Most people are more or less vaguely aware that there existed in
England, towards the end of the last century, a school of poets,
or poetasters, called Della Cruscan; and Mrs. Oliphant not long
ago suggested, in her _Literary History_, that a sketch of their
eccentricities might not be unamusing. I propose, accordingly, for
the edification of the curious, to recount a few particulars of the
Della Cruscan writers, in the days of their prosperity and the days of
their collapse. They were, let it at once be admitted, a feeble and a
frivolous folk; yet I think that a moral may suggest itself when their
story has been told.
In the year 1784 Mr. Robert Merry, a bachelor of thirty, had been for
some years domiciled at Florence. That his position and prospects
were not of a very definite order was owing to no defect of nurture
or opportunity. He had been educated at Harrow, at the same time as
Sheridan, and afterwards at Christ's College, Cambridge, and was
originally intended for the Bar. To Lincoln's Inn he accordingly made a
pretence of belonging till the death of his father, who was a Governor
of the Hudson's Bay Company; the family connection with the North Seas
being still perpetuated in the name of Merry's Island. Robert Merry
at once took advantage of the independence which came to him on his
father's death to abandon the Bar and buy himself a commission in the
Guards. His liking for high play and high society kept him, for a short
time, amused in his new position. He grew, however, once more restless;
wandered on the Continent; and became, in the phraseology of the day,
a man of letters and of leisure. His love of letters he gratified, at
Florence, by becoming a member of the Italian Academy, the Accademia
della Crusca, and his love of letters and leisure combined by joining
himself to an English society who called themselves the “Oziosi,” and,
no doubt, took good care to merit that designation.
The leading spirit of this coterie was no less a personage than Mrs.
Piozzi, happily married at last, and safely escaped from the malice
of her cold-blooded daughters, and from the virulence with which the
English journals had inveighed against her choice of a second husband.
Even now the memory of her domestic troubles tended to inspire her
with a dejection which the master-pieces of Florentine sculpture were,
oddly enough, powerless to remove. As she herself described it, in
lines at which one cannot help smiling, sincere as they perhaps were,—
The slave and the wrestlers, what are they to me,
From plots and contention removed?
And Job with still less satisfaction I see,
When I think on the pains I have proved.
The homage of her countrymen, however, did much to enliven her
despondency; and she complacently records in her journals some of the
compliments paid her by her fellow-members of the “Oziosi.” They used
to address her in this style:—
E'en so when Parsons pours his lay,
Correctly wild, or sweetly strong,
Or Greathead charms the listening day,
With English or Italian song,
Or when, with trembling wing I try,
Like some poor wounded bird, to fly,
Your fostering smiles you ne'er refuse,
But are the Pallas and the Muse!
The Parsons and Greathead of this all-round panegyric of Merry's were
two members of the “Oziosi” clique: Parsons, a bachelor with a tendency
to flirt, to “trifle with Italian dames,” as Mrs. Piozzi poetically
put it; Greathead, the newly-married husband of a beautiful wife. Both
Parsons and Greathead were voluminous contributors to the society's
Album, which soon assumed formidable dimensions. The staple of the
contents consisted of high-flown compliments in verse. Parsons, for
instance, would write to Greathead's wife:—
O blest with taste, with Genius blest,
Sole mistress of thy Bertie's breast,
Who to his love-enraptured arms are given
The rich reward his virtues claim from Heaven.
And Bertie, as in duty bound, would reply in kind, bidding the sallow
Arno pause and listen to the lays of Parsons. As an alternative to
these panegyrics, they wrote _Dithyrambics to Bacchus_, _Odes to the
Siroc_, or lines on that latest novelty, Montgolfier's air-balloon.
Mrs. Greathead was, in fact, as Parsons informs us, the only member of
the society who contributed nothing but the inspiration of her charms.
Some of these poems were printed in an _Arno Miscellany_, of which
only a few copies were privately circulated. It was a subsequent
and larger collection, published in 1785, under the name of _The
Florence Miscellany_, which first made its way to England, and drew the
attention of the English public to the rising school of versifiers.
Horace Walpole characterized their productions as “mere imitations of
our best poets,” that is to say, of Milton, Gray, and Collins. How
justly, may be inferred from the opening stanza of Merry's _Ode on a
distant prospect of Rome_:—
When Rome of old, terrific queen,
High-placed on Victory's sounding car,
With arm sublime and martial mien,
Brandished the flaming lance of war,
Low crouched in dust lay Afric's swarthy crowd,
And silken Asia sank, and barbarous Britain bowed.
The imitations of Milton and Collins are of a like description. Such
as it was, the book was a success, and samples of its contents were
reproduced, after the fashion of the day, in the newspapers and
magazines—the _Gentleman's_, the _European_, the _Universal Magazine_,
and so forth. Of the quality of the poems, critically considered,
and of the Della Cruscan poetry generally, I shall have something to
say farther on. In the meantime, it may, perhaps, be worth while to
disinter a ludicrous passage in one of Merry's contributions to the
_Florence Miscellany_. The “Oziosi” had one day agreed that each of
them should produce by the evening a story or poem which should “excite
horror by description.” Mrs. Piozzi's production will be found in her
_Autobiography_, and is by no means devoid of merit. Merry brought a
poem (“a very fine one,” says Mrs. Piozzi), in which he introduced the
following remarkable ghost, which I commend to the attention of the new
Psychical Society:—
While slow he trod this desolated coast,
From the cracked ground uprose a warning ghost;
Whose figure, all-confused, was dire to view,
And loose his mantle flowed, of shifting hue;
_He shed a lustre round; and sadly pressed
What seemed his hand upon what seemed his breast;
Then raised his doleful voice, like wolves that roar
In famished troops round Orcas' sleepy shore,_—
“Approach yon antiquated tower,” he cried,
“There bold Rinaldo, fierce Mambrino, died,” etc.
But I must not linger over the _Florence Miscellany_, which was but the
prelude to those melodious bursts which filled the spacious times of
George III. with the music of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda. A year or
two after its publication the Florence coterie broke up, and returned
to England.
The first note of the concert was struck by Robert Merry, who, in
June 1787, sent to the _World_ a poem entitled _The Adieu and Recall
to Love_, subscribing himself Della Crusca, a nickname which had
been given to him at Florence, on account of his connection, already
mentioned, with the Italian Academy. The _World_ was a daily morning
paper, price threepence, which in more than one respect resembled its
modern namesake. A contemporary satirist, writing under the modest
pseudonym of “Horace Juvenal,” describes how the young lady of 1787—
Reluctant opes her eyes, 'twixt twelve and one,
To skim the _World_, or criticise the _Sun_,
And when she sees her darling friend abused
Is half enraged, yet more than half-amused.
And another poet portrays two unlucky baronets, Sir Gregory Turner
and Sir John Miller—husband of Lady Miller of Bath Easton vase
celebrity—lamenting the ridicule with which the same newspaper had
overwhelmed them:—
Woe wait the week, Sir John, and cursed the hour,
When harmless gentlemen felt satire's power,
When, raised from insignificance and sloth,
The _World_ began to ridicule us both.
“In this paper,” says Gifford, “were given the earliest specimens of
those audacious attacks on all private character, which the town first
smiled at for their quaintness, then tolerated for their absurdity;
and now that other papers, equally wicked and more intelligible, have
ventured to imitate it, will have to lament to the last hour of British
liberty.” That literary history is self-repeating, and that prophecies
are mostly mistaken, are not new reflections; yet it is difficult to
avoid making them when we compare those days with these.
But beyond its function as a purveyor of social gossip, no newspaper
was then considered complete without a Poet's Corner, consecrated to
sentimental effusions and labored impromptus—“Complimentary verses to
the brilliancy of the Hon. Mrs. N——h's Eyes,” or “Lines on Lady T—e—l's
Ring.” In publishing his poem in the _World_, Della Crusca did but
select the natural and recognized arena of the eighteenth-century poet.
It may be as well to quote the greater part of _The Adieu and Recall to
Love_, in order to give some notion of the calibre of the verses which
were to found a school:—
Go, idle Boy, I quit thy bower,
The couch of many a thorn and flower;
Thy twanging bow, thine arrow keen,
Deceitful Beauty's timid mien;
The feigned surprise, the roguish leer,
The tender smile, the thrilling tear,
Have now no pangs, no joys for me,
So fare thee well, for I am free!
Then flutter hence on wanton wing,
Or lave thee in yon lucid spring,
Or take thy beverage from the rose,
Or on Louisa's breast repose;
I wish thee well for pleasures past,
Yet, bless the hour, I'm free at last,
But sure, methinks, the altered day
Scatters around a mournful ray;
And chilling every zephyr blows,
And every stream untuneful flows.
* * * * *
Alas! is all this boasted ease
To lose each warm desire to please,
No sweet solicitude to know
For others' bliss, or others' woe,
A frozen apathy to find,
A sad vacuity of mind?
Oh, hasten back, then, heavenly Boy,
And with thine anguish bring thy joy!
Return with all thy torments here,
And let me hope, and doubt, and fear;
Oh, rend my heart with every pain,
But let me, let me love again.
I suppose what will strike most readers with regard to these lines
is that they are decidedly fluent, and utterly commonplace. That,
however, is not the light in which a critic of the last quarter of
the eighteenth century would regard them. Amid the dead level of
sing-song couplets, the milk-and-water decency of Hayley, the chill
and prolix classicism of Pye, the ineffable mediocrity of a thousand
Pratts and Polwheles—the fluency of Merry passed, according to the
critic's leanings, for fire or for fustian; and the phraseology,
which afterwards became hackneyed, was then startling. Take, for
instance, Horace Walpole's criticism of the new poetic departure. “It
is refreshing to read natural easy poetry, full of sense and humor,
instead of that unmeaning, labored, painted style now in fashion of
the Della Cruscas and Co., of which it is impossible ever to retain a
couplet, no more than one could remember how a string of emeralds and
rubies were placed in a necklace. Poetry has great merit if it is the
vehicle and preservative of sense, but it is not to be taken in change
for it.” Poetry the vehicle and preservative of sense—that is the
critical canon which would have made Walpole as blind to Della Crusca's
merits, had he happened to possess any, as it made him keen-sighted for
his defects.
It may, nevertheless, be doubted whether Della Crusca would have caused
so great a stir in literature, had it not been for several collateral
circumstances, of which the first and most important was the appearance
in the _World_, some ten days later, of “Anna Matilda,” with a poem
entitled _To Della Crusca, the Pen_.
Oh, seize again thy golden quill,
And with its point my bosom thrill,
With magic touch explore my heart,
And bid the tear of passion start.
Thy golden quill Apollo gave,
Drenched first in bright Aonia's wave.
He snatched it fluttering through the sky,
Borne on the vapor of a sigh;
It fell from Cupid's burnished wing
As forcefully he drew the string,
Which sent his keenest, surest dart,
Through a rebellious, frozen heart,
That had, till then, defied his power,
And vacant beat through each dull hour.
Be worthy, then, the sacred loan!
Seated on Fancy's air-built throne;
Immerse it in her rainbow hues,
Nor, what the Godheads bid, refuse.
Apollo Cupid shall inspire,
And aid thee with their blended fire;
The one poetic language give,
The other bid thy passion live,
With soft ideas fill thy lays,
And crown with Love thy wintry days!
The shuttlecock of correspondence, thus fairly started, was diligently
tossed to and fro in the _World_ by the two pseudonymous writers; Della
Crusca “seized his quill” again and again, and his ideal passion for
the invisible Anna Matilda gained in fervor of expression with every
fortnight. It is obvious that here was just that element of mystery, of
romance, which creates a _furore_ and sets a fashion.
The lady who signed herself “Anna Matilda” was Mrs. Hannah Cowley, the
wife of an absent East India captain, then in her forty-fifth year,
and known to-day as the authoress of the _Belle's Stratagem_, a play
which still, and deservedly, keeps the stage. Her biographer records
the beginning of her literary career as follows: “In the year 1776,
some years after her marriage, a sense of power for dramatic writing
suddenly struck her whilst sitting with her husband at the theatre.
'So delighted with this?' said she to him; 'why, I could write as
well myself.' She then wrote _The Runaway_. Many will recollect the
extraordinary success with which it was brought out.” Her habits of
composition were not, perhaps, likely to result in poetry of much
excellence. “Catching up her pen immediately as the thought struck her,
she always proceeded with the utmost facility and celerity. Her pen
and paper were so immediately out of sight again, that those around
her could scarcely tell when it was she wrote. She was always much
pleased with the description of Michael Angelo making the marble fly
around him, as he was chiselling with the utmost swiftness, that he
might shape, however roughly, his whole design in unity with one clear
conception.” Her preparatory note to her collected “Anna Matilda”
poems bears out this account. “The beautiful lines of _The Adieu and
Recall to Love_ struck her so forcibly that, without rising from the
table at which she read, she answered them. Della Crusca's elegant
reply surprised her into another, and thus the correspondence most
unexpectedly became settled. Anna Matilda's share in it had little to
boast; but she has one claim of which she is proud, that of having been
the first to point out the excellence of Della Crusca; if there can be
merit in discerning what is so very obvious.” She further apologizes
for one of her poems to Della Crusca, on the ground that it was written
while sitting for her portrait, the painter interrupting her with
“Smile a little,” or “More to the right.” Only that class of mind which
grows incredulous when informed that orators prepare their speeches,
will expect much from such methods of workmanship.
Nevertheless, to Mrs. Cowley appears to belong the credit, or
discredit, of giving to the Della Cruscan poetry a certain turn
or development which did much to make it popular. A hint of this
development may be seen in the description of the pen, which was
“borne on the vapor of a sigh.” It took final shape in such phrases as
these:—
Hushed be each ruder note! Soft silence spread
With ermine hand thy cobweb robe around.
Was it the shuttle of the Morn,
That wove upon the cobweb'd thorn
Thy airy lay?
Or in the gaudy spheroids swell
Which the swart Indian's groves illume.
Gauzy zephyrs fluttering o'er the plain,
In Twilight's bosom drop their filmy rain.
Bid the streamy lightnings fly
In liquid peril from thine eye.
Summer tints begemmed the scene,
And silky ocean slept in glossy green.
A large and amusing assortment of this ambitious verbiage, which
subsequently became in the eyes of the critics the sole “differentia”
of Della Cruscan verse, may be seen in the notes to Gifford's _Baviad_.
It was, however, an after-development, proceeding from a gradual
consciousness of flagging powers; the feeling which induced Charles
Reade's Triplet to “shove his pen under the thought, and lift it by
polysyllables to the true level of fiction.”
The other members of the Florence coterie, who, as I have said, were
now back in England, speedily began to swell the Della Cruscan chorus
in the columns of the _World_ and the _Oracle_. Bertie Greathead as
“Reuben” became Della Crusca's rival, on paper, in the affections of
Anna Matilda; and Parsons, signing himself “Benedict,” in memory of a
sojourn in the Benedictine convent of Vallombrosa, deluged with sonnets
an imaginary Melissa. Whether Mrs. Piozzi contributed anything beyond
tea-party patronage, appears to be doubtful; but, as was only to be
expected, London already possessed a score of indigenous rhymesters,
eager to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. One of the principal
of these was Edward Jerningham, _alias_ “The Bard,” who is commemorated
in Macaulay's neat sentence: “Lady Miller who kept a vase wherein fools
were wont to put verses, and Jerningham who wrote verses fit to be
put into the vase of Lady Miller.” His brother, Sir William, of Cossy
Hall, in Norfolk, kept an album which rivalled in celebrity the vase of
Bath Easton, and “The Bard” had been a determined poetaster for the
last thirty years. He is described as “a mighty gentleman, who looks
to be painted, and is all daintification in manner, speech, and dress,
singing to his own accompaniment on the harp, whilst he looks the
gentlest of all dying Corydons.” Fashionable poets seldom suffer from
lack of appreciation. Burke wrote of Jerningham's poem _The Shakespeare
Gallery_, “I have not for a long time seen anything so well finished.
The author has caught new fire by approaching in his perihelion so near
to the sun of our poetical system.” I think we may be certain, after
reading _The Shakespeare Gallery_, that the patron of Crabbe did not
read it.
Another Della Cruscan songstress was Mrs. Robinson, _alias_ “Laura
Maria,” known to the public as a former mistress of the Prince of
Wales, and authoress of various novels. In rapidity of composition she
emulated Mrs. Cowley. “Conversing one evening with Mr. Richard Burke”
(the Burke family appear to have been sometimes unfortunate in their
poetical acquaintances) “respecting the facility with which modern
poetry was composed, Mrs. Robinson repeated nearly the whole of those
beautiful lines, 'To him who will understand them.' This improvisatore
produced in her auditor not less surprise than admiration, when
solemnly assured by its author that this was the first time of its
being repeated. Mr. Burke entreated her to commit the poem to writing,
a request which was readily complied with; and Mrs. Robinson had
afterwards the gratification of finding this offspring of her genius
inserted in the _Annual Register_, with a flattering encomium from the
pen of the eloquent and ingenious editor.” She was one of Merry's most
ardent admirers.
Winged Ages picture to the dazzled view
Each marked perfection of the sacred few,
Pope, Dryden, Spenser, all that Fame shall raise,
From Chaucer's gloom, till Merry's lucid days.
Her Della Cruscan poems were published under the signature of “Laura,”
and she was followed by Cesario, Carlos, Adelaide, Orlando, Arno, and
fifty more whose identity can no longer be determined.
A year after his first appearance in the _World_, Della Crusca printed
his poems in a volume, and Anna Matilda speedily followed suit. But
this was not enough for the reading public. They further greedily
absorbed a collection of Della Cruscan verse, published as _The Poetry
of the “World,”_ by Major Topham, the creator and editor of that
paper, who, in a dedication to Sheridan, observes: “Of their merit,
I am free to say I know no modern poems their superior. I am more
happy that your opinion has confirmed mine.” It will be well to make
allowance for changing literary fashions before we make too sure that
Sheridan is here misrepresented. _The Poetry of the “World”_ afterwards
ran through at least four editions as _The British Album_. As we
read the publisher's advertisement of this work, which still abounds
on second-hand bookstalls—_immorimur studiis lapsoque renascimur
ævo_—we seem to be walking in the Bond Street of the Prince Regent.
“Two beautiful volumes this day published, embellished with genuine
portraits of the real Della Crusca and Anna Matilda, engraved in a very
superior manner from faithful pictures, under the title of _The British
Album_, being a new edition, revised and corrected by their respective
authors, of the celebrated poems of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Arley,
Laura, Benedict, and the elegant Cesario, “the African Boy;” and
others, signed The Bard, by Mr. Jerningham; General Conway's elegy
on Miss C. Campbell; Marquis of Townshend's verses on Miss Gardiner;
Lord Derby's lines on Miss Farren's portrait.” It is unfortunate
that the only pseudonym in the list which it is of much interest to
decipher, should still remain a mystery. It is to “Arley” that we owe
the admittedly excellent ballad of “Wapping old Stairs,” which first
appeared in the _World_ for November 29th, 1787, and shines, a solitary
pearl, in the pages of the _British Album_.
The Della Cruscan mania was at its height—“bedridden old women and
girls at their samplers began to rave,”—when Gifford, in search of a
quarry for a seasonable satire, came before the town with the _Baviad_.
Of this poem I shall say but little, as it is better known than the
writings which it satirised. It contains passages of a certain coarse
and rank vigor not difficult of attainment by a student of Dryden and
Juvenal. There is, in fact, a sort of Billingsgate raciness about
the _Baviad_; and the notes, which are better written than the poem,
contain much amusing matter. The imputation made against the Della
Cruscan love-poetry of licentious warmth is, however, wholly absurd—as
absurd as the charge made by Mathias, the author of _The Pursuits of
Literature_, that Merry—
Proves a designer works without design,
And fathoms Nature with a Gallic line;
a notion which arose merely from the fact that he identified himself
with the anarchists of France, and wrote odes for the Revolution
Society, thereby acquiring the name, as Madame d'Arblay tells us, of
“Liberty Merry,” and no doubt also the reputation for free-thinking
then associated with everything French. As for detecting any breach of
decorum in the mannered and falsetto gallantries of insincere Reubens
addressing imaginary Annas, the idea was only possible to a satirist
who started with the determination to fling all the mud he could find;
and, it must be added, when he flung it at irreproachable characters
such as Mrs. Piozzi, he did but excite a certain revulsion of sympathy
for the victims. Nor was this Gifford's only misrepresentation. He
asserted, in order to bring in an apt quotation from Martial, that
the interview which finally took place between Merry and Mrs. Cowley,
produced mutual disgust. This is not the testimony of Della Crusca
himself in the poem of _The Interview_.
My song subsides, yet ere I close
The lingering lay that feeds my woes,
Ere yet forgotten Della Crusca runs
To torrid gales or petrifying suns,
Ere, bowed to earth, my latest feeling flies,
And the big passion settles on my eyes;
Oh, may this sacred sentiment be known,
That my adoring heart is Anna's own!