenth-century house, and the
new
bridge at Westminster of another Swiss, Labelye, who is not named:
“The
architect is a foreigner,” says Rouquet, who considered he had been
inadequately rewarded. “It must be confessed (he adds drily) that
in
England this is a lifelong disqualification.” From Architecture the
writer passes to the oratory of the Senate, the Pulpit and the
Stage. In
the last case exception is made for “le celebre M. Garic,”
whose only
teacher is declared to be Nature. As regards the rest, M. Rouquet
thus
describes the prevailing style:—“The declamation of the English
stage
is turgid, full of affectation, and perpetually pompous. Among
other
peculiarities, it frequently admits a sort of dolorous
exclamation,—a
certain long-drawn tone of voice, so woeful and so lugubrious that
it is
impossible not to be depressed by it.” This reads like a
recollection of
Quin in the Horatio of Rowe's Fair Penitent.
Upon Cookery M. Rouquet is edifying; and concerning the
eighteenth-century physician, with his tye-wig and gilt-head cane,
sprightly and not unmalicious. But we must now confine ourselves to
quoting a few detached passages from this discursive chronicle. The
description of Ranelagh (in the chapter on Music) is too lengthy to
reproduce. Here is that of the older Vauxhall:—“The Vauxhall
concert
takes place in a garden singularly decorated. The Director of
Amusements
in this garden [Jonathan Tyers] gains and spends successively
considerable annual sums. He was born for such enterprises. At once
spirited and tasteful, he shrinks from no expense where the
amusement of
the public is concerned, and the public, in its turn, repays him
liberally. Every year he adds some fresh decoration, some new and
exceptional scene. Sculpture, Painting, Music, bestir themselves
periodically to render this resort more agreeable by the variety of
their different productions: in this way opportunities of
relaxation are
infinite in England, above all at London; and thus Music plays a
prominent part. The English take their pleasure without amusing
themselves, or amuse themselves without enjoyment, except at table,
and
there only up to the point when sleep supervenes to the fumes of
wine
and tobacco.”
Elsewhere M. Rouquet, like M. le Blanc before him, is loud in his
denunciation of the pitiful practices of Vails-giving, which blocks
the
vestibule of every English house with an army of servants “ranged
in
line, according to their rank,” and ready “to receive, or rather
exact,
the contribution of every guest.” The excellent Jonas Hanway wrote
a
pamphlet reprehending this objectionable custom. Hogarth steadily
set
his face against it; but Reynolds is reported to have given his man
L100
a year for the door. Here, from another place, is a description of
one
of those popular auctions, at which, in the Marriage A-la-Mode, my
Lady Squanderfieid purchases the bric-a-brac of Sir Timothy
Babyhouse,
The scene is probably Cock's in the Piazza at Covent
Garden:—“Nothing
is so diverting as this kind of sale—the number of those
assembled, the
diverse passions which animate them, the pictures, the auctioneer
himself, his very rostrum, all contribute to the variety of the
spectacle. There you see the faithless broker purchasing in secret
what
he openly depreciates; or—to spread a dangerous snare—pretending
to
secure with avidity a picture which already belongs to him. There,
some
are tempted to buy; and some repent of having bought. There, out of
pique and bravado, another shall pay fifty louis for an article
which he
would not have thought worth five and twenty, had he not been
ashamed to
draw back when the eyes of a crowded company were upon him. There,
you
may see a woman of condition turn pale at the mere thought of
losing a
paltry pagoda which she does not want, and, in any other
circumstances,
would never have desired.”
A closing word as to M. Rouquet himself. The Etat des Arts
was duly
noticed by the critics—contemptuously by the Monthly Review, and
sympathetically by the Gentleman's and the Scots Magazine. In 1755,
the year to which it belongs, its author put forth another work—
L'Art
Nouveau de la Peinture en Fromage ou en Ramequin [toasted
cheese],
invente pour suivre le louable projet de trouver graduellement
des
facons de peindre inferieures a celles qui existent. This, as
its title
imports, is a skit, levelled at the recent Histoire et Secret de
la
Peinture en Cire of Diderot, who nevertheless refers to Rouquet
under
Email, in the Dictionnaire Encyclapedique, as “un
homme habile.”
He seems, however (like “la peinture a l'huile),” to
have been
somewhat “difficile”; and as we have said, his discoveries
(for he had
that useful element in enamel-work, considerable chemical
knowledge),
like Zincke's, perished with him. Several of his portraits, notably
those of Cochin and Marigny, were exhibited at the Paris Salons.
Whether
he was overparted, or overworked, in the Pompadour atmosphere; or
whether he succumbed to the “continual headache” of which he speaks
in
his letter to Hogarth, his health gradually declined. In the last
year
of his life, his reason gave way; and when he died in 1759, it was
as an
inmate of Charenton.
“Emam tua carmina sanus?”—MARTIAL.
F. OF H. I want a verse. It gives you little pains;—
You just sit down, and draw upon your brains.
Come, now, be amiable.
R. To hear you talk,
You'd make it easier to fly than walk.
You seem to think that rhyming is a thing
You can produce if you but touch a spring;
That fancy, fervour, passion—and what not,
Are just a case of “penny in the slot.”
You should reflect that no evasive bird
Is half so shy as is your fittest word;
And even similes, however wrought,
Like hares, before you cook them, must be caught;—
Impromptus, too, require elaboration,
And (unlike eggs) grow fresh by incubation;
Then,—as to epigrams,..
F. of H. Nay, nay, I've done.
I did but make petition. You make fun.
R. Stay. I am grave. Forgive me if I ramble:
But, then, a negative needs some preamble
To break the blow. I feel with you, in truth,
These complex miseries of Age and Youth;
I feel with you—and none can feel it more
Than I—this burning Problem of the Poor;
The Want that grinds, the Mystery of Pain,
The Hearts that sink, and never rise again;—
How shall I set this to some careless screed,
Or jigging stave, when Help is what you need,
Help, Help,—more Help?
F. of H. I fancied that with ease
You'd scribble off some verses that might please,
And so give help to us.
R. Why then—TAKE THESE!
One of the things that perplexes the dreamer—for, in spite of the
realists, there are dreamers still—is the almost complete
extinction of
the early editions of certain popular works. The pompous,
respectable,
full-wigged folios, with their long lists of subscribers, and their
magniloquent dedications, find their permanent abiding-places in
noblemen's collections, where, unless—with the Chrysostom
in Pope's
verses—they are used for the smoothing of bands or the pressing of
flowers, no one ever disturbs their drowsy diuturnity. Their bulk
makes
them sacred: like the regimental big drum, they are too large to be
mislaid. But where are all the first copies of that little octavo
of 246
pages, price eighteenpence, “Printed by T. Maxey for Rich. Marriot,
in
S. Dunstans Church-yard, Fleetstreet” in 1653, which constitutes
the
editio princeps of Walton's Angler. Probably they
were worn out in
the pockets of Honest Izaak's “brothers of the Angle,” or left to
bake
and cockle in the sunny corners of wasp-haunted alehouse windows,
or
dropped in the deep grass by some casual owner, more careful for
flies
and caddis-worms, or possibly for the contents of a leathern
bottle,
than all the “choicely-good” madrigals of Maudlin the milkmaid. In
any
case, there are very few of the little tomes, with their quaint
“coppers” of fishes, in existence now, nor is it silver that pays
for
them. And that other eighteenpenny book, put forth by “Nath.
Ponder at
the Peacock in the Poultrey near Cornhil” five
and twenty years
later,—The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That which is
to
come,—why is it that there are only five known copies, none
quite
perfect, now extant, of which the best sold not long since for more
than
L1400? Of these five, the first that came to light had been
preserved
owing to its having taken sanctuary, almost upon publication, in a
great
library, where it was forgotten. But the others that passed over
Mr.
Ponder's counter in the Poultry,—were they all lost, thumbed and
dog's-eared out of being? They are gone,—that is all you can say;
and
gone apparently beyond reach of recovery.
These remarks,—which scarcely rise to the dignity of
reflections—have
been suggested by the difficulty which the writer has experienced
in
obtaining particulars as to the earliest form of the Parent's
Assistant. As a matter of course, children's books are more
liable to
disappear than any others. They are sooner torn, soiled,
dismembered,
disintegratedsooner find their way to that mysterious unlocated
limbo of
lost things, which engulfs so much. Yet one scarcely expected that
even
the British Museum would not have possessed a copy of the first
issue of
Miss Edgeworth's book. Such, however, seems to be the case.
According to
the catalogue, there is nothing earlier at Bloomsbury than a
portion of
the second edition; and from the inexplicit and conjectural manner
in
which most of the author's biographers speak of the work, it can
scarcely—outside private collections—be very easily accessible.
Fortunately the old Monthly Review for September, 1796, with
most
exemplary forethought for posterity, gives, as a heading to its
notice,
a precise and very categorical account of the first impression.
The
Parent's Assistant; or, Stories for Children was, it appears,
published
in two parts, making three small duodecimo volumes. The price,
bound,
was six shillings. There was no author's name; but it was said to
be “by
E.M.” (i.e. Edgeworth, Maria), and the publisher was Cowper's
Dissenter
publisher, Joseph Johnson of No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard. Part I.
contained “The Little Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of
Truth”;
“The Orange Man; or, the Honest Boy and the Thief”; “Lazy
Lawrence”;
“Tarleton”; and “The False Key”; Part II., “The Purple Jar,” “The
Bracelets,” “Mademoiselle Panache,” “The Birthday Present,” “Old
Poz,”
and “The Mimic.” In the same year, 1796, a second edition appeared,
apparently with, some supplementary stories, e.g.: “Barring Out,”
and in
1800 came a third edition in six volumes. In this the text was
increased
by “Simple Susan,” “The Little Merchants,” “The Basket Woman,” “The
White Pigeon,” “The Orphans,” “Waste Not, Want Not,” “Forgive and
Forget,” and “Eton Montem.” One story, “The Purple Jar” at the
beginning
of Part II. of the first edition, was withdrawn, and afterwards
included
in another series, while the stories entitled respectively “Little
Dog
Trusty” and “The Orange Man” have disappeared from the collection,
probably for the reason given in one of the first prefaces, namely,
that
they “were written for a much earlier age than any of the others,
and
with such a perfect simplicity of expression as, to many, may
appear
insipid and ridiculous.” The six volumes of the third edition came
out
successively on the first day of the first six months of 1800. The
Monthly Reviewer of the first edition, it may be added, was highly
laudatory; and his commendations show that the early critics of the
author were fully alive to her distinctive qualities, “The moral
and
prudential lessons of these volumes,” says the writer, “are
judiciously
chosen; and the stories are invented with great ingenuity, and are
happily contrived to excite curiosity and awaken feeling without
the aid
of improbable fiction or extravagant adventure. The language is
varied
in its degree of simplicity, to suit the pieces to different ages,
but
is throughout neat and correct; and, without the least approach
towards
vulgarity or meanness, it is adapted with peculiar felicity to the
understandings of children. The author's taste, in this class of
writing, appears to have been formed on the best models; and the
work
will not discredit a place on the same shelf with Berquin's
Child's
Friend, Mrs. Barbauld's Lessons for Children, and Dr.
Aikin's
Evenings at Home. The story of 'Lazy Lawrence'”—the notice
goes
on—“is one of the best lectures on industry which we have ever
read.
“The Critical Review, which also gave a short account of the
Parent's
Assistant in its number for January 1797, does not rehearse the
contents. But it confirms the title, etc., adding that the price,
in
boards, was 4s. 6d.; and its praise, though brief, is very much to
the
point. “The present production is particularly sensible and
judicious;
the stories are well written, simple, and affecting; calculated,
not
only for moral improvement, but to exercise the best affections of
the
human heart.”
With one of the books mentioned by the Monthly Review—
Evenings at
Home—Miss Edgeworth was fully prepared, at all events as
regards
format, to associate herself. “The stories,” she says in a letter
to her
cousin, Miss Sophy Ruxton, “are printed and bound the same size as
Evenings at Home, and I am afraid you will dislike the
title.” Her
father had sent the book to press as the Parent's Friend, a
name no
doubt suggested by the Ami des Enfants of Berquin; but “Mr.
Johnson
[the publisher],” continues Miss Edgeworth, “has degraded it into
The
Parent's Assistant, which I dislike particularly, from
association with
an old book of arithmetic called The Tutor's Assistant.” The
ground of
objection is not very formidable; but the Parent's Assistant
is
certainly an infelicitous name. From some other of the author's
letters
we are able to trace the gradual growth of the work. Mr. Edgeworth,
her
father, an utilitarian of much restless energy, and many projects,
was
greatly interested in education,—or, as he would have termed it,
practical education,—and long before this date, as early, indeed,
as
May 1780, he had desired his daughter, while she was still a girl
at a
London school, to write him a tale about the length of a
Spectator;
upon the topic of “Generosity,” to be taken from history or
romance.
This was her first essay in fiction; and it was pronounced by the
judge
to whom it was submitted,—in competition with a rival production
by a
young gentleman from Oxford,—to be an excellent story, and
extremely
well written, although with this commendation was coupled the
somewhat
damaging inquiry,—“But where's the Generosity?” The question
cannot be
answered now, as the manuscript has not been preserved, though the
inconvenient query, we are told, became a kind of personal proverb
with
the young author, who was wont to add that this first effort
contained
“a sentence of inextricable confusion between a saddle, a man, and
his
horse.” This was a defect from which she must have speedily freed
herself, since her style, as her first reviewer allowed, is
conspicuously direct and clear. Accuracy in speaking and writing
had,
indeed, been early impressed upon her. Her father's doctrinaire
ally and
co-disciplinarian, Mr. Thomas Day, later the author of Sandford
and
Merton, and apparently the first person of whom it is affirmed
that “he
talked like a book,” had been indefatigable in bringing this home
to his
young friend, when she visited him in her London school-days. Not
content alone to dose her copiously with Bishop Berkeley's Tar
Water—the chosen beverage of Young and Richardson—he was
unwearied in
ministering to her understanding. “His severe reasoning and
uncompromising love of truth awakened her powers, and the questions
he
put to her, the necessity of perfect accuracy in her answers,
suited the
bent of her mind. Though such strictness was not always agreeable,
she
even then perceived its advantages, and in after life was deeply
grateful to Mr. Day.”[22]
Note:
[22] Maria Edgeworth, by Helen Zimmern, 1888, p. 13.
The training she underwent from the inexorable Mr, Day was
continued by
her father when she quitted school, and moved with her family to
the
parental seat at Edgeworthstown in Ireland. Mr. Edgeworth, whose
principles were as rigorous as those of his friend, devoted himself
early to initiating her into business habits. He taught her to copy
letters, to keep accounts, to receive rents, and, in short, to act
as
his agent and factotum. She frequently accompanied him in the many
disputes and difficulties which arose with his Irish tenantry; and,
apart from the insight which this must have afforded her into the
character and idiosyncrasies of the people, she no doubt very early
acquired that exact knowledge of leases and legacies and dishonest
factors which is a noticeable feature even of her children's
books.[23]
It is some time, however, before we hear of any successor to
“Generosity”; but, in 1782, her father, with a view to provide her
with
an occupation for her leisure, proposed to her to prepare a
translation
of the Adele et Theodore of Madame de Genlis, those letters
upon
education by which that gentle and multifarious moralist
acquired—to
use her own words—at once “the suffrages of the public, and the
irreconcilable hatred of all the so-called philosophers and their
partisans.” At first there had been no definite thought of print in
Mr,
Edgeworth's mind. But as the work progressed, the idea gathered
strength; and he began to prepare his daughter's manuscript for the
press. Then, unhappily, when the first volume was finished,
Holcroft's
complete translation appeared, and made the labour needless. Yet it
was
not without profit. It had been excellent practice in aiding Miss
Edgeworth's faculty of expression, and increasing her
vocabulary—to say
nothing of the influence which the portraiture of individuals and
the
satire of reigning follies which are the secondary characteristics
of
Madame de Genlis's most well-known work, may have had on her own
subsequent efforts as a novelist. Meanwhile her mentor, Mr. Day,
was
delighted at the interruption of her task. He possessed, to the
full,
that rooted antipathy to feminine authorship of which we find so
many
traces in Miss Burney's novels and elsewhere; and he wrote to
congratulate Mr. Edgeworth on having escaped the disgrace of having
a
translating daughter. At this time, as already stated, he himself
had
not become the author of Sandford and Merton, which, as a
matter of
fact, owed its inception to the Edgeworths, being at first simply
intended as a short story to be inserted in the Harry and Lucy
Mr.
Edgeworth wrote in conjunction with his second wife, Honora Sneyd.
As
regards the question of publication, both Maria and her father,
although
sensible of Mr. Day's prejudices, appear to have deferred to his
arguments. Nor were these even lost to the public, for we are
informed
that, in Miss Edgeworth's first book, ten years later, the
Letters to
Literary Ladies, she employed and embodied much that he had
advanced.
But for the present, she continued to write—though solely for her
private amusement—essays, little stories, and dramatic sketches.
One of
these last must have been “Old Poz,” a pleasant study of a country
justice and a gazza ladra, which appeared in Part II. of the
first
issue of the Parent's Assistant, and which, we are told, was
acted by
the Edgeworth children in a little theatre erected in the
dining-room
for the purpose. According to her sisters, it was Miss Edgeworth's
practice first to write her stories on a slate, and then to read
them
out. If they were approved, she transcribed them fairly. “Her
writing
for children”—says one of her biographers—“was a natural
outgrowth of
a practical study of their wants and fancies; and her constant care
of
the younger children gave her exactly the opportunity required to
observe the development of mind incident to the age and capacity of
several little brothers and sisters.” According to her own account,
her
first critic was her father. “Whenever I thought of writing
anything, I
always told him [my father] my first rough plans; and always, with
the
instinct of a good critic, he used to fix immediately upon that
which
would best answer the purpose.—'Sketch that, and shew it to
me.'—These words, from the experience of his sagacity, never
failed to
inspire me with hope of success. It was then sketched. Sometimes,
when I
was fond of a particular part, I used to dilate on it in the
sketch; but
to this he always objected—'I don't want any of your
painting—none of
your drapery!—I can imagine all that—let me see the bare
skeleton.'“
Note:
[23] Cf. “Attorney Case” in the story of “Simple Susan.”
Of the first issue of the Parent's Assistant in 1796, a
sufficient
account has already been given. In the “Preface” the practical
intention
of several of the stories is explicitly set forth. “Lazy Lawrence,”
we
are told, illustrates the advantages of industry, and demonstrates
that
people feel cheerful and happy whilst they are employed; while
“Tarleton” represents “the danger and the folly of that weakness of
mind, and that easiness to be led, which too often pass for good
nature”; “The False Key” points out some of the evils to which a
well-educated boy, on first going to service, is exposed from the
profligacy of his fellow-servants; “The Mimic,” the drawback of
vulgar
acquaintances; “Barring Out,” the errors to which a high spirit and
the
love of party are apt to lead, and so forth. In the final paragraph
stress is laid upon what every fresh reader must at once recognise
as
the supreme merit of the stories, namely, their dramatic faculty,
or (in
the actual words of the “Preface"), their art of “keeping alive
hope and
fear and curiosity, by some degree of intricacy.”[24] The
plausibility
of invention, the amount of ingenious contrivance and of clever
expedient in these professedly nursery stories, is indeed
extraordinary;
and nothing can exceed the dexterity with which—to use Dr.
Johnson's
words concerning She Stoops to Conquer—“the incidents are
so prepared
as not to seem improbable.” There is no better example of this than
the
admirable tale of “The Mimic,” in which the most unlooked-for
occurrences succeed each other in the most natural way, while the
disappearance at the end of the little sweep, who has levanted up
the
chimney in Frederick's new blue coat and buff waistcoat, is a
master-stroke. Everybody has forgotten everything about him until
the
precise moment when he is needed to supply the fitting surprise of
the
finish,—a surprise which is only to be compared to that other
revelation in The Rose and the Ring of Thackeray, where the
long-lost
and obnoxious porter at Valoroso's palace, having been turned by
the
Fairy Blackstick into a door knocker for his insolence, is restored
to
the sorrowing Servants' Hall exactly when his services are again
required in the capacity of Mrs. Gruffanuffs husband. But in Miss
Edgeworth's little fable there is no fairy agency. “Fairies were
not
much in her line,” says Lady Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, “but
philanthropic manufacturers, liberal noblemen, and benevolent
ladies in
travelling carriages, do as well and appear in the nick of time to
distribute rewards or to point a moral.”
Note:
[24] The “Preface to Parents”—Miss Emily Lawless suggests to
me—was
probably by Mr. Edgeworth.
Although, by their sub-title, these stories are avowedly composed
for
children, they are almost as attractive to grown-up readers. This
is
partly owing to their narrative skill, partly also to the clear
characterisation, which already betrays the coming author of
Castle
Rackrent and Belinda and Patronage—the last,
under its first name
of The Freeman Family, being already partly written,
although many
years were still to pass before it saw the light in 1814. Readers,
wise
after the event, might fairly claim to have foreseen from some of
the
personages in the Parent's Assistant that the author,
however sedulous
to describe “such situations only ... as children can easily
imagine,”
was not able entirely to resist tempting specimens of human nature
like
the bibulous Mr. Corkscrew, the burglar butler in “The False Key,”
or
Mrs. Pomfret, the housekeeper of the same story, whose prejudices
against the Villaintropic Society, and its unholy dealing
with the
“drugs and refuges” of humanity, are quite in the style of
the Mrs.
Slipslop of a great artist whose works one would scarcely have
expected
to encounter among the paper-backed and grey-boarded volumes which
lined
the shelves at Edgeworthstown. Mrs. Theresa Tattle, again, in “The
Mimic,” is a type which requires but little to fit it for a
subordinate
part in a novel, as is also Lady Diana Sweepstakes in “Waste not,
Want
not.” In more than one case, we seem to detect an actual portrait.
Mr.
Somerville of Somerville (“The White Pigeon"), to whom that “little
town” belonged,—who had done so much “to inspire his tenantry with
a
taste for order and domestic happiness, and took every means in his
power to encourage industrious, well-behaved people to settle in
his
neighbourhood,”—can certainly be none other than the father of the
writer of the Parent's Assistant, the busy and beneficent,
but surely
eccentric, Mr. Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown.
When, in 1849, the first two volumes of Macaulay's History
were
issued, Miss Edgeworth, then in her eighty-third winter, was
greatly
delighted to find her name, coupled with a compliment to one of her
characters, enshrined in a note to chap. vi. But her gratification
was
qualified by the fact that she could discover no similar reference
to
her friend, Sir Walter Scott. The generous “twinge of pain,” to
which
she confesses, was intelligible. Scott had always admired her
genius,
and she admired his. In the “General Preface” to the Waverley
Novels,
twenty years before, he had gone so far as to say that, without
hoping
to emulate “the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable
tact” of
Miss Edgeworth, he had attempted to do for his own country what she
had
done for hers; and it is clear, from other sources, that this was
no
mere form of words. And he never wavered in his admiration. In his
last
years, not many months before his death, when he had almost
forgotten
her name, he was still talking kindly of her work. Speaking to Mrs.
John
Davy of Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier, he said: “And there's that
Irish
lady, too—but I forget everybody's name now” ... “she's very
clever,
and best in the little touches too. I'm sure in that children's
story,
where the little girl parts with her lamb, and the little boy
brings it
back to her again, there's nothing for it but just to put down the
book
and cry.”[25] The reference is to “Simple Susan,” the longest and
prettiest tale in the Parent's Assistant.
Note:
[25] Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, ch. lxxxi. ad
finem.
Another anecdote pleasantly connects the same book with a popular
work
of a later writer. Readers of Cranford will recall the feud
between
the Johnson-loving Miss Jenkyns of that story and its Pickwick
-loving
Captain Brown. The Captain—as is well-known—met his death by a
railway
accident, just after he had been studying the last monthly “green
covers” of Dickens. Years later, the assumed narrator of
Cranford
visits Miss Jenkyns, then faliing into senility. She still vaunts
The
Rambler; still maunders vaguely of the “strange old book, with
the
queer name, poor Captain Brown was killed for reading-that book by
Mr.
Boz, you know—Old Poz; when I was a girl—but that's a long
time
ago—I acted Lucy in Old Poz.” There can be no mistake. Lucy
is the
justice's daughter in Miss Edgeworth's little chamber-drama.
“Flee fro the PREES, and dwelle with sothfastnesse.”—CHAUCER,
Balade
de Bon Conseil.
The Press is too much with us, small and great:
We are undone of chatter and on dit,
Report, retort, rejoinder, repartee,
Mole-hill and mare's nest, fiction up-to-date,
Babble of booklets, bicker of debate,
Aspect of A., and attitude of B.—
A waste of words that drive us like a sea,
Mere derelict of Ourselves, and helpless freight!
“O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!”
Some region unapproachable of Print,
Where never cablegram could gain access,
And telephones were not, nor any hint
Of tidings new or old, but Man might pipe
His soul to Nature,—careless of the Type!
I. KATE GREENAWAY
In the world of pictorial recollection there are many territories,
the
natives of which you may recognise by their characteristics as
surely as
Ophelia recognises her true-love by his cockle-hat and sandal
shoon.
There is the land of grave gestures and courteous inclinations, of
dignified leave-takings and decorous greetings; where the ladies
(like
Richardson's Pamela) don the most charming round-eared caps and
frilled
negliges; where the gentlemen sport ruffles and bag-wigs and
spotless
silk stockings, and invariably exhibit shapely calves above their
silver
shoe-buckles; where you may come in St. James's Park upon a portly
personage with a star, taking an alfresco pinch of snuff after that
leisurely style in which a pinch of snuff should be taken, so as
not to
endanger a lace cravat or a canary-coloured vest; where you may
seat
yourself on a bench by Rosamond's Pond in company with a tremulous
mask
who is evidently expecting the arrival of a “pretty fellow”; or
happen
suddenly, in a secluded side-walk, upon a damsel in muslin and a
dark
hat, who is hurriedly scrawling a poulet, not without
obvious signs of
perturbation. But whatever the denizens of this country are doing,
they
are always elegant and always graceful, always appropriately
grouped
against their fitting background of high-ceiled rooms and striped
hangings, or among the urns and fish-tanks of their sombre-shrubbed
gardens. This is the land of STOTHARD.
In the adjoining country there is a larger sense of colour—a
fuller
pulse of life. This is the region of delightful dogs and horses and
domestic animals of all sorts; of crimson-faced hosts and buxom
ale-wives; of the most winsome and black-eyed milkmaids and the
most
devoted lovers and their lasses; of the most headlong and
horn-blowing
huntsmen—a land where Madam Blaize forgathers with the impeccable
worthy who caused the death of the Mad Dog; where John Gilpin takes
the
Babes in the Wood en croupe; and the bewitchingest Queen of
Hearts
coquets the Great Panjandrum himself “with the little round button
at
top”—a land, in short, of the most kindly and light-hearted
fancies, of
the freshest and breeziest and healthiest types—which is the land
of
CALDECOTT.
Finally, there is a third country, a country inhabited almost
exclusively by the sweetest little child-figures that have ever
been
invented, in the quaintest and prettiest costumes, always happy,
always
gravely playful,—and nearly always playing; always set in the most
attractive framework of flower-knots, or blossoming orchards, or
red-roofed cottages with dormer windows. Everywhere there are green
fields, and daisies, and daffodils, and pearly skies of spring, in
which
a kite is often flying. No children are quite like the dwellers in
this
land; they are so gentle, so unaffected in their affectation, so
easily
pleased, so trustful and so confiding. And this is GREENAWAY-land.
It is sixty years since Thomas Stothard died, and only fifteen
since
Randolph Caldecott closed his too brief career.[26] And now Kate
Greenaway, who loved the art of both, and in her own gentle way
possessed something of the qualities of each, has herself passed
away.
It will rest with other pens to record her personal
characteristics, and
to relate the story of her life. I who write this was privileged to
know
her a little, and to receive from her frequent presents of her
books;
but I should shrink from anything approaching a description of the
quiet, unpretentious, almost homely little lady, whom it was always
a
pleasure to meet and to talk with. If I here permit myself to
recall one
or two incidents of our intercourse, it is solely because they bear
either upon her amiable disposition or her art. I remember that
once,
during a country walk in Sussex, she gave me a long account of her
childhood, which I wish I could repeat in detail. But I know that
she
told me that she had been brought up in just such a neighbourhood
of
thatched roofs and “grey old gardens” as she depicts in her
drawings;
and that in some of the houses, it was her particular and unfailing
delight to turn over ancient chests and wardrobes filled with the
flowered frocks and capes of the Jane Austen period. As is well
known,
she corresponded frequently with Ruskin, and possessed numbers of
his
letters. In his latter years, it had been her practice to write to
him
periodically—I believe she said once a week. He had long ceased,
probably from ill-health, to answer her letters; but she continued
to
write punctually lest he should miss the little budget of chit-chat
to
which he had grown accustomed. At another time—in a pleasant
country-house which contained many examples of her art—and where
she
was putting the last touches to a delicately tinted child-angel in
the
margin of a Bible—I ventured to say, “Why do your children always
...?”
But it is needless to complete the query; the answer alone is
important.
She looked at me reflectively, and said, after a pause, “Because I
see it so.”
Note:
[26] This was written in 1902.
Answers not dissimilar have been given before by other artists in
like
case. But it was this rigid fidelity to her individual vision and
personal conviction which constituted her strength. There are
always
stupid, well-meaning busybodies in the world, who go about making
question of the sonneteer why he does not attempt something epic
and
homicidal, or worrying the carver of cherry-stones to try his hand
at a
Colossus; but though they disturb and discompose, they luckily do
no
material harm. They did no material harm to Kate Greenaway. She
yielded,
no doubt, to pressure put upon her to try figures on a larger
scale; to
illustrate books, which was not her strong point, as it only put
fetters
upon her fancy; but, in the main, she courageously preserved the
even
tenor of her way, which was to people the artistic demesne she
administered with the tiny figures which no one else could make
more
captivating, or clothe more adroitly. It may be doubted whether the
collector will set much store by Bret Harte's Queen of the
Pirate Isle
or the Pied Piper of Hamelin, suitable at first sight as is
the
latter, with its child-element, to her inventive idiosyncrasy. But
he
will revel in the dainty scenes of “Almanacks” (1883 to 1895, and
1897);
in the charming Birthday Book of 1880; in Mother Goose, A Day in
a
Child's Life, Little Ann, Marigold Garden and the rest, of
which the
grace is perennial, though the popularity for the moment may have
waned.
I have an idea that Mother Goose; or, the Old Nursery Rhymes, 1881,
was one of Miss Greenaway's favourites, although it may have been
displaced in her own mind by subsequent successes. Nothing can
certainly
be more deftly-tinted than the design of the “old woman who lived
under
a hill,” and peeled apples; nothing more seductive, in infantile
attitude, than the little boy and girl, who, with their arms around
each
other, stand watching the black-cat in the plum-tree. Then there is
Daffy-down-dilly, who has come up to town, with “a yellow petticoat
and
a green gown,” in which attire, aided by a straw hat tied under her
chin, she manages to look exceedingly attractive, as she passes in
front
of the white house with the pink roof and the red shutters and the
green
palings. One of the most beautiful pictures in this gallery is the
dear
little “Ten-o'-clock Scholar” in his worked smock, as, trailing his
blue-and-white school-bag behind him, he creeps unwillingly to his
lessons at the most picturesque timbered cottage you can imagine.
Another absolutely delightful portrait is that of “Little Tom
Tucker,”
in sky-blue suit and frilled collar, singing, with his hands behind
him,
as if he never could grow old. And there is not one of these little
compositions that is without its charm of colour and
accessory—blue
plates on the dresser in the background, the parterres of a formal
garden with old-fashioned flowers, quaint dwellings with their
gates and
grass-work, odd corners of countryside and village street, and all,
generally, in the clear air or sunlight. For in this favoured
Greenaway-realm, as in the island-valley of Avilion there
falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns.
To Mother Goose followed A Day in a Child's Life,
also 1881, and
Little Ann, 1883. The former of these contained various
songs set to
music by Mr. Myles B. Foster, the organist of the Foundling
Hospital,
and accompanied by designs on rather a larger scale than those in
Mother Goose. It also included a larger proportion of the
floral
decorations which were among the artist's chief gifts. Foxgloves
and
buttercups, tulips and roses, are flung about the pages of the
book; and
there are many pictures, notably one of a little green-coated
figure
perched upon a five-barred gate, which repeat the triumphs of its
predecessor. In Little Ann and other Poems, which is
dedicated to the
four children of the artist's friend, the late Frederick
Locker-Lampson,
she illustrated a selection from the verses for “Infant Minds” of
Jane
and Ann Taylor, daughters of that Isaac Taylor of Ongar, who was
first a
line engraver and afterwards an Independent Minister.[27] The
dedication contains a charming row of tiny portraits of the
Locker-Lampson family. These illustrations may seem to contradict
what
has been said as to Miss Greenaway's ability to interpret the
conceptions of others. But this particular task left her perfectly
free
to “go her own gait,” and to embroider the text which, in this
case, was
little more than a pretext for her pencil.
Note:
[27] Since this paper was written, the Original Poems and Others, of Ann
and Jane Taylor, with illustrations by F.D. Bedford, and a most
interesting
“Introduction” by Mr. E.V. Lucas, have been issued by Messrs.
Wells,
Gardner, Darton and Co.
In Marigold Garden, 1885, Miss Greenaway became her own
poet; and next
to Mother Goose, this is probably her most important effort.
The
flowers are as entrancing as ever; and the verse makes one wish
that the
writer had written more. The “Genteel Family” and “Little Phillis"
are
excellent nursery pieces; and there is almost a Blake-like note
about
“The Sun Door.”
They saw it rise in the morning,
They saw it set at night,
And they longed to go and see it,
Ah! if they only might.
The little soft white clouds heard them,
And stepped from out of the blue;
And each laid a little child softly
Upon its bosom of dew.
And they carried them higher and higher,
And they nothing knew any more,
Until they were standing waiting,
In front of the round gold door.
And they knocked, and called, and entreated
Whoever should be within;
But all to no purpose, for no one
Would hearken to let them in.
“La rime n'est pas riche” nor is the technique thoroughly
assured; but
the thought is poetical. Here is another, “In an Apple-Tree,” which
reads like a child variation of that haunting “Mimnermus in Church"
of
the author of Ionica:—
In September, when the apples are red,
To Belinda I said,
“Would you like to go away
To Heaven, or stay
Here in this orchard full of trees
All your life? “And she said,” If you please
I'll stay here—where I know,
And the flowers grow.”
In another vein is the bright little “Child's Song”:—
The King and the Queen were riding
Upon a Summer's day,
And a Blackbird flew above them,
To hear what they did say.
The King said he liked apples,
The Queen said she liked pears;
And what shall we do to the Blackbird
Who listens unawares?
But, as a rule, it must be admitted of her poetry that, while
nearly
always poetic in its impulse, it is often halting and inarticulate
in
its expression. A few words may be added in regard to the mere
facts of
Miss Greenaway's career. She was born at 1 Cavendish Street,
Hoxton, on
the 17th March, 1846, her father being Mr. John Greenaway, a
draughtsman
on wood, who contributed much to the earlier issues of the
Illustrated
London News and Punch. Annual visits to a farm-house at
Rolleston in
Nottinghamshire—the country residence already referred
to—nourished
and confirmed her love of nature. Very early she showed a distinct
bias
towards colour and design of an original kind. She studied at
different
places, and at South Kensington. Here both she and Lady Butler
“would
bribe the porter to lock them in when the day's work was done, so
that
they might labour on for some while more.” Her master at Kensington
was
Richard Burchett, who, forty years ago, was a prominent figure in
the
art-schools, a well instructed painter, and a teacher exceptionally
equipped with all the learning of his craft. Mr. Burchett thought
highly
of Miss Greenaway's abilities; and she worked under him for several
years with exemplary perseverance and industry. She subsequently
studied
in the Slade School under Professor Legros.
Her first essays in the way of design took the form of Christmas
cards,
then beginning their now somewhat flagging career, and she
exhibited
pictures at the Dudley Gallery for some years in succession,
beginning
with 1868. In 1877 she contributed to the Royal Academy a water
colour
entitled “Musing,” and in 1889 was elected a member of the Royal
Institute of Painters in Water Colours.
By this date, as will be gathered from what has preceded, Miss
Greenaway
had made her mark as a producer of children's books, since, in
addition
to the volumes already specially mentioned, she had issued Under
the
Window (her earliest success), The Language of Flowers, Kate
Greenaway's Painting Book, The Book of Games, King Pepito and
other
works. Her last “Almanack,” which was published by Messrs Dent and
Co.,
appeared in 1897. In 1891, the Fine Arts Society exhibited some 150
of
her original drawings—an exhibition which was deservedly
successful,
and was followed by others.[28] As Slade Professor at Oxford,
Ruskin,
always her fervent admirer, gave her unstinted eulogium; and in
France
her designs aroused the greatest admiration. The Debats had
a leading
article on her death; and the clever author of L'Art du Rire, M.
Arsene Alexandre, who had already written appreciatively of her
gifts as
a “paysagiste,” and as a “maitresse en l'art du sourire,
du jolt
sourire d'enfant inginu et gaiement candide” devoted a
column in the
Figaro to her merits.
Note:
[28] Among other things these exhibitions revealed the great
superiority
of the original designs to the reproductions with which the public
are
familiar—excellent as these are in their way. Probably, if Miss
Greenaway's work were now repeated by the latest form of
three-colour
process, she would be less an “inheritor”—in this respect—“of
unfulfilled
renown.”
It has been noted that, in her later years, Miss Greenaway's
popularity
was scarcely maintained. It would perhaps be more exact to say that
it
somewhat fell off with the fickle crowd who follow a reigning
fashion,
and who unfortunately help to swell the units of a paying
community. To
the last she gave of her best; but it is the misfortune of
distinctive
and original work, that, while the public resents versatility in
its
favourites, it wearies unreasonably of what had pleased it at
first—especially if the note be made tedious by imitation. Miss
Greenaway's old vogue was in some measure revived by her too-early
death
on the 6th November 1901; but, in any case, she is sure of
attention
from the connoisseur of the future. Those who collect Stothard and
Caldecott (and they are many!) cannot afford to neglect either
Marigold
Garden or Mother Goose.[29]
Note:
[29] Since the above article appeared in the Art Journal,
from
which it is here substantially reproduced, Messrs. M.H, Spieimann
and
G.S. Layard have (1905) devoted a sumptuous and exhaustive volume
to
Miss Greenaway and her art. To this truly beautiful and sympathetic
book
I can but refer those of her admirers who are not yet acquainted
with it.
As I went a-walking on Lavender Hill,
O, I met a Darling in frock and frill;
And she looked at me shyly, with eyes of blue,
“Are you going a-walking? Then take me too!”
So we strolled to the field where the cowslips grow,
And we played—and we played, for an hour or so;
Then we climbed to the top of the old park wall,
And the Darling she threaded a cowslip ball.
Then we played again, till I said—“My Dear,
This pain in my side, it has grown severe;
I ought to have mentioned I'm past three-score,
And I fear that I scarcely can play any more!”
But the Darling she answered,-"O no! O no!
You must play—you must play.—I sha'n't let you go!”
—And I woke with a start and a sigh of despair,
And I found myself safe in my Grandfather's-chair!
II. MR HUGH THOMSON
In virtue of certain gentle and caressing qualities of style,
Douglas
Jerrold conferred on one of his contributors—Miss Eliza
Meteyard—the
pseudonym of “Silverpen.” It is in the silver-pensive key that one
would
wish to write of Mr. HUGH THOMSON. There is nothing in his work of
elemental strife,—of social problem,—of passion torn to tatters.
He
leads you by no terribile via,—over no “burning Marle.” You
cannot
conceive him as the illustrator of Paradise Lost, of Dante's
Inferno—even of Dore's Wandering Jew. But when,
after turning over
some dozens of his designs, you take stock of your impressions, you
discover that your memory is packed with pleasant fancies. You have
been
among “blown fields” and “flowerful closes”; you have passed quaint
roadside-inns and picturesque cottages; you are familiar with the
cheery, ever-changing idyll of the highway and the bustle of animal
life; with horses that really gallop, and dogs that really bark;
with
charming male and female figures in the most attractive old-world
attire; with happy laughter and artless waggeries; with a hundred
intimate details of English domesticity that are pushed just far
enough
back to lose the hardness of their outline in a softening haze of
retrospect. There has been nothing more tragic in your travels than
a
sprained ankle or an interrupted affair of honour; nothing more
blood-curdling than a dream of a dragoon officer knocked out of his
saddle by a brickbat. Your flesh has never been made to creep: but
the
cockles of your heart have been warmed. Mechanically, you raise
your
hand to lift away your optimistic spectacles. But they are not
there.
The optimism is in the pictures.
It must be more than a quarter of a century since Mr. Hugh Thomson,
arriving from Coleraine in all the ardour of one-and-twenty,
invaded the
strongholds of English illustration. He came at a fortunate moment.
After a few hesitating and tentative attempts upon the newspapers,
he
obtained an introduction to Mr. Comyns Carr, then engaged in
establishing the English Illustrated Magazine for Messrs.
Macmillan.
His recommendation was a scrap-book of minutely elaborated designs
for
Vanity Fair, which he had done (like Reynolds) “out of pure
idleness.”
Mr. Carr, then, as always, a discriminating critic, with a keen eye
to
possibilities, was not slow to detect, among much artistic
recollection,
something more than uncertain promise; and although he had already
Randolph Caldecott and Mr. Harry Furniss on his staff, he at once
gave
Mr. Thomson a commission for the magazine. The earliest picture
from his
hand which appeared was a fancy representation of the Parade at
Bath for
a paper in June, 1884, by the late H. D. Traill; and he also
illustrated
(in part) papers on Drawing Room Dances, on Cricket (by Mr. Andrew
Lang), and on Covent Garden. But graphic and vividly naturalistic
as
were his pictures of modern life, his native bias towards imaginary
eighteenth century subjects (perhaps prompted by boyish studies of
Hogarth in the old Dublin Penny Magazine), was already
abundantly
manifest. He promptly drifted into what was eventually to become
his
first illustrated book, a series of compositions from the
Spectator.
These were published in 1886 as a little quarto, entitled Days
with Sir
Roger de Coverley.
It was a “temerarious” task to attempt to revive the types which,
from
the days of Harrison's Essayists, had occupied so many of
the earlier
illustrators. But the attempt was fully justified by its success.
One
has but to glance at the head-piece to the first paper, where Sir
Roger
and “Mr. Spectator” have alighted from the jolting, springless,
heavy-wheeled old coach as the tired horses toil uphill, to
recognise at
once that here is an artist en pays de connaissance, who may
fairly be
trusted, in the best sense, to “illustrate” his subject. Whatever
one's
predilections for previous presentments, it is impossible to resist
Sir
Roger (young, slim, and handsome), carving the perverse widow's
name
upon a tree-trunk; or Sir Roger at bowls, or riding to hounds, or
listening—with grave courtesy—to Will Wimble's long-winded and
circumstantial account of the taking of the historic jack. Nor is
the
conception less happy of that amorous fine-gentleman ancestor of
the
Coverleys who first made love by squeezing the hand; or of that
other
Knight of the Shire who so narrowly escaped being killed in the
Civil
Wars because he was sent out of the field upon a private message,
the
day before Cromwell's “crowning mercy,”—the battle of Worcester.
But
the varied embodiments of these, and of Mrs. Betty Arable (“the
great
fortune"), of Ephraim the Quaker, and the rest, are not all. The
figures
are set in their fitting environment; they ride their own horses,
hallo
to their own dogs, and eat and drink in their own dark-panelled
rooms
that look out on the pleached alleys of their ancient gardens. They
live
and move in their own passed-away atmosphere of association; and a
faithful effort has moreover been made to realise each separate
scene
with strict relation to its text.
All of the “Coverley” series came out in the English Illustrated. So
also did the designs for the next book, the Coaching Days and
Coaching
Ways of Mr. Outram Tristram, 1888. Here Mr. Thomson had a
topographical
collaborator, Mr. Herbert Railton, who did the major part of the
very
effective drawings in this kind. But Mr. Thomson's contributions
may
fairly be said to have exhausted the “romance” of the road. Inns
and
inn-yards, hosts and ostlers and chambermaids, stage-coachmen,
toll-keepers, mail-coaches struggling in snow-drifts, mail-coaches
held
up by highwaymen, overturns, elopements, cast shoes, snapped poles,
lost
linch-pins,—all the episodes and moving accidents of bygone travel
on
the high road have abundant illustration, till the pages seem
almost to
reek of the stableyard, or ring with the horn.[30] And here it may
be
noted, as a peculiarity of Mr. Thomson's conscientious
horse-drawing,
that he depicts, not the ideal, but the actual animal. His steeds
are
not “faultless monsters” like the Dauphin's palfrey in Henry the
Fifth. They are “all sorts and conditions” of horses; and—if
truth
required it—would disclose as many sand-cracks as Rocinante, or as
many
equine defects (from wind-gall to the bolts) as those imputed to
that
unhappy “Blackberry” sold by the Vicar of Wakefield at Welbridge
Fair to
Mr, Ephraini Jenkinson.
Note:
[30] Sometimes a literary or historical picture creeps into the
text.
Such are “Swift and Bolingbroke at Backlebury” (p. 30); “Charles
II. recognised by the Ostler” (p. 144), and “Barry Lyndon cracks a
Bottle” (p. 116). Barry Lyndon with its picaresque note and
Irish
background, would seem an excellent contribution to the “Cranford"
series. Why does not Mr. Thomson try his hand at it? He has
illustrated
Esmond, and the Great Haggarty Diamond.
The Vicar of Wakefield—as it happens—was Mr. Thomson's
next
enterprise; and it is, in many respects, a most memorable one. It
came
out in December, 1890, having occupied him for nearly two years. He
took
exceptional pains to study and realise the several types for
himself,
and to ensure correctness of costume. From the first introductory
procession of the Primrose family at the head of chapter i. to the
awkward merriment of the two Miss Flamboroughs at the close, there
is
scarcely a page which has not some stroke of quiet fun, some
graceful
attitude, or some ingenious contrivance in composition. Considering
that
from Wenham's edition of 1780, nearly every illustrator of repute
had
tried his hand at Goldsmith's masterpiece in fiction,—that he had
been
attempted without humour by Stothard, without lightness by
Mulready,[31]—that he had been made comic by Cruikshank, and
vulgarised
by Rowiandson,—it was certainly to Mr. Thomson's credit that he
had
approached his task with so much refinement, reverence and
originality.
If the book has a blemish, it is to be mentioned only because the
artist, by his later practice, seems to have recognised it himself.
For
the purposes of process reproduction, the drawings were somewhat
loaded
and overworked.
Note:
[31]: Mulready's illustrations of 1843 are here referred to, net
his
pictures.
This was not chargeable against the next volumes to be chronicled.
Mrs.
Gaskell's Cranford, 1891, and Miss Mitford's Our Village, 1893, are
still regarded by many as the artist's happiest efforts. I say
“still,”
because Mr. Thomson is only now in what Victor Hugo called the
youth of
old age (as opposed to the old age of youth); and it would be
premature
to assume that a talent so alert to multiply and diversify its
efforts,
had already attained the summit of its achievement. But in these
two
books he had certain unquestionable advantages. One obviously would
be,
that his audience were not already preoccupied by former
illustrations;
and he was consequently free to invent his own personages and
follow his
own fertile fancy, without recalling to that implacable and
Gorgonising
organ, the “Public Eye,” any earlier pictorial conceptions. Another
thing in his favour was, that in either case, the very definite,
and not
very complex types surrendered themselves readily to artistic
embodiment. “It almost illustrated itself,”—he told an interviewer
concerning Cranford; “the characters were so exquisitely and
distinctly realised.” Every one has known some like them; and the
delightful Knutsford ladies (for “Cranford” was “Knutsford"), the
“Boz”—loving Captain Brown and Mr. Holbrook, Peter and his father,
and
even Martha the maid, with their mise en scene of
card-tables and
crackle-china, and pattens and reticules, are part of the memories
of
our childhood. The same may be said of Our Village, except
that the
breath of Nature blows more freely through it than through the
quiet
Cheshire market-town; and there is a larger preponderance of those
“charming glimpses of rural life” of which Lady Ritchie speaks
admiringly in her sympathetic preface. And with regard to the “bits
of
scenery”—as Mr. Thomson himself calls them—it may be noted that
one of
the Manchester papers, speaking of Cranford, praised the
artist's
intimate knowledge of the locality,—a locality he had never seen.
Most
of his backgrounds were from sketches made on Wimbledon Common,
near
which—until he moved for a space to the ancient Cinque Port of
Seaford
in Sussex—he lived for the first years of his London life.
In strict order of time, Mr. Thomson's next important effort should
have
preceded the books of Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell. The novels of
Jane
Austen—to which we now come—if not the artist's high-water mark,
are
certainly remarkable as a tour de force. To contrive some
forty page
illustrations for each of Miss Austen's admirable, but—from an
illustrator's standpoint—not very palpitating productions,—with a
scene usually confined to the dining-room or parlour,—with next to
no
animals, and with rare opportunities for landscape accessory,—was
an
“adventure”—in Cervantic phrase—which might well have given pause
to a
designer of less fertility and resource. But besides the figures
there
was the furniture; and acute admirers have pointed out that a nice
discretion is exhibited in graduating the appointments of Longbourn
and
Netherfield Park,—of Rosings and Hunsford. But what is perhaps
more
worthy of remark is the artist's persistent attempt to give
individuality, as well as grace, to his dramatis persona;. The
unspeakable Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet, the horsy Mr. John Thorpe,
Mrs.
Jennings and Mrs. Norris, the Eltons—are all carefully
discriminated.
Nothing can well be better than Mr. Woodhouse, with his “almost
immaterial legs” drawn securely out of the range of a too-fierce
fire,
chatting placidly to Miss Bates upon the merits of water-gruel;
nothing
more in keeping than the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh,
“in
the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind” of her indignation,
superciliously pausing to patronise the capabilities of the
Longbourn
reception rooms. Not less happy is the dumbfounded astonishment of
Mrs.
Bennet at her toilet, when she hears—to her stupefaction—that her
daughter Elizabeth is to be mistress of Pemberley and ten thousand
a
year. This last is a head-piece; and it may be observed, as an
additional difficulty in this group of novels, that, owing to the
circumstances of publication, only in one of the books. Pride
and
Prejudice, was Mr, Thomson free to decorate the chapters with
those
ingenious entetes and culs-de-lampe of which he so
eminently
possesses the secret.[32]
Note:
[32] That eloquence of subsidiary detail, which has had so many
exponents in English art from Hogarth onwards, is one of Mr.
Thomson's
most striking characteristics. The reader will find it exemplified
in
the beautiful book-plate at page 111, which, by the courtesy of its
owner, Mr. Ernest Brown, I am permitted to reproduce.
By this time his reputation had long been firmly established. To
the
Jane Austen volumes succeeded other numbers of the so-called
“Cranford"
series, to which, in 1894, Mr. Thomson had already added, under the
title of Coridon's Song and other Verses, a fresh
ingathering of
old-time minstrelsy from the pages of the English Illustrated. Many of
the drawings for these, though of necessity reduced for publication
in
book form, are in his most delightful and winning manner,—notably
perhaps (if one must choose!) the martial ballad of that “Captain
of
Militia, Sir Bilberry Diddle,” who
—dreamt, Fame reports, that he cut all the throats
Of the French as they landed in flat-bottomed boats
—or rather were going to land any time during the Seven Years'
War.
Excellent, too, are John Gay's ambling Journey to Exeter.,
the
Angler's Song from Walton (which gives its name to the
collection),
and Fielding's rollicking “A-hunting we will go.” Other “Cranford"
books, which now followed, were James Lane Allen's Kentucky
Cardinal,
1901; Fanny Burney's Evelina, 1903; Thackeray's Esmond, 1905; and
two of George Eliot's novels—Scenes of Clerical Life, 1906,
and
Silas Marner, 1907. In 1899 Mr. Thomson had also undertaken
another
book for George Allen, an edition of Reade's Peg Woffington,—a task
in which he took the keenest delight, particularly in the burlesque
character of Triplet. These were all in the old pen-work; but some
of
the designs for Silas Marner were lightly and tastefully
coloured.
This was a plan the author had adopted, with good effect, not only
in a
special edition of Cranford (1898), but for some of his
original
drawings which came into the market after exhibition. Nothing can
be
more seductive than a Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately
tinted in
sky-blue, rose-Du Barry, and apple-green (the vert-pomme
dear—as
Gautier says—to the soft moderns)—a treatment which lends them a
subdued but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a
pedigree,
and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm of the phrase-maker who
described their inventor as the “Charles Lamb of illustration.”
From the above enumeration certain omissions have of necessity been
made. Besides the books mentioned, Mr. Thomson has contrived to
prepare
for newspapers and magazines many closely-studied sketches of
contemporary manners. Some of the best of his work in this way is
to be
found in the late Mrs. E.T. Cook's Highways and Byways of London
Life,
1902. For the Highways and Byways series, he has also
illustrated,
wholly or in part, volumes on Ireland, North Wales, Devon, Cornwall
and
Yorkshire. The last volume, Kent, 1907, is entirely decorated by
himself. In this instance, his drawings throughout are in pencil,
and he
is his own topographer. It is a remarkable departure, both in
manner and
theme, though Mr. Thomson's liking for landscape has always been
pronounced. “I would desire above all things,” he told an
interviewer,
“to pass my time in painting landscape. Landscape pictures always
attract me, and the grand examples, Gainsboroughs, Claudes, Cromes,
and
Turners, to be seen any day in our National Gallery, are a source
of
never-failing yearning and delight.” The original drawings for the
Kent
book are of great beauty; and singularly dexterous in the varied
methods
by which the effect is produced. The artist is now at work on the
county
of Surrey. It is earnest of his versatility that, in 1904, he
illustrated for Messrs. Wells, Darton and Co., with conspicuous
success,
a modernised prose version of certain of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales,
as well as Tales from Maria Edgeworth, 1903; and he also
executed, in
1892 and 1895,[33] some charming designs to selections from the
verses of
the present writer, who has long enjoyed the privilege of his
friendship.
Personal traits do not come within the province of this paper, or
it
would be pleasant to dwell upon Mr. Thomson's modesty, his untiring
industry, and his devotion to his art. But in regard to that art,
it may
be observed that to characterise it solely as “packing the memory
with
pleasant fancies” may suffice for an exordium, but is inadequate as
a
final appreciation. Let me therefore note down, as they occur to
me,
some of his more prominent pictorial characteristics. With three of
the
artists mentioned in this and the preceding paper, he has obvious
affinities, while, in a sense, he includes them all. If he does not
excel Stothard in the gift of grace, he does in range and variety;
and
he more than rivals him in composition. He has not, like Miss
Greenaway,
endowed the art-world with a special type of childhood; but his
children
are always lifelike and engaging. (Compare, at a venture, the boy
soldiers whom Frank Castlewood is drilling in chapter xi. of
Esmond,
or the delightful little fellow who is throwing up his arms in
chapter
ix. of Emma.) As regards dogs and horses and the rest, his
colleague,
Mr, Joseph Pennell, an expert critic, and a most accomplished
artist,
holds that he has “long since surpassed” Randolph Caldecott.[34] I
doubt
whether Mr. Thomson himself would concur with his eulogist in this.
But
he has assuredly followed Caldecott close; and in opulence of
production, which—as Macaulay insisted—should always count, has
naturally exceeded that gifted, but shortlived, designer. If,
pursuing
an ancient practice, one were to attempt to label Mr. Thomson with
a
special distinction apart from, and in addition to, his other
merits, I
should be inclined to designate him the “Master of the
Vignette,”—taking that word in its primary sense as including
head-pieces, tail-pieces and initial letters. In this department,
no
draughtsman I can call to mind has ever shown greater fertility of
invention, so much playful fancy, so much grace, so much kindly
humour,
and such a sane and wholesome spirit of fun.
Notes:
[33] The Ballad of Beau Brocade, and The Story of Rosina.
[34] Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen, 2nd ed. 1894, p. 358.
ON THE TERCENTENARY OF
“DON QUIXOTE"
(Published at Madrid, by Francisco de Robles, January 1605)
“Para mi sola nacio don Quixote, y yo para el.”—CERVANTES.
Advents we greet of great and small;
Much we extol that may not live;
Yet to the new-born Type we give
No care at all!
This year,[35]—three centuries past,—by age
More maimed than by LEPANTO'S fight,—
This year CERVANTES gave to light
His matchless page,
Whence first outrode th' immortal Pair,—
The half-crazed Hero and his hind,—
To make sad laughter for mankind;
And whence they fare
Throughout all Fiction still, where chance
Allies Life's dulness with its dreams—
Allies what is, with what but seems,—
Fact and Romance:—
O Knight of fire and Squire of earth!—
O changing give-and-take between
The aim too high, the aim too mean,
I hail your birth,—
Three centuries past,—in sunburned SPAIN,
And hang, on Time's PANTHEON wall,
My votive tablet to recall
That lasting gain!
Note:
[35] I.e. January 1905.
One common grave, according to Garrick, covers the actor and his
art.
The same may be said of the raconteur. Oral tradition, or even his
own
writings, may preserve his precise words; but his peculiarities of
voice
or action, his tricks of utterance and intonation,—all the
collateral
details which serve to lend distinction or piquancy to the
performance—perish irrecoverably. The glorified gramophone of the
future may perhaps rectify this for a new generation; and give us,
without mechanical drawback, the authentic accents of speakers dead
and
gone; but it can never perpetuate the dramatic accompaniment of
gesture
and expression. If, as always, there are exceptions to this rule,
they
are necessarily evanescent. Now and then, it may be, some clever
mimic
will recall the manner of a passed-away predecessor; and he may
even
contrive to hand it on, more or less effectually, to a disciple.
But the
reproduction is of brief duration; and it is speedily effaced or
transformed.
In this way it is, however, that we get our most satisfactory idea
of
the once famous table-talker, Samuel Rogers. Charles Dickens, who
sent
Rogers several of his books; who dedicated Master Humphrey's
Clock to
him; and who frequently assisted at the famous breakfasts in St.
James's
Place, was accustomed—rather cruelly, it may be thought—to take
off
his host's very characteristic way of telling a story; and it is,
moreover, affirmed by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald[36] that, in the famous
Readings, “the strangely obtuse and owl-like expression, and the
slow,
husky croak” of Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the “Trial from
Pickwick“
were carefully copied from the author of the Pleasures of Memory, That
Dickens used thus to amuse his friends is confirmed by the
autobiography
of the late Frederick Locker,[37] who perfectly remembered the old
man,
to see whom he had been carried, as a boy, by his father. He had
also
heard Dickens repeat one of Rogers's stock anecdotes (it was that
of the
duel in a dark room, where the more considerate combatant, firing
up the
chimney, brings down his adversary);[38]—and he speaks of Dickens
as
mimicking Rogers's “calm, low-pitched, drawling voice and dry
biting
manner very comically.”[39] At the same time, it must be remembered
that
these reminiscences relate to Rogers in his old age. He was over
seventy
when Dickens published his first book, Sketches by Boz; and,
though it
is possible that Rogers's voice was always rather sepulchral, and
his
enunciation unusually deliberate and monotonous, he had
nevertheless, as
Locker says, “made story-telling a fine art.” Continued practice
had
given him the utmost economy of words; and as far as brevity and
point
are concerned, his method left nothing to be desired. Many of his
best
efforts are still to be found in the volume of Table-Talk
edited for
Moxon in 1856 by the Rev. Alexander Dyce; or preferably, as
actually
written down by Rogers himself in the delightful Recollections
issued
three years later by his nephew and executor, William Sharpe.
Notes:
[36] Recreations of a Literary Man, 1882, p. 137.
[37] My Confidences, by Frederick Locker-Lampson, 1896, pp.
98
and 325.
[38] The duellists were an Englishman and a Frenchman; and
Rogers was in the habit of adding as a postscript: “When I tell
that in
Paris, I always put the Englishman up the chimney!”
[39] It may be added that Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, himself no mean
mime, may be sometimes persuaded to imitate Dickens imitating
Rogers.
But although the two things are often intimately connected, the
“books,”
and not the “stories” of Rogers, are the subject of the present
paper.
After this, it sounds paradoxical to have to admit that his
reputation
as a connoisseur far overshadowed his reputation as a bibliophile.
When,
in December 1855, he died, his pictures and curios,—his “articles
of
virtue and bigotry” as a modern Malaprop would have styled
them,—attracted far more attention than the not very numerous
volumes
forming his library.[40] What people flocked to see at the tiny
treasure-house overlooking the Green Park,[41] which its
nonagenarian
owner had occupied for more than fifty years, were the “Puck” and
“Strawberry Girl” of Sir Joshua, the Titians, Giorgiones, and
Guidos,[42]
the Poussins and Claudes, the drawings of Raphael and Duerer and
Lucas
van Leyden, the cabinet decorated by Stothard, the chimney-piece
carved
by Flaxman; the miniatures and bronzes and Etruscan vases,—all the
“infinite riches in a little room,” which crowded No. 22 from
garret to
basement. These were the rarities that filled the columns of the
papers
and the voices of the quidnuncs when in 1856 they came to the
hammer.
But although the Press of that day takes careful count of these
things,
it makes little reference to the sale of the “books” of the
banker-bard
who spent some L15,000 on the embellishments of his Italy
and his
Poems; and although Dr. Burney says that Rogers's library
included
“the best editions of the best authors in most languages,” he had
clearly no widespread reputation as a book-collector pure and
simple.
Nevertheless he loved his books,—that is, he loved the books he
read.
And, as far as can be ascertained, he anticipated the late Master
of
Balliol, since he read only the books he liked. Nor was he ever
diverted
from his predilections by mere fashion or novelty. “He followed
Bacon's
maxim”—says one who knew him—“to read much, not many things:
multum
legere, non multa. He used to say, 'When a new book comes out,
I read
an old one.'“[43]
Notes:
[40] The prices obtained confirm this. Thetotaisum realised was
L45,188:14:3. Of this the books represented no more than L1415:5.
[41] This—with its triple range of bow-windows, from one of
which Rogers used to watch his favourite sunsets—is now the
residence
of Lord Northcliffe.
[42] Three of these—the “Noli me tangere” of Titian,
Giorgione's
“Knight in Armour,” and Guide's “Ecce Homo”—are now in the
National
Gallery, to which they were bequeathed by Rogers.
[43] Edinburgh Review, vol. civ. p. 105, by Abraham Hayward.
The general Rogers-sale at Christie's took place in the spring of
1856,
and twelve days had been absorbed before the books were reached.
Their
sale took six days more—i.e. from May 12 to May 19. As
might be
expected from Rogers's traditional position in the literary world,
the
catalogue contains many presentation copies. What, at first sight,
would
seem the earliest, is the Works of Edward Moore, 1796, 2
vols. But if
this be the fabulist and editor of the World, it can
scarcely have
been received from the writer, since, in 1796, Moore had been dead
for
nearly forty years. With Bloomfield's poems of 1802, l. p., we are
on
surer ground, for Rogers, like Capel Lofft, had been kind to the
author
of The Farmer's Boy, and had done his best to obtain him a
pension.
Another early tribute, subsequently followed by the Tales of the
Hall,
was Crabbe's Borough, which he sent to Rogers in 1810, in response
to
polite overtures made to him by the poet. This was the beginning of
a
lasting friendship, of no small import to Crabbe, as it at once
admitted
him to Rogers's circle, an advantage of which there are many traces
in
Crabbe's journal. Next comes Madame de Stael's much proscribed
De
l'Allamagne (the Paris edition); and from its date, 1813, it
must have
been presented to Rogers when its irrepressible author was in
England.
She often dined or breakfasted at St. James's Place, where
(according to
Byron), she out-talked Whitbread, confounded Sir Humphry Davy, and
was
herself well “ironed“[44] by Sheridan. Rogers considered
Corinne to
be her best novel, and Delphine a terrible falling-off. The
Germany he
found “very fatiguing.” “She writes her works four or five times
over,
correcting them only in that way”—he says. “The end of a chapter
[is]
always the most obscure, as she ends with an epigram,”[45] Another
early
presentation copy is the second edition of Bowles's Missionary, 1815.
According to Rogers, who claims to have suggested the poem, it was
to
have been inscribed to him. But somehow or other, the book got
dedicated
to noble lord who—Rogers adds drily—never, either by word or
letter,
made any acknowledgment of the homage.[46] It is not impossible
that
there is some confusion of recollection here, or Rogers is
misreported
by Dyce. The first anonymous edition of the Missionary,
1813, had no
dedication; and the second was inscribed to the Marquess of
Lansdowne
because he had been prominent among those who recognised the merit
of
its predecessor.
Notes:
[44] Perhaps a remembrance of Mrs Slipslop's “ironing.”
[45] Clayden's Rogers and his Contemporaries, 1889, i. 225.
As
an epigrammatist himself, Rogers might have been more indulgent to
a
consoeur. Here is one of Madame de Stael's “ends of
chapters”:—“La
monotonie, dans la retraite, tranquillise l'ame; la monotonie, dans
le
grand monde, fatigue l'esprit” (ch. viii.). But he evidently
found her
rather overpowering.
[46] Table-Talk, 1856, p. 258.
Several of Scott's poems, with Rogers's autograph, and Scott's
card,
appear in the catalogue; and, in 1812, Byron, who a year after
inscribed
the Giaour to Rogers, sent him the first two cantos of
Childe
Harold. In 1838, Moore presents Lalla Rookh, with
Heath's plates, a
work which, upon its first appearance, twenty years earlier, had
been
dedicated to Rogers. In 1839 Charles Dickens followed with
Nicholas
Nickleby, succeeded a year later by Master Humphrey's Clock
(1840-1),
also dedicated to Rogers in recognition, not only of his poetical
merit,
but of his “active sympathy with the poorest and humblest of his
kind.”
Rogers was fond of “Little Nell”; and in the Preface to Barnaby
Rudge,
Dickens gracefully acknowledged that “for a beautiful thought” in
the
seventy-second chapter of the Old Curiosity Shop, he was
indebted to
Rogers's Ginevra in the Italy:—
And long might'st thou have seen
An old man wandering as in quest of something,
Something he could not find—he knew not what.
The American Notes, 1842, was a further offering from
Dickens. Among
other gifts may be noted Wordsworth's Poems, 1827-35;
Campbell's
Pilgrim of Glencoe, 1842; Longfellow's Ballads and Voices
of the
Night, 1840-2; Macaulay's Lays and Tennyson's Poems, 1842; and
lastly, Hazlitt's Criticisms on Art, 1844, and Carlyle's
Letters and
Speeches of Cromwell, 1846. Brougham's philosophical novel of
Albert
Lunel; or, the Chateau of Languedoc, 3 vols, 1844, figures in
the
catalogue as “withdrawn.” It had been suppressed “for private
reasons"
upon the eve of publication; and this particular copy being
annotated by
Rogers (to whom it was inscribed) those concerned were no doubt all
the
more anxious that it should not get abroad. Inspection of the
reprint of
1872 shows, however, that want of interest was its chief error. A
reviewer of 1858 roundly calls it “feeble” and “commonplace”; and
it
could hardly have increased its writer's reputation. Indeed, by
some, it
was not supposed to be from his Lordship's pen at all. Rogers, it
may be
added, frequently annotated his books. His copies of Pope, Gray and
Scott had many marginalia. Clarke's and Fox's histories of
James II.
were also works which he decorated in this way.
As already hinted, not very many bibliographical curiosities are
included in the St. James's Place collection; and to look for
Shakespeare quartos or folios, for example, would be idle. Ordinary
editions of Shakespeare, such as Johnson's and Theobald's;
Shakespeariana, such as Mrs. Montagu's Essay and Ayscough's
Index,—these are there of course. If the list also takes in
Thomas
Caldecott's Hamlet, and As you like it (1832), that
is, first,
because the volume is a presentation copy; and secondly, because
Caldecott's colleague in his frustrate enterprise was Crowe,
Rogers's
Miltonic friend, hereafter mentioned. Rogers's own feeling for
Shakespeare was cold and hypercritical; and he was in the habit of
endorsing with emphasis Ben Jonson's aspiration that the master had
blotted a good many of his too-facile lines. Nevertheless, it is
possible to pick out a few exceptional volumes from Mr. Christie's
record. Among the earliest comes a copy of Garth's Dispensary, 1703,
which certainly boasts an illustrious pedigree. Pope, who received
it
from the author, had carefully corrected it in several places; and
in
1744 bequeathed it to Warburton. Warburton, in his turn, handed it
on to
Mason, from whom it descended to Lord St. Helens, by whom, again,
shortly before his death (1815), it was presented to Rogers. To
Pope's
corrections, which Garth adopted, Mason had added a comment. What
made
the volume of further interest was, that it contained Lord
Dorchester's
receipt for his subscription to Pope's Homer; and, inserted
at the
end, a full-length portrait of Pope; viz., that engraved in
Warton's
edition of 1797, as sketched in pen-and-ink by William Hoare of
Bath.
Another interesting item is the quarto first edition (the first
three
books) of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ponsonbie, 1590: and a
third, the
Paradise Lost of Milton in ten books, the original text of
1667 (with
the 1669 title-page and the Argument and Address to the
Reader)—both
bequeathed to Rogers by W, Jackson of Edinburgh. (One of the stock
exhibits at “Memory Hall”—as 22 St. James's Place was playfully
called
by some of the owner's friends—was Milton's receipt to Symmons the
printer for the five pounds he received for his epic. This, framed
and
glazeds hung, according to Lady Eastlake, on one of the doors.[47])
A
fourth rare book was William Bonham's black-letter Chaucer, a folio
which had been copiously annotated in MS. by Home Tooke, who gave
it to
Rogers. It moreover contained, at folio 221, the record of Tooke's
arrest at Wimbledon on 16th May, 1794, and subsequent committal on
the
19th to the Tower, for alleged high treason.[48] Further
notabilia in
this category were the Duke of Marlborough's Hypnerotomachie
of
Poliphilus, Paris, 1554, and also the Aldine edition of 1499; the
very
rare 1572 issue of Camoens's Lusiads; Holbein's Dance of
Death, the
Lyons issues of 1538 and 1547; first editions of Bewick's Birds
and
Quadrupeds; Le Sueur's Life of St. Bruno, with the
autograph of Sir
Joshua Reynolds, and a rare quarto (1516) of Boccaccio's
Decameron.
Notes:
[47] It was, no doubt, identical with the “Original Articles of
Agreement” (Add. MSS. 18,861) between Milton and Samuel Symmons,
printer, dated 27th April, 1667, presented by Rogers in 1852 to the
British Museum. Besides the above-mentioned L5 down, there were to
be
three further payments of L5 each on the sale of three editions,
each of
1300 copies. The second edition appeared in 1674, the year of the
author's death.
[48] He was acquitted. His notes, in pencil, and relating chiefly
to his
Diversions of Parley, were actually written in the Tower.
Rogers, who
was present at the trial in November, mentioned, according to Dyce,
a
curious incident bearing upon a now obsolete custom referred to by
Goldsmith and others. As usual, the prisoner's dock, in view of
possible
jail-fever, was strewn with sweet-smelling herbs-fennel, rosemary
and the
like. Tooke indignantly swept them away. Another of several
characteristic
anecdotes told by Rogers of Tooke is as follows:—Being asked once
at
college what his father was, he replied, “A Turkey Merchant.” Tooke
pere
was a poulterer in Clare Market.
But the mere recapitulation of titles readily grows tedious, even
to the
elect; and I turn to some of the volumes with which, from
references in
the Table-Talk and Recollections, their owner might
seem to be more
intimately connected. Foremost among these—one would think—should
come
his own productions. Most of these, no doubt, are included under
the
auctioneers' heading of “Works and Illustrations.” In the “Library"
proper, however, there are few traces of them. There is a quarto
copy of
the unfortunate Columbus, with Stothard's sketches; and
there is the
choice little Pleasures of Memory of 1810, with Luke
Clennell's
admirable cuts in facsimile from the same artist's
pen-and-ink,—a
volume which, come what may, will always hold its own in the annals
of
book-illustration. That there were more than one of these latter
may be
an accident. Rogers, nevertheless, like many book-lovers, must have
indulged in duplicates. According to Hayward, once at breakfast,
when
some one quoted Gray's irresponsible outburst concerning the novels
of
Marivaux and Crebillon le fils, Rogers asked his guests,
three in
number, whether they were familiar with Marivaux's Vie de
Marianne, a
book which he himself confesses to have read through six times, and
which French critics still hold, on inconclusive evidence, to have
been
the “only begetter” of Richardson's Pamela and the
sentimental novel.
None of the trio knew anything about it. “Then I will lend you each
a
copy,” rejoined Rogers; and the volumes were immediately produced,
doubtless by that faithful and indefatigable factotum, Edmund
Paine, of
whom his master was wont to affirm that he would not only find any
book
in the house, but out of it as well. What is more
(unless it be
assumed that the poet's stock was larger still), one, at least, of
the
three copies must have been returned, since there is a copy in the
catalogue. As might be expected in the admirer of Marivaux's
heroine,
the list is also rich in Jean-Jacques, whose “gout vif pour les
dejeuners,” this Amphitryon often extolled, quoting with
approval
Rousseau's opinion that “C'est le temps de la journee ou nous
sommes le
plus tranquilles, ou nous causons le plus a noire aise.“
Another of his
favourite authors was Manzoni, whose Promessi Sposi he was
inclined to
think he would rather have written than all Scott's novels; and he
never
tired of reading Louis Racine's Memoires of his father,
1747,—that
“filon de l'or pur du dix-septieme siecle”—as Villemain
calls
it—“qui se prolonge dans l'age suivant.” Some of Rogers's
likings
sound strange enough nowadays. With Campbell, he delighted in
Cowper's
Homer, which he assiduously studied, and infinitely
preferred to that
of Pope. Into Chapman's it must be assumed that he had not
looked—certainly he has left no sonnet on the subject. Milton was
perhaps his best-loved bard. “When I was travelling in Italy (he
says),
I made two authors my constant study for versification,—Milton
and
Crowe” (The italics are ours.) It is an odd collocation; but
not
unintelligible. William Crowe, the now forgotten Public Orator of
Oxford, and author of Lewesdon Hill, was an intimate friend;
a writer
on versification; and, last but not least, a very respectable echo
of
the Miltonic note, as the following, from a passage dealing with
the
loss in 1786 of the Halsewell East Indiaman off the coast of
Dorset,
sufficiently testifies:—
The richliest-laden ship
Of spicy Ternate, or that annual sent
To the Philippines o'er the southern main
From Acapulco, carrying massy gold,
Were poor to this;—freighted with hopeful Youth
And Beauty, and high Courage undismay'd
By mortal terrors, and paternal Love, etc., etc.
It is not improbable that Rogers caught the mould of his blank
verse
from the copy rather than from the model. In the matter of
style—as
Flaubert has said—the second-bests are often the better teachers.
More
is to be learned from La Fontaine and Gautier than from Moliere and
Victor Hugo.
Many art-books, many books addressed specially to the connoisseur,
as
well as most of those invaluable volumes no gentleman's library
should
be without, found their places on Rogers's hospitable shelves. Of
such,
it is needless to speak; nor, in this place, is it necessary to
deal
with his finished and amiable, but not very vigorous or vital
poetry. A
parting word may, however, be devoted to the poet himself.
Although,
during his lifetime, and particularly towards its close, his weak
voice
and singularly blanched appearance exposed him perpetually to a
kind of
brutal personality now happily tabooed, it cannot be pretended
that,
either in age or youth, he was an attractive-looking man. In these
cases, as in that of Goldsmith, a measure of burlesque sometimes
provides a surer criterion than academic portraiture. The bust of
the
sculptor-caricaturist, Danton, is of course what even Hogarth would
have
classed as outre[49]; but there is reason for believing that
Maclise's
sketch in Fraser of the obtrusively bald, cadaverous and
wizened
figure in its arm-chair, which gave such a shudder of premonition
to
Goethe, and which Maginn, reflecting the popular voice, declared to
be a
mortal likeness—“painted to the very death”—was more like the
original
than his pictures by Lawrence and Hoppner. One can comprehend, too,
that
the person whom nature had so ungenerously endowed, might be
perfectly
capable of retorting to rudeness, or the still-smarting
recollection of
rudeness, with those weapons of mordant wit and acrid epigram which
are
not unfrequently the protective compensation of physical
shortcomings.
But this conceded, there are numberless anecdotes which testify to
Rogers's cultivated taste and real good breeding, to his genuine
benevolence, to his almost sentimental craving for appreciation and
affection. In a paper on his books, it is permissible to end with
a bookish anecdote. One of his favourite memories, much repeated in
his
latter days, was that of Cowley's laconic Will,—“I give my body to
the
earth, and my soul to my Maker.” Lady Eastlake shall tell the
rest:—“This ... proved on one occasion too much for one of the
party,
and in an incautious moment a flippant young lady exclaimed, 'But,
Mr.
Rogers, what of Cowley's property?' An ominous silence
ensued, broken
only by a sotto voce from the late Mrs. Procter: 'Well, my
dear, you
have put your foot in it; no more invitations for you in a hurry,'
But
she did the kind old man, then above ninety, wrong. The culprit
continued to receive the same invitations and the same
welcome.”[50]
Note:
[49] Rogers's own copy of this, which (it may be added), he held
in horror, now belongs to Mr. Edmund Gosse. Lord Londonderry has a
number of Danton's busts.
[50] Quarterly Review, vol. 167, p. 512.
To One who asked why he wrote it.
You ask me what was his intent?
In truth, I'm not a German;
'Tis plain though that he neither meant
A Lecture nor a Sermon.
But there it is,—the thing's a Fact.
I find no other reason
But that some scribbling itch attacked
Him in and out of season,
To write what no one else should read,
With this for second meaning,
To “cleanse his bosom” (and indeed
It sometimes wanted cleaning);
To speak, as 'twere, his private mind,
Unhindered by repression,
To make his motley life a kind,
Of Midas' ears confession;
And thus outgrew this work per se,—
This queer, kaleidoscopic,
Delightful, blabbing, vivid, free
Hotch-pot of daily topic.
So artless in its vanity,
So fleeting, so eternal,
So packed with “poor Humanity”—
We know as Pepys' his journal.[51]
Note:
[51] Written for the Pepys' Dinner at Magdalene College, Cambridge,
February 23rd, 1905.
Among other pleasant premonitions of the present entente
cordiale
between France and England is the increased attention which, for
some
time past, our friends of Outre Manche have been devoting to our
literature. That this is wholly of recent growth, is not, of
course, to
be inferred. It must be nearly five-and-forty years since M.
Hippolyte
Taine issued his logical and orderly Histoire de la Litterature
Anglaise; while other isolated efforts of insight and
importance—such
as the Laurence Sterne of M. Paul Stapfer, and the excellent
Le
Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au XVIII^e Siecle
of the
late M. Alexandre Beljame of the Sorbonne—are already of distant
date.
But during the last two decades the appearance of similar
productions
has been more recurrent and more marked. From one eminent writer
alone—M. J.-J. Jusserand—we have received an entire series of
studies
of exceptional charm, variety, and accomplishment. M. Felix Rabbe
has
given us a sympathetic analysis of Shelley; M. Auguste
Angellier,—himself a poet of individuality and distinction,—what
has
been rightly described as a “splendid work” on Burns;[52] while M.
Emile
Legouis, in a minute examination of “The Prelude,” has contrasted
and
compared the orthodox Wordsworth of maturity with the juvenile
semi-atheist of Coleridge. Travelling farther afield, M. W. Thomas
has
devoted an exhaustive volume to Young of the Night Thoughts;
M. Leon
Morel, another to Thomson; and, incidentally, a flood of fresh
light has
been thrown upon the birth and growth of the English Novel by the
admirable Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du
Cosmopolitisme
Litteraire of the late Joseph Texte—an investigation
unquestionably of
the ripest scholarship, and the most extended research. And now
once
more there are signs that French lucidity and French precision are
about
to enter upon other conquests; and we have M. Barbeau's study of a
famous old English watering-place[53]—appropriately dedicated, as
is
another of the books already mentioned, to M. Beljame.[54]
Notes:
[52] A volume of Pages Choisies de Auguste Angellier, Prose et
Vers, with an Introduction by M. Legouis, has recently (1908)
been
issued by the Clarendon Press. It contains lengthy extracts from M.
Angellier's study of Burns.
[53:]_Une Ville d'Eaux anglaise au XVIIIe Siecle, La Societe
Elegante
et Litteraire a Bath sous la Reine Anne et sous les Georges. Par A.
Barbeau. Paris, Picard, 1904.
[54] The list grows apace. To the above, among others, must now
be added M. Rene Huchon's brilliant little essay on Mrs. Montagu,
and
his elaborate study of Crabbe, to say nothing of M. Jules
Derocquigny's
Lamb, M. Jules Douady's Hazlitt, and M. Joseph Aynard's Coleridge.
At first sight, topography, even when combined with social
sketches, may
seem less suited to a foreigner and an outsider than it would be to
a
resident and a native. In the attitude of the latter to the land in
which he lives or has been born, there is always an inherent
something
of the soil for which even trained powers of comparison, and a
special
perceptive faculty, are but imperfect substitutes. On the other
hand,
the visitor from over-sea is, in many respects, better placed for
observation than the inhabitant. He enjoys not a little—it has
been
often said—of the position of posterity. He takes in more at a
glance;
he leaves out less; he is disturbed by no apprehensions of
explaining
what is obvious, or discovering what is known. As a consequence, he
sets
down much which, from long familiarity, an indigenous critic would
be
disposed to discard, although it might not be, in itself, either
uninteresting or superfluous. And if, instead of dealing with the
present and actual, his concern is with history and the past, his
external standpoint becomes a strength rather than a weakness. He
can
survey his subject with a detachment which is wholly favourable to
his
project; and he can give it, with less difficulty than another, the
advantages of scientific treatment and an artistic setting.
Finally, if
his theme have definite limits—as for instance an appreciable
beginning, middle, and end—he must be held to be exceptionally
fortunate. And this, either from happy guessing, or sheer good
luck, is
M. Barbeau's case. All these conditions are present in the annals
of the
once popular pleasure-resort of which he has elected to tell the
story.
It arose gradually; it grew through a century of unexampled
prosperity;
it sank again to the level of a county-town. If it should ever
arise
again,—and it is by no means a ville morte,—it will be in
an
entirely different way. The particular Bath of the eighteenth
century—the Bath of Queen Anne and the Georges, of Nash and
Fielding
and Sheridan, of Anstey and Mrs. Siddons, of Wesley and Lady
Huntingdon,
of Quin and Gainsborough and Lawrence and a hundred others—is no
more.
It is a case of Fuit Ilium. It has gone for ever; and can
never be
revived in the old circumstances. To borrow an apposite expression
from
M. Texte, it is an organism whose evolution has accomplished its
course.
M. Barbeau's task, then, is very definitely mapped-out and
circumscribed. But he is far too good a craftsman to do no more
than
give a mere panorama of that daily Bath programme which King Nash
and
his dynasty ordained and established. He goes back to the origins;
to
the legend of King Lear's leper-father; to the Diary of the
too-much-neglected Celia Fiennes; to Pepys[55] and Grammont's
Memoirs; to
the days when hapless Catherine of Braganza, with the baleful “
belle
Stewart” in her train, made fruitless pilgrimage to Bladud's spring
as a
remedy against sterility. He sketches, with due acknowledgments to
Goldsmith's unique little book, the biography of that archquack,
poseur, and very clever organiser, Mr. Richard Nash, the
first real
Master of the Ceremonies; and he gives a full account of his
followers
and successors. He also minutely relates the story of Sheridan's
marriage to his beautiful “St. Cecilia,” Elizabeth Ann Linley. A
separate and very interesting chapter is allotted to Lady
Huntingdon and
the Methodists, not without levies from the remarkable Spiritual
Quixote of that Rev. Richard Graves of Claverton, of whom an
excellent
account was given not long since in Mr. W. H. Hutton's suggestive
Burford Papers. Other chapters are occupied with Bath and
its belles
lettres; with “Squire Allworthy” of Prior Park and his literary
guests,
Pope, Warburton, Fielding and his sister, etc.; with the historic
Frascati vase of Lady Miller at Batheaston, which stirred the
ridicule
of Horace Walpole, and is still, it is said, to be seen in a local
park.
The dosing pages treat of Bath—musical, artistic, scientific—of
its
gradual transformation as a health resort—of its eventual and
foredoomed decline and fall as the one fashionable watering-place,
supreme and single, for Great Britain and Ireland.
Note:
[55] Oddly enough—if M. Barbeau's index is to be trusted, and
it is an unusually good one,—he makes no reference to Evelyn's
visit to
Bath. But Evelyn went there in June, 1654, bathed in the Cross
Bath,
criticised the “facciata” of the Abbey Church, complained of
the
“narrow, uneven and unpleasant streets,” and inter-visited with the
company frequenting the place for health. “Among the rest of the
idle
diversions of the town,” he says, “one musician was famous for
acting a
changeling [idiot or half-wit], which indeed he personated
strangely.”
(Diary, Globe edn., 1908, p. 174.)
But it is needless to prolong analysis. One's only wonder—as usual
after the event—is that what has been done so well had never been
thought of before. For while M. Barbeau is to be congratulated upon
the
happy task he has undertaken, we may also congratulate ourselves
that he
has performed it so effectively. His material is admirably
arranged. He
has supported it by copious notes; and he has backed it up by an
impressive bibliography of authorities ancient and modern. This is
something; but it is not all[56]. He has done much more than this.
He has
contrived that, in his picturesque and learned pages, the old
“Queen of
the West” shall live again, with its circling terraces, its grey
stone
houses and ill-paved streets, its crush of chairs and chariots, its
throng of smirking, self-satisfied prom-enaders.
Note:
[56] To the English version (Heinemann, 1904) an eighteenth-century
map
of Bath, and a number of interesting views and portraits have been
added.
One seems to see the clumsy stage-coaches depositing their touzled
and
tumbled inmates, in their rough rocklows and quaint travelling
headgear,
at the “Bear” or the “White Hart,” after a jolting two or three
days'
journey from Oxford or London, not without the usual experiences,
real
and imaginary, of suspicious-looking horsemen at Hounslow, or
masked
“gentlemen of the pad” on Claverton Down. One hears the peal of
five-and-twenty bells which greets the arrival of visitors of
importance; and notes the obsequious and venal town-waits who
follow
them to their lodgings in Gay Street or Milsom Street or the
Parades,—where they will, no doubt, be promptly attended by the
Master
of the Ceremonies, “as fine as fivepence,” and a very pretty,
sweet-smelling gentleman, to be sure, whether his name be Wade or
Derrick. Next day will probably discover them in chip hats and
flannel,
duly equipped with wooden bowls and bouquets, at the King's Bath,
where,
through a steaming atmosphere, you may survey their artless
manoeuvres
(as does Lydia Melford in Humphry Clinker) from the windows
of the
Pump Room, to which rallying-place they will presently repair to
drink
the waters, in a medley of notables and notorieties, members of
Parliament, chaplains and led-captains, Noblemen with ribbons and
stars,
dove-coloured Quakers, Duchesses, quacks, fortune-hunters, lackeys,
lank-haired Methodists, Bishops, and boarding-school misses.
Ferdinand
Count Fathom will be there, as well as my Lord Ogleby; Lady
Bellaston
(and Mr. Thomas Jones); Geoffry Wildgoose and Tugwell the cobbler;
Lismahago and Tabitha Bramble; the caustic Mrs. Selwyn and the
blushing
Miss Anville. Be certain, too, that, sooner or later, you will
encounter
Mrs, Candour and Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite and his
uncle,
Mr. Crabtree, for this is their main haunt and region—in fact,
they
were born here. You may follow this worshipful and piebald
procession to
the Public Breakfasts in the Spring Gardens, to the Toy-shops
behind the
Church, to the Coffee-houses in Westgate Street, to the Reading
Rooms on
the Walks, where, in Mr. James Leake's parlour at the back—if you
are
lucky—you may behold the celebrated Mr. Ralph Allen of Prior Park,
talking either to Mr. Henry Fielding or to Mr. Leake's
brother-in-law,
Mr. Samuel Richardson, but never—if we are correctly informed—to
both
of them together. Or you may run against Mr. Christopher Anstey of
the
over-praised Guide, walking arm-in-arm with another
Bathonian, Mr.
Melmoth, whose version of Pliny was once held to surpass its
original.
At the Abbey—where there are daily morning services—you shall
listen
to the silver periods of Bishop Kurd, whom his admirers call fondly
“the
Beauty of Holiness”; at St. James's you can attend the full-blown
lectures, “more unctuous than ever he preached,” of Bishop Beilby
Porteus; or you may succeed in procuring a card for a select
hearing, at
Edgar Buildings, of Lady Huntingdon's eloquent chaplain, Mr.
Whitefield.
With the gathering shades of even, you may pass, if so minded, to
Palmer's Theatre in Orchard Street, and follow Mrs. Siddons acting
Belvidera in Otway's Venice Preserv'd to the Pierre of that
forgotten
Mr. Lee whom Fanny Burney put next to Garrick; or you may join the
enraptured audience whom Mrs. Jordan is delighting with her
favourite
part of Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp. You may assist at the
concerts
of Signer Venanzio Rauzzini and Monsieur La Motte; you may take
part in
a long minuet or country dance at the Upper or Lower Assembly
Rooms,
which Bunbury will caricature; you may even lose a few pieces at
the
green tables; and, should you return home late enough, may watch a
couple of stout chairmen at the door of the “Three Tuns” in Stall
Street, hoisting that seasoned toper, Mr. James Quin, into a sedan
after
his evening's quantum of claret. What you do to-day, you will do
to-morrow, if the bad air of the Pump Room has not given you a
headache,
or the waters a touch of vertigo; and you will continue to do it
for a
month or six weeks, when the lumbering vehicle with the leathern
straps
and crane-necked springs will carry you back again over the
deplorable
roads (“so sidelum and jumblum,” one traveller calls
them) to your
town-house, or your country-box, or your city-shop or chambers, as
the
case may be. Here, in due course, you will begin to meditate upon
your
next excursion to THE BATH, provided always that you have not
dipped
your estate at “E.O.”, or been ruined by milliners' bills;—that
your
son has not gone northwards with a sham Scotch heiress, or your
daughter
been married at Charicombe, by private license, to a pinchbeck
Irish
peer. For all these things—however painful the admission—were,
according to the most credible chroniclers, the by-no-means
infrequent
accompaniment or sequel of an unguarded sojourn at the old jigging,
card-playing, scandal-loving, pleasure-seeking city in the loop of
“the
soft-flowing Avon.”
It is an inordinate paragraph, outraging all known rules of
composition!
But then—How seductive a subject is eighteenth-century Bath!—and
how
rich in memories is M. Barbeau's book!
To William John Courthope, March 12, 1903
When Pope came back from Trojan wars once more,
He found a Bard, to meet him on the shore,
And hail his advent with a strain as clear
As e'er was sung by BYRON or by FRERE.[57]
You, SIR, have travelled from no distant clime,
Yet would JOHN GAY could welcome you in rhyme;
And by some fable not too coldly penned,
Teach how with judgment one may praise a Friend.
There is no need that I should tell in words
Your prowess from The Paradise of Birds;[58]
No need to show how surely you have traced
The Life in Poetry, the Law in Taste;[59]
Or mark with what unwearied strength you wear
The weight that WARTON found too great to bear.[60]
There Is no need for this or that. My plan
Is less to laud the Matter than the Man.
This is my brief. We recognise in you
The mind judicial, the untroubled view;
The critic who, without pedantic pose,
Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows;
Who, free alike from passion or pretence,
Holds the good rule of calm and common sense;
And be the subject or perplexed or plain,—
Clear or confusing,—is throughout urbane,
Patient, persuasive, logical, precise,
And only hard to vanity and vice.
More I could add, but brevity is best;—
These are our claims to honour you as Guest.
Notes:
[57] Alexander Pope: his Safe Return from Troy. A Congratulatory
Poem
on his Completing his Translation of Homer's Iliad. (In
ottava rima.)
By Mr. Gay, 1720(?). Frere's burlesque, Monks and Giants—it
will be
remembered—set the tune to Byron's Beppo.
[58] The Paradise of Birds, 1870.
[59] Life in Poetry, Law in Taste, two series of Lectures
delivered in Oxford, 1895-1900. 1901.
[60] A History of English Poetry. 1895 (in progress).
At this date, Thackeray's Esmond has passed from the domain
of
criticism into that securer region where the classics, if they do
not
actually “slumber out their immortality,” are at least preserved
from
profane intrusion. This “noble story"[61]—as it was called by one
of its
earliest admirers—is no longer, in any sense, a book “under
review.”
The painful student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and
compass, question its details and proportions; or the
quick-fingered
professor of paradox, jauntily turning it upside-down, rejoice in
the
results of his perverse dexterity; but certain things are now
established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, even by
those who
assume the superfluous office of anatomising the accepted. In the
first
place, if Esmond be not the author's greatest work (and
there are
those who, like the late Anthony Trollope, would willingly give it
that
rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular
kind,
for its sequel, The Virginians, however admirable in
detached
passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while Denis Duval,
of which
the promise was “great, remains unfinished. With Vanity Fair, the
author's masterpiece in another manner, Esmond cannot
properly be
compared, because an imitation of the past can never compete in
verisimilitude or on any satisfactory terms with a contemporary
picture.
Nevertheless, in its successful reproduction of the tone of a
bygone
epoch, lies Esmond's second and incontestable claim to
length of days.
Athough fifty years and more have passed since it was published, it
is
still unrivalled as the typical example of that class of historical
fiction, which, dealing indiscriminately with characters real and
feigned, develops them both with equal familiarity, treating them
each
from within, and investing them impartially with a common
atmosphere of
illusion. No modern novel has done this in the same way, nor with
the
same good fortune, as Esmond; and there is nothing more to be said
on
this score. Even if—as always—later researches should have
revised our
conception of certain of the real personages, the value of the book
as
an imaginative tour de force is unimpaired. Little remains
therefore
for the gleaner of to-day save bibliographical jottings, and
neglected
notes on its first appearance.
Note:
[61] “Never could I have believed that Thackeray, great as his
abilities
are, could have written so noble a story as Esmond.”—WALTER
SAVAGE
LANDOR, August 1856.
In Thackeray's work, the place of The History of Henry Esmond,
Esq., a
Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself
—lies
midway between his four other principal books, Vanity Fair,
Pendennis,
The Newcomes, and The Virginians; and its position
serves, in a
measure, to explain its origin. In 1848, after much tentative and
miscellaneous production, of which the value had been but
imperfectly
appreciated, the author found his fame with the yellow numbers of
Vanity Fair. Two years later, adopting the same serial form,
came
Pendennis. Vanity Fair had been the condensation of a
life's
experience; and excellent as Pendennis would have seemed
from any
inferior hand, its readers could not disguise from themselves that,
though showing no falling off in other respects, it drew to some
extent
upon the old material. No one was readier than Thackeray to listen
to a
whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe that—as he
afterwards
told his friend Elwin concerning The Newcomes—“he had
exhausted all
the types of character with which he was familiar.” Accordingly he
began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in fresh directions; and
in
the year that followed the publication of Pendennis,
prepared and
delivered in England and Scotland a series of Lectures upon the
English
Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. With the success of these
came
the prompting for a new work of fiction,—not to be contemporary,
and
not to be issued in parts. His studies for the Humourists
had
saturated him with the spirit of a time to which—witness his
novelette
of Barry Lyndon—he had always been attracted; and when Mr.
George
Smith called on him with a proposal that he should write a new
story for
L1000, he was already well in hand with Esmond,—an effort
in which,
if it were not possible to invent new puppets, it was at least
possible
to provide fresh costumes and a change of background. Begun in
1851,
Esmond progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 1852 it was
completed. Owing to the limited stock of old-cut type in which it
was
set up, its three volumes passed but slowly through the press; and
it
was eventually issued at the end of the following October, upon the
eve
of the author's departure to lecture in America. In fact, he was
waiting
on the pier for the tender which was to convey him to the steamer,
when
he received his bound copies from the publisher.
Mr. Eyre Crowe, A.R.A., who accompanied Thackeray to the United
States,
and had for some time previously been acting as his “factotum and
amanuensis,” has recorded several interesting details with regard
to the
writing of Esmond, To most readers it will be matter of
surprise, and
it is certainly a noteworthy testimony to the author's powers, that
this
attempt to revive the language and atmosphere of a vanished era was
in
great part dictated. It has even been said that, like Pendennis, it
was all dictated; but this it seems is a mistake, for, as we
shall see
presently, part of the manuscript was prepared by the author
himself. As
he warmed to his work, however, he often reverted to the method of
oral
composition which had always been most congenial to him, and which
explains the easy colloquialism of his style. Much of the “copy"
was
taken down by Mr. Crowe in a first-floor bedroom of No. 16 Young
Street,
Kensington, the still-existent house where Vanity Fair had been
written;
at the Bedford Hotel in Covent Garden; at the round table in the
Athenasum library, and elsewhere. “I write better anywhere than at
home,”—Thackeray told Elwin,—“and I write less at home than
anywhere.”
Sometimes author and scribe would betake themselves to the British
Museum, to look up points in connection with Marlborough's battles,
or
to rummage Jacob Tonson's Gazettes for the official accounts of
Wynendael and Oudenarde. The British Museum, indeed, was another of
Esmond's birthplaces. By favour of Sir Antonio Panizzi,
Thackeray and
his assistant, surrounded by their authorities, were accommodated
in one
of the secluded galleries. “I sat down,”—says Mr. Crowe—“and
wrote to
dictation the scathing sentences about the great Marlborough, the
denouncing of Cadogan, etc., etc. As a curious instance of literary
contagion, it may be here stated that I got quite bitten, with the
expressed anger at their misdeeds against General Webb, Thackeray's
kinsman and ancestor; and that I then looked upon Secretary
Cardonnel's
conduct with perfect loathing. I was quite delighted to find his
meannesses justly pilloried in Esmond's pages.” What
rendered the
situation more piquant,—Mr. Crowe adds,—all this took place on
the
site of old Montague House, where, as Steele's “Prue” says to St.
John
in the novel,” you wretches go and fight duels.”[62]
Note:
[62] With Thackeray in America, 1893, p. 4.
Those who are willing to make a pilgrimage to Cambridge, may, if
they
please, inspect the very passages which aroused the enthusiam of
Thackeray's secretary. In a special case in the Library of Trinity
College, not far from those which enclose the manuscripts of
Tennyson
and Milton, is the original and only manuscript of Esmond,
being in
fact the identical “copy” which was despatched to the press of
Messrs.
Bradbury and Evans at Whitefriars. It makes two large quarto
volumes,
and was presented to the College (Esmond's College!) in 1888 by the
author's son-in-law, the late Sir Leslie Stephen. It still bears in
pencil the names of the different compositors who set up the type.
Much
of it is in Thackeray's own small, slightly-slanted, but oftener
upright
hand, and many pages have hardly any corrections.[63] His custom
was to
write on half-sheets of a rather large notepaper, and some idea may
be
gathered of the neat, minute, and regular script, when it is added
that
the lines usually contain twelve to fifteen words, and that there
are
frequently as many as thirty-three of these lines to a page. Some
of the
rest of the “copy” is in the handwriting of the author's daughter,
now
Lady Ritchie; but a considerable portion was penned by Mr. Eyre
Crowe.
The oft-quoted passage in book ii. chap. vi. about “bringing your
sheaves with you,” was written by Thackeray himself almost as it
stands;
so was the sham Spectator, hereafter mentioned, and most of
the
chapter headed “General Webb wins the Battle of Wynendael.” But the
splendid closing scene,—“August 1st, 1714,”—is almost wholly in
the
hand of Mr. Crowe. It is certainly a remarkable fact that work at
this
level should have been thus improvised, and that nothing, as we are
credibly informed, should have been before committed to paper.[64]
When Esmond first made its appearance in October 1852, it
was not
without distinguished and even formidable competitors. Bleak
House had
reached its eighth number; and Bulwer was running My Novel in
Blackwood. In Fraser, Kingsley was bringing out
Hypatia; and Whyte
Melville was preluding with Digby Grand. Charlotte Bronte
must have
been getting ready Villette for the press; and
Tennyson—undeterred by
the fact that his hero had already been “dirged” by the
indefatigable
Tupper—was busy with his Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington.[65] The critics of the time were possibly
embarrassed with
this wealth of talent, for they were not, at the outset,
immoderately
enthusiastic over the new arrival. The Athenaeum was by no
means
laudatory. Esmond “harped upon the same string”; “wanted
vital heat”;
“touched no fresh fount of thought”; “introduced no novel forms of
life”; and so forth. But the Spectator, in a charming
greeting from
George Brimley (since included in his Essays), placed the
book, as a
work of art, even above Vanity Fair and Pendennis;
the “serious and
orthodox” Examiner, then under John Forster, was politely
judicial;
the Daily News friendly; and the Morning Advertiser
enraptured. The
book, this last declared, was the “beau-ideal of historical
romance.” On
December 4 a second edition was announced. Then, on the 22nd, came
the
Times. Whether the Times remembered and resented a
certain
delightfully contemptuous “Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,” with
which
Thackeray retorted to its notice of The Kickkburys on the Rhine
(a
thing hard to believe!) or whether it did not,—its report of
Esmond
was distinctly hostile. In three columns, it commended little but
the
character of Marlborough, and the writer's “incomparably easy and
unforced style.” Thackeray thought that it had “absolutely stopped"
the
sale. But this seems inconsistent with the fact that the publisher
sent
him a supplementary cheque for L250 on account of Esmond's
success.
Notes:
[63] One is reminded of the accounts of Scott's “copy.” “Page
after page the writing runs on exactly as you read it in
print”—says
Mr. Mowbray Morris. “I was looking not long ago at the manuscript
of
Kenilworth in the British Museum, and examined the end with
particular
care, thinking that the wonderful scene of Amy Robsart's death must
surely have cost him some labour. They were the cleanest pages in
the
volume: I do not think there was a sentence altered or added in the
whole chapter” (Lecture at Eton, Macmillan's Magazine
(1889), lx.
pp. 158-9).
[64] “The sentences”—Mr. Crowe told a member of the Athenaeum,
when speaking of his task—“came out glibly as he [Thackeray] paced
the
room.” This is the more singular when contrasted with the slow
elaboration of the Balzac and Flaubert school. No doubt Thackeray
must
often have arranged in his mind precisely much that he meant to
say.
Such seems indeed to have been his habit. The late Mr.
Lockcer-Lampson
informed the writer of this paper that once, when he met the author
of
Esmond in the Green Park, Thackeray gently begged to be allowed to
walk
alone, as he had some verses In his head which he was finishing.
They
were those which afterwards appeared in the Cornhill for
January 1867,
under the title of Mrs. Katherine's Lantern.
[65] The Duke died 14th Sept. 1852.
Another reason which may have tended to slacken—not to stop—the
sale,
is also suggested by the author himself. This was the growing
popularity
of My Novel and Villette. And Miss Bronte's book
calls to mind the
fact that she was among the earliest readers of Esmond, the
first two
volumes of which were sent to her in manuscript by George Smith,
She
read it, she tells him, with “as much ire and sorrow as gratitude
and
admiration,” marvelling at its mastery of reconstruction,—hating
its
satire,—its injustice to women. How could Lady Castlewood peep
through
a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy and a
milkmaid!
There was too much political and religious intrigue—she thought.
Nevertheless she said (this was in February 1852, speaking of vol.
i.)
the author might “yet make it the best he had ever written.” In
March
she had seen the second volume. The character of Marlborough (here
she
anticipated the Times) was a “masterly piece of writing.”
But there
was “too little story.” The final volume, by her own request, she
received in print. It possessed, in her opinion, the “most sparkle,
impetus, and interest.” “I hold,” she wrote to Mr. Smith, “that a
work
of fiction ought to be a work of creation: that the real
should be
sparingly introduced in pages dedicated to the ideal” In a
later
letter she gives high praise to the complex conception of Beatrix,
traversing incidentally the absurd accusation of one of the papers
that
she resembled. Blanche Amory [the Athenaeum and Examiner, it may be
noted, regarded her as “another Becky"]. “To me,” Miss Bronte
exclaims,
“they are about as identical as a weasel and a royal tigress of
Bengal;
both the latter are quadrupeds, both the former women.” These frank
comments of a fervent but thoroughly honest admirer, are of genuine
interest. When the book was published, Thackeray himself sent her a
copy
with his “grateful regards,” and it must have been of this that she
wrote to Mr. Smith on November 3,—“Colonel Henry Esmond is just
arrived. He looks very antique and distinguished in his Queen
Anne's
garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very well
represented by
the old Spectator type.”[66]
Note:
[66] Mr. Clement Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and her Circle,
1896, p. 403; and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, 1900,
pp. 561
et seq.
One of the points on which Miss Bronte does not touch,—at all
events
does not touch in those portions of her correspondence which have
been
printed,—is the marriage with which Esmond closes. Upon
this event it
would have been highly instructive to have had her views,
especially as
it appears to have greatly exercised her contemporaries, the first
reviewers. It was the gravamen of the Times indictment; to
the critic
of Fraser it was highly objectionable; and the Examiner
regarded it
as “incredible.” Why it was “incredible” that a man should marry a
woman
seven years older than himself, to whom he had already proposed
once in
vol. ii., and of whose youthful appearance we are continually
reminded
(“she looks the sister of her daughter” says the old Dowager at
Chelsea), is certainly not superficially obvious. Nor was it
obvious to
Lady Castlewood's children, “Mother's in love with you,—yes, I
think
mother's in love with you,” says downright Frank Esmond; the only
impediment in his eyes being the bar sinister, as yet unremoved.
And
Miss Beatrix herself, in vol. iii., is even more roundly explicit.
“As
for you,” she tells Esmond, “you want a woman to bring your
slippers and
cap, and to sit at your feet, and cry 'O caro! O bravo!' whilst you
read
your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff” [which shows that she
herself
had read Swift's Grand Question Debated]. “Mamma would have
been the
wife for you, had you been a little older, though you look ten
years
older than she does,” “You do, you glum-faced, blue-bearded, little
old
man!” adds this very imperious and free-spoken young lady. The
situation
is, no doubt, at times extremely difficult, and naturally requires
consummate skill in the treatment. But if these things and others
signify anything to an intelligent reader, they signify that the
author,
if he had not his end steadily in view, knew perfectly well that
his
story was tending in one direction. There will probably always be
some
diversity of opinion in the matter; but the majority of us have
accepted
Thackeray's solution, and have dropped out of sight that hint of
undesirable rivalry, which so troubled the precisians of the early
Victorian age. To those who read Esmond now, noting
carefully the
almost imperceptible transformation of the motives on either side,
as
developed by the evolution of the story, the union of the hero and
heroine at the end must appear not only credible but preordained.
And
that the gradual progress towards this foregone conclusion is
handled
with unfailing tact and skill, there can surely be no question.[67]
Note:
[67} Thackeray's own explanation was more characteristic than
convincing. “Why did you”—said once to him impetuous Mrs. John
Brown of
Edinburgh—“Why did you make Esmond marry that old woman?” “My dear
lady,” he replied, “it was not I who married them. They married
themselves.” (Dr. John Brmon, by the late John Taylor Brown,
1903,
pp. 96-7.)
Of the historical portraits in the book, the interest has, perhaps,
at
this date, a little paled. Not that they are one whit less
vigorously
alive than when the author first put them in motion; but they have
suffered from the very attention which Esmond and The
Humourists
have directed to the study of the originals. The picture of
Marlborough
is still as effective as when it was first proclaimed to be good
enough
for the brush of Saint-Simon. But Thackeray himself confessed to a
family prejudice against the hero of Blenheim, and later artists
have
considerably readjusted the likeness. Nor in all probability would
the
latest biographer of Bolingbroke endorse that presentment.
In the
purely literary figures, Thackeray naturally followed the
Lectures,
and is consequently open to the same criticisms as have been
offered on
those performances. The Swift of The Humourists, modelled on
Macaulay,
was never accepted from the first; and it has not been accepted in
the
novel, or by subsequent writers from Forster onwards.[68] Addison
has
been less studied; and his likeness has consequently been less
questioned. Concerning Steele there has been rather more
discussion.
That Thackeray's sketch is very vivid, very human, and in most
essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. But it is obviously
conceived under the domination of the “poor Dick” of Addison, and
dwells
far too persistently upon Steele's frailer and more fallible
aspect. No
one would believe that the flushed personage in the full-bottomed
periwig, who hiccups Addison's Campaign in the Haymarket
garret, or
the fuddled victim of “Prue's” curtain lecture at Hampton, ranked,
at
the date of the story, far higher than Addison as a writer, and
that he
was, in spite of his faults, not only a kindly gentleman and
scholar,
but a philanthropist, a staunch patriot, and a consistent
politician.
Probably the author of Esmond considered that, in a mixed
character,
to be introduced incidentally, and exhibited naturally “in the
quotidian
undress and relaxation of his mind” (as Lamb says), anything like
biographical big drum should be deprecated. This is, at least, the
impression left on us by an anecdote told by Elwin. He says that
Thackeray, talking to him once about The Virginians, which
was then
appearing, announced that he meant, among other people, to bring in
Goldsmith, “representing him as he really was, a little, shabby,
mean,
shuffling Irishman.” These are given as Thackeray's actual words.
If so,
they do not show the side of Goldsmith which is shown in the last
lecture of The Humourists.[69]
Notes:
[68] Thackeray heartily disliked Swift, and said so. “As for
Swift, you haven't made me alter my opinion”—he replied to
Hannay's
remonstrances. This feeling was intensified by the belief that
Swift, as
a clergyman, was insincere. “Of course,”—he wrote in September,
1851,
in a letter now in the British Museum,—“any man is welcome to
believe
as he likes for me except a parson; and I can't help looking
upon
Swift and Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades ... with a
scornful pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness.”
[69] Some XVIII. Century Men of Letters, 1902, i. 187. The
intention was never carried out. In The King over the Water,
1908,
Miss A. Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another
portrait in Esmond,—that of the Chevalier de St.
George,—not without
injury to its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang—like
Rob
Roy—is on his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the
reader to this highly interesting study.
But although, with our rectified information, we may except against
the
picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the
reproduction of
his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at
Charterhouse,
his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it
triumphantly in his maturity by those Novels by Eminent Hands
in which
the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The
thing is
more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison
has
rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all his works,
in
stray letters and detached passages.
In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial
report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in Denis Duval
; and in
the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess
Castlewood[70]—a letter which only requires the sprawling,
childish
script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary
efforts of
that “baby-faced” Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign
herself “L
duchesse de Portsmout.” It is better still in the letter from
Walpole to
General Conway in chap. xl. of The Virginians, which is
perfect, even
to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But
the
crown and top of these pastiches is certainly the delightful
paper,
which pretends to be No. 341 of the Spectator for All Fools'
Day,
1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats “Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix,” to
what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a “bite.”[71] Here
Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele's voice, but his very trick
of
speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the “tangled web we
weave,
When first we practise to deceive,” that although this
pseudo-Spectator is stated to have been printed “exactly as
those
famous journals were printed” for eighteenth-century
breakfast-tables,
it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the
contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin
epigraph,
unluckily appended an English translation,—a concession to the
country
gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately
abstained,
holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison's own
phrase)
“words to the wise,” of no concern to unlearned persons.[72]
Notes:
[70] Esmond, Book ii, chap, ii.
[71] Ib. Book iii, chap, iii.
[72] Spectator, No. 221, November 13, 1711.
This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect
imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary
of
Esmond. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes
been
advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high
journalistic
authority, that “no man, woman, or child in Esmond, ever
says anything
that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne.”
This is
one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its
head,
invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly “copied the language
of
Queen Anne,”—he says so in his dedication to Lord Ashburton; but
he
himself would certainly never have put forward so comprehensive a
claim
as the above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged Mr.
Lowell
(who was his fellow-passenger to America on the Canada) to
point out
in Esmond a word which had not been used in the early
eighteenth
century; and that the author of The Biglow Papers promptly
discovered
such a word. But even if the anecdote be not well-invented, the
invitation must have been more jest than earnest. For none knew
better
than Thackeray that these barren triumphs of wording belong to
ingenuity
rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the
Persian poet who left out all the A's (as well as the poetry) in
his
verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour
of
Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew's Cross,
a
lozenge,—everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray
endeavoured
after when “copying the language of Queen Anne,” and succeeded in
attaining, was the spirit and tone of the time. It was not pedantic
philology at which he aimed, though he did not disdain occasional
picturesque archaisms, such as “yatches” for “yachts,” or despise
the
artful aid of terminal k's, long s's, and old-cut type.
Consequently, as
was years ago pointed out by Fitzedward Hall (whose manifest
prejudice
against Thackeray as a writer should not blind us in a matter of
fact),
it is not difficult to detect many expressions in the memoirs of
Queen
Anne's Colonel which could never have been employed until Her
Majesty
had long been “quietly inurned.” What is more,—if we mistake
not,—the
author of Esmond sometimes refrained from using an actual
eighteenth-century word, even in a quotation, when his instinct
told him
it was not expedient to do so. In the original of that well-known
anecdote of Steele beside his father's coffin, In Tatler No.
181,
reproduced in book i. chap. vi. of the novel, Steele says, “My
mother
catched me in her arms.” “Catched” is good enough
eighteenth-century for
Johnson and Walpole. But Thackeray made it “caught,” and “caught"
it
remains to this day both in Esmond and The Humourists.
(TERCENTENARY, 1608-1908)
“Stops of various Quills.”—LYCIDAS.
What need of votive Verse
To strew thy Laureat Herse
With that mix'd Flora of th' Aonian Hill?
Or Mincian vocall Reed,
That Cam and Isis breed,
When thine own Words are burning in us still?
Bard, Prophet, Archimage!
In this Cash-cradled Age,
We grate our scrannel Musick, and we dote:
Where is the Strain unknown,
Through Bronze or Silver blown,
That thrill'd the Welkin with thy woven Note?
Yes,—“we are selfish Men”:
Yet would we once again
Might see Sabrina braid her amber Tire;
Or watch the Comus Crew
Sweep down the Glade; or view
Strange-streamer'd Craft from Javan or Gadire!
Or could we catch once more,
High up, the Clang and Roar
Of Angel Conflict,—Angel Overthrow;
Or, with a World begun,
Behold the young-ray'd Sun
Flame in the Groves where the Four Rivers go!
Ay me, I fondly dream!
Only the Storm-bird's Scream
Foretells of Tempest in the Days to come;
Nowhere is heard up-climb
The lofty lyric Rhyme,
And the “God-gifted Organ-voice” is dumb.[73]
Note:
[73] Written, by request, for the celebration at Christ's College,
Cambridge, July 10, 1908.
The general reader, as a rule, is but moderately interested in
minor
rectifications. Secure in a conventional preference of the spirit
to the
letter, he professes to be indifferent whether the grandmother of
an
exalted personage was a “Hugginson” or a “Blenkinsop”; and he is
equally
careless as to the correct Christian names of his cousins and his
aunts.
In the main, the general reader is wise in his generation. But with
the
painful biographer, toiling in the immeasurable sand of thankless
research, often foot-sore and dry of throat, these trivialities
assume
exaggerated proportions; and to those who remind him—as in a
cynical
age he is sure to be reminded—of the infinitesimal value of his
hard-gotten grains of information, he can only reply mournfully, if
unconvincingly, that fact is fact—even in matters of mustard-seed.
With
this prelude, I propose to set down one or two minute points
concerning
Henry Fielding, not yet comprised in any existing records of his
career.[74]
Note:
[74] Since this was published in April 1907, they have been
embodied in an Appendix to my “Men of Letters” Fielding; and
used, to
some extent, for a fresh edition of the Journal of a Voyage to
Lisbon
(“World's Classics").
The first relates to the exact period of his residence at Leyden
University. His earliest biographer, Arthur Murphy, writing in
1762, is
more explicit than usual on this topic. “He [Fielding],” says
Murphy,
“went from Eton to Leyden, and there continued to show an eager
thirst
for knowledge, and to study the civilians with a remarkable
application
for about two years, when, remittances failing, he was obliged to
return
to London, not then quite twenty years old” [i.e. before
22nd April,
1727]. In 1883, like my predecessors, I adopted this statement, for
the
sufficient reason that I had nothing better to put in its place.
And
Murphy should have been well-informed. He had known Fielding
personally;
he was employed by Fielding's publisher; and he could, one would
imagine, have readily obtained accurate data from Fielding's
surviving
sister, Sarah, who was only three years younger than her brother,
of
whose short life (he died at forty-eight) she could scarcely have
forgotten the particulars. Murphy's story, moreover, exactly fitted
in
with the fact, only definitely made known in June 1883, that
Fielding,
as a youth of eighteen, had endeavoured, in November 1725, to
abduct or
carry off his first love, Miss Sarah Andrew of Lyme Regis. Although
the
lady was promptly married to a son of one of her fluttered
guardians,
nothing seemed more reasonable than to assume that the disappointed
lover (one is sure he was never an heiress-hunter!) was despatched
to
the Dutch University to keep him out of mischief.[75] But in once
more
examining Mr. Keightley's posthumous papers, kindly placed at my
disposal by his nephew, Mr. Alfred C. Lyster, I found a reference
to an
un-noted article in the Cornhill Magazine for November, 1863
(from
internal evidence I believe it to have been written by James
Hannay),
entitled “A Scotchman in Holland.” Visiting Leyden, the writer was
permitted to inspect the University Album; and he found, under
1728, the
following:—“Henricus Fielding, Anglus, Ann. 20. Stud. Lit.
“, coupled
with the further detail that he “was living at the 'Hotel of
Antwerp.'“
Except in the item of “Stud. Lit.“, this did not seem to
conflict
materially with Murphy's account, as Fielding was nominally twenty
from
1727 to 1728, and small discrepancies must be allowed for.
Note:
[75] “Men of Letters” Fielding, 1907, Appendix I.
Twenty years later, a fresh version of the record came to light. At
their tercentenary festival in 1875, tne Leyden University printed
a
list of their students from their foundation to that year. From
this Mr.
Edward Peacock, F.S.A., compiled in 1883, for the Index Society, an
Index to English-Speaking Students who have graduated at Leyden
University; and at p. 35 appears Fielding, Henricus, Anglus, 16
Mart. 1728, 915 (the last being the column number of the list).
This
added a month-date, and made Fielding a graduate. Then, two years
ago,
came yet a third rendering. Mr. A.E.H. Swaen, writing in The
Modern
Language Review for July 1906, printed the inscription in the
Album as
follows; “Febr. 16. 1728: Rectore Johanne Wesselio, Henricus
Fielding,
Anglus. 20, L.” Mr. Swaen construed this to mean that, on the date
named
(which, it may be observed, is not Mr. Peacock's date), Fielding,
“aged
twenty, was entered as litterarum studiosus at
Leyden.” In this case
it would follow that his residence in Holland should have come
after
February 16th, 1728; and Mr. Swaen went on to conjecture that, “as
his
[Fielding's] first play, Love in Several Masques, was staged
at Drury
Lane in February, 1728, and his next play, The Temple Beau,
was
produced in January, 1730, it is not improbable that his residence
in
Holland filled up the interval or part of it. Did the profits of
the
play [he proceeded] perhaps cover part of his travelling expenses?”
The new complications imported into the question by this fresh
aspect of
it, will be at once apparent. Up to 1875 there had been but one
Fielding
on the Leyden books; so that all these differing accounts were
variations from a single source. In this difficulty, I was
fortunate
enough to enlist the sympathy of Mr. Frederic Harrison, who most
kindly
undertook to make inquiries on my behalf at Leyden University
itself. In
reply to certain definite queries drawn up by me, he obtained from
the
distinguished scholar and Professor of History, Dr. Pieter Blok,
the
following authoritative particulars. The exact words in the
original
Album Academicum are:—“16 Martii 1728 Henricus Fielding,
Anglus,
annor. 20 Litt. Stud.” He was then staying at the “Casteel van
Antwerpen”—as related by “A Scotchman in Holland.” His name only
occurs
again in the yearly recensiones under February 22nd, 1729,
as
“Henricus Fieldingh,” when he was domiciled with one Jan Oson. He
must
consequently have left Leyden before February 8th, 1730, February
8th
being the birthday of the University, after which all students have
to
be annually registered. The entry in the Album (as Mr. Swaen
affirmed)
is an admission entry; there are no leaving entries. As
regards
“studying the civilians,” Fielding might, in those days, Dr. Blok
explains, have had private lessons from the professors; but he
could not
have studied in the University without being on the books. To sum
up:
After producing Love in Several Masques at Drury Lane,
probably on
February 12th, I728,[76] Fielding was admitted a “Litt. Stud.” at
Leyden
University on March 16th; was still there in February 1729; and
left
before February 8th, 1730. Murphy is therefore at fault in almost
every
particular. Fielding did not go from Eton to Leyden; he did
not make
any recognised study of the civilians, “with remarkable
application” or
otherwise; and he did not return to London before he was
twenty. But
it is by no means improbable that the causa causans or main
reason for
his coming home was the failure of remittances.
Note:
[76] Genest, iii. 209.
Another recently established fact is also more or less connected
with
“Mur.—” as Johnson called him. In his “Essay” of 1762, he gave a
highly-coloured account of Fielding's first marriage, and of the
promptitude with which, assisted by yellow liveries and a pack of
hounds, he managed to make duck and drake of his wife's little
fortune.
This account has now been “simply riddled in its details” (as Mr.
Saintsbury puts it) by successive biographers, the last destructive
critic being the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who plausibly suggested
that
the “yellow liveries” (not the family liveries, be it noted!) were
simply a confused recollection of the fantastic pranks of that
other and
earlier Beau Fielding (Steele's “Orlando the Fair"), who married
the
Duchess of Cleveland in 1705, and was also a Justice of the Peace
for
Westminster. One thing was wanting to the readjustment of the
narrative,
and that was the precise date of Fielding's marriage to the
beautiful
Miss Cradock of Salisbury, the original both of Sophia Western and
Amelia Booth. By good fortune this has now been ascertained.
Lawrence
gave the date as 1735; and Keightley suggested the spring of that
year.
This, as Swift would say, was near the mark, although confirmation
has
been slow in coming. In June 1906, Mr. Thomas S. Bush, of Bath,
announced in The Bath Chronicle that the desired information
was to be
found (not in the Salisbury registers which had been fruitlessly
consulted, but) at the tiny church of St. Mary, Charlcombe, a
secluded
parish about one and a half miles north of Bath. Here is the
record:—“November y'e 28, 1734. Henry Fielding of y'e Parish of
St.
James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock, of y'e same Parish,
spinster, were married by virtue of a licence from y'e Court of
Wells.”
All lovers of Fielding owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Bush, whose
researches, in addition, disclosed the fact that Sarah Fielding,
the
novelist's third sister (as we shall see presently), was buried,
not in
Bath Abbey, where Dr. John Hoadly raised a memorial to her, but “in
y'e
entrance of the Chancel [of Charlcombe Church] close to y'e
Rector's
seat,” April 14th, 1768.[77] Mr. Bush's revelation, it may be
added, was
made in connection with another record of the visits of the
novelist to
the old Queen of the West, a tablet erected in June 1906 to
Fielding and
his sister on the wall of Yew Cottage, now renovated as Widcombe
Lodge,
Widcombe, Bath, where they once resided.
Note:
[77] Sarah Fielding's epitaph in Bath Abbey is often said to have
been
written by Bishop Benjamin Hoadly. In this case, it must have been
anticipatory (like Dr. Primrose's on his Deborah), for the Bishop
died
in 1761.
In the last case I have to mention, it is but fair to Murphy to
admit
that he seems to have been better informed than those who have
succeeded
him. Richardson writes of being “well acquainted” with four of
Fielding's sisters, and both Lawrence and Keightley refer to a
Catherine
and an Ursula, of whom Keightley, after prolonged enquiries, could
obtain no tidings. With the help of Colonel W.F. Prideaux, and the
kind
offices of Mr. Samuel Martin of the Hammersmith Free Library, this
matter has now been set at rest. In 1887 Sir Leslie Stephen had
suggested to me that Catherine and Ursula were most probably born
at
Sharpham Park, before the Fieldings moved to East Stour. This must
have
been the case, though Keightley had failed to establish it. At all
events, Catherine and Ursula must have existed, for they both died
in
1750, The Hammersmith Registers at Fulham record the following
burials:—
1750 July 9th, Mrs. Catherine Feilding (sic)
1750 Nov. 12th, Mrs. Ursula Fielding
1750 [—1] Feb'y. 24th, Mrs. Beatrice Fielding
1753 May 10th, Louisa, d. of Henry Fielding, Esq.
The first three, with Sarah, make up the “Four Worthy Sisters” of
the
reprehensible author of that “truly coarse-titled Tom Jones“
concerning which Richardson wrote shudderingly in August 1749 to
his
young friends, Astraea and Minerva Hill. The final entry relating
to
Fielding's little daughter, Louisa, born December 3rd, 1752, makes
it
probable that, in May, 1753, he was staying in the house at
Hammersmith,
then occupied by his sole surviving sister, Sarah. In the following
year
(October 8th) he himself died at Lisbon. There is no better short
appreciation of his work than Lowell's lapidary lines for the Shire
Hall
at Taunton,—the epigraph to the bust by Miss Margaret Thomas:
He looked on naked nature unashamed,
And saw the Sphinx, now bestial, now divine,
In change and re-change; he nor praised nor blamed,
But drew her as he saw with fearless line.
Did he good service? God must judge, not we!
Manly he was, and generous and sincere;
English in all, of genius blithely free:
Who loves a Man may see his image here.
“Hoc est vivere.”—MARTIAL.
The Printer's is a happy lot:
Alone of all professions,
No fateful smudges ever blot
His earliest “impressions.”
The outgrowth of his youthful ken
No cold obstruction fetters;
He quickly learns the “types” of men,
And all the world of “letters.”
With “forms” he scorns to compromise;
For him no “rule” has terrors;
The “slips” he makes he can “revise”—
They are but “printers' errors.”
From doubtful questions of the “Press"
He wisely holds aloof;
In all polemics, more or less,
His argument is “proof.”
Save in their “case,” with High and Low,
Small need has he to grapple!
Without dissent he still can go
To his accustomed “Chapel,”[78]
From ills that others scape or shirk,
He rarely fails to rally;
For him, his most “composing” work
Is labour of the “galley.”
Though ways be foul, and days are dim,
He makes no lamentation;
The primal “fount” of woe to him
Is—want of occupation:
And when, at last, Time finds him grey
With over-close attention,
He solves the problem of the day,
And gets an Old Age pension.
Note:
[78] This, derived, it is said, from Caxton's connection with
Westminster Abbey, is the name given to the meetings held by
printers to
consider trade affairs, appeals, etc, (Printers' Vocabulary).
Towards the close of the year 1766—not many months after the
publication of the Vicat of Wakefield—there appeared in Mr. Henry
Sampson Woodfall's Public Advertiser, and other newspapers,
a letter
addressed “To the Printer,” and signed “PAPYRIUS CURSOR.” The name
was a
real Roman name; but in its burlesque applicability to the theme of
the
communication, it was as felicitous as Thackeray's “MANLIUS
PENNIALINUS,” or that “APOLLONIUS CURIUS” from whom Hood fabled to
have
borrowed the legend of “Lycus the Centaur.” The writer of the
letter
lamented—as others have done before and since—the barren
fertility of
the news sheets of his day. There was, he contended, some diversion
and
diversity in card-playing. But as for the papers, the unconnected
occurrences and miscellaneous advertisements, the abrupt
transitions
from article to article, without the slightest connection between
one
paragraph and another—so overburdened and confused the memory that
when
one was questioned, it was impossible to give even a tolerable
account
of what one had read. The mind became a jumble of “politics,
religion,
picking of pockets, puffs, casualties, deaths, marriages,
bankruptcies,
preferments, resignations, executions, lottery tickets, India
bonds,
Scotch pebbles, Canada bills, French chicken gloves, auctioneers,
and
quack doctors,” of all of which, particularly as the pages
contained
three columns, the bewildered reader could retain little or
nothing.
(One may perhaps pause for a moment to wonder, seeing that Papyrius
could contrive to extract so much mental perplexity from Cowper's
“folio
of four pages”—he speaks specifically of this form,—what he would
have
done with Lloyd's, or a modern American Sunday paper!)
Coming later to
the point of his epistle, he goes on to explain that he has hit
upon a
method (as to which, be it added, he was not, as he thought, the
originator[79]) of making this heterogeneous mass afford, like
cards, a
“variety of entertainment.”
Note:
[79] As a matter of fact, he had been anticipated by a paper, No.
49 of
“little Harrison's” spurious Tatler, vol. v., where the
writer reads a
newspaper “in a direct Line” ... “without Regard to the Distinction
of
Columns,”—which is precisely the proposal of Papyrius.
By reading the afore-mentioned three columns horizontally and
onwards,
instead of vertically and downwards “in the old trite vulgar
way,” it
was contended that much mirth might observingly be distilled from
the
most unhopeful material, as “blind Chance” frequently
brought about the
oddest conjunctions, and not seldom compelled sub juga aenea
persons
and things the most dissimilar and discordant. He then went on to
give a
number of examples in point, of which we select a few. This was the
artless humour of it:—
“Yesterday Dr. Jones preached at St. James's,
and performed it with ease in less than 16 Minutes.”
“Their R.H. the Dukes of York and Gloucester
were bound over to their good behaviour.”
“At noon her R.H. the Princess Dowager was
married to Mr. Jenkins, an eminent Taylor.”
“Friday a poor blind man fell into a saw-pit,
to which he was conducted by Sir Clement Cottrell.”[80]
“A certain Commoner will be created a Peer.
N.B.—No greater reward will be offered.”
“John Wilkes, Esq., set out for France,
being charged with returning from transportation.”
“Last night a most terrible fire broke out,
and the evening concluded with the utmost Festivity.”
“Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,
and afterwards toss'd and gored several Persons.”
“On Tuesday an address was presented;
it happily miss'd fire, and the villain made off,
when the honour of knighthood was conferred on him
to the great joy of that noble family.”
“Escaped from the New Gaol, Terence M'Dermot.
If he will return, he will be kindly received.”
“Colds caught at this season are
The Companion to the Playhouse.”
“Ready to sail to the West Indies,
the Canterbury Flying Machine in one day.”
“To be sold to the best Bidder,
My Seat in Parliament being vacated.”
“I have long laboured under a complaint
For ready money only,”
“Notice is hereby given,
and no Notice taken.”
Note:
[80] Master of the Ceremonies.]
And so forth, fully justifying the writer's motto from Cicero,
De
Finibus: “Fortuitu Concursu hoc fieri, mirum est.” It
may seem that
the mirthful element is not overpowering. But “gentle Dulness ever
loves
a joke”; and in 1766 this one, in modern parlance, “caught on.”
“Cross
readings” had, moreover, one popular advantage: like the Limericks
of
Edward Lear, they were easily imitated. What is not so intelligible
is,
that they seem to have fascinated many people who were assuredly
not
dull. Even Johnson condescended to commend the aptness of the
pseudonym,
and to speak of the performance as “ingenious and diverting.”
Horace
Walpole, writing to Montagu in December 1766, professes to have
laughed
over them till he cried. It was “the newest piece of humour,” he
declared, “except the Bath Guide [Anstey's], that he had
seen of many
years”; and Goldsmith—Goldsmith, who has been charged with want of
sympathy for rival humourists—is reported by Northcote to have
even
gone so far as to say, in a transport of enthusiasm, that “it would
have
given him more pleasure to have been the author of them than of all
the
works he had ever published of his own,”—which, of course, must be
classed with “Dr. Minor's” unconsidered speeches.
“Bien heureux”—to use Voltaire's phrase—is he who can
laugh much at
these things now. As Goldsmith himself would have agreed, the jests
of
one age are not the jests of another. But it is a little curious
that,
by one of those freaks of circumstance, or “fortuitous concourses,”
there is to-day generally included among the very works of
Goldsmith
above referred to something which, in the opinion of many, is
conjectured to have been really the production of the ingenious
compiler
of the “Cross Readings.” That compiler was one Caleb Whitefoord, a
well-educated Scotch wine-merchant and picture-buyer, whose
portrait
figures in Wilkie's “Letter of Introduction.” The friend of
Benjamin
Franklin, who had been his next-door neighbour at Craven Street, he
became, in later years, something of a diplomatist, since in
1782-83 he
was employed by the Shelburne administration in the Paris
negotiation
for the Treaty of Versailles. But at the date of the “Cross
Readings” he
was mainly what Burke, speaking contemptuously of his status as a
plenipotentiary, styled a “diseur de bons mots”; and he was
for this
reason included among those “most distinguished Wits of the
Metropolis,”
who, following Garrick's lead in 1774, diverted themselves at the
St.
James's Coffee-house by composing the epitaphs on Goldsmith which
gave
rise to the incomparable gallery entitled Retaliation. In
the first
four editions of that posthumous poem there is no mention of
Whitefoord,
who, either at, or soon after the first meeting above referred to,
had
written an epitaph on Goldsmith, two-thirds of which are declared
to be
“unfit for publication.”[81] But when the fourth edition of
Retaliation
had been printed, an epitaph on Whitefoord was forwarded to the
publisher, George Kearsly, by “a friend of the late Doctor
Goldsmith,”
with an intimation that it was a transcript of an original in “the
Doctor's own handwriting.” “It is a striking proof of Doctor
Goldsmith's
good-nature,” said the sender, glancing, we may suppose, at
Whitefoord's
performance. “I saw this sheet of paper in the Doctor's room, five
or
six days before he died; and, as I had got all the other Epitaphs,
I
asked him if I might take it. “In truth you may, my Boy
(replied he),
for it will be of no use to me where I am going.”
Note:
[81] Hewins's Whitefoord Papers, 1898, p. xxvii. ff., where
the first
four lines of twelve are given. They run—
Noll Goldsmith lies here, as famous for writing
As his namesake old Noll was for praying and fighting,
In friends he was rich, tho' not loaded with Pelf;
He spoke well of them, and thought well of himself.
The lines—there are twenty-eight of them—speak of Whitefoord as,
among
other things, a
Rare compound of oddity, frolic and fun!
Who relish'd a joke, and rejoic'd in a pun;[82]
Whose temper was generous, open, sincere;
A stranger to flatt'ry, a stranger to fear;
Who scatter'd around wit and humour at will,
Whose daily bons mots half a column would fill;
A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free,
A scholar, yet surely no pedant was he.
What pity, alas! that so lib'ral a mind
Should so long be to news-paper-essays confin'd!
Who perhaps to the summit of science could soar,
Yet content “if the table he set on a roar”;
Whose talents to fill any station were fit,
Yet happy if Woodfall confess'd him a wit.
Note:
[82] “Mr, W.”—says a note to the fifth edition—“is so notorious a
punster, that Doctor Goldsmith used to say, it was impossible to
keep
him company, without being infected with the itch of
punning.” Yet
Johnson endured him, and apparently liked him, though he had the
additional disqualification of being a North Briton.
The “servile herd” of “tame imitators”—the “news-paper witlings"
and
“pert scribbling folks”—were further requested to visit his tomb—
To deck it, bring with you festoons of the vine,
And copious libations bestow on his shrine;
Then strew all around it (you can do no less)
Cross-readings, Ship-news, and Mistakes of the
Press.
It is not recorded that Kearsly ever saw this in Goldsmith's “own
handwriting”; the sender's name has never been made known; and—as
above
observed—it has been more than suspected that Whitefoord concocted
it
himself, or procured its concoction. As J.T. Smith points out in
Nollekens and his Times, 1828, i, 337-8, Whitefoord was
scarcely
important enough to deserve a far longer epitaph than those
bestowed on
Burke and Reynolds; and Goldsmith, it may be added—as we know In
the
case of Beattie and Voltaire—was not in the habit of confusing
small
men with great. Moreover, the lines would (as intimated by the
person
who sent them to Kearsly) be an extraordinarily generous return for
an
epitaph “unfit for publication,” by which, it is stated, Goldsmith
had
been greatly disturbed. Prior had his misgivings, particularly in
respect to the words attributed to Goldsmith on his death-bed; and
Forster allows that to him the story of the so-called “Postscript"
has
“a somewhat doubtful look.” To which we unhesitatingly say—ditto.
Whitefoord, it seems, was in the habit of printing his “Cross
Readings"
on small single sheets, and circulating them among his friends.
“Rainy-Day Smith” had a specimen of these. In one of Whitefoord's
letters he professes to claim that his jeux d'esprit
contained more
than met the eye. “I have always,” he wrote, “endeavour'd to make
such
changes [of Ministry] a matter of Laughter [rather] than of
serious
concern to the People, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News,
&c,
and these Pieces have generally succeeded beyond my most sanguine
Expectations, altho' they were not season'd with private Scandal or
personal Abuse, of which our good neighbours of South Britain are
realy
too fond.” In Debrett's New Foundling Hospital for Wit, new
edition,
1784, there are several of his productions, including a letter to
Woodfall “On the Errors of the Press,” of which the following may
serve
as a sample: “I have known you turn a matter of hearsay, into a
matter
of heresy; Damon into a daemon; a delicious girl, into a delirious
girl;
the comic muse, into a comic mouse; a Jewish Rabbi, into a Jewish
Rabbit; and when a correspondent, lamenting the corruption of the
times,
exclaimed 'O Mores!' you made him cry, 'O Moses!'“ And here is an
extract from another paper which explains the aforegoing reference
to
“horse Races”: “1763—Spring Meeting... Mr. Wilkes's horse,
LIBERTY,
rode by himself, took the lead at starting; but being pushed hard
by Mr.
Bishop's black gelding, PRIVILEGE, fell down at the Devil's Ditch,
and
was no where.” The “Ship News” is on the same pattern. “August
25
[1765] We hear that his Majesty's Ship Newcastle will soon
have a new
figure-head, the old one being almost worn out.”
AN EPILOGUE TO ANY BOOK
“Hic Finis chartaeque viaeque.“
“FINIS at last—the end, the End, the END!
No more of paragraphs to prune or mend;
No more blue pencil, with its ruthless line,
To blot the phrase 'particularly fine';
No more of 'slips,' and 'galleys,' and 'revises,'
Of words 'transmogrified,' and 'wild surmises';
No more of n's that masquerade as u's,
No nice perplexities of p's and q's;
No more mishaps of ante and of post,
That most mislead when they should help the most;
No more of 'friend' as 'fiend,' and 'warm' as 'worm';
No more negations where we would affirm;
No more of those mysterious freaks of fate
That make us bless when we should execrate;
No more of those last blunders that remain
Where we no more can set them right again;
No more apologies for doubtful data;
No more fresh facts that figure as Errata;
No more, in short, O TYPE, of wayward lore
From thy most un-Pierian fount—NO MORE!”
So spoke PAPYRIUS. Yet his hand meanwhile
Went vaguely seeking for the vacant file,
Late stored with long array of notes, but now
Bare-wired and barren as a leafless bough;—
And even as he spoke, his mind began
Again to scheme, to purpose and to plan.
There is no end to Labour 'neath the sun;
There is no end of labouring—but One;
And though we “twitch (or not) our Mantle blue,”
“To-morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.”