to see us--two poor, wild, aghast creatures, driving (like Matilda)
towards the sea to learn if we were to be forever doomed to misery. I
knew that Hunt was at Pisa, at Lord Byron's house, but I thought that
Lord Byron was at Leghorn. I settled that we should drive to Casa
Lanfranchi, that I should get out and ask the fearful question of
Hunt, 'Do you know anything of Shelley?' On entering Pisa, the idea of
seeing Hunt for the first time for four years under such circumstances
and asking him such a question was so terrific to me that it was with
difficulty that I prevented myself from going into convulsions. My
struggles were dreadful. They knocked at the door and some one called
out, 'Chi e?' It was the Guiccioli's maid. Lord Byron was in Pisa.
Hunt was in bed, so I was to see Lord Byron instead of him. This was a
great relief to me. I staggered upstairs; the Guicciola came to meet
me smiling, while I could hardly say, 'Where is he--Sapete alcuna cosa
di Shelley?' They knew nothing; he had left Pisa on Sunday; on Monday
he had sailed; there had been bad weather Monday afternoon; more they
knew not."
XVII
THE SCHOOL-DAYS OF JOHN KEATS
In the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the North Road
from London, my father, John Clarke, says Charles Cowden Clarke in
_The Gentleman's Magazine_, kept a school. The house had been built by
a West India merchant in the latter end of the seventeenth or
beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of
the domestic architecture of that period, the whole front being of the
purest red brick, wrought by means of molds into rich designs of
flowers and pomegranates, with heads of cherubim over niches in the
center of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect
finish of the structure were such as to procure its protection when a
branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to
Enfield....
Here it was that John Keats all but commenced, and did complete, his
school education. He was born on the twenty-ninth of October, 1795,
and he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from
the child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will
be readily conceived that it is difficult to recall from the "dark
backward and abysm" of seventy-odd years the general acts of perhaps
the youngest individual in a corporation of between seventy and
eighty youngsters; and very little more of Keats's child-life can I
remember than that he had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite
with all, particularly my mother....
Keats's father was the principal servant at the Swan and Hoop
stables--a man of so remarkably fine a common-sense, and native
respectability, that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his
demeanor used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit
his boys. John was the only one resembling him in person and feature,
with brown hair and dark hazel eyes. The father was killed by a fall
from his horse in returning from a visit to the school. This detail may
be deemed requisite when we see in the last memoir of the poet the
statement that "John Keats was born on the twenty-ninth of October,
1795, in the upper rank of the middle class." His two brothers--George,
older, and Thomas, younger than himself--were like the mother, who was
tall, of good figure, with large oval face and sensible deportment. The
last of the family was a sister--Fanny, I think, much younger than
all,--and I hope still living (in 1874)--of whom I remember, when once
walking in the garden with her brothers, my mother speaking of her with
much fondness for her pretty and simple manners....
In the early part of his school-life John gave no extraordinary
indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him
afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit
in all his undertakings: I never knew it misdirected in his required
pursuit of study. He was a most orderly scholar. The future
ramifications of that noble genius were then closely shut in the seed,
which was greedily drinking in the moisture which made it afterwards
burst forth so kindly into luxuriance and beauty.
My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing
prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of
voluntary work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last
two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that,
upon each occasion he took the first prize by a considerable distance.
He was at work before the first school hour began, and that was at
seven o'clock, almost all the intervening times of recreation were so
devoted, and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, he
would be in the school--almost the only one--at his Latin or French
translation, and so unconscious and regardless was he of the
consequences of so close and persevering an application that he never
would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes
driven out for the purpose by one of his masters.
It has just been said that he was a favorite with all. Not the less
beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which, when
roused, was one of the most picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I
ever saw. One of the transports of that marvelous actor, Edmund
Kean--whom, by the way, he idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and
the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one
occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behavior, had
boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself in the
received posture of offense, and, it was said, struck the usher--who
could, so to say, have put him into his pocket. His passion at times
was almost ungovernable, and his brother George, being considerably
the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main
force, laughing when John was in "one of his moods," and was
endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw
conflagration, for he had an intensely tender affection for his
brothers and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not
merely the "favorite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his
terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of
a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a
feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from
any one, superior or equal, who had known him.
In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he
remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading.
Thus, his whole time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive
memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those
last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted
principally of abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note;
Mavor's collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson's
histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss
Edgeworth's productions, together with many other works equally well
calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly
recurring sources of attraction were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's
_Classical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence's
_Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with
the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled in that creed outworn;" for
his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the
_AEneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before
leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a
considerable portion. And yet I remember that at that early
age--mayhap under fourteen--notwithstanding, and through all its
incidental attractiveness, he hazarded the opinion to me (and the
expression riveted my surprise), that there was feebleness in the
structure of the work. He must have gone through all the better
publications in the school library, for he asked me to lend him some
of my books, and, in my "mind's eye" I now see him at supper (we had
our meals in the school-room), sitting back on the form, from the
table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's _History of His Own Time_
between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This
work, and Leigh Hunt's _Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used
to lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil
and religious liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his
guardians, being informed what books I had lent him to read, declared
that if he had fifty children he would not send one of them to that
school. Bless his patriot head!
When he left Enfield at fourteen years of age, he was apprenticed to
Mr. Thomas Hammond, a medical man, residing in Church Street,
Edmonton, and exactly two miles from Enfield. This arrangement
evidently gave him satisfaction, and I fear it was the most placid
period of his painful life; for now, with the exception of the duty he
had to perform in the surgery--by no means an onerous one--his whole
leisure hours were employed in indulging his passion for reading and
translating. During his apprenticeship he finished the _AEneid_.
The distance between our residences being so short, I gladly
encouraged his inclination to come over when he could claim a leisure
hour; and in consequence I saw him about five or six times a month on
my own leisure afternoons. He rarely came empty-handed; either he had
a book to read, or brought one to be exchanged. When the weather
permitted, we always sat in an arbor at the end of a spacious garden,
and--in Boswellian dialect--"we had a good talk." ...
XVIII
THE HEROISM OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
When Carlyle wrote and lectured on _Heroes and Hero Worship_, he would
have made no mistake in selecting one of his contemporary countrymen
as a fine example of the man of letters as hero. But it is one of the
characteristics of human nature to see the heroic in the remote in
time and place rather than in the near. Carlyle, had he closely
examined the life of his Scotch neighbor, would have been forced to
acknowledge that no knight battling with chivalric valor in the
fiction of Sir Walter ever displayed more nobility of soul than that
displayed by Walter Scott in his adversity. Critics may find flaws in
Scott's style, but as time reveals more fully the character of the man
they are unable to find fault with the man himself. Some years ago was
published Scott's journal. Parts of this had been published before,
but, owing to the nature of some of the information, much of this had
been suppressed until sixty years after the death of the writer. To
quote from this journal is, perhaps, the best method of giving a
first-hand impression of the real man. He is his own revealer. Scott
called the big book in which he from time to time records for several
years his thoughts his "Gurnal," because his daughter Sophia had once
spelled the word in that way. This book could be closed with a lock
and key. On the title-page was written:
As I walked by myself,
I talked to myself,
And thus myself said to me.
(Old Song.)
Scott's poems and novels brought him much revenue. This he spent in
purchasing land. He became a Scotch "laird" owning many acres, and a
most beautiful home, Abbotsford. But unfortunately he formed a bad
business partnership. When the firm through mismanagement and
speculation, in which Scott had no part, went down in ruin, Scott
found to his surprise that he owed a vast sum. In his "Gurnal" of
September 5, 1827, he wrote: "The debts for which I am legally
responsible, though no party to this contraction, amount to L30,000."
But although his legal responsibility was for so great a sum, he felt
that morally he was responsible for a far greater amount. When the
printing house of James Ballantyne & Co., the publishing house of
Constable, and Hunt and Robinson, failed, they failed for upwards of
half a million pounds. Of this enormous total, Scott could be held
morally responsible for one hundred and thirty thousand pounds.
For several weeks after intimations of failure had reached Scott, he
lived in a state of uncertainty. On the 18th of December, 1825, he
wrote a long account in his journal. It was published lately for the
first time, appearing in the _Quarterly Review_. What a revelation of
the man it is!
"Ballantyne called on me this morning. _Venit illa suprema dies._ My
extremity is come. Cadell has received letters from London which all
but positively announce the failure of Hurst and Robinson, so that
Constable and Co. must follow, and I must go with poor James
Ballantyne for company. I suppose it will involve my all.... I have
been rash in anticipating funds to buy lands, but then I made from
L5,000 to L10,000 a year, and land was my temptation. I think nobody
can lose a penny--that is my one comfort. Men will think pride has had
a fall. Let them indulge their own pride in thinking that my fall
makes them higher, or seems so at least. I have the satisfaction to
recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and that
some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the
innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor.
This news will make sad hearts at Darnick, and in the cottages of
Abbotsford, which I do not cherish the least hope of preserving. It
has been my Delilah, and so I have often termed it; and now the
recollection of the extensive woods I planted, and the walks I have
formed, from which strangers must derive both the pleasure and profit,
will excite feelings likely to sober my gayest moments. I have half
resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with
such a diminished crest? How live a poor indebted man where I was once
the wealthy, and honored? My children are provided [for]; thank God
for that! I was to have gone there in joy and prosperity to receive my
friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish, but the
thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than
any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things, I must
get them kind masters; there may be yet those who loving me may love
my dog because it has been mine. I must end this, or I shall lose the
tone of mind with which men should meet distress. I find my dogs' feet
on my knees. I hear them whining and seeking me everywhere--this is
nonsense, but it is what they would do could they know how things are.
Poor Will Laidlaw! Poor Tom Purdie! this will be news to wring your
heart, and many a poor fellow's besides to whom my prosperity was
daily bread."
After touching on some other matters he comes back to
Abbotsford,--"Yet to save Abbotsford I would attempt all that was
possible. My heart clings to the place I have created. There is scarce
a tree on it that does not owe its being to me, and the pain of
leaving it is greater than I can bear."
A Mr. Skene, in whose gardens Scott while in Edinburgh about a month
later took a walk, has left a record of a conversation with Scott. He
wrote immediately after the walk so as to record the conversation.
This is what Scott said: "Do you know I experience a sort of
determined pleasure in confronting the very worst aspect of this
sudden reverse--in standing, as it were, in the breach that has
overthrown my fortunes, and saying, Here I stand, at least, an honest
man. And God knows if I have enemies, this I may at least with truth
say, that I have never wittingly given cause of enmity in the whole
course of my life, for even the burnings of political hate seemed to
find nothing in my nature to feed the flame. I am not conscious of
having borne a grudge towards any man, and at this moment of my
overthrow, so help me God, I wish well and feel kindly to every one.
And if I thought that any of my works contained a sentence hurtful to
any one's feelings, I would burn it."
Scott worked so assiduously that by January, 1828, he had reduced his
debt $200,000. On the 17th of December, 1830, more than the half of
his debt had been paid. On that day his creditors had a meeting during
which the following resolutions were passed:
"That Sir Walter Scott be requested to accept of his furniture, plate,
linen, paintings, library, and curiosities of every description as the
best means the creditors have of expressing their very high sense of
his most honorable conduct, and in grateful acknowledgment for the
unparalleled and most successful exertions he has made, and continues
to make, for them."
That the creditors of Scott would be glad to show their gratitude is
easy to believe when one learns that while Scott was paying pound for
pound the other members of the firm paid their creditors less than
three shillings to the pound. That Scott did his herculean task at
great sacrifice is known. How much of pain and worry he endured is not
so well known. At one time he writes: "After all, I have fagged
through six pages, and made poor Wurmser lay down his sword on the
glacis of Mantua--and my head aches--my eyes ache--my back aches--so
does my breast--and I am sure my heart aches--what can duty want
more?"
XIX
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Walter Savage Landor, whose course of life ran from 1775 to 1864, in
his old age confessed, "I never did a single wise thing in the whole
course of my existence, although I have written many which have been
thought so." This is the exaggeration of an old man who has been
impressed by the frailty of human endeavor. Nevertheless, Landor is a
striking illustration of the artistic temperament. He was impractical.
Landor could not make a good fist. Even when angry, a frame of mind in
which he found himself very frequently, he did not clench his fists
without leaving his thumbs in relaxation--a sure sign, it is said, of
the lack of tenacity of purpose and tact in practical dealings. He
would adjust his spectacles on his forehead, and then, forgetting what
he had done, would overturn everything in his wild search for them.
When he started out on a trip he would take the greatest pains to
remember the key of his portmanteau, and then forget to take the
portmanteau; and then on discovering the absence of the portmanteau he
would launch out into the most vehement denunciation of the
carelessness and depravity of the railroad officials, heaping
objurgations upon them, their fathers, and their grandfathers. Then
after he had exhausted his vocabulary of invective and eased his soul,
the humor of the situation would appeal to him and he would begin to
laugh, quietly at first, and then in louder and louder strains until
his merriment seemed more formidable than his wrath.
When Landor says that he never did a wise thing but has written many,
one is led to think of his marriage. No one wrote about marriage more
seriously than Landor, no one entered upon marriage more recklessly.
"Death itself," he once wrote, "to the reflecting mind is less serious
than marriage. The elder plant is cut down that the younger may have
room to nourish; a few tears drop into the loosened soil, and buds and
blossoms spring over it. Death is not even a blow, it is not even a
pulsation; it is a pause. But marriage unrolls the awful lot of
numberless generations." The man who could write thus impressively
about marriage one spring evening at Bath attended a ball. There he
met a beautiful young lady whom he admired. As soon as he set eyes on
her he exclaimed, "By heaven! that's the nicest girl in the room, and
I'll marry her." He married her and was ever after unhappy. "God
forbid," once growled Landor, "that I should do otherwise than declare
that she always _was_ agreeable--to every one but _me_." Landor was
not in the habit of talking about his domestic troubles, but at one
time when he was contrasting other and more agreeable marriages he was
heard to say that he "unfortunately was taken by a pretty face."
Kenyon related to a friend an incident of the Landor honeymoon that is
significant. On one occasion, it seems, the newly married couple were
sitting side by side; Landor was reading some of his own verses to his
bride--and who could read more exquisitely?--when all at once the
lady, releasing herself from his arm, jumped up, saying, "Oh, do stop,
Walter, there's that dear delightful Punch performing in the street. I
must look out of the window." Exit poetry forever.
It would have been difficult for any woman to live amicably with
Landor. In his youth he was suspended from college, and when he was a
very old man he was fined $5,000 for writing a libelous article.
Between these two periods his life was made up of many fits of
passion. His rustication, or suspension from Trinity College,
Cambridge, came about in the following manner: One evening Landor
invited his friends to wine. His gun, powder, and shot were in the
next room, as he had been out hunting in the morning of that day. In a
room opposite to Landor's lived a young man whom Landor disliked. The
two parties exchanged taunts. Finally in a spirit of bravado Landor
took his gun and fired a shot through the closed shutters of the
enemy. Quite naturally this bit of pleasantry was not appreciated by
the owner of the shutters and complaint was lodged. When the
investigation was made the president tried to be as lenient as he
possibly could, but his conciliatory manner was stubbornly met by the
youthful culprit. When rustication was pronounced it was hoped that
Landor would return to the college to honor it and himself by an
earnest devotion to his studies. But he never returned.
When Landor was living in Florence the Italians thought him the
ideally mad Englishman. He lived for a time in the Medici palace, but
his friendly relations with the landlord, a nobleman bearing the
distinguished name of the palace, had an abrupt termination. Landor
imagined that the marquis had unfairly coaxed away his coachman, and
he wrote a letter of complaint. The next day in comes the strutting
marquis with his hat on in the presence of Mrs. Landor and some
visitors. One of the visitors describes the scene: "He had scarcely
advanced three steps from the door, when Landor walked up to him
quickly and knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned
him out. You should have heard Landor's shout of laughter at his own
anger when it was all over; inextinguishable laughter, which none of
us could resist." This reminds one of the story Milnes told to
Emerson, that Landor once became so enraged at his Italian cook that
he picked him up and threw him out of the window, and then exclaimed,
"Good God, I never thought of those violets!"
Quite in strong contrast to the irascible side of his nature was his
tender love for his children, of which he had four, the last born in
1825. In them he took constant delight. In their games _Babbo_, as he
was affectionately termed, was the most gleeful and frolicsome of them
all. When he was separated from them he was in continual anxiety. On
one of his trips he received the first childish letter from his son
Arnold. In his reply the concluding lines reveal the intense affection
of the father:
I shall never be quite happy until I see you again and put my
cheek upon your head. Tell my sweet Julia that if I see twenty
little girls I will not romp with any of them before I romp
with her, and kiss your two dear brothers for me. You must
always love them as much as I love you, and you must teach
them how to be good boys, which I cannot do so well as you
can. God preserve and bless you, my own Arnold. My heart beats
as if it would fly to you, my own fierce creature. We shall
very soon meet.
Love your,
BABBO.
In literature Landor will be remembered as the author of _Imaginary
Conversations_, composed during his years of retirement at Florence.
In these _Conversations_ we hear the great men and women of the past
who converse as Landor imagined they might have talked. Landor's prose
style is admired, because of its simplicity and classic purity. After
the publication of the first two volumes of this work Landor was
visited as a man of genius by Englishmen and Americans. One day Hogg,
the friend of Shelley, was announced while Hare, a well-known
Englishman, was sitting in the room. Landor said, as he considered the
names of his two visitors, that he felt like La Fontaine with all the
better company of the beasts about him. Hazlitt was one of his
frequent visitors. One of their reported conversations is about
Wordsworth. Upon Landor's saying that he had never seen the famous
Lake poet, Hazlitt asked, "But you have seen a horse, I suppose?" and
on receiving an affirmative answer, continued, "Well, sir, if you have
seen a horse, I mean his head, sir, you may say you have seen
Wordsworth, sir."