THE WORKS OF WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY ESSAYS MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lra TORONTO ESSAYS FIELDING : SMOLLETT : HAZLITT : BURNS BYRON'S WORLD : 'PIPPIN' : OTHELLO •T. E. B.' : OLD ENGLAND : BALZAC : HUGO BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1921 COPYRIGHT GLASGOW. PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS r.Y ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. NOTE Of the Essays, contained in this volume, the Henry Fielding appeared in a complete edition of the novelist's works published in 1903 by Mr. W. Heinemann ; the Smollett served as an introduction to the edition of Messrs. Constable and Co. (1899); the Haxlitt prefaced Mr. Dent's complete edition of that writer's works (1902-4); and the Robert Burns was printed as a * Terminal Essay' in the Centenary Edition published by Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack in 1896. To these publishers thanks are due for permission, generously given, to reprint. The biographical sketches, here entitled Byron's Worldy served as notes to an edition of Byron's Letters, of which one volume only was published by Mr. W. Heinemann in 1897 5 ^^^ Othello^ printed in 1903, has not been traced to the place of its original publication ; the other Essays, in- cluded in this volume, made their first appearance in the Pall Mall Magazine. We take this opportunity of making the proper acknowledgments. 498079 CONTENTS Henry Fielding 1-46 His work and fame, i : the Figure itself, 3 : Mr. Dobson's monograph, 5 : Fielding's descent, 5 : his father, 6 : his first tutor, 7 : at Eton, 8 : a boyish romance, 10 : its consequences, 11 : student at Leyden, 13 : his return to London, 13 : hackney-writer or hackney-coachman ? 15 : the Stage, 17 : the Taste of the Town, 18 : Vanbrugh and Fielding, 20 : Novel and Play, 22 : Comedy, Farce, and Translation, 25 : the Burlesques, 25 : the Satires, 26 : his failure on the Stage, 26 : how he lived, 28 : his quarrel with Gibber, 29 : his marriage, 31 : Murphy's story, 32 : admitted of the Middle Temple, 35 : Journalism, 37 : Joseph Andrews, 37 : The Miscellanies, 40 : the story of Fielding's life, 41 : the Voyage to Lisbon, 42 : Taine's definition, 43 : the Four Great Books, 45. Smollett 47*95 His biographers, 47 : his boyhood, 48 : his house, 48 : apprenticed to a surgeon, 49 : his resemblance to Roderick Random, 50 : the road to London, 52 : The Regicide, 53 : Garrick and Lyttelton, 55 : Smollett, a surgeon's mate, 56 : the Navy as he knew it, 57 : his marriage, 58 : a quarrel with Rich, 59 : Roderick Random, 60 : Smollett and Le Sage, 60 : The Regicide published, 61 : Smollett's vanity, 63 : his attack upon Fielding, 65 : Peregrine Pickle, 66 : hard and cruel and cold, 68 : the excellence of Trunnion, 69 : Count Fathom, 70 : Sir Lancelot Greaves, 72 : Smollett a practising physician, 72 : a bookseller's hack, 73 : The Critical Review, 74 : its treatment of Admiral Knowles, CONTENTS 75 : The argumentum baculinum, 77 : Grainger, 77 : Hall-Stevenson, 79 : Charles Churchill, 79 : a monarch in Grub Street, 83 : his meeting with Robertson, 83 : Scotland revisited, 85 : hackwork, 86 : a journey abroad, 87 : his masterpiece, 89 : his death, 89 : Humphry Clinker, 90 : Smollett's chief fault, 91 : his master-quality, 93 : an ancestor of Pickwick, 95. William Hazlitt 96-122 His descent, 96 : his fighting talent, 96 : the Public of those days, 98 : his birth and childhood, 99 : his meeting with Coleridge, 100 : a golden year, loi : disillusion, 102 : a man of few books, 103 : a painter, 103 : art criticism, 104 : a lover of the past, 106 : Winterslow, 107 : The Morning Chronicle, 108 : Jour- nalism and Literature, 108 : The Life of Napoleon, 109 : his death, no : his candour, no : Sarah Walker, 112 : Liber Amoris, 113 : his second marriage, 114 : his aspect and character, 115 : Lamb and Hazlitt, 116 : two friends, 117 : Hazlitt a talker, 118 : his style and vocabulary, 119 : his criticism, 120 : Politics and Art, 120 : Par nohile fratrum, 121. Robert Burns 123-229 The Kirk of Scotland, 123 : the Poet's birth, 124 : his gift to the people, 124 : his parents, 125 : the Scots peasant, 126 : Burns's education, 127 : Murdoch the Pedagogue, 128 : Burns's books, 130 : at Dal- rymple school, 131 : poverty and work, 133 : a harsh and bitter life, 133 : inevitable reaction, 134 : easier times, 136 : at Lochlie, 136 : love and rhyme, 138 : flax-dressing, 140 : his friendship with Richard Brown, 140 : a peasant in revolt, 142 : the death of William Burness, 143 : the farm at Mossgiel, 145 : failure and ill-luck, 145 : an unsuccessful farmer, 146 : narrative, 149 : the Poet's Muse, 150 : the influence of Fer- gusson, 152 : English and the Vernacular, 152 : a foreign tongue, 154 : his fustian, 155 : the individual Burns, 155 : the Elegy, 156 : Scots and English, 157 : a natural development, 158 : the last of a school, 159 : his debt to others, 160 : his need of rivalry, 160 : master of the Vernacular, 161 : his titles, 162 : the level of excellence, 163 : humour his master-quality. CONTENTS 164 : The Cotter's Saturday Night, 166 : Tarn 0' Shunter, 166 : his loves, 168 : Jean Armour, 169 : a burst of Don-Juanism, 170 : the deserter deserted, 171 : the Lament, 172 : and Despondency, 172 : ' un- grateful Armour,' 173 : Mary Campbell, 174 : con- flicting theories, 174 : a white rose among passion- flowers, 175 : a creature of the brain, 176 ; the heroine-in-chief, 177 : The Court of Equity, 179 : a panorama of tumult, 180 : the Kilmarnock Volume, 181 : its triumph, 182 : an ' Edinburgh expedition,' 183 : his reception, 184 : his dignified simplicity, 185 : the reaction, 186 : Edinburgh a misfortune, 187 : the bucks of the capital, 188 : ' the cock of the company,' 189 : the first Edinburgh Edition, 190 : the return to Mauchline, 191 : Clarinda and Sylvander, 193 : their letters, 195 : Jean and Clarinda, 196 : a letter to Ainslie, 197 : reconciliation A\ith Jean, 198 : ' Adieu, Clarinda ! ' 199 : his marriage, 199 : at EUisland, 200 : appointed exciseman, 202 : ' humane and vigi- lant,' 202 : in Dumfries town, 203 : the recipe for song- making, 205 : a book of beauties, 205 : Idler and Bard, 207 : the misplaced Titan, 208 : Johnson's Museum, 209 : the folk-song, 210 : nameless singers, 211 : an inherited style, 211 : fact and legend, 212 : his appropriation, 213 : master and journeyman, 214 : Auld Lang Syne, 216 : two tyric styles, 217 : the Eighteenth Century Song-Book, '2 18 : Burns the lyrist, 219 : reality not romance, 220 : old-world Scotland, 221 : a story of decadence, 222 : the French Revolu- tion, 223 : the poet's apologists, 225 : the pathos of the end, 226 : his magnificent endowment, 227 : a ' Son of Sedition,' 228 : the good and the bad, 229. Byron's World - 230-350 Henry Angelo, 230 : Byron's Mother, 232 : Robert Charles Dallas, 236 : William Harness, 238 : Lord Holland, 242 : Pratt, the Gleaner, 243 : Gentleman Jackson, 245 : Francis Hodgson, 248 : John Cam Hobhouse, 251 : William Gifford, 257 : Bob Gregson, P. P., 259 : Lord Carlisle, 264 : Lord Falkland, 266 : William Beckford, 267 : Ali Pasha, 268 : Robert Adair, 270 : Scrope Davies, 274 : Marquess of SUgo, 277 : Joseph Blackett, 280 : Augusta Leigh, 281 : John Murray, 285 : Thomas Moore, 289 : Samuel Rogers, 298 : Robert Southey, 300 : William Pole CONTENTS Tylney Long Wellesley, 304 : John Gait, 310 : Lady Jersey, 314 : Lady Caroline Lamb, 320 : Sir Walter Scott, 327 : Lady Oxford, 330 : Leigh Hunt, 332 : Charles Morris, 340 : Marquess of Hertford, 343. 'Pippin' 351-363 ^''Othello - 364-376 *T. E. B.' 377-397 Old England 398-409 Balzac as he was 410-421 The Two Hugos - . . . . 422-432 ESSAYS HENRY FIELDING 1707-1754 They are not few that have dealt with Henry His work Fielding's work and fame ; but not too many of *^^ ^*°^®- them have done the best by him. The most of his life is, and must ever remain unknown to us ; and in the absence of accredited facts, men have had to make inferences, and the most of these have failed to stand the tests of reflection and time. Was our premier Novelist an habitual ' bulker ' : a party, that is, who slept on public benches, or butcher's stalls, or the like open air conveniences, among thieves, and buttocks, and beggars, for the sole reason that he had nowhere else to sleep ? ^ Did he play Bilkum in fact, and tap a real Stormandra for his share of her fees in the service of a living, breathing Mother Punchbowl.'* Was he used to blow a trumpet at a booth in Bartlemy Fair ? All these villainie s were-iaid-to-his charge (for a frantic Scotchman is no respecter of God, or Man, or History), and all are demonstrably false. Smollett (the aforesaid frantic Scotchman), who wrote of him^ ^ Of course, he may have bulked it once and again for fun, I myself . . . But who has not ? A 1 ESSAYS in his lifetime, wrote in so violent a passion that, his humour being for the moment in abeyance^e could not see that, in dealing as he did with a superior, he was simply revealing himself for a person sick with envy and vanity ; and Richardson, who also wrote of him in his lifetime, wrote also as a megalomaniac, and with a feminine acidity in his madness, a sort of elderly-maiden-lady ruffianism in intention and effect, which admirers of Clarissa are at some pains to dissemble. There are glimpses of him in his cousin, the Lady Mary Montagu, and these, if they be kindly on the whole, are on the whole con- temptuous ; ^ there are others in Horace Walpole, that Faddle of genius, whom God and his oppor- tunities made the best letter-writer in Eighteenth- Century England ; there is one magnificent reference, as it were a leaf from Apollo's laurel bough, in Gibbon. Comes Arthur Murphy, the Editor of the first collected Edition (1764), an excellent creature, but one not well acquainted with Fielding's life, nor able, had he been so acquainted, Mr. Boswell's inimitable performance being still undone, to make use of his knowledge to any particular advantage ; comes Sir Walter, who writes IS your right Scot will, and frankly prefers his countryman above the ^Englisher,' though in the ^ Cf. her taunt that he was capable of 'sharing a rapture with his maid.' Mr. Saintsbury's comment on this takes the shape of a quotation : — ' Which many has.' 'Tis but three words long; yet is it long enough. Her Ladyship, by the way, had a mortal contempt for Mr. Pope, the poet ; but she nowhere goes so far as to reproach him with his capacity for 'sharing a rapture' with a tainted harlot. (See post, pp. 29-31. my note on CoUey Gibber.) But then, you see, Mr. Pope had begun by solemnly, even ardently, making love to her ; and, so far as we know, her cousin had not. 2 HENRY FIELDING long-run, being Sir Walter, he is constrained to write Fielding down ^ the Father of the English Novel ' ; comes Thackeray with that achievement in por- traiture of his, a piece of work delightful as literature but wholly disloyal to letters ; come Lawrence and Keightley, who want to learn what- ever may be learned, and in their need go far to redeem our world from the reproach of knowing nothing of one of its greatest men ; comes Sir Leslie Stephen, ' a good man, good at many things,' who knows and loves his Fielding, and says the wisest and the most affectionate things of him, yet cannot refrain from making comparisons, and finding resemblances, between Fielding, the immitigable Ironist, and Thackeray, the unmiti- gated Sentimentalist, which make you wonder how and why in the world he contrives to be so affec- tionate and so wise as he is. Meanwhile the Figure The figure itself remains legendary, vague, obscure. Was^*^®^^- there a Lady Bellaston in his life ? Who knows ? Yet the chances are that there was. Who cares? Did he smoke so furiously that he needed nothing but the wrappings of his tobacco for the manuscript paper of his very solid Five Volumes of Theatre ? Was he commonly drunk, always begrimed with snuff, and ever bending the stiles along his path up Parnassus Hill with no better dunnage than a yard of clay and a flask of champagne? Thackeray's charming but (in the circumstances) really rascally discovery of him made strongly for these last con- clusions ; for Thackeray, you see, knew all about the Eighteenth Century , and was good at Grub Street, and had all but published with Lintot and 3 ESSAYS Cave. So the Middle-Victorian feeling against the Author of Tom Jones was strong ; so strong that Lord Houghton (himself a man with an idio- syncrasy which demanded privacy) writing of Thackeray dead, could actually refer to him as * Fielding without the manners' dross.' ^ It sounds incredible ; yet so it is. And, for my part, I cannot be emphatic enough in my praise of them that have done what they could to discredit this affecting perversion of life, and character, and fact. Mr. Saintsbury, for one, has brushed it aside : not without a twinge of conscience, I imagine, as becomes r fervent of Thackeray ; but critically and finally.^ Still, the first great effort to redeem our Fielding from the reproach affixed upon him by the inheritor of his province in art, his genius, his ^ So, too, Miss Bronte : who compared him to a vulture (the 'eagle' of her antithesis being W. M. T.), talked of his taste for carrion, and professed to discern terrific potentialities for mischief and illiberality (especially in his contemplation of his female friends) in the shape of his lower jaw. It is pretty evident that the impassioned spinster knew nothing of what she was talking about ; but it is also pretty evident that she followed the trend of her time. On the whole one is not sorry that her ' eagle ' found her dull, and escaped her society for the Garrick, as soon as ever (with an approach to polite- ness) he could. 2 Mr. Saintsbur}'^ is nearly always correct about Fielding. A whiff, for instance, and he disposes, once and for ever, of what Sir Walter (who is quite prepared to belieVe it of Field- ing, by the way : though I think he would have stiffened his back and bronzed his brow against it, had it been told of Smollett) rightly terms that ' humiliating anecdote,' which is related by Horace Walpole on the authority of such political and social scum as Rigby and Peter Bathhurst : I mean the story of Fielding at supper, in companj'- with a dirty cloth, a ham-bone and a mutton-bone in one dish, a blind man, a whore, and three Irishmen. A touch of Mr. Saintsbury's finger ; and 'tis seen to be, while good enough Horace Wal- pole, entirely incredible history. 4 HENRY FIELDING cynicism, and the rest — (' his wit, his humour, his pathos, and his umbrella ') — was Mr. Austin Mr. Dobson' Dobson, in that excellent monograph which he"^°"°^^^^ contributed to the 'English Men of Letters ' Series (1883). I may think Mr. Dobson is rather more apologetical than he needs to be : that, in dealing with this great man apart from his works, he also is somewhat Middle- Victorian in mood and effect. But his is a brave book, all the same : and none can read it without learning as much of Fielding as will probably be known this side Doomsday. Many may write, and many will write (as I hope), about this Man among Men of ours ; but howsoever many they be, there is none but will owe a great deal to the good Poet and fine Scholar to whom 'tis due. I It was long the fashion : a fashion to which Gibbon Fielding's gave the weight of his serene assurance and im- ^^^^"*- mense authority : to treat the Feildings ^ as descended from a Hapsburg. This fashion is now discredited ; but there is no doubt that the greatest of them sprang from an ancient and gallant stock, and came from forebears distinguished in English life and history. I am not concerned with the passage of the Feildings through the years. It is enough to begin with Sir William, created Earl of ^ So the name is still spelled, I believe, by the Denbighs — the ruling branch. Fielding's retort upon a Denbigh, who asked why he wrote his name with the ' i ' before the ' e ' — (that he supposed it was because his branch was the first that learned to spell) — leaves the question exactly where it was. 6 ESSAYS Denbigh, who married Susan Villiers, sister to George, First Duke of Buckingham ; died for his King in Rupert's rush on Birmingham ; and left behind him two sons, Basil and George. The first of these, a vigorous yet independent Roundhead, married wisely and variously,^ lived to a great age, and dying without issue, passed on the Earldom of Denbigh to William, his nephew, second son of his brother George. This same George was raised to the Irish Peerage as Viscount Callan, ' with suc- cession to the Earldom of Desmond ' ; and his fifth son, John, who entered the Church, and became Canon of Salisbury, and Chaplain to William iii., took to wife Bridget, daughter of Scipio Cokain, of Somersetshire, by whom he had issue three sons and three daughters. His third son, Edmund, followed the wars, served with distinction under Marl- borough, and made a match, whether runaway or not remains obscure, with Sarah, daughter of Sir Henry Gould, Knight, of Sharpham Park, Somer- set, a Judge of the King's Bench. And at Sharpham Park, on the 22nd April 1707, there was born to these two that Harry Fielding who is known to us as the Father of the English Novel, or (as Byron put it) 'the prose Homer of human nature.' ^ His father. Edmund Fielding may, or may not, have been what his contemporaries would have called ' a queer bitch.' Inasmuch as he fought well under Marl- borough, as I have said, and died a Major-General, ^ Either he was, or he might have been, responsible for no less than four several Countesses of Denbigh. * A niece of Dr. John's, the Lady Mary Pierrepont, was afterwards the renowned Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In effect, she was Harry Fielding's second cousin. 6 HENRY FIELDING the chances are that he was not exactly that. But there is a suspicion that he was by way of being something in that line ; for in 1706 his father-in- law bequeathed to Harry Fielding's mother a fortune of ;^3ooo — (to be invested either in the * purchase of a Church or Colledge lease, or of lands of Inheritance') — for her sole use, he (Edmund) having * nothing to doe with it.' Sir Henry knew his namesake and grandson, for he did not die till 1710 ; when Edmund and his wife removed from Sharpham Park to a house in East Stour (or Stower) in Dorsetshire. There other children were born to them, notably Sarah, author of David Simple and a valued correspondent of the celebrated Mr. ^^ Richardson,^ and there in 0^q^ when Harry was ^ somewhere about eleven years' old, his mother died. That is all that is known. Whether Edmund Fielding did, or did not, stay on in the pleasant house at East Stour none living can tell ; and they that bet on the event do so in an utter lack of information. But, speaking with perfect caution — (that is to say, with the voice of Mr. Austin Dobson) — ' it is clear that the greater part of Harry Fielding's childhood must have been spent " by the banks of sweetly-winding Stour" ... to which he subsequently refers in Tom Jones? Also, it is His first recorded that his education at this time was the*"*°^- work of the Rev. Mr. Oliver : presumably ' the clergyman of Motcombe, a neighbouring village.' According to Murphy, Oliver sat for Parson ^ Who insulted her in her brother, the victorious author of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, as only an underbred, agitated, offended citling could. 7 ESSAYS Trulliber ; but I had rather think that on this point, as on others, Murphy was mistaken. 'Tis to be noted (for one thing) that Harry Fielding, while something of a pedant, was an excellent classical scholar. I cannot believe that he learned to become one at Eton. I make bold to conclude that, who- ever it was that took on the brilliant, apprehensive, inquiring youngster, he could not choose but do his best with the material at his hand. Now, if Oliver were the Trulliber whose sole concern was pigs and pig's-wash, then one of two things is certain : either Fielding, the most generous and the most upright of men and writers, very horribly maligned him ; or Trulliber (pig-dealer and pork-butcher ; sow-gelder a ses heures) was not Oliver ; and Arthur Murphy, meaning quite handsomely by all parties, as is the manner of his kind, here said the thing which was not, and so did mischief now past repair. At Eton. Well grounded, however : whether by Trulliber- Oliver'br by another : in due course Fielding went to Eton. Here he remained for certain years, no * Colleger' (one harboured within) but an ' Oppidan ' (a scholar boarded in the town) ; here, *with true Spartan fortitude,' as he remarks, he sometimes sacrificed at that ' birchen altar ' dear so long to the High-Priests of Science ; here he met his fast friends, George Lyttelton, Winnington, and Charles Hanbury (afterwards Hanbury Williams), and had for his contemporaries Henry Fox, and William Pitt (Pitt, the Great Commoner ; ]?itt the sublime Lord Chatham!), with, it may be, Gilbert West, who translated Pindar, and little HENRY FIELDING Tommy Arne, who was afterwards to write the music of Artaxerxes and Rule Britannia^ and many a classic in English song besides ; and here, in the noble, if ambiguous, speech of the illustrious Mr. Gray (himself an Etonian, of a somewhat later date), he ' chased the rolling circle's speed ' and ' urged the flying ball ' with all the energy that Buxom health of rosy hue, Wild wit, invention ever new. And lively cheer of vigour born, could give. I know not (nobody does) the date of his reception ; ^ but I have had several lads of genius through my hands, and I make bold to say that here came his Choice of Hercules, and that that choice was hardly one which would commend itself to Minerva. There is nothing to guide one, nothing to illuminate, nothing to suggest. But women are women ; such boys as the boy Fielding, seld-seen or not, are ever occurring ; and Fielding's mind was in the main an experimenting, an observ- ing, a debating mind. Is Molly Seagrim Mr. Jones's first.'* If she be, then assuredly, I take it, there is not near so much likeness between Jones and Fielding as has hitherto been perceived. In Fielding's life and work, the Accidental Woman takes her place, and gets her due. That is one of the many things which mark him off from other English novelists. Of itself, the point is unim- portant. Boyhood counts for little or nothing in the development of sentimental Man, and Youth for very little more. It is only when Manhood lays * Mr. Dobson conjectures that he was entered soon after his mother's death. romance. ESSAYS hold upon a boy that Woman begins to count : till then she is but a sensation and a jest. But to be a Man is to be conscious of a heart ; and with, and in, that consciousness your rakish Youngster becomes a decent Male, and (forgetting his experiences) looks round for Somebody with whom to fall in love. That, as I think, was Fielding's case ; as it has been the case of many millions of lusty lads besides. To put things plainly, I think that he had learned his grammar thoroughly before he went to Eton ; and I am fully prepared to meet him when, on his departure thence, he falls over head and ears in love with Miss Sarah Andrew. A boyish She was a ' fortune and a beauty,' as they said in those days ; she lived at Lyme Regis ; she was a lonely, lovely orphan ; one Andrew Tucker was her guardian. It was so desperate a business while it lasted that, though the lover was but eighteen or so, (but, like the abducting Rochester before him, he cannot but have been an uncommonly handsome and brilliant boy), the Young Lady herself was sent away out of his reach ; while the Young Lady's Guardian was moved to protest (in an affidavit) that he went in fear of his life on account of young Mr. Fielding and his man, which latter ' he feared would beat, maim, or kill him.' Is young Mr. Fielding's man a far-away vision of Black George ? I love to think so ; but evidence, much less proof, is want- ing. What is certain is that Miss Andrew, having been deposited for safety with another Guardian, one Rhodes of Modbury, in South Devon, was presently married off out of harm's way to one of Rhodes's sons ; had several children ; and was 10 HENRY FIELDING afterwards honoured among the Tuckers and the Rhodeses as the original of Sophia Western. Of course, she was nothing of the sort ; for, as we all know. Fielding was at some pains to make it history that, in essentials and particulars alike, Sophia Western was none other than his first wife, Charlotte Cradock. But it is scarce possible to doubt that Mrs. Rhodes, who, at the time of affidaviting, was a damsel of fifteen (she died in 1783, being then some three and seventy years old), shared, if she did not encourage, the delusion ; for it is a fact that Woman, whatever her age, and what- ever her fashion, dearly loves being written about in books, and that Ronsard's lovely sonnet — * Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, a la chandelle ' — enshrines and glorifies an eternal truth. I do not for a moment think that, however romantical the Fielding of Lyme Regis, he knew thus much : and I am equally sure that the lady did not. But by the time that Tom Jones appeared, both he and she were wiser. Both were some thirty years older ; but the woman was by that much the worse for life, while the man, his eye on immortality, had so far learned his lesson that Miss Andrew was at best a pleasant memory, and he was conscious of nothing vitally glorious in the past except the girl he had married ; loved to distraction ; honoured with motherhood ; spree'd with ; starved with ; betrayed (it may be ; I know not) ; and seen die. Meanwhile he had done enough. A lad ofitscon- eighteen, he had been foiled in a fine, scandalous ®®^"®°^®^' 11 ESSAYS attempt at abduction ; he had seen a fortune and a beauty violently removed from his neighbourhood, and married out of hand with a view to making him impossible ; and he had been bound over to keep the peace by an elderly gentleman, who went in bodily fear of young Mr. Fielding and his follower. He rose to the situation (or Edmund Fielding rose for him) ; and, instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge, as in the ordinary course of things he would have done, he went to Leyden to read law under 'the learned Vitriarius.' Also, he ' took it out of ' Miss Andrew by translating a part of Juvenal's Sixth Satire * in English Burlesque Verse,' in the manner of Mr. Butler's Hudihras. It will be owned, I think, that this was not the revenge of a desperate man.^ ^Austin Dobson : Fielding (New York), Appendix I. It was Keightley who unearthed old Tucker's af&davit. It was sworn the 14th of November 1725, before John Bowdidge, Mayor of Lyme Regis ; with the result that Henry Fielding, Gent, and his 'servant or companion, Joseph Lewis,' were bound over to keep the peace, insomuch as the said ' Andrew Tucker, Gent, one of the Corporation,' was 'in fear of his life of some bodily hurt to be done or to be procured to be done to him by H. Fielding and his man.' Further : it was a Tucker tradition that Andrew of that ilk considered himself hardly used by Rhodes of Modbury, for the reason that, all the while he was going in fear of his life, etc., he was resolving that Miss Andrew should marry his own son. One Davidson, a Devon antiquary, is responsible (under an ' it is said ') for the statement that Fielding (his ' companion or servant,' no doubt, aiding and abetting) ' made a desperate attempt to carry the lady off by force on a Sunday, when she was on her way to Church.' Last of all, as Miss Andrew's mother and the mother of Sarah Gould were in some sort connected, the Chloe and Strephon of this highly romantic business appear to have been a kind of cousins. Why in the ThMtre of Henry Fielding is there no comedy called The Rival Guardians ? 12 HENRY FIELDING II Nobody knows how long Fielding remained under student at the wing of the learned Vitriarius, nor, when the ^^ ^^* learned Vitriarius was doing something else than lecture, exactly how he employed himself. It is said, however, that he worked hard at the ' civilians ' ; and it is history that he had his eye upon the drama, and brought back with him the first draft of his Don Quixote in England} It is plain that, if any Dutch maiden attracted him, the affair was attended by no memories, whether humorous or tragic, nor issued in any more trans- lations from the Roman Satirists ; and it is also . plain that neither the country nor the people made any sort of impression on him ; for I recall but a single reference to either in his afterwork.^ I suppose, with others, that when he did return to England, he returned because he could not count on ready money from his father — (who had married a second time, and was begetting a second family with all the lustiness of a British soldier) — and was unable to pay his lodgings and his fees. At any His return rate, return he did ; and, being by this time a hand- *° L°°^°"- some, vigorous, inspiring creature, over six feet high, shaped (the inference is) like one of his own heroes, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a presence, and a temperament, and a tongue, he plunged, and plunged again, and yet again plunged into the roar- ^ As his formal comedy. Love in Several Masques, was played while he was yet in his twentieth year, it seems highly probable that it also was at least begun at Leyden. ^ I forget for the moment where it occurs. But the inspira- tion of it is merely the stenches of a Dutch canal, 13 ESSAYS . ing, rioting pool of early Georgian London. His nominal income was one of £loo a year ; but it came from his father, and, as he himself remarked of it, anybody might pay it that would : so that, men and women being what they are, and have always been, I see no reason to doubt that he knew Lady Bellaston at first-hand, and, on occasion, was no more carefully concerned to reject the favours of Miss Matthews than was Lieutenant Booth. I may be slandering him ; but I do not think that he himself would have either said or thought so, and I am sure that Balzac, whom he anticipated at more than one point, and in whose theory of Fiction as a right expression of Life the Woman who gives, and the Man who takes, are essential elements, would, had he been consulted, have explained (at great length) that human intercourse is largely conducted on these lines ; ^ and if M. de Fielding had not, on occasion, vied with MM. Henri de Marsay, and Lucien de Rubempre, and Maxime de Trailles, and ^ In point of fact, the outcry against Mr. Jones's acceptance of money from Lady Bellaston, ' for value received,' is largely, if not wholly, an effect of cant. Such connexions, such fine confusions of beatitude and gratitude, have existed at least since Woman began to assert herself as Man's complement and equal ; nor, if you clear your mind of Puritan hysteria, and think it out, is there any reason, especially if you consider the practice of the whole civilised world, during many hun- dreds of years : Puritanism (or, better still, the Prudery which is the worst and most mischievous effect of Puritanism) always excepted : why there should be. This apart, how- ever : it is certain that such connexions are common yet in all civilised polities ; and it is shrewdly suspected that, even in England, their morality and convenience are found immensely less unnatural in fact than they are in fiction : so that a real Jones were not nearly so much to blame for taking real money in an inkhorn, real life from a real Lady Bellaston, as he is in taking money from Lady Bellaston, as the mere hero of a novel. 14 HENRY FIELDING the rest of those brilliant blackguards which we know, he would have been at best the * good buffalo' of Taine's report. Of course, Fielding was no more La Palferine, nor Nathan, nor de Marsay, than he was the * good buffalo ' ; and, of course, we cannot get behind that much of his auto- biography which he chose to publish in his novels. But it is evident that one of his merits is his hold ^ ^ on Character and Life : especially upon Life and Character as they are shaped and determined by the uses and the circumstances of Society. Men and women, as I have said, and as everybody knows, are pretty much now what they were then ; as then they were pretty much what they have always been. And I no more doubt that the Matthews and Bellaston episodes were profitable to Fielding : profitable and deemed in no sort reprehensible : than I doubt that their author wrote the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon^ every sentence in which is stamped the utterance of a humane, stately, and l honourable gentleman. j Be this as it may, ' young ravens must have Hackney- food ' ; and if this particular young raven differed Y^^^^ ^\ from others, his brethren, at this point, it was that, coachman ? having far larger appetites than they, he needed a fuller choice and a steadier supply of victuals. As he could get nothing from his father, and was there- fore debarred that study of the Law to which, as his grandsire's namesake and firstborn grandson, he was perhaps devoted from his birth, he presently found himself face to face with an 'extensive and peculiar ' difficulty. Should he turn hackney- writer .f* Should he turn hackney-coachman.? So 15 ESSAYS he says himself ; and, however considerable his gift with cattle may have been, I take it none can wonder that he took to persuading men and women rather than to driving hacks. In truth, there was no choice for him. Even in Grub Street the literary calling was not without its genteel elements. The loosest and arrantest of them that 'wrote for the book- sellers ' ; the men who sold their shirts for tripe and gin, and cut themselves armholes in a blanket, or a sack, to shelter them while they rapped out transla- tions from Xenophon or Tacitus, or wasted their ink in speculation as to the economic future of the Realm, or in essays on The Effect of the Precious Metals on the Conduct and Conscience of Man- kind: even these wretches, I say, could call themselves scholars and gentlemen, and, if they pawned, and starved, and cadged, and potted, could always do so on the argument that their profession was honourable, and that they themselves, however unfortunate, yet chiefly suffered by reason of the dull and stupid self-esteem of the Mobility, for which they wrote, and the rapacity of the Book- seller, whose business it was to keep the Mobility going in the matter of Polite Letters, and to pay his furnishers as little as he might, at the same time that he extorted from them every scrap of ' copy ' which their famished intellectuals would yield. Plainly, Fielding had no choice : 'he must turn to literature, or perish. So to literature he turned. And, being young, and therefore foolish ; being ignorant, and therefore unwise ; having nothing to the purpose but high spirits, a bowing acquaintance with certain languages, and a versatile and clever turn for imita- 16 HENRY FIELDING tion ; he did as all the adventurous youngsters have done who ever attempted Letters, and took to writing for the Stage. Ill 'TwAS a courageous thing to do : and it might, had The stage. he been such an homme du theatre as Dumas was afterwards : Dumas, or even Sheridan ; to say nothing of Vanbrugh and Wycherley before : it might, I say, have taken him to fame and fortune. But, for one thing, he was far too young for anything but apprenticeship to this most difficult of trades ; and, for another, he had few touches of the Stage in him, and neither saw its true inwardness nor divined the means which heaven-born dramatists use to secure their ends. To him, in the beginning at all events ; to him, as I see him in these years ; a play was a form of literature in five divisions, called Acts. It was written in dialogue ; and in writing it, therefore, you might be as facetious, or as irrelevant, or as pointed as you liked, since in these modes of composition, you were, or you thought you were, presenting Character. Then, having presented character through some three or four Acts : in the course of which you suggested a couple of adulteries, and brangled together as many absurd and futile intrigues as your scheme would comprehend, on the pretext, and with the idea, that you were painting Manners ; you made, in your Fifth Act, a kind of amende honorable to your per- secuted Hero. And Mrs. Takewell went to the right hand, and Mrs. Shakewell to the left hand ; B 17 ESSAYS and the hideous old guardian, Justice Gripewell, was confounded and bamboozled ; and Filchwell (the valet) brought in a box of deeds ; and Pinch- well (the chamber-maid) volunteered a confession ; and Mr. Valentine and the lovely and blushing, but not too innocent, Aurelia were made happy for life. A caricature.*^ Why not.^* Caricature or not, I cannot see that, in the matter of Formal Comedy, Fielding, though he did other things on other lines, ever got beyond the Theory of Drama herein con- tained and expressed. Indeed, he took that theory very seriously ; did his best to live up to it ; and sometimes succeeded, more or less, in his endeavour. But in the end, the thing about him to be got from his plays is that, if he were (as he was) the very Genius of the Novel, that terrible entity the homme du theatre^ whose absence has wrecked so many ambitions, was not included in his magnificent and various endowment. The Taste of When, at twenty, he produced his Love in t e own. Several Masques, the Gods of Comedy were dead, and the Town was running mad on that entertaining bastard, The Beggar^s Opera. Congreve and Wycherley were ancient history. Farquhar's last and best comedy. The Beaux^ Stratagem, had been produced by Mr. Wilks in 1707, the year of our neophyte's birth. Even Cibber — (the popular Actor-Manager-Author : as who should say the Georgian or Early-English Dion Boucicault ; the Cibber of Mawworm and Dr. Cantwell, of Sir Novelty Fashion and Sir Charles Easy) — was him- self a kind of relic, or antiquity. Vanbrugh, our most humorous, most vivid, most generous and X8 HENRY FIELDING abundant stage-humourist since Fletcher, was newly dead, and his posthumous Journey to London — ' faked,' perverted, finished, by ' Old King Coll ' — had, as The Provoked Husband, given the thrice- admirable Mrs. Oldfield one of her last and greatest opportunities (1727). But his best play. The Provoked Wife, dated from 1697, while his Relapse, a master's descant on certain trifling themes set forth in Gibber's Lovers Last Shift: his Relapse, with Hoyden and Foppington, with Berinthia, and Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and the Nurse : was but a year younger ; and his Confederacy, that inoubliable reminder that the Comic Muse is naturally no better than she should be, dated as far back as 1705. Of course the good men were about, and in the air. Wycherley, I take it, had passed : 'twas a big, lusty English brute, with a rare sense of the Stage, and a vis comica never so well shown as in his grossest ofl^ences against accepted morals, — such as they were. But there was always Congreve, the boldest, the wittiest, the most deliberately literary of them all : Congreve, so truly the heir of Jonson that his\ diversions, his asides, his accidents, his incidental 1 scenes, his studies in humour, his English, remainy incomparable to this day. There was Farquhar, a kind of prose Fletcher, with his velleities of romance, his dissolute, kindly humour, his mastery of a certain sort of character, his turn for telling speech, his unalterable disposition to see everything in the rosiest, the most sparkish, the most 'gallant light. Last of all there was Sir John Vanbru^h ; and I think that in Sir John, young Harry Fielding might very well have found that he wanted. For X9 ESSAYS our Man among Men was not at all romantically given : he cared nothing for that sort of gay and adventurous, yet poignant, contrast of character and event, which Farquhar set forth in The Inconstant^ and The Twin-Rivals ; so Farquhar was not for him. As for Congreve, well — ! 'II ne fait pas ce tour qui veut.' In such matters as expression and invention, is not even Sheridan's a poor reflected glory beside Congreve's? And The School for Scandal, however gallantly it go, does it contrast effectually with The Way of the World and Love for Love? And how should this masterly and vigorous, yet rare and exquisite, craftsman attract your 'prentice-hand in any but the worst sense and to the fondest end ? In fact the sole and only model left to Fielding was Vanbrugh ; and he, with all his deep and all his surface qualities, was every whit as hopeless an exemplar as the rest ; inasmuch as in his composition there was intensely and especially included that aforesaid homme du theatre, an appreciable strain of whom had somehow been omitted from Fielding's. Vanbrugh The two men had much in common ; but their ^^^Air.^ effects are never so far apart, their results exhibit i-ieiamg. , i« 1 1 • never so glarmg a discrepancy, as when each is drawing on their common heritage. As regards I Morality, for instance : both are lewd in fancy, / abrupt in treatment, coarse in intention and effect. But Vanbrugh's lewdness is amusing, Fielding's is dull ; Vanbrugh's method is brilliant and ex- hilarating, Fielding's is seldom either one or other ; Vanbrugh's effects, his jeux de scene, his processes and conclusions, are essentially dramatic, while 20 HENRY FIELDING Fielding's — well, are they for the most part worth a thought ? ^ A better way to mark the essential difference between the two is to consider them in their several methods of treating Character, and to this end I will take each man in his peculiar pro- vince : Vanbrugh on the Stage, Fielding in the Novel. And taking them thus, I stop on the one hand at Sir John Brute, on the other at Squire Western. No contrast could be more instructive. The Novelist literally plays with Western : he knows him ever so intimately, yet his introduction of him seems almost careless ; he shows him a tyrant and a ruffian and a sot ; yet he has ever a kindly, and at the same time a leisurely, half-laughing, half- reticent mastery of his creation, which he never permits to get out of hand ; so that he is able, on occasion, to assert, and to make us assent to, such an outrageous familiarity as that of the boxing of Squire Western's ears, by a person unnamed, whose sole title to credence is that, being an officer and a gentleman, he is as well acquainted with Squire Western as Squire Western's creator.^ Now, with 1 As Fielding's, yes, a thousand times. As stage-stufiE, no. I except the Burlesques : Tom Thumb the Great and The Covent Garden Tragedy. Both are masterpieces ; but in both the interest is largely literary and pedantic ; it has but a kind of rotting acquaintance with human nature ; the Poet-in- Charge is rather gibing and japing a certain mode of literary activity, and therewith a select few among his literary brethren, than doing anything for English Comedy. In other words, the Drama of Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Hoadly, Gibber (even), Sheridan» is in divers ways and degrees an expression of Life. Fielding's Burlesques, which are the best of his Theatre, are but a criticism of one side, one aspect, one ambition of a particular expression of Art. ' That is to say, a great deal better than Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Saintsbury. Sir Walter thought that Mr. Western 21 ESSAYS Western contrast that other most excellent study in Georgian English ; I mean Sir John Brute. No purpose would be served by disarticulating or anatomising the Somersetshire squire and the London mohock. My concern is with methods ; and I ask you to note how, while Fielding's Western is always presenting himself, yet is not once fiilly presented, so that, to get a complete impression of him you have to take the History of a Foundling first and last : in The Provoked Wife Vanbrugh presents his Brute from the beginning in such terms that misunderstanding is impossible.^ The char- acter, that is to say, leaps instantly into life and energy and colour, complete as Pallas springing from the brows of Zeus. A dramatist, a Comic Poet, has passed, and after that first speech of Sir John's, you could swear to your Brute among ten thousand. Novel and j ^jjj j^^^ ^^ Fielding such an injustice as to compare anything in his plays and this masterpiece of dramatic presentation. But let us go a little further : let us compare the Novelist and the Comic Poet ; let us take the immortal scenes between Western and his Sister and the scene in which Sir John and Constant begin to tell each other what they ought to have retaliated ; Mr. Saintsbury (speaking, he says, as a Tory) agrees, and seems to think this inimitable and daring touch the Novehst's ' one shp.' For myself, I am, like Mr. Dobson, of Mr. Fielding's party : for the reason that he knew his Western, and that his Western, if we are to accept him at all, must be accepted on his terms. ^ The Provoh'd Wife, Act i. Scene i. A room in Sir John Brute's house. Enter Sir John Brute. Sir John. ' What cloying meat is love, when matrimony is the sauce to it,' etc. 22 HENRY FIELDING must about my Lady. These scenes are the true apotheosis of the Western family : the Squire and his Sister are handled with an understanding, an adroitness, a mastery alike of male brutality and female im^becility, a command of English as it ought never to be spoken except in novels, which make them one of the best good things in letters ; and you take them to yourself, with the reflection that this is how the good man, sure of his method and master of his material, does. Does, that is, when he is writing a novel. But how if the same good man set out to write a play ? And how would this gem of fiction sparkle on the boards ? The answer is instant and unqualified : it would not sparkle at all. It could not : not even though, at a given point, the Squire should 'suit the action to the word,' and thereby make himself a shrined Saint for all the Naturalists in Time. Now, Sir John Brute is a frank and violent blackguard ; he is also a villainous drunkard ; he is (further) a rake of the dirtiest habit ; and he hates, insults, and despises his wife, as lively a person as Vanbrugh can make her, for the sole reason that she is his wife. She, my Lady, is pursued (much to her contentment) by one Constant ; and in the end comes one of the completest scenes in English Comedy. Constant and Lady Brute, supported by Heartfree, Constant's friend, and Belinda, Sir John's niece, are taking tea, and talking agreeable treason. Alarum. Excur- sions. The two gentlemen are dissembled in my Lady's closet ; and to my Lady and Belinda enters Sir John — (who has been beating and despoiling citizens, and has passed the night in a cell, and is ESSAYS fresh from the hands of a scandalised Justice and an astonished Constable) — as drunk, as filthy, as cynical and detestable as a man may be. At a wink from the Comic Spirit, Sir John^^ insisting on ' some of your cold tea. Wife,' breaks open the closet, and Messrs. Heartfree and Constant emerge. Sir John is magnificent : drunk as he is, he rises to the situa- tion, and is magnificent. But, says Constant in effect, after giving a lucid yet inexpressibly futile explanation of things : ' If you don't choose to believe all this. Sir, why, then, I wear a sword ' ; and so departs with Heartfree, leaving Lady Brute and Belinda to face the storm. To these Sir John : wickedly drunk, yet with a fine eye for facts, and the strongest sense imaginable of his own position, as determined by the other man's announcement that he wears a sword : to these, and to himself, Sir John : — * Wear a sword. Sir ? And what of all that. Sir .^ ' . . . I dare quote no further. But he that runs may read ; and he that doth so read may, having first of all rejoiced in Miss Western and the Squire, as being among the best the English Novel contains, go search me all the plays that Fielding wrote for a speech that on the stage would mean one-fortieth so much, or a part that would play one-fortieth so well. The conclusion is inevitable. Fielding's Rambles and Veromils, his Sotmores and his Millamours, his Guzzles and RufHers, his Posi- tive Traps, and Bellamants, and the rest, are stuff ground out for the Stage to keep some actors in parts and a certain ' young raven ' we know of in mutton and champagne ; while Vanbrugh's Sir John is stuff done for the Stage for the very simple reason 24 HENRY FIELDING that it could not possibly, any more than Othello and Hamlet could, be done for anything else. I shall not attempt to analyse the several essays Comedy, in Formal Comedy, Farce, Translation, Burlesque, j^ansia^k)n. and Political Satire which Fielding made, between Love in Several Masques (1727), which was exalted by Oldfield, Wilks, and Gibber, and The Wedding Day ( 1 743), which not even Garrick and Woffington and Macklin could keep from sinking. With this last (there was a posthumous play, called The Fathers: or The Good-Natured Man) his varied, picturesque, and in some ways interesting career as a writer for the theatres came to a rather poor full close. He is said to have remarked that he left off play-writing at the moment when he ought to have been beginning to write plays. But, for my part, while I am prepared to admit that, if he did speak to this purpose, there was much truth in what he said, I am very glad, for the sake of the English Novel, that he discovered his mistake too late to profit by it. Mr. Dobson has said all there is to say about his five-and-twenty essays in play-writing, and, in denoting Fasquin^ and The Authors Farce^ and the Burlesques for special commendation, has The left me and the others nothing particular to say. "^®s^"®^- For the Burlesques, they are, as I think, unapproach- able. In a sense they are echoes ; but they are echoes so vocal and so plangent, so wanton and so / vigorous, as altogether to drown the Voices that ^^ set them calling.^ For the Ballad-Farces, and some * One, The Covent Garden Tragedy (1732), a travesty of Ambrose Philips and Racine, is altogether too naughty and too riotous to be included in any list of Masterpieces of the 25 ESSAYS of the Formal Comedies, there is this to add : that Fielding knew his London, and in them made as good and profitable an use of it as lay in him to The Satires, make. Of the Satires, I will but note that they filled his pockets, and — incidentally, at least — suggested to Sir Robert Walpole the creation of that Dramatic Censorship by which, in the person of the Licenser of Plays, the English Stage has ever since his time been throttled. The adaptations from Moliere, The Mock Doctor (1732) and The Miser (1733), are well done ; and what is more, perhaps, they served to increase the reputation of the Miss Catharine Raftor afterwards famous as Mrs. Clive.^ The latter was a favourite with ' heavy leads ' as late as the late Sam Phelps. His failure on But, the Burlesques apart, Fielding's Theatre, the stage, while it displays the Author as a dramatic adventurer of uncommon energy, industry, and English Drama which an honest critic might essay to eternise. Yet a masterpiece it is ; and the Author was a young fellow of five-and-twenty. The other, Tom Thumb the Great, though something more pedantic, is even better fun. It was written when Fielding was twenty-three ; according to Mrs. Pilkington it forced from Swift one of the two laughs of his life ; it had a run of many nights, the last scene being invariably encored ; in a redaction (with songs) by Kane O'Hara, it held the stage for years. Liston was magnificent as Lord Grizzle ; and ' James,' said Walter Scott to the elder Ballantyne, on a day in the Year of Grace 1814 — 'James,' he said, 'I'll tell you what Byron should say to me, when we are about to accost each other : " Art thou the man whom men famed Grizzle call ? " And then how germane would be my answer : " Art thou the still more famed Tom Thumb the Small ? " ' The quotations are not so much from Fielding as from Kane O'Hara. But certain men of admirable genius — Fielding, Byron, Scott — take hands in them, and I give them for all that means. 1 1 know not if Fielding discovered this remarkable woman. But, if he did not, he did so much for her, having seen her once, that he may fairly be said to have created her. 26 HENRY FIELDING versatility, is none the less essentially oubliable. I have read it several times ; and every time it has been new to me. New, and dull. I can remember Lord Ogleby and Dr. Cantwell ; I have not for- gotten Mrs. Centlivre ; I have, to put my case on higher ground, a good running interest in The Squire of Alsatia and The Suspicious Husband. But Fielding's heroes and heroines, his rascals and his gulls, his intrigues, his diversions, his attempts at invention, are ever a blank to me : I forget them as I read. And my conclusion is that, while he makes so interesting and respectable a figure as to bulk largely in the history of the English Stage, yet, however timely and enterprising, however ondoyantes et diverses^ his ambitions were, he left English Drama and the English Stage pretty much as he found them. It is absurd to say that he did not often — (not always ; but often) — do his very best. Drunk or sober, Bellastonised or only ' on ' with this lady or that, the man was a serious artist in whatever mode of art he sought for distinction. I take it that he could not — positively could not — embark upon a five-act comedy without getting interested in his work ; and to be interested is to do one's best ; and there is enough honest intellectual effort in The Temple Beau^ or The Tragedy of Tragedies, to furnish forth (say) a dozen Second Mrs. Tanquerays. But, in the long run, there is but one thing to say of his protracted and laborious experiment : that he was not the man for the work, and that his Theatre is therefore no place for lovers of the play, as Congreve's is, and Farquhar's, and Vanbrugh's. To be content with it, we must 27 ESSAYS rather regard it as a burro wing-ground tor historians, and antiquaries, and all such persons, whether useful or not, as are interested in the manners and the Stage of Georgian London. IV How he Thus much of Fielding's Plays. And Life, mean- *^® • while : Life, which at the worst means old mutton and tobacco and champagne, and at the best is a prolonged occasion for self-respect, a luxury which Fielding never lacked, I take it, for more than a day or two at a time ? How did the author of Tow Thumb and The Temple Beau contrive to *keep his end up ' (as we say), and pay his way ? Did he come into money through his mother, and had he ever a small but regular income, in addition to that ^200 a year which ' anybody might pay who would,' to keep him in shin of beef and ' British Burgundy ' and * Freeman's Best,' when champagne and what goes with it were impossible.'^ We do not know. In his position, and with his oppor- tunities,^ a modern ^ would get an actress to pay his debts and mother his failures, or would simply work as some Miss Matthews : with a wealthy ' friend,' and a strong, but wholly imbecile, ambition to make as much of her sex in drama as (say) Mme. Duse makes of her unique temperament and unrivalled 1 It is to be noted that, whether he hit or missed, he never lacked a stage, but played whatever he did the moment it was done. * Of course, I mean a modern Frenchman. For who ever heard the like of any Englishman, unless he were the hero of an Eighteenth- Century novel ? 28 HENRY FIELDING art : would have him work, so that he presently- fitted her with a tailor-made part, much as Sardou fits Rejane or Sarah. Fielding, it seems, did neither ; though, as I have said, he made all the use he could of the admirable Miss Raftor ; ^ — and, being an adventurer of resource and parts, played ofF the idiosyncrasies of Mrs. Charke (Colley's daughter), and Theophilus Gibber (Colley's son), and Quin, and Macklin, and even CoUey himself, as well as ever he could. It is pretty certain that he made money by his experiments in drama : for the very simple reason that, if he had not, he could scarce have lived, and must certainly, if one refiase him his Bellastons and his Matthewses — (as, of course, in the interests of Purity and Art and Victorian-England one does) — have taken for a livelihood to hackney-coaching after all. For my own part, I wish he had left a diary of his assault upon the Stage. He must, I think, have loved the life, while it lasted ; for he is nowhere very severe on any of the trade. The exception is Colley^. , ^.,1 -^o -n- 1 J. 11 S 1 -^ His quarrel Libber.^ l^ieldmg soon quarrelled, none knows with Cibber. * Who was, it is told, a woman of so strict a virtue that her fair fame was never so much as touched by a breath of anything that was not demonstrably Slander. * Cibber was certainly a man of parts. As an actor of fops and villains, he seems to have had remarkable merit ; his perversion of Richard the Third held water for something like a couple of centuries, and was played by Garrick, Kean, Macready, everybody, down to the day when Sir Henry Irving sent it to Limbo for ever ; in Vanbrugh's hands his Novelty Fashion became the inimitable Lord Foppington ; as Poet-Laureate he was very little worse bestowed, he was not much more ridiculous and ineffectual, than the Austins and the Whiteheads and the Pv'^es ; for such critical portraitures of actors and actresses as are contained in the Apology — (a work which Fielding, in the course of his vengeance, was at ESSAYS why, with this debonair and graceless elder, to whom he was civil enough in the time of Love in Several Masques ; and, for the rest of his days, with that touch of pedantry which distinguished him in more than one relation of life, he never ceased from ruffianing — (a slang word ; but it exactly expresses what I mean) the unvenerable progenitor of Theo- philus and Mrs. Charke. But, this distinguished Antic being excepted, I do not remember that, however passionate and enduring his interest in the Human Comedy, he was ever concerned to any serious purpose with those acts of it which are some pains to show must of necessity be written in English, inasmuch as it could not possibly be written in anything else) — are so good, so complete, so convincing that we have to wait for Lamb and Hazlitt at their best to get anything to vie with them, and, even so, we cannot choose but feel, in comparing the antient and the moderns, that, if Hazlitt and Lamb be the better literature, 'tis the old Actor has the finer insight, and that his technical inspiration (so to speak) gets nearer, far nearer, the truth than the fine results, however closely observed or well imagined they be, of these others, par nobile fratrum. even though they had Munden and Kean to write about ; also, some of Gibber's work for the stage (as The Careless Husband) is still fairly readable. But the Apology apart, his chief title to fame is that neither Pope nor Fielding could away with him, and that he was not to be discomfited by either. Pope, for instance, was an artist in insults ; but he was so venomous a little beast, and his venom was so entirely out of his control, that. Gibber offending him, he entirely ruined The Dunciad by substituting Gibber, who was no more a dunce than himself, for ' piddling Tibbald.' For that matter, Tibbald was as little a dunce as Gibber, or as Pope ; but he was bookish, he was ever a scholar, he played the mischief with Pope's text of Shakespeare ; so that there really were reasons why he should have seemed such a dunce to Pope, and to Pope's friends, that the chief place in The Dunciad could be accorded to none but him. Now Theobald had questioned (and worse) Pope's scholarship ; but Golley had insisted that an unsound woman was not good diet for a confirmed invalid, a party in stays, however brilliant a writer of couplets that party in stays might be ; and this impeach- 30 HENRY FIELDING played by the professional comedian in the behind- the-scenes of a real theatre. Of vastly greater moment than his quarrel with His Cibber was his marriage to Miss Charlotte Cradock, "carnage. of Old Sarum, which was solemnised in 1735, if not earlier, and which, it is not unfair to assume, made two young people supremely happy. Miss Charlotte was one of three fair sisters, who, though they had some money, were not of the highest and best in Salisbury, and of whom the chaste and elegant Mr. Richardson could find nothing better to say (such was his frenzy against the author of ment of his savoir faire and his savoir vivre went so terribly to his head that, where he had before seen only Theobald, the quiet student, he now saw only Cibber, the old Young Man about Town, who knew so very much more about things as they are than (despite his gallant ambitions) an angry, dwarfed, corseted Poet could know, that Tibbald must come down, and Cibber must go up, and The Dtmciad must (in effect) be dis- featured and disnatured, all because its author wanted to pose as one who knew the Town, and had been proved an ignoramus by this ' harlotry player.' But the brilliant, warped, too- venturesome Arch-Libeller never (if I may so express myself) got any change out of Colley Cibber ; nor, so far as I can see, did Mr. Harry Fielding, either. The truth is, the old Actor was a better Artist in insolence than either. Each of them wrote his worst about him ; and he read what they had written with an eye amused, a smiling lip, and a brow of brass. Then, having read, he went out, and meditated. And Pope's repute as a Man About Town was devastated and abolished the moment he laid his hand upon it ; and his description of Fielding as a ' broken wit ' seems to have been as a wasp upon that gentleman's nose, and to have obliged him to forget himself whenever there was a chance of ' getting one in ' on the aged, disreputable, clever, self-sufficing creature, who, absurd as he was, yet knew his monde, had a vast deal of tact, had parts as an actor, and some brains as a writer, and might, had he not been the kindly whoreson (there really is no other word for him) he was, have gone out of life exulting in the reflection that he had twitted Pope into making a public fool of himself, and had been for years a thorn in the cushion of Henry Fielding. 31 ESSAYS Joseph Andrews\) than that they were bastards.^ The vainglorious and offended Cit advances not the slightest proof of his assertion, which seems, indeed, contrived and stated for the sole purpose of be- littling a hated rival. Bastard or not, however. Miss Charlotte was by common consent a beautiful creature, and a creature not less amiable than beautiful ; so that Fielding could very well afford to laugh at the little man in Salisbury Court ; and assuredly, if he ever thought of Richardson at all, which I take leave to doubt, being of a laughing humour, he did. Certain it is that he was devoted to his wife, and that when she died (as she did apparently in 1743), his passion was so violent that his friends feared for his reason. In any event hers is a name to be honoured while its memory lasts by every lover of English letters : since in her years of courtship she suggested Sophia Western, and in her years of wedlock sat for Amelia ; and in this way is primarily responsible for two of the bravest and sweetest ideals in English Fiction. Murphy's Arthur Murphy tells a story — (but it is demon- story, strably untrue) — that Mrs. Fielding had a fortune of £1^00 ; and that her husband spent it in three years by keeping open house at East Stour, whither he retired with his bride, and where he set up a carriage, invested a number of servants in costly yellow liveries, and generally ' went the pace ' to such a purpose that he had presently to return to 1 Of course, he new nothing at all about the slanders ; or despite his gout, he might, and probably would, have done a little horse-whipping : not on the elderly printer, who was small and of a chubby habit, but on the persons of some of his more outrageous allies. 32 . HENRY FIELDING London, and betake himself once more to the writ- ing of farces.^ The truth, as Mr. Dobson sees it, is that Harry Fielding may very well have retired to East Stour on the failure of The Universal Gallant. This happened in 1735, the accepted year of his marriage : which, as I have said, may well have been earlier. As he was back in London ' in the 'first months of 1736,' running ' the little French theatre in the Haymarket,' and ' the Great Mogul's Com- pany of Comedians ' (so he described them ; with the further information that they had * dropped from the Clouds'), and producing Pasquin^ Murphy's '^ three years ' of ' entertainments, hounds, and horses ' gets so hard a knock that, if we had not all been brought up (as it were) in the strong persuasion that Fielding was a squandering suck-pint, it would, I believe, have been held long since a common lie. Be this as it 1 Keightley, who describes this part of Murphy's narrative as ' a mere tissue of error and inconsistency,' points out that the family colours were white and blue ; while Sir Leslie Stephen very plausibly suggests that the ' yellow liveries * of Murphy's description were a reminiscence (by a thoroughly muddled mind) of that Beau Fielding (d. 17 12) who married the Duchess of Cleveland, and also ' hired a coach, and kept two footmen clothed in yellow.' Mr. Dobson, though he does not go so far as Keightley, and opines that there was too much liquor going at ' the old farm by the Stour, with the great locust tree at the back,' which Fielding rented, so that ' the dusky Night,' did ail-too often ' ride down the sky ' over the * prostrate forms of Harry Fielding's guests,' yet adduces certain irrefragable reasons in support of Keightley's case. As Mr. Booth is a character in fiction, his testimony is of a piece with what the Soldier said, in the historical case of Bardell v. Pickwick. If it were not, if it were real autobiography, then were Murphy only less guilty of * infamonising ' a dead man than the Thackeray who owed so much to his delusions, and did so miserably well with them. ESSAYS may, 1736 was the year of Pasquin; this was followed by The Fatal Curiosity of George Lillo, a dramatist whose work was highly esteemed by the author-manager of the Great Mogul's Company ; and this in its turn gave place to The Historical Register for the Tear 1736. With this last piece Fielding's career as a practical playwright came to an end. Herein and in Pasquin he hit out at Walpole and his Government with so quick a fist and so long and vigorous an arm that, to protect himself, the Prime Minister was reduced to laying the matter before the House of Commons. So far as I know, the example of neither Pasquin nor the Register was adduced in support of the Ministerial case. The offending thing was a satire called The Golden Rump^ which was never printed, which is described as extremely personal and indecent, and which Walpole was suspected to have ordered and paid for as the best possible argument in his favour. The great Lord Chesterfield^ spoke admirably against the Bill ; but it was to no purpose. Walpole had the Commons in his pocket ; the 'Licensing Act' was passed (June 1737) ; and despite some trifling backslidings on Fielding's part, he and the Muse of Comedy walked henceforth apart. * He was the dedicatee of Don Quixote in England ; and Mr. Dobson duly and accurately notes that some of his argu- ments may have been furnished him by the Author of that work. 84 HENRY FIELDING The Stage, then, being closed to Fielding, he Admitted returned to the Law; and in the November of kiddie' 1737, 'Henricus Fielding de East Stour, in Com. Temple. Dorset Ar. filius et haeres apparens Brig : Genlis : Edmundi Fielding,' was admitted of the Middle Temple. For the next years he studied quietly and regularly, it would appear : living on his savings over Pasquin and the Register, or on what was left of the little fortune brought him by his wife. Murphy pictures him in the act of breaking away — ' Rather drunk than otherwise ' — from the company in The Rose or The Green Dragon to go and read law all the night long ; and, if the story be true, I cannot see that, inasmuch as it presupposes a certain strength of will in the hero, it is at all to Fielding's discredit. That it is true of once or twice is pos- sible enough ; but that every night of his life he reeled upstairs and sat, with his head in towels, devising of John Doe and Richard Roe, and those other elegant and pleasing fictions which enter so largely into the illustration of the Law, I do not for one moment believe. And I take it that he who does believe it would believe anything. They are few, in fact, that start a new career at thirty ; they are still fewer who, putting their old life (in Field- ing's case a pretty pleasant and exciting one) behind them, are able to achieve the creation of so full and complete a round of interests as enables — nay, in the end compels — them to prosper in their new way. In Fielding there cannot but have been a great capacity for intellectual effort and enrichment. He 36 ESSAYS was certainly no bibulous and futile wastrel that spent ' some thousands of hours' over Tom Jones. That book is the work of a great and serious Artist ; and I hold that the Fielding of these years of study and comparison is different in no single particular from the diligent and apprehensive writer to whom we owe our greatest novel. Lady Mary, and ' Horry ' Walpole, and Arthur Murphy after them, and after him the brilliant W. M. T., knew some- thing, and guessed more ; but they did not know enough, and they guessed backwards ; and none has ever suggested a means of reconciling their 'views ' of Fielding with the strength, the majesty, the stately undiminishing serenity of Fielding's four great books. It is fair to conclude that Fielding the Templar was at least as resolute, as patient, as laborious, as Fielding the Artist. Why should he not have been ? True, he was young ; but true, also, he had married a woman he loved, and she had given him other things to think about than taverns. When their girl-child died, the poor man went near to dying with her : so great was his passion, so unmixed his agony. Booth is an idler ; but, the Fates being kind, he loves nothing so much as to be alone with Amelia and her babes. Amelia is accepted as Mrs. Fielding ; why, then, should Fielding, the resolved and careful student, be set down as one incapable of Booth's example.'* I know not. What I do know is that there is too much of Lady Mary, and Murphy, and Thackeray about this good man's name and fame for me ; and that, if Mr. Dobson had not already writ his Life^ I 'd like it written again. 36 HENRY FIELDING I need not concern myself with his contributions journalism, to The Champion (1739-45)5 a Spectator-Tatler- Ramhler kind of thing, done in conjunction with Ralph: — Silence, ye Wolves, while Ralph to Cynthia howls, And makes night hideous — Answer him, ye Owls ! — and produced three times a week, for which he wrote Essays — vague, apprehensive, moral, mostly rather tedious than not ; nor with his Ver non-tad (1740), an experiment in the mock-epic ; his Defence of the Duchess of Marlborough (1742); his Miss Lucy in Town (1742), ' a little simple farce.' ^ All these things are journalism, and Fielding, though in a manner of speaking he died writing for the Press, is by this time something better, something vastly more considerable, than the best journalist that ever lived. In effect, in 1742, this scandalous rake, idler, and tippler, produced his Joseph Andrews ; and the English Novel, started rather poorly by Nash in Jack Wilton^^ brutified and stultified by the Head of The English Rogue^ half-visioned, yet never seriously attempted, by Defoe, touched in a pretty futile way by Mrs. Behn — the English Novel, I say, became a living, breathing, working fact. The book began as a parody of Pamela (1741) ; Joseph it ended as the first English Novel. In Pamela ^"^^^^-'s- Richardson set forth the circumstances of a virginal and very lovely Menial, whose Master, the in- ^ Horace Walpole. 2 Eujjhues, Sidney, Green, Lodge — what are they but romantic futilities ? As little in touch with life as Mar- lowe's Tamhurlaine, and as bad at narrative as any one you please. 37 ESSAYS credible and indescribably wooden Mr. B., made divers desperate but entirely silly and ineffectual attempts upon her Virtue. Then, in the long run, having baffled his wiles, and beaten off his assaults, she permitted him to marry her ; so that she was amply rewarded for being a good girl, and declining to part, unless on terms, with what M. Dumas (fils) has called her capital. The story of her resistance to the impossible Mr. B. and of her final triumph over his vile passion made excellent reading for all sorts of women : fine ladies, blooming virgins, and good plain wives and mothers: then, and would make excellent reading for all sorts and conditions of maid-servants now ; though, to be sure, I pity the young woman who should risk her capital on Richardson's theory of the Master — (' Kinder they than Missuses are,' Policeman X has said ; and certainly he is right) — as embodied in the once cele- brated Mr. B. To Harry Fielding : who, for one thing, knew the worth of a wench's humour, and for another how the noble Mr. B. should have done by Pamela, and would assuredly have done by Pamela, had he not been the creation of a Vege- tarian, who knew nothing of life, and wrote of women only from their own report of themselves : ^ to Harry Fielding, I say, Pamela appeared (as in fact it is) so much strained, unhealthy, and un- natural rubbish. That being the case, he began * The worst education possible ; since it tells you nothing but what they wish to be known of themselves, at the same time that it makes you acquainted with certain subtleties which, being unconsciously revealed, appear, and probably are, so true that, seen in their light, the veracity of the whole report is made to seem unassailable. 38 HENRY FIELDING upon a parody: with Pamela's brother, Joseph, being wooed to his undoing by the sister of Mr. B., whose Footman he is, even as the obstinate Pamela is Mr. B.'s Maid. Now, Pamela is in love with Mr. B. : which makes her resolution all the nobler in fact and all the more romantical in design. But Joseph is in love with somebody else ; so that Mr. B.'s Sister, though she plays the game a vast deal better than her idiot brother, comes off no better with Joseph ^ than Mr. B. came off with Pamela. If her Ladyship could have but a single rouse ! But the Comic Spirit is afoot ; and she cannot. Also, she must not ; for here comes Adams (the Rev. Abraham : sure the nearest thing to Don Quixote in English!) ; here come Fanny, and the incom- parable Slipslop, and Beau Didapper, and the excellent Towwouses, and Trulliber and Betty, the Maid of the Inn, and — how many besides ? Who knows .f^ The book being a pure joy from begin- ning to end, who stops to count ? As a Person of Consequence in letters once said to me: — 'In Joseph Andrews^ the Old Man' — (he talked of Fielding atat 35, as 'the Old Man! ') — 'got his hands right i nto the guts of Life .' That says any- thing there is left to say about this gamesome and delightful Epic of the_Road-^ And it may stand 1 That old affair of Mrs. Potiphar's goes on until this day. • 'Tis a pleasure to record that it began as the success it is. It had not, one gathers, so instant and so splendid a triumph as Pamela ; but there were Editions ; and now, I take it, for one that reads the story of Mr, B. and the sublime Miss Richardson (for that, and nothing else, that is what Miss Pamela Andrews is) some sixty read the story of Joseph and Fanny. For the rest, it may be noted that Fornication, the sole Unpardonable Sin in English Fiction, is but a detail (as cellanies. ESSAYS here for all the ' critical ' rubbish, which I might, but will not, accumulate about it. The Mis- 1 743 was the year of the Miscellanies : included m which, with much in prose and verse which is interesting to us only because Fielding thought it worth printing, are a Journey to the Next World, that odd, clever half-success in the manner of Lucian ; and Air. Jonathan Wild the Great ; that tremendous achievement in pure Irony, that master- piece in a mode in which none save Swift has excelled this author.^ The Journey to the "Next it is in life) in Joseph Andrews ; but in much of Pamela it is the staple of the book. In the work done by the man who knew the world there is My Lady, there is Betty, there is the fair and desperate Slipslop, there are Didapper and Towwouse. But they are but circumstances : they fit in well enough, but they are nothing like the whole. Now, in Pamela, none is permitted to fornicate ; yet the theme of the novel is Fornica- tion. Mr. B. is always hovering round in a most dreadful and indecent state ; and Pamela is always praying to be pro- tected from a kind of Walking Phallus (as in a Kaulbach allegory), terribly menacing and ever ineffectual, or resisting its approaches, or writing to her parents to tell them that it has had no luck, and that she is still their Virgin child. Which is the more moral writer ? Which the more buxom book ? ^ And has he, has Swift himself, done better ? I cannot think so. Mr, Saintsbury says the other thing ; but I take leave to disagree. Swift was a master ; but in all his work there is no Jonathan, no Miss Tishey, no Mr. Snap — in fact, no Jonathan Wild the Great. Sir Walter did not understand the book : he thought it was a piece of realism, and, as I be- lieve, preferred his countryman Ferdinand Count Smollett. Thackeray, though he wrote very prettily of it, seems to have grasped the writer's purpose at least as ill as Scott had done before him. The truth is, the book is an exemplar, and the best we have, of a certain mode in letters ; and the mode which it examples is Irony : a mode in which few Englishmen have excelled, and in whose practice even Mr. Meredith has come, at times, to hopeless grief. And for this reason it is isolated in English Letters. It is given to few to love Irony for its own sake ; to still fewer to delight in the Ironical Presentation of life and character, which in this book Fielding 40 HENRY FIELDING World is ingenious and clever ; but it is not to be named in the same breath with Jonathan Wild the Great^ which is in some ways Fielding's masterpiece, and which is certainly one of the masterpieces of English Literature. Need I say anything about the rest of the Mis- cellanies'^ About the Essay on Conversation'^ Good as it is, it is only considerable because our Fielding wrote it. About the verses.'^ In truth, all one can say of them is {a) that they are not bad, and {h) that some of them show the Poet in the act The story of of making love to Miss Cradock. It is better to ^^^^^^^^^'^ ^^^^ leave these things untouched, and to go on with the story of Fielding's life, so far as we know it. That story, so far as we know it, is very easily and briefly told. He went the Western Circuit ; the gout took hold of him ; he lost his wife, and eventually married her maid ; he did lots of journalism, some of it witty and appropriate, but none of it worthy the author of Jonathan Wild and Joseph Andrews ; in 1748 he was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Westminster. It was a poor post for a man like Henry Fielding : a man versed in law, already a great writer, an adept in humanity, a past-master of essays with complete success. What did the vulgar think of it ? What but that they have always thought of what they could not understand ? Some Plays he wrote sans Wit or Plot, Adventures of Inferiors, Which with his lives of rogues and thieves Supply the Town's . That was all they got from this unrivalled book ; and I doubt not that Lady Mary, and Mr. Walpole, and Mr. S. Johnson, and Mr. Richardson, the celebrated novelist, got still less from it than these others. The ruck counts not ; but I think that Mr. Johnson should have known better. 41 ESSAYS the ways and uses of Society. But it seems to have contented him ; and he continued in it till he died. Also, he was evidently a most capable, humane, intelligent, and vigorous magistrate ; or the Bow Street records printed in The Covent Garden Journal go for naught. Then, again, there is no doubt that he got his death in the pursuit of certain gangs of robbers, which gangs he, being then quite horribly ill, did utterly confound and annihilate. In the meanwhile, he published Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751 ^) ; he endured the brutalities of Smollett, sick with envy and hate and rancour ; he edited The Covent Garden Journal. Then the time came for him. His health was irreparably broken ; he had dropsy, and he had gout ; the Magnificent Young Man of not so many years ago was plainly dying. That he knew as much is cer- tain : that he had lived his life, and here was the end. But he did not say so ; and that thief-catching affair, however splendid a piece of good magistracy and good citizenship, may fairly be said to have but precipitated an inevitable event. Our sole satis- faction in it now is that he also was satisfied : he had answered to the call of Authority ; had done his duty and retired. When he sailed for Lisbon, his work was over ; and he knew it. Still, he had enough of life and energy left to enact and write the circumstances of his pilgrimage ; and, as I to^Lisbon^^ think, 'tis in this book, this Voyage to Lisbon, that we find the true Fielding. Modest, patient, suffer- ing, ever dignified, perfectly whole-hearted, perfectly cheerful, perfectly resigned : in fact, the great ^ Published in the December of that year ; but dated 1752. 42 HENRY FIELDING Englishman whose ghost, if he have a ghost, has pretty certainly put Thackeray's on its knees long since, very much as in his real body he put his Captain on his marrow-bones in the cabin of that ^ueen of Portugal in which he sailed for Lisbon. Lisbon and Death. In Lisbon among Os CypresteSy the secular trees in the English grave- yard hard by, he lies until this day. There 's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream, And the Nightingale sings in them all the day long. So he does over the grave of Harry Fielding. Meanwhile 'Luget Britannia Gremio Non Dari Fovere Natum.' There is no more Fielding now. But we have not been idle. Fax from it. And there is now an infinite deal of Messrs. Howells and James. VII Of all the definitions that ever were defined Taine's Taine's definition of Fielding as * a good buffalo ' strikes <^®^^**°°- me as one of the most absurd. But Taine, man of genius as he was born, and savant as he made him- self, was at all times the prey of any theory that happened to commend itself to his imaginative yet very logical mind ; and either this, his theory of Harry Fielding,^ was one of the unluckiest he ever * It was as Harry, I think, that he was known to the con- temporary crowd : at all events to such of it as knew and loved him. I recall an odd instance. In certain records of the Old Bailey Sessions, purchased for professional uses by the late R. L. S., and devoutly perused by me, we came on a case of blackmailing, the details of which are happily 43 ESSAYS developed, or you can pay no man a higher compli- ment than to call him a Good Buffalo. For consider what, in Fielding's case, is comprehended in the term. Here is a man brave, generous, kind to the «th degree ; a man with a great hatred of meanness and hypocrisy, and a strong regard for all Torms of virtus^ whether natural and impulsive or an effect of culture and reflection ; an impassioned lover, a devout husband, a most cordial and careful father ; so staunch a friend that his books are so many proofs of his capacity for friendship ; of so sound a heart, of so vigorous a temperament, of so clear-eyed and serene a spirit, that years and calamities and disease do not exist for him, and he takes his leave of the World in one of the most valiant and most genial little books that ever was penned ; distinguished among talkers by a delight- ful gaiety, a fine and gracious understanding, an inalienable dignity ; withal of an intelligence at once so vigilant and so penetrating, at once so observant and so laborious and exacting, that, without hurry as without noise, patient ever and ever diligent, a master of life, a master of character, a master of style, he achieved for us the four great books we have, and, in achieving them, did so nobly by his nation and his mother tongue that he that would praise our splendid, alt-comprehending speech aright has said the best he can of it when he says that it is the speech of Shakespeare and Field- unfit for print. One of the Hunters — John, I think — was a chief witness for the defence ; and in the course of his evi- dence he noted that he had seen such a case before ; at Bow St., ' in Harry Fielding's time.* I am sure of the quotation, though I have forgot the speaker's Christian name. 4A HENRY FIELDING ing. If to be a Good Buffalo be all that — (and in Harry Fielding's case it is all that, and more) — why, then, I can't help wishing that the breed were more prolific ; and even that M. Henri Taine had himself belonged to it. I shall say nothing about the four great books, for The Four the very simple reason that everything there is to ^^^^* ^°°^^* say about them has been said. Like Dickens's work, and Scott's, but, as is inevitable and natural, to a still greater extent, as yet they are as essential a component in the mighty fabric of our Literature as the plays and poems of Shakespeare, or the poetry of Spenser and Milton, and Gibbon and John Bunyan, and Defoe's half-failures, and Mr. Bos- well's biography. And when I say that to consider them : in all their stately shapeliness of plan, their admirable completeness of structure, their reasoned prodigality of detail and adornment : is for me about the same, neither more nor less, than con- sidering St. Paul's, which I esteem the piece of architecture the nearest to perfection these eyes of mine have seen, it will be apprehended, I hope, that I keep not silence out of irreverence. But every- body worth mentioning — (as Lady Mary, Gibbon, Gray, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Sir Leslie Stephen, Mr. Lang, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury,^) has spoken : and ^ Whose notes on Fielding are edifying and sagacious in no mean degree : especially the passages in which he deals with Mr. Jones's relations to Lady Bellaston, and seeks to explain Dr. Johnson's dislike of Fielding. Thackeray's view was dis- torted and obscured by the fact that (a) he was so terrible a Sentimentalist that he thought Amelia Sedley and Laura Bell ideals for which to live and die ; (b) that he considered Fielding the Man a most improper Person ; and (c) that he 46 ESSAYS why should I essay to say something new and con- vincing after these ? 'Tis enough that, as I think, Harry Fielding was a great and good man ; who also, by premeditation and design, laboriously created an Art, and created it in such terms, and to such a purpose, that none has practised it since his time but must have worked and written differently if this immortal Master had not written and worked before him. envied Fielding the Artist his chances, would have liked to make a real Man, as Fielding had done, and could do nothing better than the ingenuous Pendennis. Scott is, as they say, ' all right as far as he goes ' ; but he goes not very far, and, as I have said, he frankly prefers Smollett before Fielding, even to the extent of making the EngUshman pick a quarrel with the Scot, and so completely falsifying history; the fact being, of course, that Smollett : who, take him all round, was a worse case of megalomania than Richardson himself : began by grossly insulting Fielding and his friend Lyttelton in the First edition of Peregrine Pickle, and went on to produce the really infamous pamphlet in which (1752) he professed to give an account of the strange and dreadful madness of one Habakkuk Hilding, ' trading justice and chapman.' Another critic, whose identity I will not discover, goes so far, in the vain endeavour to be original (an endeavour which hath made him eminently individual in the matter of facts and dates), as to ask if Amelia be not ' a little dull ' ? I will close this note by owning that Thackeray, if he, whether wilfully or stupidly, misunderstood and mis-stated the Man, was in absolute sym- pathy with the Writer, and that his eulogy of Fielding (in The English Humourists) is the most eloquent and the best there is. 46 SMOLLETT The life of Smollett has been written by several His hands in several styles : in the classic vein by his ^°^^^p ^^^ friend and imitator Dr. Moore, whose Zeluco^ now almost unreadable, was long renowned as moving and most dangerous work ; by Walter Scott, who, taking his author, as he took most things, Like a gentleman at ease, With moral breadth of temperament, produced a note on him that, despite a patriotism which makes the writer often take bladders for lanterns, none who wishes to esteem his Smollett can afford to leave unread ; by Mr. David Hannay, whose little book is of peculiar value and interest to those who would know what was the Navy in which Smollett observed the originals of his most famous creations. There are others,^ notably Robert Chambers and an anonymous Quarterly Reviewer. But I think that any one who reads ^ I can imagine no more useful summary of Smollett's ad- ventures and capacities than that contributed by Mr. T. Seccombe in the Dictionary of National Biography : this, though I think that Mr. Seccombe is, Uke Scott, to his hero's faults a little blind, and to his hero's virtues rather kinder than he ought to be, 47 ESSAYS these three, and supplements his reading with Smollett passim, need read no more to be able to figure the man as he was. I purpose, then, to give but the briefest outline of the career, and to keep as close to the man — the humorous, arrogant, red- headed, stiff-necked, thin-skinned, scurrilous, brilliant, Scots hack of genius — as his novels will let me. His boyhood. It is said that Roderick Random is largely an auto- biography. If this be so — and it is scarce credible — then must Smollett have had a most bitter boy- hood : a boyhood, truly, which would go far to account for the high-handed, hard-hitting, indis- criminating insolence and aggressiveness of his later years. By his own showing, he was hated by his grandfather, and by his cousins bullied into ferocity ; all because his father had married out of his station, and by so doing had secured the lasting displeasure of his own progenitor, and the immitigable hate and scorn of his time-serving kinsfolk. There is very little of all this in what is actually known of Smol- His house, lett's life. He came of a house which, ' though in nowise ancient,' was in every sense respectable ; ^ and his grandfather. Sir James of Bonhill — some- time a judge in the Commissary Court, often re- turned to the old Scots Parliament, a commissioner for the effecting of the Union between the King- doms — was by way of being a distinguished man. ^ He was a gentleman of coat-armour, and in France would have been counted noble.' — Hannay, Smollett (1887), p. i. SMOLLETT Sir James had four sons ; and Smollett (Tobias George) was the youngest born of Archibald, the youngest of these. Now, it is certainly true that Archibald did not marry to please his father ; but it is also written that Sir James, however sore his dis- pleasure, and however hard-fisted and illiberal he may have been in general, behaved, in the sequel, quite handsomely, and established Archibald in a farm with an income of ;^300 a year. Archibald dying soon after the birth of Tobias George (1721), Sir James provided more or less generously for his widow and children ; so that in the long run James, the eldest son, got a commission, and rose to the command of a company, while Jean, the girl, was well and prosperously married, and Tobias George was apprenticed to a certain Gordon, who is said to Apprenticed figure as the Potion of his first novel, and who was, *° ^ surgeon, historically, a Glasgow surgeon and apothecary. Now, it is written that Tobias George, for all his stomach for filth — (a stomach, by the way, which may well have been developed in him by the circum- stances of common life in the unabashed and unclean Scotland which he knew) — had a soul above clysters, and longed for nothing less than a pair of colours ; and it is certain that Sir James, not only made an apothecary of him but also, ignored the widow and orphans of Archibald Smollett in his will ; so it is conceivable that Tobias George, who was ever addicted to self-righteousness and never averse from misrepresentation, should, in a fit of fury, have grossly libelled his intimates and very scandalously misstated his environment. But in the preface to his novel he is careful to note that he made his hero D 49 ESSAYS a Scot because, for one thing, a Scot might be poor and yet well educated, which an Englishman could not be ; for another, because he could ' represent simplicity of manners in a remote part of the kingdom with more propriety than in any place near the capital' ; and, for another, because the Scot was of a wandering habit, and might therefore figure naturally as the hero of a novel of adventure. His Moreover, writing years afterwards (1763), he is trRoderick ^^^oved to declare that the resemblance between Random. himself and Roderick Random is merely general.-^ Inasmuch, then, as he takes pains to figure his associates in the vilest terms, and to present his cir- cumstances as immitigably squalid ; inasmuch, too, as in Humphry Clinker he wipes up some of the dirt which he has scattered in Roderick Random ; ^ it is fair to infer that the interest of his first novel is autobiographical only because the writer speaks in the first person, and speaks with bitterness and point enough to make his readers believe that his par- ticularity is not less authentic than the broader lines 1 ' The only similitude between the circumstances of my own fortune, and those I have attributed to Roderick Random, consists in my being born of a respectable family in Scotland, in my being bred a surgeon, and having served as a surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war during the expedition of Cartha- gena. The low situations in which I have exhibited Roderick I never experienced in my own person.' — Smollett, ' To , New Jersey, North America.' London, May 1763. * ' I was introduced,' Mr. Matthew Bramble says, ' to Mr. Gordon, patriot of a truly noble spirit, who is father of the linen manufacturer in that place, and was the great promoter of the city workhouse, public infirmary, and other works of public utility. Had he lived in ancient Rome he would have been honoured with a statue at the public expense ' {Humphry Clinker. 'To Dr. Lewis. Cameron, August 28'). No doubt ; but he lived in Eighteenth Century Glasgow, and is remembered, if at all, as Smollett's Mr. Potion. SMOLLETT on which he works are unassailable. And this, for Smollett's sake, I am very willing to believe. •"■ Whether Gordon, Smollett's master, sat or not for Potion, it is certain that he thought kindly and well of his 'ain bubbly-nosed callant wi' the stane in his pouch ' ; ^ and whether Smollett was or was not bullied into savagery by his cousins, it is certain that, according to Mr. Colquhoun of Camstradden, his conversation in these his 'prentice days consisted in a * continued string of epigrammatic sarcasm,' for which ' no talents could compensate.' It is possible that, in the intervals of dispensing medicines for Potion, he attended lectures at Glasgow University ; but of this there is no trace in that ' angry travesty ' ^ of his earlier years, which he introduced into Roderick Random, and on which the autobio- 1 All the same, the great and deserved success of Roderick Random was partially a succis de scandale. Potion, Crab, and Squire Gawkey were, Scott says, at once identified ; so was Roderick's grandfather ; divers persons contended for the honour of originating Strap — much as there were several claimants to the honour of sitting out with Burns ' Amang the rigs o' barley ' ; Oakum and Whiffle, Marmozet and Sheerwit and Narcissa — to the public of 1748 all these were plain as the nose on your face. As Roderick's uncle, honest Bowling should, one thinks, have come in for his share of recogni- tion. But the presence on Leven side of this arrant and indubitable Englishman would have been ruinous to the theory. So he was ignored. For the rest, the lack of what is called ' atmosphere,' the absence of local colpur, whether deliberate or not, are such that the incidents and characters of Smollett's earlier chapters would fit the Spain of Gil Bias almost as well as the West of Scotland. ^ Anglict', his ' own snotty-nosed youngster with the stone in his pocket ' : a description not less discrediting to Tobias George's practice of cleanliness — (Roderick, by the way, is eagerly dandified and poetical) — than it is honourable to his capacity for readiness and resource in the matter of practical ruffianism. ' Hannay, Smollett, p. 67, London. ESSAYS graphical theory is based. If, however, the theory suffer at this point — (it is plain that Smollett was well grounded and well read) — its claim to con- sideration is in some sort re-integrated by the fact that, like Random, Smollett wrote a tragedy in his 'teens, and that, like Random, he presently took The^road to the road to London. That he went by waggon is probable ; ^ and that on the way he encountered with the tremendous Rifle, the engaging Miss Ramper, the sharping, fiddling curate, the dis- tinguished Billy Weazle and his lady, and the Horatian ale-draper — this- also is probable ; for he has described all these experiences with a gust, an airy and brilliant exactness, an abounding sense of the ridiculous, which make for conviction in his readers even now, as they have made for conviction in them ever since he wrote. As convincing, as vivid, as vecues^ every whit are Roderick-Smollett's experiences of London citizens and London streets, his account of which is solemnly adduced, I believe, as one of the reasons why his countrymen have never taken him to their hearts for the rare amuse ur that he was. It is (I am told) an article of faith in Scot- land that the Scot can never be other than wilfully absurd. This is just as true, of course, as the counter-proposition ; that, whether wilfully or not, he can never be anything else. But 'tis an article * 'Twas a means of transport favoured by his countrymen. Thus, Churchill, The Prophesy of Famine (1762), concerning Scotland : — To that rare soil, where virtues clust'ring grow. What mighty blessings doth not England owe ? What waggon-loads of courage, wealth, and sense. Doth each revolving day import from hence ? 52 SMOLLETT of faith ; and it would seem that Smollett was pre- destined to figure as a sort of sacrifice to Burns. The sense of A Man'^s a Man and Tarn O' Shunter and the glorious Twenty-Fifth of January, all latent and impending, was contained in his birthright ; and, in ignoring it, and, in parading himself as a Scot bewildered and befooled, he was unequal to his opportunity, and, besides, was false to his tradition. True, that tradition as yet was unsuspected ; but it was none the less real and imperious ; especially to the sectaries born a hundred years after Strap and Roderick had been hailed for the gawks they were, and their creator had shown himself worthy his inspiration and his chance. A brilliant and divert- ing piece of farce he made of it ; and yet, 'tis said, his countrymen have ever held it as the unpardon- able thing. The explanation is, they are a people which breeds great humorists ; but they are not a humorous people. II It does not appear that Smollett purposed to The practise his art in London ; or, if he did so purpose, ^^*^* ^* that he meant his practice to be anything but a means to a higher end, which end was literature. The fact is, he had a tragedy in his pocket ; a Scots- historical tragedy ; a tragedy done after the best models, and assured — partly for that reason, but chiefly because it was the work of Tobias George Smollett — of immediate and conspicuous success. It is a tedious performance ; faint in outline, tame in workmanship, utterly insipid in effect, and written 63 ESSAYS in that inexpressive, colourless, correct iambic which the Eighteenth Century was pleased to consider an improvement upon the medium of Shakespeare. But, such as it is, Smollett loved it dearly, and his failure to convince the world of its intrinsic excel- lence was a bitter and exasperating memory during many years. ^ That he expected it to bring him gold and glory is most certain ; his disappointment else had been far less keen, his ill-humour nothing like so rancorous and so lasting. An introduction to Lord Lyttelton,^ the friend of Thomson and Fielding, the dedicatee of Tom Jones brought the young tragic into communication with Garrick, and resulted, in the sequel, in the gibbeting of both 1 It is called The Regicide, and deals in a lofty, high-snilfing, perfunctory way with the murder of James i. So far as I can see, the most that can be said for it is, that it is carefully written. For particulars in its dispraise see Hannay {Smollett, pp. 23-27) and Churchill, The Apology {1761) : — Who ever read The Regicide but swore The author wrote as man ne'er wrote before ? Others for plots and underplots may call, Here's the right method — have no plot at all. Who can so often in his cause engage The tiny pathos of the Grecian stage. Whilst horrors rise, and tears spontaneous flow At tragic Hah ! and no less tragic Oh ! To praise his nervous weakness all agree ; And as for sweetness who so sweet as he ! Too big for utterance when sorrows swell, The too big sorrows flowing tears must tell, But when those flowing tears shall cease to flow Why — then, then the voice must speak again, you know. For the rest, the author's partiality was notorious ; and, so far as I know, 'twas quizzed by everybody who took up arms against him. ' Probably, Mr. Hannay thinks, through Malloch, or Mallet, his lordship's secretary, the ' beggarly Scotchman ' of Johnson's famous description. 54 SMOLLETT Garrick and Lyttelton, the one as Mr. Marmozet, Garrick and the other as Sheerwit, in Roderick Random ; Lyttelton. together with the introduction of Lyttelton as Gosling Scrag into the First Edition of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and the Faithful Narrative, etc. (1752)5 and the ill-bred and contemptible Burlesque Ode, in which was parodied Lyttelton's Monody on the death of his wife. To Smollett, indeed, The Regicide was certainly the dearest of his works. He never forgot nor forgave the circumstances of its reception ; and when he published the poor thing (1749), after the success of Roderick Random, it was with a preface that remains a monument of exasperated vanity and petulant, undignified resentment.-^ This was later. For the present, the tragedy a proved failure, the glories of Drury Lane — 'the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses ' — remote as the light on Beulah's hills, Smollett had perforce to do the work he could or starve. He might, of course, have hired himself out to another * Garrick was forgiven in the long run ; but not until money had passed, and the Smollett of The Regicide had blossomed into the Smollett of The Reprisal, which Garrick, not only produced but, helped with a gift of twenty guineas towards the author's expenses, besides * playing it on,' in one of his best parts. Hence the fair — not to say fulsome — speeches in the History {1757-65), in which there are kind- nesses for Lyttelton also, and, with Lyttelton, Henry Fielding. Him Smollett hated and depreciated on several grounds : as his superior in art, as a successful writer for the stage, as Lyttelton's friend and Garrick's, as a person who dared to jibe in print at Peregrine Pickle. For the rest, the actor Smollett loved was — not Garrick but — Quin : between himself and whom there is place for a not uninteresting parallel. Garrick, it should be noted, is the hero of The Rosciad, the reception of which by somebody in Smollett's name and Smollett's pay, made Churchill, as we shall see, his sturdiest enemy. 55 ESSAYS Potion, and for him spread cataplasms and com- pounded clysters until he felt himself strong enough to spread and compound on his own account. Happily for letters, happily for posterity, happily (so Mr. Hannay tells us) for his country, he found Smollett, a such practice impossible, and got a berth as sur- mate.°^^ geon's mate on one of the ships which in 1740 sailed, under Vernon, on the expedition to Carta- gena.^ The navy was at this time at its worst. Its spirit was rebellious and self-seeking, its manners were ruffianly, its tradition had fallen into contempt. It was lacking neither in good officers nor in good seamen ; it was capable of notable work — as, for instance, Anson's voyage — of exemplary patience, bold initiative, enduring and desperate hardihood ; most of the qualities which, some sixty years hence, were to make it the saviour of the realm. But in the main, it was brutalised almost beyond report, thought, or belief ; it was horribly ill-found ; it was largely the creation of the press-gang, and so was riddled through and through with * smugglers, pirates, poachers, burglars, highwaymen, and insol- vent debtors ' ; ^ it was officered by a set of men * Chambers conjectures that he was helped into the place by Sir Andrew Mitchell, secretary to the Marquess of Tweed- dale, sometime Minister for Scotland (1742-5), and Minister at the Court of Frederick the Great during the Seven Years War. 2 Hannay, Smollett (1887), p. 33. At this point, being a mere layman, I do but summarise or transcribe from Mr. Hannay's book, which — to those who would know anything of Smollett's originals — of his warrant, that is, for Crampley and Trunnion, for Morgan and Bowling and Mackshane — ^is merely indispensable. See, further, his article in Blackwood for August 1888, called ' Smollett And The Old Sea-Dogs,' wherein are discussed the possibilities of Trunnion and Oakum. Writing in 1887, Mr. Hannay thought that no post-captain could ever have been altogether so bad a brute as Oakum ; 56 SMOLLETT who were part se;amen, part politicians, and part ruffians ; it detested the soldier, and would a thou- sand times rather wrangle with him than render him assistance, or accept assistance at his hands. This was the navy as Smollett knew it — this the The Navy as navy as he saw it at work at Cartagena ; and 'tis ^® ^"^^ ^*- small wonder if his story of it, whether in Roderick i^^w/ stooping shoulders and a heavy gait, an ineradicable streak of sentimentalism, what he himself calls ' the horrors of a diseased nervous system,' and that very practical exultation in the joie de vivre^ once it was known, which, while it is brilliantly expressed in / much published and unpublished verse and prose, is nowhere, perhaps, so na'ively signified as in a pleasant parenthesis addressed, years after Mount Oliphant, to the highly respectable Thomson : — * Nothing (since a Highland wench in the Cowgate once hore me three bastards at a birth) has surprised me more than,' etc. The rest is not to my purpose : which is to argue that, given Robert Burns and the apprenticeship at Mount Oliphant, a violent reaction Inevitable was inevitable, and that one's admiration for him is reaction, largely increased by the reflection that it came no sooner than it did. William Burness knew that it must come ; for, as he lay dying, he confessed that it troubled him to think of Robert's future. This, to be sure, was not at Mount Oliphant : when Robert had done no worse than insist on going to a dancing-school : but years after, at Lochlie, when Robert had begun to assert himself. True it is 134 ROBERT BURNS that at Kirkoswald — a smuggling village, whither he went, at seventeen, to study mensuration, ' dial- ling,' and the like — he had learned, he says, ' to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill and mix with- out fear in a drunken squabble.' True it is, too, that at Lochlie the visible reaction had set in. But, so far as is known, that reaction was merely formal ; and one may safely conjecture that, as boys are not in the habit of telling their fathers everything, William Burness knew little or nothing of those gallant hours at Kirkoswald. For all this, though, he seems to have discerned, however dimly and vaguely, some features of the prodigious creature he had helped into the world ; and that he should not have discerned them till thus late is of itself enough to show how stern and how effectual a discipline Mount Oliphant had proved. II The Mount Oliphant period lasted some twelve years, and was at its hardest for some time ere it reached its term. ' About 1775 my father's gener- ous master died,' ^ says Robert ; and ' to clench the curse we fell into the hands of a factor, who sat for the picture^ I have drawn of one in my tale of ' This was that Fergusson (of Ayr) in whose service William Burness had been at the time of his marriage with Agnes Brown, and (apparently) for some years after it — in fact, till he took on Mount Oliphant. This he did on a hundred pounds borrowed from his old employer ; and one may con- jecture that the legal proceedings which Robert thus resented were entailed upon Fergusson's agents by the work of winding up the estate. 2 ' Sat for the picture I have drawn of one ' is precise and 135 ESSAYS "Twa Dogs." . . . My father's spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in his lease in two years more, and to weather these we retrenched expenses ' — to the pur- pose and with the effect denoted! Then came Easier times, easier times. In 1777 William Burness removed his family to Lochlie, a hundred-and-thirty acre farm, in Tarbolton Parish. 'The nature of the bargain,' Robert wrote to Moore, ' was such as to throw a little ready money in his hand in the com- mencement,' or ' the affair would have been imprac- At Lochlie. ticable.' At this place, he adds, ' for four years we lived comfortably ' ; and at this place his gay and adventurous spirit began to free itself, his admirable talent for talk to find fit opportunities for exercise and display. The reaction set in, as I have said, and he took life as gallantly as his innocency might, wore the only tied hair in the parish, was recognis- able from afar by his fillemot plaid, was made a ' Free and Accepted Mason,' ^ founded a Bachelors' definite enough. But surely the Factor verses in The Twa Dogs are less a picture than a record of proceedings, a note on the genus Factor : — ' He'll stamp and threaten, curse and swear, He'll apprehend them, poind their gear. While they must stand, wi' aspect humble, An' hear it a', and fear and tremble.' The statement is accurate enough, no doubt, but where is the ' picture ' ? Compare the effect of any one of Chaucer's Pil- grims, or the sketches of Caesar and Luath themselves, and the Factor as individual is found utterly wanting. ^ Burns was always an enthusiastic Mason. The Masonic idea — whatever that may be — went home to him ; and in honour of the Craft he wrote some of his poorest verses. One set, the ' Adieu, Adieu,' etc., of the Kilmarnock Volume, was popular outside Scotland. At all events, I have seen a parody in a Belfast chap which is set to the tune of Burns' s Farewell. 136 ROBERT BURNS Clubj^ and took to sweethearting with all his heart and soul and strength. He had begun with a little harvester at fifteen, and at Kirkoswald he had been enamoured of Peggy Thomson to the point of sleep- less nights. Now, says his brother Gilbert, * he was constantly the victim of some fair enslaver ' — some- times of two or three at a time ; and ' the symptoms of his passion were often such as nearly to equal those of the celebrated Sappho,' so that ' the agita- tion of his mind and body exceeded anything I know in real life.' Such, too, was the quality of what he himself was pleased to call ' un penchant a (sic) I'adorable moitie du genre humain,' in com- bination with that ' particular jealousy ' he had * of people that were richer than himself, or who had more consequence in life,' that a plain face was quite as good as a pretty one : especially and particularly if it belonged to a maid of a lower degree than his own. To condescend upon one's women — to some men that is an ideal. It was certainly the ideal of Robert Burns. 'His love,' says Gilbert, * rarely > settled upon persons of this description ' — that is, persons * who were richer than himself, or who had more consequence in life.' He must still be Jove — still stoop from Olympus to the plain. Apparently he held it to be an honour to be admired by him ; and when, a short while hence (1786), he ventured ^ It was, in fact, part drinking-club and part debating-society. But Rule X. of its constitution insisted that every member must have at least one love-affair on hand ; and if potations were generally thin, and debates were often serious, there can be no question that the talk ran on all manner of themes, and especially on that one theme which men have ever found fruitful above all others. The club was so great a success that an offshoot was founded, by desire, on Robert's removal to Mossgiel. 137 ESSAYS to celebrate, in rather too realistic a strain, the Lass of Ballochmyle, and was rebuffed for his imperti- nence — (it was so felt in those unregenerate days!) — he was, 'tis said, extremely mortified. In the meanwhile, his loves, whether pretty or plain, were goddesses all ; and the Sun was ' entering Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my imagination,' the whole year round ; and the wonder is that he got off so little of it all in verse which he thought Love and too good for the fire. Rhyme he did (of course), ^ ^^^' and copiously : as at this stage every coming male must rhyme, who has instinct enough to 'couple love and dove.'* But it was not till the end of the ' Lochlie years that he began rhyming to any purpose. Indeed, the poverty of the Lochlie years is scarce less ' wonderful past all whooping ' than the fecundity of certain memorable months at Mauch- line : especially if it be true, as Gilbert and himself aver, that the Lochlie love-affairs were 'governed by the strictest rules of modesty and virtue, from which he never deviated till his twenty-third year.' ^ ^ Saunders Tait, the Tarbolton poetaster, insists that, long before Mossgiel, Burns and Sillar — ' Davie, a Brother Poet ' — were the most incontinent youngsters in Tarbolton Parish ; and, after asseverating, in terms as solemn as he can make them, that in all Scotland ' There's none like you and Bums can tout The bawdy horn,' goes on to particularise, and declares that, what with ' Moll and Meg, Jean, Sue, and Lizzey, a' decoy't. There's sax wi' egg.' Worse than all, he indites a ' poem,' a certain B — ns in his Infancy, which begins thus : — ' Now I must trace his pedigree. Because he made a song on me, 138 ROBERT BURNS For desire makes verses, and verses rather good than bad, as surely as fruition leaves verses, whether bad or good, unmade. It was natural and honourable in a young man of this lusty and amatorious habit to look round for a wife and to cast about him for a better means of keeping one than farm-service would afford. In respect of the first he found a possibility in Ellison Begbie, a Galston farmer's daughter, at this time a domestic servant, on whom he wrote (they say) his ^ Song of Similes,' and to whom he addressed some rather stately, not to say pedantic, documents in the form of love-letters. For the new line in life, he And let the world look and see. Just wi' my tongue. How he and Clootie did agree When he was young ' : — and of which I shall quote no more. But Robert and his brother are both explicit on this point ; and despite the easy morals of the class in which the Bard sought now and ever ' to crown his flame,' it must be held, I think, as proven, that he was deniaisi by Richard Brown at Irvine and by Betty Paton at Lochlie. * This is the place to say that I owe my quotations from Saunders Tait to Dr. Grosart, who told me of the copy (pro- bably unique) of that worthy's Poems and Songs : ' Printed for and Sold by the Author Only, 1796 ' : in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and at the same time communicated tran- scripts which he had made from such numbers in it as referred to Burns, As my collaborator, Mr. T. F. Henderson, was then in Scotland, I asked him to look up Tait's volume. It was found at last, after a prolonged search ; was duly sent to the Bums Exhibition ; and in a while was pronounced ' a discovery.' Tait, who was pedlar, tailor, soldier in turn, had a ribald and scurrilous tongue, a certain rough cleverness, and a good enough command of the vernacular ; so that his tirades against Burns — (he was one of the very few who dared to attack that satirist) — are still readable, apart from the interest which attaches to their theme. It is a pity that some Burns Club or Burns Society has not reprinted them in full, coarse as they are. 139 ESSAYS Flax- determined that it might, perhaps, be flax-dressing ; resbing. ^^^ ^^ ^-^^ midsummer of 1781 (having just before been sent about his business by, as he might himself have said, ' le doux objet de son attachement ') he removed to Irvine, a little port on the Firth of Clyde, which was also a centre of the industry in which he hoped to excel. Here he established himself, on what terms is not known, with one Peacock, whom he afterwards took occasion to describe as ' a scoundrel of the first water, who made money by the mystery of Thieving ' ; ^ here he saw something more of life and character and the world than he had seen at Mount Oliphant and Lochlie ; here, at the year's end, he had a terrible attack of vapours (it lasted for months, he says, so that he shuddered to recall the time) ; here, above all, he His friend- formed a friendship with a certain Richard Brown. RiSi^d According to him. Brown being the son of a Brown. mechanic, had taken the eye of ' a great man in the neighbourhood,' and had received * a genteel educa- tion, with a view to bettering his situation in life.' His patron had died, however, and he had perforce to go for a sailor (he was afterwards captain of a West-Indiaman). He had known good luck and * Nobody knows what this may mean. It seems to be only Robert's lofty way of saying that Peacock swindled him. What follows is explicit {Letter to Moore) : — ' To finish the whole, while we were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, our shop, by the drunken carelessness of my partner's wife, took fire, and burned to ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth sixpence.' How much is here of fact, how much of resentment, who shall say ? What is worth noting in it all is that Burns, despite his ' penchant k I'adorable,' etc., is first and last a peasant so far as ' I'adorable moiti6 ' is con- cerned, and, for all his sentimentahsm, can face facts about it with all the peasant's shrewdness and with all the peasant's cynicism. 140 ROBERT BURNS bad, he had seen the world, he had the morals of his calling, at the same time that * his mind was fraught with courage, independence, and magnanimity, and every noble, manly virtue ' ; and Burns, who ' loved him,' and ' admired him,' not only * strove to imitate him' but also * in some measure succeeded.' ' I had,' the pupil owns, ' the pride before ' ; but Brown * taught it to flow in proper channels.' Withal, Brown ' was the only man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself when Woman was the presiding star.' Brown, however, was a prac- tical amorist ; and he ' spoke of a certain fashionable failing with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with horror.' In fact, he was Mephisto to Burns's Faust ; ^ and ' here,' says the Bard, ' his friendship did me a mischief, and the consequence was, that soon after I assumed the plough, I wrote the enclosed Welcome.'* This enclosure (to Moore) was that half-humorous, half-defiant, and wholly delightful Welcome to His Love-Begotten Daughter ^^ throuQ^h which the spirit of the true Burns — the Burns of the good years : proud, generous, whole-hearted, essentially natural and humane — thrills from the first line to the last. And * Brown denied it. ' Illicit love ! ' quoth he. ' Levity of a sailor ! When I first knew Bums he had nothing to learn in that respect.' It is a case of word against word ; and I own that I prefer the Bard's. ' ' The same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard child.' Thus Stevenson. But Stevenson, as hath been said, had in him ' Something of the Shorter Catechist ' ; and either he did not see, or he would not recognise, that Burns's rejoicings in the fact of paternity were absolutely sincere throughout his life. 141 / ESSAYS \ we have to recall the all-important fact, that Burns ^ was first and last a peasant/ and first and last a A peasant in peasant in revolt against the Kirk, a peasant resolute to be a buck, to forgive the really scandalous con- trast presented in those versions of the affair — (versions done in the true buckish style : the leer, and the grin and the slang in full blast) — which he has given in The Fornicator^ the Epistle to John Rankine^ and — apparently — the Reply to a Trim- ming Epistle from a Tailor. At the same time we must clearly understand that we recall all this for the sake of our precious selves, and not in any way, nor on any account, for the sake of Burns. He was absolutely of his station and his time ; the poor- living, lewd, grimy, free-spoken, ribald, old Scots peasant-world^ came to a full, brilliant, even majestic close in his work ; and, if we would appreciate aright the environment in which he wrote, and the audience to which such writings were addressed, we must transliterate into the Vernacular Brantome and the Dames Galantes and Tallemant and the Historiettes. As for reading them in Victorian terms — Early- Victorian terms, or Late — that way madness lies ; madness, and a Burns that by no process known to gods or men could ever have existed save in the lubber-land of some Pious Editor's dream. * Here and elsewhere the word is used, not opprobriously, but literally. Bums was specifically a peasant, as Byron was specifically a peer, and as Shakespeare was specifically a man of the burgess class. ' I do not, of course, forget its many solid and admirable virtues ; but its elements were mixed, and it was to the grosser that the Bums of these and other rhymes appealed. 142 ROBERT BURNS At Lochlie, whither he seems to have returned in the March of 1782, the studious years ^ and the old comparative prosperity had come, or were coming, to a close. There had been a quarrel between William Burness and his landlord, one M'Clure, a merchant in Ayr ; and this quarrel, being about money, duly passed into the Courts. Its circumstances are obscure ; but it is history that arbitration went against the tenant of Lochlie, that he was ordered to ' quite possession,' that he was strongly suspected of ' preparing himself accord- ingly by dispossessing of his stock and crops,' and that a certain 'application at present craving' resulted, on shrieval authority, in the * sequestra- tion ' of all the Lochlie stock and plenishing and gear. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair, an end came to it with the end of William The death Burness. By this time his health was broken — he Bumess!"" was far gone in what Robert calls a ' phthisical con- sumption ' ; and he died in the February of the next year (1784), when, as the same Robert romantically puts it in his fine, magniloquent fashion, 'his all went among the rapacious hell- hounds that growl in the Kennel of Justice.' ^ The 1 It was parish gossip that, if you called on WilUam Burness at meal-time, you found the whole family with a book in one hand and a horn spoon in the other. • M'Clure's ' answers ' and ' counter- answers,' together with the sheriff's officer's account of the seizure of Lochhe, were published in The Glasgow Herald early In the present year, (1897). I need scarce say that Saunders Tait produced a Burns at Lochly, in which he fell on his enemy tooth and claw. His statements are as specific as M'Clure's, and are substantially in agreement with some of them, besides : — ' To Lochly ye came like a clerk. And on your back was scarce a sark, 143 ESSAYS fact that Robert and Gilbert were able (Martinmas 1783), when their father's affairs were 'drawing to a crisis,' to secure another farm — Mossgiel — in Mauchline Parish, some two or three miles off The dogs did at your buttocks bark. But now ye're bra', Ye pouch' t the rent, ye was sue stark, Made payment sma\ In another stanza, ' M'Clure,' he says — ' Ye scarcely left a mite To fill his horn, You and the Lawyers gied him a skyte. Sold a' his corn.' In a third he appears to record the particulars of a single combat between Robert and his father's landlord : — * His ain gun at him he did cock. An' never spared, Wi't owre his heid came a clean knock Maist killed the laird.' And in the last of all, after bitterly reproaching Robert and the whole Bums race with ingratitude : — * M'Clure he put you in a farm. And coft you coals your a to warm And meal and maut. . . . He likewise did the mailin stock. And built you bams ' : — he sets forth explicitly this charge : — ' M'Clure's estate has ta'en the fever. And heal again it will be never. The vagabonds, they ca' you clever, Ye're sic a sprite. To rive fra' him baith ga' and liver. And baith the feet.' The fact of the Laird's generosity is reaffirmed with emphasis in A Compliment : — * The horse, corn, pets, kail, kye, and ewes. Cheese, pease, beans, rye, wool, house and flours. Pots, pans, crans, tongs, bran-spits, and skewrs, The milk and barm. Each thing they had was a' M'Clure's, He stock' d the farm. . . . And with the remark that ' Five hundred pounds they were behind,' the undaunted Saunders brings his hbel to a close. 144 ROBERT BURNS Lochlie, is enough to show that neither errors nor crosses, neither sequestrations nor lampoons, had impaired the family credit. Ill William Burness had paid his children wages The farm at during his tenancy of Lochlie ; and the elder four, ^o^^s^^^- by presenting themselves as his creditors for wages due, were enabled to secure a certain amount of ' plenishing and gear ' wherewith to make a start at Mossgiel. It was a family venture, in whose suc- cess the Burnesses were interested all and severally, and to which each one looked for food and clothes and hire (the brothers got a yearly fee of £q apiece); and, as all were well and thoroughly trained in farming work, and had never lived other than sparely, it was reasonable in them to believe that the enterprise would prosper. That it did not i begin by prospering was no fault of Robert's. He '^ made excellent resolutions, and, what was more to Failure and the purpose, he kept them — for a time. He ' read ^ " "^ • farming books ' (thus he displays himself), he * calculated crops,' he ' attended markets ' ; he worked hard in the fields, he kept his body at least in temperance and soberness, and, as for thrift, there f is Gilbert's word for it, that his expenses never exceeded his income of £"] a year. It availed him nothing. Gilbert is said to have been rather a theorist than a sound practician ; and Robert, though a skilled farmer, cared nothing for business, and left him a free hand in the conduct of affairs. Luck, too, was against them from the first ; and K 146 ESSAYS very soon the elder's genius was revealed to him, and he had other than farmer's work to do. 'In spite of the Devil,' he writes, ' the world, and the flesh, I believe I should have been a wise man ; but the first year, from unfortunately buying in bad seed, the second, from a late harvest, we lost half of both our crops.' Naturally, ' this ' (and some other things) * overset all my wisdom, and I returned, " like the dog to his vomit " — (be it remembered, it is Robert Burns who speaks : not I) — " and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire." ' That the confession, with its rather swag- gering allusion to the Armour business, was true, is plain. But we do not need Burns's assurance to know that, though he could do his work, and prided himself on the straightness of his furrows, he was An un- scarce cut out for a successful farmer — except, it farmer!^"^ may be, in certain special conditions. Endurance, patience, diligence, a devout attention to one's own interest and the land's, an indomitable constancy in labour to certain ends and in thought on certain lines — these are some of the qualities which make the husbandman ; and, this being so, how should Mossgiel have prospered under Rab the Ranter? His head was full of other things than crops and cattle. He was bursting with intelligence, ideas, the consciousness of capacity, the desire to take his place among men ; and in Mauchline he found livelier friends ^ and greater opportunities than he ^ As his landlord, the lawyer Gavin Hamilton, to whom he dedicated the Kilmarnock Volume, and the story of whose wrangle with the Mauchline Kirk-Session (see Vol. i. pp. 147- 152, 188, 378-9, etc.) is to some extent that of Burns's assault upon the Kirk (see Vol. ii. Holy Willie's Prayer, pp. 25-30, 146 ROBERT BURNS had found elsewhere. Being a Scot, he was in- stinctively a theologian ; being himself, he was inevitably liberal-minded ; born a peasant of genius, and therefore a natural rebel, he could not 7" choose but quarrel with the Kirk — especially as her hand was heavy on his friends and himself — and it was as a Mauchline man that the best of his anti- clerical work was done.-^ Then, too, he was full of and Notes, pp. 320-324). Another was Robert Aitken, also a lawyer, by whom he was * read into fame,' to whom he dedicated The Cotter's Saturday Night, and whom he celebrated in an Epitaph (Vol. i. p. i88). Yet another was Richmond, the lawyer's clerk, whose room he was afterwards to share in Edinburgh, and who appears to be partly responsible for the preservation of The Jolly Beggars. Again, there was the Bachelors' Club, on the model of that he had founded at Tarbolton, for whose edification, and in explanation of whose function, he appears to have written The Fornicator and The Court of Equity. This last is Burns's idea of what the pro- ceedings of the Kirk-Session ought, in certain cases, to have been. It is capital fun, but something too frank and too particular for latter-day print. 1 He was ever a theological liberal and a theological dis- putant — a champion of Heterodoxy, in however mild a form, whose disputations made him notorious, so that his name was as a stumbling-block and an offence to the Orthodox. For the series of attacks which he delivered against the Kirk — The Holy Fair, the Address to the Deil, The Twa Herds, The Ordination, Holy Willie, The Kirk's Alarm, the Epistles To The Unco Guid and To John Goldie — see Vols. i. and ii. (Text and Notes). There is no record of an appearance on the stool with Paton ; but the circumstances of this his initial difficulty appear to be set forth in the Epistle to Rankine (i. 155) and the Reply to a Trimming Epistle (ii. 96), with the Notes thereto appended. All these read, considered, and digested, what interest remains in Burns's quarrel with the Kirk consists in the fact that, being a person naturally and invincibly opposed to the ' sour-featured Whiggism ' on which the Stuarts had wrecked themselves, Burns was naturally and invincibly a Jacobite. His Jacobitism was, he said, ' by way of vive la bagatelle.' He told Ramsay of Auchtertyre that he owed it to the plundering and unhousing (171 5) of his grandfather, who was gardener to Earl Marischal at Inverurie [sic). But it came to him mainly through Gavin Hamilton (who was Episco- palian by descent) and his own resentment of clerical tyranny. U7 ESSAYS rhymes, and they must out of him : his call had come, and he fell to obeying it with unexampled diligence. More than all, perhaps, he had the temperament of the viveur — the man who rejoices to live his life ; and his appetites had been inten- sified, his gift of appreciation made abnormal (so to say), by a boyhood and an adolescence of singular hardship and quite exceptional continence. It is too late in the world's history to apologise for the primordial instinct ; and to do so at any time were sheer impertinence and unreasoning ingratitude. To apologise in the case of a man who so exulted in its manifestations and results, and who so valiantly, not to say riotously, insisted on the fact of that exultation, as Robert Burns, were also a rank and frank absurdity. On this point he makes doubt impossible. The ' white flower of a blameless life ' was never a buttonhole for him : ^ his utterances, published and unpublished, are there to show that he would have disdained the presumption that it 1 It is true that he wrote thus ' To a Young Friend ' : — ' The sacred lowe o' weel-plac'd love, Luxuriantly indulge it ; But never tempt th' illicit rove, Tho' naething should divulge it : I waive the quantum o' the sin. The hazard of concealing ; But, och ! it hardens a' within. And petrifies the feeling ! ' But there is plenty to show that the writer was a great deal better at preaching than at practice. And he owns as much himself in his own epitaph : — ' Is there a man, whose judgment clear Can others teach the course to steer. Yet runs, himself, life's mad career Wild as the wave ? — Here pause — and, thro' the starting tear, Survey this grave.' 148 ROBERT BURNS ever could have been. And it is from Mauchline, practically, that, his affair with Betty Paton over and done with, and, to anticipate a little, his affair with Jean Armour left hanging in the wind, he starts on his career as amorist at large. And now for a little narrative. In the November Narrative, of 1784 Elizabeth Paton bore him a daughter: * the First Instance,' so he wrote above his Welcome^ ' that entitled him to the Venerable Appellation of Father.' The mother is described as ' very plain- looking,' but of ' an exceedingly handsome figure ' ; * rude and uncultivated to a great degree,' with a * strong masculine understanding, and a thorough, though unwomanly, contempt for any sort of refine- ment ' ; withal, ' so active, honest, and independent a creature ' that Mrs. Burns would have had Robert marry her, but ' both my aunts and Uncle Gilbert opposed it,' in the belief that ' the faults of her character would soon have disgusted him.' There had been no promise on his part ; and though the reporter (his niece, Isabella Begg) has his own sister's warrant — (Mrs. Begg, by the way, was rather what her brother, in a mood of acute fraternal piety, might possibly have called ' a bletherin' b — tch ') — for saying that ' woman never loved man with a more earnest devotion than that poor woman did him,' he in nowise sentimentalised about her. She is identified with none of his songs ; and while there is a pleasant reference to her in the Wel- come : — ' Thy mither's person, grace, and merit ' : — she is recognisably the *paitrick' of the Epistle to 149 ESSAYS Rankine^ she is certainly the heroine of The Forni- cator, she probably does duty in the Reply to a Trimming Epistle, none of which pieces shows the writer's ' penchant a Padorable,' etc., to advantage. No doubt, they were addressed to men. No doubt, too, they were, first and last, satirical impeachments of the Kirk : impeachments tinctured with the peasant's scorn of certain existing circumstances, and done with all the vigour and the furia which one particular peasant — a peasant who could see through shams and was intolerant of them — could with both hands bestow. And that the women did not resent their share in such things is shown by the fact that such things got done. It was ' the tune of the time ' — in the peasant-world at least. Still, as Diderot says somewhere or other : — ' On aime celle a qui on le donne, on est aime de celle a qui on le prend.' And one can't help regretting that there are few or none but derisive references to Betty Paton in her lover's work. IV The Poet's Of Vastly greater importance than his mistresses, ^"^®* at this or any period of his life, is the entity, which, with an odd little touch of Eighteenth Century formality, he loved to call his Muse. That entity was now beginning to take shape and substance as a factor in the sum of the world's happiness ; and the coming of that other entity in whose existence he took so high a pride and so constant a delight — I mean * the Bard ' — was but a matter of time. Burns had been ever a rhymester ; and Burns, who, 150 ROBERT BURNS as Stevenson observed, and as the Notes to these Volumes have shown, ' was always ready to borrow the hint of a design, as though he had some difficulty in commencing,' had begun by borrowing his style, as well as divers hints of designs, from stall-artists and neighbour-cuckoos. But, once emancipated, once a man, once practically assured of the primal concerns of life, once conscious that (after all) he might have the root of the matter in him, the merely local poet begins to waver. and dislimn, and the Burns of Poor Mailie (written at Lochlie) and the Epistle to Davie reigns — intermittently, perhaps, but obviously — in his stead. It is all over with stall-artists and neighbour-cuckoos. Poor Fergus- son's book ^ has fallen in his hands, and (as he says * Robert Fergusson (1750- 1774) was certainly a prime in- fluence in Burns 's poetical life. Nevertheless — or shall I say- consequently ? — he has had less than justice from the most of Burns's Editors. Yet in his way he was so remarkable a creature that there can be no question but in his death, at four-and-twenty, a great loss was inflicted on Scottish litera- ture. He had intelligence and an eye, a right touch of humour, the gifts of invention and observation and style, together with a true feeling for country and city alike ; and his work in the Vernacular (his English verse is rubbish), with its easy expressiveness, its vivid and unshrinking realism, and a merit in the matter of character and situation which makes it — not readable only, but — interesting as art, at the same time that it is valuable as history, is nothing less than memorable : especially in the view of the miserable circum- stances — (the poor lad was a starveling scrivener, and died, partly of drink, in the public madhouse) — in which it was done. Burns, who learned much from Fergusson, was an enthusiast in his regard for him ; bared his head and shed tears over ' the green mound and the scattered gowans ' under which he found his exemplar lying in Canongate Churchyard ; got leave from the managers to put up a headstone at his own cost there, and wrote an epitaph to be inscribed upon it, one line of which — ' No storied urn nor animated bust,' is somehow to be read in Gray's Elegy in a Country Church- yard. Fergusson was as essentially an Edinburgh product — 151 ESSAYS The influence of Fergusson. English and the Vernacular. in his ridiculous way) has ' caused him to string anew his wildly-sounding rustic lyre with emulating vigour.' At last the hour of the Vernacular Muse has come ; and he is hip to haunch with such adepts in her mystery as the Sempills, and Hamilton of Gilbertfield, and Allan Ramsay, and Robert Fergus- son, and the innominates whose verses, decent or not, have lived in his ear since childhood ; catching their tone and their sentiment ; mastering their rhythms ; copying their methods ; considering their effects in the one true language of his mind.^ He could write deliberate English, and, when he wanted to be not so much sincere as impressive and ' fine,' he wrote English deliberately, as the worse and weaker part of his achievement remains to prove. He could even write English, as Jourdain talked prose, 'without knowing it' — as we know from Scots Wha Hae. He read Pope, Shenstone, Beattie, Goldsmith, Gray, and the rest, with so much enthusiasm that one learned Editor has made an interesting little list of pilferings from the works of these distinguished beings. But, so far as I can see, he might have lived and died an English writing Scot, and nobody been a thrill or a memory (the old Scots capital : gay, squalid, drunken, dirty, lettered, venerable : lives in his verses much as Burns knew it twelve years after his death) — as the late R. L. S. himself ; and, while I write, old memories come back to me of the admiring terms : terms half-playful, half-afEectionate : in which the later artist was wont to speak of his all but forgotten ancestor. 1 1 do not forget that Dugald Stewart noted the correctness of his speech and the success -with which he avoided the use of Scotticisms. But in his day Scots was, not an accent but, a living tongue ; and he certainly could not have talked at Mauchhne and at Dumfries as he did in a more or less polite and Anglified Edinburgh. 162 ROBERT BURNS the better for his work. It is true that much of the Saturday Night and the Vision and the Moun- tain Daisy is written in English ; ^ but one may take leave to wonder if these pieces, with so much else of Burns' s own, would have escaped the 'iniquity of Oblivion,' had they not chanced, to their good fortune, to be companioned with Halloween^ and Holy Willie^ and The Farmer to His Auld Mare^ and a score of masterpieces besides, in which the Vernacular is carried to the highest level — in the matter of force and fire, and brilliancy of diction, and finality of effect, to name but these — it has ever reached in verse.^ Let this be as it may : ^ He contrives a compromise, to admirable purpose, too, in Tarn o' Shanter : which is written partly in English and partly in the Vernacular. But (i) Tarn o' Shanter is in a rhythmus classical in Scotland since the time of Barbour's Bruce ; (2) the English parts of Tain o' Shanter are of no particular merit as poetry — that is, ' the only words in the only order ' ; and (3) the best of Tarn o' Shanter is in the Vernacular alone. Contrast, for instance, the diabolical fire and move- ment and energy of these lines : — ' They reeled, they set, they cross 'd, they cleekit. Till ilka carlin swat and reekit. And coost her duddies to the wark. And linket at it in her sark ' : — with another famous — perhaps too famous — passage : — * But pleasures are like poppies spread : You seize the flower, its bloom is shed,' etc. In the second the result is merely Hudibrastic. In the first the suggestion — of mingled fury and stink and motion and heat and immitigable ardour — could only have been conveyed by the Vernacular Bums. * It was Wordsworth's misfortune that, being in revolt against Augustan ideals and a worn-out poetic slang, he fell in with Burns, and sought to make himself out of common English just such a vocabulary as Burns 's own. For he forgot that the Vernacular, in which his exemplar achieved such surprising and delectable results, had been a literary language for centuries when Bums began to work in it — that Bums, in fact, was handling with consummate skill a 153 ESSAYS there can be no question that when Burns wrote English he wrote what, on his own confession, was A foreign practically a foreign tongue — a tongue in which he, ongue. ^^ more than Fergusson or Ramsay, could express himself to any sufficing purpose ; but that, when he used the dialect which he had babbled in baby- hood, and spoken as boy and youth and man — the tongue, too, in which the chief exemplars and the ruling influences of his poetical life had wrought — he at once revealed himself for its greatest master since Dunbar.^ More, much more, than that : his tool whose capacity had been long since proved by Ramsay and Fergusson and the greater men who went before them ; and, having no models to copy, and no verbal inspiration but his own to keep him straight, he came to immortal grief, not once but many times. It is pretended, too, that in the matter of style Burns had a strong influence on Byron. But had he ? Byron praises Burns, of course ; but is there ever a trace of Burns the lyrist in the Byron songs ? Again, the Byron of Childe Harold and the tales was as it were a Babel in himself, and wrote Scott plus Coleridge plus Moore plus Beattie and Pope and the Augustan Age at large ; while the Byron of Beppo and the Vision and Don Juan approves him- self the master of a style of such infernal brilliancy and variety, of such a capacity for ranging heaven-high and hell- deep, that it cannot without absurdity be referred to anything except the fact that he also was a born great writer. ^ For that is what it comes to in the end. He may seem to have little to do with Catholic and Feudal Scotland, and as little with the Scotland of the Early Reformation and the First Covenant. Also, it is now impossible to say if he knew any more of Scott and Dunbar and the older makers (Davie Lindsay and Barbour excepted) than he found in The Ever Green, which Ramsay garbled out of The Bannatyne MS.. if he were read in Pinkerton (1786), or if he got much more out of Gawain Douglas than the verse which serves as a motto to Tarn 0' Shanter : though a letter to Cleghorn shows that he certainly possessed a copy of that poet before 1796. The Scotland he represents, and of which his verses are the mirror, is the Scotland out of which the ' wild Whigs ' crushed the taste for everything but fornication and theology and such expressions of derision and revolt ais Jenny M'Craw and Errock Brae : the Scotland whose literary beginnings 154 ROBERT BURNS bearings once found, he marked his use of it by the discovery of a quantity hitherto unknown in litera- ture. Himself, to wit : the amazing compound of style and sentiment with gaiety and sympathy, of wit and tenderness with radiant humour and an admirable sense of art, which is Robert Burns. He could write ill, and was capable of fustian. His fustian. But, excepting in his * Epigrams ' and ' Epitaphs ' and in his imitations of poets whose methods he did not understand, he was nearly always a great writer, and he was generally (to say the least) incapable of fustian in the Vernacular. In essaying the effects of Pope and Shenstone and those other unfamiliars, he was like a man with a personal hand set to imitate a writing-master's copy : he made as good a shot as he could at it, but there was none of himself in the result. It was otherguess work when he took on the methods and the styles in which his countrymen had approved themselves : these he could compass so well that he could far surpass his exemplars technically, and could adequately express the individual Burns besides. The Death and The Dying Words of Foot Matlie (written at Lochlie, ^^^^^J^^"^^ and therefore very early work) trace back to Gilbert- field's Bonnie Heck ; but the older piece is realistic in purpose and brutal in effect, while in the later — date, you'd fancy, not from Henryson, not from Dunbar and Douglas and the Lyon King-at-Arms, but from Sempill of Beltrees and the men who figure in the three issues of Watson's Choice Collection. But Ramsay and his fellows were a revival — not a new birth. The Vernacular School is one and indivisible. There are breaks in the effect ; but the tradition remains unbroken. And Burns, for all his com- parative modernity, descends directly from, and is, in fact, the last of that noble line which begins with Robert Henryson. 155 ESSAYS to say nothing of the farce in Hughoc — the whole philosophy of life of a decent mother-ewe is imagined with delightflil humour, and set forth in terms so kindly in spirit and so apt in style, that the Death and Dying Words is counted one of the imperishables in English letters. Contrast, again, The Elegy, the Elegy ^ written some time after the Death and Dying Words, on this immortal beast, with its exemplars in Watson and Ramsay : — * He was right nacky in his way, An' eydent baith be night and day ; He wi' the lads his part could play When right sair fleed, He gart them good bull-sillar pay ; But now he 's dead. . . .' * Wha '11 jow Ale on my drouthy Tongue, To cool the heat of Lights and Lung ? Wha '11 bid me, when the Kaile-bell's rung, To Buird me speed ? . . . Wha '11 set me by the Barrel-bung ? Since Sanny's dead ? . . .' ' He was good Company at Jeists, And wanton when he came to Feasts ; He scorn'd the Converse of great Beasts [F]or a Sheep's-head ; He leugh at Stories about Ghaists — Blyth Willie's dead ' :— and you shall find the difference still more glaring. Cleverness apart — cleverness and the touch of lire, the element of realism — the Laments for Hab Simson and Sanny Briggs, for John Cowper and Luckie Wood and the Writer Lithgow,^ are merely * All five, together with Ramsay's on Luckie Spence (an Edinburgh bawd) and Last Words of a Wretched Miser, 156 ROBERT BURNS squalid and cynical ; while in every line the Elegy ^ in despite of realism and the humorous tone and intent (essential to the models and therefore in- evitable in the copy) is the work of a writer of genius, who is also a generous human being. ^ Very early work, again, are Corn Rigs and Green Grow the Rashes ; in suggestion, inspiration, technical quality, both are unalterably Scots ; and in both the effect of mastery and completeness is of those that defy the touch of Time. To compare these two and any two of Burns's songs in English, Scots and or pseudo-English, is to realise that the poet of these ^^^lish. two should never have ventured outside the pale of his supremacy. English had ten thousand secrets which he knew not, nor could ever have known, except imperfectly ; for he recked not of those innumerable traditions, associations, connotations, surprises, as it were ambitions, which make up the romantic and the literary life of words — even as he should be read for the sake of their likeness, and at the same time their unlikeness, to not a little in Bums, and in illustra- tion of the truth that the Vernacular tradition was one of humorous, and even brutal realism. I have cited R. L. S. in connection with Fergusson. He had a far higher esteem for that maker than he had for that maker's ancestor, Allan Ramsay. Yet he quoted to me one day a stanza from the John Cowper, a certain phrase in which — a phrase obscenely significant of death — was, we presently agreed, as good an example of ' the Squalid-Picturesque ' as could be found out of Villon. ^ His suppression of such an old-fashioned touch in the first draft as this one : — ' Now Robin greetan chows the hams Of Mailie dead ' : — is significant. It is quite in the vein of Bonnie Heck, as indeed are the first four stanzas. But it would have ruined the Elegy as the world has known it since 1786. 157 ESSAYS was penetrated and possessed by the sense of any such elements as may have existed in the Vernacular. Thus, if he read Milton, it was largely, if not wholly, with a view to getting himself up as a kind of Tarbolton Satan. He was careless, so I must contend, of Shakespeare. With such knowledge as he could glean from song-books, he was altogether out of touch with the Elizabethans and the Caro- lines. Outside the Vernacular, in fact, he was a rather unlettered Eighteenth Century Englishman, and the models which he must naturally prefer before all others were academic, stilted, artificial, and unexemplary to the highest point. It may be that / I read the verse of Burns, and all Scots verse, with something of that feeling of * preciousness ' which everybody has, I take it, in reading a language, or a dialect, not his own : the feeling which blinds one to certain sorts of defect, and gives one an uncritical capacity for appreciating certain sorts of merit. However this be, I can certainly read my mother- tongue ; and most Englishmen — with, I should imagine, many Scots — will agree with me in the wish that Burns, for all the brilliant compromise between Scots and English which is devised and done in Tarn o' Shanter and elsewhere, had never pretended to a mastery which assuredly he had not, nor in his conditions ever could have had. I have stressed this point because I wish to stress another, and with a view to making clear, and to setting in its proper perspective, the fact that, genius A natural apart, Burns was, no miracle but, a natural develop- deveiopment. Ynent of circumstance and time. The fact is patent enough to all but them that, for a superstition's 158 ROBERT BURNS sake, insist on ignoring history, and decline to recognise the unchanging processes of natural and social Law. Without the achievement of iEschylus, there can be no such perfection as Sophocles : just as, that perfection achieved, the decline of Tragedy, as in Euripides, is but a matter of time. But for the Middle Ages and the reaction against the Middle Ages there could have been no Ronsard, no Rabelais, no Montaigne in France. Had there been no Surrey and no Marlowe, no Chaucer and no Ovid (to name no more than these in a hundred influences), who shall take on himself to say the shape in which we now should be privi- leged to regard the greatest artist that ever expressed himself in speech.^ It is in all depart- ments of human energy as in the eternal round of nature. There can be no birth where there is no preparation. The sower must take his seedsheet, and go afield into ground prepared for his ministra- tions ; or there can be no harvest. The Poet springs from a compost of ideals and experiences and achievements, whose essences he absorbs and assimilates, and in whose absence he could not be the Poet. This is especially true of Burns. He was the last of a school. It culminated in him. The last of because he had more genius, and genius of a finer, ^ ^^^°^^- a rarer, and a more generous quality, than all his immediate ancestors put together. But he cannot fairly be said to have contributed anything to it except himself. He invented none of its forms ; its spirit was not of his originating ; its ideals and standards of perfection were discovered, and partly realised, by other men ; and he had a certain 159 ESSAYS timidity, as it were a faineantise, in conception — a kind of unreadiness in initiative — which makes him more largely dependent upon his exemplars than His debt any great poet has ever been. Not only does he take whatever the Vernacular School can give in such matters as tone, sentiment, method, diction, phrase ; but also, he is content to run in debt to it for suggestions as regards ideas and for models in style. Hamilton of Gilbertfield and Allan Ramsay conventionalise the Rhymed Epistle ; and he accepts the convention as it left their hands, and produces epistles in rhyme which are glorified Hamilton- Ramsay. Fergusson writes Caller Water, and Leith Races, and The Farmers Ingle, and Plane- stanes and Causey, and the Ode to the Gowdspink ; and he follows suit with Scotch Drink, and the Saturday Night, and The Holy Fair, and The Brigs of Ayr, and the Mouse and the Mountain Daisy. Sempill of Beltrees starts a tradition with The Piper of Kilbarchan ; and his effect is plain in the elegies on Tam Samson and Poor Mailie. Ramsay sees a Vision, and tinkers old, indecent songs, and writes comic tales in glib octo-syllabics ; and instinctively and naturally Burns does all three. It is as though His need of some touch of rivalry were needed to put him on rivalry. j^-^ j^g^^-jg . i ^g though, instead of writing and * It was with ' emulating vigour ' that he strung his ' wildly- sounding rustic lyre ' ; and he read Ramsay and Fergusson not for ' servile imitation ' but ' to kindle at their flame.' Another instance, or rather another suggestion, from himself, and I have done. It ' exalted,' it ' enraptured ' him * to walk in the sheltered side of a wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy winter day,' and hear the wind roaring in the trees. Then was his ' best season for devotion,' for then was his mind ' rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him who ..." walks on the wings of the wind." ' The ' rapture ' and the ' exaltation ' are 160 ROBERT BURNS caring for himself alone — (as Keats and Byron did, and Shelley ; new men all, and founders of dynasties, not final expressions of sovranty) — to be k=^ himself he must still be em ^ilons of some one Hsf ~~ THis~inToFwntten as a reproach ; it is stated as a fact. On the strength of that fact one cannot choose but abate the old, fantastic estimate of Burns's originality. But originality (to which, by the way, he laid no claim) is but one element in the intricately formed and subtly ordered plexus, which is called genius ; and I do not know that we need think any the less of Burns for that it is not pre- i- — dominant in him. Original or not, he had the Vernacular and its methods at his fingers' ends. Master of the He wrote the heroic couplet (on the Dryden-Pope Vernacular, convention) clumsily, and without the faintest idea of what it had been in Marlowe's hands, without the dimmest foreshadowing of what it was presently to be in Keats's ; he had no skill in what is called ' blank verse ' — by which 1 mean the metre in which Shakespeare triumphed, and Milton after Shake- speare, and Thomson and Cowper, each according to his lights, after Shakespeare and Milton ; he was a kind of hob-nailed Gray in his use of choric strophes and in his apprehension of the ode. But he entered into the possession of such artful and difficult stanzas as that of Montgomerie's Banks of Helicon and his own favourite sextain as an heir upon the ownership of an estate which he has known in all its details since he could know anything. It but dimly and vaguely reflected in his Winter. But if some ancestor had tried to express a kindred feeling, then had Winter been a masterpiece. L 161 ESSAYS was fortunate for him and for his book, as it was fortunate for the world at large — as, too, it was afterwards to be fortunate for Scots song — that he was thus imitative in kind and thus traditional in practice. He had the sole ear of the Vernacular Muse ; there was not a tool in her budget of which he was not master ; and he took his place, the moment he moved for it, not so much, perhaps, by- reason of his uncommon capacity ^ as, because he discovered himself to his public in the very terms — of diction, form, style, sentiment even — with which that public was familiar from of old, and in which it was waiting and longing to be addressed. It was at Mossgiel that the enormous possibilities in Burns were revealed to Burns himself ; and it was at Mossgiel that he did nearly all his best and strongest work. The revelation once made, he stayed not in his course, but wrote masterpiece after masterpiece, with a rapidity, an assurance, a com- mand of means, a brilliancy of effect, which make his achievement one of the most remarkable in English letters. To them that can rejoice in the His titles. Vernacular his very titles are enough to recall a little special world of variety and character and delight : the world, in fact, where you can take your choice among lyrical gems like Corn Rigs and Green Grow * In the same way Byron sold four or five editions of the English Bards, because it was written on a convention which was as old as Bishop Hall, and had been used by every satirist from the time of that master down to Mathias and Gifford. If he had cast his libellus into the octaves of Don Juan, the strong presumption is that it would have fallen still-bom from the press. Other cases in point are Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Browning : the manner of each was new, and not all have reached the general yet. 162 ROBERT BURNS the Rashes and Mary Morison and masterpieces of satire like Holy Willie and the Address to the Unco Guid. To this time belong The Jolly Beggars and Halloween and The Holy Fair ; to this time the Louse and the Mouse, the Juld Mare and the Twa Dogs ; to this time, Scotch Drink and the Address to the Deil, the Earnest Cry and the Mountain Daisy y the Epistles to Smith and Rankine and Sillar and Lapraik, the Elegies on Tam Samson and the never-to-be-forgotten Mailie, the Reply to a Tailor and the Welcome and the Saturday 'Night, In some, as The Ordination^ The Holy Tulyie^ and, despite an unrivalled and inimitable picture of drunkenness. Hornbook itself, with others in a greater or less degree, the interest, once you have appreciated the technical quality as it deserves, is very largely local and particular.^ In others, as the Saturday Night and The Vision (after the first stanzas of description), it is also very largely senti- mental ; and in both these it is further vitiated by the writer's ' falling to his English,' to a purpose not exhilarating to the student of Shakespeare and Milton and Herrick. But all this notwithstanding, and notwithstanding quite a little crowd of careless rhymes, the level of excellenc^jsonethatjionebut The level of the born greatwTitejLcan_mai^^ excellence. ^ There is a sense in which the most are local — are paro- chial even. In Holy Willie itself the type is not merely the Scots Calvinistic pharisee : it is a particular expression of that type ; the thing is a local satire introducing the ' kail and potatoes ' of a local scandal. Take, too, The Holy Fair : the circumstances, the manners, the characters, the experience — all are local. Apply the test to almost any — not forgetting the Tam o' Shanter which is the top of Bums's achievement — and the result is the same. 163 ESSAYS variable, expressive, packed with observations and ideas, the phrases^o ringing and glittering on through verse after verse, through stave after stave, through poenrafter~poem, in a way that makes the reading ofjhispeasant a peculiar pleasure for the ^ stud ent of'styleT ^ And if, with an eye for words and effects in words, that student have also the faculty of daughter, then are his admiration and his Humour his pleasure multiplied ten-fold. For the master- qiTaiity. quality of Burns, the quality which has gone, and will ever go, the furthest to make him universally and perennially acceptable — acceptable in Mel- bourne (say) a hundred years hence as in Mauchline ^ a hundred years syne — j^ humour . His sentiment * It is not, remember, for * the love of lovely words,' not for such perfections of human utterance as abound in Shake- speare : — ' Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy ' : — in Milton : — * Now to the moon in wavering morrice move ' : — in Keats : — * And hides the green hill in an April shroud ' : — in Herrick : — * Ye have been fresh and green. Ye have been filled with flowers, And ye the walks have been Where maids have spent their hours ' : — that we revert to Bums. FeUcities he has — fehcities in- numerable ; but his forebears set themselves to be humorous, racy, natural, and he could not choose but follow their lead. The Colloquial triumphs in his verse as nowhere outside the Vision and Don Juan ; but for Beauty we must go else- whither. He has all manner of qualities : wit, fancy, vision of a kind, nature, gaiety, the richest humour, a sort of home- spun verbal magic. But, if we be in quest of Beauty, we must e'en ignore him, and ' fall to our English ' : of whose secrets, as I have said, he never so much as suspected the existence, and whose supreme capacities were sealed from him until the end. 164 ROBERT BURNS is sometimes strained, obvious, and deliberate — as might be expected of the poet who foundered two pocket-copies of that very silly and disgusting book. The Man of Feeling ; and it often rings a little false, as in much of the Saturday Night. But h is humour — broad, rich, prevailing, now lascivious or gargantuan and now fanciful or jocose, now satirical and brutal and now instinct with sympathy, is ever irresistible. Holy Willie is much more vigorously alive in London, and Sydney, and Cape Town to-day than poor drunken old Will Fisher was in the Mauchline of 1785. That * pagan full of pride,' the vigilant, tricksy, truculent, familiar, true-blue Devil lives ever in Burns's part pitying and fanciful, part humorous and controversial pre- sentment ; but he has long since faded out of his strongholds in the Kirk : — * But fare-ye-weel, Auld Nickie-Ben, O, wad ye tak' a thocht, an' men', Ye aiblins micht — I dinna ken — Still hae a stake ! I'm wae to think upon yon den, Ev'n for your sake.' Lockhart, ever the true Son of the Manse, was so misguided — so mansified, to coin a word — as to wish that Burns had written a Holy Fair in the spirit and to the purpose of The Cotter^s Saturday Night, But the bright, distinguishing qualities of The Holy Fair are humour and experience and sincerity ; the intent of the Saturday Night is idyllic and sentimental, as its effect is laboured and unreal ; and I, for my part, would not give my Holy Fair, still less my Halloween or my Jolly 165 ESSAYS Beggars — observed, selected, excellently reported The Cotter's — for a wilderness of Saturday Nights, It is not Night.^^ hard to understand that (given the prestance of its author) the Saturday Night was doomed to popu- larity from the first : ^ being of its ess ^p^^^ cpn^i'- men tal and therefore pleasin gl y untru e> and being, also^f its essence, patriotic — an assertion of the honour and the glory and the piety of Scotland. But that any one with an eye for fact and an ear for verse should prefer its tenuity of inspiration and its poverty of rhythm and diction before the ^ sincere and abounding humour and the notable mastery of means, before the plenitude of life and th e, complete accord of design and effe ct^bv which Halloween, and The Holy Fair, and nine-tenths of the early pieces in the Vernacular are distinguished, appears inexplicable. In jhese Burns is a n a rtist an d a poet : in the Saturday Night he is neither one nor other. Tarn o' In these, and 'wTTam o' Shanter, the Scots School s anter. culminates ; as English Drama, with lyrical and elegiac English, culminates in Othello and the Sonnets, in Antony and Cleopatra, and the Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece : more gloriously far than the world would ever have wagered on its begin- nings. It is the most individual asset in the heritage bequeathed by ' the Bard ' ; and still more, ^ And such popularity ! ' Poosie Nansie's ' — (thus writes a friend, even as these sheets are passing through the press) — ' or rather a house on the site of Poosie Nansie's, is, as you know,, still a tavern. There is a large room (for parties) at the back. And what, think you, is the poem that, printed and framed and glazed, is hung in the place of honour on its walls ? " The Jolly Beggars — naturally ? " Not a bit of it. The Cotter's Saturday Night ! Surrounded, too, by engravings depicting its choicest moments and its most affecting scenes.* 166 ROBERT BURNS perhaps,^ than the Songs, it stamps arid keeps him the National Poet. The world it pictures — the world of ' Scotch morals, Scotch Religion, and Scotch drink ' — may be ugly or not (as refracted through his temperament it is not). Ugly or not, however, it was the world of Burns ; t o paint it w as part_ofhismission ; it lives for us in his pictures ; and many such Attempts at reconstruction as The Earthly Paradise and The Idylls of the King will ' fade far away, dissolve,' and be quite forgotten, ere these pictures disfeature or dislimn. He had i he good sens eJOXOnr^^*" himsflf wifh theWfe he ktipw The wa y'ofrealism ^ lay broad-beaten by h is an- * I say, ' perhaps,' because Burns, among the general at least, is better sung than read. But if the Songs, his own and those which are effects of a collaboration, be the more national, the Poems are the greater, and it is chiefly to the Poems that Bums is indebted for his place in literature. * It is claimed for him, with perfect truth, that he went straight to nature. But the Vernacular makers seldom did anything else. An intense and abiding consciousness of the common circumstances of life was ever the distinguishing note of Scots Poetry. It thrills through Henryson, through Dunbar and the Douglas of certain ' Prolougs ' to Eneados, through Lindsay and Scott, through the nameless lyrist of Peeblis at the Play and Christ's Kirk on the Green, through much of The Bannatyne MS., the Sempill of the Tulchene Bischope, the Montgomerie of the Flyting with Polwarth and of certain sonnets : — ' Raw reid herring reiatit in the reik.' It is even audible in the Guid and Godlie Ballats ; and after the silence it is heard anew in the verse which was made despite the Kirk, and in the verse which proceeded from that verse — tie verse, that is, of Ramsay and Fergusson and Bums. This vivid and curious interest in facts is, as I think, a char- acteristic of the ' perfervid ingyne.' Compare, for instance, Pitscottie and Knox on the murder of Cardinal Beaton. The one is something naive, the other as it were Shakespearean ; but in both the element of particularity is vital to the complete effect. These are two instances only ; but I could 167 ESSAYS cestorsj and j was natural to his f eet ; he followed it wTtE~vision5 with humour, with * inspiration and sympathy,' and with art ; and in the sequel he is found to have a place of his own in the first flight of English poets after M iltqn^Chaucer, Shakespeare. His loves. I TAKE it that Bums was not more multifarious in his loves than most others in whom the primordial instinct is of peculiar strength. But it was written that English literature — the literature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fielding — should be turned into a kind of schoolgirls' playground ; so that careful Editors have done their best to make him even as themselves, and to fit him with a sui| of practical and literary morals, which, if his own verse and prose mean anything, he would have refused, with easily give two hundred. To return to Bums and his treatment of weather (say) and landscape. His verse is full of realities : — ' When lyart leaves bestrow the yird, Or, wavering like the bauckie-bird, Bedim cauld Boreas' blast ; When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte. . . .' ' The burn stealing under the lang, yellow broom. . . .' ' When, tumbUng brown, the bum comes down. . . .' ' The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed. . . .' ' Yon murky cloud is foul with rain. . . .' ' November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh ' : — all exactly noted and vividly recorded (a very instructive instance is the ' bumie ' stanza in Halloween ; for he had, they say, a peculiar dehght in running water). But for great, imaginative impressions : — ' Those green-robed senators of mighty woods. Tall oaks branch-charmM by the earnest stars ' : — you turn to other books than his. 168 ROBERT BURNS all the contumely of which his ' Carrick lips ' were capable, to wear. Nothing has exercised their ingenuity, their talent for chronology, their capacity for invention (even), so vigorously as the task of squaring their theory of Burns with the story of his marriage and the legend of his Highland Lassie. Now is the moment to deal with both. Elizabeth Paton's child was born in the November of 1784. In the April of that year, a few weeks after the general settlement at Mossgiel, he made the acquaintance of Armour the mason's jean daughter, Jean. She was a handsome, lively girl ; -^"^o"'"- the acquaintance ripened into love on both sides ; and in the end, after what dates approve a prolonged and serious courtship, Armour fell with child. Her condition being discovered. Burns, after some strong revulsions of reeling against — not Jean, I hope, but — the estate of marriage, gave her what he presently had every reason to call ' an unlucky paper,' recog- nising her as his wife ; and, had things been allowed to drift in the usual way, the world had lacked an unforgotten scandal, and a great deal of silly writing. This, though, was not to be. Old Armour — (* a bit mason body, who used to snufF a guid deal, and gey af 'en tak' a bit dram ') — is said to have * hated ' Burns : so that he would * reyther hae seen the Deil himsel' comin' to the hoose to coort his dochter than him.' Thus a contemporary of both Armour and Burns ; and in any case Armour knew Burns for a needy and reckless man, the father of one by-blow, a rebel at odds with the Orthodox, of whom, in existing circumstances, it would be vain to ask a comfortable living. So he first obliged Jean to 169 ESSAYS give up the ' unlucky paper,' with a view to un- making any engagement it might confirm,^ and then sent her to Paisley, to be out of her lover's way. In the meanwhile Burns himself was in straits, and had half-a-dozen designs in hand at once. Moss- giel was a failure ; he had resolved to deport himself to the West Indies ; he had made up his mind to print, and the Kilmarnock Edition was setting, when Jean was sent into exile. Worst of all, he seems to have been not very sure whether he loved or not. When he knew that he and she had not eluded the Inevitable, he wrote to James Smith that ' against two things — staying at home and owning her conjugally ' — he was ' fixed as fate.' * The first,' he says, ' by heaven I will not do ! ' Then, A burst of in a burst of Don-Juanism — Don-Juanism of the juanism. ^^^^ ^^^^ protests too much to be real — * the last, by hell I will never do.' Follows a gush of sentimen- talism (to Smith), which is part nerves and part an attempt — as the run on the ^'s and the w's shows — at literature : — ' A good God bless you, and make you happy, up to the warmest weeping wish of parting friendship.' And this is succeeded by a message to the poor, pregnant creature, of whom, but two lines before, he has sworn ' by hell ' that he will never make her honest : — * If you see Jean, tell 1 1 take it that the paper was ' unlucky,' because it became a weapon in old Armour's hands, and wais the means of in- flicting on the writer the worst and the most painful experience of his life. At the same time there seems to be no doubt that it made Jean Mrs. Burns, so that, consciously or not, Auld (who probably had a strong objection to the marriage) was guilty of an illegal act in certifying Burns a bachelor. Bums, in fact, was completely justified in his anger with the Kirk and in the scorn with which he visited the tyranny of her ministers. 170 ROBERT BURNS her I will meet her, so help me God in my hour of need.' This scrap is undated, but it must have been written before 17th February 1786, when he wrote thus to Richmond : — ' I am extremely happy with Smith ; he is the only friend I have now in Mauchline.' Well, he does meet Jean ; and, his better nature getting the upper hand, the * unlucky paper' is written. Then on the 20th March he writes thus to Muir: — 'I intend to have a gill between us or a mutchkin stoup,' for the reason that it 'will be a great comfort and consolation^ : — which seems to show that Jean had repudiated him some time between the two letters. Before the 2nd April, on which day the Kirk-Session takes cognisance of the matter, Jean has gone to Paisley ; The deserter the * unlucky paper ' is cancelled (apparently about deserted, the 14th April, the names were cut out with a pen- knife) ; so that Don Juan finds himself plante-la, and being not really Don Juan — (as what sentimen- talist could be .'') — he does not affect Don Juan any more. The prey has turned upon the hunter ; the deserter becomes the deserted, the privilege of repudiation, ' by hell ' or otherwise, has passed to the other side. The man's pride, inordinate for a peasant, is cut to the quick ; and his unrivalled capacity for * battering himself into an affection ' or a mood has a really notable opportunity for display. In love before, he is ten times more in love than ever ; he feels his loss to desperation ; he becomes the disappointed lover — even the true-souled, generous adoring victim of a jilt: — * A jillet brak his heart at last That's owre the sea.' 171 ESSAYS In effect, his position was sufficiently distracting. He had made oath that he would not marry Jean ; then he had practically married her ; then he found that nobody wanted her married to him — that, on the contrary, he was the most absolute ' detrimental ' in all Ayrshire ; when, of course, the marriage became the one thing that made his life worth living. He tried to persuade old Armour to think better of his resolve ; and, failing, ran ' nine parts and nine tenths out of ten stark staring mad.' Also he The wrote the Lament^ in which he told his sorrows to Lament, ^j^^ moon ^ (duly addressing that satellite as ' O thou pale Orb'), and took her publicly into his con- fidence, in the beautiful language of Eighteenth Century English Poetry, and painted what is in the circumstances a really creditable picture of the effects upon a simple Bard of 'a faithless woman's andDe- broken vow.' Further he produced Despondency spondency. \^ ^.j^g Same elegant lingo ; and, in Despondency^ having called for ' the closing tomb,' and pleasingly praised ' the Solitary's lot,' — * Who, all-forgetting, all-forgot Within his humble cell — The cavern, wild with tangling roots — Sits o'er his newly gathered fruits. Beside his crystal well ! ' etc. — he addressed himself to Youth and Infancy in these affecting terms : — * O enviable early days, When dancing thoughtless Pleasure's maze, To care, to guilt unknown I * Is it worth noting that, later, when he comes to sing of Mary Campbell, his confidant is no longer the Moon but the Morning Star ? 172 ROBERT BURNS How ill exchang'd for riper times, To feel the follies or the crimes Of others, or my own ! Ye tiny elves that guiltless sport, Like linnets in the bush, Ye Httle know the ills ye court. When manhood is your wish ! The losses, the crosses That active man engage ; The fears all, the tears all Of dim dechning Age ! ' ^ Moreover, he took occasion to refer to Jean (to David Brice ; I2th June 1786) as * poor, ill-advised, ungrateful Armour ' ; vowed that he could ' have ' Ungrateful no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment ' Armour.' than 'what I have felt in my own breast on her account' ; and finally confessed himself to this purpose : — ' I have often tried to forget her : I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riot ... to drive her out of my head, but all in vain.' Long before this, however — as early, it would seem, as some time in March — his * maddening passions, * I cannot attach any great importance to these exercises in Poetic English. Bums wrote to a very different purpose when he wrote from his heart and in his native tongue : — ' Had we never loved sae kindly . . .' ' Of a' the airts the wind can blaw I dearly like the west ' : — and so on, and so on. Still, there can be no doubt that they mean something. At any rate they are designed to be im- pressive and ' fine ' ; and probably the Bard believed in them to the extent to which he was satisfied with his achievement in what must certainly have seemed to him real poetry. None of your Vernacular (that is), but downright, sohd unmistakable Eng- lish Verse : verse which might stand beside the works of Beattie and Shenstone and Thomson and the ' elegantly melting Gray.' That life departed them long since is plain. But it is just as plain that they meant something to Bums, for (apparently) he took much pains with them, saw not their humorous aspect, and included them in his first (Kilmarnock) Volume. 173 ESSAYS roused to tenfold fury,' having done all sorts of dreadful things, and then ' sunk into a lurid calm,' he had ' subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable widower,' and had lifted his * grief-worn eye to look for — another wife.' In other words, he had pined for female society, and had embarked upon those famous love-passages with Highland Mary. Mary Little that is positive is known of Mary Campbell ^™P ® • except that she once possessed a copy of the Scrip- tures (now very piously preserved at Ayr), and that she is the subject of a fantasy, in bronze, at Dunoon. But to consider her story is, almiost inevitably, to be forced back upon one of two conclusions : — either (i) she was something of a lightskirts ; or (2) she is a kind of Scottish Mrs. Harris. The theory in general acceptance — what is called the Episode Theory — is that she was 'an innocent and gentle Highland nursery-maid' (thus, after Chambers, R. L. S.) ' in the service of a neighbouring family' (Gavin Hamilton's) ; that she consoled Burns — mats pour le bon motif — for Jean's desertion ; that they agreed to marry ; that, on her departure for the West to prepare for the event, * Ayr, gurgling, kissed his pebbled shore,' and they exchanged vows and Bibles ; and that she died, of a malignant fever, some few months after her return to Greenock. Cx>nflicting Another identifies her (on Richmond's authority) with a serving-maid in Mauchline, who was the mistress of a Montgomerie, and had withal such a hold upon Burns that for a brief while he was crazy to make her his wife ; and some have thought that this may be the Mary Campbell who, according to 174 ROBERT BURNS the Dundonald Session Records, fathered a child on one John Hay. This last hypothesis is, of course, most hateful to the puzzle-headed puritans who cannot, or will not, believe, despite the fact that the world has always teemed with Antonies, each of them mad for his peculiar Cleopatra, that Burns, particularly in his present straits, might very well have been enamoured of a gay girl to the point of marriage. So, for the consolation of these, there has been devised a third, according to which her name was either Mary Campbell or something unknown ; but, whatever she was called, she was so far and away the purest and sweetest of her sex — the one ' white rose,' in fact, which grew up among A white rose the ' passion flowers ' of the Bard's career — that she p^sskm- must, had she married him, have entirely ^ rectified ' flowers. his character, and have transformed him into a pattern Kirk-of-Scotland puritan of the puritans. On the other hand, it has become obvious to some whole-hearted devotees of the Marian Ideal that a ' young person ' of this sort could scarce have been of so coming a habit as to skip with alacrity into Jean's old shoes, and — shutting her innocent eyes to the fact that Burns, a man notoriously at war with the Kirk and the seducer of two unmarried women, was at the same time at his wits' end for cash — consent to cast in her lot with his at a moment's notice, and with never a sign from the family she was to enter. If she could do that, plainly she could not, except on strong positive testimony, be made to do duty as a white rose among passion-flowers ; or if, on some unknown and inenarrable hypothesis, she could, then, says 176 ESSAYS one of the devout, ' the conduct of Burns was that of a scoundrel.' This is absurd! So of late (1896-97) there has come into being a wish to believe that either Mary Campbell preceded Armour in the Bard's affections, or the Highland Lassie A creature of never existed at all, but was a creature of Burns's brain : an ideal of womanhood to which his thought ascended from the mire of this world — (the world of Ellisland, and Jean, and the children, and the songs in Johnson's Museum) — as Dante's to his Beatrice of dream. Given Burns's own habit and the habit of the Scots peasant woman, there is still no earthly reason for rejecting the Episode Theory — even were rejection possible — however seriously it reflect upon the morals of the parties concerned. But it is fair to add that the subject is both compli- cated and obscure. Burns's own references to his Highland Lassie are deliberately insignificant and vague : for once in his life he was reticent. His statement that she went home to prepare for their marriage is heavily discounted by the fact that he did not introduce her to his family as his betrothed, in nowise prepared for marriage on his own account, never dreamed, except in sporadic copies of verse, of taking her to the West Indies, and was all the while so desperately enamoured of Jean that not by any amount of self-indulgence could he rid his breast of her : by the fact, too, that, if his thought went back to the Highland Lassie in after years, his report of the journey is strongly tinctured with remorse.^ Currie's statement is that ' the banks of * He sent Thou Ling' ring Star to Mrs. Dunlop in a letter dated 8th November 1789. In acknowledging it, the lady 176 ROBERT BURNS Ayr formed the scene of youthful passions . . . the history of which it would be improper to reveal,' etc. Gilbert Burns, after noting that Nanie Fleming's charms were ' sexual '^ — 'which indeed was the characteristic of the greater part of his (Robert's) mistresses ' — is careful, perhaps with an eye on the heroine of Thou Lingering Stai\ to record the statement that Robert, at least, * was no platonic lover, whatever he might pretend or suppose of himself to the contrary.' There is Richmond's statement, as reported by Train. There is the Mary Campbell of the Dundonald Register. There is the certainty that relations there were between Burns and a Mary Campbell. There is the strong probability that Mary Campbell and the Highland Lassie were one and the same person. There is Burns's own witness to the circumstance that they met and parted under extremely suspicious condi- tions. That, really, is all. Yet, on the strength of a romantic impulse on the part of Robert Chambers, the heroine-in-chief of Burns's story is not the The heroine- loyal and patient soul whom he appreciated as the *^"^^*^^- fittest to be his wife he'd ever met : not the Jean who endured his affronts, and mothered his children (her own and another's), and took the rough and the smooth, the best and the worst of life with him, and wore his name for well-nigh forty years after his death as her sole title to regard. On the con- trary, that heroine-in-chief is a girl of whom scarce anything definite is known, while what may be noted its remorseful cast, and hoped it didn't set forth a per- sonal experience. There is nothing to show that he gave her any particulars, or essayed to disabuse her of the idea that remorse there well might be. M X77 ESSAYS reasonably suspected of her, though natural and feminine enough, is so displeasing to some fanatics, that, for Burns's sake (not hers) they would like to mythologise her out of being ; or, at the least, to make her as arrant an impossibility as the tame, proper figmentary Burns, the coinage of their own tame, proper brains, which they have done their best to substitute for the lewd, amazing peasant of genius,^ the inspired faun, whose voice has gone ringing through the courts of Time these hundred ^ years and more, and is far louder and far clearer now Y than when it first broke on the ear of man. /. Stevenson was an acute and delicate critic at ' — * many points : but he wrote like a novelist — like Thackeray, say, of Fielding and Sterne — when he wrote of Armour as a ' facile and empty-headed girl,' and insisted, still possessed by Chambers's vain imaginings, that she was first and last in love with another man. In truth the facility was on the other side. In 1784 Burns is willing to marry Betty Paton, and writes thus to Thomas Orr : — ' I am very glad Peggy [Thomson] is off my hand, as I am at present embarrassed enough without her.' In 1785 he is courting Jean Armour, and very early in 1786 Jean is in the family way, and ' by hell ' she shall never be his wife. But some time in March Jean is sent to Paisley ; and the 'maddening passions,' etc., set to work ; and he can no more 'se consoler de son depart ' than Calypso could for that of Ulysses. So in a hand's turn he becomes the stricken deer, and, as we have seen, protests (to the Moon) that to marry Jean, and wear * The promised * ' Peculiarly like nobody else ' (R. B. to Amot, April 1786). 178 ROBERT BURNS father's tender name ' are his sole ambitions. As Jean does not return, however, he seeks (and finds) such comfort as he may in exchanging vows and Bibles and what Chamfort called ' fantaisies ' with Mary Campbell. On the 1 2th- 13th May he writes The Court of Equity — a task the strangest con- The Court of ceivable for a lover, whether rejoicing or distraught. ^"^ ^' On the 14th 'Ayr gurgling kisses his pebbled shore,' and ' The flowers spring wanton to be pressed,' and Highland Mary leaves for the West to make these famous preparations. On the 15th May he dates (at least) the Epistle to a Young Friend : — * The sacred lowe o* weel-placed love Luxuriantly indulge it,' etc. : — and, as for some time past, he is still the gallant, howbeit in jest, of Betty Miller : till on the 9th June * poor ill-advised Armour' returns to Mauchline ; and on the 12th he writes that *for all her part in a certain black afl^air ' he ' still loves her to distraction,' and, with a view to forgetting her has 'run into all kinds of dissipation and riot . . . but in vain.' On the 28th June he appears before 'the Poacher Court,' acknowledges paternity, and is ' promised a certificate as a single man ' ; on con- dition that he do penance before the congregation on three successive Sundays. On the 9th July, the occasion of his first appearance, he has 'a foolish hankering fondness ' for Jean, but, calling on her and being put to the door, he remarks that she does not ' show that penitence that might have been expected ' ; so, on the 22nd, he executes a deed by ^ 179 ESSAYS which he makes over all his property to the 'wee image of his bonie Betty,' to the exclusion of what- ever might come of his affair with the recusant. A panorama Then, on the 7oth (old Armour having^, meanwhile, of tumult. ^ ' ^^ • . I.- J ^\ -L- • . got a warrant agamst him, and sent him into hiding ^), he adjures Richmond — (who, he knows, will ' pour an execration ' on Jean's head) — to ' spare the poor, ill-advised girl for my sake ' ; and on the 14th August he calls on Heaven to ' bless the Sex,' for that ' I feel there is still happiness for me among them.' Against this panorama of tumult and variety and adventure, enlarged in Edinburgh, and enriched at Ellisland and in Dumfries, there are to set the years of simple abnegation, magnanimity, and devotion with which the ' facile and empty- headed girl' repaid the husband of her choice. The conclusion is obvious. The Novelist turned Critic is still the Novelist. Consciously or not, he develops preferences, for, consciously or not, he must still create.' ^ Stevenson's preferences were with Rab Mossgiel. And the result was a grave — but not, I hope, a lasting — injustice to an excellent and very womanly woman and a model wife.^ ^ No doubt he retired on information sent by Jean. * Thus Stevenson, who himself liked ' dressing a part ' (so to speak), was persuaded that Burns did likewise, and accepted bodily that absurd, fantastic story (told by two Englishmen), in which the Bard, in a fox-skin cap and an enormous coat, and girt with a Highland broadsword, is seen angling from a Nithside rock. Jean denied it, and said that Robert (who hated field-sports, as we know) never angled in his life. But the Novelist was roused ; and all that was ignored. * On the 3rd September Jean lay in of twins. They were presently taken by their respective grandmothers, to whom, I doubt not, they gave great joy : as in that and other stages of society the appearance of the third generation, whether its 180 ROBERT BURNS As to Highland Mary, one of two conclusions : (i) Either she was a paragon ; or (2) she was not. In the first case, her story has yet to be written, and written on evidence that is positive and irrefutable. In the second, the bronze at Dunoon bears abiding witness to the existence (at a certain time) of what can only be described as a national delusion. VI By this time the end of Mauchline, and of much The besides, was nearer than Burns knew. Probably ^^j^^^^^^^ sent to press in the May of 1786, the Kilmarnock Volume was published at the end of July.^ Most right to exist be legal or not, does always. Burns announced the event as only Bums could, by sending Nature's Law : — ' Kind Nature's care had given him share Large of the flaming current,' etc. : — to Gavin Hamilton ; a ' God bless the little dears,' with a snatch of indecent song, to Richmond ; and a really heartfelt and affecting bit of prose on the subject of paternity to Robert Muir. 1 One effect of its pubUcation was to secure him the friend- ship of Mrs. Dunlop. It is evident from this lady's letters that her interest in him could scarce have been warmer had he been her son. She prized his correspondence as beyond rubies, and as a rule he was slower to reply than she (once, being hurt by his silence, she told him she wouldn't write again till he asked her, and, failing to draw him, within a week she is found begging his pardon for her petulance). She made him many gifts — apparently in money and in kind — gifts at New Year and other times, and accepted gifts from him (once he sent her a keg of old brandy). Her influence made ever for decency, and it may well have been on her remonstrances, which were strong, that he finally resolved to remove some of the coarser phrases in his earlier editions. Her leist (extant) letter is dated nth January 1795. For some unexplained reasons she ceased from writing several months before the January of 1796. It may have been that she heard of him as often in drink, or that she was told of the affair at Woodley Park. In any case she esteemed him so highly, and admired him so lavishly, that 'tis quite impossible to believe the breach in the correspondence due to any fault of hers. 181 ESSAYS of, if not all, the numbers contained in it were probably familiar to the countryside. Some had certainly been received with * a roar of applause ' ; Burns, who was not a man to hide his light under a bushel (his temperament was too radiant and too vigorous for that), was given to multiplying his verses in ms. copies for friends ; he had been 'read into fame ' by Aiken the lawyer : so that Poems^ Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was, in a sense, as Its triumph. ' well advertised ' as book could be. Its triumph was not less instant than well-deserved : ^ the first issue, six hundred copies strong, was exhausted in a month ('tis said that not one could be spared for Mossgiel). But Burns himself, according to him- self, and he was ever punctiliously exact and scrupulous on the score of money, was but ;^2o in pocket by it ; the Kilmarnock printer declined to strike off a second impression, with additions, unless he got the price of the paper {£2']) in advance ; and for some time it seemed that there was nothing but Jamaica for the writer, Local Bard and Local Hero though he were : so that he looked to have sailed in mid- August, and again on the ist September, and at some indeterminate date had ' conveyed his chest thus far on the road to Greenock,' and written that solemn and moving song — far and away the best, I think, and the sincerest thing he left in English — 1 ' Old and young,* says Heron, ' high and low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, all were alike delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, contigu- ous to Ayrshire : and I can well remember, how that even the plough-boys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages which they earned the most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might but secure the works of Burns.' 182 ROBERT BURNS The Gloomy Night is Gathering Fast. It was to be the ' last effort ' of his ' Muse in Caledonia.' But, for one or another reason, his departure was ever deferred ; and, though on the 30th October (some ten days, it is surmised, after the death of Mary Campbell), he was still writing that ' ance to the Indies he was wonted,' he'd certainly contrive to ' mak' the best o' life Wi' some sweet elf,' on the 1 8th November, ' I am thinking for my Edinburgh An ' Edin- expedition on Monday or Tuesday come s'ennight.' p^^ft^o^^'' In effect, an 'Edinburgh expedition' was natural and inevitable. Ballantine of Ayr is said to have suggested the idea of such an adventure ; Gilbert and the family are said to have applauded it. But as early as the 4th September the excellent Blacklock — (in ' a letter to a friend of mine which overthrew all my schemes') — had called — ' for the sake of the young man ' — for a second edition, ' more numerous than the former ' : inasmuch as Mt appears certain that its intrinsic merit, and the exertions of the author's friends, might give it a more universal circulation than anything of the kind which has been published within my memory.' Thus Black- lock ; and the ' friend of mine,' which was Lawrie, the minister of Loudoun, had communicated Black- lock's letter to the person most concerned in Blacklock's suggestion. Bold, proud, intelligent au possible^ strongly possessed too (so he says, and so I believe) by the genius of paternity. Burns the Man, who had a very becoming opinion of Burns the Bard, and could fairly appreciate that worthy's merits, must certainly have seen that in Edinburgh he had many chances of succeeding at the very point 183 ESSAYS where the Kilmarnock printer failed him. I do not doubt, either, that he was tired of being the Local Poet, the Local Satirist, the Local Wit, the Local Lothario (even), and eager to essay himself on another and a vaster stage than Mauchline ; for, if he hadn't been thus tired and thus eager, he wouldn't have been Robert Burns. The fighting spirit, the genius of emulation, is so strong in us all that a man of temperament and brains must assert himself, and get accepted at his own (or another) valuation, exactly as a cock must crow. And I love to believe that Burns, being immitigably of this metal, entered upon his adventure — (27th Novem- ^ ber : on a borrowed nag, with not much money, a letter of introduction to Dalrymple of Orangefield, and a visiting list consisting entirely in Dugald Stewart and Richmond the lawyer's clerk) — with a joyous heart and the stiff neck of one who knows himself a man among men, and whose chief ambition is to 'drink delight of battle with his peers ' — if he can find them. His He reached the capital on the 28 th November, reception, ^^j^^^ ^^5 hospitably entertained by Richmond — to the extent, indeed, of a bedfellow's share in the clerk's one little room in Baxter's Place, Lawn- market. Through Dalrymple of Orangefield he got access to Lord Glencairn and others ; among them Harry Erskine, Dean of Faculty, and that curious, irascible, pompous ass, the Earl of Buchan, and Creech the publisher, who had been Glencairn's tutor, and who advertised the Edinburgh Edition on the 14th December. He was everywhere re- ceived as he merited, and he made such admirable 184 ROBERT BURNS use of his vogue that, five days before Creech's advertisement was printed, he could tell his friend and patron, Gavin Hamilton, that he was rapidly qualifying for the position of Tenth Worthy and Eighth Wise Man of the World. He saw every- body worth seeing, and talked with everybody worth talking to ; he was made welcome by ' heavenly Burnett ' and her firolic Grace of Gordon, and welcome by the ribald, scholarly, hard-drinking wits and jinkers of the Crochallan Fencibles, for whose use and edification he had made the unique and precious collection now called The Merry Muses of Caledonia ; he moved and bore himself as easily at Dugald Stewart's as in Baxter's Place, in Creech's shop, with Henry Mackenzie and Gregory and Blair, as at that extraordinary meeting of the St. Andrew's Lodge, where, at the Grand Master's bidding, the Brethren assembled drank the health of * Caledonia and Caledonia's Bard — Brother Burns ' : a toast received with ' multiplied honours and repeated acclamations.' To look at, *he was like a farmer dressed to dine with the laird ' : his manners were * rustic, not clownish ' ; he had ' a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity.' Then, His ' his address to females was always extremely defer- dignified ential, and always ' — this on the authority of the ^^™^ ^^^ ^" Duchess of Gordon — 'with a turn to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention par- ticularly.' For the rest, 'I never saw a man in company with his superiors in station and informa- tion more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment.' Thus, long afterwards, Sir Walter, who noted also, boy as he 185 ESSAYS was, * the strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments,' and who, long afterwards, had never seen such an eye as Burns's Mn a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men ' — (Byron among them ; and Byron's eye was one of Byron's points) — ' of my time.' It is not wonder- ful, perhaps, that Burns, with his abounding temperament, his puissant charm, his potency in talk, his rare gifts of eye and voice,^ should have strongly affected Edinburgh Society, brilliant in its elements and distinguished in its effect as it was. There has been no Burns since Burns ; or history would pretty certainly have repeated itself. What is really wonderful is the way in which Burns kept his head in Edinburgh Society, and stood prepared The reaction, for the inevitable reaction. Through all the ' thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke ' (and there was certainly a great deal of it), he held a steady eye upon his future. He saw most clearly that the life of a nine-days' wonder is at most nine days, and that now was his time or never. But if he expected preferment, he was neither extravagantly elated in anticipation, nor unduly depressed by disappoint- ment ; and, for all his self-consciousness — (' And God had given his share ') — he was not too platonic to disdain the favours of at least one servant-girl (he was arrested, August 1787, on a warrant In meditatione fu^a)^ nor too punctilious to make love to ' a Lothian farmer's daughter, a very pretty girl, 1 Thus Maria Riddell : — ' His voice alone could improve upon the magic of his eye. Sonorous, replete with the finest modulations,' etc. It will be remembered that children used to speak of Byron as ' the gentleman with the beautiful voice.' 186 ROBERT BURNS whom I've almost persuaded to accompany me to the West Country should I ever return,' etc.^ nor too philosophical not to regret his Jean, and reflect (in this very letter to Gavin Hamilton) that he'd never ' meet so delicious an armful again.' In the long-run his magnanimity suffered a Edinburgh certain change. The peasant at work scarce ever^Q^ne^ goes wrong ; but abroad and idle he is easily spoiled, and soon. Edinburgh was a triumph for Burns ; but it was also a misfortune. It was a centre of conviviality — a city of clubs and talk and. good fellowship, a city of harlotry and high jinks, a city (above all) of drink : — ' Whare couthy chiels at e'enin meet, Their bizzin craigs and mou's to weet : An' biythely gar auld Care gae by Wi' blinket and wi' bleering eye' : — a dangerous place for a peasant to be at large in, especially a peasant of the conditions and the stamp of Burns. He was young, he was buckishly given, and he was — Burns. He had, as certain numbers in The Merry Muses witness, an entirely admirable talent of a kind much favoured by our liberal ancestors. To hear him talk was ever a privilege ; while to hear him make such use as he might of this peculiar capacity cannot but have constituted a unique experience. After all, a gift's a gift, and a man must use the gifts he has. No reasonable being can question that Burns used this one of his.^ ^ This is noted neither in praise nor in dispraise. It is noted to show that Burns was essentially a man of his time : as how, peasant of genius that he was, could he be anything else ? Our fathers loved sculduddery, and Burns, who came 187 ESSAYS In those days he could scarce be buckish — or even popular and do other. Even in the country, says Heron, in his loose yet lofty way, * the votaries of intemperate joys, with persons to whom he was The bucks of recommended by licentious wit . . . had begun to e capi a . f^^^^^ ^^ j^-j^^ ^^^^ ^^ seduce him to embellish the gross pleasures of their looser hours with the charms of his wit and fancy.' These temptations — (he was known, be it remembered, for the ribald of The Fornicator and The Court of Equity as well as for the poet of the Mountain Daisy and the Saturday Night) — he was by no means incapable of putting by. Mr. Arthur Bruce, indeed, 'a gentleman of great worth and discernment,' assured Heron that he had 'seen the poet steadily resist such solicita- from Carrick — where, as Lockhart has remarked, the Verna- cular was spoken with pecuUar gaiety and vigour — was the best gifted of them all in this respect by virtue of his genius, his turn of mind, his peasanthood, and his wonderful capacity for talk. Josiah Walker notes of Bums that his conversation was ' not more licentious ' than the conversation heard at the tables of the great ; Lockhart regrets that he can give but few of Burns's mots, for the reason that the most of those preserved and handed down were unquotable. It was a trick of the time, and long after — (remember Colonel Newcome's indig- nant retreat before old Costigan) — so that Lord Cork of The Bumper Toast, and Captain Morris at Carlton House and Bums among the Crochallan Fencibles are but expressions of the same fashion in humour, the same tendency in the human mind to apprehend and rejoice in the farce of sex. I do not know that Burns and M' Queen of Braxfield (Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston) ever met. But it was said of M' Queen that he had never read anything but sculduddery and law ; and to Ramsay of Auchtertyre, in whom Sir Walter found some elements of Monkbams, the two men seemed cast in the same mould. Burns, in any case, was a man of the later Eighteenth Century (he sent one of his best known facetics to Graham of Fintry, with a view to correcting some illiberal report about his politics) ; and to take him out of it, and essay to make him a smug, decent, Late-Victorian journaUst is, as I think, to essay a task at once discreditable in aim and impossible of execution. 188 ROBERT BURNS tions and allurements to convivial enjoyment, as scarcely any other person could have withstood.' But — thus this author : intelligent, not unfriendly on the whole, on the whole competent — * the bucks of Edinburgh accomplished . . . that in which the boors of Ayrshire ^ had failed. After residing some months in Edinburgh he began to estrange himself, not altogether, but in some measure, from the society of his graver friends. . . . He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of miserable beings who were proud to tell that they had been in company with Burns, and had seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves.' ^ One result of this condescension was this : always the best man in the room, ' the cock of the company,' as Heron puts it, ' The cock of ^ 'he began to contract something of new arrogance ^^^^V^^Y- in conversation ' ; till in the long-run ' he could scarcely refrain from indulging in similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in the presence of persons^ who could less patiently endure his presumption.' Heron's detail is vague — not to say indefinite ; his effect may be misleading. But, as I said, the peasant at large — the peasant without hard work to keep him straight — must, almost of necessity, run to waste. And it is plain that, tread- ^ This appears to be a polite description, by a staunch (though drunken) Churchman, of those desperate spirits, Gavin Hamilton and Robert Aiken. * I give all this for what it is worth. Heron himself was something of a wastrel. Yet he had a clerical habit and a clerical bias which made him easily censorious in the case of so hardened and so militant an anti-cleric as the Bard. He was personally acquainted, however, with that hero ; and his little biography (1797) is neither unintelligent nor ill- written. 3 Heron himself, no doubt. He 'had the tongues,' and thought himself the better man. 189 ESSAYS ing thus closely on the heels of ' the dissipation and riot,' the ' mason-meetings, drinking-matches, and other mischief,' of the year before, the distractions and the triumphs of Edinburgh continued the work which the mistakes and follies of Dumfries were to finish ten years after. The First At last, however, the First Edinburgh Edition iditioS!^^^ ^PP^^^^d (21st April 1787). The issue ran to 2800 copies, and 1500 of these were subscribed in advance. What Burns got for it is matter of doubt. Creech informed Heron that it was £1 100 — which is a plain untruth ; Chambers says ;£^5oc ; Burns himself told Mrs. Dunlop (25th March 1789) that he expected to clear some £^/^o to ^450. (Other impressions were called for in the course of the year, but the Bard had sold his copyright, and had no interest in them.) Whatever the amount,^ Creech was a slow paymaster ; and, as Edinburgh was bad for Burns, and Creech was responsible for Burns's detention in Edinburgh, it is impossible not to regret that Burns had not another publisher. * At the instancing of Henry Mackenzie, Creech paid Bums (23rd April 1787) a hundred guineas for the copyright of the Poems, besides subscribing five hundred copies. The Cale- donian Hunt subscribed another hundred ; and Burns sent seventy to Ballantine for ' a proper person ' in Ayr, and wrote from Dunse (17th May) to acknowledge the receipt, from Pattison, the Paisley bookseller, of ' Twenty-two pounds, seven shillings sterling, payment in full, after carriage deducted for ninety copies ' more. Twenty-four copies went to the Earl and Countess of Glencairn, twenty to Prentice of Conington Mains, forty to Muir of Kilmarnock, twenty-one to Her Grace of Gordon, forty-two to the Earl of Eglintoun and a certain number to the Scots Benedictionaries at Maryborough and Ratisbon, and the Scots Colleges at Douay, Paris, and Valla- dolid. The subscription price was five, the price to non- subscribers six, shillings : the extra shilling being (Burns to Pattison, ut sup.) ' Creech's profit.' 190 ROBERT BURNS Burns in effect, his Second Edition once published, had nothing to do but pocket his receipts,^ and be gone. This, however, was what Creech could not let him do : so that he went and came, and came and went, and it was not until the March of 1789 that the two men squared accounts.^ The Edition floated, comes a jaunt to the Border The return to (begun 5th May) with Robert Ainslie. Then, by^^""^^^"^' the 9th June, Burns is back at Mauchline, a much richer and a vastly more important person than he left it: able to lend his brother ^180 ; reconciled, too, with Jean and her people, but disgusted, or feigning himself disgusted (for, after the repudia- tion, he is ever the superior and the injured party in ^ Heron ' had reason to beUeve that he had consumed a much larger proportion of these gains than prudence could approve ; while he superintended the impression, paid his court to his patrons, and wasted the full payment of the sub- scription money/ In effect, it is hard to see how, coming to Edinburgh with next to nothing in his pocket (the £10 from Wilson could not have gone very far) , he could otherwise have lived. It would have been natural enough for him to have accepted gratuities, for the Age of Patronage was still afoot, and relief in this kind would have come as easily (to say the least) to the * ploughing poet,' howbeit he was the proudest and in some respects the most punctiUous of men, as to any other. I find it hard to believe that there were none. But there is no record of any ; and a letter (unpublished) of this period in acknowledgment of a gift of money from Mrs. Dunlop is almost painful in its embarrassment of gratitude and dis- comfort. On the whole, I take it that, however cheaply he lived in Edinburgh, he must of necessity have had to discount his profits, though not to anything like the extent suggested by Heron. Moreover, it is like enough that he spent a certain amount upon his Tours, and it is certain that Mossgiel was a dead loss to him. 2 Of the work he did about this time the best is to be found in the Haggis and the Epistles to Creech and the Guidwife of Wauchope House. What is very much more to the purpose is that he made Johnson's acquaintance, and at once began contributing to the Musical Museum. 191 ESSAYS regard to Jean), with the * mean, servile compliance ' with which his advances are met. Follows a tour to the West Highlands, which seems to be largely an occasion for drink and talk ; and in July you find him back at Mauchline, boasting how he, ' an old hawk at the sport,' has brought ' a certain lady' — (unknown) — ' from her aerial towerings, pop, down at my foot, like Corporal Trim's hat ' ; despite which Jean is presently with child by him for the second time. In August he is at Edin- burgh, intent on a settlement with Creech, but on the 25th he starts for the Highland tour with his friend Nicol.^ After a couple of excursions more — one to Ayrshire, to look at certain holdings — he is resolved on quitting Edinburgh, settlement or no settlement, to farm or go to the Indies, as cir- cumstances shall dictate. But it is written that his life shall have another disputable episode and the world an immortal scrap of song : — * Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, ^ Heron describes Nicol as a man who ' in vigour of intellect, and in wild yet generous impetuosity of passion, remarkably resembled . . . Bums ' ; who ' by the most unwearied and extraordinary professional toil, in the midst of as persevering dissipation . . . won and accumulated an honourable and sufficient competence ' ; and who died of ' a jaundice, with a complication of other complaints, the effects of long-continued intemperance.' Burns admired Nicol, named a son after him, and immortalised him as the ' Willie ' who ' brew'd a peck o' maut.' He had a generous heart and a brutal temper, with plenty of brains, a great contempt for custom and the Kirk, and what Lockhart calls ' a rapturous admiration of Bums's genius.' The violent vulgarity of his behaviour at Castle Gordon is typical of the man. He bought a little property not far from EUisland, and, what with pride and vanity and republican independence (so called) and an immitigable turn for liquor, was certainly as bad a neighbour as the Bard could possibly have had. 192 ROBERT BURNS Never met or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.' So in the beginning of December he falls in with Mrs. M'Lehose ; he instantly proposes to ' cultivate her friendship with the enthusiasm of religion ' ; and the two are languishing in Arcady in the twinkling of a cupid's wing. She was a handsome, womanly creature — ' of a ciarinda and somewhat voluptuous style of beauty ' : a style the y^^^°^^^- Bard appreciated — lively but devout, extremely sentimental yet inexorably dutiful : a grass widow with children — nine times in ten a lasting safeguard — and the strictest notions of propriety — a good enough defence for a time ; but young (she was the Bard's own age), clever, ' of a poetical fabric of mind,' and all the rest. The upsetting of a hackney coach disabled Burns from calling on her for some weeks. But he wrote her letters, and she answered them ; and he was Sylvander, and she signed herself Ciarinda ; and they addressed each other in verse as well as prose ; and she said it could never be ; and he said that at least he must know her heart was his ; and Religion was her *balm in every woe ' ; and he gave her his ideas of Deity ; and, when they could meet, Ciarinda was ever afraid lest she had let Sylvander go too far ; and Sylvander, for his part, was monstrous eloquent about ' Almighty Love ' — (he was sometimes dreadfully like his favourite Man of Feeling) — and was ' ready to hang himself ' about 'a young Edinburgh widow.' Widow she was not ; but her husband, who cared not a snap of the fingers for her, was away in the West Indies ; and it may perhaps have suited her lover — who N 108 ESSAYS never, so far as is known, was trained to the com- promises and the obsequiencies of adultery — to soothe his conscience by making believe that the affair was at the most a simple everyday amour. Clarinda was of another make. In the prime of life, deserted, sentimental, a tangle of simple in- stincts and as simple pieties, she had the natural woman's desire for a lover and the religious woman's resolve to keep that lover's passion within bounds. It is scarce questioned that she succeeded : though there is a legend that a certain gallant and insinuating little lyric: — ' May, thy morn was ne'er sae sweet As the mirk night o' December, For sparkling was the rosy wine, And secret was the chamber ! And dear was she I winna name But I will aye remember ! ' — commemorates, not only their final meeting (December 6th, 1791) but also, the triumph of the Bard.^ In any event she was plainly an excellent creature, bent on keeping herself honest and her ^ Both Ae Fond Kiss and O May, Thy Morn were sent to eiarinda after the final parting ; but the legend is ail-too obviously an effect of the very common human sentiment in deference to which so many novels end happily. For the rest. Sir Walter Scott wrote thus on the fly-leaf of a copy of the very scarce Belfast Edition (1806) of the Letters Addressed to Clarinda by Robert Burns, now at Abbotsford : — ' Clarinda was a Mrs. Meiklehose, wife of a person in the West Indies, from whom she lived separate but without any blemish, I believe, on her reputation. I don't wonder that the Bard changed her ' thrice unhappy name ' for the classical sound of Clarinda. She was a relative of my friend the late Lord Craig, at whose house I have seen her, old, charmless and devote. There was no scandal attached to her philandering with the Bard, though the Lady ran risques, for Burns was anything but platonic in his amours,' etc, 194 ROBERT BURNS lover straight; and it is impossible to read her letters to Sylvander without a respect, a certain Their letters. admiration even, which have never been awakened yet by the study of Sylvander's letters to her. For Sylvander's point of view, as M'Lehose was still alive, and an open intrigue with a married woman would have been ruin, only one inference is pos- sible : that he longed for the shepherd's hour to strike for the chime's sake only ; so that, when he thought of his future, as he must have done anxiously and often, he cannot ever have thought of it as Clarinda's, even though in a moment of peculiar exaltation, he swore to keep single till that wretch, the wicked husband, died.-^ Very early in 1788, Jean — brought, she also, some time in the preceding summer ^ pop, down at my feet, like Corporal Trim's hat' — ^was expelled her parents' house and took refuge at Tarbolton Mill. There Burns found her on his return, and thence he removed her to a house in ' Mauchline toun,' to the particular] oy, a short while after, of Saunders Tait : — ' The wives they up their coats did kilt, And through the streets so clean did stilt, Some at the door fell wi' a pelt Maist broke their leg, To see the Hen, poor wanton jilt ! Lay her fourth egg.* * * M'Lehose outlived him many years. ■ Some stanzas later in B-rns's Hen Clockin in Mauchline, Saunders (who has been likening Jean to a ship) thus notes her ' ' Now she is sailing in the Downs, Calls at the ports of finest towns. To buy bed hangings and galloons ' : and comments with fury on the fact that she's got, not only ' twa packs o' human leather,' but also 195 Clarinda. ESSAYS Follows what is perhaps the most perplexing sequence of circumstances in a perplexing life. To Clarinda, who knew of the affair with Armour, pitied the victim — (this does not mean that she wished her married to Burns) — and had sped her shepherd on his homeward way with *twa wee sarkies ' for the victim's little boy : a mistress, be it remembered, to whom he had written (14th February) in such terms as these : — ' I admire you, I love you as a woman beyond any one in the circle Jean and of creation ' : — he wrote, a few days after his arrival at Mauchline, that he had 'this morning' (23rd February 1788) 'called for a certain woman,' and been 'disgusted with her,' so that he could not ' endure her.' Though his heart ' smote him for the profanity,' he sought to compare the two ; and ' 'twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun.' ' Here,' the Old Hawk continues, ' here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning. There ^ polished good sense. Heaven- born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender passion.' This to the contrary, it needs no great knowledge of life, and still less of Burns and Armour, to divine what hap- pened ; and it needs as little of Burns at this point in his career to see why he ended his confession to ' A fine cap and peacock feather. And wi 't she 's douce. With a grand besom made of heather. To sweep her house.' It is worth noting that he winds up his lampoon by accusing the gossips at the lying-in of talking scandal of the rankest and reading The Holy Fair ! 196 ROBERT BURNS Clarinda thus : — * I have done with her, and she with me.' Eight days after this (3rd March 1788), in a letter to Ainslie, some parts of it too * curious ' A letter to for a Victorian page, he tells a different story.^ 'Jean,' says he, *I found banished like a martyr — forlorn, destitute, and friendless ; all for the good old cause. I have reconciled her to her fate : I have reconciled her to her mother : ^ I have taken her a room : I have taken her to my arms : I have given her a mahogany bed : I have given her a guinea ; and I have ' — but here Scott Douglas's garbling begins, and Burns's inditing ends ; and the original must be read, or the reader will never wholly under- stand what manner of man the writer was. Then comes an avowal so disconcerting that I cannot choose but disbelieve it, and conclude that it was made for some special purpose. * But,' says the Old Hawk, ' but, as I always am, on every occasion — I have been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree ; I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she had not,^ neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl, and . . .' The rest is unquotable. At first consideration, the spectacle of the Bard keeping * The letter is best described as a Crochallanism — as some- thing written by one Fencible for the edification of another Fencible, and dealing with its subject in right Fencible style and from the correct Fencible point of view. I am afraid that, like the aforesaid letter to Clarinda, it was designed as what Ainslie himself, then unregenerate, might have called ' a d — d bite,' ' Was reconciliation possible without a second offer of marriage ? I doubt it. 3 This is literally true : the ' unlucky paper' was destroyed. 197 ESSAYS ' the wish'd, the trysted hour,' with a settled purpose of ' prudence and caution ' in his mind, and as it were the materials for swearing in his pocket, in no wise makes for enlightenment. On reflection, however, it becomes evident that Burns wrote thus to Ainslie, whom he had asked to call on Clarinda in his absence, simply that Ainslie might quote her his report of a second (and an entirely superfluous) act of repudiation on Jean's part : ^ to the end, as I cannot doubt, of using the fact for all it was worth, when he himself appeared upon the scene. That this is at least a possible theory is shown by the terms in which he tells (7th March) the story of his Recon- reconciliation to Brown : ^ — ' I found Jean with her with^^jean. ^^^S° ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ in. . . . I have turned her into a convenient harbour where she may lie snug till she unload, and have taken the command myself, not ostensibly, but for a time in secret.' This can only mean that he purposes to marry the girl. For all that, though, he still has hopes of a practical issue to his Edinburgh affair ; for in his next letter (writ the same day) to Clarinda, who has reproached him for silence, and at the same time owned that she counts * all things (Heaven excepted) but lost, that I may win and keep you,' * Was it not blasphemy, then,' he asks, * against your own charms and against my feelings, to suppose that a short fortnight could 1 There was no need of oaths from Jean : her lover had had his bachelor's certificate in his pocket for months. And such swearing as there was — was it not all on the other side ? * It is important to note the difference in manner and tone and suggestion between Bums to Brown and Burns to Ainslie. Burns writes to Brown as friend to friend ; to Ainslie as Fencible to Fencible — much, in fact, as Swiveller, President of the Glorious Apollos, to Chuckster, Vice of the same sublime Society. 198 ROBERT BURNS abate my passion ! ' With a vast deal more to the same purpose. Three days after, he starts again for Edinburgh, and plunges deeper in desire than ever for his 'dearest angel' (so he calls her on 17th March), the ' dearest partner of his soul ' (four days after). ' Oh Clarinda ' (same date), ' what do I owe to Heaven for blessing me with such a piece of exalted excellence as you ! ' He must leave for EUisland, via Mauchline, on the 24th ; and ' Will you open,' he asks, ' with satisfaction and delight a letter ' — ('twas all to be limited to letters soon) — 'from a man who loves, who has loved you, and who will love you to death, through death, and for ever! ' They are to meet the next night, and he is to watch — (right Arcady, this!) — her lighted window : — ' 'Tis the star that guides me to Para- dise.' And for him ' the great relish to all is — that Honour — that Innocence — that Religion, are the witnesses and guarantees of our happiness.' Follows a bit of the Bible adapted to their peculiar case ; and with an ' Adieu, Clarinda ! I am going • Adieu, to remember you in my prayers,' the Old Hawk^^^"^^^' stoops to his perch for the night. Nothing is known of the last engagement ; but apparently the citadel remains inviolate, for the leaguer is raised next day, and the besieger draws off his forces by way of Glasgow. Thence he writes to Brown (26th March) that ' these eight days ' he has been ' positively crazed.' And by the 7th April he has His made Jean Armour his wife. mamag«. An amazing love-story ? True. But that love- story it was — that Burns was first and last enamoured of the woman he made his wife — is shown, I think. ESSAYS by the fact that to all intents and purposes he married her twice over. As for Clarinda, well . . .! Clarinda complicates and exhilarates the interest to this extent at least : that if words mean anything, and the Bard be judged by those he wrote, the Bard, had Clarinda been indeed a widow, might at a given moment have found himself incapable of making Jean an honest woman. And had he followed his fancy, not his heart .'^ How had the two Arcadians fared .'^ 'Tis for some future Chambers to divine and say. » VII At Eliisiand. MEANWHILE he had taken Ellisland, a farm in Dumfriesshire, of Miller of Dalswinton : with an allowance from his landlord, a worthy and generous man, of ^300, for a new steading and outhouses. His marriage at last made formal and public (it seems to have been celebrated by Gavin Hamxilton), on the 5th August 1788 the bride and bridegroom appeared before the Session, acknowledged its irregularity, demanded its * solemn confirmation,' were sentenced to be rebuked, were 'solemnly engaged to adhere faithfully to one another as husband and wife all the days of their life,' and were finally ' absolved from any scandal ' on the old account. But the new steading was long a-build- ing. It was not till the 6th November that Burns and Jean set up their rest in Dumfriesshire ; and even so, they had to go, not to their own farmhouse — (it was not ready for them till the August of 1789) — but, to a place called *The Isle,' about a 200 ROBERT BURNS mile away from it. Burns had taken Ellisland on the advice of a friendly expert ; ^ but he had had his doubts about the wisdom of *guid auld Glen's' decision, and these were soon justified. For a time, however, he stuck to his work like a man : con- versing much^ it would seem, in his leisure with his neighbour Glenriddell, and others, whose honoured guest he was, making and vamping songs, paying some heed to national and local politics, and finding time for letters not a few — among them a long and elaborate criticism on some worthless verses by that crazy creature, Helen Maria Williams.^ But by the end of July 1789 he had resolved to turn his holding into a dairy farm to be run by Jean and his sisters, and to take up his Gaugership ^ in earnest ; ^ ' A lease was granted to the poetical farmer ' (thus Heron, who knew the country) ' at the annual rent which his own friends declared that the due cultivation of his farm might easily enable him to pay.' But those friends, being Ayrshire- men, ' were little acquainted with the soil, with the manures, with the markets, with the dairies, with the modes of improve- ment in Dumfriesshire ' ; they had estimated his rental at Ayrshire rates ; so that, ' contrary to his landlord's intention,' he must pay more for Ellisland than Ellisland was worth. According to the elder Cunningham, Ellisland was a poet's choice, not a farmer's. ' Bums was not only a reader himself : he wais ever the cause of reading in others. One of his occupations at Elhs- land was the foundation and the management of a book-club. He took the keenest interest in the work, was especially careful in selection, and, according to Glenriddell, did what- ever must be done himself. Like his father, he beheved in education ; and, like his father, he did his best to educate his kind by all the means which lay to his hand. He held that the peasant could not but be the better for good reading ; and he exerted himself to the utmost to give the peasant what seemed to him the best that could be had. That he did so is as honourable a circumstance as is found in his career. 3 By Glencairn's interest he had been appointed to a place in the Excise as early as 1787. 201 ESSAYS Appointed exciseman. ' Humane. and vigilant.' and on the loth of August, some brief while after the completion of The Kirk^s Alarm, he learned from Graham of Fintry (whom he had met, in 1787, at the Duke of Athole's, on his Second Highland Tour) that he was appointed Exciseman for that district of Dumfriesshire in which EUisland is situate. The work was hard, for he had charge of ten parishes, and must ride two hundred miles a week to get his duty done. But by the beginning of December, ' I have found,' he writes, ' the Excise business go a great deal smoother with me than I expected ' ; and that he ' sometimes met the Muses,' as he jogged through the Nithsdale hills, is shown by the fact that The Whistle, the excellent verses on Captain Grose (with whom he made acquaintance at Glenriddell's table), and Thou Lingering Star, with Willie Brewed, that best of drinking-songs, and The Five Carlines (a notable piece of mimicry, if no more), all belong to the period of his probation, and were all written before the end of the year. Plainly, too, he was an officer at once humane and vigilant : since, while it is told of him that he could always wink when staring would mean blank ruin to some old unchartered ale- wife (say), his first year's * decreet' — his share, that is, of the fines imposed upon his information — was worth some fifty or sixty pounds. Exercise and the open air are held good for a man's health ; yet in the winter of 1789-90 this man suffered cruelly from his old ailment. As for verse, the Elegy on Matthew Henderson and Tarn 0' Shanter (1790) seem a poor year's output for the poet of those wonderful months at Mossgiel. But work for 202 ROBERT BURNS Johnson was going steadily on ; so that the results of these barren-looking times are in a sort the best known of his titles to greatness and to fame. Thus he strove, and faltered, and achieved till 1791, by the beginning of which year he had realised that Ellisland was impossible ; that he could not afford his rent, which (so he told Mrs. Dunlop) was raised that year by £10^ and must depend entirely on his Excisemanship : when he asked for service in a port, and, by Mrs. Dunlop's interest, was transferred to ' a vacant side- walk ' in Dumfries town. Thither, his landlord setting no manner of impediment in his way, and his crops and gear having been well and profitably sold,^ he removed himself in December, in Dumfries and established his family in a little house in the*°^^* Wee Vennel. 'Tis a circumstance to note that, beginning at Ellisland as the Burns of Of A^ the AirtSy some time before the end he was the Burns of Yestreen I Had a Vint 0' Wine? That is, he married Jean in the April of 1788, and some two years after he got Anne Park with child. Jean bore him his second * The standing crops were ' rouped ' in the last week of August. They realised ' a guinea an acre above the average.' But such a riot of drunkenness was * hardly ever seen in this country.' See Bums to Sloan (Scott Douglas, v. 394) for details and for a confession : — * You will easily guess how I enjoyed the scene ; as I was no farther over than you used to see me ' : — which take you back to the Bums of The Jolly Beggars. The stock and gear ' were not sold till August ' (Scott Douglas, V. 392). ' We did not come empty-handed to Dumfries,' Mrs. Bums told M'Diarmid. ' The Ellisland sale was a very good one, A cow in her first calf brought eighteen guineas, and the purchjiser never rued his bargain. Two other cows brought good prices. They had been pre- sented by Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop.' ' I have read somewhere that the first quatrain — the flower of the song — is old ; but I cannot verify the description. ESSAYS son (in wedlock) the 9th April 1791 ; and Anne Park had been delivered of a daughter by him ten days before (31st March). Some say that she died in childbed ; some that she lived to marry a soldier. Nobody knows, and, apparently, nobody cares, what became of her. She was no ' white rose ' (with a legend). She was scarce a ' passion flower' ; ^ and though the Bard himself thought the ditty he made upon her one of his best, the ' episode ' in which she played a principal part is not regarded with any special interest by his biographers. She was a tavern waitress, and he was the Bard ; and she pleased him ; and she lived, or died — it matters not which ; and there's an end on't. The true interest consists, perhaps, in the magnanimity of Jean, who, lying-in a few days after the interloper, was some- how moved to receive the interloper's child, and to suckle it with her own. It is further to note that Anne Park is the last of Burns's mistresses who has a name. That she was not the last in fact you gather from Currie ; ^ but this one is innominate. 1 Chambers declares that, if Jean had not been away in Ayrshire, there would have been no Elizabeth Bums : which is surely the boldest apology for a husband's lapse, at the same time that it is the frankest admission of this particular husband's inability to cleave to his wife in absence, that has ever been offered to an admiring world. Scott Douglas knocks it on the head, and shows that Chambers's valour is greater than Chambers's sense of history, by proving that neither in the June nor the July of 1790 could Jean have been away. ' He has been roundly and deservedly reproved for the manner and the circumstances in which he published his report — (of an ' accidental complaint ') — which, by the way, was started by Heron. For another piece of scandal, whether published or not I do not know — that at Dumfries the Bard walked openly with harlots — it is, of course, entirely un- authenticated ; and I here refer to it but for the purpose of ao4 ROBERT BURNS So far as is known, the goddesses of the years to come, the Chlorises and Marias and Jessies : — * 'Tis sweeter for thee despairing Than aught in the world beside ' : — are all platonic in practice, if not in idea. The pe recipe recipe for song-making was soon to be this: — 1 making, put myself in the regimen of adoring a fine woman, and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you ' — Thomson — ' are delighted with my verses.' It was a mistake, so far as the world is concerned. But Burns made it ; and by the time it was made, he probably knew no better. In his last years, indeed, the irresponsible Faunus of Mossgiel and Edinburgh becomes a kind of senti- mental sultan, who changes, or rewards, his slaves of dream with a magnificence which, edifying or not, is at least amusing. Thus, you find him designing the publication of a book of songs, with portraits of the beauties by whom they are inspired ; a book of Maria Riddell is expelled his lyrical harem as with a t>eauties. fork, because she has offended him ; Jean Lorimer, she of ^the lint- white locks' — ('Bonnie lassie, art- less lassie! ') — is the Chloris of ditty after ditty, till of a sudden Chloris is a disgusting name, and * what you once mentioned of " flaxen locks " is just ' — so just, indeed, that ' they cannot enter into pointing out that, if it were true, the fact of such familiarities, however horrifying to respectable Dumfries, would sit lightly enough both on Bums the peasant and on Bums the poet of The Jolly Beggars and My A untie Jean Held to the Shore : that, if it were true, the memory of Bums exchanging terms with the light-heels of the poet were simply one to set beside the memory of Burton rejoicing in the watermen at the bridge- foot at Oxford. 205 ESSAYS an elegant description of beauty.' ^ This he dis- covers in the February of 1 796, in the July of which year he dies. And he keeps up his trick of throw- ing the lyric handkerchief till the end. All through his last illness he is tenderly solicitous about his wife, be it remembered ; yet the deathbed songs for Jessie Lewars are the best of those closing years. In the result, then, Ellisland was a mistake : not so much because it was a farm, as because it was not Burns's own.^ He was essentially and unalterably a peasant ; and as a peasant-poet, a crofter taking down the best verses ever dictated by the Verna- cular Muse, he might, one would like to think, what with work in the fields, and work at his desk, and the strong, persuasive inducements of home, have attained to length of days and peace of mind and the achievement of still greater fame, at the same time that he realised the ideal which he has sublimated in some famous lines : — * To mak' a happy fireside clime For weans and wife, That's the true pathos and sublime Of human life.' Plainly, though, it could not be. He had too much * Is it not all the Peasant and his womankind ? The peasant's women are his equals. The sentiment of chivalry is not included in his heritage ; and he treats his associates in that lot of penury and toil which is his birthright as the ' predominant partner,' the breadwinner, the provider of children, may : he punishes, that is, and he rewards. It is unlikely that this was Burns's practice with Jean ; but assuredly it was his practice with the ' fine women ' of his dreams. 2 He would have liked the life well enough, he says, had he tilled his own acres. But to take care of another man's, at the cost, too, of a horrible and ever-recurring charge called rent — that was the devil ! 206 ROBERT BURNS genius, too much temperament, for it to be : with too much interest in life, which to him, however diverse and however variable his moods, meant, largely, if not wholly, Wine and Women and Song. Also, he had been too hardly used, too desperately driven in his youth, and too splendidly petted and pampered in his manhood, to endure with constancy the work by which the tenant-farmer has to earn his bread. He had seen his father fail at Mount Oli- phant and Lochlie ; and he had shared his brother's failure at MossgieL By no fault of his own, but owing to the circumstance that he had taken a holding out of which he could not make his rent, he failed himself at EUisland ; and though, in his case, there was small risk of 'a factor's snash,' he was infinitely too honest and too proud to take undue advantage of another man's bounty : so, to make ends meet, he turned gauger, and took charge of ten parishes and rode two hundred miles a week in all weathers. It was a thing he'd always wanted to do, and, at the time he took to doing it, it was the only thing that could profitably be done by him. But his misfortune in having to do it was none the less for that. It took him from his home, it un- settled his better habits, it threw him back on Edinburgh and his triumphing experience as an idler and a Bard, it led him into temptation by divers idler and ways. And when Pan, his goat-foot father — Pan, s^rd. whom he featured so closely, in his great gift of merriment, his joy in life, his puissant appetites, his innate and never-failing humanity — would whistle ,on him from the thicket, he could not often stop his ears to the call. He was the most brilliant and the 207 ESSAYS most popular figure in the district ; he loved good- fellowship ; he needed applause ; he rejoiced in the proof of his own pre-eminence in talk — rejoiced, too, in the transcendentalising effect of liquor upon the talker ^ as in the positive result of his name and fame, his prestance and his personality, upon adoring women. Is it not plain that Dumfries was inevitable ? Or, rather, is it not plain that, first and last, the life was one logical, irrefragable sequence of preparations for the death ? That Mount Oli- phant and Lochlie led irresistibly to Mauchline, as Mauchline to Edinburgh, and Edinburgh to Ellis- land, and EUisland to the house in the Mill Vennel ? And is not the lesson of it all that there is none so The unfortunate as the misplaced Titan — the man too Titail^^^^ great for his circumstances ? Speaking broadly, I can call none to mind who, in strength and genius and temperament, presents so close a general like- ness to Burns as Mirabeau. Born a noble, and given an opportunity commensurate with himself. Burns would certainly have done such work as Mirabeau's, and done it at least as well Born a Scots peasant, Mirabeau must, as certainly, have lived the life and died the death of Burns. In truth, it is only the fortune of war that we remember the one by his conduct of the Revolution, which called his highest capacities into action, while we turn to the other for his verses, which are the out- 1 He complained (to Clarinda) long ere this of the ' savage hospitality ' he could not choose but accept. And, in effect, he had the ill-luck to start drinking at a time when whisky, fire- new from the Highlands, was the fashionable tipple, and was fast superseding ale. Born a generation earher, when ale and claret were the staple comforters, he had stood a better chance. 208 ROBERT BURNS come (so Maria Riddell thought, and was not alone in thinking) of by no means his strongest gift. VIII Whatever the sequel, it may fairly be said for Jj^^^on's Ellisland that Burns and Jean were happy there, and that it saw the birth of Tarn o' Shunter and the per- fecting, in the contributions to Johnson's Museum^ of the Vernacular Song.^ The last, as we know, was Burns's work ; but he had assistants, and they did him yeoman service. He worked in song exactly as he worked in satire and the rest — on familiar, old-established bases ; but, he did so to a very much greater extent than in satire and the rest, and with a great deal more of help and inspiration from without. I have said that he contributed nothing to Vernacular Poetry except himself, but, his contribution apart, was purely Scots-Tradi- tional ; and this is especially true of his treatment of the Vernacular Song. What he found ready to his hand was, in brief, his country's lyric life. Scotland had had singers before him ; and they, nameless now and forgotten save as factors in the^- — sum of his achievement, had sung of life and the ^ I say nothing of the numbers sent to Thomson. Very many are copied from the Museum, and the others need not here be discussed with even an approach to particularity. A point to note in connection with the contributions both to the Museum and to Scottish Airs is that Bums was honour- ably and intensely proud of them. He regarded them as work done in the service of the Scotland whose ' own inspirM Bard ' he was, and neither asked money, nor would take it, for them. To think that he was writing for Thomson to the very end is to have at least one pleasant memory of Dumfries. O 209 ESSAYS experiences of life, the tragedy of death and defeat, the farce and the romance of sex, the rapture and the fun of battle and drink, with sincerity always, and often, very often, with rich or rich-rank humour. Among them they had observed and realised a little world of circumstance and character ; The among them they had developed the folk-song, had folk-song. ^^^^ .^g ^^p^^ j^^j ^^g^ -^ -j^^Q ^j^g rhythms which best fitted its aspirations, had equipped it with all manner of situations and refrains, and, above all, had possessed it of a great number of true and taking lyrical ideas. Any one who has tried to write a song will agree with me, when I say that a lyrical idea — by which I mean a rhythm, a burden, and a drift — once found, the song writes itself. It writes itself easily or with difficulty, it writes itself well or ill ; but in the end it writes itself. In this matter of lyrical ideas Burns was fortunate beyond any of Apollo's sons. He had no need to quest for them : there they lay ready to his hand, and he had but to work his will with them. That they were there explains the wonderful variety of his humours, his effects, and hisjhemes : t hat he couH livTand^ork up to so many'among them is proof pjosilrve and_endurmg:::efj:hf ripprphrnsiyeness, of his humanity3SIgS^_ rights p^y^^It is certain that, had he not been, they had long since passed out of practical life into the Chelsea Hospital of some antiquarian publication. But it is also certain that, had they not been there for him to take and despoil and use, he would not have been — he could not have been — the master- lyrist we know. What he found was of quite extra- — 310 ROBERT BURNS ordinary worth to him ; what he added was himself, and his addition made the life of his find perennial. But, much as are the touch of genius and the stamp of art, they are not everything. The best of many nameless singers lives in Burns's Nameless songs ; but that Burns lives so intense a lyric life ^*"^^^^- is largely due to the fact that he took to himself, and made his own, the lyrical experience, the lyrical longing, the lyrical invention, the lyrical possi- bilities of many nameless singers. He was the last and the greatest of them all ; but he could not have been the greatest by so very much as he seems, had these innominates not been, nor could his songs have been so far-wandered as they are, nor so long- lived as they must be, had these innominates not lived their lyric life before him. In other terms, ^^ the atmosphere, the style, the tone, the realistic styiT ^ method and design, ^ with much of the material and the humanity, of Burns's songs are inherited. Again and again his forefathers find him in lyrical ^ As I have said, r ealism is the distinguishing note of the Vernacular School f and the folk-singers are not less curious in detail than their literary associates and forebears. Even that long sob of pain, O. Waly, Waly, has its elements of everyday life and circumstance : — ' My love was clad in the black velvet. And I myself in cramasie ' : — its references to St. Anton's Well and Arthur's Seat and the sheets that ' sail ne'er be pressed by me.' C/., too, that wonderful little achievement in romance. The Twa Corbies : — ' Ye '11 sit on his white hause-bane, And I '11 pyke out his bonie blue een, Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair We '11 theek our nest when it grows bare.' C/., too, in other styles, Toddlin Hame and Ellibanks and Ellihraes and — well, any folk-song you care to try ! 211 ESSAYS ideas, in whose absence there must certainly — there cannot but have been — a blank in his work. They are his best models, and he does not always surpass them, as he is sometimes not even their equal. ^ And if his effect along certain lines and in certain specified directions be so intense and enduring as it is, the reason is that they are a hundred strong behind him, and that he has selected from each and all of them that which was lyrical and incorruptible. A peasant like themselves, he knew them as none else could ever know. He sympathised from within with their ambitions, their fancies, their ideals, their derisions, even as he was master, and something more, of their methods. And, while it is fair to say that what is best in them is sublimated and glorified by him, it is also fair to say that, but for them, he could never have approved himself the most exquisite artist in folk-song the world has ever seen. It has been complained that, thus much of his claim to be original removed, he must henceforth shine in the lyrical heaven with a certain loss of magnitude and his splendour something dimmed. Fact and And this is SO far true that the Burns of fact differs, legend. ^ Cf . O, Waly, Waly and The Twa Corbies and Helen of Kirconnel ; with Toddlin Hame, which Burns thought ' the first bottle-song in the world,' the old sets of A Cock-Laird Fu' Cadgie and Fee Him, Father, and, in yet another genre, O, Were My Love. Even in The Merry Muses Bums, who wrote a particular class of song with admirable gust and spirit, does no better work than some of the innominates — the poets of Erroch Brae and Johnie Scott and Jenny M'Craw, for example ; while his redaction of Ellibanks and Ellihraes — (' an old free-spoken song which celebrates this locality would be enough in itself to bring the poet twenty miles out of his way to see it ') — is in no wise superior to the original. 212 ROBERT BURNS and differs considerably and at many points, from the Burns of legend. The one is an effect of cer- tain long-lived, inexorable causes ; the other — that * formidable rival of the Almighty,' who, deriving from nobody, and appearing from nowhere, does in ten years the work of half-a-dozen centuries — is an impossible superstition, as it were a Scottish Mumbo- Jumbo. The one comes, naturally and inevitably, at the time appointed, to an appointed end ; but by no conceivable operation in the accom- plishing of human destiny could the other have so much as begun to be. And, after all, however poignant the regret, and however wide-eyed and resentful the amazement of those who esteem a man's work on the same terms as they would a spider's, and value it in proportion as it does, or does not, come out of his own belly, enough remains to Burns to keep him easily first in the first flight of singers in the Vernacular, and to secure him, out- side the Vernacular, the fame of an unique artist. I have said that, as I believe, his genius was at once imitative and emulous ; and, so far as the Verna- cular Song is concerned, to turn the pages of our Third Volume is to see that, speaking broadly, his f unction jwas not ori gination bu t treatment, and t hat in treatme nt it is that the finer qualities of jiis en- dowment are best ex pressed and d isp^laxed. His measures are highhanded enough ; but they are mostly justified.^ He never boggles at appropria- His appro- priation. * Not always. See Vol. iii. (p. 96 and Note) for an attempt to improve upon Ayton (or another), and Vol. iv. (p. 42 and Note) for another to improve upon Carew. Both are failures ; but only one is in the Vernacular, and neither owns a Vernacular original. 213 ESSAYS tion,^ so that some of his songs are the oddest conceivable mixture of Burns, Burns's original, and somebody Burns has pillaged. Take, for instance, that arch and fresh and charming thing, For the sake of Somebody. In the first place, * Somebody' comes to Burns as a Jacobite catchword ; and in the next, the lyrical idea is found in a poor enough botch by Allan Ramsay : — * For the sake of Somebody, For the sake of Somebody, I could wake a winter's night For the sake of Somebody.' This is pretty certainly older than The Tea-Table Miscellany, and has nothing whatever to do with the verses which the later minstrel has tagged it withal. But it is a right lyrical idea, and in the long-run a lyrical idea is a song. So thinks Burns ; and you have but to compare the two sets to see the Master and difference between master and journeyman at a glance. The old, squalid, huckstering little comedy of courtship: — * First we '11 buckle, then we '11 tell. Let her flyte and syne come to . . . I '11 slip hame and wash my feet, An' steal on linens fair and clean, 1 Besides the folk-singers and the nameless lyrists of the song-books, he is found pilfering from Sedley, Garrick, Lloyd, Ramsay, Fergusson, Theobald, Carew, Mayne, Dodsley, and Sir Robert Ayton (or another). See also our Notes (Vol. iii.) on Duncan Davison, on Landlady, Count the Lawin, on Sweetest May, on The Winter it is Past, on We're A' Noddin, to name but these ; and, as a further illustration of his method, note that, according to Scott Douglas (ms. annotation), the first three lines of Gat Ye Me belong to old song No. i., the next five to Bums, and the last eight to old song No. ii. 214 journeyman. ROBERT BURNS Syne at the trysting place we '11 meet, To do but what my dame has done ' : — gives place to a thing to-day as comfortable to the ear and as telling to the heart as when Burns vamped it from Ramsay's vamp from somebody unknown. What is further to note is that not all the latest vamp is Burns plus Ramsay plus Innominate i. plus Jacobite catchword : inasmuch as the first line of Stanza ii. is conveyed from an owlish lover in The Tea-Table Miscellany : — * Ye powers that preside over virtuous love.' Thus some solemn poetaster a good helf-century at least ere Burns ; and for over a hundred years * Ye powers that smile on virtuous love ' has lived as pure Burns, and as pure Burns is now passed into the language. Yet, despite the pilferings and the hints, it were as idle to pretend that Somebody^ as it stands, is not Burns, as it were foolish to assert that Burns would have written Somebody without a certain unknown ancestor. Another flash of illus- tration comes from It Was A^ For Our Right fu"^ King : with its third stanza lifted clean from Mally Stewart^ and set in a jewel of Burnsian gold, especi- ally contrived and chased to set it ofl^ and make the lyric best of it. A third example is found in A Red^ Red Rose^ which, as we have shown (iii. 143 and Note), is a mosaic of rather beggarly scraps of English verse : just as Jonson's peerless Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes is a mosaic contrived in scraps of conceited Greek prose. It is exquisitely done, of course : but, the beggarly scraps of verse away, could it ever have been done at all.'* And 215 ESSAYS Auid Lang Auld Lang Syne} It passes for pure Burns ; but ^^^^' was the phrase itself — the phrase which by his time had rooted itself in the very vitals of the Vernacular — was the phrase itself, I say, not priceless to him ? Something or nothing may be due to Ramsay for his telling demonstration of the way in which it should «o^ be used as a refrain. But what of that older maker and the line which Burns himself thought worth repeating, and which the world rejoices, and will long, rejoice, to repeat with Burns: — ' Should auld acquaintance he forgot, An' never thocht upon ? ' Is there nothing of his cadence, no taste of his senti- ment, no smack of his lyrical idea, no memory (to say the least) of his burden : — ' On old long syne, my jo, On old long syne. That thou canst never once reflect On old long syne ' : — in the later masterpiece ? To say ' No ' were surely to betray criticism. And Ay Waukin^ O — should we, could we ever, have had it, had there been nobody but Burns to start the tune and invent the lyrical idea.'' ' O, wat, wat, O, wat and weary ! Sleep I can get nane For thinkin o' my dearie. * A' the night I wake, A' the day I weary. Sleep I can get nane For thinkin o' my dearie.' 216 ROBERT BURNS Thus, it may be, some broken man, in hiding among the wet hags ; some moss-trooper, drenched and prowling, with a shirtful of sore bones ! Whoever he was, and whatever his calling and condition, he had at least one lyrical impulse, he has his part in a masterpiece by Burns, and his part is no small one. I might multiply examples, and pile Pelion upon Ossa of proof. But to do so were simply to repeat the Bibliographical and the Notes to our Third Volume ; and in this place I shall be better employed in pointing out that these double conceptions (so to speak), these achievements in lyrical collaboration, are for the most part the best known and the best liked of Burns's songs, and are, moreover, those among Burns's songs which show Burns the song- smith at his finest. The truth is that he wrote two Two lyric lyric styles : (i) the style of the Eighteenth Century ''^^^• Song-Books,^ which is a bad one, and in which he * He was trained in it from the first. In early youth he carried an English song-book about with him — wore it in his breeches-pocket, so to speak. This was The Lark : ' Contain- ing a Collection of above Four Hundred and Seventy Cele- brated English and Scotch Songs, None of which are con- tain'd in the other Collections of the same size, call'd The Syren and The Nightingale. With a Curious and Copious Alphabetical Glossary for Explaining the Scotch words. London. Printed (1746) for John Osbom at the Golden Ball in Pater Noster Row.* 'Tis a fat little book, and as multifarious a collection of Restoration and — especially — post- Restoration songs as one could wish to have. Antiquated political squibs ; ballads, as Chevy Chace, with Gilderoy, the Queen's Old Soldier, and Katherine Hayes ; a number of indecencies from D'Urfey's Pills ; Scots folk-songs, like Toddlin Hame and The Ewe Bughts, and O, Waly, Waly and John Ochiltree and The Blithesome Bridal ; current English ditties like Old Sir Simon and Phillida Flouts Me ; a song of a Begging Soldier, whose vaunt, ' With my rags upon my bum,' is echoed in The Jolly Beggars ; much Allan Ramsay ; with scattered examples of Dryden, Dorset, Con- greve, Alexander Scott, Brome, Prior, Wycherley, Rochester, 217 ESSAYS could be as vulgar, or as frigid, or as tame, as very much smaller men ; ^ and (2) the style of the Ver- nacular Folk-Song, which he handled with that understanding and that mastery of means and ends which stamp the artist. To consider his experi- ments in the first is to scrape acquaintance with The Eigh- Claunda^ Mistress of My Soul^ and Turn J gain ^ Century Thou Fair Eliza^ and On A Bank of Flowers^ and Song-Book. Sensibility^ How Charming^ and Castle Gordon^ and A Big-Bellied Bottle^ and Strathallan^s Lament^ and Raving Winds Around Her Blowings and How Pleasant the Banks, and A Rosebud By My Early Walk,^ and many a thing besides, which, were it not known for the work of a great poet, would long Farquhar, Cibber — even Skelton ; and a wilderness of commonplace ditties about love and drink. On the whole an interesting collection. Particulariy if you take it as an element in the education of the lyric Bums, 1 Cf . Their Groves of Sweet Myrtle (Vol. iii. 252-3 and Note), among other things : — ' The slave's spicy forests and gold-bubbling fountains The brave Caledonian views wi' disdain ; He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains. Save Love's willing fetters — the chains o' his Jean.' Such achievements in what Mr. Meredith calls ' the Bathetic,* are less infrequent in Bums than could be wished. * It is understood that Scots Wha Hae is an essay in the Vernacular (I gather, by the way, that it is one of the two or three pieces by ' the Immortal Exciseman nurtured ayont the Tweed ' which are most popular in England). But, even so, one has but to contrast it with 7s There for Honest Poverty, to recognise that in the one the writer's technical and lyrical mastery is complete, while in the other it is merely academic — academic as the lyrical and technical mastery of (say) Rule Britannia. Now, Is There for Honest Poverty is calqui on a certain disreputable folk-song ; while Scots Wha Hae is for all practical purposes the work of an Eighteenth Century Scotsman writing in English, and now and then propitiating the fiery and watchful Genius of Caledonia by spelling a word as it is spelt in the Vernacular. 218 ROBERT BURNS since have gone down into the limbo that gapes for would-be art. In the other are all the little master- pieces by which Burns the lyrist is remembered. He had a lead in The Silver Tassie ^ and in Auld Bums the Lang Syne^ in A Man^s a Man and Duncan Davi-^^^^^' son^ in A Waukrife Minnie and Duncan Gray and Finlay, in / Hae a Wife and It Was /P For Our Rightfu^ King and A Red, Red Rose, in Macpher- son's Lament, and Ay Waukin, O, and Somebody, and Whistle, and IHl Come to Tou — in all or very nearly all, the numbers which make his lyrical bequest as it were a little park apart — an unique retreat of rocks and sylvan corners and heathy spaces, with an abundance of wildings, and here and there a hawthorn brake where, to a sound of running water, the Eternal Shepherd tells his tale — in the spacious and smiling demesne of English Litera- ture. And my contention — that it is to Burns the artist in folk-song that we must turn for thorough contentment — is proved to the hilt by those lyrics in the Vernacular for which, so far as we know, he found no hint elsewhere, and in which, so far as we know, he expressed himself and none besides. He had no suggestions, it seems (but I would not like to swear), no catchwords, no lyrical material for Tarn Glen and Of A' the Airts, for Willie Brewed and Bonie Doon, for Last May a Braw Wooer and O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast,^2Lnd Mary Morison * ' The first four lines are old,' he says, ' the rest is mine.' And, in effect, the quatrain is unique in his work. * It is oddly and amusingly illustrative of Bums's trick of mosaic that a line in this charming song : ' The brightest jewel in my crown ' : comes bodily from — The Court of Equity ! 219 ESSAYS — to name no more. But, if they be directly refer- able to nobody but himself, they feature his whole ancestry. They are folk-songs writ by a peasant of genius, who was a rare and special artist ; and they show that the closer he cleaved to folk-models, and the fuller and stronger his possession by the folk- influence, the more of the immortal Burns is there to-day. Suggested or not, the songs of Burns were devised and written bv a peasan t, devising and writing for peasants, ^he emo tions they deal withal are_ihe_smipj^ in the humanTist3^anijre_^g3^ vivid and ReaUty not direct astoj^e classjic_in its kind. Romance there romance. |g ^^^^ -^^ them, fpF there was^none4n- Burns ^ — 'tis the sole point, perhaps, at which he was out of touch with the unrenowned generations whose flower and crown he was. But of reality, which could best and * None, or so little that if his Jacobitisms seem romantic, it is only by contrast with the realities in which they occur. The interest of even It Was A' For Our Rightfu' King is centred in the vamper's sympathy with, not the romantic situation : — ' He turned him richt and round about Upon the Irish shore,' etc. : — but with that living, breathing, palpitating ' actuality * of sentiment developed in both hero and heroine by the dis- astrous turn of circumstances : — * Now a' is done that man can do. And a' is done in vain ' : — and the position created by those circumstances at the end : — ' But I hae parted from my love Never to meet again ' : — which places this lyric somewhere near the very top of homely and familiar song. 220 ROBERT BURNS soonest bring them home to the class in which their genius was developed, and to which themselves were addressed : — * Grain de muse qui git invisible Au fond de leur eternit6 ' : — there is enough to keep them sweet while the Ver- nacular is read. They are for all, or nearly all, the peasant's trades and crafts : so that the gangrel tinker shares them with the spinner at her wheel, the soldier with the ploughman, the weaver with the gardener and the tailor and the herd. Morals, experiences, needs, love and liquor, the rejoicing vigour and unrest of youth, the placid content of age — there is scarce anything he can endure which is not bril- liantly, and (above all) sincerely and veraciously, set forth in them. That old-world Scotland, whose oid-worid last and greatest expression was Burns, either has Scotland, passed or is fast passing away. In language, manners, morals, ideals, religion, substance, capacity, the theory and practice of life — in all these the country of Burns has changed : in some, has changed * beyond report, thought, or belief.' But that much of her which was known to her Poet is with us still, and is with us in these songs. For man and woman change not, but endure for ever : so that what was truly said a thousand years ago comes home as truth to-day, and will go home as truth when to-day is a thousand years behind. To the making of these things there went the great and generous humanity of Burns, with the humanity, less great but still generous_and ^sincere, of those unknownsTwIiosenamelessness was ever a regret to 221 ESSAYS hlm.^ They are art in their kind. And there is no reason why this ' little Valclusa fountain ' should lack pilgrims, or run dry, for centuries.^ IX I PURPOSE to deal with the Dumfries period with A story of ^11 possible brevity. The story is a story of decadence ; and, even if it were told in detail, would tell us nothing of Burns that we have not already heard or are not ail-too well prepared to learn. In a little town, where everybody's known to everybody, there is ever an infinite deal of scandal ; and Burns was too reckless and too con- * ' Are you not quite vexed to think that these men of genius, for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be unknown ? It has given me many a heartache ' (R. B. to Thomson, 19th November 1794). And see his Journal for a more heart-felt recognition still. * They lived not long the limited life of Johnson's Musical Museum and Thomson's Scottish Airs. Thus, in a collection of North of England chap-books {c. 1810-20) which I owe to the kindness of the Earl of Crawford, I find at least two Burns ' Songsters ' — (they are the same, but one is called ' The Ayrshire Bard's Songster,' the other something else) — both ' Printed by J. Marshall in the Old Fleshmarket,' New- castle. In a third — a miscellany, this one — is Scots Wha Hae, ' As sung by Mr. Braham at the Newcastle Theatre Royal ' (Carlyle thought this famous lyric should be ' sung by the throat of the whirlwind ' ; but it had better luck than that). The great Jew tenor further warbled a couple of stanzas of The Winter It is Past at a concert in the same city, when Miss Stephens was responsible for Charlie He's My Darling. In other chaps Bums is found rubbing shoulders with Moore and Campbell and TomDibdin, and a hundred others, among them Allan Ramsay. In these Of A' the Airts is sandwiched between The Twopenny Postman and the Wedding at Bally- poreen, while Somebody is kept in countenance by Paddy Carey and The Wounded Hussar. The most popular, perhaps, are Of A' the Airts and Scots Wha Hae, and Willie Brew'd; but On a Bank of Flowers lacks not admirers. 222 ROBERT BURNS spicuous not to become a peculiar cockshy for the scandalmongers of Dumfries. In a little town, especially if it be a kind of provincial centre, there must of necessity be many people with not much to do besides talking and drinking ; and Burns was ever too careless of consequences, as well as ever too resolute to make the most of the fleeting hour — it may be, too, was by this time too princely and too habitual a boon-companion — to refrain from drink and talk when drink and talk were to be had. In the sequel, also, it would seem that that old jealousy of his betters (to use the ancient phrase) had come to be a more disturbing influence than it had ever been before. He knew, none better, that, however brilliantly the poet had succeeded, the man was so far a failure as an investment, that, with bad health and a growing family, he had nothing to look for- ward to but promotion in the Excise ; and his discontent with the practical outcome of his ambi- tion and the working result of his fame was certainly not soothed, and may very well have been exacerbated, by his rather noisy sympathy with the i leading principles of the French Revolution. He The French was too fearless and too proud to dissemble that devolution, sympathy, which was presently (1794) to find ex- I pression in one of his most vigorous and telling lyrics ; he was, perhaps, too powerful a talker not to exaggerate its quality and volume ; and, though it was common, in the beginning at least, to many Scotsmen, its expression got him, as was inevitable, into trouble with his superiors, and in the long-run was pretty certainly intensified, to the point at which resentment is translated into terms of indiscretion 223 ESSAYS and imprudence, by the reflection, whether just or not,^ that it had damaged his chances of promotion. That he fought against temptation is as plain as that he proved incapable of triumph, and that, as Carlyle has wisely and humanely noted, the best for him, certain necessary conditions being impossible, was to die. Syme,^ who knew and loved him, said that he was ' burnt to a cinder ' ere Death took him ; we can see for ourselves that the Burns of the Kilmarnock Volume and the good things in the Museum had ceased to be some time before the end ; there is evidence that some time before the end he was neither a sober companion nor a self-respecting husband. And the reflection is not to be put by, 1 It seems to have been unjust. Pitt, though he loved the poetry of Burns, did nothing for him — was probably, indeed, too busy to think of doing anything once the page was read and the bottle done ; and Fox, to whom Bums looked for advancement, was ever out of office, and could do nothing, even had he been minded to do something, which we are not told that he was. But the Bard had a sure stay in Graham of Fintry ; and, though Glencairn was dead, and he was sometimes reprimanded (et pour cause), there is no reason to believe that he would have missed preferment had he lived to be open to it. * It has been said, I believe, that Syme's evidence is worth- less, inasmuch as it tends to discredit Burns. But one eye- witness, however dull and prejudiced (and Syme was neither one nor other), is worth a wilderness of sentimental his- torians ; and Syme's phrase, howbeit it is so picturesque that it conveys what is, perhaps, too violent an impression, probably means no more than that Burns had damaged him- self with drink. That much Bums admitted time and again ; and Currie — who cannot but have got his information from Maxwell — remarks that for over a year before the end ' there was an evident decline of our Poet's personal appearance, and, though his appetite continued unimpaired, he was himself sensible that his constitution was sinking.' It was all, the doctor thought, the effect of alcohol on a difficult digestion and a sensitive nervous system ; and, though he was some- thing of a fanatic in this matter, I see no reason, as he was also an honest man, to question his diagnosis. ROBERT BURNS that he left the world at the right moment for himself and for his fame. There is small doubt that the report of his mis- conduct was at best unkindly framed ; there is none that certain among his apologists have gone a very The poet's great deal too far in the opposite direction. We ^^° °^^^ ^' may credit Findlater, for instance, but it is impos- sible, having any knowledge of the man, to believe in the kind of Exciseman-Saint of Gray : impec- cable in all the relations of life and never the worse for liquor : even as it is impossible to believe in the bourgeois Burns of the latest apotheosis. As Lock- hart says, the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes ; and one is glad to agree with Lockhart. Even so, however, tradition, as reported by friends and enemies alike, runs stronger in his disfavour than it does the other way.^ And, though we know that party feeling ran high in Dumfries, and that Burns — ^with his stiff neck, and his notable distinction, and his absolute gift of speech — did ^ ' We are raising a subscription (horrid word) ' — (thus Sir Walter, to Morritt, 15th January 1814) — 'for a monument to Bums, an honour long delayed, pisrhaps till some parts of his character were forgotten by those among whom he lived.' This was written within twenty years of Burns's death : when the grievance of the Revolution was lost in the shadow cast by the tremendous presence of Napoleon. And, if it be urged that Bums's offending against Toryism must have been rank indeed to be recalled thus bitterly and thus late, it may be retorted that by no possibility can it have been an hundredth part so indecent as the conduct of the Parliamentary Whigs during the life and long after the death of Pitt. Of all men living Bums was entitled to an opinion ; of all men living he had the best gift of expression. Well, he had his opinion, and he used his gift ; and Dumfries could not forgive him. It is again a question of circumstances. Fox and the rest were honoured Members of His Majesty's Opposition. Bums was only an exciseman. ESSAYS certainly damn himself in the eyes of many by what, in the circumstances, must have seemed a suicidal intemperance of feeling and expression, we know also that, once extremely popular, he was presently cut by Dumfries society ; that after a time his reputation was an indifferent one on other counts than politics ; and that more than once — as in the case of Mrs. Riddell, and again, when he had to apologise for a toast no reasonable or well-bred man would have proposed in the presence of a King's officer, unless he were prepared to face the conse- quences — he behaved himself ill, according to the standard of good manners then and now. The explanation in these and other cases is that he was drunk ; and, as matter of fact, drink and disappoint- ment were pretty certainly responsible between them The pathos for the mingled squalor and gloom and pathos of of the end. ^^^ ^^^^ There is nothing like liquor to make a strong man vain of his strength and jealous of his prerogative — even while it is stealing both away ; and there is nothing like disappointment to confirm such a man in a friendship for liquor. Last of all, there needs but little knowledge of character and life to see that to apologise for Burns is vain : that we must accept him frankly and without reserve for a peasant of genius perverted from his peasanthood, thrust into a place for which his peasanthood and his genius alike unfitted him, denied a perfect oppor- tunity, constrained to live his qualities into defects, and in the long-run beaten by a sterile and un- natural environment. We cannot make him other than he was, and, especially, we cannot make him a man of our own time : a man born tame and civil 226 ROBERT BURNS and unexcessive — *he that died o' Wednesday,' and had obituary notices in local prints. His elements are ail-too gross, are ail-too vigorous and turbulent for that. ' God have mercy on me,' he once wrote of himself, ' a poor damned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool! the sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagina- tions, agonising sensibility and bedlam passions.' Plainly he knew himself as his apologists have never known him, nor will ever know. That his intellectual and temperamental endow- His mag- i^^^ ment was magnificent we know by the way in which gj^^o^^^gnt he affected his contemporaries, and through the terms in which some of them — Robertson, Heron, Dugald Stewart, and, especially, Maria Riddell — recorded their impression of him ; yet we know also that, for all his magnificence, or, as I prefer to think, by reason of its magnificence, it could not save him from defeat and shame. Where was the lesion.? What was the secret of his fall ? Lord Rosebery, as I believe, has hit the white in saying that he was * great in his strength and great in his weaknesses.' ^ His master-qualities, this critic very justly notes, were ^ inspiration and sympathy.' But if I would add ' and character ' — which, to be sure, is largely an effect of conditions — how must the commentary run ? There is pride — the pride of Lucifer : what did it spare him in the end? There is well-nigh the finest brain conceivable ; yet is there a * I note with pleasure that Lord Rosebery knows too much of life, and is too good a judge of evidence, to think of putting a new complexion on the facts of these last, unhappy years. But has he been explanatory enough ? What, after all, but failure is possible for strength misplaced and misapplied ? 237 ESSAYS certain curious intolerance of facts which obliges the owner of that brain, being a Government officer and seeing his sole future in promotion, to flaunt a friendship with roaring Jacobins like Maxwell and A • Son of Syme, and get himself nicknamed a ' Son of Sedi- Sedition. ^-jon,' and have it reported of him, rightly or not, that he has publicly avowed disloyalty at the local theatre.-^ There is a passionate regard for women ; with, as Sir Walter noted, a lack of chivalry which is attested by those lampoons on living Mrs. Riddell and on dead Mrs. Oswald. There is the strongest sense of fatherhood with the tenderest concern for ' weans and wife ' ; and there is that resolve for pleasure which not even these uplifting influences can check. There is a noble generosity of heart and temper ; but there is so imperfect a sense of conduct, so practical and so habitual a faith in a certain theory: — * The heart ay 's the part ay, That maks us richt or wrang * : — that in the end you have a broken reputation, and death at seven or eight and thirty, the effect of a variety of discrediting causes. Taking the pre- cisian's point of view, one might describe so extraordinary a blend of differences as a bad, well- ^ I do not for an instant forget that here is more circum- stance : that he was a true Briton at heart, and that in the beginning his Jacobinism was chiefly, if not solely, an effect of sympathy with a tortured people. But there are ways and ways of favouring an unpopular cause ; and Bums's were alike defiant and unwise. Thus Maxwell was practically what most people then called a ' murderer ' — of the French King ; yet it was while, or soon after, the enormities of the Terror were at their worst, that he became a chief associate of Bums. To some this seems a ' noble imprudence.' Was it not rather pure incontinence of self ? 228 ROBERT BURNS meaning man, and one might easily defend the description. But the precisian has naught to do at this grave-side ; and to most of us now it is history that, while there was an infinite deal of the best sort of good in Burns, the bad in him, being largely The good compacted of such purely unessential defects as*" e a . arrogance, petulance, imprudence, and a turn for self-indulgence, this last exasperated by the condi- tions in which his lot was cast, was not of the worst kind after all. Yet the bad was bad enough to wreck the good. The little foxes were many and active and greedy enough to spoil a world of grapes. The strength was great, but the weaknesses were greater; for time and chance and necessity were ever developing the weaknesses at the same time that they were ever beating down the strength. That is the sole conclusion possible. And to the plea, that the story it rounds is very pitiful, there is this victorious answer : — that the Man had drunk his life to the lees, while the Poet had fulfilled him- self to the accomplishing of a peculiar immortality ; so that to Burns Death came as a deliverer and a friend. 229 BYRON'S WORLD Henry Henry's father, Domenico Malevoli Tremamundo Angeio. AngelOj a renowned professor of equitation and the sword, was an ami intime of Peg Woffington, who fell in love with him — (so Henry says) — at a fencing-match, and whirled him off to England in her own carriage. Here he taught the manege and the use of the arme blanche^ patronised the arts, was everybody's friend, married the daughter of ' Cap- tain Masters, Commander of the Chester frigate,' lived honourably, and died when he was eighty- seven, leaving his son (whom he had sent to Eton and to Paris) to reign in his stead. Like Domenico, Henry taught everybody fencing, and knew every- body worth knowing. He had, too, a talent for acting and the singing of comic songs, and he played much at Wargrave with Hell-Gate Barry- more and his following, and in London with the Margravine of Anspach. An old schoolmate (Dublin) of R. B. Sheridan's, who learned the sword of him, he was particularly associated with Bannister the actor, Rowlandson the caricaturist, Jackson the pugilist (with whom he had rooms in Bond Street), and Bate Dudley, the Fighting Parson ; fenced regularly with Edmund Kean ; was able to bet fifty 230 BYRON^S WORLD pounds that he had dined at the same table with the Henry Prince of Wales ('twas in 1806, at the Neapolitan ^"g^^°- Club), and to win his wager on the authority of ' Anacreon Moore ' ; and was, in short, as jovial, buxom, and flourishing a blade as his state in society could show. His acquaintance with Byron began at Harrow (' From his Lordship's affability and pleasant manners I knew more of him than of many I attended there at the time ') ; and at the Albany, years afterwards, he used to play single-stick daily (at half a guinea a lesson) with the poet, for the express purpose of giving his pupil ' a fine breathing sweat,' and taking down his fat. Angelo has several stories to tell of Byron : — how he (Angelo) hunted down a quotation for him, and so enabled him to win a bet ; how they met at Newmarket the day that Captain Barclay walked his match with Wood, and how Byron drove him to Cambridge (Theodore Hook was of the party), gave him dinner, saw him and Hook to the coach, and * sent to St. John's College for the good beer it was noted for, when, filling two tumblers, he handed them up himself to us, laughing at the many people who were wondering at his being so very busy waiting on the outside passengers ' ; how Byron ' gave me an order on Mr. Murray (whom I had first the pleasure of knowing near forty years since, when at the Rev. Dr. Thompson's, Kensington) for several of his books, Childe Harold^ etc.,' . . . and ' I did not at the time request his signature on the title- page' ; how * I,' Henry Angelo, collected portraits of pugilists and players, from Slack and Betterton downwards, and therewith composed him a certain 231 ESSAYS Henry famous screcn, which John Murray the Second Angeio. ]3ought at the sale in Piccadilly, and which abides in Albemarle Street unto this day. On the whole, Angeio retained so good and moving a memory of his pupil that he cannot recall that time at Cam- bridge, the ' pleasure ' of which was so ' greatly enhanced ' by Lord Byron's ' affability and cordial reception,' without a little attempt at the cri du cceur and the note emu e. ' What must be my feel- ings now,' he writes (1830), 'when recollecting the scene of that evening — his obliging condescension, our parting, the coach driving off, his huzzas, and the twisting of his hat! Such feelings can never be obliterated.' In effect. Sunt lacrimae rerum. . . . Byron's My amiable Alecto: — Byron's Mother, who at mother, ^.j^-g |.jj^g Yi'Sid taken to the use of fireirons as a means of marking her sense of displeasure with her son. She was Catherine, only Child and heiress of George Gordon of Gight, and she married John Byron, in 1785, the year after the death of his first wife, Amelia d'Arcy, Baroness Conyers, a daughter of the fourth Earl of Holderness, with whom, as Marchioness of Carmarthen, he had eloped some years before. In person she was dumpy and plain, in disposition passionate, in temper furious and tyrannical, in mind a superstitious dullard, and in manners a naturally awkward and untrained pro- vincial. But she was a fortune ; and John Byron, a handsome scamp, who was head over ears in debt, had small difficulty in making her and her money his own. This, from what Moore calls ' an BYRON'S WORLD authentic source ' (it reads like the family lawyer), Byron's is how he carried out his part of the marriage con- ™°*^®^- tract : — * At the time of the marriage, Miss Gordon was pos- sessed of about £3000 in money, two shares of the Aberdeen Banking Company, the estates of Gight and Monkshill, and the superiority of two salmon-fishings on Dee. Soon after the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Byron Gordon in Scot- land, it appeared that Mr. Byron had involved himself very deeply in debt, and his creditors commenced legal proceedings for the recovery of their money. The cash in hand was soon paid away, — the bank shares were dis- posed of at £600 (now worth £5000) — timber on the estate was cut down and sold to the amount of £1500 — the farm of Monkshill and superiority of the fishings, affording a freehold qualification, were disposed of at £480 ; and, in addition to these sales, within a year after the marriage, £8000 was borrowed upon a mortgage on the estate, granted by Mrs. Byron Gordon to the person who lent the money. In March 1786 a contract of marriage in the Scotch form was drawn up and signed by the parties. In the course of the summer of that year Mr. and Mrs. Byron left Gight, and never returned to it ; the estate being, in the following year, sold to Lord Haddo for the sum of £17,850, the whole of which was appHed to the payment of Mr. Byron's debts, with the exception of £1122, which remained as a burden on the estate (the interest to be appHed to paying a jointure of £55, lis. id. to Mrs. Byron's grandmother, the principal reverting, at her death, to Mrs. Byron), and £3000 vested in trustees for Mrs. Byron's separate use, which was lent to Mr. Carsewell of Ratharllet, in Fifeshire.' In the summer of 1786 she accompanied her hus- band to France ; and, returning to England towards the end of 1787, took a furnished house in Holies Street, and there gave birth to her only child in the late January of 1788. From London she went to 233 ESSAYS Byron's Aberdeen, where she was presently joined by Cap- tain Byron. Of course they could not agree ; and, after an attempt at life in separate lodgings (at opposite ends of the same street), during which they visited and took tea together, they ceased from speaking, and John Byron, who simply wanted her money, soon left for London. He returned in no great while, and, having squeezed her to the amount of a few pounds more, again departed, and died the next year (1791) at Valenciennes: leaving his foolish, ill-bred, ill-conditioned, ill-served, yet ador- ing widow to expend the full amount of her very emotional temperament and habit on the 'lame brat,' their child. He was a lively boy, but very sensitive and shy, and ' in my sullen moods ... a devil.' What chance had such a son with such a mother? With him, it is told on first-hand authority, ' she would pass from passionate caresses to the actual repulsion of disgust,' and 'the next moment she would devour him with kisses again, and swear his eyes were as beautiful as his father's.' In 1798, on Byron's accession to the title, the pair removed to Newstead ; and there she placed her son in the hands of an ignoble quacksalver, whose treatment of the poor boy's malformation — (it con- sisted chiefly in twisting and wrenching the foot, and in screwing it up in a wooden engine) — inflicted on him many hours of futile and excruciating agony. By the summer of 1799, however, it was borne in upon her, ' daft Gordon ' as she was, that the practice of this ignorant brute had failed ; so she removed to London, took a house in Sloane Terrace, gave her son to the care of Dr. Baillie, and 234 BYRON\S WORLD — havins: been placed, for some occult reason, on Byron's ,„. .9^.-^ • c r i. mother. the Civil List for a pension of i,300 a year — sent him to a private school at Dulwich. At Dulwich Byron might have done well enough, had he been left alone ; but patience and tact and self-restraint were not in his mother's nature. She disgusted Lord Carlisle, who was her son's guardian, so that in no great while that highly respectable nobleman was moved to wash his hands of both his ward and his ward's mother ; while, as for the Dulwich school, she so exerted her ill-timed and capricious fondness that, when Byron left it for Harrow, he was, says the kindly and painstaking Glennie, ' as little prepared as it is natural to suppose from two years of elemen- tary instruction, thwarted by every art that could estrange the mind of youth from preceptor, from school, and from serious study.' Years wrought no change, save for the worse, in her ; and though Byron, by 1806, had contrived to get his own temper fairly well in hand, and was often able to listen to her rants in silence, the scenes between them were many and painful (the comic aspect of the situation is presented with admirable wit and tact in Disraeli's VeneXid), ' It is told,' says Moore, ' as a curious proof of their opinions of each other's violence, that, after parting one evening in a tempest of this kind, they were known each to go privately that night to the apothecary's, inquiring anxiously whether the other had been to purchase poison, and cautioning the vendor of drugs not to attend to such an application, if made.' On the present occasion, as we have seen, Byron took refuge in flight. 235 ESSAYS Byron's Mrs. Byron died at Newstead — which her son mother, j^^j appropriated 'almost exclusively' to her use, and to which he insisted on coming as a guest — in the July of 1 8 1 1 . She had grown extremely cor- pulent, and had been ' of late indisposed, but not to any alarming degree ' ; when (so Moore reports) ' a fit of rage, brought on ... by reading over the upholsterer's bills, was the ultimate cause of her death.' The Volage had landed Byron but a very few days before the news of her seizure was con- veyed to him ; but he reached Newstead too late to see her again in life. On the morning of the funeral he boxed, they say, with Rushton. But everybody has his way of working off an emotion. And Byron, despite the extraordinary quality of his relations with his mother, was passionately grieved by her loss. It was with many tears that he told her maid, who found him watching beside the bed of death, that he * had but one friend in the world, and she was gone.' And there can be no manner of doubt that Mrs. Byron was immensely fond of him in her way, at the same time that in her way she was immensely proud of him. R. c. Robert Charles Dallas (1754-1824), 'author' Dallas. (Moore says) 'of some novels, popular, I believe, in their day,' was the son of a doctor, was born at Dallas Castle, and was educated at Musselburgh and at Kingston (under James Elphinstone). He read law at the Inner Temple ; but, on attaining his majority, he went to Jamaica, where he had pro- perty, and for some time lived there and in the 236 BYRON'S WORLD U.S.A. Returning to England, he turned author, R. c. and published Miscellaneous Writings (1797: ' Consisting of Poems ; Lucretia, a Tragedy ; and Moral Essay Sy with a Vocabulary of the Passions ') ; Percivaly or Nature Vindicated (1801), a novel ; Elements of Self -Knowledge (1802); Aubrey (1804) 5 Tales Illustrative of the Simple and the Surprising (1805) > ^^^ much else. He was a sort of connexion (* Captain George Anson Byron of the Royal Navy, father of the present Lord Byron, had married a sister of Mr. Dallas.' — Moore) ; and at this time he introduced himself to Byron's notice in a solemn letter about Hours of Idleness : a letter in which he cited, being aggressively, and even ponderously, moral, the good Lord Lyttelton as an example and the wicked Lord Lyttelton as the other thing, and wrote himself down generally the well- meaning, officious, wordy, pompous, and extremely self-satisfied person he was. Byron replied — delighted to be taken seriously, yet with his tongue most plainly in his cheek ; and Dallas was presently privileged to assist in the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Four years after, on Byron's return from the East, Dallas was still further privileged, and assisted in the publication of Childe Haroldy which Byron gave him, and on which he received the profits (;^8oo), as he presently received, in the same way, the profits on The Corsair (18 13). Then the pair drifted apart; and after Missolonghi Dallas produced an account of Byron against which Hanson and Hobhouse, the poet's executors, procured an injunction, on the strength of certain letters to the Hon. Mrs. Byron which 237 ESSAYS R- c. were set forth in its pages. This was just before Dallas's death, when the book was republished in Paris (1824), as Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron from the Tear 1808 to the end of 18 14. William WiLLiAM HARNESS (1790-1869) was Byron's arness. j^j^j^j. ^^ Harrow. Harness was weak and lame when he entered the school ; and Byron fought his battles for him. They fell out, but were recon- ciled : so that Byron was moved to dedicate the First and Second Harold to him, but did not'* for fear it should injure him in his profession.' Writ- ing some years after Harrow, Byron speaks thus of both the estrangement and the friendship : — * We both seem perfectly to recollect, with a mixture of pleasure and regret, the hours we once passed together, and I assure you, most sincerely, they are numbered among the happiest of my brief chronicle of enjoyment. I am now getting into years, that is to say, I was twenty a month ago, and another year will send me into the world to run my career of folly with the rest. I was then just fourteen, — you were almost the first of my Harrow friends, certainly the first in my esteem, if not in date ; but an absence from Harrow for some time, shortly after, and new connexions on your side, and the difference in our conduct (an advantage decidedly in your favour) from that turbulent and riotous disposition of mine, which impelled me into every species of mischief, — all these circumstances combined to destroy an intimacy, which affection urged me to continue, and memory compels me to regret. But there is not a 238 BYRON'S WORLD circumstance attending that period, hardly a sen- William tence we exchanged, which is not impressed on my mind at this moment. I need not say more, — this assurance alone must convince you, had I considered them as trivial, they would have been less indelible. How well I recollect the perusal of your "first flights"! There is another circumstance you do not know ; the first lines I ever attempted at Harrow were addressed to you. You were to have seen them ; but Sinclair had the copy in his possession when we went home ; — and, on our return, we were strangers. They were destroyed, and certainly no great loss ; but you will perceive from this circum- stance my opinions at an age when we cannot be hypocrites. I have dwelt longer on this theme than I intended, and I shall now conclude with what I ought to have begun. We were once friends, — nay, we have always been so, for our separation was the efl^ect of chance, not of dissension. I do not know how far our destinations in life may throw us together, but if opportunity and inclination allow you to waste a thought on such a harebrained being as myself, you will find me at least sincere, and not so bigoted to my faults^ as to involve others in the consequences. Will you sometimes write to me? I do not ask it often ; and if we meet, let us be what we should be, and what we were.^ — (Moore.) In a letter to Moore, written after Byron's death. Harness gives this pleasant and particular account of their friendship : — ^ A coolness afterwards arose, which Byron alludes to in the first of the accom- panying letters, and we never spoke during the last year of his remaining at school, nor till after the ESSAYS WiUiam publication of his Hours of Idleness. Lord Byron was then at Cambridge ; I, in one of the upper forms at Harrow. In an English theme I happened to quote from the volume and mention it with praise. It was reported to Byron that I had, on the contrary, spoken slightingly of his work and of himself, for the purpose of conciliating the favour of Dr. Butler, the master, who had been severely satirised in one of the poems. Wingfield, who was afterwards Lord Powerscourt, a mutual friend of Byron and myself, disabused him of the error into which he had been led, and this was the occasion of the first letter of the collection. Our intimacy was renewed, and continued from that time till his going abroad. Whatever faults Lord Byron might have had towards others, to myself he was always uni- formly affectionate. I have many slights and neglects towards him to reproach myself with ; but I cannot call to mind a single instance of caprice or unkindness, in the whole course of our friendship, to allege against him.' In effect, Harness was one of the friends whose portraits Byron had painted by Sanders ere his departure for the East. He remembered the Harrow days so well that at Rogers's table he was able to quote to Moore, who was then (1828-29) engaged upon the Life and Letters, such a * strain of unpremeditated art ' as this of Byron's, ' roared out ' at a schoolmate who was a violent Bonapartist : — Bold Robert Speer was Bony's bad precursor. Bob was a bloody dog, but Bonaparte a worser. He visited at Newstead in 18 12, when Byron was 240 BYRON'S WORLD correctlngf the proofs of the First and Second wniiam Harold. There he met Francis Hodgson, who was *at work in getting out the ensuing number of The Monthly Review^^ and for three weeks — weeks of late hours at both ends of the day — * the general talk was of poets and poetry, and who could or who could not write,' though it occasionally ' strayed into very serious discussions on religion,' In due course Harness took orders and a country curacy ; but Byron was never afraid of the cloth — (conspicuous among his early friends are Becher, Harness, Hodg- son, and Drury, parsons all) — and the intimacy continued unimpaired till 1 8 1 6 and the Exile, after which it died a natural death. Harness, a person of elegant taste, had always found Byron's poetry 'a little too "strong" for him'; being Boyle Lecturer at Cambridge, he took occasion to speak of Cain as he thought it deserved ; and two years after came the end. But though he found Byron's Venetian life still * stronger ' than Byron's poetry, he never ceased from being Byron's champion ; and the few pages in which he discusses the Marriage, and the Separation, and the Characters of the parties thereto, are uncompromisingly Byronian, at the same time that they are sane and liberal enough to make you wish that he had written many more. For the rest, he lived an active, blameless, usefiil life: as minister (1825) of Regent Square Chapel, St. Pancras, where he stayed for twenty years ; as Morning Preacher at Trinity Chapel, Conduit Street, and Minister and Evening Lecturer at St. Ann's, Soho ; and as Minister of Brompton Chapel, in which capacity he compassed the building of All Q 241 ESSAYS William Souls', Knightsbridgc. He edited Shakespeare Harness. ^^^ Masslnger, wrote much for Blackwood^ and published a certain amount of timid, unexception- able verse. Moreover, being extremely popular as a preacher, and withal *a gentleman of the Old School,' he went everywhere and saw everybody. His lifelong friend (they knew each other as babies) was Mary Russell Mitford, whose Life he lived to write ; but Sir Walter, Crabbe, Rogers, Sydney Smith, the Kembles, the Derbys, the Lansdownes, Daniel Webster, Washington Irving, the Berrys, Lydia White, Father Mathew, Talfourd, Joanna Baillie, Milman, Dickens, Thackeray, Crabb Robin- son — at one or the other time he knew them all. In the end, being very old, he fell down a stone stair in the Deanery at Battle, and was taken up dead. Lord Henry Richard Vassall Fox, Third Baron Holland. Holland, a nephew of Charles James Fox (1773- 1 840), was educated at Eton and Oxford. In 1 797 he married Elizabeth Vassall, the divorced wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, to whom he had already paid ;£'6ooo damages as defendant in an action for crim. con. The ' constant protector of all oppressed races and persecuted sects' (Macaulay), he did good work against the Slave-Trade, the Corn Laws, and the Criminal Code ; took the other side in the matter of the War and the isolation of Napoleon ; and served on the Ministries of Earl Grey and Lord Melbourne. Also, he wrote gracefully about Spanish literature and his uncle Fox, and edited the 243 BYRON'S WORLD Waldepfrave Memoirs. A grood talker, a capital Lord • • • J V U A U / ^ Holland. mimic, an engaging and accomplished host, to Sheridan he is 'the only public man I have any attachment for ' ; his Holland House parties are historical ; and in 1833 Ticknor ' cannot help agree- ing with Scott that he is the most agreeable man I have ever met,' the reason being that ' to the great resources of his knowledge he adds a laissez-aller, arising from his remarkable good-nature which is irresistible.' Of Lord Holland in Parliament, Holcroft, writing in 1799, remarks that 'He has not sufficient vehemence of feeling to become a man of genius ' ; while to Byron (18 13) he is ' impressive from sense and sincerity.' As we shall see, Byron believed himself justified in what he wrote to Becher (that the Edinburgh Reviewers never praise except the partisans of Lord Holland and Co.), and in the Text and Notes of English Bards he trounced the Holland House set with all the strength that was in him. Afterwards, being convinced of his error, he was on excellent terms with Lord Holland, to whom he was introduced by Rogers, and to whom he dedicated The Bride of Ahydos (18 13), 'With Every Sentiment of Regard and Respect.' This was Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749-18 14). Pratt, the Born at St. Ives (Bucks), he began, it appears, as a ^1^^^^^- parson, but, getting into trouble over women, and quarrelling with his parents, he turned actor, playing under the noble name of Courtney Melmoth in Dublin, and failing (1774) at Covent Garden in Hamlet and in Philaster. After this he took to 343 ESSAYS Pratt, the scribbling — still as Courtney Melmoth ; went into partnership (c. 1776) with a Bath bookseller named Clinch ; and coming to London some time after- wards, fell in with Wolcot, Beattie, Colman, and iEschylus Potter, and took so valiantly to scribbling prose and verse that three columns of the British Museum Catalogue are filled with the titles of his works : among them Sympathy : -vr n i i • 1809), Captain, K.JN., was mortally wounded in a duel by a Mr. Powell, and died the same day. The quarrel appears to have taken place in the Argyle Institution (or some such place), which was part hell and part assembly rooms. Hence the lines in English Bards : — The jovial caster 's set, and seven 's the nick, Or — done ! — a thousand on the coming trick ! If, mad with loss, existence 'gins to tire. And all your hope or wish is to expire, Here 's Powell's pistol ready for your hfe, And, kinder still, two Pagets for your wife. In a note to this passage Byron writes : — ' I knew the late Lord Falkland well. On Sunday night I beheld him presiding at his own table, in all the honest pride of hospitality ; on Wednesday morn- ing, at three o'clock, I saw stretched before me all that remained of courage, feeling, and a host of passions. He was a gallant and successful officer : his faults were the faults of a sailor [those of dissipa- tion] — as such, Britons will forgive them. He died like a brave man in a better cause ; for had he fallen in like manner on the deck of the frigate to which he was just appointed, his last moments would have been held up by his countrymen as an example to succeeding heroes.' In a letter to Hanson (8th February 1809), Byron, after remark- ing that he is ' dunned from noon till twilight,' and that he must have money or ' quit the country,' adds this : — ' If I do not get my seat immediately, I shall sail with Lord Falkland in the Desiree frigate for Sicily.' Yet, soon after the duel, says Moore, he BYRON'S WORLD * reminded the unfortunate widow that he was to be Lord godfather to her infant ; the child was christened Byron-Charles-Ferdinand-Plantagenet Gary, and after the ceremony the poet inserted a five hundred pound note in a breakfast cup . . . not discovered till he had left the house.' William Beckford (1759-1844) of ^^r/i^fe wiUiam (1787)5 that masterpiece of wit, imagination, and narrative, written at twenty-two, and in a single sitting of ' three days and two nights,' during which time ' I never took off my clothes,' so that ' the severe application made me very ill.' At the time of Byron's writing he was still the Beckford of Font- hill and its Tower, which he did not sell till 1822. But the Beckford of Cintra (1794-96) was already so completely of the past, that Byron, not long after this very Letter, could address him in these terms : — Here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan, Beneath yon mountain's ever beauteous brow : But now, as if a thing unblest by Man, Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou ! Here giant weeds a passage scarce allow To halls deserted, portals gaping wide : Fresh lessons to the thinking bosom, how Vain are the pleasaunces on earth suppHed ; Swept into wrecks anon by Time's ungentle tide ! In 1822 he became the Beckford of Bath, where he built him another Tower, and shut himself up with his books, his pictures and statues, his moods and humours and caprices ; and then in 1834 he pub- lished his third book, the excellent series of letters 267 ESSAYS William entitled Italy : with Sketches of Spain and Portugal. In that year, too, he reprinted his Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters^ written at seventeen, and still amusing reading of a kind ; and in 1835 ^^ published his Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alohaga and Batalha. This is all his literary baggage ; and from the Recollections onward till his death he was a resolute, invisible recluse. But at eleven he had succeeded to the worth of a million of money ; and he had sat in Parliament (once for Eccles and once for Hindon), known the greatest grief that can befall a man, lived as he would with none to say him nay, produced such a master-story as must live as long as the French in which it was written and the English into which it was translated, and thereby approved himself the best Voltairean bred in England before the coming of Benjamin Disraeli. As to Byron's description of him, this from Moore {Diary : i8th October 18 18) may serve to eke it out : — ' Beckford wishes me to go to Fonthill with R[ogers] ; anxious that I should look over his Travels . . . and prepare them for the press. Rogers supposes he would give me something magni- ficent for it, — a thousand pounds, perhaps. But if he were to give me a hundred times that sum, I would not have my name coupled with his. To be Beckford's suh^ not very desirable.' AU Pasha. Ali Pasha (1741-1822), called 'the Lion,' born at Tepeleni, Albania. The son of a plundered father and a very tigress of a mother, he began his 268 BYRON'S WORLD career ('tis said) by finding a treasure, with which ^.li Pasha, he raised an army, and took merciless and summary vengeance on the thieving Pasha who had spoiled his house. Then, having slain his brother, and shut up his mother for the crime, he took arms for the Porte against the Vizier of Scutari, and, being rewarded for his services with a sort of lieutenancy of police, went hand and glove with the very brigands he was commissioned to keep in check. Recalled in disfavour, he bribed himself free again ; fought for the Porte against Austria and Russia (1787) ; was given the Thessalian Pashalik of Trikala ; and laying hands on Yanina, part forged, part bribed, part threatened himself into the Pashalik thereof. He intrigued (1796 and 1807) with Napoleon ; he took Prevyza from the French (1797); he subdued and massacred the Suliotes ; he sought alliance with the English, got hold of Parga, and made himself so living a terror to the Sultan, that his deposition was ordained, and he was at last forced back upon, and shut up in, Yanina. In the end, he yielded on the strength of an oath that his life would not be taken nor his treasures forfeited, and received the bowstring there and then. His head, being sent to Constantinople, and spiked outside the seraglio, was cheapened by a native merchant as a good enough speculation for the London show-market (Ali was well known in England, where everybody read the Harold) ; but the scheme ' was defeated by the piety of an old servant of the Pasha,' who bribed the executioner with a higher price, and bestowed decent sepulture on the relic. He was at once a bloody tyrant, an ESSAYS AU Pasha, admirable soldier, and a vigorous and enlightened ruler. * A short man,' says Hobhouse, ' about five feet five inches in height, possessing a very pleasing face, fair and round, with blue quick eyes, and not at all settled into Turkish gravity' (Travels, etc.). And Byron, after calling him a * man of war and woes,' continues thus (Second Harold, Ixii.) : — Yet in his lineaments ye cannot trace, While gentleness her milder radiance throws Along that aged venerable face, The deeds that lurk beneath, and stain him with disgrace. Robert RoBERT (afterwards Sir Robert) Adair (1763- 1855), Ambassador at Vienna (1806), Constanti- nople (1808-11), Brussels (1831-5), and Berlin. The son of Sergeant- Surgeon Adair and Lady Caroline Keppel, he went to Westminster School and thence to Gottingen, where he fell in love with his tutor's daughter, and thus (being an ancient Whig) suggested to George Canning the character of Rogero (^ Adair was ever an enthusiastic admirer of the fair sex,' Lord Albemarle says, and perhaps the name sets forth a synonym too liberal for dis- cussion here), and a certain classic in The Rovers, or The Double Arrangement'. — Whene'er with haggard eyes I view This dungeon that I 'm rotting in, I think on those companions true Who studied with me at the U- -niversity of Gottingen -niversity of Gottingen. 270 BYRON'S WORLD This was in the Thirtieth Anti-Jacobin (June Robert 1798) ; but it was by no means Adair's first appear- ance in that print. In 1796 he had published Part of a Letter from Robert Adair^ Esq.y to the Right Hon. C, J. Low: Occasioned by Mr. Burke^s Men- tion of Lord Keppel in a Recent Publication. Hence the description in the Eleventh Number : — * Or is it he, — the youth, whose daring soul With half a mission sought the Frozen Pole, And then, returning from the unfinished work. Wrote half a letter — to demolish Burke ? Studied Burke's manner, — aped his forms of speech ; Though when he strives his metaphors to reach, One luckless sHp the meaning overstrains, And loads the blunderbuss with Bedford's brains ' : — with this note on the last line : — ' This line is wholly unintelligible without a note. And we are afraid the note will be wholly incredible, unless the reader can fortunately procure the book to which it refers. In the Part of a Letter^ which was published by Mr. Robt. Adair, in answer to Mr. Burke's Letter to the D. of J5., nothing is so remarkable as the studious imitation of Mr. Burke's style. His vehemence, and his passion, and his irony, his wild imagery, his far-sought illustrations, his rolling and lengthened periods, and the short, quick, pointed sentences in which he often condenses as much wisdom and wit as others would expand through pages, or through volumes, — all these are carefully kept in view by his opponent, though not always very artificially copied or applied. But imitators are liable to be led strangely astray ; and never was there an instance of a more complete mistake of a 271 ESSAYS Robert plain meaning, than that which this line is intended to illustrate — a mistake no less than that of a coffin for a corpse. This is hard to believe or to com- prehend — but you shall hear. Mr. Burke, in one of his publications, had talked of the French " unplumbing the dead in order to destroy the living," — by which he intended, without doubt, not metaphorically, but literally, " stripping the dead of their leaden coffins, and then making them (not the DEAD hut the coffins) into bullets.'*^ A circumstance perfectly notorious at the time the book was written. But this does not satisfy our author. He determines to retort Mr. Burke's own words upon him ; and unfortunately " reaching at a metaphor," where Mr. Burke only intended a ract, he falls into the little mistake above mentioned, and by a stroke of his pen transmutes the illustrious Head of the house of Russell into a metal, to which it is not for us to say how near or how remote his affinity may possible have been. He writes thus — "// Mr. Burke had been content with ^unplumb- ing^ a dead Russell^ and hewing HIM (observe — not the coffin, but him — the old dead Russell him- self) into grape and canister^ to sweep down the whole generation of his descendantSy^^ etc. etc. The thing is scarcely credible ; but it is so! We write with the book open before us.' The ' half a mission ' to ' the Frozen Pole ' ^s a gibe at a journey to St. Petersburg (1791), which Adair was supposed to have made at Fox's instance, with a view to concerting measures with the Empress and her Ministers to the prejudice of Pitt. Hence, too, the parody of Non V sit at a Nee Tenui 272 BYRON'S WORLD Penna. called A Bit of an Ode to Mr. Fox, which Robert appeared in the Twelfth Anti-Jacobin : — I mount, I mount into the sky, Sweet bird, to Petersburg I '11 fly. Or, if you bid, to Paris. Fresh missions of the Fox and Goose Successful Treaties may produce, Though Pitt in all miscarries. * This idle story,' writes Adair, in an autograph statement prefixed to the Life of Wilherforce (London, 1838), and quoted by Mr. Charles Edmunds in his Edition (London, 1890) of the Poetry of The Anti-Jacohin — 'This idle story is here accredited by Mr. Wilberforce, and inserted by his sons, without due examination. It was grounded on a journey I made to Vienna and St. Petersburg in 1791. Dr. Prettyman [sic\ Bishop of Winchester, in a work entitled The Life of the Right Hon. William Pitt^ published by him in 1823, brought forward the fact of my having gone upon this journey as a criminal charge against Mr. Fox, who, as he pretends, sent me upon it with the intent of counteracting some negotiations then carrying on between Great Britain and Russia at St. Petersburg. I answered his accusation, I trust, successfully, in two letters published by Longman & Co. [Two Letters from Mr. Adair to the Bp. of Winchester^ in answer to the charge of a High Treasonable Misdemeanour brought by his Lord- ship against Mr. Fox and himself in his Life of the Rt. Hon. W. Pitt, 8vo, 1821], and explained the circumstances which induced me in my travels in 1 79 1 to visit the two capitals above mentioned- — ■ S 273 ESSAYS Robert RoBERT Adair, 1 838.' The charge was first ^^^' bruited by Edmund Burke, says Mr. Edmunds, in his Letter on the Conduct of the Minority^ and was broached anew, as late as 1854, by Lord Malmes- bury, in a speech to the Lords : when it was solemnly denied by Lord Campbell. It remains to add of Adair that he wrote the ' Margaret Nicholson ' and the * Song of Scrutina ' in The Rolliad^ an account of his Mission to the Court of Vienna (1844) and Negotiations for the Peace of the Dardanelles (1845) 5 married a daughter of the Marquis d'Hazincourt ; and died in Chesterfield Street only eight years short of a hundred old. Scrope ScROPE Berdmore Davies, a Cambridge friend, went to Eton with Hodgson and Drury and the rest, and was afterwards, according to custom, a Fellow of King's. ' One of the cleverest men I ever knew, in conversation, was Scrope Berdmore Davies. Hobhouse is also very good in that line, though it is of less consequence to a man who has other ways of showing his talents than in company. Scrope was always ready, and often witty — Hob- house as witty but not so ready, being more diffi- dent.' — MS. Journal of Lord Byron (Moore). In the August of 1 8 1 1 Byron made a will, in which he named Davies and Hobhouse his executors : the two to divide 'my library and furniture of every description.' On the 28th of the same month he executed a codicil, by which he revoked the bequest of his * household goods and furniture, library, 274 BYRON'S WORLD pictures, sabres, watches, plate, linen, trinkets, and Scrope other personal estate (except money and securities) situate within the walls of the mansion-house and premises at his decease — and bequeathed the same (except his wine and spirituous liquors) to his friends, the said J. C. Hobhouse, S. B. Davies, and Francis Hodgson, their executors, etc., to be equally divided between them for their own use ; — and he bequeathed his wine and spirituous liquors, which should be in the cellars and premises at Newstead, unto his friend, the said J. Becher, for his own use, and requested the said J. C. Hobhouse, S. B. Davies, F. Hodgson, and J. Becher, respectively, to accept the bequest therein contained to them respectively, as a token of his friendship.' A quaint and pleasing picture of Davies is painted (under date of March 28, 1814) in Byron's MS. Journal (Moore): — 'Yesterday, dined tete-a-tete at the Cocoa, with Scrope Davies — sat from six till midnight — drank between us one bottle of champagne and six of claret, neither of which wines ever affect me. Offered to take Scrope home in my carriage ; but he was tipsy and pious, and I was obliged to leave him on his knees praying to I know not what pur- pose or pagod. No headache, nor sickness. ... I have heard nothing more from Scrope. Yesterday paid him four thousand eight hundred pounds, a debt of some standing, and which I wished to have paid before.' In 18 14 Davies is one of the Drury Lane Committee, presents a share to Edmund Kean, and appears as a subscriber to the Testimonial Cup. And in 18 16 he, with Hobhouse, visits Byron at Diodati. After which you find him 'giving very 275 ESSAYS Scrope good accounts of his (Byron's) health and spirits ' to Augusta, 'though he confesses he found him gloomy ' (Mrs. Leigh to Hodgson, 29th October 1 8 1 6) ; and about the same time a generous inscrip- tion gives him Parisina. According to Gronow (Reminiscences^ Third Series), Davies, whom he describes as ' the life and soul of those who relished learning and genius and wit,' was a desperate gambler, and for some time played with equal daring and success. As a rule, he preferred the bank before the individual ; but on one occasion, having departed from his custom, he fairly beggared his antagonist, and reduced him to despair, when, learning that nothing was left him in the world, he restored his winnings on the spot, on the other man's promise that he would play no more. After a while, however, ' fortune deserted her old favourite,' and, ' unable to mingle any longer with the rich, the efiddy, and the ^aj,' he retired to Paris, where he had ' few intimates,' received those whom he wished to see on a bench in the Tuileries Gardens, and occupied himself with the composition of certain ' notes on the men of his time ' — (he talked of them to Murray) — the MS. of which has disappeared. ' His manners and appearance,' says this writer, ' were of the true Brummell type ' : that is, 'there was nothing showy in his exterior.' A pun of his has got itself enbalmed in the true Byron : — * When Brummell was obliged to retire to France, he knew no French, and having obtained a grammar for the purpose of study, our friend Scrope Davies was asked what pro- gress Brummell had made in French; he responded, "that 276 BYRON'S WORLD Brummell had been stopped, like Buonaparte in Russia, Scrope by the elements.'* I have put this pun into Beppo^ etc.' — Da vies. Byron, Diary ^ 1821 : — and a neat enough distich (on an amateur actor) is quoted in J. T. Hodgson's Memoir : — Not to be hissed delights the dunce, But who can hiss and groan at once ? In the same book you get the last of him, in a letter to Hodgson from Dr. Hawtrey : — ' I am sure you will be sorry to hear that our old friend Scrope Davies was found dead in his bed at Paris ' — (2 Rue Miromenil) — ' a few days since ' (24th May 1852). * He was a most agreeable and kind-hearted person, and I shall not soon forget the pleasant hours I have passed with him. He seemed quite broken down when I had a glimpse of him a few months since at Eton. I hardly knew him again, and should not have done so had he not mentioned his name.' Howe Peter Browne (1788-1845), Second Mar- Marquess of quess of Sligo, was, like most of the men of his age, ^^^^°" a patron of Pugilism, and in 18 13, on the occasion of Tom Belcher's second fight with Dogherty, I find him giving five guineas at the ring-side towards a purse for the twice-beaten Irishman. Withal, he was something of an antiquary, and the vases, lachrymatories, and gold ornaments which he found in the tombs of Hellas were taken by him to West- port House, Westport, where they now are. To understand what follows, one must know that at Gibraltar he had joined Lady Hester Stanhope 277 ESSAYS Marquess of ( I '776- 1 8 29), then Starting on that uncommon ^°* adventure which was to stamp her one of the most notable women of her time. At Gibraltar she had arrived with her brother. Captain Stanhope ; but at Gibraltar Stanhope was ordered to rejoin his regi- ment, and either she must have turned back, or she must have come on alone, had not Michael Bruce — the Bruce who was to contrive the escape of Lava- lette with Hutchinson and Sir Robert Wilson (18 1 5) — undertaken to escort her on the perilous journey which she had resolved to make through European Turkey. (Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope. ... * Narrated By Her Physician,' London, 1846, i. 4.) At the Piraeus, adds the Physician, 'just as we were passing the mole-head, we saw a man jump from it into the sea, whom Lotd Sligo recognised to be Lord Byron himself, and, hailing him, bade him hasten to dress and to come and join us.' The sequel may be told in Moore's own words : — ' It was in the course, I believe, of their first interview, at his (Lord Sligo's) table, that Lady Hester, with that lively eloquence for which she is so remarkable, took the poet briskly to task for the depreciating opinion, which, as she under- stood, he entertained of all female intellect. Being but little inclined, were he even able, to sustain such a heresy, against one who was in her own person such an irresistible refutation of it. Lord Byron had no other refuge from the fair orator's arguments than in assent and silence ; and this well-bred deference being, in a sensible woman's eyes, equiva- lent to concession, they became, from thenceforward, most cordial friends. In recalling some recoUec- 278 BYRON'S WORLD tions of this period in his Memoranda^ after relating Marquess of the circumstance of his being caught bathing by an ^^°" English party at Sunium, he added, " This was the beginning of the most delightful acquaintance which I formed in Greece." He then went on to assure Mr. Bruce, if ever those pages should meet his eyes, that the days they had passed together at Athens were remembered by him with pleasure.' Further, Lord Sligo told Moore several anecdotes of Byron, which may here be reproduced. The first was recalled as a proof of the poet's conscious- ness of his beauty: — 'He was a good deal weakened and thinned by his illness at Patras, and, on his return to Athens, standing one day before a looking-glass, he said to Lord Sligo — " How pale I look! — I should like, I think, to die of a con- sumption." — " Why of a consumption ? " asked his friend. "Because then (he answered) the women would all say, ' See that poor Byron — how interest- ing he looks in dying ! "" The next is an anticipation of The Deformed Transformed : — 'He spoke often of his mother . . . and with a feeling that seemed little short of aversion. " Some time or other," he said, " I will tell you why I feel thus towards her.". — A few days after, when they were bathing together in the Gulf of Lepanto, he referred to this promise, and, pointing to his naked leg and foot, exclaimed — " Look there ! — it is to her false delicacy at my birth I owe that deformity ; and yet as long as I can remember, she has never ceased to taunt and reproach me with it. Even a few days before we parted, for the last time, on my leaving England, she, in one of her fits of passion, 279 ESSAYS Marquess of uttered ail imprecation upon me, praying that I ^^°* might prove as ill formed in mind as 1 am in body ! " His look and manner, in relating this frightful cir- cumstance, can be conceived only by those who have ever seen him in a similar state of excitement.' ' The little value,' Moore goes on to say, ' he had for those relics of ancient art, in pursuit of which he saw all his classic fellow-travellers so ardent, was, like everything he ever thought or felt, unre- servedly avowed by him. Lord Sligo having it in contemplation to expend some money in digging for antiquities. Lord Byron, in offering to act as his agent . . . said — " You may safely trust me — I am no dilettante. Your connoisseurs are all thieves ; but I care too little for these things ever to steal them." ' A profession of indifference which is fully confirmed by Gait. Joseph Joseph Blackett (1786-1810), ' Cobler Joe,' as Biackett. Byron somewhere calls him, came eleventh in the family of twelve children born to a day labourer in the service of Sir John Lawson, at Tunstill, Yorks. In 1797 he went to London as apprentice to his brother (a shoemaker) ; married at eighteen ; was a widower (with child) at twenty-one ; was helped by a printer called Marchant, who set up his verses gratis, and introduced him to Pratt ; published a book of Specimens (with Pratt to the front as editor and bear-leader) at twenty- three (1809) ; and died in the August of the next year at Seaham, in Northumberland, where, as the county historian puts it of this ' unfortunate child of genius,' his 280 BYRON'S WORLD 'last days were soothed by the generous attention Joseph of the family of Milbanke.' — Moore. See, too, English Bards : — When some brisk youth, the tenant of a stall, Employs a pen less pointed than his awl, Leaves his snug shop, forsakes his store of shoes, St. Crispin quits, and cobbles for the Muse, Heavens ! how the vulgar stare ! how crowds applaud ! How ladies read, and Hterati laud : — with Byron's Note (1816) : — 'This was meant for poor Blackett, who was then patronised by A. J. B. ; but that I did not know, or this would not have been written, at least I think not.' In a letter to Dallas, Byron writes of this same Blackett : — ' Who would think that anybody would be such a blockhead as to sin against an express proverb : — Ne sutor ultra crepidam ? But spare him, ye Critics, his folhes are past. For the Cobbler is come, as he ought, to his last. Which two lines, with a scratch under last to show where the joke lies, I beg that you will prevail on Miss Milbanke to have inserted on the tomb of her departed Blackett.' Augusta Byron — Mrs. Shelley's ' Dowdy-Goody ' Augusta — seems to have been born in 1784 — (the year of ^^^sh. her mother's death ; though Mr. Paget, in his admirable account of 'the Beecher-Stowe fiasco (Blackwood, January 1870: Paradoxes and PuzzleSy London and Edinburgh, 1874), thinks that she may have been born as early as 1780) — ESSAYS Augusta and lived with her father at Chantilly, and with her ®^^ ' father and stepmother at Chantilly and in Holies Street till the year of Byron's birth, when her grandmother, the once beautiful Dutch girl, now the Dowager-Countess of Holderness, took charge of her. This lady and the ingenuous Mrs. John Byron were not friends : so that it was not until after the Dowager-Countess's death that the brother and sister began to see and know each other. By that time Byron was a boy of fourteen ; but to Augusta he was ever the ' Baby Byron ' she had left in Holies Street. Henceforth, too, she was his best and staunchest friend, the one influence in his life that made steadily for good. ' Augusta,' he said at Genoa, ' knew all my weaknesses, yet had love enough to bear with them ; in fact, she ' but loved and pitied me the more because I was erring.' She never shrank from telling him the truth, nor from excepting to such of his acts and words as seemed to her to put him in the wrong ; he left to her and her children whatever remained of his estate, after the performance of the trusts of his marriage settlement — ' in consequence of my dear wife Lady Byron and whatever children I may have being otherwise amply provided for' ; he cherished for her an unwavering regard, which found utterance in more than one immortal song. After the Mar- riage, Mrs. Leigh (she had been the wife of Colonel Leigh of the Tenth Huzzars since 1807) was received into high favour by her sister-in-law, was chosen to be her companion before and after, her confinement, and became (in fact) the ' Goose ' to Lady Byron's * Pippin' and to Byron's 'Duck.' 282 BYRON'S WORLD She did her utmost for both parties at the time of Augusta the Separation. 'To me,' said Byron to Lady^®^^*^' Biessington, ' she was, in the hour of need, a tower of strength.' Indeed, ' her affection was my last rally ing-point, and is now the only bright spot that the horizon of England offers to my view.' Still, when Byron went into Exile (1816), she remained on terms of the most affectionate intimacy with his wife, till the end (it would seem) of 1829, when Lady Byron's insistence in appointing to the vacant trusteeship of Byron's estate no less a person than the Stephen Lushington of the Separation — (who could scarce be expected to prove a persona grata to Byron's sister) — led to a series of protests (Mor- rison Collection) from Mrs. Leigh, which the recipient either could not, or was anxious not, to brook. Thereafter, Byron's only child, the name- child, Augusta Ada, remained an entire stranger to her aunt ; and the ill-matched sisters met no more till 1 85 1 — the year of Mrs. Leigh's death. It had been conveyed to her (it would seem) that Lady Byron had complained, and loudly, that but for Augusta's influence, Byron and she might have been reconciled ; and this induced Mrs. Leigh to ask a meeting. Writing from Brighton (i8th February 1851), 'I propose,' says Lady Byron, 'to meet you at the nearest convenient Hotel on this railway ' ; to 'hear in Private whatever you might have to say to me ' ; but ' should I, after hearing it, wish to make any observations, you must permit me to do so in the presence of a friend, who will accompany me.' The meeting — (which ' cannot but be one of suffering to me,' but . . . ' I think 283 ESSAYS Augusta it right to make it') — took place under these con- ^^^ ditions (the ' friend ' was Frederick Robertson of Brighton) at the White Hart, Reigate. Mrs. Leigh's communication was simply to the effect that such influence as she had had with her brother had ever been used to the advantage of his wife. * Is that all ? ' said the other lady, who seems to have expected nothing less than a peculiar version of the story of Laon and Cythna. And, in writing to Mrs. Leigh (Brighton, April 12, 1851), after re- marking that she (Lady B.) has ' done all in her power ' to ' contribute to your peace of mind,' she 'remains under the afflicting persuasion that it is not to be attained by such means as you have taken.' The matter appears to end, so far as the world is concerned, with Mrs. Leigh's reply, to this curious expression of self-righteousness : — St. J. Palace, April 26, 185 1. I feel sure that you would not willingly be unjust, and therefore after much perplexing and deep consideration I have determined again to address you. My great wish for an interview with you arose partly from a secret desire to see you once more in this world, and still more to have the means of convincing you that accusations which I had reason to beheve had been brought against me to you were unfounded, and at this, if only from the recol- lection of the affection that once subsisted between us, you cannot be surprised — I had not and never implied that I had anything to reveal to you, with which you were not previously acquainted, on any other subject — nor can I at all express to you the regret I have felt ever since those words escaped you, showing that you imagined I had ' encouraged a bitterness of feehng in Lord Byron towards you.' I now as solemnly declare to you as if I were on my oath or on my death-bed that I never did so in any one instance, but that I invariably did the con- 284 BYRON'S WORLD trary — I have letters from him, and of my own to him Augusta (returned to me after his death) which would bear out Leigh, this assertion, and I am ready at this, or any other moment, to make the most solemn asseveration of this, in any way that you can devise. I would willingly see your Friend Mr. Robertson, and afford him every proof of my veracity in my power. It was clear that he thought that I was keeping back communications that ought to be made to you, and as your confidential friend, it would be comfort to me to talk openly with him on such points as might tend to convince you of the truth of what I now say — and without which the remainder of my hfe will be still more unhappy than the miseries, of various kinds, which surround me must inevitably make me. She died at the end of this same year ; but Lady Byron, whether or not she had, as Paget insists, and it is generally believed, she had, talked Laon-and- Cythna under seal to Lushington, lived to talk and think it ten years longer. John Murray (1778-1843) was the son of John John M*Murray (John i. 1745-1793), who threw up a ^^"""^y* commission in the Marines to turn bookseller at 32 Fleet Street, where, under the style and title of John Murray, he succeeded Paul Sandby. John 11. was but fifteen when his father died ; but he had uncommon energy and intelligence ; he made some fortunate ventures ; and by the time he was thirty or so he had planned and launched The Quarterly Review^ with GifFord as editor, and Scott and Heber, Canning and George Ellis, for contributors. It was so instant a success that it was everywhere accepted as the official Tory organ, and the shop in Fleet Street — (it was not till 1 8 1 2 that John 11. took 285 ESSAYS John over Miller's place in Albemarle Street, and became urray. ^^^ ^ Emperor of the West ') — was soon a veritable literary centre. Murray was Publisher to the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude ; but there is no department of letters in which he did not make and leave his mark. Among his authors were Henry Hallam, Lockhart (the Scott and the Burns), Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets), Richard Ford, ' Aristophanes ' Mitchell, Plumer Ward, Crabbe, Lord Mahon, Prior ( Life of Goldsmith), Sir John Barrow, Sir John Malcolm, Heber, Southey, Lord Rosse, Sir Humphrey Davy, Sir George Back, Greig, Sir George Head, Walter Scott, Morier (Hajji Baba), Hope {Anastasius), Washington Irving, Napier, Mme. de Stael, Wellington, Lady Caroline Lamb, Croker (Bos- well's Johnson), George Borrow, Sir Edward Parry, Sir Alexander Burness, * Monk ' Lewis, Sir John Franklin, Malthus (Essay on the Principle of Population), Faraday, Babbage, Fanny Kemble, Mrs. Trollope, Careme (The Art of French Cookery), 'Nimrod,' Benjamin Disraeli (Contarini Fleming and Gallomania), and Mr. W. E. Glad- stone (The State in its Relation with the Church) — to name but these. 'Tis a brilliant gathering ; but its raisons d^etre are conspicuous. ^I believe' — thus John II. to Napier, to whom he had offered ;^5oo for the first volume of the Peninsular War — ' I believe that you will not find it is in my char- acter to make any ungenerous offer for a valuable work ' ; and he did himself the barest justice in the assumption. He gave Crabbe ;£'3ooo for a set of copyrights, whose interest was on the wane, and BYRON'S WORLD which the Longmans had refused to reconsider — John and lost ;£i 500 or so by the bargain. Washington ^^^^' Irving's Columbus and Granada cost him nearly ;£"88oo, which represented a deficit of £21^0. To Moore, for the Life of Byron, he paid some ^4800 in cash ; and in 1831 he stood to lose £2^0 on the first issue, * even if the whole were sold.' But if he lost with one hand, he gained with the other. By 1838 Mrs. Rundell's Art of Cookery: — Along thy shelves in order shine The works thou deemest most divine, The Art of Cookery, and mine, My Murray : — an early venture of his, had gone through sixty editions ; the circulation of the Quarterly ranged between nine and twelve thousand copies ; his interest in Byron alone must have been literally golden. For he was sagacious as well as daring. The business (so he held) of 'a publishing book- seller ' lay in his brains — not in his shop ; and if he endured a loss of ;^2 6,000 in the matter of The Representative — (the ill-starred daily print which was the first in time and the worst in fortune of Benjamin Disraeli's many enterprises) — he had the rectitude and the good sense to retire from business with Constable and the Ballantynes ; so that when the crash came, he was able, not only to meet it with composure, but also, to stand to the rescue of some fellow- traders who must have gone under but for his hand. His authors, too, — and we have seen what manner of men they were — were his personal friends. He had the gift of wearing, as well as the trick of winning. And he passed the greater part 287 ESSAYS John of a long, laborious, honourable life on equal terms - urray. ^^^ .^ constant association with the best of his time. It was in 1811, while John 11. was still in Fleet Street, that Dallas took him the MS. of the First and Second Harold ; and this was the beginning of a connexion which, though it was interrupted by his refusal to publish Don Juan from the Sixth Canto onwards, was in the end resumed, and was through- out an advantage and a pleasure to both the parties. Poet and publisher were soon on the best possible terms. As his letters show, to nobody did Byron write with a finer felicity or a more abounding spirit than he wrote to Murray ; while as for Murray, his regard for Byron was confessed not merely in big prices — (which he could afford to pay, and which were simply Byron's due) — but in a hundred little friendly offices, in a constant care for Byron's interest and Byron's fame, and in a series of letters (for which see Dr. Smiles's Memoir, passim), which show that the writer was never so happy as in seeking to make his correspondent happy by the transmission of good news, or a good book, or good words from an admirer or a friend. For the business relations between the two, enough to say that, roughly speak- ing, Murray produced everything that Byron wrote, with the exception of English Bards, the Vision, the Hours, the Age of Bronze, and the last cantos (eleven) of Don Juan (all which he bought of the Executors at a cost of £2^^^) '■> ^^^^5 besides what he gave Dallas for the First and Second Harold and The Giaour (;{^i 125 in all), he paid to Byron nearly ^15,000 in hard cash ; that he purchased the MS. Memoir of Moore for ;^2too, and had decided to 288 BYRON'S WORLD destroy it, and to be at a loss of the purchase-money, Joim when the matter was taken out of his hands ; that ^^^^' in answer to Leigh Hunt's attack on Byron's memory he commissioned Moore to prepare the Life and Letters (1830), himself contributing a good half of the matter, agreed to pay him four thousand guineas for the work, and in the long-run paid him ^600 more ; and that in 1 837 he produced the annotated edition of the Poems which, in one or other of its forms, has been hitherto the sole complete Byron to be had. Murray, in fact, was Byron's publisher, even as Byron was Murray's poet ; and to disassociate their several names and fames would, now or ever, be impossible. Thomas Moore (1779- 1852) was the son of a Thomas Dublin (Catholic) Grocer ; was educated at m°°"«- Sheridan's old school — (Mr. Whyte's : * I was long his favourite show-schohr ') — and at Trinity Col- lege, Dublin — ^ after the memorable act of 1793, was one of the first of the young Helots of the land, who hastened to avail themselves of the privilege of being educated at their country's university ' ; at fourteen, or less, was writing for the Anthologia^ a local magazine, in which he read The Pleasures of Memory ; at fifteen began the practice of political satire at the mock-court (Dalkey) of King Stephen (Armytage), a singing pawnbroker ; at nineteen came to London to read law at the Middle Temple ; and before he was twenty-one had published (1800) a translation (as it were into scented soap) of the Odes of Anacreon, ESSAYS Thomas which was dedicated — through his earliest patron, Lord Moira, afterwards First Marquess of Hastings — to the Prince of Wales, and which (with his own excellent talent as an actor and singer) gave him the run of the very choicest Whig Society. It was followed (1801) by The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little, Esq. — a gentleman who ' died in his one-and-twentieth year ' ; who had ' given much of his time to the study of the amatory writers ' ; and whose works were (therefore) ' all the productions of an age when the passions very often give a colour- ing too warm to the imagination'; and in 1803 Lord Moira got him made Registrar to the Admir- alty Court at Bermuda. He had looked for better patronage, but he was ever a man to make the best of things, and he made the best of this one. That is, he went to Bermuda, found and engaged a Deputy, travelled in Canada : — Faintly as tolls the evening chime, Our voices keep tune, and our oars keep time. . . . Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast. The rapids are near and daylight 's past : — and the United States ; returned to England ; published his Odes and Epistles (1806) ; and in 1807 began the Irish Melodies (Part x., 1834), which he sang with rare and peculiar art, which were long worth ;^5oo a year to him, which are still singing here and there, and which, as translated by Gounet, and set to music by no less a man than Hector Berlioz, had, like the twice or thrice trans- lated Epicurean, a certain part in the Romantic Renaissance of 1830. In 181 1 he married, and in 1 8 12 he published The Twopenny Post-Bag, and 290 BYRON'S WORLD became Avenger-General to the Whigs, who were Thomas fresh from the Great Disappointment of 1 8 1 1 , and who exulted in his effect, whether he wept over a false and fallen Prince in an Irish Melody : — When first I met thee, warm and young, There shone such truth about thee, And on thy lip such promise hung I did not dare to doubt thee, But go, deceiver, go, etc. : — or took note (in The Morning Chronicle or The Times) of the run of things at Lady Hertford's : — The house where you know There 's such good mutton cutlets and strong curagoa : — in Manchester Square, and gibed the wigs and stays and whiskers, the moral obliquities and the physical rotundities, in evidence at Carlton House. In 1 8 17 he published Lalla Rookh ; for the copyright of which he received three thousand guineas ; which he dedicated to Samuel Rogers from 'His very grateful and Affectionate Friend ' ; and whose vogue was so instant and so far-wandered that Luttrell was soon able to address him thus : — I 'm told, dear Moore, your lays are sung (Can it be true, you lucky man ?) At midnight in the Persian tongue Along the streets of Ispahan. In 18 18 he went to Paris (with Rogers), and there produced that excellent set of pasquils, the first Fud-ge Family. Meanwhile the Deputy at Ber- muda was found to have defaulted to the tune of £6ooOy and, to escape arrest, Moore went abroad, travelled in Italy — (he stayed a few days at Venice 291 ESSAYS Thomas ^jth Byron, who gave him the MS. Memoir) — and then, retracing his steps, set up his rest in Paris, where he abode till, having compromised his debt to the Exchequer for ;^iooo, he returned to Eng- land : there to publish his Loves of the Angels (1823), his Captain Rock (1824), his Sheridan (1825), his Epicurean (1827), his Byron (1830), and his Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831), to say nothing of innumerable lyrics and pasquinades. In 1835 he ^^^ P^^ ^^ *^^ Civil List for a pension of ^300 ; but his last years were miserable enough. For all the smirk in his love-songs and the sting (as of nettles) in his satire, he was a worthy and mag- nanimous little man — the best of sons, the most devout among husbands (he was horribly scandal- ised, you learn from his Diary, by the Marianna Segati business at Venice, and not less so by the sketch of Donna Inez in Don Juan), the most affectionate of fathers ; and, having lost his only daughter in her girlhood, he was doomed to see the death of his second son (by consumption) at the very threshold of what promised to be an honour- able career, and to watch the ruin of his heir, who ended, as one of the Foreign Legion, in an Algerine hospital. Such gleams of happiness as were his came through his countrymen, who wore him, tinsel and all, in their heart of hearts, and never failed to greet him with just such ovations (in terms of whisky and sentiment) as the Modern Scot reserves for the immortal memory of Burns. In the long- run his mind decayed: by 1847 ^^ ^^^ ^sinking' (so he wrote to Rogers) *into a mere vegetable,' and in reading of the end your sole feeling is one of 292 BYRON'S WORLD regret that it came so late and took so long. As to Thomas his personal qualities, a single testimony, being Sir °°^®' Walter's, will suffice : — ' It would be a delightful addition to life,' he wrote in 1825, 'if Thomas Moore had a cottage within two miles of me.' For his poetry, it is the fashion to decry him ; and it is a fact that his Lalla Rookh and his Loves of the Angels (a mild Whig Paradise done by a tame, suburban Byron) are glittering and * conceited' enough to look tawdry, at the same time that they are so clever, and so breathless in their cleverness, as to be extremities of hard reading. But none in this century has surpassed him as a writer of light, brilliant, and scarifying insolence ; while he was a master of cadence, and his. songs — as Bendemeer^s Streamy as Jt the Mid-Hour of Night, as Doth Not a Meeting, to name no more — have a rhythmical quality, at once exquisite and simple, for which you may quest in vain among the Minors of to-day. For his connexion with Byron : it began in 1 8 1 2, under such circumstances as are set forth below. It was said of him that he ' dearly loved a lord ' ; but to love a lord was in those days no crime — especially in an earnest Whig ; and Sir Walter, albeit a fine, unalterable Tory, was no more averse from aristo- cratic intimacies than (to slide to the lowest rung of the ladder) the Radical Leigh Hunt. In any case, Moore had kept the company of peers — Moira, Lansdowne, Holland, and the like — since his debut in 1800 ; and it is fair to argue that he was at least as strongly attracted by Byron's temperament and Byron's genius as he was touched by Byron's barony. It is possible — even probable — that Mr. ESSAYS Thomas Fraser Rae is justified in saying that he was jealous °°^®* of Sheridan : like himself an Irishman, a commoner like himself, and like himself — but to far more splendid purpose than himself — a practical and social success. But in Byron's case there were no grounds for spleen ; for Byron, who recognised him instantly, and was ever his admirer and his friend, was not less manifestly his superior in poetry and genius than he was his superior by birth and fortune. In any event, it is certain that his attitude towards his ' noble friend ' (which being mannerly and cor- rect, was Shelley's phrase and Scott's), while cordial in the extreme, was never (that I can see) unduly subservient. He received the dedication of The Corsair with a vast deal. of pride ('They may say,' he wrote to Power, ' that the praise is laid on with a trowel, but at least it is a golden trowel that lays it on ') ; but he gave nothing in return for it but his very mediocre F«^/^5 for the Holy Alliance (1823). He accepted the MS. Memoir gratefully, but with- out humility — as a gift from friend to friend ; and he did his best for his friend's sake to keep at least a part of it for posterity. He avenged the memory of 'a late noble Lion' on a certain 'small puppy dog' (see post^ p. 337) with exemplary thorough- ness. He took up the work of writing the Life with such an independence of mind that he began by making himself hateful to the Lady-Byronites, and went on to scandalise the opposite faction in the end. In brief, I cannot find that (even in his revolts in the character of a ' Domestic Man ') he was ever other than loyal to a friendship which was one of the best things of his life. 294 BYRON'S WORLD For the occasion of its beginning we must go Thomas back to 18065 and thence onward to 1809 and the publication of English Bards. In the former year, the Irish poet, exasperated by the strictures which Jeffrey had passed on his verses, challenged his critic to the arbitrament of mortal combat. The would-be duellists met at Chalk Farm — (they took a fancy to each other on the ground) — but the affair had taken wind (through William Spencer and Lord Fincastle) and they were arrested. Now Jeffrey's friend was that Francis Horner whom Sir Walter likened to Father Shandy's bull, and on him devolved the deadly work of loading the tools. He was far too serious and too highly cultured a Whig to know anything about firearms ; and when the pistols were examined at Bow Street, it was found that one had a bullet in it, but the other had not. Then 'Enter Rumour' — on this occasion, as on many others, ' an Irish Journalist ' — ' painted full of tongues,' all holloaing that the pistols held no bullets. ' In consequence of this,' says Moore, ' I was induced to write a letter to the editor of one of the Journals ' — * almost all ' had gone with Rumour — 'contradicting the falsehood that had been cir- culated, and stating briefly the real circumstances of the case.' This contradiction Byron did not see ; and in English Bards he took it on him to tell the tale, in prose and verse, as the world loved to hear it told: — Can none remember that eventful day, That ever glorious, almost fatal fray, When Little's leadless pistol met his eye. And Bow Street myrmidons stood laughing by ? 295 ESSAYS Thomas « In 1806 Messrs. Jeffrey and Moore met at Chalk Farm. The duel was prevented by the interference of the magistracy ; and, on examination, the balls of the pistols were found to have evaporated. This incident gave occasion to much waggery in the daily prints.' The First Edition of English Bards was anonymous ; but to the Second (published in the summer of the same year) Byron put his name. This at the time Moore did not know ; but when at last he learned who had belittled him, he put on his best duelling manner, and thus addressed his adversary : — Dublin, January i, 18 10. My Lord, — Having just seen the name of ' Lord Byron ' prefixed to a work entitled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which, as it appears to me, the lie is given to a public statement of mine, respecting an affair with Mr. Jeffrey some years since, I beg you will have the goodness to inform me whether I may consider your Lordship as the author of this pubHcation. I shall not, I fear, be able to return to London for a week or two ; but, in the meantime, I trust your Lord- ship will not deny me the satisfaction of knowing whether you avow the insult contained in the passages alluded to. It is needless to suggest to your Lordship the propriety of keeping our correspondence secret. — I have the honour to be, your Lordship's very humble servant, Thomas Moore. 22 Molesworth Street. Byron, however, had gone abroad, and the letter got no further than Hodgson, who promised — but failed — to send it on to him. Byron returned to England in 181 1, as we have seen; and in the 296 BYRON'S WORLD interval Moore had (as he puts it) ' taken upon him- Thomas self obligations, both as husband and father, which make most men — and especially those who have nothing to bequeath — less willing to expose them- selves to danger.' All the same, the Note to the * leadless pistol ' couplet rankled, and he resolved to have it out — as peaceably as might be — with its noble author. * The death of Mrs. Byron,' he remarks, ' for some time delayed my purpose. But as soon after that event as was consistent with decorum, I addressed a letter to Lord Byron, in which, referring to my former communication, and expressing some doubts as to its having ever reached him, I restated, in pretty nearly the same words, the nature of the insult, which, as it appeared to me, the passage in his note was calculated to convey. " It is now useless," I continued, " to speak of the steps with which it was my intention to follow up that letter. The time which has elapsed since then, though it has done away neither the injury nor the feeling of it, has, in many respects, materially altered my situation ; and the only object which I have now in writing to your Lordship is to preserve some consistency with that former letter, and to prove to you that the injured feeling still exists, however circumstances may compel me to be deaf to its dictates at present. When I say * injured feeling,' let me assure your Lordship that there is not a single vindictive sentiment in my mind towards you. I mean but to express that uneasi- ness, under (what I consider to be) a charge of falsehood, which must haunt a man of any feeling to his grave, unless the insult be retracted or atoned 297 ESSAYS Thomas for ; and which, if I did not feel, I should, indeed, °°^®- deserve far worse than your Lordship's satire could inflict upon me." In conclusion 1 added, that so far from being influenced by any angry or resentful feeling towards him, it would give me sincere pleasure if, by any satisfactory explanation, he would enable me to seek the honour of being henceforward ranked among his acquaintance.' Samuel Samuel Rogers (i 763- 1 855) was poet, wit, Rogers, banker ; author of The Pleasures of Memory (1792), The Voyage of Columbus (1812), Jac- queline (published with Lara, 18 14), Italy (1822- 28), etc. Rich as he was, he never married. He was content to give the best breakfasts in London ; to speak bitterly and give generously (Campbell said : — ' Borrow five hundred pounds of Rogers, and he will never say a word against you till you want to repay him ') ; to patronise the arts and to write, with the most careftil and fastidious pen in history — (the Columbus took him fourteen years to write, the Pleasures seven, and the Italy fifteen) — book after book of verses which are still enjoyable, howbeit a little as wax flowers are decorative, and to which, in the end, he fitted (at a cost of ;^i 5,000) over a hundred designs by Turner and Stothard, renowned among the masterpieces of English illustration. Byron, who to be sure was no critic, thought the world of him ('the Tithonus of poesy, immortal already'), as we shall see as we go on. But perhaps his best work is a certain epigram : — 298 BYRON'S WORLD They say Ward has no heart, but I deny it ; Samuel He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it. Rogers. In 1 8 12 Byron dedicated The Giaour to him, and he lived to accept the dedication of Master Hum- phrey's Clock and to decline (1850) the Laureate- ship, and so make way for Tennyson. Rogers wrote nobly enough of Byron in his Italy ; and Byron, though at Genoa he likened Rogers's achievement to an hortus siccus^ was generally lavish of regard for ' the father of present poesy.' Remains that achievement in satire, the famous Question and Answer which, as I think, might have been dictated by the Devil : — Nose and chin would shame a knocker, Wrinkles that would puzzle Cocker, Mouth which marks the envious scorner. With a scorpion in each corner, etc. It was published in Eraser (January 1833). I have somewhere read (I forget where) that, on the occa- sion of a visit from Rogers, Byron, who was excel- lent at what is called ' chaff,' not only gave his guest a riotous reception, but slipped this ferocious caricature of him, this Gillray-Daumier (so to speak) under his pillow. That it was done in jest is evident. As evident is it that Rogers, despite those grave and generous verses in the Italy ^ lived to resent it, and resent it bitterly. This if we may believe — and I see no reason why we may not — the late Charles Mackay. Talking with Rogers one day, he praised Byron, as a young man would ; and Rogers as steadily dispraised. Says Mackay : — * You will at least acknowledge, sir, that he had fire.' Samuel Rogers. ESSAYS And to him Rogers: — * Yes, hell-firt.^ With which remark the elegant, ambitious, careful poet- aster disappears. Robert Southey. The Curse of Kehama (1810) was the fourth, I believe, of those ' epics ' whose frequent occurrence had already made Byron write (in English Bards) of a very worthy man but an extremely long-winded versifier, the ' Balladmonger Southey' (1774- 1843): — To him let Camoens, Milton, Tasso yield, Whose annual strains, like armies, take the field : — and even long afterwards to make him write again (in Don Juan) : — I know that what our neighbours call ' longueurs,'' (We 've not so good a word, but have the thing, In that complete perfection which insures An epic from Bob Southey every spring — ) Form not the true temptation which allures The reader. At the first time of writing, Byron did in nowise hate his Southey : he did but laugh at Southey's so-called poetry, of which, by the way, the writer was inordinately vain (* I was perfectly aware,' he wrote to Murray of Kehama^ * that I was planting acorns, while other men were setting Turkey beans. The oak will grow,' etc.). Of Southey the man he knew nothing till 18 13, when they met at Holland House. This was in September ; and some two months after (November 22) Byron writes in his Journal thus : — ' Southey, I have not seen much of. 300 BYRON'S WORLD His appearance is Epic ; and he is the only existing f^^^^^ entire man of letters. All the others have some °" ^^* pursuit annexed to their authorship. His manners are mild, but not those of a man of the world, and his talents of the first order. His prose is perfect. Of his poetry there are various opinions : there is, perhaps, too much of it for the present generation ; — posterity will probably select. He has passages equal to anything. At present, he has a party ^ but no public — except for his prose writings. The Life of Nelson is beautiful.' But Southey, who, as young men will, had started life as a Republican, and in that character had written tragedies of Wat Tyler (1794) and Inscrip- tions in Martin the Regicide his honour: — Dost thou ask his Crime ? He had rebelled against his king, And sat in judgment on him : — had turned with time into so hardened and so mili- tant a Tory that, when ' Poetical Pye ' departed the world in this same year, he was chosen, Scott having said no in the interval, to wear the widowed wreath. Now, Byron was an aristocrat and an individual Radical ; besides, thus to forswear yourself was not his way ; and his references to Southey were for some time contemptuous enough. Still, for signs of positive and violent enmity we have to wait till the first years of the Exile, with the report, which Byron believed the Laureate to have set going in London, that at Geneva he and Shelley had ' formed a league of incest with two sisters,' Mary Godwin (1797-1851), that is, and Jane Clairmont (1797- 301 ESSAYS Robert 1 879), who was presently to become the mother of ey. ^iiggj.^ . — i-j^-g |.|^g daughter of William Godwin (175 6- 1 836) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759- 1797), that the daughter of William Godwin's second wife, the widow Clairmont, or Clements, whom he married in 1801. It was a piece of malignant gossip, picked up at a Genevese hotel ; but under the circumstances it was not at all un- natural. Byron, deserted by his wife, ' accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and by private rancour,' had been fairly vomited by English society ; Shelley, notoriously an atheist and a free- thinker in matters sexual, had left his wife for a woman with whom he was living in open adultery ; and, while both the ladies were young and pretty, which made things bad, both the ladies were whole or parcel Godwin, which made things worse, for had not Mr. Godwin's first wife vindicated the Rights of Women ? and had not Godwin himself declined all laws, and especially the marriage law, ' the worst of all'.^ None the less, Byron was, very naturally, exasperated by it ; and one effect of the information that Southey was responsible for its introduction to talking England was that achieve- ment in assault, the 'Dedication' (18 18) sup- pressed, to Byron's chagrin, of the First and Second Don Juan. This, however, was very far from being the end. In 18 19 appeared three cantos more, and Southey, in putting forth his ridiculous Vision of Judgment, attached to it an appropriate preface in which he opined that the poignancy of a deathbed repentance would nothing avail the author of such * lascivious ' stuff, talked of that author's ' Satanic 302 BYRON'S WORLD spirit of pride and audacious impiety,' and hinted Robert that here was a case for the Law. Byron retorted in °" ^^* his most savage and most scornful vein, remarking (truly enough), among other things, that there was * something at once ludicrous and blasphemous in this arrogant scribbler of all work sitting down to deal damnation and destruction upon his fellow- creatures, with Wat Tyler ^ the Apotheosis of George the Third, and the Elegy on Martin the Regicide, all shuffled together in his writing-desk.' Southey, no more disposed than his antagonist to turn his cheek to the smiter, addressed a letter to The London Courier (5th January 1822), in which he explicitly denied that he had ' scattered abroad calumnies, knowing them to be such, against Lord Byron and others' ; gloried in his attack on the Satanic School ; defended himself with spirit and effect against the charge of being a scribbler of all work ; protested that he had stuck the name of the author of Don Juan upon the gibbet, for reproach and infamy as long as it should endure ; and ended by counselling Byron to * attack him in rhyme ' or not at all. Byron's reply was twofold. He chal- lenged Southey, through Douglas Kinnaird ; and he finished that Vision of Judgment^ which is, by common consent, one of the master satires of the world. Of the challenge Southey never heard (Kinnaird suppressed it) till its author was dead ; but he read the Vision in the first number of The Liberal that very year, and he must certainly have known that he shared with Brougham the very doubtful honour of being contemned and hated till the very end. 308 ESSAYS Robert Xo end con la bocca dolce^ here is a touch of fun ^^' from Medwin's Journal (1824) : — 'On my calling on Lord Byron one morning, he produced The Deformed Transformed. Handing it to Shelley, he said — " Shelley, I have been writing a Faustish kind of drama : tell me what you think of it." After reading it attentively, Shelley returned it. "Well," said Lord B., "how do you like it.?" " Least," replied he, " of anything I ever saw of yours. It is a bad imitation of Faust, and besides, there are two entire lines of Southey's in it." Lord Byron changed colour immediately, and asked hastily, "What lines?" Shelley repeated, ** And water shall see thee, And fear thee, and flee thee. They are in The Curse of Kehama^ His Lord- ship instantly threw the poem into the fire. He seemed to feel no chagrin at seeing it consume — at least his countenance betrayed none, and his con- versation became more gay and lively than usual. Whether it was hatred of Southey, or respect for Shelley's opinion,' etc. William WiLLIAM PoLE TyLNEY LoNG WeLLESLEY (1788- Poie^Tyiney ^g^^^ ^^^ afterwards (1845) Fourth Earl of Morn- WeUesiey. ington. The story of this 'most distinguished Briton ' is one so full of insolence, adultery, thriftlessness, and the right Regency feeling for blackguardism and the Establishment, that I cannot choose but tell it with a certain particularity. In 1 8 12, after a pursuit which itself was something of 304 BYRON'S WORLD a scandal, he married Catherine, eldest daughter and wiUiam co-heir of Sir James Tylney Long, Bart., of Dray- Long ^ ^^^ cot, Wilts, whose names he added to his own, Weiiesiey. and thus inspired a delicious line in Rejected Addresses : — Long may Long Tilney Wellesley Long Pole live ! The lady had some ;i40,ooo a year (her pin-money ran to ;^' 13,000) and Wellesley had nothing ; but * the ancient and approved servants ' of the Tylney family were dismissed at once, and in the March of 1 8 1 3 there was tried at Chelmsford the case of ' The King V. Wellesley Pole Tylney Long Wellesley.' This was an action to try the right of the public to a way through Wanstead Park, and in the course of it Mr. Serjeant Shepherd, who was briefed for the defence, protested strongly against the right of common people to ' offend his (Pole's) princely mansion with the passage of unseemly vehicles.' In truth, the man was born magnificent ; his life was of a piece throughout ; he kept open house and a sumptuous table, had the finest hounds and horses on the country-side, retained an hundred and fifty servitors in Lincoln green, would have nothing but guineas in his pockets, and all the rest of it ; and by 1 821 he was in such straits that in 1822 he had to take his wife abroad (tradition says that he dodged the traps in a boat, and boarded the packet far out at sea). They were living at Naples when (in 1823) they met a certain Captain Bligh, of the Coldstream Guards, and his wife Helena (nee Pater- son), both of whom they had known in England. In the July of that year Mrs. Bligh left her ESSAYS p^\^^%"^i husband's house in consequence of an intrigue with i^ng ^ "^^ Wellesley ; but Wellesley filed an affidavit of WeUesley. denial before the British Vice-Consul, and persuaded Mrs. Wellesley to offer the injured lady the protec- tion of her roof. This she did, but at Florence she had to turn the injured lady out of the house. From Italy the Wellesleys went to Paris (1824), whither Mrs. Bligh had preceded them ; and from Paris Mrs. Wellesley wrote to her father-in-law (Lord Maryborough, a most respectable man : elder brother to the Duke of Wellington, Master of the Mint in 1 8 1 5, Master of the Buckhounds in 1828), that, if Wellesley would have done with Mrs. Bligh, she would forgive the man *his profligate and unprincipled conduct,' and provide for the woman out of her own income. Lord and Lady Mary- borough went to Paris and did their best ; but it was to no purpose ; so that Mrs. Wellesley took her children to England, and in the June of 1825 began to sue for a divorce in the Ecclesiastical Court. About that time, too, Wellesley and Mrs. Bligh, who had been playing at man and wife in divers gites in France and Holland, crossed to London ; and on July 7 Wellesley drove Bligh to his wife's house in Clarges Street, for the purpose of getting hold of one or more of his children. He entered the house, when Bligh drove round to Mme. Vestris's, there to wait the event ; but Mrs. Wellesley heard his voice, escaped (with her daughter) by the kitchen door, served him with a citation for divorce, and filed a bill in Chancery to make her children wards of the Court, after which the errant couple scuttled back to France. 'In the BYRON'S WORLD September of that year Mrs. Wellesley died, wnuam • • • 1- • ^ :^i- A/T- T ^ • ^ ^ PoleTylney enjoining her sisters, the Misses -Long, to resist to i^ng the utmost any attempt on Wellesley's part toWeiiesley. remove the children ; and in 1827 — (in which year he had to pay swingeing damages to Captain Bligh, as defendant in a suit for crim. con.) — Wellesley brought an action against their guardian, his uncle Wellington, to recover possession of them. In delivering judgment, the Chancellor (Eldon) re- niarked that they had it in evidence that in July 1824 Wellesley had 'a venereal tumour removed from his eye by Dr. Southcote ' ; that Southcote had sworn that, to his knowledge, Wellesley when in Paris got blackguard children to come to the back of the house to teach his children to blaspheme ; that Mr. Pitman, the tutor of Wellesley's choice, testified that he had ' heard the eldest infant plain- tiffs use some very disgusting expressions, and utter the most coarse and vulgar oaths in French,' and the boy William, being rebuked for his obscenities, had replied that ^ his father liked it ' ; that a letter of Wellesley's was before the Court (dated February 9, 1825) containing such phrases as 'If the fellow be a sportsman, . . . damn his infernal soul to hell ' ; that in another letter he bade his boys to ' study hard, but as soon as you have completed your tasks, go out in all weathers, and play hell and tommy — make as much riot as your tongues can admit — chase cats, dogs, and women, old and young, but spare my game ' ; and that Dr. Bulkeley, the physician who attended the Wel- lesleys at Naples, and who afterwards resided and travelled with them, had sworn that W. P. L. 807 ESSAYS William Wellesley said, in the presence of his children, Long -^ " ^ ' Debauch all the women you meet with, young and Wellesley, old': — For all which reasons he, Eldon, would ' deserve to be hunted out of society if he hesitated for one moment to say, that he would sooner forfeit his life than permit the girl Victoria to go in the company of such a woman, or into the care and pro- tection of a man who had the slightest connexion with that woman.' With incredible magnificence the Plaintiff returned to the charge and published Two Letters to the Right Hon. Earl Eldon^ Lord Chancellor^ etc. etc. etc.^ with official and other documents and additional notes. 'By the Hon. W. L. Wellesley. Third Edition. London : John Miller, Pall Mall, 1827.' His defence—' If shape that can be called which shape hath none ' — is monumental. His wife, he says, 'was a most amiable woman . . . but she had not profited by education to the degree that might have been expected,' and that her letters were mostly written by her lady's-maid. He throws the blame on her sisters, who 'entertain principles and doctrines hostile to the Established Church.' The real cause of dislike is revealed elsewhere: it is that 'a few years after my marriage I was called upon to pay the young ladies their portions' — ^15,000 each, plus interest — ' making the whole amount to nearly ;^40,ooo.' He flirther contends that during Mrs. Wellesley's minority, and afterwards, she gave ' very large sums of money ' (a commodity he could properly appreciate) to Lady Catherine and the Misses Long. But it was understood that the Misses Long: — and be it remembered that ' sec- 306 BYRON'S WORLD tarian troubles have operated upon the minds of the wiiuam elder sister ... to such a degree that it can j^^g ^ "^^ scarcely be called rational' ; while * the younger, to Weiiesiey. a temper the most violent, adds manners the least refined ' : — should transfer their portions, charged on the Long estates, to himself and wife. The Longs, it would seem, were Methodists, and Wellesley, a pillar of the Establishment, hated Methodism, as Sir Andrew hated a Puritan. The ladies, in fact, had sat too sedulously at the feet of one Barry, sometime resident apothecary to Sir James Long : — * A man of sectarian principles, and a great collector of sectarian tracts (it was tracts of this nature which I was in the habit of burning after my marriage ; not because they were religious, but because they were wild, fanatic, and not in accor- dance with the true spirit of Christianity) with which he supplied the different members of the family,' etc. etc. etc. Barry, by the way, had made himself still more obnoxious to this sound Church- man by proposing that the Long estates should, in the event of there being no male issue of the Wellesley-Long marriage, be re-settled on the Misses Long, the defender of the true faith to receive an annuity of ;^ 10,000. In 1828 Wellesley married 'the daughter of Colonel Paterson and widow of Captain Bligh of the Coldstream Guards' (The Times, 4th July 1857). But, to quote the same authority, this second union ' would appear to have been no better assorted than the first, to judge from the fact that, since her husband's accession to the title, Lady Mornington has repeatedly appeared in our ESSAYS William columns as an applicant for relief at the metro- Long ^ "^^ politan police-courts in consequence of having been Weiiesiey. left destitute by her husband, and chargeable to the parish.' In the end the old blood died of heart disease ; and on 4th July 1857 an inquest was held (by Mr. Wakely) at the Coachmakers' Arms, Bentinck Street, Manchester Square: — 'Dr. Pro- ber t, the Earl's medical man, said the late Earl had been very badly off so far as pecuniary affairs were concerned, and until the last two years had wanted the necessaries of life. . . . Major W. J. Richard- son, a friend of the Earl, said he did not consider that he [the Earl] had been lately in pecuniary want, for his cousin, the Duke of Wellington, allowed him ;£^io a week ' : which, to be sure, was little enough * for a man who once had ;^ 100,000 a year.' John Gait; In 1809 Galt, who had left Greenock and the Custom House for London and Letters (he had the usual tragedy in his pocket) as early as 1804, was obliged, for his health's sake, to go South. At Gibraltar one day, ' in a withering levanter,' which confined him to the library, he saw Byron, and noted, without knowing who he was, the ' neatness and simplicity,' and at the same time the ' peculiarity of style,' which distinguished his attire, the fact that his ' physiognomy,' though disfigured by what was * undoubtedly the occasional scowl of some un- pleasant reminiscence' — (it appears by the sequel that this 'made a stronger impression upon me than it did upon many others ') — was ' prepossessing and intelligent,' while ' the general cast of his features 310 BYRON'S WORLD was impressed with elegance and character.' The John Gait, next day Gait took ship for Sardinia, and, when Byron and Hobhouse came aboard the packet, it seemed to him that ^ in the little bustle of embarking their luggage his Lordship affected . . . more aristocracy than befitted his years on the occasion.' Also, he wouldn't put on the passenger at all (as Hobhouse did) : on the contrary, he ' sat on the rail, leaning on the mizzen shrouds, inhaling, as it were, poetic sympathy from the gloomy rock, then dark and stern,' etc. About the third day out from Gibraltar ' Byron relented from his rapt mood . . . and became playful' ; produced pistols, and ap- proved himself the best shot on board at a bottle, ' but not pre-eminently so ' ; helped the captain to catch a turtle — ' I rather think two ' ; and did his part (we may assume) in hooking a shark, ' part of which was dressed for breakfast,' but ' tasted with- out relish,' for ' your shark is but a cannibal dainty.' And so on, and so on. Gait was amused by and pleased with Hobhouse, who told him bawdy stories — (stories ' more after the matter and manner of Swift than of Addison ') — and was ' altogether an advantageous specimen of a well-educated English gentleman.' But Byron, who ate little, and drank less, and persisted in ' sitting amidst the shrouds and rattlings in the tranquillity of the moonlight, churming an inarticulate melody,' seemed * almost apparitional ' to him — suggested, in fact, that classic of the genre, ' a mystery in a winding-sheet crowned with a halo.' 'Tis true there were times when he was * familiar and earthy ' ; but, as a rule, * his dwelling was amidst the murk 311 ESSAYS John Galti and the mist, and the home of his spirit in the abysm of the storm, and the hiding-places of guilt.' Even at two-and-twenty you couldn't meet him — or rather Gait couldn't — ' without experiencing a pre- sentiment that he was destined to execute some singular and ominous purpose.' Thus Gait, some twenty years after the event, of Byron at sea ; and as Byron admitted to Lady Blessington that, while he saw that Gait was ' mild, equal, and sensible,' he * took no pains to cultivate his acquaintance,' the sentiment may be accepted as natural, if the expres- sion may not. But at Cagliari — (where Gait rather thinks that he may very possibly have seen the real original of Lara in the pit of the theatre) — the acquaintance ripened ; on the voyage to Sicily * the champagne was uncorked and in the finest condi- tion ' ; and at Malta, despite the lack of * a salute from the batteries ' (which Byron expected), it was found to be still on tap, for Byron and Hobhouse had to begin by ' begging a bed and a morsel for the night ' of a particular friend of Gait's ; and ' God forgive me ! ' says Gait, with a certain irrelevancy, * but I partook of Byron's levity at the idea of per- sonages so consequential wandering destitute in the streets,' etc. There is more of Malta, and there is much of Greece (Gait and Byron met again at Athens), but I shall sample Gait no mrther. Enough to say that after the return to England, and at a time when Byron ' could not well be said to be a celebrated character' — a time, in fact, when Childe Harold was known to Murray and Dallas alone — ' I was frequently with him.' Then, however, came a tiff over The Bride of Ahydos (1813), the story of 312 BYRON'S WORLD which, as Gait insisted, was — not Byron's but — John Gait. Gait's. Byron protested, and the tiff was ended, for the time being, by a very friendly letter. But the relation was not one made to last. At this time Byron, as he confessed to Lady Blessington, ' was in no frame of mind to form an impartial opinion ' of Gait : — ' His mildness and equanimity struck me even then ; but, to say the truth, his manner had not deference enough for my then aristocratical taste, and, finding I could not awe him into a respect sufficiently profound for my sublime self, either as a peer or an author, I felt a little grudge against him,' etc. If I add that Byron thought highly of Gait's novels (he read The Entail three times), and spoke very sensibly and well of the peculiar quality of his gift, I shall have said enough of Gait and Byron during Byron's life. The worst came after Byron's death, when Gait read (in Moore) an entry in one of Byron's Diaries that he (Gait) was * almost the last person on whom any one would commit literary larceny.' That nettled him, and, in The Life of Lord Byron (1830), a work which, as we have seen, is rather well meant than well written, but which is still worth reading, he reflects (i) that Childe Harold was preceded by ' a poem in the Spenserian measure,' which was ' called The Unknoivn,^ which was 'intended to describe . . . pilgrim . . . the scenes I expected to visit,' and on which ' I was occasionally engaged ... during the passage with Lord Byron from Gibraltar to Malta, and he knew what I was ahout^ ; (2) that * I wrote at Athens a burlesque poem on nearly the same subject' as The Curse of Minerva^ that the 313 ESSAYS John Galti MS. was ' sent to his Lordship in Asia Minor, and returned to me through Mr. Hobhouse,' and that ' his Curse of Minerva I saw for the first time in 1828 in Galignani's edition of his works' ; and (3) that, though ' his Lordship disdained to commit any larceny on me, and no doubt the following passage from The Giaour is perfectly original' (follows the passage), yet 'not the most judicious action of all my youth was to publish certain,' etc., and ' his Lordship had the printed book in his pos- session long before,' etc., ' and may have read the following passage,' etc. etc. etc. It might be in- ferred from this that the creator of the inimitable Micah Balquhidder and the scarce less admirable Lady Grippy (as who should say a Glasgow Mrs. Gamp) was not remarkable for humour in private life. But, however that be, he was the only true begetter of the * apparitional ' Byron — the Byron who was as a mystery in a winding-sheet crowned with a halo, at the same time that he was 'distinguished for superior personal elegance, particularly in his bust.' Lady 'SUPPOSE that you were in love with a girl, and Jersey. ^-j^^t her father refused his consent to the union, what would you do.'^ ' Thus, some time in 1782, John, Tenth Earl of Westmoreland, to Child the banker. ' Do ? ' was the answer : ' why, run away with her, to be sure ! ' That very night ('tis said). Lord Westmoreland and his interlocutor's one child eloped together, and took the road from Berkeley Square to Gretna Green. The father 314 BYRON'S WORLD followed ' hot and instant in their trace,' and in the Lady end so nearly ran them down that Lord Westmore- J^^^ey. land had to stand up in the fleeing chaise, and shoot one of the banker's leaders : which happy yet desperate expedient enabled him to make good his retreat. Three months after the wedding, Robert Child died, bequeathing his very splendid fortune to the first daughter, who should be called Sarah, after his own dead wife. This was Lady Sarah Sophia Fane ; and on the 23rd May 1804 she married George Villiers, Fifth Earl of Jersey, twice Lord Chamberlain of the Household, twice Master of the Horse — (according to Byron, as reported by Lady Blessington, 'Pegasus was perhaps the only horse of whose points Lord Jersey couldn't be a judge ') — and. Lord Malmesbury says, ' in manner and appearance le plus grand seigneur of his time.' From the beginning to the end the Countess of Jersey, who was extremely beautiful, was the greatest of great ladies de par le monde, and wielded an influence in society which none, perhaps, but Lady Palmerston's could rival. She was one of the Committee of Lady Patronesses which decided who should, and who should not, be admitted to Almack's, the assembly rooms in King Street, St. James's Street, founded in 1769, and then * the Seventh Heaven of the fashionable world ' (Gronow) : so that, after 1 8 1 5, * to be excluded from them was fatal to any one who aspired to belong to the elite of fashion ' (Lord William Lennox). To Almack's, after Waterloo, Lady Jersey imported * the favourite quadrille, which has so long remained popular ' (a French print, copied 315 ESSAYS Lady into Gronow's First Set of Reminiscenes, shows her in act to dance it, her fellows being Lord and Lady Worcester, and Clanronald Macdonald) ; and at Almack's (1819) Ticknor, who describes her * as a beautiful creature with a great deal of talent, taste, and elegant accomplishment,' stood by on a memor- able occasion when the Duke of Wellington (a great society man : whose nickname was The Beau) was announced at seven minutes past eleven of the clock, and heard her say, ' with emphasis and distinctness,' these awful words: — 'Give my compliments — Lady Jersey's compliments — to the Duke of Well- ington, and say that she is very glad that the first enforcement of the rule of exclusion is such that hereafter no one can complain of its application. He cannot be admitted.'^ [It is worth noting that once before the Duke had been denied his place in Paradise, for that he came to look for it in trousers, and not in breeches as a reputable angel should.] Gronow, who did not love the Countess, complains that, in 18 14 — ^when the Committee consisted of herself, the Countess Lieven, Lady Castlereagh, Lady Sefton, the Countess Cowper, Mrs. Drum- mond Burrell, and the Princess Esterhazy, — 'her bearing,' as compared to Lady Cowper's, ' was that of a theatrical tragedy queen,' and that ' whilst attempting the sublime, she frequently made herself simply ridiculous, being inconceivably rude, and in her manner often ill-bred.' But there were two Lady Jerseys, it would seem ; and this one was the leader of ro«, whom Byron described to Lady Blessington as ' the veriest tyrant that ever governed Fashion's fools, and compelled them to shake their 316 BYRON'S WORLD caps and bells as she willed it.' The other, the Lady Lady Jersey of private life, was not at all that sort of J^^^^' person. In the May of this same year Byron, who was ever her devout admirer — ('Does she still retain her beautifbl cream-coloured complexion and raven hair ? ' he asked at Genoa) — and who was very soon to see her dancing with the Czar : — He wore but a starless blue coat, and in kersey- mere breeches, waltzed round with the Countess of Jersey, Who, lovely as ever, looked just as dehghted With majesty's presence, as those she invited : — inscribed to her the famous Condolatory Address : — * On the Occasion of the Prince Regent Return- ing her Picture to Mrs. Mee.' 'Don't be very angry with me,' he writes, in a note (unpublished) communicated to me by the present Earl. ' If ill- done, the shame can only be mine. . . . They were begun and finished since ten o'clock to-night, so that, whether good or bad, they were done in good earnest. Do with them what you please. Whether they amuse your friends or li^ht your fire, I shall be content, so they don't offend you.^ This is scarce the sort of letter wKich a man would write to ' a theatrical tragedy queen ' ; nor is a Siddons manque e suggested by Sheridan's description ( 1 8 1 5 : reported by Lady Granville and quoted by Mr. Fraser Rae) of his * Silence ' (so he called her) as 'a pretty rushing babbling stream, never stagnant.' [From this of Sheridan's about his ' Silence,' by the way, you understand why Byron * used to long to tell her that she spoiled her looks by excessive animation,' for * eyes, tongue, 317 ESSAYS Lady head, and arms were all in motion at once.'] Take, too, the acutely observed, not altogether friendly portrait which Charles Greville painted of her after staying at Middleton in 1819 : — 18 1 9, January 17 th — * ... It was very agreeable, and the house extremely comfortable. Lady Jersey is an extraordinary woman, and has many good qualities ; surrounded as she is by flatterers and admirers, she is neither proud nor conceited. She is full of vivacity, spirit, and good-nature, but the wide range of her sym- pathies and affections proves that she has more general benevolence than particular sensibihty in her character. She performs all the ordinary duties of Hfe with great correctness, because her heart is naturally good ; and she is, perhaps, from her temperament, exposed to fewer temptations than the generality of her sex. She is deficient in passion and in softness (which constitute the greatest charm in women), so that she excites more of admiration than of interest ; in conversation she is lively and pleasant, without being very remarkable, for she has neither wit, nor imagination, nor humour ; her understanding is active rather than strong, and her judgment is too often warped by prejudice to be sound. She has a retentive memory and a restless mind, together with a sort of intellectual arrangement, with which she appears rather to have been gifted by nature than to have derived from the cultivation of her reasoning faculties.' It may have been a mistake in taste for Lady Jersey to identify herself (as she did) with the cause of the ill-guided and ill-starred Caroline of Brunswick (whose worst enemy her mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess, had been) ; and it may be that the Regent, in turning her picture out of his Gallery of Beauties, was within his rights as both Gentleman and King. But the enduring argument 318 BYRON'S WORLD in her favour is that, despite the weight and manner Lady of her tyranny, she so developed and consolidated her social influence that in the end, Lord Malmes- bury says, she was ^ almost a European personage, for no crowned head or representative of royalty ever landed in England without immediately calling on her, and being found in her salon during his stay.' She died at eighty-two, having survived her husband (by some seventeen years) and her three daughters--(one of them married an Esterhazy, while the second eloped, as her grandmother before her) — and displayed to the last ' the courage and coolness for which she was famous ' (Malme sbury). These qualities were certainly conspicuous in her treatment of Byron at the lowest pitch of his for- tune. On the eve of his departure into banishment, when all London was ringing with the rumour of his misdeeds, and there was scarce a voice which dared uplift itself in his defence, she took the lists for him with equal benevolence and intrepidity, ' made a party for him expressly,' and received him with a serene and gracious ' kindness,' which he remembered gratefully until the last. The ^ party ' was a failure. Most of the guests were uncivil or worse, and only one, Miss Mercer, afterwards Lady Keith, was cordial. ' Nothing short, perhaps,' says Moore, * of that high station in society which a life as blameless as it is brilliant has secured to her, could have placed beyond all reach of misrepresentation, at that moment, such a compliment to one marked by the world's censure so deeply.' This is probably true. In any case, it was Byron's last taste of 319 ESSAYS Lady English Society, and on the lady's side 'twas well ^^^^* and valiantly done. Byron's own account of it was the page which Moore regretted worst of all in the MS. Memoir. In effect, Byron's true demon was upon him : he was within a year or two of Beppo and the Vision and the early cantos of Don Juan. What wildernesses of unexceptionable printed matter one would cheerfully resign, to know that this piece of his writing had escaped the grate in Albemarle Street, and would presently be given to the world! Lady BoRN PoNSONBY, LaDY CAROLINE (1785-1828) WaS L^mb"^ daughter to the Third Earl of Bessborough, by Henrietta Frances, daughter to the First Earl Spencer, and sister to the beautiful Duchess, Georgiana of Devonshire. Reared in a milieu of uncommon state and splendour and self-indulgence, at ten years old she made verses, but could neither write nor read. Then she went to live with her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, and, having an active body and a quick and appre- hensive mind, learned French and Italian, dabbled in the classics, drew, painted, sang, danced, rode — became, in short, the parcel-blue and parcel-beauty who was presently to queen it at Melbourne House. At nineteen she fell in with William Lamb (1779- 1 848), then the penniless younger son of Penistone Lamb, First Viscount Melbourne ; and at twenty (1805), he being then his father's heir and a man six years her elder, she married him. It was a love- match more or less ; and both the parties lived to 390 BYRON'S WORLD regret it. Meanwhile, she bore him a son ; and ^^y. for a certain while, despite her whims and humours Lamb, and frivolities — despite, too, a distribution of energy among so many points, that to read of her to-day is to conjure up a sort of Zimri-in-Petticoats — things went well enough between them. But, as Mr. Dunckley has noted of her in the admirable sketch inserted in his Lord Melbourne— (m 'The Queen's Prime Ministers') — her whole life 'was composed of a series of episodes in which love, or what passed for it, played a leading part.' Vain, selfish, wilful, spoiled, she was one of those bravos of the heart who, while they must still be challeng- ing — challenging for the excitement of combat and the glory of victory — ^yet often lose their heads, forget their prime object, and are left hurt or dead upon the ground. And, as she was unscrupulous in attack, so was she disadvantaged by defeat to the loss, not only of dignity and self-control, but also of all self-respect and all care for others. She could jilt, it seems, without a pang — as many women can ; but she might not endure disdain — as, for that matter, what woman ever could r* And, as she knew not reticence, nor cared twopence who suffered so she had her way, it is not astonishing that in a very few years her husband's regard, for all his affable, genial, affectionate nature, was something the worse for wear. Even so, the time of real trouble was to come. In the February of 1 8 1 2 Byron put forth the First and Second Harold, and awoke to find himself — not merely famous, but — famous as English poet never was before. Lady Caroline saw the book at X 321 ESSAYS Lady Rogers's (as Moore had done), and, after disdaining Lamb" the writer openly (at Lady Westmoreland's) and confiding to her Diary that she thought him ' mad, bad, and dangerous to know,' felt suddenly aware that here was a worthy opposite in the duel of sex, and (not to crack the wind of the poor metaphor) at once proceeded to call him out. Her challenge was accepted, and in the sequel her reputation was so badly winged that she never recovered the use of it. Byron dined with her the day after Lady Hol- land made them known. He called, she says in a statement penned in dustier and less ' sanitated ' days than ours : — ' Rogers and Moore were stand- ing by me. I was on the sofa ; I had just come in from riding. I was filthy and heated. When Lord Byron was announced, I flew out of the room to wash myself. When I returned, Rogers said, "Lord Byron, you are a happy man. Lady Caro- line has been sitting in all her dirt with us, but when you were announced, she flew to beautify herself." Lord Byron wished to come and see me at eight o'clock when I was alone ; that was my dinner- hour. I said he might. From that moment for more than nine months he almost lived at Mel- bourne House.' In no great while, that is, her ' goings-on ' with Byron became the scandal they remained until the end. She sat with him, drove with him (in close carriages) from routs and plays, wrote verses to him, would even have had him take her jewels and pawn them for his own use — in short, did everything she could to compromise herself and him, and, above all, to absorb him — genius and love and glory and will — to the last atom. She achieved 322 BYRON'S WORLD the inevitable effect. He 's a fool, says an expert in Lady human life and destiny, who pins his faith upon Lamb!^^ (among other things) a boy's love ; and Byron, if he were no more a boy, was at all events too young and vain, too brilliant and too irresistible — especi- ally too irresistible — for constancy. So, from being a goddess. Lady Caroline was in due course revealed a bore of the first magnitude : a bore who rowed you in public, and wrote you reproaches by the ream, and tried to storm your chambers in disguise, and at supper sought to mangle herself with table- knives, or essayed to cast herself out of ball-room windows. What was there for it but division? There was an interview, and there were letters. [One very frantic, desperate, and loverlike elucu- bration from Byron, in which the writer protests himself ready ' to obey, to honour, love, and fly with you, when, where, and how yourself . . . may determine ' : the sort of composition, in fact, which young men achieve in certain circumstances, and then make haste to blush for or to forget : is printed in Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson's The Real Lord Byron (i. 261-3) from a copy 'made from the original MS.'] But no sort of modus vivendi was possible, and, to smooth things over. Lady Bessborough took her deliberately impulsive child to Ireland, to be out of Byron's way. Still, they corresponded ; and after some time, Lady Caroline intimated her inten- tion of returning to London and her place in Byron's life and heart. The answer to this intima- tion, written upon paper stamped with the coronet and the initials of a detested rival (Lady Oxford, it is said), was ' that cruel letter that I have published 323 ESSAYS Lady in Glenarvon ; it destroyed me ; I lost my brain. Lamb!^^ I was bled, leeched ; kept' — (thus the heroine to her friend, Lady Morgan, the Wild Irish Girl) — * for a week in the filthy " Dolphin " at Rock.' Here is the document, or as much of it as Lady Caroline chose to publish : — Lady Caroline Lamb, — I am no longer your lover ; and since you oblige me to confess it by this truly un- feminine persecution, learn that I am attached to another, whose name it would of course be dishonest to mention, I shall ever remember with gratitude the many instances I have received of the predilection you have shown in my favour. I shall ever continue your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself. And as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice : correct your vanity, which is ridiculous ; exert your absurd caprices on others ; and leave me in peace. — Your obedient servant, Byron. A ' cruel letter ' ? Doubtless. But what is, what has ever been, more cruel than the man a woman has sickened of those favours which she yet insists on thrusting on his acceptance? The situation is as old as Society, and Byron's way of ending it was, and is, and will ever remain, a convention of the game : — The Eternal Saki from that bowl has poured Millions of bubbles like him, and will pour. And for Lady Caroline, as for himself, it was not an end but a beginning. Lady Melbourne, William Lamb's mother, was always his very good friend ; he had proposed to her kinswoman. Miss Milbanke, in the autumn of the Harold year itself ; in 1 8 14 324 BYRON'S WORLD he proposed again ; in the January of 1 8 1 5 came Lady the Marriage ; and on the 25 th April 1 8 1 6 followed ^^b!^^ the Exile. In the interval Lady Caroline had not been idle ; and, whatever her effect in the part of a Lapland Witch, whatever her share in the storm which drove her quondam lover from England, it is certain, at least, that she had him burned in effigy (she sent him an account of the proceedings), certain that she wrote and published Glenarvon in the year of his departure, and certain that in Glenarvon she did her best against his fame and him. She wrote this wretched book, so she tells you, in a page's habit, and at dead of night ; and for a motto she adapted two famous verses from The Corsair: — He left a name to all succeeding times, Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes. But when Byron had read, he had no more to say of Glenarvon than this : — ' It seems to me, that if the authoress had written the truth^ and nothing but the truth — the whole truth — the romance would not only have been more romantic, but more entertain- ing. As for the likeness, the picture can't be good. — I did not sit long enough.' His first sentence may well have given Disraeli the idea of a matchless scene in Fenetia. For the rest, the sole change suffered by that antic disposi- tion which was Lady Caroline's was for the worse. In 1824 it chanced that, riding out one morning, she saw a funeral pass the gates, and, asking whose it was, was told that it Was Byron's. It was her first news of his death, and she took to her bed in a state of utter collapse, nor recovered till she had 325 ESSAYS Lady sent for Edward Bulwer, then a boy of twenty-one, Lamb!^^ added him to her list of opposites, given him a rival in the person of a certain Mr. Russell, * a fashionable beau, extremely handsome, but dull, insipid, and silly,' and sent him so far off his wits with jealousy, that in the end he must have recourse to flight and . the loss of twenty ounces of blood. — (Dunckley.) By this time, in fact, her eccentricities had grown to such a pitch of extravagance that there was nothing for William Lamb but to leave her. This he did (1824), as amiably as he did everything ; but in 1828, the year which saw him Viscount Melbourne, she died in his company forgiven and at peace. A handful of opinions about her. I think it must be she of whom Lady Byron (July- August 1 8 1 5) writes thus to ' Dearest Sis ' (Augusta Leigh) : — ' She has never called on me, and when I made her a vis — (sic) with my mother, was very dignified. . . . She asked after B ! — Such a wicked-looking cat I never saw.' — (Morrison Autographs.) Dis- raeli, greatly daring, essayed to realise her in the Mrs. Felix Lorraine of Vivian Grey. After Glen- arvon Rogers dismissed her in a famous couplet from Pope : — From furious Sappho scarce a milder fate, Poxed by her love and libelled by her hate. * It is at least extraordinary,' Harness writes, ' that, while thus courted and admired, if his (Byron's) life were as licentious as some have represented, the only scandal which disturbed the decorum of Society ' — (the Society, be it remembered, which had not long lost 'Old Q.', that indefatigable virtuoso, so to 326 BYRON'S WORLD speak, which had still its Regent and its Yar- Lady mouth, its Harriet Wilson and its Mrs. Clarke, to f^^^"^^ name but these, and to which crim. con. was an essential of being) — ' and with which Byron's name is connected, did not originate in any action of his but in the insane and unrequited passion of a woman.' Last of all, Sir Walter : — * Poor soul ! if a godlike face and godlike powers could have made any excuse for devilry, to be sure she had one.' Withal she was a true histrion of the heart, had a right instinct for what she deemed the beau role and the centre of the stage, and could play her part to suit all humours. ' That beautiful pale face is my fate ' : so (as she told Scott's friend) she told herself in the beginning: and, writing to Murray (13th July 1824) : — ' I am sure I am very sorry I ever said one word against him.' Each of these utter- ances is what is called a mot de la fin ; and each is capital of its kind. Byron began, of course, by lumping Scott with sir Walter Jeffrey. Both were products of Edinburgh ; so ^^°**- both were equally damnable, and both must be (and both were) brought forth and scourged before the people, the one as a hackney poet — (* my crime,' says Scott, ' was having written a poem ... for a thousand pounds ') — the other as a venal critic. Scott was no better pleased than another man of spirit would be in the circumstances ; and soon after the publication of English Bards you find him writ- ing (7th August 1 8a9) of * a young whelp of a Lord Byron,' and noting that *it is not his Lordship's 327 ESSAYS Sir Walter merit, though it may be his great good fortune, that Scott. ^^ ^^g ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ |-^^ ^^ ^-^ literary talents or success.' Again (4th April 18 12) he tells Joanna Baillie that Childe Harold is ' a clever poem, but gives no good symptoms of the writer's heart or morals,' that 'it must require impudence at least equal to the noble Lord's other powers, to claim sympathy for the ennui arising from his being tired of his wassailers and his paramours,' etc. etc. But, once made, the acquaintance, which was of Scott's seeking, was never crossed by so much as the shadow of a shade. As matter of fact, in nothing which the great and good Sir Walter ever wrote are sanity of judgment and soundness of humanity more con- spicuous than in (i) the 'interesting communica- tion ' with which, years after the event, he * found time, in the midst of all his marvellous labours for the world,' to ' favour ' Byron's biographer ; and (2) the reflections on Byron's death which he contri- buted (1824) to an Edinburgh newspaper. They met not often, nor corresponded very vigorously ; but the understanding of these two radiant and distinguished spirits was none the less complete for 'that. 'No one,' Scott writes to Murray (loth January 1 8 1 7), ' can honour Lord Byron's genius more than I do, and no one had so great a wish to love him personally, though personally we had not the means of becoming very intimate ' ; and he goes on to regret that he had not interfered, as he might have done, in Byron's ' family distress (deeply to be deprecated, and in which probably he can yet be excused),' for the reason that he ' always seemed to give me credit for wishing him sincerely well.' 328 BYRON'S WORLD Thus Scott to Murray ; and thus Murray, concern- Sir Walter ing Scott, to Byron (22nd September 18 18): — ^^°"' * The Saturday and Sunday previous I passed most delightfully with Walter Scott, who was incessant in his inquiries after your welfare. He entertains the noblest sentiments of regard towards you, and speaks of you with the best feelings.' I might go on, but this is enough on the one part. On the other, I shall only note that, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers once off the writer's stomach, Byron never wavered in his admiration and respect for Scott. ' There was something highly gratifying to the feelings ' — of the Countess of Blessington — ' in witnessing the warmth and cordiality that Byron's countenance displayed in talking of Sir Walter Scott,' whom, for the rest, he ' never named but with praise and affection.' ' We don't say " Mr. Caesar," ' he writes, by way of apology for speaking of his friend as plain Scott ; the Novels, ' a literature in themselves,' are among the books he loves best and reads most ; Scott's review of the Third Harold gives him extreme pleasure ; to Scott Cain is dedicated, ' by his obliged friend and faithflil servant,' (1821); and Scott, the 'Ariosto of the North,' of the Fourth Harold (18 17) — * meaning thereby of all countries which are not the South,' — the ' Monarch of Parnassus, and the most English of bards ' of a certain ' triangular gradus ad Par- nassiim^ (18 13), accepts 'with feelings of great obligation ' Byron's ' very flattering proposal ' to prefix the name of Walter Scott to his 'very grand and tremendous drama.' It is well at all times to remember that Byron's name, if it stank in the 32D ESSAYS Sir Walter nostrils of Georgian London, was always sweet, and sweet enough, in those of the best good man of his time. Lady Hoppner's portrait of Lady Oxford (1774- Oxford. 1824)— one of his best; exhibited in 1798 — shows a woman amiable as beautiful — the very woman, in fact, of the letter from Uvedale Price, with which I end this Note. It seems to have been Lady Oxford of whom Byron spoke thus at Genoa (Blessington, Conversations^ etc., 1834): — * Even now the autumnal charms of Lady are remembered by me with more than admiration. She resembled a landscape by Claude Lorraine, with a setting sun, her beauties enhanced by the know- ledge that they were shedding their last dying leaves, which threw a radiance round. A woman ... is only grateful for her first and last conquests. The first of poor dear Lady 's was achieved before I entered on this world of care, but the last^ I do flatter myself, was reserved for me, and a bonne bouche it was.' If this be a memory of the Coun- tess, it is a good enough commentary on the fact that Byron took Thyrnham Court to be near the Oxfords next year ; and that he thought of going to Sicily this year in Lord Oxford's train, and did actually get as far as Portsmouth. Portsmouth was the end ; for the Oxfords were long abroad, and Byron lived his life at top speed. Death came to both these lovers in the same year. And on the occasion of her departure, Uvedale Price wrote thus (Clayden, Rogers and His Contemporaries y 330 BYRON'S WORLD i. 397-8) to Rogers, from Foxley, under date of Lady 26th December 1824: — ' This is a melancholy subject ' — [the death, by con- sumption, of Lord Aberdeen's children] — and ' I must go to another : poor Lady Oxford. I had heard with great concern of her dangerous illness, but hoped she might get through it, and was much, very much grieved to hear that it had ended fatally. I had, as you know, lived a great deal with her from the time she came into this country, immediately after her marriage, but for some years past, since she went abroad, had scarcely had any correspondence or intercourse with her, till I met her in town last spring. I then saw her twice, and both times she seemed so overjoyed to see an old friend, and expressed her joy so naturally and cordially, that I felt no less overjoyed at seeing her after so long an absence. She talked, with great satisfaction, of our meeting for a longer time this next spring, httle thinking of an eternal separation. There could not, in all respects, be a more ill-matched pair than herself and Lord Oxford, or a stronger instance of the cruel sports of Venus, or, rather, of Hymen : — Cui placet impares Formas atque animos sub juga ahenea Saevo mittere cum joco. It has been said that she was, in some measure, forced into the match ; had she been united to a man whom she had loved, esteemed, and respected, she herself might have been generally respected and esteemed as well as loved ; but in her situation, to keep clear of all misconduct required a strong mind or a cold heart ; perhaps both, and she had neither. Her failings were in no small degree the effect of circumstances ; her amiable qualities all her own. There was something about her in spite of her errors remarkably attaching, and that some- thing was not merely her beauty ; " kindness has resistless charms," and she was full of affectionate kindness to those she loved, whether as friends or as lovers. As a friend, I always found her the same ; never at all changeful 331 ESSAYS Lady or capricious ; as I am not a very rigid moralist and am Oxford, extremely open to kindness, " I could have better spared a better woman." ' Leigh James Henry Leigh Hunt (i 784-1 859) was imprisoned in Horsemonger Lane Gaol for that famous description (Examiner, 12th March 18 13) of the Prince Regent as ' a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demi-reps,' and ' a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.' Hunt was a Radical, of course, and Moore a Whig ; but to abuse the Regent was to go straight to the heart of the great Whig Party, among whose members, says Moore, ' there existed . . . at this period a strong feeling of indignation at the late defection from themselves and their principles of the illustrious personage who had been so long looked up to as the friend and patron of both.' As a good and loyal Whig, Moore himself was 'warmly — perhaps intemperately — under the in- fluence of this feeling ' ; he ' regarded the fate of Mr. Hunt with more than common interest ' ; so, ' immediately on my arrival in town (I) paid him a visit in his prison.' Byron heard of the experience and of the prisoner's circumstances — ' his trelliced flower-garden without, and his books, busts, pic- tures, and pianoforte within ' ; and being, he also, of the Whig way of thinking, requested an intro- duction. The visit was repeated, there was a 332 BYRON'S WORLD dinner, there were presents of books ; and, ^ It Leigh strikes me,' Hunt wrote to his wife, with a truly ""^' amazing capacity for self-deception, ' that he and I shall become friends, literally and cordially speaking. There is something in the texture of his mind that seems to resemble mine to a thread ; I think we are cut out of the same piece, only a different wear may have altered our respective naps a little.' Byron, on his part, thought the captive * an extraordinary character. . . . Much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere yet not repulsive aspect,' at the same time that he was ' the bigot of virtue (not religion)^ and, perhaps, a trifle opinionated. . . . But withal, a valuable man, and less vain than suc- cess, and even the consciousness of preferring the right to the expedient, might excuse.' The * respec- tive naps ' are different, to be sure ; but for some time the relations between the wearers were friendly enough. It was to Byron that Hunt dedicated that achievement in affected English and shabby-genteel heroics in which, by an immortal piece of bathos, Dante's lovers, at the very crisis of their fate, are turned into a suburban milliner and her 'young man ' : — * May I come in ? ' said he ; — it made her start, — That smiling (!) voice — she coloured, pressed her heart A moment, as for breath, and then with free And usual tones said, * Oh yes, certainly (!) * : — and Byron, though he despised the style, yet thought the poem ' a devilish good one,' recom- mended it to Murray, and would have liked Moore to give it a hand in The Edinburgh Review. Again, Hunt says that he was much with Byron in 333 ESSAYS Leigh the pre-Exile days, and when the Exile came, he broke forth in valediction and in song: — And so adieu, dear Byron, — dear to me For many a cause, disinterestedly, etc. But by 1 8 1 8 Byron's mood had grown truly critical, not to say truculent : — * He (Hunt) is a good man, with some poetical elements in his chaos, but spoiled by the Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper, — to say nothing of the Surrey gaol, which conceited him into a martyr. But he is a good man. ... He believes his trash of vulgar phrases, tortured into compound barbarisms, to be old English. . . . He sent out his Foliage by Percy Shelley . . . and of all the ineffable Centaurs that was ever begotten by Self- Love upon a Nightmare, I think this monstrous Sagittary the most prodigious. He (Leigh H.) is an honest char- latan, who has persuaded himself into a belief in his own impostures, and talks Punch in pure simplicity of heart. ... Is that * * * at the head of your profession in your eyes } I '11 be cursed if he is of mine^ or ever shall be. . . . But Leigh Hunt is a good man ; and a good father — see his Odes to all the Masters Hunt ; a good husband — see his Sonnet to Mrs. Hunt ; a good friend — see his Epistles to different people ; and a great cox- comb, and a very vulgar person in everything about him.' It is delightfully savage. But listen to Keats (4th Jan. 18 1 9), who knew his Hunt like a book : — ' In reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in taste and morals. . . . He does one harm by making fine things petty, and beautiful things hate- ful.' By contrast this character of Byron's conveys the impression that the writer must have had a real regard for Hunt, however dashed with scorn, to have countenanced the famous tour to Italy at all. 334 BYRON'S WORLD That tour was made at Shelley's suggestion, and Leigh gn funds (;£'2oo) which Shelley borrowed from Byron for the purpose. In the sequel it proved the worst day's work he ever did. Its objects were (i) rest and change for Hunt, and (2) the foundation of a magazine to be written by Hunt, Shelley, and Byron. It is absurd to suppose that such a venture could have prospered ; but, as matter of fact, no such venture was ever made. Hunt (with his wife and six children) was bound for Pisa, where Shelley (then at Lerici) had furnished the ground-floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, Byron's house, for him. At Leghorn he was joined by Shelley and Williams in the Don Juan. The party went on to Pisa, whither Byron followed ; and, a few days after, the Don Juan — 'built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark ' — put out to sea for the last time. The impossible combination disappeared ; and Byron was left with Hunt (cum suis) on his hands, and the strong conviction in his mind that the whole posi- tion was a mistake. In effect, the results were disastrous all round. The host, to his discredit, was at no particular pains to make himself agreeable to his guest ; the guest, who was at best a journalist of parts, but thought himself by far the better poet of the two — (he was very soon to show, and m The Liberal too, how Byron ought to write the ottava rima\) — was not greatly concerned to conciliate his host, at the same time that he looked to that host to give lavishly and ask no questions. In this, how- ever, the guest was disappointed. More : he had been all his life a sponge, and for the first time in his life (as Mr. Monkhouse has remarked in his excel- ESSAYS Leigh lent little monograph) he was made to feel like the sponge he was. He had, as Keats says, takep Haydon's ' silver,' and * expostulated on the in- delicacy' of a demand for its return ; and in less trying times he had had ^1400 out of Shelley in a single year. Byron was not that stamp of treasurer. He was better versed in character and life than Shelley ; and, whether or not he had contracted what he calls the ' good old-gentlemanly vice,' it is certain that Hunt, though he accepted some ;f 500 of him, and lived ' for the best part of two years ' at his expense, was neither satisfied nor pleased. Thus the pike which tries to swallow what appears to him his natural prey, but has to give over the experience, ' distracted and amazed.' The starting of The Liberal made matters worse. It was founded with Byron's money, and fed with such Byronisms as Heaven and Hell, the Vision, the translation from Pulci, and the letter to * My dear Roberts.' But it was a failure from the beginning, when John Hunt was fined and imprisoned for publishing the Vision ; and as, though it was little or nothing to Byron, it was bread of life, and more, to Hunt, nobody need be surprised, though every- body should be distressed, to find that Hunt was presently disposed — (I quote again his able and humane apologist) — to ' impute the meanest motives to everything Byron said or did.' If you lie down with dogs (in fact), you get up with fleas. Byron consorted with Hunt, and four years after Byron's death (1828) Hunt published his Lord Byron and His Contemporaries. He wrote this stuff because he wanted money, and he would not 336 BYRON'S WORLD have written it (so he says) could he have got money Leigh by any other means ; and, with a littleness of mind ^" ' and spirit unparalleled in any but a cast mistress or an embittered poetaster, he essayed to present the man on whom he had sponged ' for the best part of two years' as a cad of the first magnitude — as, in fact, as false, as selfish, as contemptible a human thing as had disgraced the century. But by the time that this ignoble piece of book- making got into print, the British public had awakened to a sense of what it had lost in Byron — to a sense, too, of its own superb stupidity in Byron's case ; and, as Mr. Monkhouse says, its reception of Hunt's Mibel probably caused him more suffering than all the former attacks of the Quarterly ^ — (in which Lockhart described the thing as ' the miserable book of a miserable man ') — ' Blackwood^ and other enemies put together.' The most galling, I think, because the most con- temptuous, diatribe of all came from his ex-friend, Moore. I shall quote it here in full, not from the Satirical and Humorous Poems (where it is signed 'T. Pidcock,' and dated from ^Exeter Change,' where the menagerie was), but from a copy, in the Morrison Autographs, in the handwriting of Augusta Leigh : — THE • LIVING DOG ' AND THE * DEAD LION * THOMAS MOORE TO LEIGH HUNT Jan. 13. Next week will be published, as ' Lives ' are the rage, The whole Reminiscences, wondrous and strange, Of a small puppy dog, that lived once in the Cage Of the late noble Lion at Exeter Change. Y 887 ESSAYS Leigh Though the dog is a dog of the kind they call * sad,' Hunt^ 'Tis a puppy that much to good breeding pretends ; And few Dogs have such opportunities had, Of knowing how lions behave among friends. How the Animal eats, how he snores, how he drinks, Is all noted down by this Boswell so small, And 'tis plain from each sentence the puppy dog thinks That the Lion was no such great things after all. Though he roar'd pretty well — this the puppy allows — It was all, he says, borrow'd — all second-hand roar, And he vastly prefers his own little bow-wows [To] the loftiest War-note the Lion could pour. 'Tis indeed as good fun as a Cynic could ask. To see how this cockney-bred setter of rabbits Takes gravely the head of the Forest to task And judges of Lions by Puppy Dog habits. Nay, fed as he was (and this makes [it] a dark case) With sops every day from the Lion's own pan. He Hfts up his leg at the noble beast's carcase. And does all a Dog, so diminutive, can. However, the Book 's a good book — being rich in Examples and warnings to Lions high-bred. How they suffer small mongrelly curs in their kitchen. Who '11 feed on them living, and foul them when dead. Thus ]VIoore, and, broadly speaking, thus the general press. An ordinary person — if one can imagine an ordinary person in such circumstances — would have imitated Captain Shandy's (proposed) method of dealing with that work which the great Lepsius composed the day he was born. But Hunt was a spirited creature in his way ; and, howbeit something saddened and surprised (above all sur- prised) by the terms of his reception, he at once proceeded to give proof positive that, as he told his BYRON'S WORLD readers, he had ' moral courage, and a great deal of Leigh it.' In Sir Walter's phrase (Lang, Lockhart^ ii. 23), he had already ' behaved like a hyaena to Byron,' for that he had ' dug him up to girn and howl over him in the same breath ' ; and in a second edition he showed that he could do still worse. For in certain Appendices, while protesting that ' no man could hold in greater horror ' than he did ' the violation of the sub iisdem trahihus — the sacred enclosure of private walls,' he essayed to justify himself on this head ; and in his Preface, retorting on a reference (Lockhart) to his ' not very tractable children,' he ventured to ' thank God they were not tractable to' Byron, and to add this: — 'I have something very awful to say on this subject in case it is forced from me.' He said not how nor when this ' something very awful ' was discovered to him ; and in common charity one must infer that it was neither when he was living under Byron's roof nor when he was taking Byron's money as an outdoor pensioner. ' I have many infirmities,' he wrote, ' and nothing great in me but my sympathy with mankind.' The infirmities are patent ; but for the * sympathy,' etc., one must go else-whither than to Lord Byron and His Contemporaries. It is fair to add that Hunt wrote with true piety of Shelley — (but if, as Trelawny says, he really did prefer his own Muse before Shelley's, the density of his conceit is not to be expressed in terms of words) — and Keats ; that he lived to a green old age ; that he numbered Carlyle among his many friends ; and that another of them, Charles Dickens, was severely taken to ESSAYS Leigh task for presenting him as the Harold Skimpole of Bleak House. A person of parts, no doubt — of parts, and a certain charm, and a facile, amiable, liquorish temperament. But there was no clearer, keener vision than Keats's ; and I fear that Keats's word about Leigh Hunt must be remembered as the last. Charles Captain Charles Morris (i 745-1 838), author of innumerable moral songs (Lyra Urbanica^ 1840), but remembered chiefly for Jenny Sutton and The Great Plenipotentiary (both still prized among amateurs of the genre), and a single line in The Contrast : — * O, give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall.' Being a Whig bard and satirist (he was responsible for such pasquinades as Billy '5 Too Young to Drive Us) he incensed the Anti- Jacobins, who introduced him with peculiar opprobrium, in a sham account of the celebration of Fox's birthday. Thus runs that part of the report (compiled, 'tis said, from the Morning Post and Morning Chronicle : ' the Courier being too stupid for our purpose') which concerns him : — ' We know not how far Mr. Fox might have proceeded, had he not been interrupted by a jangling of bells from the Side-table which immediately drew all eyes that way. This proceeded from Captain Morris, who had fallen asleep during Mr. Fox's Song, and was now nodding on his chair, with a large paper Cap on his head, ornamented with gilt tassels and bells, which one of the Company had dexter- ously whipped on unperceived. The first motion was that of indignation ; but the stupid stare of the unconscious 340 BYRON'S WORLD Captain, who half opened his eyes at every sound of the Charles bells as his head rose or fell, and immediately closed them Morris, again, somno vinoque gravatus, had such a powerful effect on the risible faculties of the Company, that they broke, as if by consent, into the most violent and con- vulsive fits of laughter ; Mr. Fox himself not being exempt from the general contagion. As soon as the Captain was made sensible of the cause of this uproar, he attempted to pull off the Cap, but was prevented by a Citizen from the Corresponding Society, who main- tained that the Company had a right to be amused by the Captain in what manner they pleased ; and that, as he seemed to amuse them more effectually in that state than in any other, he insisted, for one, on his continuing to wear the Cap. This was universally agreed to, with the exception of the Duke of Norfolk. The Captain was therefore led to the upper table, with all his " jangHng honours loud upon him " ! Here, as soon as he was seated, his Noble Friend called upon him for a Song. The Captain sang the Plenipo in his best manner. This was received with great applause ; and then the Duke gave " The Defenders — of Ireland " — {three times three). Captain Morris then began : — " And all the Books of Moses " : — but was interrupted, before he had finished the first line, by Mr. Tierney, who declared he would not sit there and hear anything like ridicule on the Bible. — (Much coughing and scraping.) — Mr. Erskine took God to witness, that he thought the Captain meant no harm ; — and a gentleman from Cambridge, whose name we could not learn, said, with great naivete, that it was no more than was done every day by his acquaintance. Mr. Tierney, however, persisted in his opposition to the Song, and Captain Morris was obhged to substitute Jenny Sutton in the place of it. But the good humour of the company was already broken in upon, and Mr. Tierney soon after left the room (to which he did not return) with greater marks of displeasure in his face than we ever remember to have seen there.' 341 ESSAYS Charles Thus, too, Kirkpatrick Sharpe — Sir Walter's friend : °"^^' withal ' the unclean bird, which buildeth its nest in the corner of the temple, and defileth the holy places,' of the Chaldee Manuscript — in that Vision of Liberty which he contributed to The Ami- Jacobin Review and Magazine: — ' On a cock sparrow fed with Spanish flies, A swilHng Captain came, with hquor mellow. And still the crowd in hideous uproar cries, " Sing us a b dy song, thou d d good fellow." Incontinent he sets himself to bellow, And shouts with all the strength that in him Hes ; The Citizens exclaim, " He's sans pareilly O " ; The Citizens in raptures roll their eyes, And drink with leathern ears the fool's lewd ribal- dries.' (Both quotations are from Mr. Edmonds's Edition of The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin ; London, 1890.) The captain was for many years a parasite of that violentWhig, the Duke of Norfolk, who left him nothing in the end. He had, however, an annuity of ;^2oo from the Regent, and, for all his reputation, is described by Moore as ' a very grave, steady person ' (this is confirmed by the odd anony- mous Memoirs of a Man of Fashion ; London, 1 821). For a pretty story of Morris and Lord Stowell and their old sweetheart, Molly Dacre (then Lady Clarke), see Moore {Diary ^ 19th November 1829), who is also responsible for the story that the captain's widow expected ;^ 10,000 of Murray for the MS. afterwards published as Lyra Urbanica. 342 BYRON'S WORLD Our next round of toasts was a fancy quite new, Marquess For we drank — and you '11 own 'twas benevolent too — jj t a To those well-meaning husbands, cits, parsons, or peers, ^^ ^^ ' Whom we 've, any time, honoured by courting their dears. This museum of wittols was comical rather ; Old H — df — rt gave M — ss — ^y, and / gave your f — th — r. Thus an ' Intercepted Letter ' from ' G — ge, Pr — ce R — g — nt, to the E — rl of Y — rm — th ' ; and as matter of fact the second Marchioness of Hertford — (Isabella Anne Ingram Shepeard {d, 1834), daughter and co-heir of Charles, Viscount Irwin, of Scotland) — who had at this time * reached the regulation age,' and was, (As near as one can fix From peerage dates) full fifty-six, was all-powerful with the Regent, and was jusdy execrated of the Whigs. They suspected her of alienating their sometime Patron's affections from them, and of dictating that course of policy, one effect — and not the worst — of which was their absolute exclusion from Place ; and they applauded with both hands not only such capital chaff as the Horace: Ode xi. Book ii. ('Freely Translated by the Pr — ce R — g — nt ') : — Go — bid her haste hither, And let her bring with her The latest No-Popery Sermon that 's going — Oh ! let her come with her dark tresses flowing, All gentle and juvenile, curly and gay. In the manner of — Ackermann's Dresses for May : — but also such ruffianism as the lines first quoted, and the well-nigh unpresentable anacreontic. To a Plumas ster : — 343 Hertford. ESSAYS Marquess Seek me out a fine Pea-hen ; o^ , , Such a Hen, so tall and grand, As by Juno's side might stand, If there were no cocks at hand. Seek her feathers, soft as down, etc. Her son, Francis Charles Seymour Conway, Earl of Yarmouth (1777-1842) and Third Mar- quess of Hertford (1822), was fifteen years the Prince's junior. Familiarly known as 'Red Her- rings,' by reason partly of his title and partly of the fiery hue of his whiskers : — Thy whiskers, too, Yarmouth — alas ! even they, Tho' so rosy they burn. Too quickly must turn (What a heart-breaking change for thy whiskers !) to Grey : — he was one of the most conspicuous, as well as one of the most characteristic, figures of the later Georgian Age. Educated at Eton and Oxford (Christ Church and St. Mary's Hall : he proceeded to his M.A. degree as late as 18 14), in 1798 he married Maria Fagniani, old Q's (or George Selwyn's : he left her ;^3 0,000) natural daughter, and entered the Commons as member for Orford (Suffolk). In 1802-3, after the Peace of Amiens, he took his wife to Paris, and was presently captured with the rest of his countrymen in France, and sent to Verdun : a special exception being made for his Countess, who remained in the capital. [In 1842 The Times (i2th March) quotes The Scotsman to this effect : — ' The wife of the deceased Marquis was the acknowledged mistress of Marshal Junot.' Hence, perhaps, the epithet in Moore's pasquinade : 344 BYRON'S WORLD — ' His Y — rm — th's own Frenchified hand cut it Marquess out.' Be this as it may, it was at Paris that was Hertford, born her second son, the Lord Henry Seymour (i 805-1 859), who was afterwards to found the French Jockey Club, and of whom it is reported that neither could he speak English, nor had he ever set foot on English ground.] When the Whigs came in (1806), the Prince requested Fox, who was in private correspondence with Talleyrand, to negotiate Yarmouth's release ^ and the Emperor, believing him to be a personal friend of Fox's, let him out at once, and packed him off to England to arrange terms of peace. He reached London on 4th June, and was sent back as Envoy-Extra- ordinary ; but in the interval there had been pour- parlers with Russia, Napoleon had raised his terms, and Yarmouth was dished. His mission remained a secret till August, when he was joined by Lord Lauderdale, who took up the negotiations in his stead ; but neither Lauderdale (with Yarmouth) for England nor d'Oubril for Russia was clever enough to play bowls with Napoleon, and in the sequel they went home baffled and shamed. (All this on the word of The Gentleman^s Magazine^ May 1842.) In 1809 Yarmouth seconded his cousin Castlereagh in the duel with Canning ; in 18 10 he succeeded to * the greatest part of the disposable property of the rich and eccentric Duke of Queensberry, the puta- tive father of his wife' — to ;{^ 150,000, that is, besides real estate; in 181 1 he was made Vice- Chamberlain ; in 1 8 12 he was appointed Lord Warden of the Stanneries and a member of the Privy Council, and (with his mother) was preferred 345 ESSAYS Marquess by the Regent before Lords Grey and Grenville, Hertford. ^^^ declined to join the New Cabinet unless the Hertfords (the Second Marquess (i 743-1 822) was Lord High Chamberlain) and their son were removed from the Household ; in 18 14 he helped to found the Pugilistic Club, and was told off to do the honours to the Emperor Alexander, who gave him the Order of St. Anne ; in 1822 he succeeded to the Marquisate, and received the Garter ; and in 1827, being sent, as Ambassador-Extraordinary, to invest the Czar Nicholas with the Garter at Tsar- koeseloe, he played his part with a magnificence which set the Court and City gaping. After the passing of the Reform Bill he ' took a dislike ' to England, and chiefly lived abroad until his death, which made him still more notorious (if that were possible) than he had been in life. His will, indeed, was made the occasion for years of scan- dalous litigation. It disposed of a vast amount of property ; it dealt largely with scamps and demi- reps ; and it was so violently phrased that The Times declined to quote a number of its instruc- tions. It is far too elaborate and long to analyse, much less to print in full ; and the executors, who had their work cut out for them in any case, were moved, unwisely, to boggle at certain of its pro- visions. Hence an action by one Angelique Borel, who recovered ;^3000 ; hence, too, an action by Lord Hertford's valet, Nicholas Suisse, who recovered more thousands than I care to say ; and hence the criminal prosecution of Suisse — first in London and then in Paris — on a charge of em- bezzling divers sums of money, amounting (on one 346 BYRON'S WORLD count only) to as much as 100,000 francs. For the Marquess legitimate effect of the will, it remains obscure. Hertford. But, so far as I can learn, a codicil (one of thirty) revoked a large bequest to the mother of Lord Hertford's three wards, because she had formed a connexion which was displeasing to him ; but those wards, the daughters of Admiral Sir Richard Strachan (scandal gave them another sire) : — Sir Richard, longing to be at 'em, Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham : — Countess Zichy (who lived with him until the end), Countess Barthold, and Princess Ruffo got ;^8 6,000, ;£8o,ooo, and ;^40,ooo, respectively. Also 'Lady Strachan's maid' took ;6'5ooo down and a life annuity of ;^iooo ; the servants ;£i 6,000 to ;^2o,ooo among them ; John Wilson Croker (whose relations with the Marquess are suggested in Thackeray's Mr. Wenham and, especially, Disraeli's Mr. Rigby), ;£2 1,000 and the wine (the best of it was abroad, so he made not much by this part of the bequest) ; the executors ;^5ooo apiece ; and so on, and so on. Altogether an amazing document. * Aware of the infamy of the character of one ' of a pair of legatees, the testator * wishes the other to be as little in the power of that person as possible, and regulates certain payments in order that the one person may have no occasion to shorten the life of the other.' This provision The Times made bold to reproduce. We may judge of those it let alone. Besides being Lord Warden of the Stanneries, Lord Hertford was Steward and Vice-Admiral of 347 ESSAYS Marquess the Duchy of Cornwall, Chief Commissioner of Hertford. ^^^ Duchy of Cornwall, Recorder of Coventry and Bodmin, Custos Rotulorum of the County of Antrim, Vice-Admiral of the Coast of Suffolk, etc. etc. etc. Also, as the * patron ' of Aldeburgh, Bodmin, Orford, and Lisburne, he nominated eight Members of Parliament. Indeed, his chief claims to distinction are that he so lived his life as to make it as it were a sublimation of the life and spirit of his time, and was as high, as puissant, and as magni- ficent a being as that time could show. In this capacity he touched the imagination of two men of genius, and he exists in literature as the Monmouth of Coningsby and the Steyne of Vanity Fair. Both are masterpieces, and the one completes the other ; for Lord Monmouth produces the impression not merely of the dissolute grandee, but also of the Great Noble who is naturally and easily in the front of politics and society, has the sense of affairs, can be a statesman when he will, and on occasion can do the honours for his country as becomes the best among English gentlemen ; while Lord Steyne, with his decoration of red hair and gleaming tusks, his leg and his grand air and his Garter, his effect in theatres and drawing-rooms, and his general potency in intrigue, remains a perfect exemplar of the debauched patrician, the person of birth and wealth and breeding who is above all an homme a femmes. And on the whole, Lord Hertford was ever rather Steyne than Monmouth to the general. I seem to remember him figuring thus, ' for all he 's worth,' in that blackguard thing, The Mysteries of the Court ; he appears (as, for that matter, who does not.'*), 348 BYRON'S WORLD though to no great purpose, in the Memoirs of Marquess Harriette Wilson ; and there is a little book, T/j^ Hertford. Confessions of Nicholas Suisse, Late Valet to the Marquis of Hertford (Jackson and Co., 134 New Bond Street, 1 842), which I would quote, if I dared, in illustration of the repute in which he was held, and of the terms in which men spoke and thought of him. [In reading Suisse, by the way, one cannot choose but think of a certain Monsieur Fiche — ('Since Monseigneur's death he has returned to his native country, where he lives much respected, and has purchased from his prince the title of Baron Ficci ') — and his desperate confidences to Mrs. Rawdon Crawley on the Pincian Hill.] In ajiy case, he was a sterling Georgian type, a man of Byron's monde, a representative of the age whose mouthpiece Byron was ; and that must serve as my excuse for this Note. A last touch or two. Lord Yarmouth, being robbed of certain jewels, informed the authorities that he kept them ' in his rouge-box.' Also, he is said to have kicked and caned his master for mis- behaviour to a lady. The story is told in Suisse's Confessions, and in a lampoon of the period, R — y — / Stripes^ or a Kick from Y — rm — th to Wa — 5, etc. 'A Poem, by P P , Poet Laureat (London, E. Wilson, 1812) ' : — Lord Y h's blood began to freeze, To see P e G e upon his knees, Yet guess'd the meaning of his motions : And thinking this no time for speech. Gave him a kick across the breech. Which marr'd his H ss's devotions. . . . 349 ESSAYS Marque?s Loud roar'd the P e, but roar'd in vain, 9^ ^ J L d Y h brandish'd high his cane, Hertford. a j -j j i i. And guided every r — y — 1 movement ; Now up, now down, now to, and fro The R 1 nimbly moved his toe. The lady much enjoy'd the show, And complimented his improvement. . . . Soft pity touch'd the tender fair, She heard his accents of despair, His piteous sighs, his deep repentance ; And begg'd Lord Y h to refrain. And give some respite to his cane, And mitigate the r — y — 1 sentence. The Peer obey'd — the nymph admir'd — No more he laid his stick upon him ; And Britain's blubb'ring P e retir'd, With bliishing honours thick upon him, etc. 850 'PIPPIN' On September 23, 18 14, the amiable and lovely Annabella M communicated to her dearest Emily an ' event that affords me the best prospect of happiness,' in the following terms : — ' I am engaged to marry Lord B . Convinced by intimate knowledge and the deepest investigation that he merits my highest esteem, whilst he possesses my strongest affection, I feel myself honoured in the choice ; and I expect, of your candour and kind- ness, that you will rely more on the opinion which we have had reason to form, than on the vague prejudices of the world.' On October ist, writ- ing to Colonel D : ' After an intimate, and not merely a recent knowledge,' Miss Annabella says, * of his (Lord B 's) character, with the best opportunities of judging his heart and dispositions, I have yielded to his sincere and constant attach- ment, convinced that he is fully deserving of mine, and hoping to be successful in my endeavours to make him happy. I have reason to believe that we understand one another particularly well, and though I do not pretend to equal, I may be capable of appreciating his merits.' A few days after, in answer, apparently, to her dearest E., ' It is not,' the 351 ESSAYS young thing says — ' It Is not in the great world that Lord B 's true character must be sought. But ask of those nearest to him — of the unhappy whom he has consoled, of the poor whom he has blessed, of the dependants to whom he is the best of masters. ... I cannot reproach myself for having resisted my own wishes as well as his, until thoroughly convinced that their fulfilment would produce mutual happiness. ... I have a calm and deep security — a confidence in God and man.' Her friends and relations, she goes on to say, ' con- cur in thinking my views of happiness as fair as this world can promise ; but in the dearest wishes I always look beyond temporary hopes.' Thus the fair, the accomplished, the unexceptionable Anna- bella M . And in some eighteen months from the date of her expressing these most beautiful sentiments, her ideal husband, overwhelmed with charges whose nature none has ever known, deserted a few days after the birth of the only child his wife was ever to bear him, was fleeing his country, a broken and dishonoured man. There Is nothing like it in history, nor — so far as I know — in faction neither ! For these passages are not excerpted from a hitherto unpublished work by the creator of the anxious Miss Harlowe, the high-souled Harriet, the noble and exemplary Sir Charles Grandlson. Miss Austen had no hand In them, nor had Miss Burney. They were written by the Miss Milbanke, who three months after the writing (January 2, 1 8 1 5) became Lady Byron, and they convey In terms sufficiently clear and exact her opinion of an engage- 352 * PIPPIN' ment which had been some years in the making. Apparently the Milbankes were pleased all round. ' My daughter,' Lady Milbanke writes (October 4, 1814)5 'is engaged to marry Lord Byron, with the entire approbation of her father and myself^ to which is added my brother's kindest sanction. Tou, who, like Lord Byron, are favoured by the Muses' — (the lady's correspondent was the ineffable Sir James Bland Burgess of Porson's epigram : — * Poetis nos laetamur tribus, Pye, Petro Pindar, parvo Pybus : Si ulterius ire pergis, Adde his Sir James Bland Burgis ') : — ' no doubt admire him as a poet : but, believe me, he has, like yourself, a warm, affectionate, and liberal heart, with many qualities which promise happiness to the woman who will be his wife ; his attachment to her has been constant and is deep founded on the best basis : that of esteem. . . . Annabella, I must confess, returns his attachment very sincerely.' Why not? Byron's love-letters (a meagre selection is printed by Mr. Prothero) are excellent in manner and tone and kind. When he wrote them, he was far and away the most brilliant and conspicuous figure in English letters ; he had lived and loved and suffered ; he was the poet of Harold i.-ii., the Giaour^ the Bride, the Corsair, Lara, to say nothing of English Bards ; his suc- cess among women was notorious ; his beauty and wit and prestance, his dandyism, his violent anti- Toryism, had done almost as much for his reputation as his poetry itself. Yet he writes to the little country blue-stocking, which was Miss Milbanke, z 353 ESSAYS in a strain of what I cannot but call affectionate humility, which would have gone home to the heart of (let us say) the ingenuous Mr. Thackeray. Indeed, knowing what I know of Thackeray, and reading what Lord Lovelace has transcribed from Byron, I can ail-but figure the one great writer's account of the other. Byron is tired of ropery, dead-tired. Das Lied ist aus. He wants to make an end. His friends' wives have (as he somewhere says) done him no good. He wants a wife of his own. He has always believed that Miss Milbanke was the sole and only person ; and, when he finds that at last — after refusing him — she owns that she 'reciprocates,' he is sorry for his past, he wishes he were better and worthier, he is moved to write in a strain that, as I have said, would certainly have agitated Thackeray's waistcoat. ' Tears,' he might have written, 'fill the honest fellow's eyes, as he thinks of his own unworthiness, and of the sweet- ness, the guileless innocence, the sacred purity,' etc. etc. etc. And it would all have been true. I grant that Byron was a rake ; but I wish to point out that no man can be a rake unless the other sex is art and part with him in the matter of his offence. More : I am credibly informed that raking is on the whole a tedious business, and that there comes a moment in the life of every practitioner of the art when reform and a ' pure woman ' (which is conventional English for a home and a child or two) present themselves as the best in life. Well : Byron had reached that point ; he had reached it partly by thinking of Miss Milbanke ; he was convinced that all he needed was a chance, and that Miss Milbanke 354 'PIPPIN' was the girl to give him that chance. So he wrote to her, — and such letters of his as we are privileged to see do him much honour. And she wrote to him — but we cannot say what her letters to him were like, for the simple reason that Mr. Prothero has none to show. In the end they were married, by special licence ; a year and a fortnight after the wedding, Lady Byron left her husband never to return to him ; and the great heart of the Public rose to the occasion. A Bride repudiating her Groom ! A young mother fleeing the embrace of her firstborn's father ! Obviously he was the guilty party. Obviously she — young, innocent, high- principled, above all virtuous — was the victim. By specifying nothing, and so suggesting the unspeak- able, she captured the general imagination, and set it working to her sole advantage. ' He is com- pletely lost in the opinion of the world,' and ' I look upon him as given up to every worthless excess for the rest of his life ' : — thus Miss Godfrey to her friend, Thomas Moore ; and, condemning on hear- say and in advance, the poor soul did but follow her Ladyship's suggested lead. There were so many of her way of feeling and thinking that an actress^ could not take a turn in the country with her ' fancy man,' but it was thought that she had gone away with Byron, and on her reappearance she was hissed 1 Mrs. Mardyn, to wit. She went off with a lad of eighteen, a son of Dowton the actor. Old Dowton wanted to protest, but Byron peremptorily declined to recognise so contemptible a scandal. One Cruikshank etching, printed for public con- sumption, showed Mrs. Mardyn and two other ladies setting sail with Byron, while sailors jibe, and from the sea-banks her Ladyship, with Ada in her arms, considers the event. Another associated Byron with the Devil and a distant gallows. 355 ESSAYS from the boards ! It was a victory for the Virtuous Woman all along the line. As ever, she was a crown to her husband, but this time it was a crown of thorns. She had but to refrain from speaking, indeed, and one of the strongest, bravest spirits of our century was expelled his country. And none knew why she did it, nor how. And why she did it remains a mystery even till this day. But how she did it Mr. Prothero is able to let us see. They were married,^ as I said, on January 2, 1 8 1 5 — at Seaham, Durham ; and they went to spend the honeymoon in Yorkshire. Returning to Seaham, they seem to have made the best of things, both for themselves and for their parents. ' Lady B. writes me word ' (thus Augusta Leigh to Hodg- son) ' she never saw her father and mother so happy ; that she believes the latter would go to the bottom of the sea herself to find fish for B.'s dinner ; that he (B.) owns at last that he is very happy and com- fortable at Seaham, though he had predetermined to be miserable.' 'Tis true, his health is ' not very good,' but * he seldom complains ' ; and ' both that and his spirits have been improved by some daily walks she had prevailed on him to take.' Also, she ' attributes much of his languor in y^ morning and feverish feels at night to his long fasts, succeeded by too hearty meals for any one,' etc. Further, * they had been playing the fool one evening, " old and ^Writing in October 1814, Hodgson, afterwards Provost of Eton, describes a meeting with Byron at Cambridge ; and, after telling of Byron on Miss Milbanke, and Byron on Miss Milbanke's money, and Byron's settlements on Miss Milbanke, • Where, where,' he asks, ' are the hearts of those who can undervalue, who can depreciate, this man ? ' 366 * PIPPIN' young." B. dressed in Lady M.'s long-haired wig (snatched from her head for the purpose), his dressing-gown on turned wrong side out,' and 'Lady B. in his travelling-cap and long cloak with whiskers and mustachios.' A dreadful picture, truly ! Indeed, since ' the most capricious poet, honest Ovid,' breathed out his soul among the Goths, there has been none like it. Harold snatch- ing wigs! The Giaour in a dressing-gown the wrong side out! Tennyson (or Browning) buf- fooning in somebody else's head of hair! Mr. Arnold (or Tennyson) in But no ! An ounce of civet, good apothecary! Such fancies are im- possible. To attempt them is merely to see how very far we are removed from a romping, bibulous Regency. All the same, the story was worth the telling ; if only because it shows that the young couple (by this time she was Pippin to him and he to her was Duck) were on the best and silliest of good terms. The inference that both bride and groom were all they ought to be at such a date is confirmed by Duck himself. In a letter to Moore (March 2, 1 8 14) he is a little inclined to play the banished dandy ; and, in effect, the differences between ' Father-in-law Sir Jacob ' (as, with his absurd resolve to read Foote's farce into his life, he takes care to call Sir Ralph Milbanke) must certainly have been a little trying to the boon companion of Sheridan and Colman. But he isn't at all malignant — (indeed, the letters in this admirable third volume of Mr. Prothero's give you the impression that he was one of the best good-natured men that ever lived) — and in the end he takes leave of his experi- 357 ESSAYS ence in pleasant enough terms. * I have been very comfortable here,' he writes to Moore (March 8, 1 8 1 5)5 ' listening to that damned monologue, which elderly gentlemen call conversation, and in which my pious father-in-law repeats himself every even- ing — save one, when he played upon the fiddle. However, they have been very kind and hospitable, and I like them and the place vastly, and I hope they will live many happy months.' As for his wife : 'Bell is in health and unvaried good-humour and behaviour^ '^ (the italics are mine). That is the last of Seaham. Next day the couple left for New- market (Colonel Leigh's) and London. And on March i8th Mrs. Leigh, henceforth to be Goose to the Duck and Pippin of the other two, tells Hodg- son that she thinks she ' never saw nor heard of a more perfect being ' than Her Ladyship ' appears to be ' ; while, as for My Lord, who is ' looking par- ticularly well,' he * seems quite sensible of her value,' and * as happy as the present alarming state of public and the tormenting uncertainties of his own private affairs will admit of.' Then come 13 Piccadilly Terrace, and the beginning of the end. ' I am sorry to say,' writes Mrs. Leigh again to Hodgson, ' his nerves and spirits are very far from what I wish them. ... I think the uncomfortable * Contrast the facts of the marriage as set forth in Mr. Prothero's pages with the absconded Pippin's plea to Hodgson : — ' All this it is in his disposition to revenge on the object if in his power. When his revenge avowedly began as soon as I became so by marriage, and seems to have increased in force rather than diminished, what would it be now ? Those who consider his welfare, ought not to desire my return ' : lest (the inference is) the ruffian Duck be moved to twist poor Pippin's neck, and sacrifice his own ! Cf., too, Her Ladyship's preposterous story to Lady Ann Lindsay. 358 * PIPPIN' state of his affairs is the cause ; at least I can discern no other. He has every outward blessing,' etc. He had, no doubt. Yet in a year or so the hapless Duck was outward bound — the Pilgrim of Eter- nity. And the hand that thrust this greatness on him was — Pippin's. The time in Piccadilly Terrace went both well and ill. Byron had no money and was up to his ears in debt ; he had failed to sell Newstead, and he could get nothing out of his Rochdale property ; he had married a fortune, and the Jews were continually at his haunches. We know not all that he was at home, but we have his own authority for saying that he was irritable and 'humorous,' that his habits were personal, that he brooded, and was ill-pleased with many things. All the same, both Parisina and The Siege of Corinth are the work of this year, and Pippin transcribes his MSS. for the printer ; and Duck will not suffer his Pippin — who is in delicate health — to go much into society. Abroad, he talks and works as a member of the Drury Lane Com- mittee, and he talks and works so well 4:hat, when he leaves the theatre, not even an actor has quar- relled with him. Coleridge writes to him for help, is asked to write a tragedy, and — meanwhile — is strongly recommended to Murray ; Sotheby and Maturin ' accost,' and their plays get all the backing he can give ; Hogg and Hunt descend upon him, and he pleads their cause with Murray as it had been his own ; Mackintosh approaches him (through Rogers) for help for Godwin, and he at once remembers that Murray has offered him a thousand guineas for Parisina and The Siege (which he has 359 ESSAYS refused), and is all eagerness to strike the bargain, that he may send £600 to Godwin, and divide the balance (^'450) between Coleridge and Maturin.^ Meanwhile, however. Pippin has made up her mind about him, and has begun to take measures to be rid of him. It is obvious to her — or so she says — that he is mad ; and a little before or after her lying-in she has broached the matter to Augusta, and has persuaded that excellent creature that, Parisina notwithstanding, and despite the Siege^ 'tis time the matter be most carefully considered. Then Ada Byron — * Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart' — is born (December 10,1815) ; on January 8, 1 8 16, Pippin has asked Dr. Baillie, ' as a friend,' to tell her whether Byron is or is not mad ; a week after she leaves Piccadilly Terrace for Kirkby Mallory, her father's residence ; next day, ' by medical advice,' she writes cheerfully and affection- ately to her husband ; and that is all. They never met again ; and the next that Duck knew of Pippin was that she had taken his child from him, and pur- posed — strongly purposed — that he should never more set eyes on either of them. He never did. Byron the poet, Byron the dandy, Byron the homme a femmes^ Byron the lover, Byron the husband and father — the little country blue-stocking was more than a match for them. Against them all she set her unaided wits, and against them all she scored ; and scored so heavily that in France, and places where they know better, the name and fame of the * It was Murray who prevented the transaction. Byron, in fact, was at this time so desperately driven for money, that he had to sell his books, etc., which Murray bought of him en bloc for ;£i5oo. 360 'PIPPIN' British Female suffer for Pippin's achievement yet. I do not mean to tell the story of her engineering. Enough to say that it was grandly contrived and excellently done : that, having conceived her design, she put it through point by point — not faltering once, nor turning once from her main purpose. She began by suggesting insanity, and by saying that, if she were right, she would be reconciled. But she knew quite well that she could not possibly prove insanity ; so she said at the outset that if she were wrong, then there could be no reconcilement, and that she must take steps to protect herself against the recurrence of — nobody knows what. Byron, sick to death (and who can blame him ?) of such a monstrous experience,^ most foolishly and quixotically declared that she might have her will, and be separated ; but his friends said no, and he presently said ditto to his friends ; and there were parleys and alarums and excursions. And Pippin stuck to her point so closely and so well that this might have been — not the first but — the fourteenth husband she desired to shed. And she shifted her ground continually ; and, so far as one can see, she lied to everybody taken in the welter ; much as she lied years afterwards to Lady Ann Lindsay, and years after that to poor old Beecher Stowe. And, at the last, when, in the face of all that her father had said and done in her behalf, it seemed to her advisers that reconciliation was both possible and desirable, ^ What else to call it, in effect ? This husband was dis- charged, ' without a character,' like a footman, after a year's trial ! And, to the extent of a first-born, and ;^6o,ooo in settle- ments, he had duly fulfilled his part of the bargain, too ! 361 ESSAYS she took the matter into her own hands, and went, alone, to Lushington, and told him — what? No- body knows. Nobody but Lushington ever knew. Lushington died without telling it. She died without telling it. And we can get no further. Whatever it was, it made so great an impression on Lushington that, he said, he would have no hand in any attempt at smoothing over things. So, having challenged his adversary to come into court, and challenged her in vain, Byron signed the deed of separation, and departed on his pilgrimage. And with him went Manfred and Harold iii.-iv., and Sardanapalus^ and Cain, and the Vision, and Don Juan — the one epic of modern life which has as yet got written. And he died at Missolonghi and was mourned by Walter Scott. And in the end it was found that he had largely recreated European art. As for his lady, she who in 1 8 1 6 seemed so keen (yet was not nearly so keen as she seemed) to prove him mad, it is enough to say that she died in 1861, having lived to take on Robertson of Brighton as her spiritual director, to develop unseemly ideas about Augusta, and to confide those ideas to an American sensation-monger. A charitable explana- tion is that Pippin was a very plausible and moving yet a most mischievous and inexorable mono- maniac : one who knew not when she did ill and lied, and when she did not. In other words, she was — as I see her — a piece of self-righteousness so complete, so assertive, so full of will and purpose and approval, that she had but to do ill to make her ill-doing virtue — but to utter a lie for her utterance 362 * PIPPIN' to make her lie a truth. She married Byron, and she so put her talent out to use — that it is not nearly so difficult as it used to be to account for the ' cold heart and serpent smile ' and the ' unfathomed depths of guile ' of a famous passage in Manfred. I am not sure that it was not the best thing that she could have done — for Byron, for letters, for the race. But there are times when I can't help wishing that she'd married some one else. Wordsworth, for instance. Wordsworth } It is pretty certain that, if she had, he, the impeccable, would have had plenty of opportunity to learn * how awful goodness is ' ; while, as for his sister . . . O Dorothy, dear Dorothy — the very different sort of martyr you mig^ht be! 363 OTHELLO I In 1622 'N. O.' printed for Thomas Walkly : ' and are to be sold at his Shop, at the sign of the Eagle and Child, in Brittan's Bursse ' : the ' Tragoedy of Othello the Moore of Venice,' as it had been ' divers times acted at the Globe and at the Black-Friars by his Maiestie's Servants.' This is the first Othello. ' To commend it I will not,' Walkly says ; ' for that which is good I hope every man will commend, without entreaty ; and I am the bolder because the Author's name is sufficient to vent his work.' Then, the year after (1623), came the First Folio ; and in 1630 Walkly, who seems to have been in pocket by his earlier venture, published a Second Quarto. It is of no particular interest or import- ance : the text, as we have it, being Walkly plus Heminge and Condell, the First Quarto plus the First Folio. The latter version is longer than Walkly's by some hundred and fifty lines ; but the Walkly, printed (Mr. Herford conjectures) 'from an old copy of the play, as curtailed, and otherwise modified, for performance,' is very much richer in * oaths and expletives ' than the Heminge and Condell, and is therefore of respectable authority. 364 OTHELLO As the first recorded performance of Othello is dated 1 604 : in the November of which year it was pre- sented before the Court at Whitehall : and as the style, as beseems the subject, is * simple, sensuous, and passionate' to the n^^ degree: a style with memories of Hamlet yet with scarce a foretaste of Macbeth: it is assumed that 1604 was the birth- year of this unrivalled achievement in intimate, or domestic, drama, and that the text, as we have it, is very much the text that left Shakespeare's hand. II The material is engagingly old and plain, at the same time that it is unalterably and essentially eternal. As stated recently by a critic, a critic, by the way, of the same name as the ' Moore's ' first printer, it is simply the story of what your Modern Frenchman has elected to denote and to discriminate as un crime passionnel. In Cinthio's Hecatom- mithi^ where Shakespeare found the raw suggestion of his mighty and magnificent presentation of jealousy : of jealousy, too, in its operation on a mind which, rich in other sorts of experience, is, sexually speaking, next door to virginal : the pas- sional crime is ever so much more persuasively paragraphed than it is in Mr. Walkly's amiable boutade ; for in Cinthio the hero is not Othello (he is not so much, I believe, as named) but lago, his Ensign, * in love with Desdemona.' To that fair and innocent creature Cinthio's Antient imparts the purpose of his passion ; she understands him not ; he instantly conceives her enamoured of the party 365 ESSAYS we know as Michael Cassio. So he goes to work, corrupts the Moor, plots Disdemona's death, and the Lieutenant's ; and, in the end, after sand- bagging the object of his passion into the other world in her husband's presence, pulling down the ceiling upon her broken body, and giving out that she has been killed by a fallen beam, turns on the Moor, accuses him of murder, gets him tortured and done to death, and having thus justified his Renaissance habit, and purged himself of his crime d^amour^ goes gallantly to justice on another count, and accepts the sweet compulsion of the Rope for another crime. It is in this rather blackguard story of a blackguard lecher's disappointment and re- venge that our Archimage discovered his ' Othello.' He astonishes always, when you come to look into his treatment of other men's material. His method is ever royal : he lays hands on what he wants, and the fact that he wants it makes it his and none else's. I know not that, anywhere in his work, is there discovered so clear a proof of sovereignty as here. Othello, lago, Cassio, Emilia, Desdemona — even the Handkerchief — all these figure in the twenty- seventh of the Hecatommithi. Yet to compare the Novella and the Play is to live in two worlds at once, and, so living, to be utterly and everlastingly cognisant of the inexpressible difference between creation as Cinthio understood and practised it, and creation as it was apprehended and done by William Shakespeare. OTHELLO III In Cinthio's anecdote, or compte-rendu^ the interest is almost wholly one of incident. The Novelist, or Reporter, is primarily concerned with — not char- acter, nor action in its effect on character, but — action for its own sake, action as material for narra- tive. His Moor, his Lieutenant, his Desdemona, are counters all : such character-interest as he dis- covers is contained in his Antient ; and he even is no more personal than any trim, literal incarnation of the clear-eyed, clean, self-seeking, ruthless, self- sufficing scoundrelism of Cesare Borgia would be. Cinthio's Antient is wholly lacking in those touches of doubt, those instants of inquiry, those hints and flashes of internal conflict, those glimpses of desperate debate between Mind and Appetite, between Brain and Temperament, which lend so potent and so variable a magic to the portraiture of that strange, brilliant, evil-speaking, evil-thinking, evil-doing ' demi-devil ' : that parcel-tamed, over- civilised man-eating tiger, which we know as lago. He is Cinthio's hero : but in Cinthio his psychology remains obscure : in fact, we know as much and as little of him as we know of the chief agent in any criminal affair which was reported yesterday. Stated in Police Court terms : he is a subaltern, who tries to lie with his General's wife ; failing in his intent, he gets jealous of an airy rival ; poisons his General's ear ; has the satisfaction of bruising the lady of his desire to death — as a positive confirmed whore too! — in the eye of him he'd fain have cuckolded ; experiences a wolfish joy in the death 367 ESSAYS of that once potential horned beast ; and, in the end, is himself sent down to the Pit on quite other grounds than poor Disdemona's broken breast-bone and spine, and with never so much as a memory or a thought of the cuckold that was not to be, whom he had escorted to the bounds of Space and Time with every circumstance of miserableness and hate. That is pretty much as he half exists in the Heca- tommithi : for the simple reason that Cinthio, having made him play his part, with supreme suc- cess, in the affairs of Disdemona and the Moor, as a good enough Renaissance Italian, a Cesare Borgia on the smallest scale, was content to ask no more of him, but to let him end even as in an enlightened Italy such small change of Machiavelli's ideal Prince might end, and very often did. In Othello all this is changed : lago quits the Police-Court (so to say) for the purlieus of Humanity at large, and, instead of depending for immortality on the word of a mere reporter, is taken up, and shaken, and squeezed, and made to know something of him- self, and to make that much of himself, and a great deal besides, intelligible to others, by the greatest manieur d^hommes that ever lived. The result is such an exemplary presentation of active, motiveless, and militant wickedness as Balzac, say — the Balzac of Philippe Bridau and Cousin Betty — has not so much as approached. IV Is it quite made out } I am reluctant to determine. I think it is ; but I have to admit that, if it be, the OTHELLO achievement is accomplished largely by means of soliloquy : an expedient in dramatic art abominable to the play-going mind. Yet was it a common device with Shakespeare, to whom its practice saved much trouble : nay, made things possible which in its absence could not have been essayed. Accepting it for the compromise it is, you may say, I think, that, thanks to its use, lago is entirely credible. Despite the majestic assurance and completeness of his presentment as a chief actor in the play, we should not know him as we do if we were denied the privilege of sitting with him in the privy chamber of his thought, and taking our fill, and more, of those terrible mental practices by which he seeks, in the dry light of an excellent and daring intelligence, to reconcile his action with his con- science, his processes with his results, and, half in earnest, half in jest, as it were to excuse himself before his soul. He is a piece of pure intellect : he has gaiety, wit, invention, a kind of lethal humour ; he is versed in ' politic authors,' and, besides, he is deeply read in the books of Character and Life, so that he 'knows all qualities of human dealing^ with a most learned spirit ' ; he discovers in himself a fine observer, a shrewd and gluttonous critic ; first and last he is high in resolve, stern of heart, swift and resolute of hand ; in speech he is liberal to the point of intemperance, with an odd trick of obscenity, whether suggested or phrased, which he has practised till it has mastered him, and in which the World, if it were but wise, would find proof indubitable of the inherent baseness of his mind. Said a fine critic to me long years ago, in 2 A 369 ESSAYS the great Salvini times : ' You may meet lago on any Yorkshire racecourse' ; and, the inevitable mutations duly made, I take the remark to be in- trinsically just. Palmer of Rugely, the poisoning creature, was of lago's type and strain ; and the Ring breeds many such potential beasts of prey. These are the men who kill, and are half surprised and half angered to find, as they generally do, that Killing is called Murder^ is an offence before the Law, and has to be expiated on the Gallows. These wretches play with Evil much as a young man plays with Life ; and are just as sorry for themselves when they come to the unchanging end. For the rest, lago, like his kind at large, is wholly the creature of the Event he quickens and stage- manages. He gulls Roderigo, he gulls Cassio, he gulls Othello into killing Desdemona, and essaying to compass his Lieutenant's murder. But, though he never so much as suspect it, the mortal issue he has made imminent, masters him ever, and, being determined, leaves him the most wretched slave this side Eternity. He starts by * guying ' an aged and respectable Senator on a most delicate and peculiar point of honour, in terms so rank that Shakespeare himself, good as he was at filth (and none better ever lived), has not improved on them ; he ends as the murderer whole or parcel-gilt of Othello, Desde- mona, Roderigo, and Emilia, with a bad wound in his body, the assurance of being done to death, and the knowledge that, thanks to him, the Cassio he so miserably loathed and scorned is Governor of Cyprus. For all his vocabulary and for all his brains, his contempt for elementary human law is 370 OTHELLO ever too strong for him. He makes the best of circumstances he can ; he wins his points ; he is always alert, maleficent, superior to his opportunity ; and in the long-run he is found to be merely the peer of the Hogarthian Thomas Idle. V BuT,rto make a play, it is not enough to present Intelligence at odds with Morals. For, as was long since pointed out to me by my dear friend Fleeming Jenkin, the staple of Drama is Emotion. ' You must have Incident,' he argued, in his fine, logical way, ' or your Emotion will not be Strong ; you must have Character, or it will not be Interesting ; you must have Style, or your presentation of it, whatever it be, will not be Literature.' But, if you lacked all these (the contention was) you might stagger through, and grip your audience, and achieve your end, if only you had Emotion. Dumas pere^ though Jenkin knew it not, had said the same thing years before. There was an essential differ- ence, he remarked, between himself and Hugo, * le Penseur ' (so the loyal old Artist called the greatest Liar in all Drama), and the difference consisted in this : Hugo could do nothing in the play-writing way without what one may call the fripperies of^ drama, — Horns of Hernani, Tombs of Charle- magne, ' Soupers a Ferrare,' Choruses of Monks, Coffins, Thunder and Lightning, Ruined Castles, and the like ; whereas all he wanted was *four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion.' 'Tis the briefest, the most comprehensive, the most 37X ESSAYS luminous statement of the essentials of drama that ever, I believe, was made ; and it fits the Othello of Shakespeare as it fits the ^schylean Oresteia like a glove. Scene by scene and act by act, the Moor of Venice moves with an irresistible stride to an inevitable end ; 'tis a lasting and affecting proof, if any proof were needed, that the 'well-made play' did not begin with ' Antony ' and ' la Tour de Nesle ; it shows that the Sardou formula and the Ibsen formula were mere matters of to-day, and that here at least is a point at which the Sophocles of the CEdipus might take hands with Shakespeare, and own that, his own masterpiece, all radiant and serene as it appears, is no greater nor more splendid an achievement in design, in construction, in effect, than this. This is another way of saying that, lago apart, the interest of Othello is entirely and unalter- ably emotional. You might play it in a barn, and it would still fulfil itself ; for the singular reason that here, wherever you look, are old Dumas' ' two actors and a passion,' and that what Jenkin called the ' emotion ' is never absent. The actors change : are now Othello and lago, now Desdemona and Emilia, now Othello and Desdemona, now Emilia and Othello, now Othello and Fate, the tremendous, the inevitable : even Death. But the passion per- sists : it shifts its quality as the Master wills, takes on the hues, speaTcs with the voice, dares with the furiousness of love and hate and jealousy and misery and murder and despair. But, once evoked, it never lets go of your throat ; and this is what makes Othello the play of plays it is. I think that Lear 372 OTHELLO is bigger, as being more elemental (let us say) ; I think that Hamlet is certainly more subtle, more engaging, more romantic ; I think that in Measure for Measure and Macbeth^ perhaps, too, in Troilus^ we get more of such vital and undisguisable essen- tials as went to the making of our Prospero-Proteus, our Man of Men, our Chief of Poets. But no- where in his achievement has he discovered a greater capacity, a clearer insight, a more assured and royal method, than here. Of course, he plundered Cinthio ; but who was Cinthio that he should not be plundered. And of what effect were Cinthio now — he, and his Antient, and his Lieutenant, his Moor, and his Disdemona — had he not been trans- lated, and glorified, and eternised in terms of very Shakespeare ? VI Tragedy is an abstraction of life at its quint- essential points ; its passages of high-climbing, inoubliable, annihilating rapture ; its supreme moments of envy, hate, wrath, misery, suspicion, lust, despair. And Shakespeare, the great 'Ab- stractor of Quintessences,' accomplished no more splendidly difficult task in all the years of his tre- mendous and triumphing achievement than when he made his Moor, not merely plausible, but entirely human and credible. It has been, and perhaps still is, objected to this august and immortal thing, that Othello is too 'easily moved' ; that his ear is too wide, that is, his mind too prompt, his heart too eager to entertain suspicion ; and that he is so 373 ESSAYS readily satisfied in the matter of proof that he might give points to such typical exemplars of horndom as Arnolphe in PEcole des femmes and the Sganarelle of le Cocu imaginaire. These objections have, of course, been traversed, and traversed to so complete a purpose that I note them only for the form's sake, and with never a thought of going back on them. 'Tis enough to note that Tragedy, being a quint- essentialised abstraction of life in its most desperate potentialities, has its own convention, and is governed by none but its own rules, and that to begin upon the examination of an exemplary piece J of tragedy by questioning the propriety of that convention were to make Criticism impossible. To accept the Tragic Convention is to find the character of Othello an ' entire and perfect crysolite ' among creations : an achievement in presentation which Shakespeare himself has not surpassed ; a study in passion-wrought character in which the last is said. 'Tis as it were a soul in earthquake and eclipse ; and there is never a detail, never a touch of the cata- clysm, however variable and minute, but is realised and recorded with so consummate an artistry, an intelligence so abounding, so complete, and so assured, that the issue savours of inspiration. VII It is history that J.-B. Poquelin, called Moliere, wrote for his company, and that, cutting his parts to his actors and actresses much as a modern snip cuts you his * tailor-mades ' and his * suits ' to the physical idiosyncrasies of his customers, female and 374 OTHELLO male, succeeded, being an accomplished and very admirable master in this sort of sartorials, not only in fitting his customers but, also, in founding and establishing a tradition: a tradition, too, of such comprehensive and enduring potency that, in its shadow, Coquelin aine plays Scapin much as Moliere played Scapin, while Agnes (say) and Horace are to this day presented in the same terms, on the same level, so far as is possible in the same spirit as were imposed by J.-B. Poquelin on le Sieur Lagrange and on that brilliant and beautiful Mile, de Brie, of whom 'tis told that, at sixty, she was still the best Agnes of them all. Now, Moliere was the greatest Actor-Manager ^ that ever lived ; but it is obvious that Shakespeare, being a person of (shall I say?) considerable intelligence, anticipated him in this matter, and, having a great actor, Burbage to wit, in his company, wrote as carefully and as joyously for him as, long years after, le Sieur Poquelin wrote for Moliere and Lagrange and de Brie. I would go so far as to say that had Dick Burbage^a Stratford man, too ! — been of another temperament than he was, and lacked the strange, romantic, passionate face he had, there had been differences in Richard, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, as we have them, and that they who would fain present the dramatist from his plays would do well to look carefully and keenly into the intellectual and emotional quality of his chief of actors. But such argument is not for here nor now ; and I end ^ That he wrote his best for himself and his temporary woman, or * leading lady,' is but to say that he was a Manager- Actor in the fullest sense of the term. 376 ESSAYS with this reflection : * This afternoon, at the Globe Theatre, First Performance of " Othello, the Moore of Venice" ; Othello, Master Richard Burbadge.' Othello ? with Burbadge * up,' and Shakespeare prompting him from the wings? What a premiere ! 376 T. E. B 3 1 THE MAN It was in i860 that I knew him first ; and the occasion of my knowing him was this. The old Crypt Grammar School had been founded in 1 509 — or was it 151 9? — by a burgess of the City, one John Cooke ; ^ had served its term, so far as ' certain poor boys ' were concerned, for many years ; had gone to wreck and confusion, and ceased from fulfilling its purpose for many others ; had come ^Letters of Thomas Edward Brown, Author of Fo'c's'le Yarns, Edited, with an Introductory Memoir, by Sidney T. Irwin. (London : A. Constable and Co., Ltd., 1900.) In two volumes. ' He is buried in the Cathedral, he and his wife Joan ; and there is a monument to them in the nave of that noble fane which I have considered many times, and can see before me as I write. It is in the wall, and, if I mistake not, is railed off from the general. In the centre is a lozenge with an appro- priate inscription ; and on the right hand of the lozenge, in an attitude of prayer, is John Cooke, in the costume of the period, and behind him in a diminuendo, a sort of vanishing quantity, are his eight sons, all kneeling, and all costumed, and all praying. And on the left hand of the lozenge is Joan his wife, also in the costume of the period ; and behind her, in a diminuendo, a sort of vanishing quantity, are her seven daughters. As a small boy, I looked much at them : wondering, especially, if they went on Uke that in real life. Also how, if they (the eight sons) dressed Uke that, they escaped being stoned in Gloucester streets. 377 ESSAYS into the hands of divers persons having authority, and had by them been purged of its iniquities, and given a fresh start in life, with a sufficient income, and a great capacity for useful work among the off- spring of the middling and the lower middle-classes. I do not know its history in detail ; but I imagine it to have been badly misgoverned and mishandled, and to have fallen so low that only on reform and change from the foundations upwards could there be any hope for it. Well, reform it got, and change — as absolute, both, as the Chancery Commissioners could give ; and they set the seal upon their work by the discovery and appointment of a competent staff. In the attainment of this object they suc- ceeded perfectly ; and the best of their gift, though the City knew it not, was the headmaster. He was not more than thirty ; his career had been one of exceptional and peculiar brilliancy ; he was a double-first (Classics and Modern History) ; he had a gift of exciting and a gift of teaching. Unfortunately for us, the boys he might have shaped and trained, he was also a man of character and genius ; and, as I now know, his patience had been somewhat hardly tried during the time of his servi- torship at ' the House.' He was intolerant of interference — especially such futile interference as he must endure ; he was contemptuous of comment — above all, such ignorant and pettifogging com- ment as he got. His critics were impudent ; I think they thought he was going to run the school on Pinnock and MangnaWs ^uestions^ and the like, and were disgusted beyond measure to find that he meant his boys to have decent books — books which 378 «T. E. B.' cost money, and could not be done without. He, on his part, was insolent, as he had every right to be, considering the stamp and quality of his assailants ; and that he stooped to their level, and did battle with them in the local prints, is, as I now see, a proof that he was uncomfortable from the first, and could in nowise realise the kind of illiteracy — vain, fat-witted, beery, excessively conservative — into whose midst he had descended.^ Be this as it may, he was a failure, and in Mr. Irwin's memoir his passage through the sleepy grey city of my birth, his conduct of the old Crypt School is referred to merely as * the Gloucester episode.' That he hated the memory is plain ; and it may be that I wrong his noble ghost in treating of it as I have done. But I do not think so. It is a platitude that every- thing depends on the point of view. And I am fain to say that his point of view is not mine. From his, 'the Gloucester episode' was, I take it, an unpleasing and ridiculous experiment. From ^ The point is, that he had to deal with the sons of a class which hated scholarship, and knew nothing of letters. He would have been, I take it, less out of his element at the Cathedral School, whereat there was an atmosphere of reading, a tradition of the humanities (so to speak) : where the mortar-board (if I may so put it) had been worn for generations, so that when we of the Crypt began to go abroad in that head-gear, the Cathedral School boys mixed and intertwined their tjissels with blue, to distinguish themselves from us, the upstarts, who had laid hands on the hitherto inviolable black. Brown's misfortune — (it might so well have been his opportunity !) — was that he had to create a tradition, and that time and his material were against him. As to his material : when he was last with me he recalled the performance of a youth, who — (the Head and his assistants had to teach us cricket !) — being sent out to field, protested, to the master in charge, in these terms : — ' Look 'ere, Sur, what I wants to know is, when '11 it be my turn to knawck.' As to time, perhaps he was impatient. But, given his tempera- ment, could he have been aught else ? 379 ESSAYS mine, it was an unqualified success : since it made him known to me, and opened to me ways of thought and speech that well! since it came upon me like a call from the world outside — the great, quick, living world — and discovered me the beginnings, the true materials, of myself.^ 'Tis wellnigh forty years ago that the revelation came to me ; and that it came through him has ever been a joy to mind and heart. That it came to me here and there — in broken lights, at odd moments, on remote occasions — that neither is, nor has ever been, anything to the purpose. The matter of that purpose is that he was T. E. B., the man of genius — tJhe first I 'd ever seen ; and that, being so, he took hold upon me with a grip he never knew, and led me out into the nearer distances — into the shadows at the edge of the great sea — to a point I might never have reached without him. What he did for me, practically, was to suggest such possibilities in life and character as I had never dreamed. He was singularly kind to me ^ at a moment when I needed kindness even more than I needed encouragement. The occasion was an examination ; I did surpris- ingly well — without knowing it ; he rejoiced in the effect, and did what he could to reward me for my share in it. The names were called, and mine — 1 Thus (the itaUcs are mine) — thus another pupil, Mr. H. F. Brown : — ' He was a " widener." He made one feel that there was something beyond the school, beyond successful performances at lessons or at games ; there was a whiff of the great world brought in by him.' * Much as the Regius Professor, Jacobson, had been kind to him at Oxford — and, mutatis mutandis, on the same grounds ; but the gift of books was of infinitely greater consequence in my case than Jacobson's had been in his. 3S0 'T. E. B.' mine! — was once and again the first: to the astonishment, it may be the disgust, of the listening benches ; and after that, the school dismissed, there was an interview. Shall I ever forget its meanest circumstance ? I trow not ; and the thing is, that he forgot it no more than I, but spoke of it the last time I saw him — a year or two before he died. I could not follow him far on that occasion. Old memories were too much for me. It was close on forty years since it had happened ; an infinite deal of water had gone under the bridges in the mean- while ; life had had its fill of pupil and master both, and there had been joy and achievement and trouble for both master and pupil, and it may be that death had drawn us closer to each other than all else. Yet he remembered that interview, and would fain have spoken of it. I was younger — much younger — than he, and could say nothing. I meant to have it out with him the next time ; but there was none. When, in due course, he came again to England, I got a joyous letter from him from Cardiff, dilating gaudily upon a certain essay on Robert Burns, which' (it appeared) had filled him with pride and happi- ness. But he got no farther than Clifton. There the brave, brilliant, helpful life fell on a sudden and a happy close. There the amazing temperament, the great heart, the thrice-filled brain, the inexhaustible and unfailing gift of sympathy, the infinite under- standing of things human which went to the making of that unique thing, 'T. E. B.' — there, I say, these gifts lapsed, and he passed into the past. There are many, very many living, on whose lives his mark is indelible. There are many, not so 881 ESSAYS many, not nearly so many, nearer to him than those others, to whom the world can never again be the world they knew when he walked its ways with them. I take leave to say that there is none in either lot but thanks God for his presence, and is happier and stronger in the thought of what he was and said and did. Scholar and humorist ; poet and teacher and priest ; a notable and lavish temperament, quite excellently disciplined and equipped ; a born writer and a born observer — of such bountiful differences as these was ' T. E. B.' In some sort, they had his best who knew him day by day and year by year, and were privileged to make out life with him ; for, at any rate, they had his voice, his eyes, his presence, his talk, the strengthening and comforting effect of his friendship. Such triumphs of humanity there are — such exemplars of the Pure Creature — whose influence ends with their removal from the stage whereon they have played the brilliant and dis- tinguished part for which our mother Nature cast them at the moment of their birth. They are miracles ; but they pass. They are lights against the dark ; but their place must one day know them no more, and where they flashed and wavered and shone there is presently the blackness of the eternal night. They are like Byron as he appeared, the end being come and a new point of view being necessary, to Thomas Carlyle ; craters empty of flame and beset with ashes and snow. Not of these was the man of whom I speak. Mr. Irwin tells you that he had all the brilliancy, all the grave and riotous gaiety, all the grace and force and charm, of 382 'T. E. B.' the ideal talker ; and there is none that knew him, I take it, who will not agree. But that was only the beginnings of him : that was merely the man in his everyday aspect, as he showed, and could not choose but show himself, in the act of paying his way through life. But, for our good fortune, who did not and could not rejoice in his neighbourhood, he had a vast deal more than that. As I have said, he was a born writer and observer ; and he poured himself out alike in prose and verse. Of his verses I shall say nothing on this page, except that I esteem them for as personal and as exhaustive an expression of life ^ as the second half of the century has seen. As to his prose, here, to speak for itself, is an instal- ment of it in the shape of certain letters, selected and edited by Mr. S. T. Irwin, one of his closest friends, who contributes (by the way) a memoir of T. E. B., which, in its modest, unassuming way, is an achievement — in tact, reticence, taste. Speak- ing for myself, I think it impossible for us to have too much of the very lovable and remarkable man I have been trying to put on to paper. I want all the letters to be had ; and I want all, or nearly all, the articles which he was good enough to write for The National Observer and The New Review.^ ^ What else is Poetry ? Surely poetry is an expression of life, or it is nothing ? Matthew Arnold, I know, declared it to be ' a criticism of Ufe,' and naught besides. But in this description there is more moralist than critic, and perhaps more Matthew Arnold — a writer ever with a point to make or a paradox to float — than either. ' One of Mr. Irwin's correspondents notes of T. E. B. the Christ Church servitor — ('tis incredible ; but a servitor he was, and a servitor at Christ Church, till he became a fellow of Oriel) — that he delighted in such books as Anthony h Wood's. He was busy on an Anthony d Wood for me and The New Review, when he died. ESSAYS And especially I want the letters. Mr. Irwin's selection is excellent, so far as it goes. But I want more. I want T. E. B. in his fighting hurnour — as, in these volumes, he appears in his remarks on Tess of the D^Urbervilles ; I want T. E. B. as he looked when he rent and tore and trampled ; I want especially more of T. E. B. the musician and the critic of music. ^ It is possible — even probable — that I shall be left wanting. For the world that reads is, after all, a frivolous, not to say an unin- structed world ; and the T. E. B. of these Letters is, despite his immense humanity and his admirable alertness, his immitigable felicity of phrase, a master apart : a writer, that is, who is looking, not so much for a public here and now as, for the. high place which must be his in the shining and immortal hierarchy of English Literature. I do not propose to analyse these scraps of life — these fragments, now passionate and now humorous, now radiant and serene, now melar^choly and pro- found, now doubting and limited, which Mr. Irwin has recovered from the epistolary life of my dear dead friend and honoured master. Still less do I propose to find a place in English for them ; though, for myself, I think that they suggest both Byron ^ Mr. E. M. Oakeley contributes an addendum to Mr. Irwin's memoir which is sorely disconcerting in its suggestiveness — and its insufficiency. So far as I can see, on one Hne of musical criticism you might look for the nearest to Brown in Berlioz : both being poets as well as musicians ; though Brown could turn from realising Beethoven to be Tom Baynes, which Berlioz, of course, could not. And Wagner — I can't be certain what Brown thought of the Parsifal. I can see that he hated the ' lewd and superfluous naughtiness ' of the scenic imposture ; but what did fee think of the music ? I gather that But no ! I won't — I will not — till I know. 384 «T. E. B.' and Stevenson at their best, and that as to these two — both moderns, both poets, both writers, — well, here is Brown, with more heart than either, perhaps, and, certainly, a more even brilliancy, a larger set of interests, a riper wisdom, a richer and kindlier sense of the world's beauty and the essential graciousness of human life ; and they who read can do their sort- ing for themselves. The great thing is that they who read should be many and fit. For these are the letters of a man of genius ; and men of genius are rarer than you might believe. II THE POET ^ We are told that to many he was only a local poet, a person who rhymed in dialect — a kind of beggar at Apollo's gate ; and we are told by academic persons — things made after supper at the Muses' table out of a melon rind — that he was one affected and un- skilled in letters. We are told, too, that to a friend who feigned to condole with him for that his name was not found in a certain list of minor poets, ' Perhaps,' he said — ' perhaps I am among the majors ? ' A Major Poet ! 'Tis a magnificent assumption, a ' great perhaps,' indeed ; yet to read this Complete Edition of his verse is to be with him heart and soul. I knew it all before ; and I have taken it^all again ; and I will avow my conviction that when I wrote of it as ' the fullest expression of ^ The Collected Poems of T. E. Brown. London : Macmillan. 2B 385 ESSAYS life ' we of these late years have been privileged to consider and enjoy, I stated a truth so baldly and so niggardly that my statement clamours for enhance- ment. The Letters have shown what manner of man Brown was — how personal, how many-sided, how humorous and intense ; how rich in sentiment, yet how rich in farce ; how brilliantly and variously lettered, and how inalterably humane ; how strong in discipline, how quick with the defen- sive spirit, yet how riotously accidental, how beautifully unpedantic. Well, to state that that particular Brown unpacked his heart in words, and here they are — to state this, I say, should be enough for all them that have the sense of character and the right delight in letters. Brown was ever so many things : scholar, talker, mimic, farceur, preacher, teacher, schoolmaster, musician, lover of nature, lover of man ; yet of his very essence, before all these differences, before the talker and the mimic even, there was the man of letters, there was the artist in style. To his father (so he tells you) style was like the instinct of personal cleanliness. To himself it was that and something more : it was a part of his birthright, the master-jewel in his in- heritance. To think of him beggared of any one or two of his many gifts is hard. To think of him without his literary faculty is impossible. This volume is a proof of it. The contents fall naturally into two parts ; on the one hand are the verses in English — they are models of English verse ; on the other are the poems in dialect, and of them it is not too much to say that they are unique. The great exemplar is Burns, whose achievement is a culmina- 388 'T. E. B.' tion, and whose genius as it were focusses all the vocal talent of a race. 6ut I think it could be shown, and shown easily, that there is nothing to compare in Burns to the wealth of life and humour and fancy that is packed into these Fo^c^sHe Tarns of Brown's ; while in the matter of style, the sovran quality, the Manxman, with his immense vocabulary, his not- able feeling for words, his high and fine sense of literature — the Manxman, I say, has nothing to learn of the Scot. Burns, however, has his tradi- tion, and 'tis over a century old already ; while Brown is even of them that died o' Wednesday, and his tradition, which he created, is all in front of him ; so that 'tis idle, on the face of it, to build comparisons between the two. But to place a good thing one cannot but approach the best ; and in Brown's case, far more than in most others, none but the best will serve. For the rest, my appeal to Burns will, I doubt not, move many to laughter in these days, and many to wrath. That is in the nature of things. Fifty years hence the comparison will seem less arbitrary than now, and the conclusion will certainly be held not nearly so impavid as it reads to-day. In any case here is a poet who is also a man, and who writes, whether in fine English or in the ' asynartete octosyllables ' of Tom Baynes, like a master ; so that his work, whether in English or in Manx, should go straight to the brain and heart of everybody that loves good poetry. That it will do so at once I do not for one moment believe. The manner is too personal, the man too instant, too intent on himself or on what he has to say, too ESSAYS violent, and also too clean-spoken, too desperately given to have nothing dubitable in his utterance. At a first glance, he has a kind of likeness to Brown- ing. But come to intimacy, and the shadow flees, the likeness dislimns ; you find that the one man does where the other man has but feigned, that books and life have been to the one what books alone were to the other, that the one knew and postulated while the other — curious, eager, imperti- nent for the most part, mainly inarticulate — only groped and fumbled after knowledge, and was con- tent to fumble and grope in speech as he had done before in thought. All the same there remains a likeness ; and, time and again, in reading Brov/n, you come upon a fancy, an image, half-beautiful and half -grotesque, but realised — realised to the last touch of down on the feather, so to say : — This sea was Lazarus, all day At Dives' gate he lay, And lapped the crumbs. Night comes ; The beggar dies : Forthwith the Channel, coast to coast, Is Abraham's bosom, and the beggar lies A lovely ghost : — till you rub your eyes as you read, and think : — * Hallo ! here's Browning, doing it — but doing it ! — doing it as he never did it before ! ' As to their gospel, it is substantially the same. But Browning preaches it, even ' local-preaches ' it, as in Rabbi Ben Ezra^ and Cleon^ and that Death in the Desert in which he seeks — a strange ambition, surely! — to convert Strauss — or is it Renan ? — to the turn of *T. E. B.' thought and the way of" belief of good, fair-living, high-thinking Clapham. Brown's, on the other hand, is blazoned or implied in all he does ; and in all he does the Teacher and the Poet are one. 'Tis a true man's optimism that bears him up and through and on : there is nothing servile about it, nothing slavish, nor spasmodical, nor pot-valiant. He lives and does and suffers — ah, how he suffers ! ^ But if there be wailing and gnashing of teeth, there is always the man behind ; and in the man there is always the optimist : and the lesson to be learned from both is constant and inalterable. As for Tennyson, he imitates that unrivalled writer of verses a little languidly, a little distantly in Bella Gorry. But when, when can we imagine our un- rivalled writer of, verses telling such a story as Bella Gorry's.'' Having all his work before us, the answer is easy. And the answer is, in one word, ' Never.' He could never have told such a story, because, in despite of Rizpah^ he was never in- terested — not really interested — in maternity, but only in the processes, charming or not, by which maternity becomes possible. Brown, however, has done the thing — * Nursing the baby ! ' So Parson Gale — for all time ; and has done it in verse which in its languid intolerance of difficulties is, while entirely self-sufficing, by no means a bad criticism of Tennyson's own. That for the larger lines, the big outward semblances : when it comes to compari- sons, achievements, intricacies, I think there is ^ See Aber Stations and the thrice-admirable Epistola ad Dakyns, and the daring, the grotesque, the wonderful and taking Dartmoor : Sunset at C hag ford (a piece he never revised for press), with many things besides. ESSAYS scarce one alive (so besotted am I in my view of the reading Briton ! ) — I think there is scarce one alive who reads verse habitually, and knows the difference between truth and falsehood, but will prefer Brown's Chaise a Killy before the old, thrice-laurelled Laureate's May ^ueen. Tennyson makes a pretty, sentimental picture, and runs you on a May Queen that never could have been in any circumstances regnant on this globe. Brown, on the other hand, takes his Chaise, and carries him through all sorts of strange, ridiculous experiences : — And I did play upon a comb : — and makes you love and pity him long or you are done with the verse in which he 's celebrate. Surely in the presence of such a brave, pathetic reality the May Queen, with Robin, and the silver-haired parson, and the garden-tools ('upon the grannary floor') even the matchless touches of dumb nature : — When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool On the oat-grass, and the sword-grass, and the bullrush in the pool : — surely these are nothing .^^ I am speaking still of Brown's English verses. But if I turn to dialect, and bring out the incomparable Mater Dolorosa^ where, I ask, is Tennyson then ? 'Tis but thirty to forty lines of half-Manx, half-English speech ; it is only the wail of a woman with her true time gone for nothing, and her weary womb, and her baffled breast clamant — clamant ! Yet out of this book of Brown's I look for its like in vain. He loved to live. It was good to him to be 390 «T. E. B.' himself alive, and to steep himself in life as it was revealed to him in the breathing, sentient, passionate environment of which he was the centre. There is scarce one of these English poems of his but is the cry of a living man. However strait and severe its form, the soul of it tingles and throbs with being ; and where the utterance is personal — as in the Epistoldy and Aher Stations^ and the Sunset at Chagford — the effect is poignant in the extreme. There are moments, indeed, when that odd con- fession of his, * I am a born sobber,' recurs to your mind with an insistence that is not wholly agree- able : when you pause, in fact, to wonder to what heights of self-revelation he would have risen had he not been the artist, above all the humorist he was. I believe that, in his heart of hearts, he was not averse from ' wallowing naked in the pathetic ' ; but I am sure that, if this were so, his inexhaustible humour, his fine sense of things as they are, that solemn and chastened joy in the Abstract Fool which he confesses that he had, his abounding humanity, his unending interest in the comedy of life — these kept him straight. And thus it was that, if times there came, when he let himself go, and made as if he beat out his heart against the wires of the cage in which, by God's will (that was an essential in his theory of the world), he was cabined, he was never so lost to good literary manners that the glimpse of a landscape or the consciousness of a character could not, and did not, call him back to his greater and better self. Man and nature, nature and man, romantically and humorously considered : these, in fact, were the two elements in the scene in which he 391 ESSAYS exulted with a right sense of mastery. And it is to note that he selected neither, but took them both as they came to him, like the strenuous optimist he was. God had made things so, and therefore things were to be accepted and treated as God made them : the rough with the smooth, storm with shine, the harlot with the maid, what ought to be but isn't with what shouldn't have been but is. Hence, I take it, his indefatigable interest, whether humorous or tragic, in the thing called character. He wanted it, anyhow and anywhere ; but he preferred it as it is ; not altogether good nor altogether bad. If he light on a kind of saint — as in Parson Gale— he does him all the honour he can ; but all the rever- ence he shows for Parson Gale and all the delight he has in Parson Gale do not for a moment prevent him from telling the squalid underside of the Parson's life with Mrs. Gale (Christmas Rose): It is just this blessed gift of seeing people as they are, and not as they ought to be, which makes Brown the man of men, and so the poet among poets that he is. Take Peggy ^s Wedding, for instance, and you will see at once that it is imitated from Swift ; but you will also see, if you have any taste of letters in you, that it is infinitely better art than Swift's, in that it gives you, with a touch of farce perhaps, but with not so much as the hint of a departure from the big lines of human nature, two characters whom you have never met before, but whom you will know to your dying day. And that sequence of portraitures called In the Coach — is there anything like them elsewhere ? And is there any fault to find with them for what they are ? And the Mater Dolorosa — the 392 *T. E. B.^ poor, half-articulate creature, with her frustrated instinct, and her aching bosom, and her reeling brain — who is there, as 1 said before, that has done the like for us? Not Tennyson, or he had been an even greater poet than he is ; and not Browning, or he ^d have reeled you off some fifty pages of blank verse, with a cry or two here and there, and a dagger or a bowl to wind up withal. Societies would cer- tainly have raged together over the discrepancy between what the heroine said and what her historian obviously intended to have it thought she meant ; and, about these high matters, we might, were the poet still alive, be fighting, fighting ever- more. That, though, is not Brown's way at all. He does not sit down to write — or, rather, half- write — the facts, and all the facts that develop from them, and all the developments from those develop- ments, as nearly exhibited as a flux of words and a partial understanding of the central circumstance will permit. Not a bit of it. Forty lines or so, and his effect is complete. He deals with nothing but essentials ; and his Mater Dolorosa is an achievement apart in our various and noble litera- ture. That it 's the result of ' wallowing ' as afore- said may be cheerfully conceded. Stevenson did not so wallow : knowing his own talent as he knew it — and he knew it as a runner knows his pace, or a cricketer his best hit — he was certainly right. But Shakespeare did ; so did Dickens ; so did Scott. And I conceive that Brown, could we but come at him now, would far rather sin with these — Scott, Dickens, Shakespeare, to name no more — than be saved with Stevenson. 393 ESSAYS The moral of this, however, is by the way : is only polemic, literary polemic — polemic, that is, which is found at the end to have its source, its roots, its ' strong foundations ' in the quality called taste, and is therefore a thing disputable by every- body who does not happen to see eye to eye, or rather to feel stomach and stomach with the original opinionist. In the circumstances it is better to go on with the consideration of Brown the poet, and especially the poet of Fo^c^sHe Tarns, the rough-and- ready verses,^ into which he expressed, not merely all the Manxman in him but also, all his humour, all his passionate love of nature, all his unrivalled sense of character, all his theory of life and the world and time, and therewith as much of the experience and the results, observed and apprehended, of his long and varied and peculiar life as the number of lines he wrote would hold. It is in some sort to their disadvantage that they are written in dialect ; for the public which reads verse is easily frightened from its purpose, and had far liefer read plain English than (let us say) good Scots : so that, other qualities apart. Burns — even Burns! — can never capture or control in any latitude south of his own midden a fortieth, even a five-hundredth, part of that public — many-mooded, indiscriminating, ful- some — which is as it were the natural inheritance of Byron or Tennyson, or even Keats. And the worst is, that Brown being a convinced and resolute artist, the public gets no help from him. He does not ^ So they seem. But to look carefully into their structure and consider the means by which they achieve their effect is to see that they are a result of conscious and deliberate art. 394 ^T. E. B.' write Manx as Barnes wrote Dorsetese : he does not, that is, write English verses with a local accent, but otherwise with * two gowns and everything hand- some about them.' On the contrary, his syntax and his prosody are the island's own, and he will bate you no ace of her claim to be heard on her own peculiar conditions in her own especial terms. Barnes, I take it, wrote in English, and added the local accent (as, by the way, at times did Burns) ; so that, if you feel not equal to an encounter with his rustic — so-called rustic — Muse, you have but to order her to change her shoes and stockings, and get out of that apron, and the like, and she falls at once to her native tongue, which is clean Wordsworthian English. Brown's Tom Baynes — ' Old salt, old rip, old friend ! ' — is not a bit like this. In his use of Manx-English he is just as much Manx and just as little English as his author : who, indeed, in- vented him as a sort of escape-pipe for the mingled steam of English and Manx which was constantly generating in his own boiler. The effect is as remarkable as I know in verse ; and I see no earthly reason why that select and careful public, which is addicted to the reading of verse, should not put in its spoon and sup with the best of us. The dialect is, no doubt, an hindrance and an offence. But, after all, a dialect is soon mastered ; and once you realise that ' priddhas '=/>or«(o^5, that *pinjane' = curds and whey^ that ' arrim ' and ' gorrim ' are only localism for at him and got him, that * at' is a kind of preposition-of-all-work, and means at or by or about, exactly as the speaker wills, there is little indeed in Brown the Manxman to keep you at a ESSAYS halt. And there are such worlds to bring you on ! Open the Tarns where you will, it matters not : the book being the Tarns, you are ever assured of some matchless expression of something — a bee in a flower, an easy pipe, a night in the cells, a sailor's home, a fugue of Bach's, a man in drink, a woman in love, white witchcraft and black, the pool at Bethesda, a storm at sea, a carted harlot, a summer dawn, a milking, a perfect priest — que sgays-jef The Tarns are rich as life itself in character, emotion, experience, tragedy, farce, comedy, fact ; and there is none of their innumerable details but is presented with an assurance, an understanding of essentials, a mastery of means that stamp its pre- sentation as literature. As for poetry, what is poetry } * The only words in the only order ' "^ So be it! Apply the test to these Fo^c^sHe Tarns, and you will find at once that, given the dialect, they also are poetry, and poetry of the most authentic strain. 'Tis small wonder to me that he who made them believed that they would triumph in the end. He thought they would nourish and enkindle and bring on the great Manx poet. I do not agree with him there. I also believe in them, but I believe in them for themselves. We may be wrong : he, the master, I, the pupil — we may both be wrong. What is certain is that if the great Manx poet ever come along, here is as rare and fortifying a compost for him to nuzzle his genius in, as poet ever had. After all, though, talking about Brown the poet is useless. There is nothing for it but reading him : in his English, first, certainly — in all his heights and 'T. E. B.' deeps, in all his brilliancies and in all his ' wallow- ings.' High or low, radiant or despondent, here is a poet anyhow. You love the style, or you do not ; but, anyhow, here is a poet. A poet in English. Then comes what I think the best of all the Browns we have — the Brown of the Manx things and the Tarns. Herein is vastly more than there is in most of the verse written of late about especial neigh- bourhoods, by rhymesters of all grades of talent and accomplishment, from the departed Laureate down- wards. And the end is, simply: — 'Master his dialect, and read.' Master his dialect, such as it is, and become a worshipper of Brown. After all, his Tom Baynes is infinitely more " literary " than most of our Laureates have been, and has, besides, a very great deal to say that few indeed among our Laureates have had the wit to conceive ; seeing that Tom Baynes is the most of what was written on the heart of T. E. B. Yes : that is so. And no better man, I think, has lived, and not many that were stronger or more helpful to his kind. 397 OLD ENGLAND Is there in all literature a romance of the road so intimate and so inevitable — quite! — as Lavengro? I do not think there is. Or if such an one there be, it has yet to come into my ken. Not even the Lucius of The Golden Ass has a more plausible occasion ; not even Don Quixote a more specious and a more searching incitement. Yet the good Alonso Quixada indoors were merely a provincial humorist with a distempered brain and an inordi- nate appetite for a certain type of fiction ; while Lucius off the road would have eaten roses instantly, and so would have been healed of his translation, and come down to us as the hero of a feeble and futile tale of witchcraft. Yes, all that is true ; and it may be that I began by pitching my note too high. You see, I was thinking, not of these archetypes, not of these inevitables, so much as of Gil Bias, and Roderick Random, and the adventures of Guzman d'Alfarache, and that dull and deplorable English Rogue, that Meriton Latroon of whose author Borrow is dullard enough to remark that he was a man of singular (or surprising) genius. So was I led astray! Even so, however, and allowing for enthusiasm, it seems to me that I am very near the 398 OLD ENGLAND truth when I claim for Lavengro a place, so far as mere inevitableness goes, with Don Quixote and The Golden Ass. As thus. The Scholar is born into a marching regiment, and so is a wanderer in his cradle. Starting from East Dereham, he sees all manner of places before he settles down at Nor- wich ; and if he coach thence to London, and have remarkable adventures there with publishers and Armenians and antient apple- women, you feel all the while that these things are naught, for that Mr. Petulengro is behind these things, and with him the King's Highway ; so that presently London — neither understood nor realised, neither seen nor suggested — will pass like the unsubstantial pageant that it is, and in its place you will find the open road, and ' the wind on the heath, brother,' and the ' poor person's child,' and Peter Williams, Blazing Bos- ville, and Isopel Berners, and the red-haired priest, and all the rest of that homespun pageant which we know. Borrow calls it ^ a dream,' and thus no doubt it is rightly described : being, in fact, a dream of the writer's own adventures, not exactly as they happened and as he appeared in them, but as he would have liked to believe that they happened, and thus, and not otherwise, did other people see him. A pleasing ambition ? No doubt. But an inno- cent and humane one, surely ? And, no doubt, not much unlike the reality. Or, at any rate, not nearly so much unlike the reality as you migfht observe, if you pushed home, in the cases of other writing men.^ Be this as it may, his * dream' was essen- 1 Thackeray, for instance, is said to have painted himself in Colonel Esmond. Now I am told that Borrow once inter- ESSAYS tially one of the open road, and to ignore or to misapprehend the circumstances and the fancies with which it is inwrought were to make sheer nonsense of it. 'Tis the most English of English books withal : even as the Scholar, for all his excursions into philo- logy, is the most English of English men. Beef, beer, horses, Moll Flanders and the Church of England, the King and The Newgate Calendar, — what is there, what could there be more typically English than all these .f^ Peter Williams, too, the follower of Wesley — Peter Williams, with Mr. Petulengro and his crew, and the old apple-woman, and Blazing Bosville, and the Postilion who was once in Italy, and the Scholar's father with his memories of Ben Brain : all these, like the landscape and the joy in highway and dell and by-way, in the wayside tavern and the near gypsy camp, like Thurtell and The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell, are purely English, alike in conception and association and effect. And that rhapsody on the heroes of the ropes and stakes, with its special eulogy of Tom Spring : — * Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the brown eye, worthy to have carried a six-foot bow at Flodden,' and all the rest of it, even to the ' bold chorus,' ' Here 's a health to old honest John Bull,' in which it culminates: — where shall you find more English and more valiant pellated Thackeray in society as ' the most offensive snob I have ever seen, Sir,' — or words to that effect. The distance between the several points of view is obvious ; yet Thackeray may not have been utterly and hopelessly far-wandered in his presentation of himself as the sentimental Colonel. Even as Borrow may have been worse guided than I think he was when he sketched himself as the Scholar. 400 OLD ENGLAND stuff? And 'twas ever the same with him. Read him, for instance, on the brother who wanted to go to Rome to study painting. 'What,' says he, his cup of ale gripped mightily in his good right fist, his eye in a fine pugilistic frenzy rolling — ' What hast thou to do with old Rome, and thou an English- man ? Did thy blood never glow at the mention of thy native land ? As an artist merely ? Yes, I trow, and with reason, for thy native land need not grudge old Rome her " pictures of the world " ; she has pictures of her own, "pictures of England" ; and is it a new thing to toss up caps and shout — England against the world? Yes, against the world in all, in all : in science and in arms, in min- strel strain, and not less in the art " which enables the hand to deceive the intoxicated soul by means of pictures." Seek'st models? To Gainsborough and Hogarth turn, not names for the world, maybe, but English names — and England against the world ! ' That is explicit, is it not ? Explicit, and likewise forcible ! You feel as you read that about this Englishman there is no manner of nonsense — no nonsense at all ! And that if he were yet living, and any were ill-advised enough to hold a pro-Boer meeting in his neighbourhood, there would certainly be bloody noses and cracked crowns, and these of his achievement, in the hall that night! That he could rail to excellent purpose is shown in the inimitable Appendices to The Romany Rye ; but I deem it scarce possible that, with a Little-Englander in hand, he 'd have confined his treatment of the wretch to pen-and-ink. Given the occasion and the incitement, he would assuredly have found other 2C ^1 ESSAYS and braver work for ' Long Melford ' than the pre- paration of mere articles of impeachment. Manual coercion is, no doubt, a most disgusting form of tyranny ; and freedom of speech is an essential item in an Englishman's birthright. But it is plain that, on such a provocation as pro-Boerism, this English- man would have rejoiced to employ the one with a view to the suppression of the other. It is impos- sible, of course ; but I confess that to conceive of George Borrow, alive and opugnant in the good old way, tapping Mr. Morley's claret (say), or ' admini- stering a slashing upper-cut ' (as they used to put it) to the sainted Mr. Leonard Courtney, or ' serving out ' the noble Mr. Cronwright Schreiner, with a reminiscence of Jack Randall in his antient left — this is, I confess, a pastime which, however futile, is not at all unpleasing to the unregenerate breast. In principle, I need scarce say, I am with The Spec- tator^ that omniscient and most meritorious print. But if it came to practice, I fear that in such a mellay I could not find it in my heart to be on anybody's side but Borrow's. That, though, is ever the way of the Unregenerate. 'There's the wind on the heath, brother,' says the Lord of the Horse-Shoe to the Lord of Words ; and the Unregenerate are with the Lord of the Horse-Shoe to the hilts. ' There 's the wind on the heath, brother ' ; and it comes and, it goes, and there 's nothing better in life. And that — for them — is the end. I gather from Thormanby's preface to his Boxers and their Battles that he knew Borrow au temps jadis. 'Tis well — 'tis mighty well. But . . .! Did Borrow, I wonder, ever shake hands and talk 402 OLD ENGLAND pugilism with ' Thormanby ' ? Apparently not ; or 'Thormanby,' who is pleasantly garrulous and personal, and talks with a certain pride of his acquaintance with the late Jem Ward, would pro- bably, even certainly, have told us all about it. 'Tis pity that they did not, and that somebody skilled in shorthand was not on hand to report their talk ; for men say things in the intimacy of speech which they would shrink from chronicling in cold, hard print, and these two, both experts in ring-lore, both lovers of the Noble Art, would pretty certainly have said things that the world, or some not incon- siderable part of it, would not willingly have let die. This, however, did not happen ; so that one refers to it only as another notable Might-Have-Been, and passes on to the consideration of Thormanby as he is. This done, one finds that his heart is in his work, and he really has things to say : one of which is that Borrow pitched his paean in praise of pugilism in a key perhaps too high. His own apologia, all the same, is by no means wanting in spirit ; and he reels you off a list of English worthies who have loved the Ring which only fails of its effect by being incomplete. Why did he not include, for instance, the Elegant Earl Grey ? And the Dukes of Kent and Clarence? And the sole and only Duke — the Duke of Wellington.? And Barclay of Urie, the admirable and inventive athlete.'' And John Hamilton Reynolds, the friend of Keats, author of that excellent sonnet to Jack Randall : — * Good with both hands and only ten stone four ' ? 403 ESSAYS And Keats himself, the Poet of Beauty? And Byron, the Poet of Passion and Revolt, an original member of the Pugilistic Club, a confirmed and ardent amateur. And Yarmouth — 'Red Her- rings,' so they called him, from the colour of his whiskers — who presently sat to Disraeli for the Earl of Monmouth and to Thackeray for the Marquis of Steyne, and who beat the Regent dreadfully for proposing to substitute Lady Yarmouth for that Marchioness of Hertford who was nothing if not her husband's mother? And Kean, the portent, the miracle, the prodigious actor, who found (they say) one of the finest effects in the unquenched fury of a beaten ' pug ' ? Why, in fact, did he not name near everybody worth knowing in the Regency and later Georgian days? Pugilism was then the pastime of all good Englishmen ; ^ and over a big fight, which would be witnessed by some five-and- twenty thousand roaring citizens, there would chane:e hands sums of money not to be stated under six figures. The Ring, in fact, had so far entered into the national life that it seemed to be a vital and essential part therein. It had begun with 1 There is never a big Scots boxer on the roll of fame ; and if the Irish be many, there is but one of them, so far as I know, who takes imperial honours ; and Jack Randall (for he it was), Randall the Nonpareil, who fought and won fourteen battles, and ' died at the Hole in the Wall, Chancery Lane,' some four years after Byron, aged but thirty-four, was a London Irishman, * a St. Giles's Greek ' — what they now call a ' Bark ' — was yet as dear to the general British heart as Cribb or Spring themselves. Randall it was who (in his fight with Turner : a fight which, by the way, was witnessed by Tom Moore, as the guest, or novice, of Scrope Davies and Mr. John Jackson) thrilled and enchanted by his brilliant practice the soul of John Keats, then (December 1818) the lover of Fanny Brawne and the poet of Endymion and Isabella, and beginning to work his hardest at Hyperion. 404 OLD ENGLAND Figg — ' Th' heroical Figg so fierce and sedate ' — in Hogarth's time ; it had been passed from hand to hand by Broughton and Slack,^ and Johnson and Brain, and Humphries and Mendoza and John Jackson ; till, at the beginning of the present cen- tury, Jem Belcher was and deserved to be an English hero, and when Gully fought Gregson (1808) Earl Grey sent on the result of the battle to his colleague, Windham, in a ministerial despatch- box, by a ministerial courier. Redit et virgo. . . . 'Twas the Golden Age : the age of Pearce and the Belchers, and Cribb the solid Englishman, and Dutch Sam, the drunken yet terrific Jew. To Thormanby, as to myself, this is all hearsay and tradition ; but he comes to his subject with, I should fancy, a pretty full knowledge of those dreadful later years, in which it was shown that pugilism meant blackguardism, and that for one decent fighter there was a wilderness of scoundrels. In the end the institution was redeemed, in a kind of way and to some extent, by the piety of poor Tom Sayers; in the interval much brilliant work had been put in by such men as Dick Curtis and Young Dutch Sam, as Deaf Burke and Owen Swift and Hammer Lane — to name no more ; such sur- vivals as Jem Ward, Gully (worth a chapter in himself), Spring, Tom Belcher, Mr. Jackson, lived in a sort of rough-and-tumble odour of sanctity, and went abroad in something very like a halo till they died. But the Ring was doomed — had doomed itself ; and the Ring died ; and at its death there were few mourners. According to ' fierce old ^ ' J 'en passe et des meilleurs.' 405 ESSAYS Cobbett^ — and Borrow, who quotes, is not indis- posed to agree — the mischief began with the Jews. It may be so. They had some good men of their own — Mendoza, Dutch Sam and his boy, Belasco, Barney Aaron. But it may be so. I know not. What is certain is that, if the Jew began it, the Gentile was quick to take up the work of corrupting, and in the long-run there was little or nothing to choose between the two. 'All fights are good reading,' says Mr. Saints- bury, superbly — not to say despotically : the truth being that there is scarce an intelligible record in all the literature of fisticuffs. In Boxiana the reports are mere jargon and false fire — a horrible confusion of terms. ^ Jon Bee, in The Fancy ^ is ' not so bad,' as they say ; but even his reports, though you think you sometimes know what he means, are cloudy and vague. There are notes in the latter pages of Pugilistka which are helpful, being decent report- ing. But, in point of fact, no fights are good reading but those which occur in literature. After all, there is little use in reporting. Your fight is a thing psychical as well as physical. It is logical throughout, and its logic is both visible and un- seen : the mere cataloguing of hits on the nose (or eye, or ear, or anywhere) is not much to the purpose. Hence the apparent imbecility of Boxiana, the strenuous ineffectualness of Jon Bee, the failure, as history and as art, of Puplistica. Poor Pierce Egan goes on — goes on ! But if only Byron had 1 1 came to the conclusion, long since, that Pierce Egan knew a certain amount of slang, was innocent of every other kind of knowledge, and never saw anything in his life. 406 ( OLD ENGLAND set his hand to the work, and told us of Belcher and Pearce, or — still better — of Belcher and Cribb ! If only Keats had set down in prose his impressions of the Randall and Turner business ! Some details he sketched to Cowden Clarke ; but O, if he had but pulled off the picture : as Mr. Morrison has done in Three Rounds y^ or better still, perhaps — for the three rounds are fought under difficulties and in uncommon circumstances — in the scrap so masterfully presented in A Child of the J ago. There is a good turn-up in Kenelm Chillingly : a dim old-fashioned novel which, I fear, is practically unknown to the most of those who, referring to these pages, read what, in the first Lord Lytton's days, a writer on pugilism would have thought he was familiar and comic if he wrote ' this here.' And there is excellent stuff in Cash el Byron^s Profession — a novel written by Mr. Bernard Shaw in the days when (so far as I know) he also was a mere artist,^ as were, and are, these others also. Thormanby, too, is an artist in his way. I like him when he writes — (apparently ' out of his own stomach ' : a coarse metaphor, but I am writing about pugilism) — about Hammer Lane and Yankee Sullivan — (Lane broke his arm, yet all but won the fight) — about Owen Swift and Brighton Bill — (in the sequel the Brightonian died) : about everything, in fine, which he may very well have seen. But I like him still better when he is trying to make literature, and 1 Tales of Mean Streets (London : Methuen). * 'Tis a delightful book — a treat of wit and insight, amusing morals and right impudence ; and I should like it known of all them that read the present essay. 407 ESSAYS producing the net result of the confidences of others as to things he never saw. Thus, as to Cribb and Molineaux, he shows plainly that, in the first fight, the nigger was very badly used, and that, at a given moment, Cribb was a beaten man. Thus, too, he is constrained, as all must be constrained who take up the study of the P.R., to break ground with Jem Belcher, the sole and only man of genius who ever fought in the Ring.-^ Nothing, of course, will ever give us any idea of this astonishing creature : his face — (not unlike the Young Napoleon's) struck terror to his opposites, and reminded Egan of ' a renowned military character on the Continent' ; his unaccountable, irresistible hands ; his gaiety, valour, prestance ; his original and entirely in- imitable method, his practice of which was so thrill- ing that, to quote old records, you knew not when nor where nor how he had hit until you saw the 1 Says I, one night, to my friend Professor I dare not give his name, without asking his permission ; but I doubt not that he'll rage when he sees it left in blank. Says I to him, one night, in a balcony at Barnes, with ' the old Father- River ' having his will of us twain, and of all souls born, or fallen into his dominion, in full view : ' There are but two men in the history of the P.R. whom we can call absolutely and utterly first-rate, and they are ' ' Belcher and the Nonpareil,' he says to me ; and I was left wondering. Since then, I 've seen that inspiration plus accomplishment is better than accomplishment plus instinct ; and that his list of two should be shortened by one, and that one not Jem Belcher.* * Dr. Knapp, Sorrow's editor, writes thus : — ' Not the old Belcher, him of 1791.' And I confess I know not what he means. Jem Belcher, the greatest fighter that ever hved, was not born in 1791 ; nor did he fight in 1791 ; nor did he die in 1791 ; nor in fact, did he, so far as I can discover, do anything in 1 79 1 — when, by the way, he was but ten years old. He was, in fact, only eight years Byron's senior ; and he did for the Ring what Byron did for English morals. 408 OLD ENGLAND effects of his hitting. That Thormanby begins his Boxers and their Battles^ some ninety years after poor Belcher's death and burial (1811), is enough to show how tremendously he has ever bulked in the imagination of them that have studied their P.R. But Thormanby is only one of ever so many who have taken this thrice-beaten hero to their hearts. Beaten .f^ He never was beaten, says Jon Bee. The Belcher who, being at the top of fame, and the top of life, had his eye beaten out by a racquet ball, and from being invincible became ! Says Jon Bee : — * The real Belcher was never beaten ; he couldn't be beat.' This, or words to this effect. As told by Thormanby, the story of his defeats — the abolished eye the chief factor in them — suggests Napoleon and the campaign of 18 14. He was bound to be licked ; and licked he was. But he was licked in such a way that men went to him in his defeats to learn how to come upsides with Victory. 409 BALZAC AS HE WAS The men of 1 830 have been taxed with insincerity ; and the reproach is merely just. There was none of them but would be a Byron, even though, to compass his ambition, he must do for himself what the world did for the poet of Parisina and Harold and The Giaour^ and carefully contrive his own legend. Dumas and Berlioz wrote their Memoirs, and very delightful books they are ; and bien fol qui s^y fie — if it be question of anything but their delightfulness. Hugo went further. He did his utmost to develop a legendary Brow as well as a legendary Hugo, and set himself, being something of a Hercules, to the great work of going down to posterity as very much of an Apollo. Balzac's ideal Balzac was as none of these others. Despite the famous Stick — the stick which set half Europe talking ; despite the loge des tigres — that box at the Opera to win the entree to which Maxime de Trailles, and Rastignac, and la Palferine themselves would have had to produce their credentials — despite, I say, the dandyism which he affected, and the habit of supreme society which sat so ill upon his heroes and so very much worse upon their creator — despite the confidences of mysterious and nameless ladies, who, suffering in silence and a 410 BALZAC AS HE WAS l^ ombre, were moved to appeal to him for counsel, sympathy, hope — Balzac resolved to impose himself upon posterity as an embodiment of (i) Debt, (2) Work, (3) Chastity, and (4) Sentiment. How far he succeeded with the world at large I cannot pre- tend to say. I can, however, protest, and solemnly, that for years (and they were pretty bad years, too), I lived upon his legend. I saw him in his garret — toiling, toiling ; steaming with Intellect and Will ; producing fifteen times over, breaking the hearts of compositors, ruining the eyes and the moral char- acters of readers for the press ; striving, magnifi- cent and enormous, like Porthos at Belle-Isle, against burdens of achievement too great for mortal man to bear ; and doing it all on black coffee, and alone — alone! Never the ghost of a petticoat (I thought), never the possibility, the shadow, the dream (even) of a kiss! Work, and then work, and work again ; and black coffee, and a few hours' sleep ; and then more work, and more black coffee ; and days that were Italian Campaigns in the matter of getting money ; and nights that were Jenas and Ulms in the matter of expression and conception ; and a head that steamed — steamed ; and — never a woman in the whole wide world? Not one! till you came to be Daniel d'Arthez, and then you fell in with the Princesse de Cadignan (sometime Diane de Maufrigneuse) ; and she went for you ; and, elderly as you both were, you . . . But let me not anticipate! Enough to note, here and now, that that was Balzac's ideal, as adumbrated in the Comedie humaine : — * The new edition fifty volumes long * : — 411 ESSAYS and as preached to those young men — as Theophile Gautier — who came within range of his overpower- ing and bewildering personality. I was one of these. I was born the year before he died ; but I lived in his work — neck and shoulders deep in it — for years ; and for years I read the Balzac of Legend with the Balzac of the Comedie. Then I began to know better and to see clearer. And now I can, and do, laugh at my old Ideal as cheerfully and as whole-heartedly as I can, and do, laugh at myself — his victim for so long. There is no doubt that he worked ; worked like a harvester, like a Titan, like a William Shakespeare even ; for have we not those wonderful effects in intuition, which are also those incredible achieve- ments in presentation, the ninety-odd masterpieces which make up the several sections of the Comedie ? And behind all these are there not the three dizains of the Contes drolatiques^ and in these three tens are there not a dozen stories — as la Conne table ^ and Berthe la repentie^ and le Feche-veniel^ and le Sue- cube, and Perseverance d^ amour — which would suffice for immortality to any one but Balzac. Work ^ O yes : that he worked, and worked, and killed himself with work, there is no doubt at all. Scott worked, too ; but he worked easily, joyously, carelessly ; and we love and revel in his loose but consummate achievement. To Balzac every page of copy meant heaven knows how many slips of proof ; so that, while Sir Walter, conscious of his own weight and strength and prestance^ and caring little or nothing for style, would take on his 412 BALZAC AS HE WAS printers, even after weeks of colic,^ with a super- human equanimity, Balzac is conscious, as he writes, that this that he is writing, or rather this that he is striving to write, is the imperfect thing — is not the half of that he wishes to tell (over his signature) to the world. So he gets to work ; and set after set of proofs is ruined and recast and rewritten ; and in the end everything is five or six times re-achieved. I say 'five or six,' because I wish to be credible ; but if we are to believe himself, the statement is utterly inadequate. His Pierrette, for instance, cost him thirteen sets of proofs and thirteen re- writings ; his Birotteau, seventeen sets of proofs and seventeen rewritings ; and so with the rest. The effort is so prodigious, the outcome so magni- ficent, that you are neither displeased nor surprised to find him likening himself, as he gladly does, to Napoleon. There, in effect, he sits — sits in his white monk's frock : distilling corruption ; invent- ing characters, stories, facts, societies, moralities, philosophies, religions ; producing Vautrins and S^raphitas with an equal interest in the result, an equal constancy in the process of creation ; ranging between heaven-high (as he conceives of heaven) and hell-deep with an imperturbable assurance, an irresistible persuasiveness, an incomparable power. And at fifty, or so, he dies ; and you may reflect that, if he 'd never been, the world of Fiction were the poorer by something like two thousand figures of men and women, and by not a few of the most 1 As with The Bride of Lammertnoor : dictated to Laidlaw when, what with pains and fomentations and dictations, the noble creature knew not what he had done. 418 ESSAYS notable stories ever made. Yes : as I said before, there is no doubt that he worked ; as there is none that his oeuvre is aere perennius, at the same time that it is unique in human achievement. It is another-guess matter with his Debts, and of these I shall say no more than that Leon Gozlan (the Nathan of the Comedie), who knew him inti- mately, declined to believe in their existence, and insisted, more or less, that they were his day-dreams, his illusions, the sole ' enchanted cigarettes ' which he permitted himself to smoke. 'Tis the same, but a great deal more flagrant and more demonstrable, with that other article of faith — his Chastity, He preached the virtue with a most constant mouth ; and with a most constant heart he declined to prac- tise it. M. de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, who knows his Balzac like the clock, is careful to note that the affectation of continence was an essential element in Balzac's pose^ and remains an essential feature in Balzac's legend. It is the merest impos- ture ; yet the great man, ' in his many aventures d^amour^ (S. de L.), was solicitous, even resolute, to maintain it. From two-and-twenty onwards he was the protege of a certain Mme. de B : 'la dtlecta^^ he calls her : who, being twice his age, and almost beyond experience credulous, motherly, sisterly, kind, was such an influence in his life that after her death he was never quite the same. But a Mme. de B., however she ' fill the bill ' when one is two-and-twenty and a nobody, is apt to be super- fluous when one is two-and-thirty, and withal the author of le Chat qui pelotte^ and la Vendetta^ and les Chouans^ and the Peau de chagrin^ and la 414 BALZAC AS HE WAS Physiologie du manage. By that time other women, veiled or not, sincere or not, curious cer- tainly, had come upon the scene. By that time, in fact, the Hysteriac — the Lady-Errant, if you will : the Woman who Wants to Know — had realised that here was her Confessor-General ; of whom she might ask such questions as she would, and to whom she might look for such answers as she was prepared to receive. It is, I take it, to the credit of Balzac's arch-illusion that, whatever the cUente^s name, she was positively assured that She, and She only, was Woman to him : that, apart from Her, life was a desperate round of copy, proofs, black coffee, debts, and six hours' sleep out of the twenty-four. That She believed it is improbable ; but 'tis certain that Balzac went on saying it. Meanwhile, the dedi- catee of Eugenie Grande t brought him a daughter ; friends of his knew of a son and of yet another daughter — both dead within the last few years ; so late as 1846, a girl child, ' nee a six mois,' declared herself in circumstances so moving that, according to M. de Lovenjoul, *les rapides progr^s' of Balzac's ^ maladies de cceur ' were ' dus en partie a cette terrible aventure.' We know not precisely what this means. What we do know is that the ' Maria ' of Eugenie Grandet — ' la plus na'ive creature qui soit . . . qui vient chez moi en cachette, n'exige ni correspondance ni soins, et qui dit : " Aime-moi un an, je t'aimerai toute ma vie " ' — was no more Balzac's 'only She' than the * dilecta ' herself, or than that Mme. la Marquise de Castries, who, ' quoique voluptueuse comme mille chats,' was, Balzac told his sister, ' ni gracieuse 416 ESSAYS ni femme.' What we know, too, is that, however many uniques there were, Balzac, braggart and vocal as he was in all other relations of life, was careful to compromise no one of them. On the contrary, ' Blessed are the pure in fact,' he said, ' for they alone shall do enduring work.' It was an excellent device. He made his legend, and behind it did as he would. In reality he was the jovial Tourangeau of les Contes drolatiques. In the public eye he was the creator of Mme. de Mortsauf and the Bennassis of le Medecin de campagne^ the author of Eugenie Grandet, and le Cure de village : a great artist, a great moralist, a great satirist ; a worker so obstinate and so energetic that he had no time in which to be adventurous — no time, in fact, for anything but proofs and copy, copy and proofs — copy and proofs, and black, black coffee, and never a petticoat from one book's end to another's. And his client es^ his women (if I may use the phrase) ' played up.' It is a mistake to suppose that Nora Helmer always slams the door behind her when she goes forth to find herself. The Nora Helmers who came and went about Balzac knew a trick worth two of that. They discovered themselves at home, and went abroad, as in the ordinary run of things, to get their discovery confirmed. That is the great, the essential, difference between Nora Helmer and (say) the Duchesse de Langeais. This, however, is by the way. The thing to insist on is that all they who went to Honore de Balzac for certificates of self- discovery got plenty of Sentiment fromx him, and were happy. What the sentiment was worth they only know who have compared his Lys dans la 416 BALZAC AS HE WAS vallee (let us say) and his stories of the building of Azay-le-Rideau and the humours of King Louis xi. I take it, then, that Balzac the feministe^ Balzac the amateur des femmes, was, despite his amazing flow of sentimental fancy and speech, severely prac- tical. Yet the great affair of his life was largely an affair of Sentiment and the Fine Shades, and it was his, in the very prime of his life and fame, to perform such a scamper through the Pays du tendre as few men have achieved and survived. It began in 1832, when he was thirty-three years old, and its inspiration was a lady who signed herself ' Une Etrangere,' and whose letter bore the postmark of Odessa. That letter, I believe, is lost. Lost or not, it had its effect on Balzac's life and Balzac's mind, and was, in fact, the beginning of a connexion that ended only with Balzac's death. It seems to have been of no particular merit ; but it was anony- mous, it reproached the poet with the cynicism of the Feau de chagrin^ it insisted that he should return to the purer atmosphere of the Scenes de la Vie privee ; and, as I have said, it immensely impressed the recipient, who seems to have set to work to knock up a passion as soon as ever he had received and read. Came a second (acknowledged in the ^uotidienne^ and thereby establishing in France what is known to us as the Agony Column), and a third ; and then, nobody knows how, the nympho- lept was bidden to Neuchatel. He had already sought to mark his appreciation of the Etrangere's attentions by essaying to dedicate (with an appro- priate date) a certain novelle 'Diis ignotis,' and had been foiled of his intent by the ' dilecta^^ who was 2D 417 ESSAYS in the habit of reading his proofs, and who made him suppress the dedication and the sheet in which it appeared ; and for this reason and others he had to invent a pretext for leaving Paris which would serve him at once at home and abroad. He was equal to the occasion, and repaired to Neuchatel. There are two accounts of the meeting. One is, that he found her reading Balzac, looked at her, was recognised, and was instantly honoured with what Browning calls ' the blessing of embrace ' ; another, that the lady, having recognised, was disgusted by the squatness, the drover-like aspect, the general commonness in effect of her adored Master, and that he had to put forth his best to prove that he was essentially the Balzac of her dream. Whichever we accept, it is certain that Balzac was, so to say, clean bowled by the Etrangere's first ball. Writing to his sister, he gives such an account of the business as might come from the author of the Physiologie du manage : in the course of which he touches off Mme. de Castries and the * dilecta,^ owns that a certain * simple et delicieuse bourgeoise ' — the Maria of the Grandet dedication — has made him a father, enumerates the new woman's points, talks of 'le damme mari,' notes that 'a I'ombre d'un chene s'est donne le fiirtif baiser premier de I'amour,' and then, physiologist of marriage — cynic, ribald, practical amorist — as he is, proceeds to give himself away with both hands. 'Puis,' says he, ' comme notre mari s'achemine vers la soixantaine, j'ai jure d'attendre, et elle de me reserver sa main, son cceur.' No schoolgirl ever showed so much facility — no schoolboy such a 418 BALZAC AS HE WAS superb capacity for surrrender ! Yet this was soon to be the Balzac of Goriot and the Illusions perdues and la Fille aux yeux d^orl This was the creator of la Palferine, and de Marsay, and Corentine, and Rastignac, and Mame Nourrisson, and the Miles. Goriot, and Fremiet, and Gobseck, and Vautrin, and Valerie de Marneffe, and Philippe Bridau, and Crevel, and Hulot — the great all-father of corrup- tions, the Homer (as it were) of whatever is vilest and most artful in fiction! If it were not true, 'twould be incredible — would it not ? It was a Polish lady — a Mme. Hanski or Hanska — who did this feat. She was five-and-twenty years her husband's junior, but had had several children by him, of whom but one survived. Bal- zac saw the Hanski s again at Geneva, and yet again at Vienna ; and in the space between and for years to come he 'reeled it off.' She was his 'chere epouse d'amour,' his ' ange adore,' his ' ange idolatre,' his * cher tresor en bonheur,' his ' chere noble ame,' his ' belle et noble maitresse,' ' ma grande souveraine, ma fee, ma femme,' his * chere lumiere du monde ' ; and his refrain is ' Adoremus in aeternum.' The Man of the Fine Shades has his chance, and goes for it through letter after letter, with all the strength that is in his big, subtle, seeth- ing, teeming brain. With the years, though, the nympholept changes his tone, and gets into another key. M. de Hanski seems to have seen elucubra- tions of his, and to have been by no means pleased with them. Balzac's apologies to ' notre mari ' are things to read, especially in their place among the letters. M. de Hanski is wholly in error, it ap- 419 ESSAYS pears. The fact is, Mme. de Hanska had remarked one day, in Balzac's hearing, that she had never had a love-letter in her life ; and Balzac had written these things of which M. de Hanski complains, in pure friendliness, just to show her what love-letters are like ! I do not think that * notre mari ' was altogether so credulous as his would-be ' Minotaur ' would have liked him to be. In any case, Balzac the nympholept goes under, and his room is filled by Balzac the Writer, Balzac the Adventurer, Balzac the Man of Debts, the behemoth of Chastity, the leviathan * pour copie conforme.' His illusions are with him first and last ; so that some of his letters, if you could but believe him, would read tragically enough. But belief in him is impossible. These letters of his to Mme. Hanska are plainly the out- come of a strong delusion. I do not doubt that they helped him in his struggle with life and time. But I would not, for all their particularity, hang any one of my cats upon their testimony. He is always going to Russia ; but somehow he never goes. He has a dozen volumes to write, three stories to finish, ten or twenty thousand francs to raise, an illness the result of months of overwork — (but for his Chastity, his doctor tells him, he had been a dead man ! ) — to recover from ; and he never goes. He can find time for Sardinia ; he can make none for the Ukraine. So it goes on till 1841, when M. de Hanski died ; and in 1842 Balzac journeyed to Russia. They were not married, however — he and his Eve — till the April of 1850 ; and between 1841 and 1851 there is, as we have seen, a marking date — even 1846. For the rest. BALZAC AS HE WAS the marriage seems to have been none of the best. Balzac died some three or four months after the event ; and Victor Hugo (in Choses vues) has told us how he died, and where was Mme. de Balzac when death took him away. Thus passes the Senti- mentalist, the man who insists on seeing life other than it is, and on making facts other than they are. His widow was not of his kidney ; and when she died, some years ago, she had recognised her true place in time, and was not even her husband's widow, but a figure which Balzac would have loved to study and to present : among the grimiest in the Comedie. 421 THE TWO HUGOS When Renan says of Nero that he had ' the intellect of one of Victor Hugo's heroes,' he strikes a shrewd blow at Hugo as well as at Didier and Ruy Bias, at the poet ofles Orientales and la Legende as well as at Gwynplaine and Hernani and Jean Valjean. For a man's heroes are that part of his work which he loves best, and on which — Perchance as finding there unconsciously Some image of himself — he lingers with the most complacency. Now, it was written of Hugo — by no less an artist in criti- cism than Heine — that somewhere or other, on this part of his person or on that, he had, however art- fully dissembled, a hump — a malformation which insisted on getting itself manifested in everything he did ; and it was written of Hugo's heroes — by no less an expert in character than Thackeray — that they were monsters all : creatures with humps, who might not be measured by the standards in use among ordinary human beings. Both these opinions are irrefragable. Hugo's heroes are monsters, and they are monsters because Hugo had a hump : not a hump physical, as Heine was so 422 THE TWO HUGOS malevolent as to suggest, but a hump moral and spiritual, which hump its owner could not choose but bestow upon the several creatures of his fancy. One and all, they are expressions of sentiment gone wrong ; and as the name of Hugo's hump — which is Hugo's master-quality — was Insincerity, they are one and all impossible and incredible. There are times when Hugo, if he were not true to fact, if he had not lived and moved and had actual being, would seem incredible and impossible as the most personal of his own creations. One might say of him, with perfect truth, that life for him was one long sequence of attitudes, all exaggerated, and each one nothing if not conscious and deliberate. All were cleverly conceived and done, for Hugo (his genius apart) was in some ways an uncommonly clever fellow : a man with a keen eye for the main chance, an extraordinary feeling for Number One, and a very natural resolve to make the most he could by (as well as of) an unrivalled technical endow- ment. But all were attitudes, and now there is none but recalls that saying of Renan's with which I begin this Note. Of what size and quality, in effect, are the intel- lects of Hugo's heroes.^ And in what degree do they differ from Hugo's own.^ The answer con- sists in another question : — Is it possible to conceive of Hernani or of Ruy Bias with any brains but the shallowest.^ I do not think it is. Hernani is a fool positive ; or the Horn would leave him cold, and there would be no play. Ruy Bias is a fool positive ; or he would make no more of Don Salluste than of the dust under his foot, and again ESSAYS there would be no play. That both Ruy Bias and Hernani are in all other respects impossible — that they are as false to history as they are false to nature — has nothing to do with the present contention. They are good enough Hugo to be typical Hugo ; and the sole conclusion possible about them is that they have only the very rudiments of brains, and that what in human beings is called character is shown in them as an instinctive and overmastering capacity for attitude. They have, that is, the qualities and the defect of their creator. They have presence, rhetoric, music, colour, a certain flamboy- ancy in inverisimilitude. But they are also liars born and made : they are hard put to it to mean a word they say. Or, if they be not liars, and if it be expected of you that you take their utterances for gospel, then are they the worst witted and the most helpless impostors that ever foisted themselves upon a thrice-gullible public. And here their creator meets and beats them on their own ground ; and, in the long-run, one is left gasping at the spectacle — of assurance, ignorance, insincerity, and sham superiority — which, thanks to his abounding lyrism, his magnificent temperament, and his scarce less magnificent capacity for expressing his neant — the Bottomless Pit that was innate, essential Hugo — in brilliant and sonorous verse, in antithetic and fanciful prose, he contrived to offer to the world until the end. Attitude — attitude — and again and always atti- tude : in the beginning, as in the end, attitude and an almost unnatural mastery of rhythm and speech. That is the secret of his success, that the explanation 424 THE TWO HUGOS of the hold he had upon his lieges and the world. His ignorance runs deeper than ever plummet sounded ; so that his Cromwell^ his Marie Tudor^ his V Homme qui rit — to name but these — might stand, were they not already forgotten, for monu- ments of human impudence at the same time that they are achievements in human nescience. For (be it noted) he is always careful to insist upon the variety and the extent of his reading : he knows his public thoroughly, and he knows — and here is the cleverness which distinguishes his pose — that his public is even less bookish than himself, and will take his learning for granted because he insists on it, and because he writes good verses. He believes in his learning as Didier in the authenticity of Marion de POrme's new-made virginity : because he will, and there is none to say him nay. And his egotism is so vigorous that he has no eye and no ear and no suspicion of the vengeful Muse of History, whose servants will presently come down upon him, upset all his facts, make hay of his conclusions, and de- monstrate that, whatever he may have known of character and life, he knew absolutely nothing, for all his solemn and imposing countenance and his * austere regard of control ' — nothing, I say, of history, nothing of books, nothing of anything excepting the fact that he, Hugo, was superior to facts and rules, and that, for the moment at least, he spoke as one inspired, and might, without fear of questioning, say anything he would. It was not for nothing that he called himself Olympic ; wrote his own life — or dictated it to his wife ; and insisted that (in the words of ' our immortal Chiggle, sir '), 425 ESSAYS his Brow was more than mortal. ■"■ He was so self- satisfied, he had so little sense of humour, that he thought it all true, and struck such attitudes as seemed appropriate to his occasions in the full belief that, inasmuch as they were his, they were removed beyond criticism. In a sense he was justified of himself ; for it is demonstrable to the hilt that he made such verses as no Frenchman had ever made, and had, besides, such a temperament as has been matched, I think, by none but our Mr. Gladstone's within the memory of man. Had the blind gods but given a touch of conscious fun to either, how much richer had they left the world in fact and how much poorer in occasions to scoff! It is told of Victor Hugo that, being taken in flagrante delicto^ by an outraged husband and a Commissaire in a tri- coloured scarf, he was subjected to a formal inter- rogatoire^ and that, being attired in the costume which is usual at such passes in human existence, he responded to the question as to his status exactly as Ru)' Bias or Didier or Gwynplaine or Hernani or Ruy Gomez would have answered, in these noble words: 'Monsieur, je suis pair de France! ' Is there such an entire and perfect chrysolite of fatu- ousness in all the history of genius .^^ He was a pair de France^ you see, and, being a pair de France^ as much above and beyond the law which governs 1 ' II avait en lui beaucoup de I'Hercule ' : thus M. Rodin to the present writer and to R. L. S. as we were considering his magnificent bust of Hugo. Now, the said bust is rather Herculean than Apollonian : the Brow, that is, is sacrificed to the back-head, which, in Hugo, as in Gladstone, was superb. The bust, therefore, was not accepted by the Family, nor was Rodin called in to take the poet's death-mask. 426 THE TWO HUGOS grocers and coal-mongers and the like as Lauzun or Richelieu or Bassompierre. Does not the answer read as something straight from one of his own immortal works ? Can you not see Frederick dress- ing himself — ' tres digne ' — in whatever is handy, and taking the stage, to give it out with one of those gestures ' as of an inspired windmill ' of which he had the secret ; while Georges (or Mars, or Dorval) sobs, artfully denuded, L. C. ? That, however, is Hugo the man and Hugo the maker of heroes. As the parodist, poor Andre Gill, once wrote : — ' Tout [Hugo] est la. Ou la. La ou Ik? Tyrolienne. Passons.' Add the lyrist of les Orientates and les Contemplations and les Chdtiments and the rest, and you begin to understand the kind of effect he had upon his lieges and upon the world. It was Theo- phile Gautier, I believe, who said that he could not so much as think that Hugo had made a bad verse unless he were fathoms underground, in black dark- ness, utterly removed from human cognisance. Others were more critical and less loyal : — Je Tadmire vraiment. — Et franchement, personne Ne me rappelle mieux, parfois, le mardi-gras. Quel porteur d'oripeau ! quel faiseur d'embarras ! Et'que souvent il pese ! et quel creux rauque il sonne ! Nul n'a fait tant de vers ni si beaux ni si droles : II est grand, il est bas ; il engraisse nos Gaules, — Mais jusqu'^ les crever ! — d'un fumier pr^cieux. I should like to quote the whole sonnet, which is sound criticism throughout. But the gist of it is enough, and the * fumier precieux ' is said once and 427 ESSAYS for all time. As for the antithesis — ' II est grand, il est bas ' — that also were demonstrable to the hilt. I need not note that, on the one hand, Hugo was a great lyric poet, and that, on the other, Hugo's heroes are Hugo's ideals — are Hugo's conceptions of Hugo in certain circumstances, under certain conditions, and at grip with certain chances. Now, as Hugo's heroes are all lackbrains, with a passion for attitude, and a temperament which sets them higher than right or wrong — are idiots, in short, or sentimental rastaquoueres^ or both — it follows that . . . Well, it follows that, given a certain endowment, a certain technical imagination, a man needs neither character nor intellect of the highest class to be a very considerable poet. It was Got, himself a most intelligent man, who declared that, to the best of his knowledge and belief, you might state as incontrovertible the para- dox that the more clever the man the worse the actor. Put the thing thus : the more clever the man outside his work^ and you may apply Got's test to most of the arts, and find that there is much to be said in its favour. Take painting, for instance. One has always heard that Claude was both illiterate and dull ; yet are his landscapes of the noblest ever made. One hears little or nothing of Turner to make one sorry that one did not know him ; yet one is told that his achievement is among the highest in all the range of art. For my part, I know nothing which gives me a greater sense of mastery, a fuller feeling of completeness, than a good Corot ; but I have yet to read anything which shows that, outside his pictures, Corot was by so much as one degree 428 THE TWO HUGOS removed from Colonel Newcome or Joe Gargery. Again, few better workmen than Courbet have prac- tised painting since this century began ; yet Courbet intime was a puzzle-headed, gross, and rather drunken boor. Or take the case of music. Out- side his instruments, Beethoven was wellnigh inarticulate ; and Beethoven is the greatest of them all. In literature it is other-guess work. Or rather, in literature it may be ; for the medium of literature is also the medium of science and philo- sophy, and withal, the means of expression common to all mankind ; and Shakespeare and Goethe and Dante are there to show that one may have all the brains that are going, and be the greater artist and poet for the possession. But it by no means follows that, because a man works in speech, and may say things at the same time that he is making poetry, he is poet and thinker both. For on the other side — remote from Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe — is Browning, who really was (they tell me) an infinitely clever fellow — a person with a brain of extra- ordinary range and subtilty — yet who chiefly lives as a kind of Shocking Case, an Awful Warning, an exemplar of everything the aspirant should not do. Decidedly, there is something in the old actor's theory. There is nothing more exquisite in litera- ture than the best of Herrick — is there ? Yet who would ' pass his word for twopence ' that Herrick had, outside his art, any more intelligence than the other country parsons of his time ? And is not Hugo the lyrist great and satisfying on the whole in spite of Hugo the intellect and the man.f^ Speaking in his own name, as an agent in human 429 ESSAYS affairs, as an influence on human destiny, was he ever aught but fatuous? Who can think so? You may read Thackeray on his intercession with the existing King for a man's life in the early Thirties. It is painful reading, though apparently the few poor verses did their work. In 1 8 7 1 he was issuing manifestoes to the Germans, urging on them the duty of sparing Paris and proclaiming the German Republic. He knew nothing when he began, that is ; and he knew nothing when he ended. In the half-century between he had written many, very many delightful verses, with many, very many — an infinite array, in fact — of verses that are not delightful at all. At the last he approved him- self a kind of poetry-machine, grinding out alex- andrines and octosyllabics and all the other stuff of the trade as mechanically as Mr. Babbage's apparatus dealt with calculations. In all there are signs of the fecund and brilliant technical imagination which had been his fi-om the first ; in all there are notes of technical excellence which none living could equal. But in all there is so much of Heine's hump that to read ?Art d^etre grand-pere (let us say) is to be sick of children, and to wonder why persons without tact, without reticence, without any of the quality of virtus — that honourable and engaging quality! — should be gifted as Hugo was, and should be per- mitted, as Hugo was, to go on, year after year, degrading their endowment. That said, I hasten to add that I should dearly like to compile an antho- logy from Hugo's verse. 'Tis an impossible notion, of course ; for was not everything he wrote Inspired? And Is not everything he wrote thrice 430 THE TWO HUGOS sacrosanct ? But I think that, supposing it were not impossible, I could make a book out of his eight- and-forty volumes that would live. Out of his verse, of course — out of his verse! There is but one way to enjoy your Hugo ; and that is to read his verses — here and there ; and to leave his prose alone. If you read the verse you get the poet — often, and often, and very often. If you read the prose, you get the Bounder, the rastaq — I will not say ' always,' but more often than is good for your peace of mind. In the so-called Memoirs^ you get very little else than the Bounder ; and he does not emerge from the experience with anything like flying colours and a whole skin. There is here some quite magnificent blither about the Improper Person who loves the Robber : — She was a harlot and he was a thief, But they loved each other beyond beHef : — and how they live in divers cells of the subterranean Void ; and how his Smile is hell-spoiled, but hers is tinctured with the hues of heaven ; and how there would be no harlots if it were not for human nature, and no thieves but for cruel and most unsentimental laws ; and how, despite the efforts of God and Man and the Police, the Thief and the Harlot contrive to exchange ' the kiss of azure.' But the worst of all are the references during the Siege to * Little Jeanne.' The whole business of the Siege — which Hugo thoroughly enjoyed — is an exhibition of the Heinesque hosse. But 'tis only when the poet takes on ' Little Jeanne,' and runs her (so to speak) in and with and between the bulletins — her caudle- 431 ESSAYS cup among the cannon, her bib against the bayonets — that you see how essential, how indestructible was the sentimental rastaq in Victor Hugo, and how hard it is for decent people to have anything to do with him. GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVEKSITV PRESS BY ROBERT MACUEHOSE AND CO. LTD. THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. NOV y ii: $E P 8 19 47 ir.hy^gijij^ # ^ 4 May '5 J; •^nimjko MAR 2 7 '67 -i A LOAN DEPT LD 21-100m-12,'43 (8796s) — . i : 1 > ^- r CO o CD 498079 UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA UBRARY