De Libris: Prose and Verse by Austin Dobson (page 2)

Whoever should be within;
But all to no purpose, for no one
Would hearken to let them in.

“_La rime n’est pas riche_” nor is the technique thoroughly assured; but the thought is poetical. Here is another, “In an Apple-Tree,” which reads like a child variation of that haunting “Mimnermus in Church” of the author of Ionica:–

In September, when the apples are red, To Belinda I said,
“Would you like to go away
To Heaven, or stay
Here in this orchard full of trees All your life? “And she said,” If you please I’ll stay here–where I know,
And the flowers grow.”

In another vein is the bright little “Child’s Song”:–

The King and the Queen were riding
Upon a Summer’s day,
And a Blackbird flew above them,
To hear what they did say.

The King said he liked apples,
The Queen said she liked pears;
And what shall we do to the Blackbird Who listens unawares?

But, as a rule, it must be admitted of her poetry that, while nearly always poetic in its impulse, it is often halting and inarticulate in its expression. A few words may be added in regard to the mere facts of Miss Greenaway’s career. She was born at 1 Cavendish Street, Hoxton, on the 17th March, 1846, her father being Mr. John Greenaway, a draughtsman on wood, who contributed much to the earlier issues of the _Illustrated London News_ and _Punch_. Annual visits to a farm-house at Rolleston in Nottinghamshire–the country residence already referred to–nourished and confirmed her love of nature. Very early she showed a distinct bias towards colour and design of an original kind. She studied at different places, and at South Kensington. Here both she and Lady Butler “would bribe the porter to lock them in when the day’s work was done, so that they might labour on for some while more.” Her master at Kensington was Richard Burchett, who, forty years ago, was a prominent figure in the art-schools, a well instructed painter, and a teacher exceptionally equipped with all the learning of his craft. Mr. Burchett thought highly of Miss Greenaway’s abilities; and she worked under him for several years with exemplary perseverance and industry. She subsequently studied in the Slade School under Professor Legros.

Her first essays in the way of design took the form of Christmas cards, then beginning their now somewhat flagging career, and she exhibited pictures at the Dudley Gallery for some years in succession, beginning with 1868. In 1877 she contributed to the Royal Academy a water colour entitled “Musing,” and in 1889 was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours.

By this date, as will be gathered from what has preceded, Miss Greenaway had made her mark as a producer of children’s books, since, in addition to the volumes already specially mentioned, she had issued _Under the Window_ (her earliest success), _The Language of Flowers, Kate Greenaway’s Painting Book, The Book of Games, King Pepito_ and other works. Her last “Almanack,” which was published by Messrs Dent and Co., appeared in 1897. In 1891, the Fine Arts Society exhibited some 150 of her original drawings–an exhibition which was deservedly successful, and was followed by others.[28] As Slade Professor at Oxford, Ruskin, always her fervent admirer, gave her unstinted eulogium; and in France her designs aroused the greatest admiration. The _DÈbats_ had a leading article on her death; and the clever author of _L’Art du Rire_, M. ArsËne Alexandre, who had already written appreciatively of her gifts as a “_paysagiste_,” and as a “_maÓtresse en l’art du sourire, du jolt sourire_ _d’enfant inginu et gaiement candide_” devoted a column in the _Figaro_ to her merits.

Note:

[28] Among other things these exhibitions revealed the great superiority of the original designs to the reproductions with which the public are familiar–excellent as these are in their way. Probably, if Miss Greenaway’s work were now repeated by the latest form of three-colour process, she would be less an “inheritor”–in this respect–“of unfulfilled renown.”

It has been noted that, in her later years, Miss Greenaway’s popularity was scarcely maintained. It would perhaps be more exact to say that it somewhat fell off with the fickle crowd who follow a reigning fashion, and who unfortunately help to swell the units of a paying community. To the last she gave of her best; but it is the misfortune of distinctive and original work, that, while the public resents versatility in its favourites, it wearies unreasonably of what had pleased it at first–especially if the note be made tedious by imitation. Miss Greenaway’s old vogue was in some measure revived by her too-early death on the 6th November 1901; but, in any case, she is sure of attention from the connoisseur of the future. Those who collect Stothard and Caldecott (and they are many!) cannot afford to neglect either _Marigold Garden_ or _Mother Goose_.[29]

Note:

[29] Since the above article appeared in the _Art Journal_, from which it is here substantially reproduced, Messrs. M.H, Spieimann and G.S. Layard have (1905) devoted a sumptuous and exhaustive volume to Miss Greenaway and her art. To this truly beautiful and sympathetic book I can but refer those of her admirers who are not yet acquainted with it.

A SONG OF THE GREENAWAY CHILD

As I went a-walking on _Lavender Hill_, O, I met a Darling in frock and frill;
And she looked at me shyly, with eyes of blue, “Are you going a-walking? Then take me too!”

So we strolled to the field where the cowslips grow, And we played–and we played, for an hour or so; Then we climbed to the top of the old park wall, And the Darling she threaded a cowslip ball.

Then we played again, till I said–“My Dear, This pain in my side, it has grown severe; I ought to have mentioned I’m past three-score, And I fear that I scarcely can play any more!”

But the Darling she answered,-“O no! O no! You must play–you must play.–I sha’n’t let you go!”

–And I woke with a start and a sigh of despair, And I found myself safe in my Grandfather’s-chair!

TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS

II. MR HUGH THOMSON

In virtue of certain gentle and caressing qualities of style, Douglas Jerrold conferred on one of his contributors–Miss Eliza Meteyard–the pseudonym of “Silverpen.” It is in the silver-pensive key that one would wish to write of Mr. HUGH THOMSON. There is nothing in his work of elemental strife,–of social problem,–of passion torn to tatters. He leads you by no _terribile via_,–over no “burning Marle.” You cannot conceive him as the illustrator of _Paradise Lost_, of Dante’s _Inferno_–even of DorÈ’s _Wandering Jew_. But when, after turning over some dozens of his designs, you take stock of your impressions, you discover that your memory is packed with pleasant fancies. You have been among “blown fields” and “flowerful closes”; you have passed quaint roadside-inns and picturesque cottages; you are familiar with the cheery, ever-changing idyll of the highway and the bustle of animal life; with horses that really gallop, and dogs that really bark; with charming male and female figures in the most attractive old-world attire; with happy laughter and artless waggeries; with a hundred intimate details of English domesticity that are pushed just far enough back to lose the hardness of their outline in a softening haze of retrospect. There has been nothing more tragic in your travels than a sprained ankle or an interrupted affair of honour; nothing more blood-curdling than a dream of a dragoon officer knocked out of his saddle by a brickbat. Your flesh has never been made to creep: but the cockles of your heart have been warmed. Mechanically, you raise your hand to lift away your optimistic spectacles. But they are not there. The optimism is in the pictures.

It must be more than a quarter of a century since Mr. Hugh Thomson, arriving from Coleraine in all the ardour of one-and-twenty, invaded the strongholds of English illustration. He came at a fortunate moment. After a few hesitating and tentative attempts upon the newspapers, he obtained an introduction to Mr. Comyns Carr, then engaged in establishing the _English Illustrated Magazine_ for Messrs. Macmillan. His recommendation was a scrap-book of minutely elaborated designs for _Vanity Fair_, which he had done (like Reynolds) “out of pure idleness.” Mr. Carr, then, as always, a discriminating critic, with a keen eye to possibilities, was not slow to detect, among much artistic recollection, something more than uncertain promise; and although he had already Randolph Caldecott and Mr. Harry Furniss on his staff, he at once gave Mr. Thomson a commission for the magazine. The earliest picture from his hand which appeared was a fancy representation of the Parade at Bath for a paper in June, 1884, by the late H. D. Traill; and he also illustrated (in part) papers on Drawing Room Dances, on Cricket (by Mr. Andrew Lang), and on Covent Garden. But graphic and vividly naturalistic as were his pictures of modern life, his native bias towards imaginary eighteenth century subjects (perhaps prompted by boyish studies of Hogarth in the old Dublin _Penny Magazine_), was already abundantly manifest. He promptly drifted into what was eventually to become his first illustrated book, a series of compositions from the _Spectator_. These were published in 1886 as a little quarto, entitled _Days with Sir Roger de Coverley_.

It was a “temerarious” task to attempt to revive the types which, from the days of Harrison’s _Essayists_, had occupied so many of the earlier illustrators. But the attempt was fully justified by its success. One has but to glance at the head-piece to the first paper, where Sir Roger and “Mr. Spectator” have alighted from the jolting, springless, heavy-wheeled old coach as the tired horses toil uphill, to recognise at once that here is an artist _en pays de connaissance_, who may fairly be trusted, in the best sense, to “illustrate” his subject. Whatever one’s predilections for previous presentments, it is impossible to resist Sir Roger (young, slim, and handsome), carving the perverse widow’s name upon a tree-trunk; or Sir Roger at bowls, or riding to hounds, or listening–with grave courtesy–to Will Wimble’s long-winded and circumstantial account of the taking of the historic jack. Nor is the conception less happy of that amorous fine-gentleman ancestor of the Coverleys who first made love by squeezing the hand; or of that other Knight of the Shire who so narrowly escaped being killed in the Civil Wars because he was sent out of the field upon a private message, the day before Cromwell’s “crowning mercy,”–the battle of Worcester. But the varied embodiments of these, and of Mrs. Betty Arable (“the great fortune”), of Ephraim the Quaker, and the rest, are not all. The figures are set in their fitting environment; they ride their own horses, hallo to their own dogs, and eat and drink in their own dark-panelled rooms that look out on the pleached alleys of their ancient gardens. They live and move in their own passed-away atmosphere of association; and a faithful effort has moreover been made to realise each separate scene with strict relation to its text.

All of the “Coverley” series came out in the _English Illustrated_. So also did the designs for the next book, the _Coaching Days and Coaching Ways_ of Mr. Outram Tristram, 1888. Here Mr. Thomson had a topographical collaborator, Mr. Herbert Railton, who did the major part of the very effective drawings in this kind. But Mr. Thomson’s contributions may fairly be said to have exhausted the “romance” of the road. Inns and inn-yards, hosts and ostlers and chambermaids, stage-coachmen, toll-keepers, mail-coaches struggling in snow-drifts, mail-coaches held up by highwaymen, overturns, elopements, cast shoes, snapped poles, lost linch-pins,–all the episodes and moving accidents of bygone travel on the high road have abundant illustration, till the pages seem almost to reek of the stableyard, or ring with the horn.[30] And here it may be noted, as a peculiarity of Mr. Thomson’s conscientious horse-drawing, that he depicts, not the ideal, but the actual animal. His steeds are not “faultless monsters” like the Dauphin’s palfrey in _Henry the Fifth_. They are “all sorts and conditions” of horses; and–if truth required it–would disclose as many sand-cracks as Rocinante, or as many equine defects (from wind-gall to the bolts) as those imputed to that unhappy “Blackberry” sold by the Vicar of Wakefield at Welbridge Fair to Mr, Ephraini Jenkinson.

Note:

[30] Sometimes a literary or historical picture creeps into the text. Such are “Swift and Bolingbroke at Backlebury” (p. 30); “Charles II. recognised by the Ostler” (p. 144), and “Barry Lyndon cracks a Bottle” (p. 116). _Barry Lyndon_ with its picaresque note and Irish background, would seem an excellent contribution to the “Cranford” series. Why does not Mr. Thomson try his hand at it? He has illustrated _Esmond_, and the _Great Haggarty Diamond_.

The _Vicar of Wakefield_–as it happens–was Mr. Thomson’s next enterprise; and it is, in many respects, a most memorable one. It came out in December, 1890, having occupied him for nearly two years. He took exceptional pains to study and realise the several types for himself, and to ensure correctness of costume. From the first introductory procession of the Primrose family at the head of chapter i. to the awkward merriment of the two Miss Flamboroughs at the close, there is scarcely a page which has not some stroke of quiet fun, some graceful attitude, or some ingenious contrivance in composition. Considering that from Wenham’s edition of 1780, nearly every illustrator of repute had tried his hand at Goldsmith’s masterpiece in fiction,–that he had been attempted without humour by Stothard, without lightness by Mulready,[31]–that he had been made comic by Cruikshank, and vulgarised by Rowiandson,–it was certainly to Mr. Thomson’s credit that he had approached his task with so much refinement, reverence and originality. If the book has a blemish, it is to be mentioned only because the artist, by his later practice, seems to have recognised it himself. For the purposes of process reproduction, the drawings were somewhat loaded and overworked.

Note:

[31]: Mulready’s illustrations of 1843 are here referred to, net his pictures.

This was not chargeable against the next volumes to be chronicled. Mrs. Gaskell’s _Cranford_, 1891, and Miss Mitford’s _Our Village_, 1893, are still regarded by many as the artist’s happiest efforts. I say “still,” because Mr. Thomson is only now in what Victor Hugo called the youth of old age (as opposed to the old age of youth); and it would be premature to assume that a talent so alert to multiply and diversify its efforts, had already attained the summit of its achievement. But in these two books he had certain unquestionable advantages. One obviously would be, that his audience were not already preoccupied by former illustrations; and he was consequently free to invent his own personages and follow his own fertile fancy, without recalling to that implacable and Gorgonising organ, the “Public Eye,” any earlier pictorial conceptions. Another thing in his favour was, that in either case, the very definite, and not very complex types surrendered themselves readily to artistic embodiment. “It almost illustrated itself,”–he told an interviewer concerning _Cranford_; “the characters were so exquisitely and distinctly realised.” Every one has known some like them; and the delightful Knutsford ladies (for “Cranford” was “Knutsford”), the “Boz”–loving Captain Brown and Mr. Holbrook, Peter and his father, and even Martha the maid, with their _mise en scËne_ of card-tables and crackle-china, and pattens and reticules, are part of the memories of our childhood. The same may be said of _Our Village_, except that the breath of Nature blows more freely through it than through the quiet Cheshire market-town; and there is a larger preponderance of those “charming glimpses of rural life” of which Lady Ritchie speaks admiringly in her sympathetic preface. And with regard to the “bits of scenery”–as Mr. Thomson himself calls them–it may be noted that one of the Manchester papers, speaking of _Cranford_, praised the artist’s intimate knowledge of the locality,–a locality he had never seen. Most of his backgrounds were from sketches made on Wimbledon Common, near which–until he moved for a space to the ancient Cinque Port of Seaford in Sussex–he lived for the first years of his London life.

In strict order of time, Mr. Thomson’s next important effort should have preceded the books of Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell. The novels of Jane Austen–to which we now come–if not the artist’s high-water mark, are certainly remarkable as a _tour de force_. To contrive some forty page illustrations for each of Miss Austen’s admirable, but–from an illustrator’s standpoint–not very palpitating productions,–with a scene usually confined to the dining-room or parlour,–with next to no animals, and with rare opportunities for landscape accessory,–was an “adventure”–in Cervantic phrase–which might well have given pause to a designer of less fertility and resource. But besides the figures there was the furniture; and acute admirers have pointed out that a nice discretion is exhibited in graduating the appointments of Longbourn and Netherfield Park,–of Rosings and Hunsford. But what is perhaps more worthy of remark is the artist’s persistent attempt to give individuality, as well as grace, to his dramatis persona;. The unspeakable Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet, the horsy Mr. John Thorpe, Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Norris, the Eltons–are all carefully discriminated. Nothing can well be better than Mr. Woodhouse, with his “almost immaterial legs” drawn securely out of the range of a too-fierce fire, chatting placidly to Miss Bates upon the merits of water-gruel; nothing more in keeping than the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, “in the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind” of her indignation, superciliously pausing to patronise the capabilities of the Longbourn reception rooms. Not less happy is the dumbfounded astonishment of Mrs. Bennet at her toilet, when she hears–to her stupefaction–that her daughter Elizabeth is to be mistress of Pemberley and ten thousand a year. This last is a head-piece; and it may be observed, as an additional difficulty in this group of novels, that, owing to the circumstances of publication, only in one of the books. _Pride and Prejudice_, was Mr, Thomson free to decorate the chapters with those ingenious _entÍtes_ and _culs-de-lampe_ of which he so eminently possesses the secret.[32]

Note:

[32] That eloquence of subsidiary detail, which has had so many exponents in English art from Hogarth onwards, is one of Mr. Thomson’s most striking characteristics. The reader will find it exemplified in the beautiful book-plate at page 111, which, by the courtesy of its owner, Mr. Ernest Brown, I am permitted to reproduce.

By this time his reputation had long been firmly established. To the Jane Austen volumes succeeded other numbers of the so-called “Cranford” series, to which, in 1894, Mr. Thomson had already added, under the title of _Coridon’s Song and other Verses_, a fresh ingathering of old-time minstrelsy from the pages of the _English Illustrated_. Many of the drawings for these, though of necessity reduced for publication in book form, are in his most delightful and winning manner,–notably perhaps (if one must choose!) the martial ballad of that “Captain of Militia, Sir Bilberry Diddle,” who

–dreamt, Fame reports, that he cut all the throats Of the French as they landed in flat-bottomed boats

–or rather were going to land any time during the Seven Years’ War. Excellent, too, are John Gay’s ambling _Journey to Exeter_., the _Angler’s Song_ from Walton (which gives its name to the collection), and Fielding’s rollicking “A-hunting we will go.” Other “Cranford” books, which now followed, were James Lane Allen’s _Kentucky Cardinal_, 1901; Fanny Burney’s _Evelina_, 1903; Thackeray’s _Esmond_, 1905; and two of George Eliot’s novels–_Scenes of Clerical Life_, 1906, and _Silas Marner_, 1907. In 1899 Mr. Thomson had also undertaken another book for George Allen, an edition of Reade’s _Peg Woffington_,–a task in which he took the keenest delight, particularly in the burlesque character of Triplet. These were all in the old pen-work; but some of the designs for _Silas Marner_ were lightly and tastefully coloured. This was a plan the author had adopted, with good effect, not only in a special edition of _Cranford_ (1898), but for some of his original drawings which came into the market after exhibition. Nothing can be more seductive than a Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately tinted in sky-blue, _rose-Du Barry_, and apple-green (the _vert-pomme_ dear–as Gautier says–to the soft moderns)–a treatment which lends them a subdued but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a pedigree, and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm of the phrase-maker who described their inventor as the “Charles Lamb of illustration.”

From the above enumeration certain omissions have of necessity been made. Besides the books mentioned, Mr. Thomson has contrived to prepare for newspapers and magazines many closely-studied sketches of contemporary manners. Some of the best of his work in this way is to be found in the late Mrs. E.T. Cook’s _Highways and Byways of London Life_, 1902. For the _Highways and Byways_ series, he has also illustrated, wholly or in part, volumes on Ireland, North Wales, Devon, Cornwall and Yorkshire. The last volume, Kent, 1907, is entirely decorated by himself. In this instance, his drawings throughout are in pencil, and he is his own topographer. It is a remarkable departure, both in manner and theme, though Mr. Thomson’s liking for landscape has always been pronounced. “I would desire above all things,” he told an interviewer, “to pass my time in painting landscape. Landscape pictures always attract me, and the grand examples, Gainsboroughs, Claudes, Cromes, and Turners, to be seen any day in our National Gallery, are a source of never-failing yearning and delight.” The original drawings for the Kent book are of great beauty; and singularly dexterous in the varied methods by which the effect is produced. The artist is now at work on the county of Surrey. It is earnest of his versatility that, in 1904, he illustrated for Messrs. Wells, Darton and Co., with conspicuous success, a modernised prose version of certain of Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, as well as _Tales from Maria Edgeworth_, 1903; and he also executed, in 1892 and 1895,[33] some charming designs to selections from the verses of the present writer, who has long enjoyed the privilege of his friendship.

Personal traits do not come within the province of this paper, or it would be pleasant to dwell upon Mr. Thomson’s modesty, his untiring industry, and his devotion to his art. But in regard to that art, it may be observed that to characterise it solely as “packing the memory with pleasant fancies” may suffice for an exordium, but is inadequate as a final appreciation. Let me therefore note down, as they occur to me, some of his more prominent pictorial characteristics. With three of the artists mentioned in this and the preceding paper, he has obvious affinities, while, in a sense, he includes them all. If he does not excel Stothard in the gift of grace, he does in range and variety; and he more than rivals him in composition. He has not, like Miss Greenaway, endowed the art-world with a special type of childhood; but his children are always lifelike and engaging. (Compare, at a venture, the boy soldiers whom Frank Castlewood is drilling in chapter xi. of _Esmond_, or the delightful little fellow who is throwing up his arms in chapter ix. of _Emma_.) As regards dogs and horses and the rest, his colleague, Mr, Joseph Pennell, an expert critic, and a most accomplished artist, holds that he has “long since surpassed” Randolph Caldecott.[34] I doubt whether Mr. Thomson himself would concur with his eulogist in this. But he has assuredly followed Caldecott close; and in opulence of production, which–as Macaulay insisted–should always count, has naturally exceeded that gifted, but shortlived, designer. If, pursuing an ancient practice, one were to attempt to label Mr. Thomson with a special distinction apart from, and in addition to, his other merits, I should be inclined to designate him the “Master of the Vignette,”–taking that word in its primary sense as including head-pieces, tail-pieces and initial letters. In this department, no draughtsman I can call to mind has ever shown greater fertility of invention, so much playful fancy, so much grace, so much kindly humour, and such a sane and wholesome spirit of fun.

Notes:

[33] _The Ballad of Beau Brocade_, and _The Story of Rosina_.

[34] _Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen, 2nd ed. 1894, p. 358._

HORATIAN ODE

ON THE TERCENTENARY OF

“DON QUIXOTE”

_(Published at Madrid, by Francisco de Robles, January 1605)_

“Para mÌ sola naciÛ don Quixote, y yo para Èl.”–CERVANTES.

Advents we greet of great and small;
Much we extol that may not live;
Yet to the new-born Type we give
No care at all!

This year,[35]–three centuries past,–by age More maimed than by LEPANTO’S fight,– This year CERVANTES gave to light
His matchless page,

Whence first outrode th’ immortal Pair,– The half-crazed Hero and his hind,–
To make sad laughter for mankind; And whence they fare

Throughout all Fiction still, where chance Allies Life’s dulness with its dreams– Allies what is, with what but seems,– Fact and Romance:–

O Knight of fire and Squire of earth!– O changing give-and-take between
The aim too high, the aim too mean, I hail your birth,–

Three centuries past,–in sunburned SPAIN, And hang, on Time’s PANTHEON wall,
My votive tablet to recall
That lasting gain!

Note:

[35] _I.e._ January 1905.

THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS

One common grave, according to Garrick, covers the actor and his art. The same may be said of the raconteur. Oral tradition, or even his own writings, may preserve his precise words; but his peculiarities of voice or action, his tricks of utterance and intonation,–all the collateral details which serve to lend distinction or piquancy to the performance–perish irrecoverably. The glorified gramophone of the future may perhaps rectify this for a new generation; and give us, without mechanical drawback, the authentic accents of speakers dead and gone; but it can never perpetuate the dramatic accompaniment of gesture and expression. If, as always, there are exceptions to this rule, they are necessarily evanescent. Now and then, it may be, some clever mimic will recall the manner of a passed-away predecessor; and he may even contrive to hand it on, more or less effectually, to a disciple. But the reproduction is of brief duration; and it is speedily effaced or transformed.

In this way it is, however, that we get our most satisfactory idea of the once famous table-talker, Samuel Rogers. Charles Dickens, who sent Rogers several of his books; who dedicated _Master Humphrey’s Clock_ to him; and who frequently assisted at the famous breakfasts in St. James’s Place, was accustomed–rather cruelly, it may be thought–to take off his host’s very characteristic way of telling a story; and it is, moreover, affirmed by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald[36] that, in the famous Readings, “the strangely obtuse and owl-like expression, and the slow, husky croak” of Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the “Trial from _Pickwick_” were carefully copied from the author of the _Pleasures of Memory_, That Dickens used thus to amuse his friends is confirmed by the autobiography of the late Frederick Locker,[37] who perfectly remembered the old man, to see whom he had been carried, as a boy, by his father. He had also heard Dickens repeat one of Rogers’s stock anecdotes (it was that of the duel in a dark room, where the more considerate combatant, firing up the chimney, brings down his adversary);[38]–and he speaks of Dickens as mimicking Rogers’s “calm, low-pitched, drawling voice and dry biting manner very comically.”[39] At the same time, it must be remembered that these reminiscences relate to Rogers in his old age. He was over seventy when Dickens published his first book, _Sketches by Boz_; and, though it is possible that Rogers’s voice was always rather sepulchral, and his enunciation unusually deliberate and monotonous, he had nevertheless, as Locker says, “made story-telling a fine art.” Continued practice had given him the utmost economy of words; and as far as brevity and point are concerned, his method left nothing to be desired. Many of his best efforts are still to be found in the volume of _Table-Talk_ edited for Moxon in 1856 by the Rev. Alexander Dyce; or preferably, as actually written down by Rogers himself in the delightful _Recollections_ issued three years later by his nephew and executor, William Sharpe.

Notes:

[36] _Recreations of a Literary Man_, 1882, p. 137.

[37] _My Confidences_, by Frederick Locker-Lampson, 1896, pp. 98 and 325.

[38] The duellists were an Englishman and a Frenchman; and Rogers was in the habit of adding as a postscript: “When I tell that in Paris, I always put the Englishman up the chimney!”

[39] It may be added that Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, himself no mean mime, may be sometimes persuaded to imitate Dickens imitating Rogers.

But although the two things are often intimately connected, the “books,” and not the “stories” of Rogers, are the subject of the present paper. After this, it sounds paradoxical to have to admit that his reputation as a connoisseur far overshadowed his reputation as a bibliophile. When, in December 1855, he died, his pictures and curios,–his “articles of virtue and bigotry” as a modern Malaprop would have styled them,–attracted far more attention than the not very numerous volumes forming his library.[40] What people flocked to see at the tiny treasure-house overlooking the Green Park,[41] which its nonagenarian owner had occupied for more than fifty years, were the “Puck” and “Strawberry Girl” of Sir Joshua, the Titians, Giorgiones, and Guidos,[42] the Poussins and Claudes, the drawings of Raphael and D¸rer and Lucas van Leyden, the cabinet decorated by Stothard, the chimney-piece carved by Flaxman; the miniatures and bronzes and Etruscan vases,–all the “infinite riches in a little room,” which crowded No. 22 from garret to basement. These were the rarities that filled the columns of the papers and the voices of the quidnuncs when in 1856 they came to the hammer. But although the Press of that day takes careful count of these things, it makes little reference to the sale of the “books” of the banker-bard who spent some £15,000 on the embellishments of his _Italy_ and his _Poems_; and although Dr. Burney says that Rogers’s library included “the best editions of the best authors in most languages,” he had clearly no widespread reputation as a book-collector pure and simple. Nevertheless he loved his books,–that is, he loved the books he read. And, as far as can be ascertained, he anticipated the late Master of Balliol, since he read only the books he liked. Nor was he ever diverted from his predilections by mere fashion or novelty. “He followed Bacon’s maxim”–says one who knew him–“to read much, not many things: _multum legere, non multa_. He used to say, ‘When a new book comes out, I read an old one.'”[43]

Notes:

[40] The prices obtained confirm this. Thetotaisum realised was £45,188:14:3. Of this the books represented no more than £1415:5.

[41] This–with its triple range of bow-windows, from one of which Rogers used to watch his favourite sunsets–is now the residence of Lord Northcliffe.

[42] Three of these–the “_Noli me tangere_” of Titian, Giorgione’s “Knight in Armour,” and Guide’s “_Ecce Homo_”–are now in the National Gallery, to which they were bequeathed by Rogers.

[43] _Edinburgh Review_, vol. civ. p. 105, by Abraham Hayward.

The general Rogers-sale at Christie’s took place in the spring of 1856, and twelve days had been absorbed before the books were reached. Their sale took six days more–_i.e._ from May 12 to May 19. As might be expected from Rogers’s traditional position in the literary world, the catalogue contains many presentation copies. What, at first sight, would seem the earliest, is the _Works_ of Edward Moore, 1796, 2 vols. But if this be the fabulist and editor of the _World_, it can scarcely have been received from the writer, since, in 1796, Moore had been dead for nearly forty years. With Bloomfield’s poems of 1802, l. p., we are on surer ground, for Rogers, like Capel Lofft, had been kind to the author of _The Farmer’s Boy_, and had done his best to obtain him a pension. Another early tribute, subsequently followed by the _Tales of the Hall_, was Crabbe’s Borough, which he sent to Rogers in 1810, in response to polite overtures made to him by the poet. This was the beginning of a lasting friendship, of no small import to Crabbe, as it at once admitted him to Rogers’s circle, an advantage of which there are many traces in Crabbe’s journal. Next comes Madame de StaÎl’s much proscribed _De l’Allamagne_ (the Paris edition); and from its date, 1813, it must have been presented to Rogers when its irrepressible author was in England. She often dined or breakfasted at St. James’s Place, where (according to Byron), she out-talked Whitbread, confounded Sir Humphry Davy, and was herself well “_ironed_”[44] by Sheridan. Rogers considered _Corinne_ to be her best novel, and _Delphine_ a terrible falling-off. The Germany he found “very fatiguing.” “She writes her works four or five times over, correcting them only in that way”–he says. “The end of a chapter [is] always the most obscure, as she ends with an epigram,”[45] Another early presentation copy is the second edition of Bowles’s _Missionary_, 1815. According to Rogers, who claims to have suggested the poem, it was to have been inscribed to him. But somehow or other, the book got dedicated to noble lord who–Rogers adds drily–never, either by word or letter, made any acknowledgment of the homage.[46] It is not impossible that there is some confusion of recollection here, or Rogers is misreported by Dyce. The first anonymous edition of the _Missionary_, 1813, had _no_ dedication; and the second was inscribed to the Marquess of Lansdowne because he had been prominent among those who recognised the merit of its predecessor.

Notes:

[44] Perhaps a remembrance of Mrs Slipslop’s “_ironing_.”

[45] Clayden’s _Rogers and his Contemporaries_, 1889, i. 225. As an epigrammatist himself, Rogers might have been more indulgent to a _consoeur_. Here is one of Madame de StaÎl’s “ends of chapters”:–“_La monotonie, dans la retraite, tranquillise l’‚me; la monotonie, dans le grand monde, fatigue l’esprit_” (ch. viii.). But he evidently found her rather overpowering.

[46] Table-Talk, 1856, p. 258.

Several of Scott’s poems, with Rogers’s autograph, and Scott’s card, appear in the catalogue; and, in 1812, Byron, who a year after inscribed the _Giaour_ to Rogers, sent him the first two cantos of _Childe Harold._ In 1838, Moore presents _Lalla Rookh_, with Heath’s plates, a work which, upon its first appearance, twenty years earlier, had been dedicated to Rogers. In 1839 Charles Dickens followed with _Nicholas Nickleby_, succeeded a year later by _Master Humphrey’s Clock_ (1840-1), also dedicated to Rogers in recognition, not only of his poetical merit, but of his “active sympathy with the poorest and humblest of his kind.” Rogers was fond of “Little Nell”; and in the Preface to _Barnaby Rudge_, Dickens gracefully acknowledged that “for a beautiful thought” in the seventy-second chapter of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, he was indebted to Rogers’s Ginevra in the _Italy_:–

And long might’st thou have seen
An old man wandering _as in quest of something,_ Something he could not find–he knew not what.

The _American Notes_, 1842, was a further offering from Dickens. Among other gifts may be noted Wordsworth’s _Poems_, 1827-35; Campbell’s _Pilgrim of Glencoe_, 1842; Longfellow’s _Ballads and Voices of the Night_, 1840-2; Macaulay’s _Lays_ and Tennyson’s _Poems_, 1842; and lastly, Hazlitt’s _Criticisms on Art_, 1844, and Carlyle’s _Letters and Speeches of Cromwell_, 1846. Brougham’s philosophical novel of _Albert Lunel; or, the Ch‚teau of Languedoc_, 3 vols, 1844, figures in the catalogue as “withdrawn.” It had been suppressed “for private reasons” upon the eve of publication; and this particular copy being annotated by Rogers (to whom it was inscribed) those concerned were no doubt all the more anxious that it should not get abroad. Inspection of the reprint of 1872 shows, however, that want of interest was its chief error. A reviewer of 1858 roundly calls it “feeble” and “commonplace”; and it could hardly have increased its writer’s reputation. Indeed, by some, it was not supposed to be from his Lordship’s pen at all. Rogers, it may be added, frequently annotated his books. His copies of Pope, Gray and Scott had many _marginalia_. Clarke’s and Fox’s histories of James II. were also works which he decorated in this way.

As already hinted, not very many bibliographical curiosities are included in the St. James’s Place collection; and to look for Shakespeare quartos or folios, for example, would be idle. Ordinary editions of Shakespeare, such as Johnson’s and Theobald’s; Shakespeariana, such as Mrs. Montagu’s _Essay_ and Ayscough’s _Index_,–these are there of course. If the list also takes in Thomas Caldecott’s _Hamlet_, and _As you like it_ (1832), that is, first, because the volume is a presentation copy; and secondly, because Caldecott’s colleague in his frustrate enterprise was Crowe, Rogers’s Miltonic friend, hereafter mentioned. Rogers’s own feeling for Shakespeare was cold and hypercritical; and he was in the habit of endorsing with emphasis Ben Jonson’s aspiration that the master had blotted a good many of his too-facile lines. Nevertheless, it is possible to pick out a few exceptional volumes from Mr. Christie’s record. Among the earliest comes a copy of Garth’s _Dispensary_, 1703, which certainly boasts an illustrious pedigree. Pope, who received it from the author, had carefully corrected it in several places; and in 1744 bequeathed it to Warburton. Warburton, in his turn, handed it on to Mason, from whom it descended to Lord St. Helens, by whom, again, shortly before his death (1815), it was presented to Rogers. To Pope’s corrections, which Garth adopted, Mason had added a comment. What made the volume of further interest was, that it contained Lord Dorchester’s receipt for his subscription to Pope’s _Homer_; and, inserted at the end, a full-length portrait of Pope; viz., that engraved in Warton’s edition of 1797, as sketched in pen-and-ink by William Hoare of Bath. Another interesting item is the quarto first edition (the first three books) of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_, Ponsonbie, 1590: and a third, the _Paradise Lost_ of Milton in ten books, the original text of 1667 (with the 1669 title-page and the Argument and Address to the Reader)–both bequeathed to Rogers by W, Jackson of Edinburgh. (One of the stock exhibits at “Memory Hall”–as 22 St. James’s Place was playfully called by some of the owner’s friends–was Milton’s receipt to Symmons the printer for the five pounds he received for his epic. This, framed and glazeds hung, according to Lady Eastlake, on one of the doors.[47]) A fourth rare book was William Bonham’s black-letter Chaucer, a folio which had been copiously annotated in MS. by Home Tooke, who gave it to Rogers. It moreover contained, at folio 221, the record of Tooke’s arrest at Wimbledon on 16th May, 1794, and subsequent committal on the 19th to the Tower, for alleged high treason.[48] Further _notabilia_ in this category were the Duke of Marlborough’s _Hypnerotomachie_ of Poliphilus, Paris, 1554, and also the Aldine edition of 1499; the very rare 1572 issue of Camoens’s _Lusiads_; Holbein’s _Dance of Death_, the Lyons issues of 1538 and 1547; first editions of Bewick’s _Birds_ and _Quadrupeds_; Le Sueur’s _Life of St. Bruno_, with the autograph of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a rare quarto (1516) of Boccaccio’s _Decameron_.

Notes:

[47] It was, no doubt, identical with the “Original Articles of Agreement” (Add. MSS. 18,861) between Milton and Samuel Symmons, printer, dated 27th April, 1667, presented by Rogers in 1852 to the British Museum. Besides the above-mentioned £5 down, there were to be three further payments of £5 each on the sale of three editions, each of 1300 copies. The second edition appeared in 1674, the year of the author’s death.

[48] He was acquitted. His notes, in pencil, and relating chiefly to his _Diversions of Parley_, were actually written in the Tower. Rogers, who was present at the trial in November, mentioned, according to Dyce, a curious incident bearing upon a now obsolete custom referred to by Goldsmith and others. As usual, the prisoner’s dock, in view of possible jail-fever, was strewn with sweet-smelling herbs-fennel, rosemary and the like. Tooke indignantly swept them away. Another of several characteristic anecdotes told by Rogers of Tooke is as follows:–Being asked once at college what his father was, he replied, “A Turkey Merchant.” Tooke _pËre_ was a poulterer in Clare Market.

But the mere recapitulation of titles readily grows tedious, even to the elect; and I turn to some of the volumes with which, from references in the _Table-Talk_ and _Recollections_, their owner might seem to be more intimately connected. Foremost among these–one would think–should come his own productions. Most of these, no doubt, are included under the auctioneers’ heading of “Works and Illustrations.” In the “Library” proper, however, there are few traces of them. There is a quarto copy of the unfortunate _Columbus_, with Stothard’s sketches; and there is the choice little _Pleasures of Memory_ of 1810, with Luke Clennell’s admirable cuts in _facsimile_ from the same artist’s pen-and-ink,–a volume which, come what may, will always hold its own in the annals of book-illustration. That there were more than one of these latter may be an accident. Rogers, nevertheless, like many book-lovers, must have indulged in duplicates. According to Hayward, once at breakfast, when some one quoted Gray’s irresponsible outburst concerning the novels of Marivaux and CrÈbillon _le fils_, Rogers asked his guests, three in number, whether they were familiar with Marivaux’s _Vie de Marianne_, a book which he himself confesses to have read through six times, and which French critics still hold, on inconclusive evidence, to have been the “only begetter” of Richardson’s _Pamela_ and the sentimental novel. None of the trio knew anything about it. “Then I will lend you each a copy,” rejoined Rogers; and the volumes were immediately produced, doubtless by that faithful and indefatigable factotum, Edmund Paine, of whom his master was wont to affirm that he would not only find any book _in_ the house, but _out_ of it as well. What is more (unless it be assumed that the poet’s stock was larger still), one, at least, of the three copies must have been returned, since there is a copy in the catalogue. As might be expected in the admirer of Marivaux’s heroine, the list is also rich in Jean-Jacques, whose “_go˚t vif pour les dÈjeuners_,” this Amphitryon often extolled, quoting with approval Rousseau’s opinion that “_C’est le temps de la journÈe o˘ nous sommes le plus tranquilles, o˘ nous causons le plus ‡ noire aise._” Another of his favourite authors was Manzoni, whose _Promessi Sposi_ he was inclined to think he would rather have written than all Scott’s novels; and he never tired of reading Louis Racine’s _MÈmoires_ of his father, 1747,–that “_filon de l’or pur du dix-septiËme siecle_”–as Villemain calls it–“_qui se prolonge dans l’‚ge suivant._” Some of Rogers’s likings sound strange enough nowadays. With Campbell, he delighted in Cowper’s _Homer_, which he assiduously studied, and infinitely preferred to that of Pope. Into Chapman’s it must be assumed that he had not looked–certainly he has left no sonnet on the subject. Milton was perhaps his best-loved bard. “When I was travelling in Italy (he says), I made two authors my constant study for versification,–Milton _and Crowe_” (The italics are ours.) It is an odd collocation; but not unintelligible. William Crowe, the now forgotten Public Orator of Oxford, and author of _Lewesdon Hill_, was an intimate friend; a writer on versification; and, last but not least, a very respectable echo of the Miltonic note, as the following, from a passage dealing with the loss in 1786 of the _Halsewell_ East Indiaman off the coast of Dorset, sufficiently testifies:–

The richliest-laden ship
Of spicy Ternate, or that annual sent To the Philippines o’er the southern main From Acapulco, carrying massy gold,
Were poor to this;–freighted with hopeful Youth And Beauty, and high Courage undismay’d By mortal terrors, and paternal Love, etc., etc.

It is not improbable that Rogers caught the mould of his blank verse from the copy rather than from the model. In the matter of style–as Flaubert has said–the second-bests are often the better teachers. More is to be learned from La Fontaine and Gautier than from MoliËre and Victor Hugo.

Many art-books, many books addressed specially to the connoisseur, as well as most of those invaluable volumes no gentleman’s library should be without, found their places on Rogers’s hospitable shelves. Of such, it is needless to speak; nor, in this place, is it necessary to deal with his finished and amiable, but not very vigorous or vital poetry. A parting word may, however, be devoted to the poet himself. Although, during his lifetime, and particularly towards its close, his weak voice and singularly blanched appearance exposed him perpetually to a kind of brutal personality now happily tabooed, it cannot be pretended that, either in age or youth, he was an attractive-looking man. In these cases, as in that of Goldsmith, a measure of burlesque sometimes provides a surer criterion than academic portraiture. The bust of the sculptor-caricaturist, Danton, is of course what even Hogarth would have classed as _outrÈ_[49]; but there is reason for believing that Maclise’s sketch in _Fraser_ of the obtrusively bald, cadaverous and wizened figure in its arm-chair, which gave such a shudder of premonition to Goethe, and which Maginn, reflecting the popular voice, declared to be a mortal likeness–“painted to the very death”–was more like the original than his pictures by Lawrence and Hoppner. One can comprehend, too, that the person whom nature had so ungenerously endowed, might be perfectly capable of retorting to rudeness, or the still-smarting recollection of rudeness, with those weapons of mordant wit and acrid epigram which are not unfrequently the protective compensation of physical shortcomings. But this conceded, there are numberless anecdotes which testify to Rogers’s cultivated taste and real good breeding, to his genuine benevolence, to his almost sentimental craving for appreciation and affection. In a paper on his books, it is permissible to end with a bookish anecdote. One of his favourite memories, much repeated in his latter days, was that of Cowley’s laconic Will,–“I give my body to the earth, and my soul to my Maker.” Lady Eastlake shall tell the rest:–“This … proved on one occasion too much for one of the party, and in an incautious moment a flippant young lady exclaimed, ‘But, Mr. Rogers, what of Cowley’s _property_?’ An ominous silence ensued, broken only by a _sotto voce_ from the late Mrs. Procter: ‘Well, my dear, you have put your foot in it; no more invitations for you in a hurry,’ But she did the kind old man, then above ninety, wrong. The culprit continued to receive the same invitations and the same welcome.”[50]

Note:

[49] Rogers’s own copy of this, which (it may be added), he held in horror, now belongs to Mr. Edmund Gosse. Lord Londonderry has a number of Danton’s busts.

[50] _Quarterly Review_, vol. 167, p. 512.

PEPYS’ “DIARY”

To One who asked why he wrote it.

You ask me what was his intent?
In truth, I’m not a German;
‘Tis plain though that he neither meant A Lecture nor a Sermon.

But there it is,–the thing’s a Fact. I find no other reason
But that some scribbling itch attacked Him in and out of season,

To write what no one else should read, With this for second meaning,
To “cleanse his bosom” (and indeed
It sometimes wanted cleaning);

To speak, as ’twere, his private mind, Unhindered by repression,
To make his motley life a kind,
Of Midas’ ears confession;

And thus outgrew this work _per se_,– This queer, kaleidoscopic,
Delightful, blabbing, vivid, free
Hotch-pot of daily topic.

So artless in its vanity,
So fleeting, so eternal,
So packed with “poor Humanity”–
We know as Pepys’ his journal.[51]

Note:

[51] Written for the Pepys’ Dinner at Magdalene College, Cambridge, February 23rd, 1905.

A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH

Among other pleasant premonitions of the present _entente cordiale_ between France and England is the increased attention which, for some time past, our friends of Outre Manche have been devoting to our literature. That this is wholly of recent growth, is not, of course, to be inferred. It must be nearly five-and-forty years since M. Hippolyte Taine issued his logical and orderly _Histoire de la LittÈrature Anglaise_; while other isolated efforts of insight and importance–such as the _Laurence Sterne_ of M. Paul Stapfer, and the excellent _Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au XVIII^e SiËcle_ of the late M. Alexandre Beljame of the Sorbonne–are already of distant date. But during the last two decades the appearance of similar productions has been more recurrent and more marked. From one eminent writer alone–M. J.-J. Jusserand–we have received an entire series of studies of exceptional charm, variety, and accomplishment. M. Felix Rabbe has given us a sympathetic analysis of Shelley; M. Auguste Angellier,–himself a poet of individuality and distinction,–what has been rightly described as a “splendid work” on Burns;[52] while M. …mile Legouis, in a minute examination of “The Prelude,” has contrasted and compared the orthodox Wordsworth of maturity with the juvenile semi-atheist of Coleridge. Travelling farther afield, M. W. Thomas has devoted an exhaustive volume to Young of the _Night Thoughts_; M. LÈon Morel, another to Thomson; and, incidentally, a flood of fresh light has been thrown upon the birth and growth of the English Novel by the admirable _Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme LittÈraire_ of the late Joseph Texte–an investigation unquestionably of the ripest scholarship, and the most extended research. And now once more there are signs that French lucidity and French precision are about to enter upon other conquests; and we have M. Barbeau’s study of a famous old English watering-place[53]–appropriately dedicated, as is another of the books already mentioned, to M. Beljame.[54]

Notes:

[52] A volume of _Pages Choisies de Auguste Angellier, Prose et Vers_, with an Introduction by M. Legouis, has recently (1908) been issued by the Clarendon Press. It contains lengthy extracts from M. Angellier’s study of Burns.

[53:]_Une Ville d’Eaux anglaise au XVIIIe SiËcle, La SociÈtÈ Elegante et LittÈraire ‡ Bath sous la Reine Anne et sous les Georges_. Par A. Barbeau. Paris, Picard, 1904.

[54] The list grows apace. To the above, among others, must now be added M. RenÈ Huchon’s brilliant little essay on Mrs. Montagu, and his elaborate study of Crabbe, to say nothing of M. Jules Derocquigny’s Lamb, M. Jules Douady’s Hazlitt, and M. Joseph Aynard’s Coleridge.

At first sight, topography, even when combined with social sketches, may seem less suited to a foreigner and an outsider than it would be to a resident and a native. In the attitude of the latter to the land in which he lives or has been born, there is always an inherent something of the soil for which even trained powers of comparison, and a special perceptive faculty, are but imperfect substitutes. On the other hand, the visitor from over-sea is, in many respects, better placed for observation than the inhabitant. He enjoys not a little–it has been often said–of the position of posterity. He takes in more at a glance; he leaves out less; he is disturbed by no apprehensions of explaining what is obvious, or discovering what is known. As a consequence, he sets down much which, from long familiarity, an indigenous critic would be disposed to discard, although it might not be, in itself, either uninteresting or superfluous. And if, instead of dealing with the present and actual, his concern is with history and the past, his external standpoint becomes a strength rather than a weakness. He can survey his subject with a detachment which is wholly favourable to his project; and he can give it, with less difficulty than another, the advantages of scientific treatment and an artistic setting. Finally, if his theme have definite limits–as for instance an appreciable beginning, middle, and end–he must be held to be exceptionally fortunate. And this, either from happy guessing, or sheer good luck, is M. Barbeau’s case. All these conditions are present in the annals of the once popular pleasure-resort of which he has elected to tell the story. It arose gradually; it grew through a century of unexampled prosperity; it sank again to the level of a county-town. If it should ever arise again,–and it is by no means a _ville morte_,–it will be in an entirely different way. The particular Bath of the eighteenth century–the Bath of Queen Anne and the Georges, of Nash and Fielding and Sheridan, of Anstey and Mrs. Siddons, of Wesley and Lady Huntingdon, of Quin and Gainsborough and Lawrence and a hundred others–is no more. It is a case of _Fuit Ilium_. It has gone for ever; and can never be revived in the old circumstances. To borrow an apposite expression from M. Texte, it is an organism whose evolution has accomplished its course.

M. Barbeau’s task, then, is very definitely mapped-out and circumscribed. But he is far too good a craftsman to do no more than give a mere panorama of that daily Bath programme which King Nash and his dynasty ordained and established. He goes back to the origins; to the legend of King Lear’s leper-father; to the _Diary_ of the too-much-neglected Celia Fiennes; to Pepys[55] and Grammont’s Memoirs; to the days when hapless Catherine of Braganza, with the baleful “_belle_ Stewart” in her train, made fruitless pilgrimage to Bladud’s spring as a remedy against sterility. He sketches, with due acknowledgments to Goldsmith’s unique little book, the biography of that archquack, _poseur_, and very clever organiser, Mr. Richard Nash, the first real Master of the Ceremonies; and he gives a full account of his followers and successors. He also minutely relates the story of Sheridan’s marriage to his beautiful “St. Cecilia,” Elizabeth Ann Linley. A separate and very interesting chapter is allotted to Lady Huntingdon and the Methodists, not without levies from the remarkable _Spiritual Quixote_ of that Rev. Richard Graves of Claverton, of whom an excellent account was given not long since in Mr. W. H. Hutton’s suggestive _Burford Papers_. Other chapters are occupied with Bath and its _belles lettres_; with “Squire Allworthy” of Prior Park and his literary guests, Pope, Warburton, Fielding and his sister, etc.; with the historic Frascati vase of Lady Miller at Batheaston, which stirred the ridicule of Horace Walpole, and is still, it is said, to be seen in a local park. The dosing pages treat of Bath–musical, artistic, scientific–of its gradual transformation as a health resort–of its eventual and foredoomed decline and fall as the one fashionable watering-place, supreme and single, for Great Britain and Ireland.

Note:

[55] Oddly enough–if M. Barbeau’s index is to be trusted, and it is an unusually good one,–he makes no reference to Evelyn’s visit to Bath. But Evelyn went there in June, 1654, bathed in the Cross Bath, criticised the “_facciata_” of the Abbey Church, complained of the “narrow, uneven and unpleasant streets,” and inter-visited with the company frequenting the place for health. “Among the rest of the idle diversions of the town,” he says, “one musician was famous for acting a changeling [idiot or half-wit], which indeed he personated strangely.” (_Diary_, Globe edn., 1908, p. 174.)

But it is needless to prolong analysis. One’s only wonder–as usual after the event–is that what has been done so well had never been thought of before. For while M. Barbeau is to be congratulated upon the happy task he has undertaken, we may also congratulate ourselves that he has performed it so effectively. His material is admirably arranged. He has supported it by copious notes; and he has backed it up by an impressive bibliography of authorities ancient and modern. This is something; but it is not all[56]. He has done much more than this. He has contrived that, in his picturesque and learned pages, the old “Queen of the West” shall live again, with its circling terraces, its grey stone houses and ill-paved streets, its crush of chairs and chariots, its throng of smirking, self-satisfied prom-enaders.

Note:

[56] To the English version (Heinemann, 1904) an eighteenth-century map of Bath, and a number of interesting views and portraits have been added.

One seems to see the clumsy stage-coaches depositing their touzled and tumbled inmates, in their rough rocklows and quaint travelling headgear, at the “Bear” or the “White Hart,” after a jolting two or three days’ journey from Oxford or London, not without the usual experiences, real and imaginary, of suspicious-looking horsemen at Hounslow, or masked “gentlemen of the pad” on Claverton Down. One hears the peal of five-and-twenty bells which greets the arrival of visitors of importance; and notes the obsequious and venal town-waits who follow them to their lodgings in Gay Street or Milsom Street or the Parades,–where they will, no doubt, be promptly attended by the Master of the Ceremonies, “as fine as fivepence,” and a very pretty, sweet-smelling gentleman, to be sure, whether his name be Wade or Derrick. Next day will probably discover them in chip hats and flannel, duly equipped with wooden bowls and bouquets, at the King’s Bath, where, through a steaming atmosphere, you may survey their artless manoeuvres (as does Lydia Melford in _Humphry Clinker_) from the windows of the Pump Room, to which rallying-place they will presently repair to drink the waters, in a medley of notables and notorieties, members of Parliament, chaplains and led-captains, Noblemen with ribbons and stars, dove-coloured Quakers, Duchesses, quacks, fortune-hunters, lackeys, lank-haired Methodists, Bishops, and boarding-school misses. Ferdinand Count Fathom will be there, as well as my Lord Ogleby; Lady Bellaston (and Mr. Thomas Jones); Geoffry Wildgoose and Tugwell the cobbler; Lismahago and Tabitha Bramble; the caustic Mrs. Selwyn and the blushing Miss Anville. Be certain, too, that, sooner or later, you will encounter Mrs, Candour and Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite and his uncle, Mr. Crabtree, for this is their main haunt and region–in fact, they were born here. You may follow this worshipful and piebald procession to the Public Breakfasts in the Spring Gardens, to the Toy-shops behind the Church, to the Coffee-houses in Westgate Street, to the Reading Rooms on the Walks, where, in Mr. James Leake’s parlour at the back–if you are lucky–you may behold the celebrated Mr. Ralph Allen of Prior Park, talking either to Mr. Henry Fielding or to Mr. Leake’s brother-in-law, Mr. Samuel Richardson, but never–if we are correctly informed–to both of them together. Or you may run against Mr. Christopher Anstey of the over-praised _Guide_, walking arm-in-arm with another Bathonian, Mr. Melmoth, whose version of Pliny was once held to surpass its original. At the Abbey–where there are daily morning services–you shall listen to the silver periods of Bishop Kurd, whom his admirers call fondly “the Beauty of Holiness”; at St. James’s you can attend the full-blown lectures, “more unctuous than ever he preached,” of Bishop Beilby Porteus; or you may succeed in procuring a card for a select hearing, at Edgar Buildings, of Lady Huntingdon’s eloquent chaplain, Mr. Whitefield. With the gathering shades of even, you may pass, if so minded, to Palmer’s Theatre in Orchard Street, and follow Mrs. Siddons acting Belvidera in Otway’s _Venice Preserv’d_ to the Pierre of that forgotten Mr. Lee whom Fanny Burney put next to Garrick; or you may join the enraptured audience whom Mrs. Jordan is delighting with her favourite part of Priscilla Tomboy in _The Romp_. You may assist at the concerts of Signer Venanzio Rauzzini and Monsieur La Motte; you may take part in a long minuet or country dance at the Upper or Lower Assembly Rooms, which Bunbury will caricature; you may even lose a few pieces at the green tables; and, should you return home late enough, may watch a couple of stout chairmen at the door of the “Three Tuns” in Stall Street, hoisting that seasoned toper, Mr. James Quin, into a sedan after his evening’s quantum of claret. What you do to-day, you will do to-morrow, if the bad air of the Pump Room has not given you a headache, or the waters a touch of vertigo; and you will continue to do it for a month or six weeks, when the lumbering vehicle with the leathern straps and crane-necked springs will carry you back again over the deplorable roads (“so _sidelum_ and _jumblum_,” one traveller calls them) to your town-house, or your country-box, or your city-shop or chambers, as the case may be. Here, in due course, you will begin to meditate upon your next excursion to THE BATH, provided always that you have not dipped your estate at “E.O.”, or been ruined by milliners’ bills;–that your son has not gone northwards with a sham Scotch heiress, or your daughter been married at Charicombe, by private license, to a pinchbeck Irish peer. For all these things–however painful the admission–were, according to the most credible chroniclers, the by-no-means infrequent accompaniment or sequel of an unguarded sojourn at the old jigging, card-playing, scandal-loving, pleasure-seeking city in the loop of “the soft-flowing Avon.”

It is an inordinate paragraph, outraging all known rules of composition! But then–How seductive a subject is eighteenth-century Bath!–and how rich in memories is M. Barbeau’s book!

A WELCOME FROM THE “JOHNSON CLUB”

To William John Courthope, _March 12, 1903_

When Pope came back from Trojan wars once more, He found a Bard, to meet him on the shore, And hail his advent with a strain as clear As e’er was sung by BYRON or by FRERE.[57]

You, SIR, have travelled from no distant clime, Yet would JOHN GAY could welcome you in rhyme; And by some fable not too coldly penned, Teach how with judgment one may praise a Friend.

There is no need that I should tell in words Your prowess from _The Paradise of Birds_;[58] No need to show how surely you have traced The Life in Poetry, the Law in Taste;[59] Or mark with what unwearied strength you wear The weight that WARTON found too great to bear.[60] There Is no need for this or that. My plan Is less to laud the Matter than the Man.

This is my brief. We recognise in you The mind judicial, the untroubled view;
The critic who, without pedantic pose, Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows; Who, free alike from passion or pretence, Holds the good rule of calm and common sense; And be the subject or perplexed or plain,– Clear or confusing,–is throughout urbane, Patient, persuasive, logical, precise,
And only hard to vanity and vice.

More I could add, but brevity is best;– These are our claims to honour you as Guest.

Notes:

[57] _Alexander Pope: his Safe Return from Troy. A Congratulatory Poem on his Completing his Translation of Homer’s Iliad._ (In _ottava rima_.) By Mr. Gay, 1720(?). Frere’s burlesque, _Monks and Giants_–it will be remembered–set the tune to Byron’s _Beppo_.

[58] _The Paradise of Birds_, 1870.

[59] _Life in Poetry, Law in Taste_, two series of Lectures delivered in Oxford, 1895-1900. 1901.

[60] _A History of English Poetry_. 1895 (in progress).

THACKERY’S “ESMOND”

At this date, Thackeray’s _Esmond_ has passed from the domain of criticism into that securer region where the classics, if they do not actually “slumber out their immortality,” are at least preserved from profane intrusion. This “noble story”[61]–as it was called by one of its earliest admirers–is no longer, in any sense, a book “under review.” The painful student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and compass, question its details and proportions; or the quick-fingered professor of paradox, jauntily turning it upside-down, rejoice in the results of his perverse dexterity; but certain things are now established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, even by those who assume the superfluous office of anatomising the accepted. In the first place, if _Esmond_ be not the author’s greatest work (and there are those who, like the late Anthony Trollope, would willingly give it that rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular kind, for its sequel, _The Virginians_, however admirable in detached passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while _Denis Duval_, of which the promise was “great, remains unfinished. With _Vanity Fair_, the author’s masterpiece in another manner, _Esmond_ cannot properly be compared, because an imitation of the past can never compete in verisimilitude or on any satisfactory terms with a contemporary picture. Nevertheless, in its successful reproduction of the tone of a bygone epoch, lies _Esmond’s_ second and incontestable claim to length of days. Athough fifty years and more have passed since it was published, it is still unrivalled as the typical example of that class of historical fiction, which, dealing indiscriminately with characters real and feigned, develops them both with equal familiarity, treating them each from within, and investing them impartially with a common atmosphere of illusion. No modern novel has done this in the same way, nor with the same good fortune, as Esmond; and there is nothing more to be said on this score. Even if–as always–later researches should have revised our conception of certain of the real personages, the value of the book as an imaginative _tour de force_ is unimpaired. Little remains therefore for the gleaner of to-day save bibliographical jottings, and neglected notes on its first appearance.

Note:

[61] “Never could I have believed that Thackeray, great as his abilities are, could have written so noble a story as _Esmond_.”–WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, August 1856.

In Thackeray’s work, the place of _The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself_–lies midway between his four other principal books, _Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes_, and _The Virginians_; and its position serves, in a measure, to explain its origin. In 1848, after much tentative and miscellaneous production, of which the value had been but imperfectly appreciated, the author found his fame with the yellow numbers of _Vanity Fair_. Two years later, adopting the same serial form, came _Pendennis_. _Vanity Fair_ had been the condensation of a life’s experience; and excellent as _Pendennis_ would have seemed from any inferior hand, its readers could not disguise from themselves that, though showing no falling off in other respects, it drew to some extent upon the old material. No one was readier than Thackeray to listen to a whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe that–as he afterwards told his friend Elwin concerning _The Newcomes_–“he had exhausted all the types of character with which he was familiar.” Accordingly he began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in fresh directions; and in the year that followed the publication of _Pendennis_, prepared and delivered in England and Scotland a series of _Lectures upon the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_. With the success of these came the prompting for a new work of fiction,–not to be contemporary, and not to be issued in parts. His studies for the _Humourists_ had saturated him with the spirit of a time to which–witness his novelette of _Barry Lyndon_–he had always been attracted; and when Mr. George Smith called on him with a proposal that he should write a new story for £1000, he was already well in hand with _Esmond_,–an effort in which, if it were not possible to invent new puppets, it was at least possible to provide fresh costumes and a change of background. Begun in 1851, _Esmond_ progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 1852 it was completed. Owing to the limited stock of old-cut type in which it was set up, its three volumes passed but slowly through the press; and it was eventually issued at the end of the following October, upon the eve of the author’s departure to lecture in America. In fact, he was waiting on the pier for the tender which was to convey him to the steamer, when he received his bound copies from the publisher.

Mr. Eyre Crowe, A.R.A., who accompanied Thackeray to the United States, and had for some time previously been acting as his “factotum and amanuensis,” has recorded several interesting details with regard to the writing of _Esmond_, To most readers it will be matter of surprise, and it is certainly a noteworthy testimony to the author’s powers, that this attempt to revive the language and atmosphere of a vanished era was in great part dictated. It has even been said that, like _Pendennis_, it was _all_ dictated; but this it seems is a mistake, for, as we shall see presently, part of the manuscript was prepared by the author himself. As he warmed to his work, however, he often reverted to the method of oral composition which had always been most congenial to him, and which explains the easy colloquialism of his style. Much of the “copy” was taken down by Mr. Crowe in a first-floor bedroom of No. 16 Young Street, Kensington, the still-existent house where Vanity Fair had been written; at the Bedford Hotel in Covent Garden; at the round table in the Athenasum library, and elsewhere. “I write better anywhere than at home,”–Thackeray told Elwin,–“and I write less at home than anywhere.” Sometimes author and scribe would betake themselves to the British Museum, to look up points in connection with Marlborough’s battles, or to rummage Jacob Tonson’s Gazettes for the official accounts of Wynendael and Oudenarde. The British Museum, indeed, was another of _Esmond’s_ birthplaces. By favour of Sir Antonio Panizzi, Thackeray and his assistant, surrounded by their authorities, were accommodated in one of the secluded galleries. “I sat down,”–says Mr. Crowe–“and wrote to dictation the scathing sentences about the great Marlborough, the denouncing of Cadogan, etc., etc. As a curious instance of literary contagion, it may be here stated that I got quite bitten, with the expressed anger at their misdeeds against General Webb, Thackeray’s kinsman and ancestor; and that I then looked upon Secretary Cardonnel’s conduct with perfect loathing. I was quite delighted to find his meannesses justly pilloried in _Esmond’s_ pages.” What rendered the situation more piquant,–Mr. Crowe adds,–all this took place on the site of old Montague House, where, as Steele’s “Prue” says to St. John in the novel,” you wretches go and fight duels.”[62]

Note:

[62] _With Thackeray in America_, 1893, p. 4.

Those who are willing to make a pilgrimage to Cambridge, may, if they please, inspect the very passages which aroused the enthusiam of Thackeray’s secretary. In a special case in the Library of Trinity College, not far from those which enclose the manuscripts of Tennyson and Milton, is the original and only manuscript of _Esmond_, being in fact the identical “copy” which was despatched to the press of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans at Whitefriars. It makes two large quarto volumes, and was presented to the College (Esmond’s College!) in 1888 by the author’s son-in-law, the late Sir Leslie Stephen. It still bears in pencil the names of the different compositors who set up the type. Much of it is in Thackeray’s own small, slightly-slanted, but oftener upright hand, and many pages have hardly any corrections.[63] His custom was to write on half-sheets of a rather large notepaper, and some idea may be gathered of the neat, minute, and regular script, when it is added that the lines usually contain twelve to fifteen words, and that there are frequently as many as thirty-three of these lines to a page. Some of the rest of the “copy” is in the handwriting of the author’s daughter, now Lady Ritchie; but a considerable portion was penned by Mr. Eyre Crowe. The oft-quoted passage in book ii. chap. vi. about “bringing your sheaves with you,” was written by Thackeray himself almost as it stands; so was the sham _Spectator_, hereafter mentioned, and most of the chapter headed “General Webb wins the Battle of Wynendael.” But the splendid closing scene,–“August 1st, 1714,”–is almost wholly in the hand of Mr. Crowe. It is certainly a remarkable fact that work at this level should have been thus improvised, and that nothing, as we are credibly informed, should have been before committed to paper.[64]

When _Esmond_ first made its appearance in October 1852, it was not without distinguished and even formidable competitors. _Bleak House_ had reached its eighth number; and Bulwer was running _My Novel in Blackwood_. In _Fraser_, Kingsley was bringing out _Hypatia_; and Whyte Melville was preluding with _Digby Grand_. Charlotte BrontÎ must have been getting ready _Villette_ for the press; and Tennyson–undeterred by the fact that his hero had already been “dirged” by the indefatigable Tupper–was busy with his _Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_.[65] The critics of the time were possibly embarrassed with this wealth of talent, for they were not, at the outset, immoderately enthusiastic over the new arrival. The _Athenaeum_ was by no means laudatory. _Esmond_ “harped upon the same string”; “wanted vital heat”; “touched no fresh fount of thought”; “introduced no novel forms of life”; and so forth. But the _Spectator_, in a charming greeting from George Brimley (since included in his _Essays_), placed the book, as a work of art, even above _Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_; the “serious and orthodox” _Examiner_, then under John Forster, was politely judicial; the _Daily News_ friendly; and the _Morning Advertiser_ enraptured. The book, this last declared, was the “beau-ideal of historical romance.” On December 4 a second edition was announced. Then, on the 22nd, came the _Times_. Whether the _Times_ remembered and resented a certain delightfully contemptuous “Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,” with which Thackeray retorted to its notice of _The Kickkburys on the Rhine_ (a thing hard to believe!) or whether it did not,–its report of _Esmond_ was distinctly hostile. In three columns, it commended little but the character of Marlborough, and the writer’s “incomparably easy and unforced style.” Thackeray thought that it had “absolutely stopped” the sale. But this seems inconsistent with the fact that the publisher sent him a supplementary cheque for £250 on account of _Esmond’s_ success.

Notes:

[63] One is reminded of the accounts of Scott’s “copy.” “Page after page the writing runs on exactly as you read it in print”–says Mr. Mowbray Morris. “I was looking not long ago at the manuscript of _Kenilworth_ in the British Museum, and examined the end with particular care, thinking that the wonderful scene of Amy Robsart’s death must surely have cost him some labour. They were the cleanest pages in the volume: I do not think there was a sentence altered or added in the whole chapter” (Lecture at Eton, _Macmillan’s Magazine_ (1889), lx. pp. 158-9).

[64] “The sentences”–Mr. Crowe told a member of the Athenaeum, when speaking of his task–“came out glibly as he [Thackeray] paced the room.” This is the more singular when contrasted with the slow elaboration of the Balzac and Flaubert school. No doubt Thackeray must often have arranged in his mind precisely much that he meant to say. Such seems indeed to have been his habit. The late Mr. Lockcer-Lampson informed the writer of this paper that once, when he met the author of Esmond in the Green Park, Thackeray gently begged to be allowed to walk alone, as he had some verses In his head which he was finishing. They were those which afterwards appeared in the _Cornhill_ for January 1867, under the title of _Mrs. Katherine’s Lantern_.

[65] The Duke died 14th Sept. 1852.

Another reason which may have tended to slacken–not to stop–the sale, is also suggested by the author himself. This was the growing popularity of _My Novel_ and _Villette_. And Miss BrontÎ’s book calls to mind the fact that she was among the earliest readers of _Esmond_, the first two volumes of which were sent to her in manuscript by George Smith, She read it, she tells him, with “as much ire and sorrow as gratitude and admiration,” marvelling at its mastery of reconstruction,–hating its satire,–its injustice to women. How could Lady Castlewood peep through a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy and a milkmaid! There was too much political and religious intrigue–she thought. Nevertheless she said (this was in February 1852, speaking of vol. i.) the author might “yet make it the best he had ever written.” In March she had seen the second volume. The character of Marlborough (here she anticipated the _Times_) was a “masterly piece of writing.” But there was “too little story.” The final volume, by her own request, she received in print. It possessed, in her opinion, the “most sparkle, impetus, and interest.” “I hold,” she wrote to Mr. Smith, “that a work of fiction ought to be a work of creation: that the _real_ should be sparingly introduced in pages dedicated to the _ideal_” In a later letter she gives high praise to the complex conception of Beatrix, traversing incidentally the absurd accusation of one of the papers that she resembled. Blanche Amory [the _Athenaeum_ and _Examiner_, it may be noted, regarded her as “another Becky”]. “To me,” Miss Bronte exclaims, “they are about as identical as a weasel and a royal tigress of Bengal; both the latter are quadrupeds, both the former women.” These frank comments of a fervent but thoroughly honest admirer, are of genuine interest. When the book was published, Thackeray himself sent her a copy with his “grateful regards,” and it must have been of this that she wrote to Mr. Smith on November 3,–“Colonel Henry Esmond is just arrived. He looks very antique and distinguished in his Queen Anne’s garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very well represented by the old _Spectator_ type.”[66]

Note:

[66] Mr. Clement Shorter’s _Charlotte BrontÎ and her Circle_, 1896, p. 403; and Gaskell’s _Life of Charlotte BrontÎ_, 1900, pp. 561 et seq.

One of the points on which Miss BrontÎ does not touch,–at all events does not touch in those portions of her correspondence which have been printed,–is the marriage with which _Esmond_ closes. Upon this event it would have been highly instructive to have had her views, especially as it appears to have greatly exercised her contemporaries, the first reviewers. It was the gravamen of the _Times_ indictment; to the critic of _Fraser_ it was highly objectionable; and the _Examiner_ regarded it as “incredible.” Why it was “incredible” that a man should marry a woman seven years older than himself, to whom he had already proposed once in vol. ii., and of whose youthful appearance we are continually reminded (“she looks the sister of her daughter” says the old Dowager at Chelsea), is certainly not superficially obvious. Nor was it obvious to Lady Castlewood’s children, “Mother’s in love with you,–yes, I think mother’s in love with you,” says downright Frank Esmond; the only impediment in his eyes being the bar sinister, as yet unremoved. And Miss Beatrix herself, in vol. iii., is even more roundly explicit. “As for you,” she tells Esmond, “you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at your feet, and cry ‘O caro! O bravo!’ whilst you read your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff” [which shows that she herself had read Swift’s _Grand Question Debated_]. “Mamma would have been the wife for you, had you been a little older, though you look ten years older than she does,” “You do, you glum-faced, blue-bearded, little old man!” adds this very imperious and free-spoken young lady. The situation is, no doubt, at times extremely difficult, and naturally requires consummate skill in the treatment. But if these things and others signify anything to an intelligent reader, they signify that the author, if he had not his end steadily in view, knew perfectly well that his story was tending in one direction. There will probably always be some diversity of opinion in the matter; but the majority of us have accepted Thackeray’s solution, and have dropped out of sight that hint of undesirable rivalry, which so troubled the precisians of the early Victorian age. To those who read _Esmond_ now, noting carefully the almost imperceptible transformation of the motives on either side, as developed by the evolution of the story, the union of the hero and heroine at the end must appear not only credible but preordained. And that the gradual progress towards this foregone conclusion is handled with unfailing tact and skill, there can surely be no question.[67]

Note:

[67} Thackeray’s own explanation was more characteristic than convincing. “Why did you”–said once to him impetuous Mrs. John Brown of Edinburgh–“Why did you make Esmond marry that old woman?” “My dear lady,” he replied, “it was not I who married them. They married themselves.” (Dr. _John Brmon_, by the late John Taylor Brown, 1903, pp. 96-7.)

Of the historical portraits in the book, the interest has, perhaps, at this date, a little paled. Not that they are one whit less vigorously alive than when the author first put them in motion; but they have suffered from the very attention which _Esmond_ and _The Humourists_ have directed to the study of the originals. The picture of Marlborough is still as effective as when it was first proclaimed to be good enough for the brush of Saint-Simon. But Thackeray himself confessed to a family prejudice against the hero of Blenheim, and later artists have considerably readjusted the likeness. Nor in all probability would the latest biographer of Bolingbroke endorse _that_ presentment. In the purely literary figures, Thackeray naturally followed the _Lectures_, and is consequently open to the same criticisms as have been offered on those performances. The Swift of _The Humourists_, modelled on Macaulay, was never accepted from the first; and it has not been accepted in the novel, or by subsequent writers from Forster onwards.[68] Addison has been less studied; and his likeness has consequently been less questioned. Concerning Steele there has been rather more discussion. That Thackeray’s sketch is very vivid, very human, and in most essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. But it is obviously conceived under the domination of the “poor Dick” of Addison, and dwells far too persistently upon Steele’s frailer and more fallible aspect. No one would believe that the flushed personage in the full-bottomed periwig, who hiccups Addison’s _Campaign_ in the Haymarket garret, or the fuddled victim of “Prue’s” curtain lecture at Hampton, ranked, at the date of the story, far higher than Addison as a writer, and that he was, in spite of his faults, not only a kindly gentleman and scholar, but a philanthropist, a staunch patriot, and a consistent politician. Probably the author of _Esmond_ considered that, in a mixed character, to be introduced incidentally, and exhibited naturally “in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind” (as Lamb says), anything like biographical big drum should be deprecated. This is, at least, the impression left on us by an anecdote told by Elwin. He says that Thackeray, talking to him once about _The Virginians_, which was then appearing, announced that he meant, among other people, to bring in Goldsmith, “representing him as he really was, a little, shabby, mean, shuffling Irishman.” These are given as Thackeray’s actual words. If so, they do not show the side of Goldsmith which is shown in the last lecture of _The Humourists._[69]

Notes:

[68] Thackeray heartily disliked Swift, and said so. “As for Swift, you haven’t made me alter my opinion”–he replied to Hannay’s remonstrances. This feeling was intensified by the belief that Swift, as a clergyman, was insincere. “Of course,”–he wrote in September, 1851, in a letter now in the British Museum,–“any man is welcome to believe as he likes for me _except_ a parson; and I can’t help looking upon Swift and Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades … with a scornful pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness.”

[69] _Some XVIII. Century Men of Letters_, 1902, i. 187. The intention was never carried out. In _The King over the Water_, 1908, Miss A. Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another portrait in _Esmond_,–that of the Chevalier de St. George,–not without injury to its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang–like Rob Roy–is on his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the reader to this highly interesting study.

But although, with our rectified information, we may except against the picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at Charterhouse, his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it triumphantly in his maturity by those _Novels by Eminent Hands_ in which the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The thing is more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison has rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all his works, in stray letters and detached passages.

In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in _Denis Duval_; and in the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess Castlewood[70]–a letter which only requires the sprawling, childish script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary efforts of that “baby-faced” Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign herself “L duchesse de Portsmout.” It is better still in the letter from Walpole to General Conway in chap. xl. of _The Virginians_, which is perfect, even to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But the crown and top of these _pastiches_ is certainly the delightful paper, which pretends to be No. 341 of the _Spectator_ for All Fools’ Day, 1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats “Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix,” to what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a “bite.”[71] Here Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele’s voice, but his very trick of speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the “tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive,” that although this pseudo-_Spectator_ is stated to have been printed “exactly as those famous journals were printed” for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables, it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph, unluckily appended an English translation,–a concession to the country gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained, holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison’s own phrase) “words to the wise,” of no concern to unlearned persons.[72]

Notes:

[70] _Esmond_, Book ii, chap, ii.

[71] _Ib_. Book iii, chap, iii.

[72] _Spectator_, No. 221, November 13, 1711.

This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary of _Esmond_. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high journalistic authority, that “no man, woman, or child in _Esmond_, ever says anything that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne.” This is one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its head, invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly “copied the language of Queen Anne,”–he says so in his dedication to Lord Ashburton; but he himself would certainly never have put forward so comprehensive a claim as the above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged Mr. Lowell (who was his fellow-passenger to America on the _Canada_) to point out in _Esmond_ a word which had not been used in the early eighteenth century; and that the author of _The Biglow Papers_ promptly discovered such a word. But even if the anecdote be not well-invented, the invitation must have been more jest than earnest. For none knew better than Thackeray that these barren triumphs of wording belong to ingenuity rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the Persian poet who left out all the A’s (as well as the poetry) in his verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour of Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew’s Cross, a lozenge,–everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray endeavoured after when “copying the language of Queen Anne,” and succeeded in attaining, was the spirit and tone of the time. It was not pedantic philology at which he aimed, though he did not disdain occasional picturesque archaisms, such as “yatches” for “yachts,” or despise the artful aid of terminal k’s, long s’s, and old-cut type. Consequently, as was years ago pointed out by Fitzedward Hall (whose manifest prejudice against Thackeray as a writer should not blind us in a matter of fact), it is not difficult to detect many expressions in the memoirs of Queen Anne’s Colonel which could never have been employed until Her Majesty had long been “quietly inurned.” What is more,–if we mistake not,–the author of _Esmond_ sometimes refrained from using an actual eighteenth-century word, even in a quotation, when his instinct told him it was not expedient to do so. In the original of that well-known anecdote of Steele beside his father’s coffin, In _Tatler_ No. 181, reproduced in book i. chap. vi. of the novel, Steele says, “My mother catched me in her arms.” “Catched” is good enough eighteenth-century for Johnson and Walpole. But Thackeray made it “caught,” and “caught” it remains to this day both in _Esmond_ and _The Humourists_.

A MILTONIC EXERCISE

(TERCENTENARY, 1608-1908)

“Stops of various Quills.”–LYCIDAS.

What need of votive Verse
To strew thy _Laureat Herse_
With that mix’d _Flora_ of th’ _Aonian Hill_? Or _Mincian_ vocall Reed,
That _Cam_ and _Isis_ breed,
When thine own Words are burning in us still?

_Bard, Prophet, Archimage!_
In this Cash-cradled Age,
We grate our scrannel Musick, and we dote: Where is the Strain unknown,
Through Bronze or Silver blown,
That thrill’d the Welkin with thy woven Note?

Yes,–“we are selfish Men”:
Yet would we once again
Might see _Sabrina_ braid her amber Tire;

Or watch the _Comus_ Crew
Sweep down the Glade; or view
Strange-streamer’d Craft from _Javan_ or _Gadire_!

Or could we catch once more,
High up, the Clang and Roar
Of Angel Conflict,–Angel Overthrow; Or, with a World begun,
Behold the young-ray’d Sun
Flame in the Groves where the _Four Rivers_ go!

Ay me, I fondly dream!
Only the Storm-bird’s Scream
Foretells of Tempest in the Days to come; Nowhere is heard up-climb
The lofty lyric Rhyme,
And the “God-gifted Organ-voice” is dumb.[73]

Note:

[73] Written, by request, for the celebration at Christ’s College, Cambridge, July 10, 1908.

FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING

The general reader, as a rule, is but moderately interested in minor rectifications. Secure in a conventional preference of the spirit to the letter, he professes to be indifferent whether the grandmother of an exalted personage was a “Hugginson” or a “Blenkinsop”; and he is equally careless as to the correct Christian names of his cousins and his aunts. In the main, the general reader is wise in his generation. But with the painful biographer, toiling in the immeasurable sand of thankless research, often foot-sore and dry of throat, these trivialities assume exaggerated proportions; and to those who remind him–as in a cynical age he is sure to be reminded–of the infinitesimal value of his hard-gotten grains of information, he can only reply mournfully, if unconvincingly, that fact is fact–even in matters of mustard-seed. With this prelude, I propose to set down one or two minute points concerning Henry Fielding, not yet comprised in any existing records of his career.[74]

Note:

[74] Since this was published in April 1907, they have been embodied in an Appendix to my “Men of Letters” _Fielding_; and used, to some extent, for a fresh edition of the _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_ (“World’s Classics”).

The first relates to the exact period of his residence at Leyden University. His earliest biographer, Arthur Murphy, writing in 1762, is more explicit than usual on this topic. “He [Fielding],” says Murphy, “went from Eton to Leyden, and there continued to show an eager thirst for knowledge, and to study the civilians with a remarkable application for about two years, when, remittances failing, he was obliged to return to London, not then quite twenty years old” [_i.e._ before 22nd April, 1727]. In 1883, like my predecessors, I adopted this statement, for the sufficient reason that I had nothing better to put in its place. And Murphy should have been well-informed. He had known Fielding personally; he was employed by Fielding’s publisher; and he could, one would imagine, have readily obtained accurate data from Fielding’s surviving sister, Sarah, who was only three years younger than her brother, of whose short life (he died at forty-eight) she could scarcely have forgotten the particulars. Murphy’s story, moreover, exactly fitted in with the fact, only definitely made known in June 1883, that Fielding, as a youth of eighteen, had endeavoured, in November 1725, to abduct or carry off his first love, Miss Sarah Andrew of Lyme Regis. Although the lady was promptly married to a son of one of her fluttered guardians, nothing seemed more reasonable than to assume that the disappointed lover (one is sure he was never an heiress-hunter!) was despatched to the Dutch University to keep him out of mischief.[75] But in once more examining Mr. Keightley’s posthumous papers, kindly placed at my disposal by his nephew, Mr. Alfred C. Lyster, I found a reference to an un-noted article in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for November, 1863 (from internal evidence I believe it to have been written by James Hannay), entitled “A Scotchman in Holland.” Visiting Leyden, the writer was permitted to inspect the University Album; and he found, under 1728, the following:–“_Henricus Fielding, Anglus, Ann. 20. Stud. Lit._”, coupled with the further detail that he “was living at the ‘Hotel of Antwerp.'” Except in the item of “_Stud. Lit._”, this did not seem to conflict materially with Murphy’s account, as Fielding was nominally twenty from 1727 to 1728, and small discrepancies must be allowed for.

Note:

[75] “Men of Letters” _Fielding_, 1907, Appendix I.

Twenty years later, a fresh version of the record came to light. At their tercentenary festival in 1875, tne Leyden University printed a list of their students from their foundation to that year. From this Mr. Edward Peacock, F.S.A., compiled in 1883, for the Index Society, an _Index to English-Speaking Students who have graduated at Leyden University_; and at p. 35 appears _Fielding, Henricus, Anglus_, 16 Mart. 1728, 915 (the last being the column number of the list). This added a month-date, and made Fielding a graduate. Then, two years ago, came yet a third rendering. Mr. A.E.H. Swaen, writing in _The Modern Language Review_ for July 1906, printed the inscription in the Album as follows; “Febr. 16. 1728: Rectore Johanne Wesselio, Henricus Fielding, Anglus. 20, L.” Mr. Swaen construed this to mean that, on the date named (which, it may be observed, is not Mr. Peacock’s date), Fielding, “aged twenty, was _entered_ as _litterarum studiosus_ at Leyden.” In this case it would follow that his residence in Holland should have come after February 16th, 1728; and Mr. Swaen went on to conjecture that, “as his [Fielding’s] first play, _Love in Several Masques_, was staged at Drury Lane in February, 1728, and his next play, _The Temple Beau_, was produced in January, 1730, it is not improbable that his residence in Holland filled up the interval or part of it. Did the profits of the play [he proceeded] perhaps cover part of his travelling expenses?”

The new complications imported into the question by this fresh aspect of it, will be at once apparent. Up to 1875 there had been but one Fielding on the Leyden books; so that all these differing accounts were variations from a single source. In this difficulty, I was fortunate enough to enlist the sympathy of Mr. Frederic Harrison, who most kindly undertook to make inquiries on my behalf at Leyden University itself. In reply to certain definite queries drawn up by me, he obtained from the distinguished scholar and Professor of History, Dr. Pieter Blok, the following authoritative particulars. The exact words in the original _Album Academicum_ are:–“16 Martii 1728 Henricus Fielding, Anglus, annor. 20 Litt. Stud.” He was then staying at the “Casteel van Antwerpen”–as related by “A Scotchman in Holland.” His name only occurs again in the yearly _recensiones_ under February 22nd, 1729, as “Henricus Fieldingh,” when he was domiciled with one Jan Oson. He must consequently have left Leyden before February 8th, 1730, February 8th being the birthday of the University, after which all students have to be annually registered. The entry in the Album (as Mr. Swaen affirmed) is an _admission_ entry; there are no leaving entries. As regards “studying the civilians,” Fielding might, in those days, Dr. Blok explains, have had private lessons from the professors; but he could not have studied in the University without being on the books. To sum up: After producing _Love in Several Masques_ at Drury Lane, probably on February 12th, I728,[76] Fielding was admitted a “Litt. Stud.” at Leyden University on March 16th; was still there in February 1729; and left before February 8th, 1730. Murphy is therefore at fault in almost every particular. Fielding did _not_ go from Eton to Leyden; he did _not_ make any recognised study of the civilians, “with remarkable application” or otherwise; and he did _not_ return to London before he was twenty. But it is by no means improbable that the _causa causans_ or main reason for his coming home was the failure of remittances.

Note:

[76] _Genest_, iii. 209.

Another recently established fact is also more or less connected with “Mur.–” as Johnson called him. In his “Essay” of 1762, he gave a highly-coloured account of Fielding’s first marriage, and of the promptitude with which, assisted by yellow liveries and a pack of hounds, he managed to make duck and drake of his wife’s little fortune. This account has now been “simply riddled in its details” (as Mr. Saintsbury puts it) by successive biographers, the last destructive critic being the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who plausibly suggested that the “yellow liveries” (not the family liveries, be it noted!) were simply a confused recollection of the fantastic pranks of that other and earlier Beau Fielding (Steele’s “Orlando the Fair”), who married the Duchess of Cleveland in 1705, and was also a Justice of the Peace for Westminster. One thing was wanting to the readjustment of the narrative, and that was the precise date of Fielding’s marriage to the beautiful Miss Cradock of Salisbury, the original both of Sophia Western and Amelia Booth. By good fortune this has now been ascertained. Lawrence gave the date as 1735; and Keightley suggested the spring of that year. This, as Swift would say, was near the mark, although confirmation has been slow in coming. In June 1906, Mr. Thomas S. Bush, of Bath, announced in _The Bath Chronicle_ that the desired information was to be found (not in the Salisbury registers which had been fruitlessly consulted, but) at the tiny church of St. Mary, Charlcombe, a secluded parish about one and a half miles north of Bath. Here is the record:–“November y’e 28, 1734. Henry Fielding of y’e Parish of St. James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock, of y’e same Parish, spinster, were married by virtue of a licence from y’e Court of Wells.” All lovers of Fielding owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Bush, whose researches, in addition, disclosed the fact that Sarah Fielding, the novelist’s third sister (as we shall see presently), was buried, not in Bath Abbey, where Dr. John Hoadly raised a memorial to her, but “in y’e entrance of the Chancel [of Charlcombe Church] close to y’e Rector’s seat,” April 14th, 1768.[77] Mr. Bush’s revelation, it may be added, was made in connection with another record of the visits of the novelist to the old Queen of the West, a tablet erected in June 1906 to Fielding and his sister on the wall of Yew Cottage, now renovated as Widcombe Lodge, Widcombe, Bath, where they once resided.

Note:

[77] Sarah Fielding’s epitaph in Bath Abbey is often said to have been written by Bishop Benjamin Hoadly. In this case, it must have been anticipatory (like Dr. Primrose’s on his Deborah), for the Bishop died in 1761.

In the last case I have to mention, it is but fair to Murphy to admit that he seems to have been better informed than those who have succeeded him. Richardson writes of being “well acquainted” with four of Fielding’s sisters, and both Lawrence and Keightley refer to a Catherine and an Ursula, of whom Keightley, after prolonged enquiries, could obtain no tidings. With the help of Colonel W.F. Prideaux, and the kind offices of Mr. Samuel Martin of the Hammersmith Free Library, this matter has now been set at rest. In 1887 Sir Leslie Stephen had suggested to me that Catherine and Ursula were most probably born at Sharpham Park, before the Fieldings moved to East Stour. This must have been the case, though Keightley had failed to establish it. At all events, Catherine and Ursula must have existed, for they both died in 1750, The Hammersmith Registers at Fulham record the following burials:–

1750 July 9th, Mrs. Catherine Feilding (_sic_) 1750 Nov. 12th, Mrs. Ursula Fielding
1750 [–1] Feb’y. 24th, Mrs. Beatrice Fielding 1753 May 10th, Louisa, d. of Henry Fielding, Esq.

The first three, with Sarah, make up the “Four Worthy Sisters” of the reprehensible author of that “truly coarse-titled _Tom Jones_” concerning which Richardson wrote shudderingly in August 1749 to his young friends, Astraea and Minerva Hill. The final entry relating to Fielding’s little daughter, Louisa, born December 3rd, 1752, makes it probable that, in May, 1753, he was staying in the house at Hammersmith, then occupied by his sole surviving sister, Sarah. In the following year (October 8th) he himself died at Lisbon. There is no better short appreciation of his work than Lowell’s lapidary lines for the Shire Hall at Taunton,–the epigraph to the bust by Miss Margaret Thomas:

He looked on naked nature unashamed, And saw the Sphinx, now bestial, now divine, In change and re-change; he nor praised nor blamed, But drew her as he saw with fearless line. Did he good service? God must judge, not we! Manly he was, and generous and sincere; English in all, of genius blithely free: Who loves a Man may see his image here.

THE HAPPY PRINTER

“_Hoc est vivere._”–MARTIAL.

The Printer’s is a happy lot:
Alone of all professions,
No fateful smudges ever blot
His earliest “impressions.”

The outgrowth of his youthful ken
No cold obstruction fetters;
He quickly learns the “types” of men, And all the world of “letters.”

With “forms” he scorns to compromise; For him no “rule” has terrors;
The “slips” he makes he can “revise”– They are but “printers’ errors.”

From doubtful questions of the “Press” He wisely holds aloof;
In all polemics, more or less,
His argument is “proof.”

Save in their “case,” with High and Low, Small need has he to grapple!
Without dissent he still can go
To his accustomed “Chapel,”[78]

From ills that others scape or shirk, He rarely fails to rally;
For him, his most “composing” work
Is labour of the “galley.”

Though ways be foul, and days are dim, He makes no lamentation;
The primal “fount” of woe to him
Is–want of occupation:

And when, at last, Time finds him grey With over-close attention,
He solves the problem of the day,
And gets an Old Age pension.

Note:

[78] This, derived, it is said, from Caxton’s connection with Westminster Abbey, is the name given to the meetings held by printers to consider trade affairs, appeals, etc, (Printers’ Vocabulary).

CROSS READINGS–AND CALEB WHITEFOORD

Towards the close of the year 1766–not many months after the publication of the Vicat of Wakefield–there appeared in Mr. Henry Sampson Woodfall’s _Public Advertiser_, and other newspapers, a letter addressed “To the Printer,” and signed “PAPYRIUS CURSOR.” The name was a real Roman name; but in its burlesque applicability to the theme of the communication, it was as felicitous as Thackeray’s “MANLIUS PENNIALINUS,” or that “APOLLONIUS CURIUS” from whom Hood fabled to have borrowed the legend of “Lycus the Centaur.” The writer of the letter lamented–as others have done before and since–the barren fertility of the news sheets of his day. There was, he contended, some diversion and diversity in card-playing. But as for the papers, the unconnected occurrences and miscellaneous advertisements, the abrupt transitions from article to article, without the slightest connection between one paragraph and another–so overburdened and confused the memory that when one was questioned, it was impossible to give even a tolerable account of what one had read. The mind became a jumble of “politics, religion, picking of pockets, puffs, casualties, deaths, marriages, bankruptcies, preferments, resignations, executions, lottery tickets, India bonds, Scotch pebbles, Canada bills, French chicken gloves, auctioneers, and quack doctors,” of all of which, particularly as the pages contained three columns, the bewildered reader could retain little or nothing. (One may perhaps pause for a moment to wonder, seeing that Papyrius could contrive to extract so much mental perplexity from Cowper’s “folio of four pages”–he speaks specifically of this form,–what he would have done with _Lloyd’s_, or a modern American Sunday paper!) Coming later to the point of his epistle, he goes on to explain that he has hit upon a method (as to which, be it added, he was not, as he thought, the originator[79]) of making this heterogeneous mass afford, like cards, a “_variety_ of entertainment.”

Note:

[79] As a matter of fact, he had been anticipated by a paper, No. 49 of “little Harrison’s” spurious _Tatler_, vol. v., where the writer reads a