For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.
That the poet was shortly afterward “married to another,” is sufficient
to explain the cessation of the correspondence, from which Gifford
argues that the interview resulted in aversion. And he might further
have reflected that when a poet is reduced to talk of “petrifying suns”
his correspondence has been known to cease for lack of ideas.
The satirised poets did their best to retaliate on Gifford by
abusive sonnets in the newspapers; and Mr. Jerningham wrote a feebly
vituperative poem on Gifford and Mathias. The Della Cruscans had,
undeniably, the worst of the battle. The efficacy of Gifford's satire
in putting an end to the school is, however, more than doubtful. It is
true that it afterwards came to be considered, naturally enough, that
he had given the Della Cruscans their death-blow. Scott, for instance,
writing in 1827, observes that the _Baviad_ “squabashed at one blow
a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long enough”;
but that is not the evidence of contemporary witnesses. Seven years
after the publication of the _Baviad_, Mathias, in the preface to _The
Pursuits of Literature_, remarks that “even the _Baviad_ drops from
Mr. Gifford's pen have fallen off like oils from the plumage of the
Florence and Cruscan geese. I am told that Mr. Greathead and Mr. Merry
yet write and speak, and Mr. Jerningham (poor man!) still continues
'sillier than his sheep.”
This statement is in far better accordance both with the facts and the
probabilities of the case. Satire, even first-rate satire, does not
kill follies. They gradually die of inanition, or are crowded out by
newer fashions. Laura Matilda's dirge in the _Rejected Addresses_ is a
standing monument of the vitality of Della Cruscanism more than twenty
years after its supposed death-blow.
The career as stage-writers of Merry, Greathead, and Jerningham, their
bad tragedies and bad farces, do not belong to my present subject.
Of the subsequent history of one or two of them a word may, however,
be said. Jerningham lived to publish, as late as 1812, two editions
of a flaccid poem, called _The Old Bard's Farewell_, after which he
disappears from life and literature. Mrs. Cowley, perhaps the most
interesting of the group, died in rural and religious retirement at
Tiverton, in 1809. Mrs. Piozzi, as is well known, outlived all her
contemporaries, and witnessed the popularity of a modern literature of
which she had no very high opinion.
As for Della Crusca, he married, in 1791, Miss Brunton, an actress,
whose sister became Countess of Craven, and who had played the heroine
in his tragedy of _Lorenzo_. His reply to the remonstrances of his
aunt on the _mésalliance_ shall be quoted, to show that he had his
lucid intervals. “She ought,” he said, “to be proud that he had brought
a woman of such virtue and talents into the family. Her virtue his
marrying her proved; and her talents would all be thrown away by taking
her off the stage.” Nevertheless, he afterwards weakly yielded to his
relations, and withdrew her from the stage against her own inclination,
thereby depriving himself of a source of income with which, as
a gambler and _bon vivant_, he could ill afford to dispense. He
accordingly quitted England, and must have betaken himself to France,
an adventure which befell him in Paris, in September, 1792, being thus
amusingly given by Horace Walpole:—
In the midst of the massacre of Monday last, Mr. Merry, immortalized,
not by his verses, but by those of the _Baviad_, was mistaken for the
Abbé Maury, and was going to be hoisted to the _lanterne_. He cried
out that he was Merry, the poet: the ruffians, who probably had never
read the scene in Shakespeare, yet replied, “Then we will hang you for
your bad verses”; but he escaped better than Cinna, I don't know how,
and his fright cost him but a few “gossamery tears,” and I suppose
he will be happy to re-cross the “silky ocean,” and shed dolorous
nonsense in rhyme over the woes of _this_ happy country.
But England was not to see much more of Merry. English society was
probably not so kind to the Radical husband of an actress as it had
been to the bachelor of fashion. He withdrew, with his wife, to
America, in 1796, and died, three years afterwards, of apoplexy, in his
garden at Baltimore.
Merry did not fail to find in his own day apologists of some
pretensions to taste. I find in the notes to George Dyer's poem, _The
Poet's Fate_, published in 1797—which contains early and interesting
laudations not only of his school-fellows Lamb and Coleridge, but also
of Wordsworth and Southey—the following reference to Merry:—“But,
after all, though the hero of the _Baviad_ betrayed glitter and
negligence—though he misled the taste of some, too much inclined to
admire and imitate defects, yet Merry's writings possess poetical
merits; and the spirit of liberty and benevolence which breathes
through them is ardent and sincere.” The criticism may be incorrect,
but it is worth noting, because it is the criticism of a contemporary.
Had it not been for Coleridge's fervently expressed admiration
for Bowles's sonnets, which so perplexes critics who do not judge
literature from a historical point of view, the world would have
continued to sneer at him, with Byron, as “simple Bowles,” and to know
him only by Byron's line. The fact is, literary history will never
be intelligently written, till it is studied in the spirit of the
naturalist, to whom the tares are as interesting as the wheat. We may,
perhaps, give the Della Cruscans, with their desperate strainings after
poetic fire and poetic diction, the credit of having done something to
shake the supremacy of versified prose; of having forwarded, however
feebly, the poetic emancipation which Wordsworth and Coleridge were to
consummate. The false extravagance of Della Crusca may have cleared
the way for the truthful extravagance of Keats. It is, I am aware,
customary to attribute the regeneration of English poetry to the French
Revolution, which “shook up the sources of thought all over Europe,”
but the critics who use these glib catch-words are in no hurry to point
out a concrete chain of logical connection between Paris mobs and
sequestered poets. Plain judges will ever consider it a far cry from
_The Rights of Man_ to _Christabel_. At all events, Dyer was right in
deprecating the savagery of Gifford's satire. The question
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
will apply to other schools and fashions besides that of the “elegant
Cesario's,” whom Leigh Hunt designated _par excellence_ as “the plague
of the Butterflies.” And here, I think, we touch upon the moral which I
promised at the outset.
It is not very long since the country, to which Della Crusca ultimately
betook himself, received to her shores the reputed prophet of
Æstheticism, whose career, in other respects, presented remarkable
parallels with that of Robert Merry. Each made his poetical appearance
in the columns of a newspaper called the _World_; each professed
Republican opinions; each wrote poems not remarkable for truth to
nature or sobriety of diction; each represented a school; and the
name of each became as a red rag to the Giffords who played the
part of the bull in the china shop. But it is not with this clumsy
rage that posterity will regard our follies; nor is it useful, or
desirable, that we should now so regard them. It is with a smile of
amused anticipation, it is with a bland and philosophic interest,
that the antiquarian of the future will turn to the pages of _Punch_
or the libretto of _Patience_, to read of the Anna Matildas who
lately delighted to apparel themselves in what Bramston called
“shape-disguising sacks”—the Della Cruscas who took Postlethwaite for a
great poet.—_National Review._