Stories of Authors, British and American
by Edwin Watts Chubb · English · Gutenberg #26910 · 547,908 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Stories of Authors, British and American
Author: Edwin Watts Chubb
Release date: October 13, 2008 [eBook #26910]
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Language: English
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[Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER
From a portrait in Occleve's Poems in the British Museum]
Stories of Authors
_British and American_
BY
EDWIN WATTS CHUBB
Professor of English Literature
in the Ohio University.
_ILLUSTRATED_
New York
STURGIS & WALTON
COMPANY
1910
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1910
BY STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910
Reprinted May, 1910
PREFACE
The purpose of this book is to help in making literature and the
makers of literature alive and interesting. Few schools have libraries
including the bound volumes of the magazines of the past quarter of a
century. But what an aid such a collection is to the appreciation of
literature! The dignified and abbreviated history of literature cannot
indulge in such delightful gossip as is found in the freer essay and
fuller biography. To show the excellences of the art and the
lovableness of the artist rather than to hunt for defects is the duty
and the delight of the teacher of literature. This does not mean,
however, that one dare never see the weaker side, the foibles and
eccentricities of the man of genius.
I like Macaulay none the less because his cock-sureness and loquacity
came dangerously near to making him a bore; Dr. Johnson grows in
interest when I learn that he found it a continual and almost hopeless
struggle to become an early riser, that he feared death, and could
drink tea as long as the housekeeper could brew it; that Tennyson was
a slave to tobacco and acted like a yokel when the newly-wedded
Muellers entertained him at breakfast does not detract from my
enjoyment of the exquisite pathos of _Tears, Idle Tears_; that the
marriage of the Brownings was a runaway romance is a whole commentary
of explanation when I read their poems of romantic love; that
Longfellow is said to have declined an invitation to the Adirondacks
because he was told that Emerson was to carry a gun is really far more
delightful, and I may add valuable, information than to know the exact
date of the birth of either. Of knowledge such as this is the kingdom
of literary interest. It is not well to place our literary lights upon
a pedestal so lofty that the radiating warmth and light never reach
our hearts.
While many of the articles may be somewhat gossipy in tone, the
serious phase has not been overlooked. The sketches have been gathered
from many sources. Some have been written by myself, others have been
gathered from magazines and books. I wish to acknowledge the kindness
of _Scribners' Magazine_, of the _Bookman_, and of the _New England
Magazine_ in permitting me to use articles originally appearing in
these respective magazines. To all who have wittingly or unwittingly
made it possible for me to gather my material I wish to acknowledge my
indebtedness. Every article has been written, selected, or adapted
because of some special value. In these pages the reader may find what
Lamb earned during the years of his famous clerkship, or the exciting
details of Shelley's death. How many times have we heard of Sir Philip
Sidney's immortal act of chivalry as he _lay_ on the field at Zutphen!
But definite information has it otherwise. To learn of the prodigious
industry of the youthful Mill, the perseverance of Darwin, the heroic
struggle of Scott, the gentleness of Stevenson, the modesty of
Browning, the lifelong consecration of Motley,--is not the leaven of
inspiration made of knowledge such as this?
I have an unshaken conviction that the highest art of the teacher is
manifested in the awakening of such an interest that the pupil shall
forever after be an eager learner. Am I wrong in hoping that no one,
though with but a meager knowledge of literature, can read these
sketches without a desire to know more of the men and women who are
the glory of England and America? Here is but a taste of a more
sumptuous feast.
Dreams, books are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
EDWIN WATTS CHUBB.
CONTENTS
ENGLISH WRITERS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Ancient Tabard Inn 1
II. Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen 4
III. About Shakspere 9
IV. John Milton 17
V. Charles Lamb, the Clerk of the India House 24
VI. Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb 28
VII. The Death of Dr. Johnson 33
VIII. Gray Writes the Elegy 37
IX. Cowper as a Letter Writer 42
X. Gibbon and His Visit to Rome 46
XI. Burns Falls in Love 50
XII. Burns' First Book of Poems 54
XIII. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in School and College 59
XIV. Byron as Swimmer and Feaster 64
XV. Shelley as a Freshman 71
XVI. The Death of Shelley 76
XVII. The School-days of John Keats 82
XVIII. The Heroism of Sir Walter Scott 88
XIX. Walter Savage Landor 93
XX. Leigh Hunt's Business Ability 100
XXI. De Quincey Runs Away 102
XXII. Macaulay's Childhood 108
XXIII. Macaulay Becomes Famous 114
XXIV. Dickens Writes the Pickwick Papers 119
XXV. Charles Dickens as Reader 123
XXVI. On the Death of Dickens 126
XXVII. Ruskin's Childhood 130
XXVIII. The Marriage of the Brownings 135
XXIX. Robert Browning 140
XXX. Knight's Reminiscences of Tennyson 145
XXXI. Emerson on Carlyle and Tennyson 150
XXXII. Literary Recollections of Max Mueller 156
XXXIII. The Early Education of John Stuart Mill 162
XXXIV. Carlyle Goes to the University 167
XXXV. Carlyle and His Wife 170
XXXVI. Carlyle as Lecturer 175
XXXVII. Carlyle on Wordsworth and Browning 180
XXXVIII. The Author of "Jane Eyre" 184
XXXIX. Thackery in America 189
XL. George Eliot Becomes a Writer of Fiction 194
XLI. The Author of "Alice in WonderLand" 200
XLII. About Darwin 203
XLIII. Anecdotes of Huxley 209
XLIV. Stevenson at Vailima 214
XLV. Kipling in India 221
AMERICAN WRITERS
XLVI. Benjamin Franklin Runs Away 226
XLVII. Washington Irving 234
XLVIII. Cooper and "The Spy" 242
XLIX. John Lothrop Motley and Bismarck 249
L. The Youth of George Ticknor 254
LI. Fitz-Greene Halleck 259
LII. The Author of Thanatopsis 262
LIII. Curtis and Hawthorne at the Brook Farm 266
LIV. Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter 270
LV. Max Mueller's Recollections of Emerson, Lowell and Holmes 279
LVI. Howells Calls on Emerson, and Describes Longfellow 284
LVII. Longfellow, the Universal Poet 290
LVIII. Henry David Thoreau 297
LIX. The Last Days of Edgar Allan Poe 303
LX. Artemus Ward 313
LXI. Edmund Gosse Visits Whittier 317
LXII. Personal Recollections of Whittier 320
LXIII. Henry Ward Beecher 329
LXIV. The London "Times" on Lowell 333
LXV. The Writing of "America" 338
LXVI. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her First Story 340
LXVII. Sidney Lanier 344
LXVIII. The Story of Mark Twain's Debts 349
LXIX. Hamlin Garland's Literary Beginning 358
LXX. Stephen Crane: A "Wonderful Boy" 361
LXXI. Eugene Field 364
ILLUSTRATIONS
Geoffrey Chaucer _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Old Tabard Inn 2
William Shakspere 8
John Milton 16
Robert Burns 50
Lord Byron 64
Percy Bysshe Shelley 70
Charles Dickens 122
Robert Browning 134
Alfred Tennyson 144
Ralph Waldo Emerson 150
Thomas Carlyle 175
Benjamin Franklin 226
William Cullen Bryant 262
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 290
John Greenleaf Whittier 320
STORIES OF AUTHORS
I
THE ANCIENT TABARD INN
The picture we see here is that of an inn whose fame is as widespread
as the love of English poetry, for it is at the Tabard Inn that
Chaucer more than five hundred years ago assembled his nine and twenty
pilgrims who were preparing to visit the tomb of Thomas a Becket at
Canterbury. The witchery of the springtime had stirred the blood of
these Londoners who, perhaps, were enticed from home more by the soft
April showers and the melody of the birds than by their need of
spiritual consolation. This, at least, is the impression we receive as
in imagination we join these immortal pilgrims at the Tabard. Our
guide is
Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still,--
and as he moves among his motley group, let us take a glance at the
Tabard.
The picture we have is that of the typical old English inn. "As late
as 1870 the ruins of the famous Tabard could be found. It was near St.
Saviour in the Borough High Street. Turning from the street into one
of those courtyards which abound in the east of London, the visitor
comes upon the ruins of the once famous inn the very name of which has
been transformed by time. It is now known as the '_Talbot_,' but the
inscription above the doorway contradicts the modern signboard and
proclaims the house to be '_The Ancient Tabard Inn_.' The whole yard
is redolent of dilapidation. Facing the visitor on entering is an
interesting block of old buildings, forming part of the left side, and
the bottom of what once was an ample courtyard. This part of the
building contains not improbably the shell of the corresponding
portion of the original inn. The doors of the first floor all open
into one of the wide balustraded galleries or verandas so common in
the genuine old English hostelry. Until recently the landlord of the
_Talbot_, then a small public-house, and still forming part of the
modern mass of brick building that blocks up the right side and part
of the center of the courtyard, rented the rooms by which this
balustraded gallery was, and still is, surrounded. They were then let
as bedrooms, and kept in good repair; and are supposed to occupy the
site of the very rooms once tenanted by the Canterbury pilgrims; the
gallery probably differing but little in appearance from what it was
when Chaucer frequented it in search of good wine. The landlord
eventually became insolvent; the paltry tavern was shut up, and the
bedrooms were dismantled. In that plight they might be seen some years
ago, may still possibly be seen--empty, dusty, dreary--ranged above
ground-floor premises which do duty as a parcels' conveyance office,
and abutting on a mean, ill-kept yard. Until within the last few
years the coigne of the old balustraded gallery was connected on the
right with the modern brick mass by an ancient wood-work bridge,
coeval at least with the oldest portion of the building as it stands.
But the bridge is gone, and the lust of gold and the pride of life
have so destroyed that spirit of reverence and refined superstitious
love for the venerable which should characterize an advanced
civilization, that it is greatly to be feared the rest of the
structure will soon follow. Yet it was in this courtyard, and before
this very inn, that Chaucer and his nine-and-twenty pilgrims stood in
picturesque confusion in the early dawn of that spring morning, long,
long ago; and agreed for their common amusement on the road each one
of them should tell at least one tale in going to, and another in
returning from Canterbury; the best story teller to be treated to a
supper by his fellow travelers on their return to the Tabard Inn. The
company comprises representatives from all classes of society except
the two extremes; there is neither a prince nor a beggar. The
characters are taken from middle-class life, of which they may be
accepted as fair and truthful types; being described with a vigorous
fidelity which has never been surpassed in the whole range of art.
Every figure stands out from the canvas sharp and clear like pictures
seen through a stereoscope. Not a touch, not a line is wanting; each
trick of speech and peculiarity of feature or of dress, is
photographed with Preraphaelite fidelity."
[Illustration: THE OLD TABARD INN
From a drawing by Herbert Railton]
II
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY AT ZUTPHEN
Whenever the name of Sir Philip Sidney is mentioned one involuntarily
thinks of noble generosity and knightly gentleness and self-sacrifice.
And here is the story of the act that forever united his name with the
highest ideals of chivalry:
In August, 1586, Leicester assembled his troops at Arnheim, which he
made his headquarters. After reducing Doesburg, he prepared to besiege
Zutphen, an important town on the Yssel. The garrison was in sore need
of provisions, which Parma, before marching to its relief, determined
to supply. A convoy of corn, meat, and other necessaries, sufficient
to victual the place for three months, was accordingly collected, and
on the twenty-second of September left the Spanish camp. So high was
Parma's estimate of the importance of preserving Zutphen, that the
escort despatched with the convoy numbered twenty-nine hundred foot
and six hundred horse. Leicester was informed of the enemy's movement,
but not of the force which protected it. An ambuscade of five hundred
men, under Sir John Norris, was held sufficient to intercept the
convoy. About fifty young officers volunteered to add their services.
This gallant band was composed of the flower of the English army....
It was indeed "an incredible extravagance to send a handful of such
heroes against such an army," but Leicester can scarcely be blamed for
failing to restrain the impulsive ardor which animated his entire
staff. Sidney's characteristic magnanimity betrayed him that day into
a fatal excess. He had risen at the first sound of the trumpet and
left his tent completely armed, but observing that Sir William Pelham,
an older soldier, had not protected his legs with cuishes, returned
and threw off his own. The morning was cold and densely foggy, as the
little company galloped forth to join their comrades in ambush. Just
as they came up, Sir John Norris had caught the first sounds of the
approaching convoy. Almost at the same moment the fog cleared off and
revealed at what terrible odds the battle was to be fought that day.
Mounted arquebusiers, pikemen and musketeers on foot, Spaniards,
Italians, and even, it is said, Albanians, to the number of
thirty-five hundred, guarded the wagons before and behind. The English
were but five hundred and fifty men. Yet among them all, the historian
has the right of blood to say with confidence, "There was no thought
of retreat." The indomitable national spirit embodied itself in the
war-cry of young Essex: "Follow me, good fellows, for the honor of
England and England's queen!" At the word a hundred horsemen, Sidney
in the midst, with lance in hand and curtel-axe at saddle-bow, spurred
to the charge. The enemy's cavalry broke, but the musketeers in the
rear fired a deadly volley, under cover of which it formed anew. A
second charge re-broke it. In the onset Sidney's horse was killed, but
he remounted and rode forward. Lord Willoughby, after unhorsing and
capturing the Albanian leader, lost his own horse. Attacked on all
sides, he must have fallen and yielded, when Sidney came to the rescue
and struck down his assailants. Individual valor, however, proved
unavailing against the might of numbers. After nearly two hours'
desperate opposition, the convoy still made way. Charge succeeded
charge in the vain effort to prevent its effecting a junction with the
garrison, two thousand of whom were waiting for the right moment to
sally forth. In the last of these onsets, Sir Philip's impetuosity
carried him within musket-shot of the camp. A bullet struck his
unprotected leg, just above the knee, and shattered the bone. He
endeavored to remain on the field, but his horse became unmanageable,
and in agonies of pain and thirst he rode back to the English
quarters, a mile and a half distant. An incident of that ride, as told
in the quaint language of Lord Brooke, retains the immortal charm of
pathos which commands our tears, how often soever repeated:
In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army,
where his uncle the general was, and being thirsty with excess
of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought
him, but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a
poor soldier carried along who had eaten his last at that same
feast, ghastly, casting up his eyes at the bottle, which Sir
Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and
delivered it to the poor man with these words, "Thy necessity
is greater than mine." And when he had pledged this poor
soldier, he was presently carried to Arnheim.
The golden chain of heroic actions, Christian and pagan, may contain
examples of self-denial sublimer and more absolute than this; but in
the blended grace and tenderness of its knightly courtesy, we know not
where to find its parallel.
Leicester met his nephew as he was borne back to the camp, and burst
into a genuine passion of sorrow. Many a rough soldier among those
who, in returning from the failure of their impossible enterprise, now
came up with their comrade, was unmanned for the first time that day.
Sir William Russell, as tender-hearted as he was daring, embraced him
weeping, and kissed his hand amid broken words of admiration and
sympathy. But Sidney needed no consolation. "I would," said Leicester,
in a letter to Sir Thomas Heneage, "you had stood by to hear his most
loyal speeches to her Majesty, his constant mind to the cause, his
loving care over me, and his most resolute determination for death;
not one jot appalled for his blow, which is the most grievous that
ever I saw with such a bullet."
The English surgeons at first gave hopes of his speedy restoration to
health, and the favorable news was sent to England. Lady Sidney, who
had followed him to Flushing some months before, at once hastened to
him, but with no idea of his danger. The nation at large thought him
convalescent. He himself, however, never expected to recover, although
submitting with fortitude to whatever systems of treatment were
proposed. Nothing was left untried that affection could suggest or the
imperfect science of the age effect. His wife tenderly nursed him, and
his two younger brothers were constantly at his side. His quondam foe,
Count Hohenlo, though himself dangerously wounded, sent off his own
physician, Adrian Van den Spiegel, to his aid. After examining the
injuries Adrian pronounced them mortal, and then hastened back to the
Count, whose case was not so desperate. "Away, villain!" cried the
generous soldier in a transport of wrath; "never see my face again
till thou bring better news of that man's recovery, for whose
redemption many such as I were happily lost!"
From the first to the last moment of his suffering Sir Philip's temper
was calm and cheerful. During the three weeks that he lingered at
Arnheim he occupied himself with the thoughts befitting a
death-bed.... On the 17th of October he felt himself dying, and
summoned his friends to say farewell. His latest words were addressed
to his brother Robert: "Love my memory; cherish my friends; their
faith to me may assure you they are honest. But, above all things,
govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator;
in me beholding the end of this world with all her vanities." When
powerless to speak, he replied to the entreaty of friends, who desired
some token of his trust in God, by clasping his hands in the attitude
of prayer, and a few moments afterwards had ceased to breathe.
--Adapted from the _Edinburgh Review_.
[Illustration: WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
From the portrait by Martin Droeshout]
III
ABOUT SHAKSPERE
What would we not give to be able to relate a half-dozen good
anecdotes about Shakspere? It is true there are traditions, the best
known of which is the story that he poached deer in the park of Sir
Thomas Lucy. Men have discussed the pros and cons of this
deer-stealing tradition with a gravity and fulness worthy of a
weightier cause. Suppose he did engage in the exciting sport of
worrying a nobleman who had a game preserve. Does that fact blacken
the youth's character? It is said the students at Oxford were the most
notorious poachers in the kingdom, although expulsion was the penalty.
Dr. Forman relates how a student who afterwards became a bishop was
more given to poaching than to study.
What do we know about the life of Shakspere? We know that he was born
at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, that he died there in 1616, April 23.
Some years ago I stood in the house which is reputed to be the place
of his birth; over 20,000 pilgrims from all lands each year pay their
shilling for the privilege of going through that house; the town
corporation has purchased the property and controls it; the place has
been photographed until the reading world is familiar with the
picture,--and yet we do not positively know that Shakspere was born in
that house. For Shakspere's father owned two houses at the time of the
son's birth; in which of the two he lived at this time we can but
guess. We suppose he lived in the Henley Street house, for it was the
better of the two houses and the Shakspere family was prospering when
William was born. The house itself has been remodeled. I think it is
Sidney Lee who says that the only thing that remains as it was in
Shakspere's time is the cellar. We do not know the day of Shakspere's
birth. In Holy Trinity Church one may look into the book containing
the baptismal record of the babe, William. He was baptized on April 26
and as children were usually baptized three days after their birth we
infer he was born April 23. We know that he married Anne Hathaway, a
woman eight years his senior; that in early manhood he went to London;
that he became an actor, dramatist, manager of a theater; that in
1597 he bought New Place, the stateliest residence in Stratford; that
he lived in Stratford during the last years of his life as a highly
esteemed and worthy man, and that he died in 1616 and was buried in
Trinity Church. These are the facts in the records of Shakspere's
life. They, however, are not the important facts. The main fact in his
life is his work, the matchless collection of literary masterpieces
that bear the imprint of his genius. It is also well to keep in mind
that our paucity of definite documentary records is not characteristic
of Shakspere alone. We may know little of Shakspere, but we know less
of Marlowe, his most brilliant competitor.
It is because we know so little of fact in the life of Shakspere that
we delight to let fancy paint its charming pictures. We are led into
the old Grammar School which Shakspere in all probability attended.
Tradition points out the desk at which he used to sit. We can infer
what he studied. The name of the Latin grammar then used we can deduce
from his quoting a Latin sentence just as it was misquoted in Lilly's
grammar. Artists have painted from imagination the picture of the boy
Shakspere. Poets have wandered over the Warwickshire region and in
their mind's eye have seen the youthful bard as he walked over the
same picturesque region. In _Midsummer-Night's Dream_ we read
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.--
and we see the young Shakspere, keen-eyed, observant, reveling in the
beauty of nature. In _Macbeth_ we read
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.--
and we recall that Kenilworth and Warwick Castles are near Stratford
and we see the boyish Shakspere as he walks about these magnificent
testimonies to the might and power of feudal England, or perhaps
mingling with the crowd when Royalty has come to Kenilworth to be
entertained by the lavish Leicester. So, too, when we find in _Much
Ado About Nothing_
The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait,--
we have a picture before us of the boy standing on the banks of the
placid Avon, enjoying the sports of boyhood and unconsciously
receiving impressions that shall later be reproduced to adorn with
freshest imagery the poetry of the world's greatest genius.
After years of labor the scholars of the world have scraped together
enough definite information to make the Life of Shakspere, as Mr.
Raleigh puts it, "assume the appearance of a scrap-heap of respectable
size." But to us the great fact in the life of Shakspere is that he
has given us his masterpieces. Perhaps it is just as well that we know
so little about the facts in his life. We have all the more time to
study his works. About their quality there is little of disagreement.
Three hundred years ago Ben Jonson wrote
... I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much,--
and the critic of to-day is saying the same thing, only he uses two
volumes instead of two lines to say it. It is true an occasional
voice, like that of Tolstoy's, will be heard in protest, but the
protest and the critic are both likely to be forgotten before the
consensus of three centuries shall be set aside.
Shakspere lives and shall live as long as the human race shall delight
in the study of the human heart, not because of the chastity and
clearness of his diction, not because of the supremacy of his
imagination, nor because of the variety of his melodious verse,--not
even because of the matchless combination of all these charms; but the
Bard of Stratford lives and shall live because his sanity enabled him
to see the "God of things as they are," and his passion penetrated
into the deepest sorrows and rose to the highest aspirations of the
human heart,--and throughout all this sympathizing with goodness and
while despising the depraved yet pitying with a heart of love.
No system-maker or formula-builder can account for Shakspere. Genius
is ever a miracle. However, we can study the environment in which
genius moves and has its being. When we ask ourselves how does it
happen that the plays of Shakspere breathe such a wholesome and
vigorous morality, we are led to two conclusions,--first, that the
England of Shakspere's time was a wholesome and vigorous England;
second, that the man Shakspere was sound to the core.
The close of the sixteenth century is one of the most remarkable
periods in the history of the world. Indeed, so striking is the
intellectual activity of this age that lately an eminent scientist
advanced the hypothesis that some electric influence, some magnetic
current must have let itself loose to work upon the destinies of the
world in the production of great men. For in that period in Italy we
find Tasso, the greatest of modern epic poets; then too lived Galileo
and Kepler, the astronomers; in France we find the philosophic
essayist, Montaigne; in Spain the world-renowned Cervantes, the author
of the immortal Don Quixote; in England both Bacon and Shakspere,
beside a host of other writers, generals, admirals and artists. This
same age is the most flourishing period in Mahometan India; so, too,
in China, in Japan, and even in far away Persia we find an unusual
degree of intellectual activity.
The England of Shakspere! The phrase suggests a train of associations
that kindle the imagination. The age of literature, war, conquest,
adventure, and achievement. The era of Edmund Spenser, "called from
faeryland to struggle 'gainst dark ways;" of Sir Philip Sidney, the
scholar, the courtier, the gentleman; of Sir Walter Raleigh, author,
knight, and explorer; of Bacon, "the wisest, meanest, brightest of
mankind." It is the time when in the _Golden Hind_ Drake is
circumnavigating the globe; when Hawkins is exploring the Indies, and
Frobisher is becoming the hero of the Northwest passage; the age of
marvelous tales told by intrepid explorers and adventurers returning
from America, a land whose fountains renewed youth and whose rivers
flowed over sands of gold. It is the era of English sea-dogs pillaging
Spanish provinces in spite of imperial manifestos,--above all, it is
the age of the Spanish Armada.
To recall what this means it is necessary to remember that Spain was
the great dominating empire of the sixteenth century. Philip II, the
Duke of Alva, the horrors of the Spanish inquisition, condemn Spain's
power in this period. But one midsummer morn all England awoke to the
glorious news that the Invincible Armada lay at the bottom of the sea.
England had triumphed, and now for the first time national life
dreamed of the possibility of leadership in the great game of
world-politics. The atmosphere was electric with new life. In rural
England along lanes flanked with green hedges Englishmen walked with
bosoms swelling with new pride, in bustling London vigorous burghers
strode the city's streets with hearts pulsating with new warmth, and
everywhere the eyes of all Englishmen flashed with new fire.
Could a soul so sensitive as Shakspere's live in such an atmosphere
and not be influenced by it? Listen to him as he pays his beautiful,
patriotic tribute to England's national glory:
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world.
And the second cause, we say, is the personality of the man himself.
Shakspere wrote pure and lofty poetry because his was a pure and lofty
nature. I know the disparagers of Shakspere and the advocates of the
Baconian theory make much of the traditional wildness of Shakspere's
youth. The common argument is that a man who is charged with the
poaching of deer in his youth is too bad to write good poetry,
therefore Bacon wrote Shakspere. Was Bacon an angel? By the same
process of reasoning Burns could not have written the Cotter's
Saturday Night. But I deny that Shakspere was profligate, and in
making this denial I need not prove the impeccability of Shakspere.
But his life was essentially pure, his heart good, because the
influence of the life is sane and wholesome.
Not alone the greatest intellect of his time, of all times, but also
the greatest heart, was that possessed by this Warwickshire poet. As a
man thinketh in his heart so he is. As Shakspere was, so he wrote.
This crystalline wholesome water dashing over this rocky cliff did
not have its origin in yonder pool. Pure water does not flow from a
mud-puddle. Here is a man who in twenty years writes in round numbers
forty productions--the task of Hercules. The product of the man
attests the nobility of his soul. No man can labor for twenty years
without putting his stamp upon his work. Shakspere was no bar-room
brawler, no prodigal spender of time and substance in riotous living.
He lived to the mature age of fifty-two and died a well-to-do man. The
prodigals of the world do not retire with a competency. I repeat that
Shakspere was not impeccable; he was no Puritan; but we cannot think
of the creator of Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Desdemona, Cordelia,
Portia, Rosalind, Miranda, and Prospero as other than a man of a
contrite spirit and a pure heart. As he surpassed his contemporaries
in breadth and loftiness of intellect, so too he surpassed them in the
reach and vigor of his moral feeling.
We cannot believe that this man who penetrated deeper than others into
the mystery of life missed the meaning of his own life. Let us hear
the conclusion of the whole matter--the power that moves the world is
not brilliancy of intellect; it is purity of heart. Nobility of
character is the essence of powerful personality. Lincoln is greater
than Webster, Washington than Jefferson, not through greater mental
grasp, but because of a purer spiritual essence. The world without
takes its meaning and color from the world within. Shakspere saw a
world of pure passion and wholesome sanity because his world within
was pure and sane.
[Illustration: JOHN MILTON
From a miniature by Faithorne, painted in 1667]
IV
JOHN MILTON
In 1623, when Milton was a boy of fifteen, John Heminge and Henry
Condell, "only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow
alive as was our Shakspere," had given to the world the folio edition
of Shakspere's works, very anxious that the said folio might commend
itself to "the most noble and incomparable pair of brethern," William,
Earl of this, and Philip, Earl of that, and exceedingly unconscious
that, next to the production of the works themselves, they were doing
the most important thing done, or likely to be done, in the literary
history of the world. Milton read Shakspere, and in the lines which he
wrote upon him in 1630, there seems to be the due throb of
transcendent admiration....
As Shakspere is the supreme name in this order of poets, the men of
sympathy and of humor, Milton stands first in that other great order
which is too didactic for humor, and of which Schiller is the best
recent representative. He was called the lady of his college not only
for his beautiful face, but because of the vestal purity and austerity
of his virtue. The men of the former class are intuitive, passionate,
impulsive; not steadily conscious of their powers; fitful,
unsystematic. Their love is ecstasy; their errors are the intoxication
of joy; their sorrows are the pangs of death....
Milton, the poet of Puritanism, stands out in bold contrast to these
imperfect characters. From his infancy there was nothing unregulated
in his life. His father, clearly a superior man, of keen
Protestantism, successful in business, well skilled in music, soon
perceived that one of the race of immortals had been born in his
house. He began, apparently with the conscious and delighted assent of
his son, to give the young Apollo such an education as Plato might
have prescribed. An eminently good education it proved to be; only not
so good, with a view to the production of a world-poet, as that which
nature, jealous of the Platos and pedagogues, and apt to tumble them
and their grammatical appurtenances out of the window when she has one
of her miraculous children in hand, had provided for that Stratford
lad who came to London broken in character and probably almost broken
in heart, some forty years earlier, to be a hanger-on of the theaters
and to mount the intellectual throne of the world. No deer-stealing
expeditions late o' nights when the moon silvered the elms of
Charlecote chase; no passionate love affairs and wild boy-marriage.
Milton, carefully grounded in the tongues, went in due course to
Cambridge University, and during those years when the youthful mind is
in its stage of richest recipiency, lived among the kind of men who
haunt seats of learning,--on the whole, the most uninteresting men in
existence, whose very knowledge is a learned ignorance; not bees of
industry, who have hoarded information by experience, but
book-_worms_.... It is important, also, that Milton was never to any
distracting extent in love. If Shakspere had been a distinguished
university man, would he have told us of a catch that could "draw
three souls out of one weaver?" And if the boy of eighteen had not
been in a fine frenzy about Anne Hathaway, could he have known how
Juliet and Romeo, Othello and Desdemona, loved?
... It is a proof of the fiery and inextinguishable nature of Milton's
genius that it triumphed over the artificiality of his training; that
there is the pulse of a true poetical life in his most highly wrought
poems, and that the whole mountain of his learning glows with the
strong internal flame. His inspiration was from within, the
inspiration of a profound enthusiasm for beauty and an impassioned
devotion to virtue. The district in which he lived during much of his
most elaborate self-education is not marked enough to have disturbed,
by strong impressions from without, the development of his genius from
within. Horton lies where the dead flat of southeastern Buckingham
meets the dead flat of southwestern Middlesex. Egham Hill, not quite
so high as Hampstead, and the chalk knoll on which Windsor Castle
fails to be sublime, are the loftiest ground in the immediate
neighborhood. Staines, the Pontes of the Romans, and Runnymede with
its associations, are near the parish church of Horton, in which
Milton worshiped for five or six years, and in which his mother is
buried, has one of the Norman porches common in the district, but is
drearily heavy in its general structure, and forms a notable contrast
to that fine example of the old English church in which, by the
willows of Avon, lie Shakspere's bones. The river Colne breaks itself,
a few miles to the north, into a leash of streams, the most
considerable of which flows by Horton. The abounding watercourses are
veiled with willows, but the tree does not seem to have attracted
Milton's attention. It was reserved for the poet-painter of the _Liber
Studiorum_ to show what depths of homely pathos, and what exquisite
picturesqueness of gnarled and knotted line, could be found in a
pollard willow, and for Tennyson to reveal the poetic expressiveness
of the tree as denoting a solemn and pensive landscape, such as that
amid whose "willowy hills and fields" rose the carol
... mournful, holy,
Chaunted loudly, chaunted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,
of the Lady of Shalott....
Milton's bodily appearance at this time was in brilliant
correspondence with the ideal which imagination might form of a
youthful poet. Perfect in all bodily proportions, an accomplished
fencer, with delicate flowing hair, and beautiful features through
which genius, still half in slumber, shed its mystic glow, he was all
that the imagination of Greece saw in the young Hyperion or Apollo.
... His three daughters, Anne, Deborah, and Mary, were the children of
his first wife. He was twice married after her death in 1653, but had
no more children. So early as 1644 his sight began to fail, and when
his little girls were left motherless, they could be known to him, as
Professor Masson touchingly says, "only as tiny voices of complaint
going about in the darkness." The tiny voices did not move him to love
or pity. His impatient and imperious nature had doubtless undergone
exquisite misery from the moaning discontent of his wife; the
daughters took the mother's part so soon as they were able to
understand her sorrows; and the grave Puritan displeasure with which
Milton regards the mother seems to have been transferred to the
children. His austerity as a Puritan and a pedagogue, and the worse
than old Hebrew meanness of his estimate of women, appear to the
greatest disadvantage in connection with his daughters. Had they been
sons, he would have thrown all his ardor into the enterprise of their
education. The training of boys was one of his enthusiasms; but his
daughters were taught nothing except to read, and were ordered to read
aloud to him in languages of which they did not understand a word.
Naturally they never loved him; his fame, which they were not able to
appreciate, cast on them no ray of comforting light; and they thought
probably in sad and scared bewilderment of the relations between their
unhappy wraith-like mother, and their Titan father. How different the
warm and tender relations between Shakspere and his children! In that
instance it was the daughter, the pet Judith, that was the demure
sweet Puritan, yet with a touch of her father's wit in her, and able
to enjoy all the depth of his smile when he would ask her whether
cakes and ale were to be _quite_ abolished when the reign of the
saints came in.
... To the man himself we turn, for one brief glance before laying
down the pen. In the evil times of the Restoration, in the land of
the Philistines, Agonistes but unconquerable, the Puritan Samson ended
his days. Serene and strong; conscious that the ambition of his youth
had been achieved, he begins the day with the Hebrew Bible, listens
reverently to words in which Moses or David or Isaiah spake of God.
But he attends no church, belongs to no communion, and has no form of
worship in his family; notable circumstances which we may refer, in
part at least, to his blindness, but significant of more than that.
His religion was of the spirit, and did not take kindly to any form.
Though the most Puritan of the Puritan, he had never stopped long in
the ranks of any Puritan party, or given satisfaction to Puritan
ecclesiastics and theologians. In his youth he loved the night; in his
old age he loves the sunlight of early morning as it glimmers on his
sightless eyes. The music which had been his delight since childhood
has still its charm, and he either sings or plays on the organ or
bass-violin every day. In his gray coat, at the door of his house in
Bunhill Fields, he sits on clear afternoons; a proud, ruggedly genial
old man, with sharp satiric touches in his talk, the untunable fiber
in him to the last. Eminent foreigners come to see him; friends
approach reverently, drawn by the splendor of his discourse. It would
range, one can well imagine, in glittering freedom, like "arabesques
of lightning," over all ages and all literatures. He was the prince of
scholars; a memory of superlative power waiting, as submissive
handmaid, on the queenliest imagination. The whole spectacle of
ancient civilization, its cities, its camps, its landscapes, was
before him. There he sat in his gray coat, like a statue cut in
granite. England had made a sordid failure, but he had not failed. His
soul's fellowship was with the great Republicans of Greece and Rome,
and with the Psalmist and Isaiah and Oliver Cromwell.
--From Peter Bayne in the _Contemporary Review_.
V
CHARLES LAMB, THE CLERK OF THE INDIA HOUSE
The author of the _Essays of Elia_ and _Tales Founded on the Plays of
Shakspere_ worked for the greater part of his life in the employ of
the Honorable East India Company. He received his appointment in 1792,
the year of the birth of Shelley. He had been trained at Christ's
Hospital for a university career; this gave him a good classical
education but not especially good preparation for his new work. Had he
been obliged to pass a civil service examination he would hardly have
received the appointment. Of geography and arithmetic he knew little.
The schoolboy of to-day will be surprised to learn that a boy a
hundred and more years ago might reach the age of fifteen in a good
grammar school of that period and yet not be able to use the
multiplication table. As late as 1823 Lamb writes: "I think I lose a
hundred pounds a year owing solely to my want of neatness in making up
accounts: how I puzzle 'em out at last is the wonder!" There is no
evidence, however, to show that Lamb did not overcome his lack of
preparation. The contrary impression sometimes prevails, due, perhaps,
to his supposed apology for his late arrival by his representation
that he made up for it by a correspondingly early departure. His
industry must have been appreciated, for his salary rose from nothing
to a fair figure.
The modern young man, desirous of earning a good salary at once, will
be surprised at the statement that Lamb worked for nothing at first.
He will be still more surprised to learn that in those days a clerk in
the employ of the great India Company worked three years for nothing.
This period evidently was considered as the apprenticeship. It is true
a gratuity of 30 pounds was given, and by extra work one might earn
small sums. In April, 1795, three years having ended, he received a
salary of 40 pounds a year. The next year it rose to 70. By 1799 it
had advanced to 90, and from then on to 1814 he received an increment
of ten pounds every two years. He also received a gratuity each year.
The gratuity by 1814 had amounted to 80 pounds. After a reorganization
of the company in 1815 Lamb seems to have progressed in salary, for he
then received 480 pounds, and in 1821 it was 700; and at the time of
his retirement it was 730.
On the whole, one can say that Lamb's lot was not a hard one. No
doubt, many of his fellow-authors had reason to envy him his assured
income. His work was hard and not always pleasant, but he knew, with
all his half-pretended grumbling, that it would not be wise to rely on
his pen for a livelihood. He once remonstrated with the poetical
Quaker, Bernard Barton, who proposed to give up a bank-clerkship, in
this wise: "Trust not the public; I bless every star that Providence,
not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next good to
settle me down on the stable foundation of Leadenhall.... Henceforth
I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employments; look upon
them as lovers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome, dead
timber of a desk that makes me live! a little grumbling is a wholesome
medicine for the spleen; but in my inner heart do I improve and
embrace this our close but unharassing way of life."
That his work was no sinecure can be gathered from this letter of
about 1815: "On Friday I was at office from ten in the morning (two
hours dinner excepted) to eleven at night; last night till nine. My
business and office business in general have increased so; I don't
mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it. I
never leave till four, and do not keep a holiday now once in ten
times, where I used to keep all red-letter days and some five days
besides, which I used to dub nature's holidays.... I had formerly
little to do.... Hard work and thinking about it taints even the
leisure hours--stains Sunday with workday contemplations."
After thirty-three years of service he was granted by his company a
pension of 450 pounds. On the minutes of the Court of Directors can be
found the following resolution: "that the resignation of Mr. Charles
Lamb, of the accountant-general's office, on account of certified
ill-health be accepted, and it appearing that he has served the
company faithfully for thirty-three years ... he be allowed a pension
of 450 pounds annually."
When the resolution was communicated to him he went home to enjoy one
long holiday of leisure and literary study and authorship. "I am
Retired Leisure.... I have worked task work, and have the rest of the
day to myself." But his day did not last many years. "Lamb was but
fifty when he quitted the service of the company; yet less than ten
years of life were left to him. Not only so, but the happiness he had
expected to find proved more and more elusive. The increasing
frequency of his sister's aberration was a heavy burden for a back
which grew daily less able to bear the strain. The leisure to which he
had looked forward so eagerly was spent in listening to incoherent
babblings, that rambling chat which was to him 'better than the sense
and sanity of this world.' In her lucid intervals they played picquet
together, or talked gravely but firmly of the inevitable separation
looming nearer and nearer. In 1830 Hazlitt died. Four years later that
'great and dear spirit,' Coleridge, passed away after long suffering.
The blow to Lamb was stunning in its severity; and the loss of this
earliest and best-loved friend possibly accelerated his own decease.
Towards the close of the year a fall while walking caused a trifling
wound. No harm was expected to result; but the general feebleness of
his health brought on erysipelas, and upon Saturday, January 3, 1835,
he was borne to his rest in a quiet corner of Edmonton Church-yard,
there to await the coming, twelve years later, of the sister who had
been throughout his life at once his greatest joy and his chiefest
care."
VI
DR. JOHNSON AND CHARLES LAMB
Between Johnson and Lamb there would seem to be little in common. The
ponderous old philosopher, "tearing his meat like a tiger, and
swallowing his tea in oceans," presents a picture very dissimilar to
that of the stammering Lamb whom Coleridge has well called the
"gentle-hearted Lamb." And yet there are many points of similarity.
Perhaps the most striking resemblance is in respect to their
generosity. The unfailing testimony of all their friends is that
neither could restrain the impulse to give. The celebrated De Quincey
is led to characterize Lamb's munificence as _princely_, while
Procter, one of his younger friends, simply says, "he gave away
greatly." On the other hand, the testimony in regard to the generosity
of Johnson is equally strong. He was so open-hearted that he could not
trust himself to go upon the street with much money in his purse.
Neither Lamb nor Johnson believed in the modern methods of attending
to charitable giving through the mediation of boards and committees.
Each violated the commonest precepts of a coldblooded political
economy. If want and suffering were depicted upon the face of the
mendicant, that was enough to call for the open purse. What if the
beggar did look like a thief or drunkard? He might spend the money for
gin or tobacco, but what of that? "Why should they be denied such
sweeteners of their existence?" was Johnson's indulgent plea. This
stern moralist so much enjoyed giving that he doubtless would have
regretted the passing of laws prohibiting the beggar from plying his
vocation in public. So too would the genial Elia, who obeyed his own
precept of "give and ask no questions."
While returning to his lodgings after midnight Johnson would often
drop pennies into the hands of poor children sleeping on the
thresholds and stalls, to furnish them with the means for a breakfast.
This was done at a time when he was living on pennies himself.
"Reader," pleads Elia in his _Praise of Chimney Sweepers_, "if thou
meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to
give him a penny--it is better to give him a twopence." And then Lamb
describes the choice and fragrant drink, _Saloop_, the delight of the
sweep, a basin of which together with a slice of delicate bread and
butter will cost but a twopence. As we read the description we have no
hesitancy in believing that the "unpennied sweep" frequently became a
pennied sweep after the gentle Elia had passed by.
Goldsmith once remarked that to be miserable was enough to insure the
protection of Johnson. This generous quality of mind filled the house
of Johnson with a queer assortment of pensioners. Had Lamb's home life
permitted, equally full of the needy and homeless would it have been.
In 1796 occurred the terrible tragedy that we may permit Lamb himself
to describe in his letter to Coleridge,--"White, or some of my
friends, or the public papers by this time may have informed you of
the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only
give you the outlines: My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of
insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only
time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in
a madhouse, from which I fear she must be moved to an hospital.... My
poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him
and my aunt.... God Almighty have us well in his keeping!" Lamb
assumed the tender care of his sister, and his watchfulness and loving
care are more beautiful than the most charming essay he ever wrote.
But this condition at home prevented that generous open-hearted
hospitality so characteristic of Johnson. As it was he contributed to
the support of several. For a long period he gave thirty pounds a year
to his old schoolmistress. Telfourd relates that when Lamb saw the
nurse who had waited on Coleridge during his last illness, he forced
five guineas on her. Equally impulsive was his manner toward Procter,
whom he one time noticed to be in low spirits and imagined the cause
to be lack of money. "My dear boy," said he suddenly turning toward
his friend, "I have a quantity of useless things, I have now in my
desk a--a hundred pounds--that I don't _know_ what to do with. Take
it."
Some years ago when comparing these two men a Mr. Roose wrote in
concluding his paper: "We are all familiar with Johnson's huge,
ungainly form, arrayed in brown suit more or less dilapidated,
singed, bushy wig, black stockings, and mean old shoes. A quaint
little figure, Lamb comes before our vision, in costume uncontemporary
and as queer as himself, consisting of a suit of black cloth (they
both affected dark colors), rusty silk stockings shown from the knees,
thick shoes a mile too large, shirt with a wide, ill-plaited frill,
and tiny white neckcloth tied in a minute bow."
It is pleasant to fancy these two originals being brought into
personal contact. Nor is it hard, for all the tokens to the contrary,
to imagine Elia taking the grand, humane old doctor into his embrace
(a huger armful than his beloved folios), sitting up with him o'
nights, as he did with them, delighting in the humor of his
conversation, which was said by a contemporary to be unequaled except
by the old comedians, in whom Lamb's spirit found diversion; piercing
to heights and depths in his nature which Boswell never revealed to
him; while Johnson, it may safely be inferred, would have loved this
"poor Charles," in whom Carlyle could perceive but so slender a strain
of worth. But had they met at all, it would have been on equal terms.
Goldsmith maintained with difficulty, though he did maintain, his
attitude of independence towards the colossus of his age. Charles
Lamb, without any difficulty and without the show of assertiveness,
would have maintained it better. Lamb, who from earliest manhood
refused to knock under to the threatening intellectual arrogance of
Coleridge; who shook Wordsworth by the nose instead of by the hand
with the greeting, "How d'ye do, old Lake Poet!"--his stammering voice
might have broken with impunity on the doctor's weightiest utterances
with the absurdest quips and twists of speech of which even he was
capable. Yet both were of wayward nature, and had they met might not
have coalesced.
Lamb would have understood Johnson better than Johnson would have
understood the whimsicalities of the witty clerk. At one time while
discussing authors with friends Lamb said,--"There is Dr. Johnson: I
have no curiosity; no strange uncertainty about him."
Johnson's restraint in the use of alcoholic drinks is in contrast with
Lamb's indulgence. But Johnson's intemperate tea-drinking makes him
one with Lamb in his struggle with tobacco. In writing to Coleridge
for advice on smoking, Lamb asks: "What do you think of smoking? I
want your sober _average noon opinion_ of it.... May be the truth is,
that _one_ pipe is wholesome, _two_ pipes toothsome, _three_ pipes
noisome, _four_ pipes fulsome, _five_ pipes quarrelsome; and that's
the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason."
And Telfourd tells us that when Parr saw Lamb puffing like some
furious enchanter, he asked how he had acquired the power of smoking
at such a rate. Lamb replied, "I toiled after it, sir, as some men
toil after virtue."
VII
THE DEATH OF DR. JOHNSON
By common consent Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ takes first place as a
biography. Some critics go so far as to say that the excellence of the
biography is to be accounted for by the deficiency in the character of
Boswell; that Boswell was such a blind and whole-souled worshiper of
Johnson that he exposed the faults of his subject with the same zeal
with which he published the virtues. This may be true. Whether true or
not, it is not an altogether bad quality. Many of us think that the
biographies of our modern men of letters would have more vivacity and
lifelikeness were they to contain an occasional glimpse of the hero
when he is not on the parade ground. The biography of Tennyson by his
son, Lord Hallam, would be far more convincing had the son given us
occasional pictures of the poet when he was not at his best. But,
perhaps, it is too much to hope that a reverent and admiring son can
give the world a vital, impartial, and comprehensive life of his
father.
Boswell has given us a full account of Johnson's last days. The gruff
old lexicographer had lived a robust life; he had faced many
temptations, and had not always retired from the conflict victorious.
On the whole, however, he had lived an exemplary life, but like many
another good man he had a dread of dying; he feared he might not meet
the last foe as worthily as a man of his character and reputation
should. But this was a groundless fear. For when the last illness was
upon him, he asked his physician to tell him plainly whether there was
any hope of his recovery. The doctor first asked his patient whether
he could hear the whole truth, whatever it might be. Upon hearing an
affirmative reply, the physician declared that in his opinion nothing
short of a miracle would restore health.
"Then," said Johnson, "I will take no more physic, not even my
opiates; for I have prayed that I may render up my soul unclouded."
A brother of Boswell's wrote the following letter concerning the last
hours of Johnson:
"The Doctor, from the time that he was certain his death was near,
appeared to be perfectly resigned, was seldom or never fretful or out
of temper, and often said to his faithful servant, who gave me this
account, 'Attend, Francis, to the salvation of your soul, which is the
object of greatest importance:' he also explained to him passages in
the Scripture, and seemed to have pleasure in talking upon religious
subjects.
"On Monday, the 13th of December, the day on which he died, a Miss
Morris, daughter to a particular friend of his, called, and said to
Francis, that she begged to be permitted to see the doctor, that she
might earnestly request him to give her his blessing. Francis went
into the room, followed by the young lady, and delivered the message.
The doctor turned himself in the bed, and said, 'God bless you, my
dear!' These were the last words he spoke. His difficulty of breathing
increased till about seven o'clock in the evening, when Mr. Barber and
Mrs. Desmoulins, who were sitting in the room, observed that the noise
he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found he was
dead."
This account, together with several others given by various friends,
assures us that the death of Johnson was trustful and tranquil. It is
another illustration of that beautiful dispensation of nature which,
as a rule, makes death a mere slipping away, a falling asleep. The
Francis who is mentioned in the letter is the faithful negro servant
whom Johnson so generously provided for in his will. In making his
will the doctor had asked a friend how much of an annuity gentlemen
usually gave to a favorite servant, and was told that in the case of a
nobleman fifty pounds a year was considered an adequate reward for
many years of faithful service:
"Then," said Johnson, "shall I be _nobilissimus_, for I mean to leave
Frank seventy pounds a year, and I desire you to tell him so."
This generosity was too much for the equanimity of Sir John Hawkins,
one of the executors of the will, who, when he found that this negro
servant would receive about fifteen hundred pounds, including an
annuity of seventy pounds a year, grumbled and muttered "a caveat
against ostentatious bounty and favor to negroes." But however much
the Sir Johns may grumble, we cannot think the less of Johnson for his
kindness in remembering a faithful and deserving servant.
Johnson's refusal to take either wine or opiates recalls that in an
age in which the use of alcoholic drinks was very common he was an
uncompromising foe to wine, and that he was, in his latter years, loud
in his praise of water. "As we drove back to Ashbourne," says Boswell,
"Dr. Johnson recommended to me, as he had often done, to drink water
only. 'For,' said he, 'you are then sure not to get drunk; whereas if
you drink wine, you are never sure.'" And this was not the only matter
in which he was in advance of his contemporaries, and of most of ours
too. Johnson liked satisfying food, such as a leg of pork, or veal pie
well stuffed, with plum pie and sugar, and he devoured enormous
quantities of fruit, especially peaches. His inordinate love of tea
has almost passed into a proverb,--he has actually been credited with
twenty-five cups at a sitting, and he would keep Mrs. Thrale brewing
it for him till four o'clock in the morning. The following impromptu,
spoken to Miss Reynolds, points its own moral:
For hear, alas, the dreadful truth,
Nor hear it with a frown:
Thou can'st not make the tea so fast
As I can gulp it down.
VIII
GRAY WRITES THE ELEGY
Recently I was conversing with a practical man of affairs who had just
returned from his first visit to Europe. Art galleries had proved
tiresome and Westminster Abbey had bored him. But there was one place
that he had determined to see and see it he did.
"What place was that?" I asked.
"Stoke Pogis," was the reply.
Is not this answer indicative of the attitude of thousands who can
never forget the exquisite charm cast over their youth by the
melancholy beauty of the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_? If fame was
the end of General Wolfe's ambition, he was wise in saying that he
would rather have written the _Elegy_ than be able to take Quebec on
the morrow; for of all English poems the _Elegy_ is the most popular
and widely known; it is the flower of the "literature of melancholy."
The _Elegy_ is the glorification of the obscure; therein lies its
popularity. The most of us are obscure. The _Elegy_ flatters us by
suggesting that we might have swayed the rod of empire or "waked to
ecstasy the living lyre," if we had had the chance,--or, what we think
is more likely the explanation, if we had not had a saner insight into
the values of life than the Miltons and Cromwells.
Stoke Pogis is always associated with the name of Gray. It is a
village, if such it may be called, between London and Windsor Castle.
The church is "on a little level space about four miles north of the
Thames at Eton. From the neighborhood of the church no vestige of
hamlet or village is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly
artificial, like a rustic church in a park on a stage. The traveler
almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, cheerfully
habited, make their appearance, dancing on the greensward."
Gray and his mother, the father having died in 1741, went to Stoke
Pogis in 1742. At West End House, a simple farmhouse of two stories,
Gray lived for many years. In the autumn of 1742 was begun the _Elegy
in a Country Church-yard_. The common impression is that the whole
poem was written at Stoke Pogis, but this is not the truth. It is
better to say that it was begun in October or November at Stoke Pogis,
continued seven years later at the same place and at Cambridge, and
finished at Stoke Pogis on June 12th, 1750. It is interesting to note
that in each case an impetus was given to the composition of the poem
by the death of a friend. Several months before the poem was begun in
1742, West, a friend whose death made a very deep impression upon the
sensitive nature of Gray, had passed away; and on October 31 Jonathan
Rogers, an uncle of Gray's, died at Stoke Pogis; and when the poem was
next taken up Gray was mourning the death of his aunt. In commenting
on this subject Mr. Gosse writes,--"He was a man who had a very
slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually in the Valley of
the Shadow of Death, and whose periods of greatest vitality were
those in which bereavement proved to him that, melancholy as he was,
even he had something to lose and to regret."
On the 12th of June, 1750, Gray wrote to his friend, Horace
Walpole,--"Having put an end to a thing whose beginning you have seen
long ago, I immediately send it to you. You will, I hope, look upon it
in the light of a thing with an end to it: a merit that most of my
writings have wanted, and are like to want." Walpole was naturally
delighted with the poem--so delighted, in fact, that he handed it
about from friend to friend and even made manuscript copies of it.
This caused some embarrassment to the poet. In February, 1751, he was
annoyed to find that the publisher of the _Magazine of Magazines_ was
actually printing his _Elegy_ in his periodical. So Gray immediately
wrote to Walpole: "As I am not at all disposed to be either so
indulgent or so correspondent as they desire, I have but one bad way
to escape the honor they would inflict upon me: and therefore am
obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately (which
may be done in less than a week's time) from your copy, but without my
name, in what form is most convenient for him, but on his best paper
and character; he must correct the press himself, and print it without
any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in some places
continued without them." On the 16th of February, only five days after
this letter was received, _An Elegy wrote in a Country Church-yard_
appeared as a large quarto pamphlet, anonymous, price sixpence.
From the very first it achieved great popularity. Magazine after
magazine published it without giving the author any compensation.
Gray was soon hit upon as the author. Unfortunately, the success of
the poem gave no increased income to the poet. Dodsley, the publisher,
is said to have made about a thousand pounds from the various poems of
Gray, but Gray had the impractical idea that it was not dignified for
a poet to make money from poetry.
In view of this lack of compensation for his poetic writings, it is
very gratifying to know that during the latter days of his life Gray
enjoyed the emolument arising from his holding the chair of Modern
Literature and Modern Languages at Cambridge. This paid him 400 pounds
a year, and did not require much work, as the office was a sinecure.
One of the biographers points out that this promotion was brought
about inadvertently through the riotous living of Gray's great enemy,
Lord Sandwich. Professor Lawrence Brockett, the incumbent of the chair
of Literature at Cambridge, dined with Lord Sandwich at Hinchinbroke.
He became so drunk that in riding home to Cambridge he fell from his
horse and broke his neck. At once five obscure dons made brisk
application for the vacant place, and Gray, sensitive and lacking the
arts of the politician, did not expect the place. But the author of
the _Elegy_ was no longer to be neglected. He soon received a letter
highly complimenting his work and offering him the professorship. Gray
accepted and was summoned to court to kiss the hand of the monarch,
George III. The king made several complimentary remarks to Gray.
Afterwards when the poet's friends asked Gray to tell them what the
king had said he replied that the room was so hot and he so
embarrassed that he really did not know what the king had said.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere;
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to misery--all he had--a tear,
He gained from Heaven--'twas all he wished--a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,--
There they alike in trembling hope repose,--
The bosom of his father and his God.
IX
COWPER AS A LETTER WRITER
William Cowper is well known as a poet, having written one of the most
popular hymns in the English language, and he is also one of the best
of letter writers. It is commonly said that we have lost the gentle
art of writing a good letter. When a man can send a postal card from
Boston to San Francisco for one cent and one from New York to Paris
for two cents, he is not likely to be so choice in his use of language
as when he paid a shilling for the privilege of getting a letter. In
the first letter which is here quoted we find Cowper writing an urgent
invitation to his cousin, Lady Hesketh, to visit him at Olney.
"And now, my dear, let me tell you once more that your kindness in
promising us a visit has charmed us both. I shall see you again. I
shall hear your voice. We shall take walks together. I will show you
my prospects, the hovel, the alcove, the Ouse and its banks,
everything that I have described. Talk not of an inn! Mention it not
for your life! We have never had so many visitors but we could
accommodate them all, though we have received Unwin and his wife, and
his sister, and his son, all at once. My dear, I will not let you
come till the end of May, or beginning of June, because before that
time my greenhouse will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only
pleasant room belonging to us. When the plants go out, we go in. I
line it with mats, and spread the floor with mats; and there you shall
sit with a bed of mignonette at your side, and a hedge of
honeysuckles, roses, and jasmine; and I will make you a bouquet of
myrtle every day. Sooner than the time I mention the country will not
be in complete beauty; and I will tell you what you shall find at your
first entrance. Imprimis, as soon as you have entered the vestibule,
if you cast a look on either side of you, you shall see on the right
hand a box of my making. It is the box in which have been lodged all
my hares, and in which lodges Puss (Cowper's pet hare) at present. But
he, poor fellow, is worn out with age and promises to die before you
can see him. On the right hand stands a cupboard, the work of the same
author; it was once a dove-cage, but I transformed it. Opposite to you
stands a table, which I also made. But a merciless servant having
scrubbed it till it became paralytic, it serves no purpose now but of
ornament, and all my clean shoes stand under it. On the left hand, at
the farther end of this superb vestibule, you will find the door of
the parlor, into which I will conduct you, and where I will introduce
you to Mrs. Unwin, unless we should meet her before, and where we will
be as happy as the day is long. Order yourself, my cousin, to the
_Swan_ at Newport and there you shall find me ready to conduct you to
Olney. My dear, I have told Homer what you say about casks and urns,
and have asked him whether he is sure that it is a cask in which
Jupiter keeps his wine. He swears that it is a cask, and that it will
never be anything better than a cask to eternity. So if the god is
content with it, we must even wonder at his taste, and be so
too.--Adieu! my dearest, dearest cousin,--W.C."
Cowper's letters are not interesting because they treat of the great
men and important affairs of his day. They are interesting because he
lived a quiet life and was able in his own way to paint a picture
treating of the common doings of an apparently unimportant life. Here
is a picture of an election in the country, or rather of the
candidates' methods in the old days:
"We were sitting yesterday after dinner, the two ladies and myself,
very composedly, and without the least apprehension of any such
intrusion, in our snug parlor, one lady knitting, the other netting,
and the gentleman winding worsted, when, to our unspeakable surprise,
a mob appeared before the window, a smart rap was heard at the door,
the boys halloed, and the maid announced Mr. Grenville. Puss was
unfortunately let out of her box, so that the candidate, with all his
good friends at his heels, was refused entrance at the grand entry,
and referred to the back door, as the only possible way of approach.
Candidates are creatures not very susceptible to affronts, and would
rather, I suppose, climb in at a window than be absolutely excluded.
In a minute the yard, the kitchen, and the parlor were filled. Mr.
Grenville, advancing toward me, shook me by the hand with a degree of
cordiality that was extremely seducing. As soon as he and as many more
as could find chairs were seated, he began to open the intent of his
visit. I told him I had no vote, for which he readily gave me credit.
I assured him I had no influence, which he was not equally inclined to
believe, and the less, no doubt, because Mr. Ashburner, the drapier,
addressing himself to me at that moment, informed me that I had a
great deal. Supposing that I could not be possessed of such a treasure
without knowing it, I ventured to confirm my first assertion by saying
that if I had any I was utterly at a loss to imagine where it could
be, or wherein it consisted. Thus ended the conference. Mr. Grenville
squeezed me by the hand again, kissed the ladies, and withdrew. He
kissed likewise the maid in the kitchen, and seemed upon the whole a
most loving, kissing, kind-hearted gentleman."
X
GIBBON AND HIS VISIT TO ROME
In that celebrated literary club founded by Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua
Reynolds were Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Fox, Gibbon, and Sheridan. Of
these Gibbon is not the least distinguished. He is an illustrious
example of what an ordinary personality can accomplish by reason of an
extraordinary devotion to one purpose. Some few men achieve fame by
their brilliant versatility; some, as in the case of Samuel Johnson,
by their commanding personal force; Gibbon has won a permanent place
in literary history by spending his life in doing one thing. That one
thing he did so well that E.A. Freeman, one of the prominent
historians of the nineteenth century, has truthfully said,--"He
remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern
research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside."
In his memoirs Gibbon reveals himself as a man with little dignity or
heroism. There is a droll story that is apt to suggest itself when one
thinks of Gibbon. At one time, when asking a dignified lady for her
hand in marriage, he fell upon his knees in proper lover-like manner.
Unfortunately Gibbon was so stout that upon her refusal he found
himself in the embarrassing need of calling in a servant to help him
to his feet again. Memories such as these, however, cannot blind us to
the essential worth in the character of the great historian. In the
light of his consecration to a worthy purpose his life is not without
its heroism. To write _The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_ is a monumental achievement. To bend every energy to the
fulfilling of a high resolve is heroic. From 1764 to 1787 his one aim
in life was to write a scholarly history that should cover the vast
field that he had chosen. He may lack that spiritual insight which
enables one to estimate world movements in the upper regions of
religion, but he did not lack unfaltering devotion to his purpose. So
well did he do his work that his six volumes can be found in the
library of every student of the past. The story is told of a great
German who learned English in order to read Gibbon in the original.
In the following extract from his Autobiography is found his own
explanation of the circumstances under which he conceived his vast
project "amid the ruins of the Capitol," in 1764:
"My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm; and the enthusiasm
which I do not feel, I have ever scorned to affect. But, at the
distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor express the
strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and
entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a
lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus
stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye;
and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could
descend to a cool and minute investigation. My guide was Mr. Byers, a
Scotch antiquary of experience and taste; but in the daily labor of
eighteen weeks, the powers of attention were sometimes fatigued, till
I was myself qualified, in a last review, to select and study the
capital works of ancient and modern art. Six weeks were borrowed for
my tour of Naples, the most populous of cities, relative to its size,
whose luxurious inhabitants seem to dwell on the confines of paradise
and hell-fire. I was presented to the boy-king by our new envoy, Sir
William Hamilton, who, wisely diverting his correspondence from the
Secretary of State to the Royal Society and British Museum, has
elucidated a country of such inestimable value to the naturalist and
antiquarian. On my return, I fondly embraced, for the last time, the
miracles of Rome.... In my pilgrimage from Rome to Loretto I again
crossed the Apennine; from the coast of the Adriatic I traversed a
fruitful and populous country, which could alone disprove the paradox
of Montesquieu, that modern Italy is a desert....
"The use of foreign travel has been often debated as a general
question; but the conclusion must be finally applied to the character
and circumstances of each individual. With the education of boys,
where or how they may pass over some juvenile years with the least
mischief to themselves or others, I have no concern. But after
supposing the previous and indispensable requisites of age, judgment,
a competent knowledge of men and books, and a freedom from domestic
prejudices, I will briefly describe the qualifications which I deem
most essential to a traveler. He should be endowed with an active,
indefatigable vigor of mind and body, which can seize every mode of
conveyance, and support, with a careless smile, every hardship of the
road, the weather, or the inn. The benefits of foreign travel will
correspond with the degrees of these qualifications; but, in this
sketch, those to whom I am known will not accuse me of framing my own
panegyric. It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat
musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars
were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of
writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."
XI
BURNS FALLS IN LOVE
When Robert Burns and his brother were working hard on the Mount
Oliphant farm, Robert fell in love. This experience, alas, in after
years became too frequent an occurrence to occasion much comment, for
the ease with which the poet fell in and out of love was the chief
fault in a faulty life. But when this episode occurred the boy was
still an innocent country lad in his fifteenth year, a lad perhaps
somewhat rude and clownish, at least such is an unfounded tradition.
Out of the monotony of this life of prosaic toil and drudgery, Burns
is lifted by the romance which fortunately he has himself described.
"You know," he says, "our country custom of coupling a man and woman
together as partners in the labors of the harvest. In my fifteenth
summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than
myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her
justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a
bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to
herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which in spite of
acid disappointment, gin-house prudence, and book-worm philosophy,
I hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the
contagion I cannot tell.... Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked
so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from
our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill
like an AEolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious
ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the
cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities,
she sung sweetly; and it was her favorite reel to which I attempted
giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to
imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men
who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be
composed by a country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with
whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well
as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep and cast peats, his
father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than
myself. Thus with me began love and poetry."
[Illustration: ROBERT BURNS
From the portrait by Nasmyth]
The song that was due to this boyish passion is called "Handsome
Nell," and is said to be the first he wrote. It can be found in any
complete edition of the poet's work. In after years he himself calls
it puerile and silly, but, while lacking the exquisite perfection of
Burns' later lyrics, it is far superior to the usual first attempts of
poets. The last two stanzas run thus:
A gaudy dress and gentle air
May slightly touch the heart;
But it's Innocence and Modesty
That polishes the dart.
'Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
'Tis this enchants my soul!
For absolutely in my breast
She reigns without control.
"I composed it," says Burns, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to
this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at
the remembrance."
Poor Burns! How much happier he would have been had all his loves been
as innocent as this first experience! In one of Tennyson's most
vigorous passages in the _Idylls_ we read,
... for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thoughts, and amiable words
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
Perhaps, if Burns in a later love affair had been successful in his
suit, his life and reputation would not have suffered as they have,
for the most culpable trait in the character of the famous Scotch poet
is the ease with which he abandoned one lover for another. He was
forever falling in love, and there is some evidence to the effect that
he loved two or three at the same time. There is only too much truth
in Burns' own lines,
Where'er I gaed, where'er I rade,
A mistress still I had aye.
But perhaps all this would have been different had Ellison Begbie, the
daughter of a small farmer, smiled favorably upon the advances of the
young farmer from Lochlea. She is said to have been a young woman of
great charm and liveliness of mind, though not a beauty. In after
years Burns always spoke of her with the greatest of respect and as
the one woman, of the many upon whom he had lavished his fickle
affection, who most likely would have made a pleasant partner for
life.
His love affair with this young lady took place near the close of his
twenty-second year. Her refusal seems to have had a malign influence
upon the career of our poet. Up to this time his love affairs,
although numerous, were innocent. As his brother Gilbert says, they
were "governed by the strictest rules of virtue and modesty." But
henceforth there is a change in the character of Burns. Shortly after
the fair Ellison had turned a deaf ear to the letters and love-songs
of the importunate wooer, Robert and his brother Gilbert went to
Irvine, hoping that in this flax-dressing center they could increase
their income by dressing the flax raised on their own farm. Here
Burns, always very susceptible to new influences,--he would not be the
poet he is had he not been keenly alive and susceptible,--fell under
the malignant charm of a wild sailor-lad whose habits were loose and
irregular. "He was," says Burns, "the only man I ever knew who was a
greater fool than myself, where woman was the presiding star; but he
spoke of lawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with
horror. _Here his friendship did me a mischief._"
XII
BURNS' FIRST BOOK OF POEMS
Burns was in trouble; he had failed as a farmer, and as a young man he
had wounded the sensibilities of his family. It seemed best to try a
new life in a new land, so he promised a Mr. Douglas to go to Jamaica
and become a bookkeeper on his estate there. But where should he get
the money to pay his passage? There were the poems lying in his
table-drawer--might they not be published and money be raised by the
sale? His friends encouraged him to publish them, and what is more to
the point, they subscribed in advance for a number of the copies. John
Wilson of Kilmarnock was to do the printing. During May, June, and
July of 1786 the printer was doing his work. At the end of July the
volume appeared, and soon the fame of the Ayrshire Plowman was
established. Let us hear Burns himself give his account of the
venture:
"I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and made what little
preparation was in my power for Jamaica. But, before leaving my native
country forever, I resolved to publish my poems. I weighed my
productions as impartially as was in my power; I thought they had
merit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a clever
fellow, even though it should never reach my ears--a poor
negro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and gone
to the world of spirits! I can truly say that _pauvre inconnu_ as I
then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of my works as I have at
this moment, when the public has decided in their favor....
"I threw off about six hundred copies, of which I got subscriptions
for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified by
the reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, all
expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came very
seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money,
to procure a passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the
price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage in
the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for
'Hungry ruin had me in the wind.'
"I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under all
the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had uncoupled the
merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last farewell
of my friends; my chest was on the way to Greenock; I had composed the
last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, '_The gloomy night is
gathering fast_,' when a letter from Dr. Blackwood to a friend of mine
overthrew all my schemes, by opening up new prospects to my poetic
ambition."
The success of the first edition of his poems was so pronounced that
Burns soon gave up the idea of going away to Jamaica. Ayrshire was
flattered to discover that within its borders lived a genuine poet.
Robert Heron, a young literary man living in that neighborhood, gives
us an account of the reception of the little book of poems: "Old and
young, high and low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, were alike
delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that time resident in
Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, and I can well remember how even
plowboys and maidservants would have gladly bestowed the wages they
earned most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary
clothing, if they might procure the works of Burns."
When Burns wished a second edition of his poems, he had a very poor
offer from his printer. So he went to Edinburgh to see whether he
could not make a more advantageous bargain in the Scottish capital. He
reached that famous city on the 28th of November, 1786. Here he was
feted and banqueted, admired and criticised. In April, 1787, the
second edition appeared. The volume was a handsome octavo. The
Scottish public had subscribed very liberally, and eventually Burns
received 500 pounds, but Creech, his publisher, was so slow in making
payments that Burns had to wait a long time before he received his
due.
Walter Scott was among the many who met Burns during his stay in
Edinburgh. Scott was but a boy of fifteen, but he never forgot the
glance of approval bestowed upon him by the poet. We are especially
fortunate in having Scott's own account of the incident: "As for
Burns, I may truly say, '_Virgilium vidi tantum_.' I was a lad of
fifteen when he came to Edinburgh. I saw him one day at the late
venerable Professor Adam Fergusson's. Of course we youngsters sat
silent, looked, and listened. The only thing I remember which was
remarkable in Burns' manner, was the effect produced upon him by a
print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his
dog sitting in misery on one side--on the other his widow, with her
child in her arms. These lines were written beneath:
Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain--
Bent o'er the babe, her eye dissolved in dew,
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave the sad presage of his future years,
The child of misery baptized in tears.
"Burns seemed much affected by the print: he actually shed tears. He
asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself
remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's,
called by the unpromising title of _The Justice of Peace_. I whispered
my information to a friend present, who mentioned it to Burns, who
rewarded me with a look and a word, which though of mere civility, I
then received with very great pleasure. His person was strong and
robust; his manner rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness
and simplicity. His countenance was more massive than it looks in any
of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known who he
was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school--the
_douce gudeman_ who held his own plow. There was a strong expression
of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think,
indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and
of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally, glowed) when he spoke
with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human
head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time."
XIII
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE IN SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
The following affecting narrative, written in Coleridge's person by
the tender-hearted Elia, gives the best view possible of Coleridge's
scanty and suffering commencement of life. At that time, it may be
premised, the dietary of Christ's Hospital was of the lowest:
breakfast consisting of a "quarter of penny loaf, moistened with
attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched
leathern jack it was poured from," and the weekly rule giving "three
banyan-days to four meat days."
"I was a poor, friendless boy; my parents, and those who should have
cared for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, whom
they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a
little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my
first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They
seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough.
One after another they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among
six hundred playmates. Oh the cruelty of separating a poor lad from
his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in
those unfledged years!... The warm, long days of summer never return
but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those
_whole days' leave_, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned
out for the livelong day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends
to go to or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the New River
which Lamb recalls with so much relish, better, I think, than he
can--for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not care much for such
water-parties. How we would sally forth into the fields, and strip
under the first warmth of the sun, and wanton like young dace in the
streams, getting appetites for the noon; which those of us that were
penniless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the
means of allaying--while the cattle and the birds and the fishes were
at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings; the very
beauty of the day and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of
liberty setting a keener edge upon them! How faint and languid,
finally, we would return toward nightfall to our desired morsel, half
rejoicing, half reluctant, that the hours of uneasy liberty had
expired!
"It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets
objectless, shivering at cold windows of printshops, to extract a
little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little
novelty, to pay a fifty-times-repeated visit (where our individual
faces would be as well known to the warden as those of his own
charges) to the lions in the Tower, to whose _levee_, by courtesy
immemorial, we had a prescriptive right of admission."
This melancholy and harsh life was, however, ameliorated by some
curious personal incidents. Once, for example, the solitary boy,
moving along the crowded streets, fancied, in the strange vividness of
his waking dream, that he was Leander swimming across the Hellespont.
His hand "came in contact with a gentleman's pocket" as he pursued
this visionary amusement, and for two or three minutes Coleridge was
in danger of being taken into custody as a pickpocket. On finding out
how matters really stood, however, this stranger--genial, nameless
soul--immediately gave to the strange boy the advantage of a
subscription to a library close by, thus setting him up, as it were,
in life. On another occasion, one of the higher boys, a
"deputy-Grecian," found him seated in a corner reading Virgil. "Are
you studying your lesson?" he asked. "No, I am reading for pleasure,"
said the boy, who was not sufficiently advanced to read Virgil in
school. This introduced him to the favorable notice of the head-master
Bowyer, and made of the elder scholar, Middleton by name, a steady
friend and counselor for years. Yet at this time Coleridge was
considered by the lower-master, under whom he was, "a dull and inept
scholar who could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax,
although he would give a rule in his own way." The life, however, of
this great school, with all its injudicious liberties and
confinements, must have been anything but a healthy one. Starved and
solitary, careless of play as play, and already full of that consuming
spiritual curiosity which never left him, Coleridge's devotion to the
indiscriminate stores of the circulating library gave the last
aggravation to all the unwholesome particulars of his life. "Conceive
what I must have been at fourteen," he exclaims. "I was in a continual
low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of
present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read,
read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island finding a mountain of
plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the
shapes of tables and chairs--hunger, and fancy!" ...
A droll incident occurred about this period of his life, which shows
... his absolute want of ambition. The friendless boy had made
acquaintance with a shoemaker and his wife, who had a shop near the
school, and who were kind to him; and thereupon he conceived the
extraordinary idea of getting himself apprenticed to his friend, whom
he persuaded to go to the head-master to make this wonderful proposal.
"Od's, my life, man, what d'ye mean?" cried the master, with not
unnatural indignation mingling with his amazement; and notwithstanding
Coleridge's support of the application, the shoemaker was turned out
of the place, and the would-be apprentice chosen, "against my will,"
he says, "as one of those destined for the university." The same
irascible yet excellent master flogged the boy severely on hearing
that he boasted of being an infidel....
His next stage in life was not a shoemaker's shop in Newgate Street,
but Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1791 at the age of
nineteen--the object of many high prophecies and hopes on the part of
his school and schoolfellows, who had unanimously determined that he
was to be great and do them honor. The first thing he did, however,
was alas! too common an incident: he got into debt, though not, it
would appear, for an overwhelming sum, or in any discreditable way. So
long as his friend of Christ's Hospital, Middleton, remained in
Cambridge, Coleridge pursued his studies with a great deal of
regularity and in his first year won the prize for a Greek ode. But
after awhile his industry slackened, and a kind of dreamy
idleness--implying no languor of the soul or common reluctance to
mental work, but rather, it would seem, a disinclination to work in
the usual grooves, and do what was expected of him--took possession of
the young scholar. "He was very studious, but his reading was
desultory and capricious," writes a fellow-student. "He was ready at
any time to shed his mind in conversation, and for the sake of this
his rooms were a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends.
What evenings I have spent in these rooms! What little suppers, or
_sizings_, as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus and
Plato and Thucydides were pushed aside with a pile of lexicons and the
like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day! Ever and anon a pamphlet
issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book
before us; Coleridge had read it in the morning and in the evening he
would repeat whole pages _verbatim_."
--Adapted from _Blackwood's Magazine_.
XIV
BYRON AS SWIMMER AND FEASTER
In 1858 Trelawney published his _Recollections of the Last Days of
Shelley and Byron_. In many ways this is a remarkable book. It is the
one source of information as to the last days of Shelley; concerning
Byron's, others have furnished material. Trelawney is suspected of
mingling some fiction with his truth, but the general tendency
nowadays is to place confidence in these _Recollections_. He may not
always give us a literal report, but he has likely reproduced the
spirit. He is much more sympathetic in his treatment of Shelley than
he is in his account of Byron. Trelawney himself was a remarkable
character. He lived far into the time of a new generation, dying in
his eighty-ninth year in 1881. Mary Shelley, in a letter to Maria
Gisborne, February, 1822, describes him as "A kind of half-Arab
Englishman.... He is clever: for his moral qualities I am yet in the
dark. He is a strange web which I am endeavoring to unravel."
In the _Recollections_ occurs this interesting account of Byron:
Byron has been accused of drinking deeply. Our universities,
certainly, did turn out more famous drinkers than scholars. In the
good old times, to drink lustily was the characteristic of all
Englishmen, just as tuft-hunting is now. Eternal swilling, and the
rank habits and braggadocio manners which it engendered, came to a
climax in George IV's reign. Since then, excessive drinking has gone
out of fashion, but an elaborate style of gastronomy has come in to
fill the void; so there is not much gained. Byron used to boast of the
quantity of wine he had drunk. He said, "We young Whigs imbibed
claret, and so saved our constitutions: the Tories stuck to port, and
destroyed theirs and their country's."
[Illustration: LORD BYRON
From the portrait by T. Phillips]
He bragged, too, of his prowess in riding, boxing, fencing, and even
walking; but to excel in these things feet are as necessary as hands. It
was difficult to avoid smiling at his boasting and self-glorification. In
the water a fin is better than a foot, and in that element he did well;
he was built for floating,--with a flexible body, open chest, broad beam,
and round limbs. If the sea was smooth and warm, he would stay in it for
hours; but as he seldom indulged in this sport, and when he did,
over-exerted himself, he suffered severely; which observing, and knowing
how deeply he would be mortified at being beaten, I had the magnanimity
when contending with him to give in.
He had a misgiving in his mind that I was trifling with him; and one
day as we were on the shore, and the _Bolivar_ at anchor, about three
miles off, he insisted on our trying conclusions; we were to swim to
the yacht, dine in the sea alongside of her, treading water the while,
and then to return to the shore. It was calm and hot, and seeing he
would not be fobbed off, we started. I reached the boat a long time
before he did; ordered the edibles to be ready, and floated until he
arrived. We ate our fare leisurely, from off a grating that floated
alongside, drank a bottle of ale, and I smoked a cigar, which he tried
to extinguish,--as he never smoked. We then put about, and struck off
towards the shore. We had not got a hundred yards on our passage, when
he retched violently, and, as that is often followed by cramp, I urged
him to put his hand on my shoulder that I might tow him back to the
schooner.
"Keep off, you villain, don't touch me. I'll drown ere I give in."
I answered as Iago did to Roderigo:
"'A fig for drowning! drown cats and blind puppies.' I shall go on
board and try the effects of a glass of grog to stay my stomach."
"Come on," he shouted, "I am always better after vomiting."
With difficulty I deluded him back; I went on board, and he sat on the
steps of the accommodation-ladder, with his feet in the water. I
handed him a wineglass of brandy, and screened him from the burning
sun. He was in a sullen mood, but after a time resumed his usual tone.
Nothing could induce him to be landed in the schooner's boat, though I
protested I had had enough of the water.
"You may do as you like," he called out, and plumped in, and we swam
on shore.
He never afterwards alluded to this event, nor to his prowess in
swimming, to me, except in the past tense. He was ill, and kept to his
bed for two days afterwards.
To return to his drinking propensities, after this digression about
his gymnastic prowess: I must say, that of all his vauntings, it was,
luckily for him, the emptiest--that is, after he left England and his
boon companions, as I know nothing of what he did there. From all that
I heard or witnessed of his habits abroad, he was and had been
exceedingly abstemious in eating and drinking. When alone, he drank a
glass or two of small claret or hock, and when utterly exhausted at
night, a single glass of grog; which when I mixed it for him I lowered
to what sailors call "water bewitched," and he never made any remark.
I once, to try him, omitted the alcohol; he then said, "Tre, have you
not forgotten the creature comfort?" I then put in two spoonfuls, and
he was satisfied. This does not look like an habitual toper. His
English acquaintances in Italy were, he said in derision, all
milksops. On the rare occasion of any of his former friends visiting
him, he would urge them to have a carouse with him, but they had grown
wiser. He used to say that little Tommy Moore was the only man he knew
who stuck to the bottle and put him on his mettle, adding, "But he is
a native of the damp isle, where men subsist by suction."
Byron had not damaged his body by strong drinks, but his terror of
getting fat was so great that he reduced his diet to the point of
absolute starvation. He was of that soft, lymphatic temperament which
it is almost impossible to keep within moderate compass, particularly
as in his case his lameness prevented his taking exercise. When he
added to his weight, even standing was painful, so he resolved to keep
down to eleven stone, or shoot himself. He said everything he
swallowed was instantly converted into tallow and deposited on his
ribs.
He was the only human being I ever met with who had sufficient
self-restraint and resolution to resist this proneness to fatten: he
did so, and at Genoa, where he was last weighed, he was ten stone and
nine pounds, and looked much less. This was not from vanity about his
personal appearance, but from a better motive; and as, like Justice
Greedy, he was always hungry, his merit was the greater. Occasionally
he relaxed his vigilance, when he swelled apace.
I remember one of his old friends saying, "Byron, how well you are
looking!" If he had stopped there it had been well, but when he added,
"You are getting fat," Byron's brow reddened, and his eyes
flashed--"Do you call getting fat looking well, as if I were a hog?"
and, turning to me, he muttered, "The beast, I can hardly keep my
hands off him." The man who thus offended him was the husband of the
lady addressed as "Genevra," and the original of his "Zuleika," in the
_Bride of Abydos_. I don't think he had much appetite for his dinner
that day, or for many days, and never forgave the man who, so far from
wishing to offend, intended to pay him a compliment.
Byron said he had tried all sorts of experiments to stay his hunger,
without adding to his bulk. "I swelled," he said, "at one time to
fourteen stone, so I clapped the muzzle to my jaws, and, like the
hibernating animals, consumed my own fat."
He would exist on biscuits and soda-water for days together, then, to
allay the eternal hunger gnawing at his vitals, he would make up a
horrid mess of cold potatoes, rice, fish, or greens, deluged in
vinegar, and gobble it up like a famished dog. On either of these
unsavory dishes, with a biscuit and a glass or two of Rhine wine, he
cared not how sour, he called feasting sumptuously. Upon my observing
he might as well have fresh fish and vegetables, instead of stale, he
laughed and answered:
"I have an advantage over you, I have no palate; one thing is as good
as another to me."
"Nothing," I said, "disagrees with the natural man; he fasts and
gorges, his nerves and brain don't bother him; but if you wish to
live?--
"Who wants to live?" he replied, "not I. The Byrons are a short-lived
race on both sides, father and mother; longevity is hereditary: I am
nearly at the end of my tether. I don't care for death a ----; it is
her sting! I can't bear pain."
His habits and want of exercise damaged him, not drink. It must be
borne in mind, moreover, that his brain was always working at high
pressure. The consequences resulting from his way of life were low or
intermittent fevers; these last had fastened on him in his early
travels in the Levant; and there is this peculiarity in malarial
fevers, that if you have once had them, you are ever afterwards
susceptible to a renewal of their attacks if within their reach, and
Byron was hardly ever out of it. Venice and Ravenna are belted in with
swamps, and fevers are rife in the autumn. By starving his body Byron
kept his brains clear; no man had brighter eyes or a clearer voice;
and his resolute bearing and prompt replies, when excited, gave to
his body an appearance of muscular power that imposed on strangers. I
never doubted, for he was indifferent to life, and prouder than
Lucifer, that if he had drawn his sword in Greece, or elsewhere, he
would have thrown away the scabbard.
[Illustration: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
From a chalk drawing after the original painting by Miss
Curran]
XV
SHELLEY AS A FRESHMAN
If one were to name ten of the greatest English poets beginning with
Chaucer and ending with Tennyson, the name of Shelley would be
included, although he died before he was thirty years old. Hogg, a
friend of Shelley's, has given us an interesting account of their
meeting when both were freshmen at Oxford.
"At the commencement of Michaelmas Term," writes Hogg, "that is, at
the end of October in the year 1801, I happened one day to sit next a
freshman at dinner; it was his first appearance in hall. His figure
was slight, and his aspect remarkably youthful, even at our table,
where all were very young. He seemed thoughtful and absent. He ate
little and had no acquaintance with any one. I know not how we fell
into conversation, for such familiarity was unusual, and, strange to
say, much reserve prevailed in a society where there could not
possibly be occasion for any." This conversation led into a heated
discussion of the merits of German and Italian literature. When the
time for leaving the dining hall had come, Hogg invited his new
acquaintance over to his rooms. During the transit the thread of the
argument was lost, and while Hogg was lighting the candles Shelley
frankly said that he was not competent to argue the point, as he had
little knowledge of either German or Italian literature. Then Hogg
with equal ingenuousness confessed that he knew but little of Italian
and nothing of German literature.
So the talk went merrily on. Shelley said it made little difference
whether Italian or German literature were the more worthy, for all
literature, what was it but vain trifling? What is the study of
language but the study of words, of phrases, of the names of things?
How much better and wiser to study things themselves!
"I inquired," says Hogg, "a little bewildered, how this was to be
effected. He answered, 'Through the physical sciences, and especially
through chemistry,' and raising his voice, his face flushing as he
spoke, he discoursed, with a degree of animation that far outshone his
zeal in defense of the Germans, of chemistry and chemical analysis."
While this is going on Hogg studies the youthful speaker. What manner
of man is this brilliant guest? "It was a sum of many contradictions.
His figure was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and
strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low
stature. His clothes were expensive and made after the most approved
mode of the day; but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His
gestures were abrupt, and sometimes violent, occasionally even
awkward, yet more frequently gentle and graceful. His complexion was
delicate and almost feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was
tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn,
as he said, in shooting. His features, his whole face and
particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small, yet the last
appeared of a remarkable bulk, for his hair was long and bushy, and in
fits of absence, and in the agonies (if I may use the word) of anxious
thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands, or passed his
fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was
singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the mode to imitate
stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair
was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity
was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth,
perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely
powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid
and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other
countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the
intellectual, for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and
especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound
religious veneration that characterizes the best works, and chiefly
the frescoes of the great masters of Florence and Rome."
The next day Hogg pays a visit to Shelley's rooms. The furniture was
new and the walls were freshly papered, but everything in the room was
in confusion. "Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments,
clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable,
with money, stockings, prints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were
scattered on the floor in every place, as if the young chemist, in
order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to
reconstruct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the carpet,
were already stained with large spots of various hues, which
frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an
air pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass
jars were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. Upon the table by his
side were some books lying open, several letters, a bundle of new
pens, and a bottle of japan ink, that served as an ink-stand, a piece
of deal, lately part of the lid of a box, with many chips, and a
handsome razor that had been used as a knife. There were bottles of
soda-water, sugar, pieces of lemon, and the traces of an effervescent
beverage. Two piles of books supported the tongs, and these upheld a
small glass retort above an argand lamp. I had not been seated many
minutes before the liquor in the vessel boiled over, adding fresh
stains to the table, and rising in fumes with a disagreeable odor.
Shelley snatched the glass quickly, and dashing it in pieces among
ashes under the grate, increased the unpleasant and penetrating
effluvium."
Hogg and Shelley soon became fast friends and met every evening. "I
was enabled," writes Hogg, "to continue my studies in the evening in
consequence of a very remarkable peculiarity. My young and energetic
friend was then overcome by extreme drowsiness, which speedily and
completely vanquished him; he would sleep from two to four hours,
often so soundly that his slumbers resembled a deep lethargy; he lay
occasionally upon the sofa, but more commonly stretched upon the rug
before a large fire, like a cat, and his little round head was
exposed to such fierce heat, that I used to wonder how he was able to
bear it. Sometimes I have interposed some shelter, but rarely with any
permanent effect, for the sleeper usually contrived to turn himself,
and to roll again into the spot where the fire glowed the brightest.
His torpor was generally profound, but he would sometimes discourse
incoherently for a long while in his sleep. At six he would suddenly
compose himself, even in the midst of an animated narrative or of
earnest discussion, and he would lie buried in entire forgetfulness,
in a sweet and mighty oblivion, until ten, when he would suddenly
start up, and rubbing his eyes with great violence, and passing his
fingers swiftly through his long hair, would enter at once into a
vehement argument, or begin to recite verses, either of his own
composition or from the works of others, with a rapidity and an energy
that were often quite painful. During the period of his occultation I
took tea, and read or wrote without interruption. He would sometimes
sleep for a shorter time, for about two hours, postponing for the like
period the commencement of his retreat to the rug, and rising with
tolerable punctuality at ten, and sometimes, though rarely, he was
able entirely to forego the accustomed refreshment."
After supper, which Shelley would take upon awaking at ten, the two
friends would talk and read together until two o'clock.
XVI
THE DEATH OF SHELLEY
In the Protestant cemetery at Rome one can find in an obscure place a
plain stone bearing record of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and these lines
from Shakspere's Tempest:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
And this is the story of how Shelley happens to have a memorial in the
Roman cemetery:
Shelley was a revolutionist in religion and politics, and
revolutionists are seldom popular at home. Shelley's lyric poetry is
unsurpassed, but his theories in some respects will never meet with
the approval of common-sense humanity. England proved uncomfortable
and so he left his country to live in other lands. In 1822 we find him
with his family and a Mr. and Mrs. Williams in Casa Magni, a Roman
villa in a cove on the bay of Spezzia. Here the poet and his friends
became very fond of sailing in a boat which had been made for them.
The boat, which they called the Ariel, was twenty-eight feet long and
eight feet broad, and this with the assistance of a lad they learned
to manage fairly well. To Shelley, whose health had been failing, the
out-of-door life gave renewed vigor.
On the eighth of July, Shelley and Williams, accompanied by a
sailor-lad, left the harbor of Leghorn to go home to their wives, from
whom they had been absent for several days. They had gone to Pisa to
welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy, to meet other friends (among the number
was Byron), and to do some business. Neither Shelley, Williams, nor
the lad, was ever seen alive after that day. As we are indebted to
Hogg for the best pen-pictures of the boy Shelley, so we are indebted
to Trelawney for the best description of the closing scene. So we
shall follow Trelawney's account in the main.
Trelawney was in Leghorn and intended to accompany his friends out of
the harbor in a separate boat, but owing to the refusal of the health
officer of the harbor he was not allowed to go. As from his own vessel
he watched the Ariel, containing the small party happy in the thought
that in seven short hours they should be at home with their loved
ones, his Genoese mate turned to him and said: "They are standing too
much in-shore; the current will set them there." "They will soon have
the land-breeze," replied Trelawney. "Maybe," said the mate, "she will
soon have too much breeze; that gaff topsail is foolish in a boat with
no deck and no sailor on board." Then he added as he pointed to the
southwest, "Look at those black lines and dirty rags hanging on them
out of the sky; look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing
mischief."
"Although the sun was obscured by mists," Trelawney writes, "it was
oppressively sultry. There was not a breath of air in the harbor. The
heaviness of the atmosphere and an unwonted stillness benumbed my
senses. I went down into the cabin and sank into a slumber. I was
roused up by a noise overhead, and went on deck. The men were getting
up another chain-cable to let go another anchor. There was a general
stir amongst the shipping; shifting berths, getting down yards and
masts, veering out cables, hauling in of hawsers, letting go anchors,
hailing from the ships and quays, boats sculling rapidly to and fro.
It was almost dusk, although only half-past six o'clock. The sea was
of the color and looked as solid and smooth as a sheet of lead, and
covered with an oily scum. Gusts of wind swept over without ruffling
it, and big drops of rain fell on its surface, rebounding, as if they
could not penetrate it. There was a commotion in the air, made up of
many threatening sounds, coming upon us from the sea. Fishing craft
and coasting vessels, under bare poles, rushed by us in shoals,
running foul of the ships in the harbor. As yet the din and hubbub was
that made by men, but their shrill pipings were suddenly silenced by
the crashing voice of a thunder-squall that burst right over our
heads. For some time no other sounds were to be heard than the
thunder, wind, and rain. When the fury of the storm, which did not
last for more than twenty minutes, had abated and the horizon was in
some degree cleared, I looked to sea anxiously, in the hope of
descrying Shelley's boat amongst the many small craft scattered about.
I watched every speck that loomed on the horizon, thinking that they
would have borne up on their return to the port, as all the other
boats that had gone out in the same direction had done."
Then followed a period of painful suspense. Were they safe or had they
gone down? On the third day Trelawney went to Pisa to ascertain
whether any one had heard anything of Shelley. "I told my fears to
Hunt," he writes, "and then went upstairs to Byron. When I told him
his lip quivered, and his voice faltered as he questioned me."
And what of the wives at Casa Magni awaiting the return of their
husbands? Let one of the two tell the story. Mary is the wife of
Shelley, and Jane is Mrs. Williams.
"Yet I thought when he, when my Shelley returns, I shall be happy--he
will comfort me; if my boy be ill, he will restore him and encourage
me.... Thus a week passed. On Monday, 8th, Jane had a letter from
Edward dated Saturday; he said that he waited at Leghorn for Shelley,
who was at Pisa; that Shelley's return was certain; 'but,' he
continued, 'if I should not come by Monday, I will come in a felucca,
and you may expect me on Thursday evening at furthest.'
"This was Monday, the fatal Monday, but with us it was stormy all day,
and we did not at all suppose that they could put to sea. At twelve at
night we had a thunder-storm. Tuesday it rained all day and was
calm--the sky wept on their graves. On Wednesday, the wind was fair
from Leghorn, and in the evening several feluccas arrived thence. One
brought word they had sailed Monday, but we did not believe them.
Thursday was another day of fair wind, and when twelve at night came,
and we did not see the tall sails of the little boat double the
promontory before us, we began to fear, not the truth, but some
illness, some disagreeable news for their detention."
"Jane got so uneasy that she determined to proceed the next day to
Leghorn in a boat to see what was the matter. Friday came and with it
a heavy sea and bad wind. Jane, however, resolved to be rowed to
Leghorn, since no boat could sail, and busied herself in preparation.
I wished her to wait for letters, since Friday was letter-day. She
would not, but the sea detained her; the swell rose so that no boat
would endure out. At twelve at noon our letters came; there was one
from Hunt to Shelley; it said, 'Pray write to tell us how you got
home, for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed on Monday
and we are anxious.' The paper fell from me. I trembled all over. Jane
read it. 'Then it is all over,' she said. 'No, my dear Jane,' I cried,
'it is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful. Come with me--we
will go to Leghorn, we will post, to be swift and learn our fate.'
"We crossed to Lerici ... we posted to Pisa. It must have been fearful
to see us--two poor, wild, aghast creatures, driving (like Matilda)
towards the sea to learn if we were to be forever doomed to misery. I
knew that Hunt was at Pisa, at Lord Byron's house, but I thought that
Lord Byron was at Leghorn. I settled that we should drive to Casa
Lanfranchi, that I should get out and ask the fearful question of
Hunt, 'Do you know anything of Shelley?' On entering Pisa, the idea of
seeing Hunt for the first time for four years under such circumstances
and asking him such a question was so terrific to me that it was with
difficulty that I prevented myself from going into convulsions. My
struggles were dreadful. They knocked at the door and some one called
out, 'Chi e?' It was the Guiccioli's maid. Lord Byron was in Pisa.
Hunt was in bed, so I was to see Lord Byron instead of him. This was a
great relief to me. I staggered upstairs; the Guicciola came to meet
me smiling, while I could hardly say, 'Where is he--Sapete alcuna cosa
di Shelley?' They knew nothing; he had left Pisa on Sunday; on Monday
he had sailed; there had been bad weather Monday afternoon; more they
knew not."
XVII
THE SCHOOL-DAYS OF JOHN KEATS
In the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the North Road
from London, my father, John Clarke, says Charles Cowden Clarke in
_The Gentleman's Magazine_, kept a school. The house had been built by
a West India merchant in the latter end of the seventeenth or
beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of
the domestic architecture of that period, the whole front being of the
purest red brick, wrought by means of molds into rich designs of
flowers and pomegranates, with heads of cherubim over niches in the
center of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect
finish of the structure were such as to procure its protection when a
branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to
Enfield....
Here it was that John Keats all but commenced, and did complete, his
school education. He was born on the twenty-ninth of October, 1795,
and he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from
the child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will
be readily conceived that it is difficult to recall from the "dark
backward and abysm" of seventy-odd years the general acts of perhaps
the youngest individual in a corporation of between seventy and
eighty youngsters; and very little more of Keats's child-life can I
remember than that he had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite
with all, particularly my mother....
Keats's father was the principal servant at the Swan and Hoop
stables--a man of so remarkably fine a common-sense, and native
respectability, that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his
demeanor used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit
his boys. John was the only one resembling him in person and feature,
with brown hair and dark hazel eyes. The father was killed by a fall
from his horse in returning from a visit to the school. This detail may
be deemed requisite when we see in the last memoir of the poet the
statement that "John Keats was born on the twenty-ninth of October,
1795, in the upper rank of the middle class." His two brothers--George,
older, and Thomas, younger than himself--were like the mother, who was
tall, of good figure, with large oval face and sensible deportment. The
last of the family was a sister--Fanny, I think, much younger than
all,--and I hope still living (in 1874)--of whom I remember, when once
walking in the garden with her brothers, my mother speaking of her with
much fondness for her pretty and simple manners....
In the early part of his school-life John gave no extraordinary
indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him
afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit
in all his undertakings: I never knew it misdirected in his required
pursuit of study. He was a most orderly scholar. The future
ramifications of that noble genius were then closely shut in the seed,
which was greedily drinking in the moisture which made it afterwards
burst forth so kindly into luxuriance and beauty.
My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing
prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of
voluntary work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last
two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that,
upon each occasion he took the first prize by a considerable distance.
He was at work before the first school hour began, and that was at
seven o'clock, almost all the intervening times of recreation were so
devoted, and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, he
would be in the school--almost the only one--at his Latin or French
translation, and so unconscious and regardless was he of the
consequences of so close and persevering an application that he never
would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes
driven out for the purpose by one of his masters.
It has just been said that he was a favorite with all. Not the less
beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which, when
roused, was one of the most picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I
ever saw. One of the transports of that marvelous actor, Edmund
Kean--whom, by the way, he idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and
the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one
occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behavior, had
boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself in the
received posture of offense, and, it was said, struck the usher--who
could, so to say, have put him into his pocket. His passion at times
was almost ungovernable, and his brother George, being considerably
the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main
force, laughing when John was in "one of his moods," and was
endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw
conflagration, for he had an intensely tender affection for his
brothers and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not
merely the "favorite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his
terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of
a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a
feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from
any one, superior or equal, who had known him.
In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he
remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading.
Thus, his whole time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive
memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those
last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted
principally of abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note;
Mavor's collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson's
histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss
Edgeworth's productions, together with many other works equally well
calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly
recurring sources of attraction were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's
_Classical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence's
_Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with
the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled in that creed outworn;" for
his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the
_AEneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before
leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a
considerable portion. And yet I remember that at that early
age--mayhap under fourteen--notwithstanding, and through all its
incidental attractiveness, he hazarded the opinion to me (and the
expression riveted my surprise), that there was feebleness in the
structure of the work. He must have gone through all the better
publications in the school library, for he asked me to lend him some
of my books, and, in my "mind's eye" I now see him at supper (we had
our meals in the school-room), sitting back on the form, from the
table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's _History of His Own Time_
between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This
work, and Leigh Hunt's _Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used
to lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil
and religious liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his
guardians, being informed what books I had lent him to read, declared
that if he had fifty children he would not send one of them to that
school. Bless his patriot head!
When he left Enfield at fourteen years of age, he was apprenticed to
Mr. Thomas Hammond, a medical man, residing in Church Street,
Edmonton, and exactly two miles from Enfield. This arrangement
evidently gave him satisfaction, and I fear it was the most placid
period of his painful life; for now, with the exception of the duty he
had to perform in the surgery--by no means an onerous one--his whole
leisure hours were employed in indulging his passion for reading and
translating. During his apprenticeship he finished the _AEneid_.
The distance between our residences being so short, I gladly
encouraged his inclination to come over when he could claim a leisure
hour; and in consequence I saw him about five or six times a month on
my own leisure afternoons. He rarely came empty-handed; either he had
a book to read, or brought one to be exchanged. When the weather
permitted, we always sat in an arbor at the end of a spacious garden,
and--in Boswellian dialect--"we had a good talk." ...
XVIII
THE HEROISM OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
When Carlyle wrote and lectured on _Heroes and Hero Worship_, he would
have made no mistake in selecting one of his contemporary countrymen
as a fine example of the man of letters as hero. But it is one of the
characteristics of human nature to see the heroic in the remote in
time and place rather than in the near. Carlyle, had he closely
examined the life of his Scotch neighbor, would have been forced to
acknowledge that no knight battling with chivalric valor in the
fiction of Sir Walter ever displayed more nobility of soul than that
displayed by Walter Scott in his adversity. Critics may find flaws in
Scott's style, but as time reveals more fully the character of the man
they are unable to find fault with the man himself. Some years ago was
published Scott's journal. Parts of this had been published before,
but, owing to the nature of some of the information, much of this had
been suppressed until sixty years after the death of the writer. To
quote from this journal is, perhaps, the best method of giving a
first-hand impression of the real man. He is his own revealer. Scott
called the big book in which he from time to time records for several
years his thoughts his "Gurnal," because his daughter Sophia had once
spelled the word in that way. This book could be closed with a lock
and key. On the title-page was written:
As I walked by myself,
I talked to myself,
And thus myself said to me.
(Old Song.)
Scott's poems and novels brought him much revenue. This he spent in
purchasing land. He became a Scotch "laird" owning many acres, and a
most beautiful home, Abbotsford. But unfortunately he formed a bad
business partnership. When the firm through mismanagement and
speculation, in which Scott had no part, went down in ruin, Scott
found to his surprise that he owed a vast sum. In his "Gurnal" of
September 5, 1827, he wrote: "The debts for which I am legally
responsible, though no party to this contraction, amount to L30,000."
But although his legal responsibility was for so great a sum, he felt
that morally he was responsible for a far greater amount. When the
printing house of James Ballantyne & Co., the publishing house of
Constable, and Hunt and Robinson, failed, they failed for upwards of
half a million pounds. Of this enormous total, Scott could be held
morally responsible for one hundred and thirty thousand pounds.
For several weeks after intimations of failure had reached Scott, he
lived in a state of uncertainty. On the 18th of December, 1825, he
wrote a long account in his journal. It was published lately for the
first time, appearing in the _Quarterly Review_. What a revelation of
the man it is!
"Ballantyne called on me this morning. _Venit illa suprema dies._ My
extremity is come. Cadell has received letters from London which all
but positively announce the failure of Hurst and Robinson, so that
Constable and Co. must follow, and I must go with poor James
Ballantyne for company. I suppose it will involve my all.... I have
been rash in anticipating funds to buy lands, but then I made from
L5,000 to L10,000 a year, and land was my temptation. I think nobody
can lose a penny--that is my one comfort. Men will think pride has had
a fall. Let them indulge their own pride in thinking that my fall
makes them higher, or seems so at least. I have the satisfaction to
recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and that
some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the
innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor.
This news will make sad hearts at Darnick, and in the cottages of
Abbotsford, which I do not cherish the least hope of preserving. It
has been my Delilah, and so I have often termed it; and now the
recollection of the extensive woods I planted, and the walks I have
formed, from which strangers must derive both the pleasure and profit,
will excite feelings likely to sober my gayest moments. I have half
resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with
such a diminished crest? How live a poor indebted man where I was once
the wealthy, and honored? My children are provided [for]; thank God
for that! I was to have gone there in joy and prosperity to receive my
friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish, but the
thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than
any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things, I must
get them kind masters; there may be yet those who loving me may love
my dog because it has been mine. I must end this, or I shall lose the
tone of mind with which men should meet distress. I find my dogs' feet
on my knees. I hear them whining and seeking me everywhere--this is
nonsense, but it is what they would do could they know how things are.
Poor Will Laidlaw! Poor Tom Purdie! this will be news to wring your
heart, and many a poor fellow's besides to whom my prosperity was
daily bread."
After touching on some other matters he comes back to
Abbotsford,--"Yet to save Abbotsford I would attempt all that was
possible. My heart clings to the place I have created. There is scarce
a tree on it that does not owe its being to me, and the pain of
leaving it is greater than I can bear."
A Mr. Skene, in whose gardens Scott while in Edinburgh about a month
later took a walk, has left a record of a conversation with Scott. He
wrote immediately after the walk so as to record the conversation.
This is what Scott said: "Do you know I experience a sort of
determined pleasure in confronting the very worst aspect of this
sudden reverse--in standing, as it were, in the breach that has
overthrown my fortunes, and saying, Here I stand, at least, an honest
man. And God knows if I have enemies, this I may at least with truth
say, that I have never wittingly given cause of enmity in the whole
course of my life, for even the burnings of political hate seemed to
find nothing in my nature to feed the flame. I am not conscious of
having borne a grudge towards any man, and at this moment of my
overthrow, so help me God, I wish well and feel kindly to every one.
And if I thought that any of my works contained a sentence hurtful to
any one's feelings, I would burn it."
Scott worked so assiduously that by January, 1828, he had reduced his
debt $200,000. On the 17th of December, 1830, more than the half of
his debt had been paid. On that day his creditors had a meeting during
which the following resolutions were passed:
"That Sir Walter Scott be requested to accept of his furniture, plate,
linen, paintings, library, and curiosities of every description as the
best means the creditors have of expressing their very high sense of
his most honorable conduct, and in grateful acknowledgment for the
unparalleled and most successful exertions he has made, and continues
to make, for them."
That the creditors of Scott would be glad to show their gratitude is
easy to believe when one learns that while Scott was paying pound for
pound the other members of the firm paid their creditors less than
three shillings to the pound. That Scott did his herculean task at
great sacrifice is known. How much of pain and worry he endured is not
so well known. At one time he writes: "After all, I have fagged
through six pages, and made poor Wurmser lay down his sword on the
glacis of Mantua--and my head aches--my eyes ache--my back aches--so
does my breast--and I am sure my heart aches--what can duty want
more?"
XIX
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Walter Savage Landor, whose course of life ran from 1775 to 1864, in
his old age confessed, "I never did a single wise thing in the whole
course of my existence, although I have written many which have been
thought so." This is the exaggeration of an old man who has been
impressed by the frailty of human endeavor. Nevertheless, Landor is a
striking illustration of the artistic temperament. He was impractical.
Landor could not make a good fist. Even when angry, a frame of mind in
which he found himself very frequently, he did not clench his fists
without leaving his thumbs in relaxation--a sure sign, it is said, of
the lack of tenacity of purpose and tact in practical dealings. He
would adjust his spectacles on his forehead, and then, forgetting what
he had done, would overturn everything in his wild search for them.
When he started out on a trip he would take the greatest pains to
remember the key of his portmanteau, and then forget to take the
portmanteau; and then on discovering the absence of the portmanteau he
would launch out into the most vehement denunciation of the
carelessness and depravity of the railroad officials, heaping
objurgations upon them, their fathers, and their grandfathers. Then
after he had exhausted his vocabulary of invective and eased his soul,
the humor of the situation would appeal to him and he would begin to
laugh, quietly at first, and then in louder and louder strains until
his merriment seemed more formidable than his wrath.
When Landor says that he never did a wise thing but has written many,
one is led to think of his marriage. No one wrote about marriage more
seriously than Landor, no one entered upon marriage more recklessly.
"Death itself," he once wrote, "to the reflecting mind is less serious
than marriage. The elder plant is cut down that the younger may have
room to nourish; a few tears drop into the loosened soil, and buds and
blossoms spring over it. Death is not even a blow, it is not even a
pulsation; it is a pause. But marriage unrolls the awful lot of
numberless generations." The man who could write thus impressively
about marriage one spring evening at Bath attended a ball. There he
met a beautiful young lady whom he admired. As soon as he set eyes on
her he exclaimed, "By heaven! that's the nicest girl in the room, and
I'll marry her." He married her and was ever after unhappy. "God
forbid," once growled Landor, "that I should do otherwise than declare
that she always _was_ agreeable--to every one but _me_." Landor was
not in the habit of talking about his domestic troubles, but at one
time when he was contrasting other and more agreeable marriages he was
heard to say that he "unfortunately was taken by a pretty face."
Kenyon related to a friend an incident of the Landor honeymoon that is
significant. On one occasion, it seems, the newly married couple were
sitting side by side; Landor was reading some of his own verses to his
bride--and who could read more exquisitely?--when all at once the
lady, releasing herself from his arm, jumped up, saying, "Oh, do stop,
Walter, there's that dear delightful Punch performing in the street. I
must look out of the window." Exit poetry forever.
It would have been difficult for any woman to live amicably with
Landor. In his youth he was suspended from college, and when he was a
very old man he was fined $5,000 for writing a libelous article.
Between these two periods his life was made up of many fits of
passion. His rustication, or suspension from Trinity College,
Cambridge, came about in the following manner: One evening Landor
invited his friends to wine. His gun, powder, and shot were in the
next room, as he had been out hunting in the morning of that day. In a
room opposite to Landor's lived a young man whom Landor disliked. The
two parties exchanged taunts. Finally in a spirit of bravado Landor
took his gun and fired a shot through the closed shutters of the
enemy. Quite naturally this bit of pleasantry was not appreciated by
the owner of the shutters and complaint was lodged. When the
investigation was made the president tried to be as lenient as he
possibly could, but his conciliatory manner was stubbornly met by the
youthful culprit. When rustication was pronounced it was hoped that
Landor would return to the college to honor it and himself by an
earnest devotion to his studies. But he never returned.
When Landor was living in Florence the Italians thought him the
ideally mad Englishman. He lived for a time in the Medici palace, but
his friendly relations with the landlord, a nobleman bearing the
distinguished name of the palace, had an abrupt termination. Landor
imagined that the marquis had unfairly coaxed away his coachman, and
he wrote a letter of complaint. The next day in comes the strutting
marquis with his hat on in the presence of Mrs. Landor and some
visitors. One of the visitors describes the scene: "He had scarcely
advanced three steps from the door, when Landor walked up to him
quickly and knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned
him out. You should have heard Landor's shout of laughter at his own
anger when it was all over; inextinguishable laughter, which none of
us could resist." This reminds one of the story Milnes told to
Emerson, that Landor once became so enraged at his Italian cook that
he picked him up and threw him out of the window, and then exclaimed,
"Good God, I never thought of those violets!"
Quite in strong contrast to the irascible side of his nature was his
tender love for his children, of which he had four, the last born in
1825. In them he took constant delight. In their games _Babbo_, as he
was affectionately termed, was the most gleeful and frolicsome of them
all. When he was separated from them he was in continual anxiety. On
one of his trips he received the first childish letter from his son
Arnold. In his reply the concluding lines reveal the intense affection
of the father:
I shall never be quite happy until I see you again and put my
cheek upon your head. Tell my sweet Julia that if I see twenty
little girls I will not romp with any of them before I romp
with her, and kiss your two dear brothers for me. You must
always love them as much as I love you, and you must teach
them how to be good boys, which I cannot do so well as you
can. God preserve and bless you, my own Arnold. My heart beats
as if it would fly to you, my own fierce creature. We shall
very soon meet.
Love your,
BABBO.
In literature Landor will be remembered as the author of _Imaginary
Conversations_, composed during his years of retirement at Florence.
In these _Conversations_ we hear the great men and women of the past
who converse as Landor imagined they might have talked. Landor's prose
style is admired, because of its simplicity and classic purity. After
the publication of the first two volumes of this work Landor was
visited as a man of genius by Englishmen and Americans. One day Hogg,
the friend of Shelley, was announced while Hare, a well-known
Englishman, was sitting in the room. Landor said, as he considered the
names of his two visitors, that he felt like La Fontaine with all the
better company of the beasts about him. Hazlitt was one of his
frequent visitors. One of their reported conversations is about
Wordsworth. Upon Landor's saying that he had never seen the famous
Lake poet, Hazlitt asked, "But you have seen a horse, I suppose?" and
on receiving an affirmative answer, continued, "Well, sir, if you have
seen a horse, I mean his head, sir, you may say you have seen
Wordsworth, sir."
Emerson was desirous of seeing Landor. One of the motives that led him
to take his first trip abroad was the desire to see five distinguished
men. These men were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, DeQuincey, and
Carlyle. "On the 15th May," writes Emerson in his _English Traits_,
"I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in
a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding
a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified
from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath,--an untamable
petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but
certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind and he
was the most patient and gentle of hosts."
Landor used to say somewhat loftily, "I do not remember that
resentment has ever made me commit an injustice." And in this
connection he related to a friend an incident of his early married
life, when he was living at Como, where he had for his next-door
neighbor the Princess of Wales. Landor and his royal neighbor had a
quarrel arising from trespassing by the domestics of the Princess.
"The insolence of her domestics," said Landor, "was only equaled by
the intolerable discourtesy of her Royal Highness when she was
appealed to in the matter."
Some years later when the Milan Commission was carrying on its
"delicate investigation" concerning the character of the Queen, about
whom there had been rumors detrimental to her character, Landor was
asked to give confidential testimony against Queen Caroline. This made
Landor indignant and he replied,--"Her Royal Highness is my enemy; she
has deeply injured me, therefore I can say nothing against her, and I
never will."
It is significant that shortly before this application for testimony
was made, George IV took an opportunity to ask Landor to dinner. "I
declined the honor," said the old lion, "on the plea that I had an
attack of quinsy. I always have quinsy when royal people ask me to
dinner," he added, laughing immoderately.
Ah, what avails the sceptered race,
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!--
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
XX
LEIGH HUNT'S BUSINESS ABILITY
Sir George Murray Smith, leading member of the famous publishing house
of Smith, Elder and Company, was well acquainted with the leading
literary men of England during an active career of sixty years. The
following account of Leigh Hunt is especially entertaining:
"Business was by no means Leigh Hunt's strong point. In this respect,
but not otherwise, he may have suggested Skimpole to Charles Dickens.
On one of my visits I found him trying to puzzle out the abstruse
question of how he should deduct some such sum as thirteen shillings
and ninepence from a sovereign. On another occasion I had to pay him a
sum of money, L100 or L200, and I wrote him a check for the amount.
'Well,' he said, 'what am I to do with this little bit of paper?' I
told him that if he presented it at the bank they would pay him cash
for it, but I added, 'I will save you that trouble.' I sent to the
bank and cashed the check for him. He took the notes away carefully
inclosed in an envelope. Two days afterward Leigh Hunt came in a state
of great agitation to tell me that his wife had burned them. He had
thrown the envelope, with the bank notes inside, carelessly down, and
his wife had flung it into the fire. Leigh Hunt's agitation while on
his way to bring this news had not prevented him from purchasing on
the road a little statuette of Psyche which he carried, without any
paper round it, in his hand. I told him I thought something might be
done in the matter; I sent to the bankers and got the numbers of the
notes, and then in company with Leigh Hunt went off to the Bank of
England. I explained our business, and we were shown into a room where
three old gentlemen were sitting at tables. They kept us waiting some
time, and Leigh Hunt, who had meantime been staring all round the
room, at last got up, walked up to one of the staid officials, and
addressing him said in wondering tones: 'And this is the Bank of
England! And do you sit here all day, and never see the green woods
and the trees and flowers and the charming country?' Then in tones of
remonstrance he demanded, 'Are you contented with such a life?' All
this time he was holding the little naked Psyche in one hand, and with
his long hair and flashing eyes made a surprising figure. I fancy I
can still see the astonished faces of the three officials; they would
have made a most delightful picture. I said, 'Come away, Mr. Hunt,
these gentlemen are very busy.' I succeeded in carrying Leigh Hunt
off, and, after entering into certain formalities, we were told that
the value of the notes would be paid in twelve months. I gave Leigh
Hunt the money at once, and he went away rejoicing."
XXI
DE QUINCEY RUNS AWAY
My father died when I was about seven years old, says the author of
the _Confessions of an Opium-Eater_, and left me to the care of four
guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small, and was
very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for
my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease, and at
fifteen my command of that language was so great, that I not only
composed Greek verses in lyric meters, but would converse in Greek
fluently, and without embarrassment--an accomplishment which I have
not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which, in my case,
was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspapers into the
best Greek I could furnish _extempore_; for the necessity of
ransacking my memory and invention for all sorts and combinations of
periphrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images,
relations of things, etc., gave me a compass of diction which would
never have been called out by a dull translation of moral essays, etc.
"That boy," said one of my masters, pointing the attention of a
stranger to me, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than
you or I could address an English one." He who honored me with this
eulogy was a scholar, "and a ripe and good one," and of all my tutors,
was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Unfortunately for me
(and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy man's great
indignation), I was transferred to the care, first of a blockhead, who
was in a perpetual panic lest I should expose his ignorance; and,
finally, to that of a respectable scholar, at the head of a great
school on an ancient foundation. This man had been appointed to his
situation by ---- College, Oxford, and was a sound, well-built
scholar, but (like most men whom I have known from that college)
coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A miserable contrast he presented, in
my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of my favorite master; and,
besides, he could not disguise from my hourly notice the poverty and
meagerness of his understanding. It is a bad thing for a boy to be,
and know himself, far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or power
of mind. This was the case, so far as regarded knowledge at least, not
with myself only, for the two boys who jointly with myself composed
the first form were better Grecians than the head-master, though not
more elegant scholars.... I who had a small patrimonial property, the
income of which was sufficient to support me at college, wished to be
sent thither immediately. I made earnest representations on the
subject to my guardians, but all to no purpose. One, who was more
reasonable, and had more knowledge of the world than the rest, lived
at a distance; two of the other three resigned all their authority
into the hands of the fourth, and this fourth, with whom I had to
negotiate, was a worthy man, in his way, but haughty, obstinate, and
intolerant of all opposition to his will. After a certain number of
letters and personal interviews, I found that I had nothing to hope
for, not even a compromise of the matter, from my guardian:
unconditional submission was what he demanded, and I prepared myself,
therefore, for other measures. Summer was now coming on with hasty
steps, and my seventeenth birthday was fast approaching, after which
day I had sworn within myself that I would no longer be numbered among
schoolboys. Money being what I chiefly wanted, I wrote to a woman of
high rank, who, though young herself, had known me from a child, and
had latterly treated me with great distinction, requesting that she
would "lend" me five guineas. For upward of a week no answer came, and
I was beginning to despond, when at length a servant put into my hands
a double letter, with a coronet on the seal. The letter was kind and
obliging; the fair writer was on the sea-coast, and in that way the
delay had arisen; she inclosed double of what I had asked, and
good-naturedly hinted that if I should _never_ repay her, it would not
absolutely ruin her. Now, then, I was prepared for my scheme: ten
guineas, added to about two that I had remaining from my pocket-money,
seemed to me sufficient for an indefinite length of time, and at that
happy age, if no _definite_ boundary can be assigned to one's power,
the spirit of hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite.
It is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's (and, what cannot often be said of
his remarks, it is a very feeling one) that we never do anything
consciously for the last time (of things, that is, which we have long
been in the habit of doing) without sadness of heart. This truth I felt
deeply when I came to leave ----, a place which I did not love, and
where I had not been happy. On the evening before I left ---- forever,
I grieved when the ancient and lofty schoolroom resounded with the
evening service, performed for the last time in my hearing; and at
night, when the muster-roll of names was called over, and mine (as
usual) was called first, I stepped forward, and passing the
head-master, who was standing by, I bowed to him, and looked earnestly
in his face, thinking to myself, "He is old and infirm, and in this
world I shall not see him again." I was right; I never _did_ see him
again, nor never shall. He looked at me complacently, smiled
good-naturedly, returned my salutation (or rather my valediction), and
we parted (though he knew it not) forever. I could not reverence him
intellectually, but he had been uniformly kind to me, and had allowed
me many indulgences, and I grieved at the thought of the mortification
I should inflict upon him.
The morning came which was to launch me into the world, and from which
my whole succeeding life has, in many important points, taken its
coloring. I lodged in the head-master's house, and had been allowed,
from my first entrance, the indulgence of a private room, which I used
both as a sleeping-room and as a study. At half after three I rose,
and gazed with deep emotion at the ancient towers of ----, "drest in
earliest light," and beginning to crimson with the radiant luster of a
cloudless July morning. I was firm and immovable in my purpose, but
yet agitated by anticipation of uncertain danger and troubles; and if
I could have foreseen the hurricane, and perfect hail-storm of
affliction, which soon fell upon me, well might I have been agitated.
To this agitation the deep peace of the morning presented an affecting
contrast, and in some degree a medicine. The silence was more profound
than that of midnight, and to me the silence of a summer morning is
more touching than all other silence, because, the light being broad
and strong as that of noonday at other seasons of the year, it seems
to differ from perfect day chiefly because man is not yet abroad, and
thus, the peace of nature, and of the innocent creatures of God, seem
to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man, and his
restless and unquiet spirit, are not there to trouble its sanctity.
I dressed myself, took my hat and gloves, and lingered a little in the
room. For the last year and a half this room had been my "pensive
citadel:" here I had read and studied through all the hours of the
night, and, though true it was that, for the latter part of this time,
I, who was framed for love and gentle affections, had lost my gayety
and happiness, during the strife and fever of contention with my
guardian, yet, on the other hand, as a boy so passionately fond of
books, and dedicated to intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to
have enjoyed many happy hours in the midst of general dejection. I
wept as I looked round on the chair, hearth, writing-table, and other
familiar objects, knowing too certainly that I looked upon them for
the last time. While I write this, it is eighteen years ago, and yet,
at this moment, I see distinctly, as if it were yesterday, the
lineaments and expressions of the object on which I fixed my parting
gaze: it was a picture of the lovely ----, which hung over the
mantelpiece, the eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful, and the
whole countenance so radiant with benignity and divine tranquillity,
that I had a thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, to gather
consolation from it, as a devotee from his patron saint. While I was
yet gazing upon it, the deep tones of ---- clock proclaimed that it
was four o'clock. I went up to the picture, kissed it, and then gently
walked out and closed the door forever!
XXII
MACAULAY'S CHILDHOOD
Macaulay is one of the brilliant lights of the first half of the last
century. Trevelyan's _Life and Letters_ of Macaulay gives us an
interesting glimpse of his childhood. When his parents moved from the
heart of London into a less crowded district, Macaulay, baby though he
was, kept the early impressions of the place.
"He remembered," says his biographer, "standing up at the nursery
window by his father's side, looking at a cloud of black smoke pouring
out of a tall chimney. He asked if that was hell: an inquiry that was
received with great displeasure which at the time he could not
understand. The kindly father must have been pained almost against his
own will at finding what feature of his stern creed it was that had
embodied itself in so very material a shape before his little son's
imagination. When in after days, Mrs. Macaulay was questioned as to
how soon she began to detect in the child a promise of the future, she
used to say that his sensibilities and affections were remarkably
developed at an age which to her hearers appeared next to incredible.
He would cry for joy on seeing her after a few hours' absence, and
(till her husband put a stop to it) her power of exciting his feelings
was often made an exhibition to her friends. She did not regard this
precocity as a proof of cleverness, but, like a foolish young mother,
only thought that so tender a nature was marked for early death.
"The new residence was in the High Street of Clapham, a more
commodious part of London than that which they had just left. "It was
a roomy, comfortable dwelling, with a very small garden behind, and in
front a very small one indeed, which has entirely disappeared beneath
a large shop thrown out toward the roadway by the present occupier,
who bears the name of Heywood. Here the boy passed a quiet and most
happy childhood. From the time that he was three years old he read
incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire, with
his book on the floor, and a piece of bread and butter in his hand. A
very clever woman who then lived in the house as parlor-maid told how
he used to sit in his nankeen frock, perched on the table by her as
she was cleaning the plate, and expounding to her out of a volume as
big as himself. He did not care for toys, but was very fond of taking
his walk, when he would hold forth to his companion, whether nurse or
mother, telling interminable stories, out of his own head, or
repeating what he had been reading in language far above his years.
His memory retained without effort the phraseology of the book which
he had been last engaged on, and he talked, as the maid said, 'quite
printed words,' which produced an effect that appeared formal, and
often, no doubt, exceedingly droll. Mrs. Hannah More was fond of
relating how she called at Mr. Macaulay's, and was met by a fair,
pretty, slight child, with abundance of light hair, about four years
of age, who came to the front door to receive her, and tell her that
his parents were out, but that if she would be good enough to come in
he would bring her a glass of old spirits, a proposition which greatly
startled the old lady, who had never aspired beyond cowslip-wine. When
questioned as to what he knew about old spirits he could only say that
Robinson Crusoe often had some. About this period his father took him
on a visit to Lady Waldegrave at Strawberry Hill, and was much pleased
to exhibit to his old friend the fair, bright boy, dressed in a green
coat with red collar and cuffs, a frill at the throat, and white
trousers. After some time had been spent among the wonders of the
Orford Collection, of which he ever after carried a catalogue in his
head, a servant who was waiting on the company in the great gallery
spilled some hot coffee over his legs. The hostess was all kindness
and compassion, and when, after a while, she asked him how he was
feeling, the little fellow looked up in her face, and replied, 'Thank
you, madam, the agony is abated.'
"But it must not be supposed his quaint manners proceeded from
affectation or conceit, for all testimony declares that a more simple
and natural child never lived, or a more lively and merry one. He had
at his command the resources of the Common; to this day the most
unchanged spot within ten miles of St. Paul's, and which to all
appearance will ere long hold that pleasant pre-eminence within ten
leagues. That delightful wilderness of gorse bushes, and poplar groves
and gravel pits, and ponds great and small, was to little Tom Macaulay
a region of inexhaustible romance and mystery. He explored its
recesses; he composed, and almost believed, its legends; he invented
for its different features a nomenclature which has been faithfully
preserved by two generations of children. A slight ridge intersected
by deep ditches toward the west of the Common, the very existence of
which no one above eight years old would notice, was dignified with
the title of the Alps; while the elevated island, covered with shrubs,
that gives a name to the Mount pond, was regarded with infinite awe,
as being the nearest approach within the circuit of his observation to
a conception of the majesty of Sinai. Indeed, at this period his
infant fancy was much exercised with the threats and terrors of the
Law. He had a little plot of ground at the back of the house, marked
out as his own by a row of oyster shells, which a maid one day threw
away as rubbish. He went straight to the drawing-room, where his
mother was entertaining some visitors, walked into the circle and
said, very solemnly, 'Cursed be Sally; for it is written, cursed be he
that removeth his neighbor's landmark.'
"When still the merest child, he was sent as a day-scholar to Mr.
Greaves, a shrewd Yorkshireman with a turn for science, who had been
brought originally to the neighborhood in order to educate a number of
African youths sent over to imbibe Western civilization at the
fountain-head. The poor fellows had found as much difficulty in
keeping alive at Clapham as Englishmen experience at Sierra Leone;
and, in the end, their tutor set up a school for boys of his own
color, and one time had charge of almost the entire rising generation
of the Common. Mrs. Macaulay explained to Tom that he must learn to
study without the solace of bread-and-butter, to which he replied,
'Yes, Mama, industry shall be my bread and attention my butter.' But,
as a matter of fact, no one ever crept more unwillingly to school.
Each several afternoon he made piteous entreaties to be excused
returning after dinner, and was met by the unvarying formula, 'No,
Tom, if it rains cats and dogs, you shall go.'
"His reluctance to leave home had more than one side to it. Not only
did his heart stay behind, but the regular lessons of the class took
him away from occupations which in his eyes were infinitely more
delightful and important; for these were probably the years of his
greatest literary activity. As an author he never again had more
facility, or anything like so wide a range. In September, 1808, his
mother writes: 'My dear Tom continues to show marks of uncommon
genius. He gets on wonderfully in all branches of his education, and
the extent of his reading, and of the knowledge he derived from it,
are truly astonishing in a boy not yet eight years old. He is at the
same time as playful as a kitten. To give you some idea of the
activity of his mind I will mention a few circumstances that may
interest you and Colin. You will believe that to him we never appear
to regard anything he does as anything more than a schoolboy's
amusement. He took it into his head to write a compendium of universal
history about a year ago, and he really contrived to give a tolerably
connected view of the leading events from the creation to the present
time, filling about a quire of paper. He told me one day that he had
been writing a paper which Henry Daly was to translate into Malabar,
to persuade the people of Travancore to embrace the Christian
religion. On reading it, I found it to contain a very clear idea of
the leading facts and doctrines of that religion, with some strong
arguments for its adoption. He was so fired with reading Scott's _Lay_
and _Marmion_, the former of which he got entirely, and the latter
almost entirely, by heart, merely from his delight in reading them,
that he determined on writing himself a poem in six cantos which he
called _The Battle of Cheviot_.'"
XXIII
MACAULAY BECOMES FAMOUS
In 1848 Macaulay was a famous man. He had served in India and had
written the first part of his _History of England_. In this year after
a lapse of nine years he again keeps a diary. From this diary we quote
extracts showing how he became famous.
"Dec. 4th, 1848.--I have felt to-day somewhat anxious about the fate
of my book. The sale has surpassed expectation: but that proves only
that people have formed a high idea of what they are to have. The
disappointment, if there is disappointment, will be great. All that I
hear is laudatory. But who can trust to praise that is poured into his
own ear? At all events, I have aimed high; I have tried to do
something that may be remembered; I have had the year 2000, or even
3000, often in my mind; I have sacrificed nothing to temporary
fashions of thought and style; and if I fail, my failure will be more
honorable than nine-tenths of the successes that I have witnessed."
"Dec. 12th, 1848.--Longman called. A new edition of three thousand
copies is preparing as fast as they can work. I have reason to be
pleased. Of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ two thousand two hundred
and fifty copies were sold in the first year; of _Marmion_ two
thousand copies in the first month; of my book three thousand copies
in ten days. Black says that there has been no such sale since the
days of _Waverley_. The success is in every way complete beyond all
hope and is the more agreeable to me because expectation had been
wound up so high that disappointment was almost inevitable. I think,
though with some misgivings, that the book will live."
"January 11th, 1849.--I am glad to find how well my book continues to
sell. The second edition of three thousand was out of print almost as
soon as it appeared, and one thousand two hundred and fifty of the
third edition are already bespoken. I hope all this will not make me a
coxcomb. I feel no intoxicating effect; but a man may be drunk without
knowing it. If my abilities do not fail me, I shall be a rich man, as
rich, that is to say, as I wish to be. But that I am already, if it
were not for my dear ones. I am content, and should have been so with
less. On the whole, I remember no success so complete, and I remember
all Byron's poems and all Scott's novels."
"Saturday, January 27th.--Longman has written to say that only sixteen
hundred copies are left of the third edition of five thousand, and
that two thousand more copies must be immediately printed, still to be
called the third edition.... Of such a run I had never dreamed. But I
had thought that the book would have a permanent place in our
literature, and I see no reason to alter that opinion."
"February 2d.--Mahon sent me a letter from Arbuthnot, saying that the
Duke of Wellington was enthusiastic in admiration of my book. Though I
am almost callous to praise now, this praise made me happy for two
minutes. A fine old fellow!"
The above selections are from Macaulay's diary, as was said. Now come
several from letters to a Mr. Ellis, to whom Macaulay sent many.
"March 8th, 1849.
"At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet
Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a
book-seller's window with the following label: 'Only L2 2s.
Hume's _History of England_, in eight volumes, highly valuable
as an introduction to Macaulay.' I laughed so convulsively
that the other people who were staring at the books took me
for a poor demented gentleman. Alas for poor David! As for me,
only one height of renown remains to be attained. I am not yet
in Madam Tussaud's wax-works. I live, however, in hope of
seeing one day an advertisement of a new group of figures--Mr.
Macaulay, in one of his own coats, conversing with Mr. Silk
Buckingham in Oriental costume, and Mr. Robert Montgomery in
full canonicals."
"March 9th, 1850.
"I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake, and I
can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the
works of God. But you must hear of my triumphs. Thackeray
swears that he was eye-witness and ear-witness of the proudest
event of my life. Two damsels were about to pass that doorway
which we, on Monday, in vain attempted to enter, when I was
pointed out to them. 'Mr. Macaulay,' cried the lovely pair.
'Is that Mr. Macaulay? Never mind the hippopotamus.' And
having paid a shilling to see Behemoth, they left him in the
very moment at which he was about to display himself to them
in order to see--but spare my modesty. I can wish for nothing
more on earth, now that Madam Tussaud, in whose Parthenon I
once hoped for a place, is dead."
In his diary of June 30th, 1849, we find: "Today my yearly account
with Longman is wound up. I may now say that my book has run the
gauntlet of criticism pretty thoroughly. The most savage and dishonest
assailant has not been able to deny me merit as a writer. All critics
who have the least pretense to impartiality have given me praise which
I may be glad to think that I at all deserve.... I received a note
from Prince Albert. He wants to see me at Buckingham Palace at three
to-morrow. I answered like a courtier; yet what am I to say to him?
For, of course, he wants to consult me about the Cambridge
professorship. How can I be just at once to Stephen and to Kemble?"
"Saturday, July 1st--To the Palace. The Prince, to my extreme
astonishment, offered me the professorship, and very earnestly and
with many flattering expressions, pressed me to accept it. I was
resolute, and gratefully and respectfully declined. I should have
declined, indeed, if only in order to give no ground to anybody to
accuse me of foul play, for I have had difficulty enough in steering
my course so as to deal properly both by Stephen and Kemble, and if I
had marched off with the prize, I could not have been astonished if
both had entertained a very unjust suspicion of me. But, in truth, my
temper is that of the wolf in the fable, I cannot bear the collar, and
I have got rid of much finer and richer collars than this. It would be
strange if, having sacrificed for liberty, a seat in the Cabinet and
twenty-five hundred pounds a year, I should now sacrifice liberty for
a chair at Cambridge and four hundred pounds a year. Besides, I never
could do two things at once. If I lectured well, my _History_ must be
given up, and to give up my _History_ would be to give up much more
than the emoluments of the professorship--if emolument were my chief
object, which it is not now, nor ever was. The prince, when he found
me determined, asked me about the other candidates."
XXIV
DICKENS WRITES THE PICKWICK PAPERS
We are always interested in the beginnings of a successful career, for
humanity with all its selfishness takes a generous pleasure in the
advancement of those who have made an honest fight for fame or wealth.
The first success of Dickens came with the publication of the
_Pickwick Papers_, by the publication of which the publishers, it is
said, made $100,000,--much to their astonishment.
We all know the early career of the famous novelist: How he passed a
boyhood of poverty; how he became a stenographer, a good one, for said
a Mr. Beard, "There never was such a shorthand writer," at the time
Dickens entered the gallery as a Parliament reporter; how he later
became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. In the December number
of the _Old Monthly Magazine_ his first published story saw the light.
This was in 1833, when Dickens was twenty-one. The story first went
under the name of _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_, but it afterwards was
changed to _Mr. Mims and his Cousin_. Then came _Sketches by Boz_ in
1835, and in 1836 _Pickwick_ appeared in serial form, the book coming
out a year later.
An amusing and striking illustration of the widespread interest in
the story of _Pickwick_, if we may call so rambling an account as
_Pickwick_ a story, is related by Carlyle: "An archdeacon with his own
venerable lips repeated to me the other night a strange profane story:
of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation
to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and
got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank
God, _Pickwick_ will be out in ten days any way!'--this is dreadful."
We are always interested in knowing whether the author received
adequate remuneration for his work. Literature is not a commercial
venture. The man who says, "Go to, now I shall make money by my pen!"
is not the one who achieves a masterpiece. Nevertheless we are glad to
know that genius is rewarded. It is more comforting to learn that Pope
received $45,000 for his translations of Homer than that Milton got
$25 for his _Paradise Lost_; that Scott received over $40,000 for
_Woodstock_, a novel written in three months, than that the author of
the _Canterbury Tales_ two years before his death was obliged to
petition the king, "for God's sake and as a work of charity," for the
grant of a hogshead of wine yearly at the port of London.
Did Dickens receive anything for his _Pickwick_? Mr. Chapman, one of
the publishers, told Mr. Forster, the friend and biographer of
Dickens, that there was but a verbal agreement. The publishers were to
pay 15 guineas for each number and as there were twenty numbers it is
not hard to estimate his receipts on such a basis. The publishers,
however, were to add to this compensation according to the sale. Mr.
Chapman thinks that his firm paid about 3,000 pounds for _Pickwick_,
but Mr. Forster thinks the sum was about 2,500 pounds. While this sum
bears but a small proportion to what Dickens would have received had
he made a good bargain with his publishers, it is yet a large sum to
one beginning his literary career, and must have been deeply
appreciated by Dickens, who had been so poor that he was paid 30
pounds in advance for the first two numbers, so that he might "go and
get married."
_Pickwick_ was soon followed by _Oliver Twist_, and then came
_Nicholas Nickleby_, and the long series of successful novels that
brought the author both fame and money. For when Dickens died he had a
fortune of L93,000. Some of this was made in America, where his
"readings" were attended by great crowds. On his second tour to
America, after he had given thirty-seven readings, about one-half the
entire number, he sent home a check for L10,000. Some evenings he took
in $2,000.
One reason why Dickens is a popular novelist is that he understands
the common emotions of humanity. He may be "stagey," be lacking in
plot, given to exaggeration, indulge in cheap pathos, but in spite of
all these defects his abounding vitality, his sympathy with the common
lot, his imagination, are of such transcendent power that his world of
readers adores the name of Dickens. Dickens was a good man. While not
closely following the forms of religion, his life was better than that
of many who follow the letter but break the spirit. As an illustration
of his Christian belief I quote an extract from his letter to his
youngest son, who was about to go to Australia:
September, 1868.
Never take a mean advantage of any one in any transaction, and
never be hard upon people who are in your power. Try to do to
others as you would have them do to you, and do not be
discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you
that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down
by our Saviour than that you should. I put a New Testament
among your books for the very same reasons, and with the very
same hopes, that made me write an easy account of it for you,
when you were a little child. Because it is the best book that
ever was, or will be, known in the world; and because it
teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature, who
tries to be truthful and faithful to duty, can possibly be
guided.... You will remember that you have never at home been
harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities--I
have always been anxious not to weary my children with such
things, before they are old enough to have opinions respecting
them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most
solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the
Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the
impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but
heartily respect it.... Never abandon the wholesome practice
of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have
never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS]
XXV
CHARLES DICKENS AS READER
My first sight of Dickens, writes Herman Merivale in a gossipy article
in an English magazine, was characteristic enough. I was in the second
or third row of seats with some friends, at one of his readings of
_Oliver Twist_. As Thackeray was a gossip on the platform, so Dickens
was an actor. Like all speakers and actors, he longed for sympathy
somewhere; an unanswering audience kills us, on whichever side the
fault may lie. In the days of my political measles I have harangued a
London audience for an hour and twenty minutes when I have meant to
speak for a quarter of an hour; and in an out-of-the-way Hampshire
district, where I had gone on purpose to address the rurals for a set
hour, I have sate down, covered with confusion, in ten minutes, not
being able to hit on anything that interested them at all. I saw too
plainly, in all their good-natured faces, that they regarded me as the
greatest ass they had ever seen, or as an odd kind of cow gone wrong,
and of no use to the three acres. Dickens's audience that night was
dull, and he became so, too. I was disappointed. His characters were
not lifelike, and his acting was not good, and got worse as he went
on. It was the inevitable law of reaction. His audience bored him, and
he began to bore me, amongst the rest. He was not "in touch" with us,
that is all; and his eyes wandered as hopelessly in search of some
sympathetic eye to catch them, as the gladiators of old, for mercy in
the circus. Then suddenly, at one point of his reading, he had to
introduce the passing character of a nameless individual in a London
crowd, a choleric old gentleman who has only one short sentence to
fire off. This he gave so spontaneously, so inimitably, that the
puppet became an absolute reality in a second. I saw him, crowd,
street, man, temper, and all. For I am, I may say, what is called a
very good audience. I like what I like, and I hate what I hate; and on
one occasion growled at the theater so audibly at what I thought some
very bad acting that I began to hear ominous cries of "Turn him out!"
It was the first night of one of my own plays, Dickens's electric
flash bowled me over so completely and instantly that I broke into a
peal of laughter, and as we sometimes do when hard hit, kept on
laughing internally, which is half tears, and half hiccough, for some
time afterwards. Upon my word, I am laughing now, as I recall it. It
was so funny. The audience of course glared at me with the well-known
look of rebuke. "How _dare_ you express your feelings out loud, and
disturb us!"
But Dickens's eye--I wasn't much more than a boy, and he didn't know
me from Adam--went at once straight for mine. "Here's somebody who
likes me, anyhow," it said. For the next few minutes he read at me, if
ever man did. The sympathetic unit is everything to us. And on my
word the result was that he so warmed to his work that he got the
whole audience in his hand, and dispensed with me. Only once
again--oh, how like him it was!--he fixed me with his eye just towards
the end of the reading, and made a short but perceptible pause. I
wondered what was coming--and soon knew. The choleric old party in the
street had to appear for one passing instant more, and fire off one
more passing sentence. Which he did--with the same results. Good
heavens! what an actor Dickens was.
When that reading ended--with the success which it deserved--never did
that most expressive of all human features, the eye, thank a boy more
expressively. Over all things cultivate sympathy. If antipathy goes
with it, so much the better. If the magnet must attract, it likewise
must repel. Dickens was a magnet of the magnets; but in his case I
must confess, that when a modern specimen tells me he can't laugh at
him, he makes me feel rather as Heine felt when somebody told him that
he--the somebody--was an atheist; frightened.
... Dickens is perhaps best described as to my immense amusement, and
by the most delicious misprint I ever saw, I found myself once
described in the "Visitors' List" in an English paper abroad--"Human
Marvel, and family." It looked like some new kind of acrobat. Of
Charles Dickens's great kindnesses to me in after days, and of some
personal experiences of his stage passion, at the end of his life, I
ventured to gossip with readers of the _Bar_, some months ago, in a
paper called "With the Majority." In one sense, yes; but in
another--in what a minority, Thackeray and he!
XXVI
ON THE DEATH OF DICKENS
When Charles Dickens died the English papers and magazines were filled
with criticisms and appreciations of the great writer. It may be
interesting to glance at a few extracts from these:
From _Fraser's Magazine_.--On the eighth of June, 1870, the busiest
brain and the busiest hand that ever guided pen over paper finished
their appointed work, and that pen was laid aside forever. Words of
its inditing were sure of immediately reaching and being welcomed by a
larger number of men and women than those of any other living
writer--perhaps of any writer who has ever lived.
About six o'clock on that summer evening, having done his day's work
with habitual assiduity, Charles Dickens sat down to dinner with some
members of his family. He had complained of headache, but neither he
nor any one felt the least apprehension. The pain increased, the head
drooped forward, and he never spoke again. Breathing went on for
four-and-twenty hours, and then there was nothing left but ... dismay
and sorrow. When the sad news was made public it fell with the shock
of a personal loss on the hearts of countless millions, to whom the
name of the famous author was like that of an intimate and dear
friend....
Anthony Trollope in _St. Paul's_.--It seems to have been but the other
day that, sitting where I now sit, in the same chair, at the same
table, with the same familiar things around me, I wrote for the
_Cornhill Magazine_ a few lines in remembrance of Thackeray, who had
then been taken from us, and when those lines appeared they were
preceded by others, very full of feeling, from his much older friend,
Charles Dickens. Now I take up my pen again because Charles Dickens
has also gone, and because it is not fit that this publication should
go forth without a word spoken to his honor.
It is singular that two men in age so nearly equal, in career so
nearly allied, friends so old, and rivals so close, should each have
left us so suddenly, without any of that notice, first doubting and
then assured, which illness gives; so that in the case of the one as
of the other, the tidings of death's dealings have struck us a hard
and startling blow, inflicting not only sorrow, but for a while that
positive, physical pain which comes from evil tidings which are
totally unexpected. It was but a week or two since that I was
discussing at the club that vexed question of American copyright with
Mr. Dickens, and while differing from him somewhat, was wondering at
the youthful vitality of the man who seemed to have done his forty
years of work without having a trace of it left upon him to lessen his
energy, or rob his feelings of their freshness. It was but the other
day that he spoke at the Academy dinner, and those who heard him then
heard him at his best; and those who did not hear him, but only read
his words, felt how fortunate it was that there should be such a man
to speak for literature on such an occasion. When he took farewell of
the public as a public reader, a few months since, the public wondered
that a man in the very prime of his capacity should retire from such a
career. But though there was to be an end to his readings, there was
not, therefore, to be an end of his labors. He was to resume, and did
resume, his old work, and when the first number of _Edwin Drood's
Mystery_ was bought up with unprecedented avidity by the lovers of
Dickens's stories, it was feared, probably, by none but one that he
might not live to finish his chronicle. He was a man, as we all
thought, to live to be a hundred. He looked to be full of health, he
walked vigorously, he stood, and spoke, and, above all, he laughed
like a man in the full vigor of his life....
He would attempt nothing--show no interest in anything--which he could
not do, and which he did not understand. But he was not on that
account forced to confine himself to literature. Every one knows how
he read. Most readers of these lines, though they may never have seen
him act,--as I never did,--still know that his acting was excellent.
As an actor he would have been at the top of his profession. And he
had another gift,--had it so wonderfully, that it may almost be said
that he has left no equal behind him. He spoke so well, that a public
dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the
chair,--had its compensating twenty minutes of pleasure, even if he
were called upon to propose a toast, or to thank the company for
drinking his health. For myself, I never could tell how far his
speeches were ordinarily prepared:--but I can declare that I have
heard him speak admirably when he has had to do so with no moment of
preparation.
A great man has gone from us--such a one that we may surely say of him
that we shall not look upon his like again. As years roll on, we shall
learn to appreciate his loss. He now rests in the spot consecrated to
the memory of our greatest and noblest; and Englishmen would certainly
not have been contented had he been laid elsewhere.
XXVII
RUSKIN'S CHILDHOOD
We are fortunate in having Ruskin's own account of how he passed his
childhood days. In _Praeterita_ we have his autobiography. His
description of his early days runs as follows:
"I am and my father was before me a violent Tory of the old school
(Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's); I name these two
out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two
masters. I had Walter Scott's novels and the _Iliad_ (Pope's
translation), for my only reading when I was a child, on weekdays; on
Sunday their effect was tempered by _Robinson Crusoe_ and the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, my mother having it deeply in her heart to make
an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more
evangelical than her mother, and my aunt gave me cold mutton for
Sunday's dinner, which, as I much preferred it hot, greatly diminished
the influence of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the end of the matter
was, that I got all of the imaginative teachings of De Foe and Bunyan,
and yet--am not an evangelical clergyman.
"I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that
compulsorily, and every day of the week.
"Walter Scott and Pope's Homer were reading of my own election, but my
mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the
Bible by heart, as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud,
hard names and all, from Genesis, to the Apocalypse, about once a
year: and to that discipline--patient, accurate, and resolute--I owe,
not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally
serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the
best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I
might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people's novels;
and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson's English, or
Gibbon's, as types of language; but once knowing the 32d of
Deuteronomy, or the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the
Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by
heart, and having always a way of thinking with; myself what words
meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of
youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English, and the
affectation of trying to write like Hooker or George Herbert was the
most innocent I could have fallen into."
* * * * *
"As years went on, and I came to be four or five years old he (the
father) could command a post-chaise and pair for two months in the
summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the round of
his country customers (who liked to see the principal of the house,
his own traveler); so that, at a jog-trot pace, and through the
panoramic opening of the four windows of a post-chaise, made more
panoramic still to me because my seat was a little bracket in front
(for we used to hire the chaise regularly for the two months out of
Long Acre, and so could have it bracketed and pocketed as we liked), I
saw all the highroads, and most of the cross ones, of England and
Wales, and great part of lowland Scotland, as far as Perth, where
every other year we spent the whole summer; and I used to read the
_Abbot_ at Kinross, and the _Monastery_ at Glen Farg, which I used to
confuse with 'Glendearg,' and thought that the White Lady had as
certainly lived by the streamlet in the glen of the Ochlis, as the
Queen of Scots in the island of Loch Leven.
"To my farther benefit, as I grew older, I thus saw nearly all the
noblemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of
uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any
political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a
small house, and have Warwick castle to be astonished at, than to live
in Warwick castle and have nothing to be astonished at; but that, at
all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more
pleasantly habitable, to pull Warwick castle down."
* * * * *
"Contented, by reason of these occasional glimpses of the rivers of
Paradise, I lived until I was more than four years old in Hunter
Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few
weeks in the summer breathing country air, by taking lodgings in small
cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about
Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at 'Mrs. Ridley's,' the last of a row in a
lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself
full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my
chief remaining impressi
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