related, but not one touch in the portrait but is to be found
somewhere in the frank and easy pages of _Love and Business_. The
poems are of their age and kind. There is a "Pindarick," of course; it
was so easy to write one, and so reputable. There are compliments in
verse to one of the female wits who were writing then for the stage,
Mrs. Trotter, author of the _Fatal Friendship_; there are amatory
explanations of all kinds. When he fails to keep an appointment with
a lady on account of the rain--for there were no umbrellas in those
days--he likens himself to Leander, wistful on the Sestian shore. He
is not always very discreet; Damon's thoughts when "Night's black
Curtain o'er the World was spread" were very innocent, but such as we
have decided nowadays to say nothing about. It was the fashion of the
time to be outspoken. There is no value, however, in the verse,
except that it is graphic now and then. The letters are much more
interesting. Those sent from Holland in the autumn of 1700 are very
good reading. I make bold to quote one passage from the first,
describing the storm he encountered in crossing. It depicts our hero
to the life, with all his inconsistencies. He says: "By a kind of
Poetical Philosophy I bore up pretty well under my Apprehensions;
though never worse prepared for Death, I must confess, for I think I
never had so much Money about me at a time. We had some Ladies aboard,
that were so extremely sick, that they often wished for Death, but
were damnably afraid of being drown'd. But, as the Scripture says,
'Sorrow may last for a Night, but Joy cometh in the Morning,'" and so
on. The poor fellow means no harm by all this, as Hodgson once said of
certain remarks of Byron's.
The love-letters are very curious. It is believed that the sequel of
them was a very unhappy marriage. Captain Farquhar was of a loving
disposition, and as inflammable as a hay-rick. He cannot have been
much more than twenty-one when he described what he desired in a wife.
"O could I find," he said--
_O could I find (Grant, Heaven, that once I may!)
A Nymph fair, kind, poetical and gay
Whose Love should blaze, unsullied and divine.
Lighted at first by the bright Lamp of mine.
Free as a Mistress, faithful as a wife.
And one that lov'd a Fiddle as her Life,
Free from all sordid Ends, from Interest free,
For my own Sake affecting only me,
What a blest Union should our Souls combine!
I hers alone, and she be only mine!_
It does not seem a very exacting ideal, but the poor poet missed it.
Whether Mrs. Farquhar loved a fiddle as her life is not recorded, but
she certainly was not free from all sordid ends and unworthy tricks.
The little lady in the mourning mantua soon fell in love with our
gallant spark, and when he made court to her, she represented herself
as very wealthy. The deed accomplished, Mrs. Farquhar turned out to be
penniless; and the poet, like a gentleman as he was, never reproached
her, but sat down cheerfully to a double poverty. In _Love and
Business_ the story does not proceed so far. He receives Miss Penelope
V----'s timid advances, describes himself to her, is soon as much in
love with his little lady as she with him, and is making broad demands
and rich-blooded confidences in fine style, no offence taken where
no harm is meant. In one of the letters to Penelope we get a very
interesting glance at a famous, and, as it happens, rather obscure,
event--the funeral of the great Dryden, in May 1700. Farquhar says:
"I come now from Mr. Dryden's Funeral, where we had an Ode in Horace
sung, instead of David's Psalms; whence you may find that we don't
think a Poet worth Christian Burial; the Pomp of the Ceremony was a
kind of Rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras than him; because
the Cavalcade was mostly Burlesque; but he was an extraordinary Man,
and bury'd after an extraordinary Fashion; for I believe there was
never such another Burial seen; the Oration indeed was great and
ingenious, worthy the Subject, and like the Author [Dr. Garth], whose
Prescriptions can restore the Living, and his Pen embalm the Dead.
And so much for Mr. Dryden, whose Burial was the same with his
Life,--Variety, and not of a Piece. The Quality and Mob, Farce and
Heroicks, the Sublime and Ridicule mixt in a Piece, great Cleopatra in
a Hackney Coach."
WHAT ANN LANG READ
Who was Ann Lang? Alas! I am not sure; but she flourished one hundred
and sixty years ago, under his glorious Majesty, George I., and I have
become the happy possessor of a portion of her library. It consists
of a number of cheap novels, all published in 1723 and 1724, when Ann
Lang probably bought them; and each carries, written on the back of
the title, "ann Lang book 1727," which is doubtless the date of her
lending them to some younger female friend. The letters of this
inscription are round and laboriously shaped, while the form is always
the same, and never "Ann Lang, her book," which is what one would
expect. It is not the hand of a person of quality: I venture to
conclude that she who wrote it was a milliner's apprentice or a
servant-girl. There are five novels in this little collection, and
a play, and a pamphlet of poems, and a bundle of love-letters, all
signed upon their title-pages by the Ouida of the period, the great
Eliza Haywood.
No one who has not dabbled among old books knows how rare have become
the strictly popular publications of a non-literary kind which a
generation of the lower middle class has read and thrown away. Eliza
Haywood lives in the minds of men solely through one very coarse and
cruel allusion to her made by Pope in the _Dunciad_. She was never
recognised among people of intellectual quality; she ardently desired
to belong to literature, but her wish was never seriously gratified,
even by her friend Aaron Hill. Yet she probably numbered more readers,
for a year or two, than any other person in the British realm. She
poured forth what she called "little Performances" from a tolerably
respectable press; and the wonder is that in these days her abundant
writings are so seldom to be met with. The secret doubtless is that
her large public consisted almost wholly of people like Ann Lang.
Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, by seamstresses, by
basket-women, by 'prentices of all sorts, male and female, but mostly
the latter. For girls of this sort there was no other reading of a
light kind in 1724. It was Eliza Haywood or nothing. The men of the
same class read Defoe; but he, with his cynical severity, his absence
of all pity for a melting mood, his savagery towards women, was not
likely to be preferred by "straggling nymphs." The footman might read
_Roxana_, and the hackney-writer sit up after his toil over _Moll
Flanders_; there was much in these romances to interest men. But what
had Ann Lang to do with stories so cold and harsh? She read Eliza
Haywood.
But most of her sisters, of Eliza's great _clientèle_, did not know
how to treat a book. They read it to tatters, and they threw it away.
It may be news to some readers that these early novels were very
cheap. Ann Lang bought _Love in Excess_, which is quite a thick
volume, for two shillings; and the first volume of _Idalia_ (for Eliza
was Ouidaesque even in her titles) only cost her eighteen-pence. She
seems to have been a clean girl. She did not drop warm lard on the
leaves. She did not tottle up her milk-scores on the bastard-title.
She did not scribble in the margin "Emanuella is a foul wench." She
did not dog's-ear her little library, or stain it, or tear it. I owe
it to that rare and fortunate circumstance of her neatness that her
beloved books have come into my possession after the passage of so
many generations. It must be recollected that Eliza Haywood lived in
the very twilight of English fiction. Sixteen years were still to
pass, in 1724, before the British novel properly began to dawn in
_Pamela_, twenty-five years before it broke in the full splendour of
_Tom Jones_. Eliza Haywood simply followed where, two generations
earlier, the redoubtable Mrs. Aphra Behn had led. She preserved the
old romantic manner, a kind of corruption of the splendid Scudéry and
Calprenède folly of the middle of the seventeenth century. All that
distinguished her was her vehement exuberance and the emptiness of the
field. Ann Lang was young, and instinctively attracted to the study of
the passion of love. She must read something, and there was nothing
but Eliza Haywood for her to read.
The heroines of these old stories were all palpitating with
sensibility, although that name had not yet been invented to describe
their condition. When they received a letter beginning "To the divine
Lassellia," or "To the incomparable Donna Emanuella," they were
thrown into the most violent disorder; "a thousand different Passions
succeeded one another in their turns," and as a rule "'twas all too
sudden to admit disguise." When a lady in Eliza Haywood's novels
receives a note from a gentleman, "all her Limbs forget their
Function, and she sinks fainting on the Bank, in much the same posture
as she was before she rais'd herself a little to take the Letter." I
am positive that Ann Lang practised this series of attitudes in the
solitude of her garret.
There is no respite for the emotions from Eliza's first page to her
last. The implacable Douxmoure (for such was her singular name)
"continued for some time in a Condition little different from Madness;
but when Reason had a little recovered its usual Sway, a deadly
Melancholy succeeded Passion." When Bevillia tried to explain to her
cousin that Emilius was no fit suitor for her hand, the young lady
swooned twice before she seized Bevillia's "cruel meaning;" and
then--ah! then--"silent the stormy Passions roll'd in her tortured
Bosom, disdaining the mean Ease of raging or complaining. It was a
considerable time before she utter'd the least Syllable; and when she
did, she seem'd to start as from some dreadful Dream, and cry'd, 'It
is enough--in knowing one I know the whole deceiving Sex'"; and she
began to address an imaginary Women's Rights Meeting.
Plot was not a matter about which Eliza Haywood greatly troubled
herself. A contemporary admirer remarked, with justice:
'_Tis Love Eliza's soft Affections fires;
Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires;
'Tis Love that gives D'Elmont his manly Charms,
And tears Amena from her Father's Arms_.
These last-named persons are the hero and heroine of _Love in Excess;
or The Fatal Inquiry_, which seems to have been the most popular of
the whole series. This novel might be called _Love Through a Window_;
for it almost entirely consists of a relation of how the gentleman
prowled by moonlight in a garden, while the lady, in an agitated
disorder, peeped out of her lattice in "a most charming Dishabillée."
Alas! there was a lock to the door of a garden staircase, and while
the lady "was paying a Compliment to the Recluse, he was dextrous
enough to slip the Key out of the Door unperceived." Ann Lang!--"a
sudden cry of Murder, and the noise of clashing Swords," come none too
soon to save those blushes which, we hope, you had in readiness for
the turning of the page! Eliza Haywood assures us, in _Idalia_, that
her object in writing is that "the Warmth and Vigour of Youth may be
temper'd by a due Consideration"; yet the moralist must complain
that she goes a strange way about it. Idalia herself was "a lovely
Inconsiderate" of Venice, who escaped in a "Gondula" up "the River
Brent," and set all Vicenza by the ears through her "stock of
Haughtiness, which nothing could surmount." At last, after adventures
which can scarcely have edified Ann Lang, Idalia abruptly "remember'd
to have heard of a Monastery at Verona," and left Vicenza at break of
day, taking her "unguarded languishments" out of that city and out of
the novel. It is true that Ann Lang, for 2s., bought a continuation of
the career of Idalia; but we need not follow her.
The perusal of so many throbbing and melting romances must necessarily
have awakened in the breast of female readers a desire to see the
creator of these tender scenes. I am happy to inform my readers that
there is every reason to believe that Ann Lang gratified this innocent
wish. At all events, there exists among her volumes the little book of
the play sold at the doors of Drury Lane Theatre, when, in the summer
of 1724, Eliza Haywood's new comedy of _A Wife to be Lett_ was acted
there, with the author performing in the part of Mrs. Graspall. The
play itself is wretched, and tradition says that it owed what little
success it enjoyed to the eager desire which the novelist's readers
felt to gaze upon her features. She was about thirty years of age
at the time; but no one says that she was handsome, and she was
undoubtedly a bad actress, I think the disappointment that evening
at the Theatre Royal opened the eyes of Ann Lang. Perhaps it was the
appearance of Eliza in the flesh which prevented her old admirer from
buying _The Secret History of Cleomina, suppos'd dead_, which I miss
from the collection.
If Ann Lang lived on until the publication of _Pamela_--especially if
during the interval she had bettered her social condition--with
what ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all its
shortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps she went to Vauxhall with
it in her muff, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of
her acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novel
after another break forth to lighten the darkness of life. She must
have looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza Haywood,
with their long-drawn palpitating intrigues, with positive disgust.
The English novel began in 1740, and after that date there was always
something wholesome for Ann Lang and her sisters to read.
CATS
LES CHATS. _A Rotterdam, chez Jean Daniel Beman, MDCCXXVIII_.
An accomplished lady of my acquaintance tells me that she is preparing
an anthology of the cat. This announcement has reminded me of one of
the oddest and most entertaining volumes in my library. People who
collect prints of the eighteenth century know an engraving which
represents a tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of a
gentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a volume. The volume
is _Les Chats_, the book before us, and the portrait is that of the
author, the amiable and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif. He was
the son of English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in
Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years
is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes
Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent
bubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with
the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art
with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so
much in fashion in France. Somebody said of him, when he was famous
as the laureate of the cats, that he had risen in life by never
scratching, by always having velvet paws, and by never putting up his
back, even when he was startled. Voltaire called him "my very dear
Sylph," and he was the ideal of all that was noiseless, graceful,
good-humoured, and well-bred. He slipped unobtrusively into the French
Academy, and lived to be eighty-three, dying at last, like Anacreon,
in the midst of music and dances and fair nymphs of the Opera,
affecting to be a sad old rogue to the very last.
This book on Cats, the only one by which he is now remembered, was the
sole production of his lifetime which cost him any annoyance. He was
forty years of age when it appeared, and the subject was considered a
little frivolous, even for such a _petit conteur_ as Moncrif. People
continued to tease him about it, and the only rough thing he ever did
was the result of one such twitting. The poet Roy made an epigram
about "cats" and "rats," in execrable taste, no doubt; this stung our
Sylph to such an excess that he waited outside the Palais Royal and
beat Roy with a stick when he came out. The poet was, perhaps, not
much hurt; at all events, he had the presence of mind to retort,
"Patte de velours, patte de velours, Minon-minet!" It was six years
after this that Moncrif was elected into the French Academy, and
then the shower of epigrams broke out again. He wished to be made
historiographer; "Oh, nonsense," the wits cried, "he must mean
historiogriffe" and they invited him, on nights when the Academy met,
to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimneypots. He had the
weakness to apologise for his charming book, and to withdraw it from
circulation. His pastoral tales and heroic ballets, his _Zélindors_
and _Zéloïdes_ and _Erosines_, which to us seem utterly vapid and
frivolous, never gave him a moment's uneasiness. His crumpled
rose-leaf was the book by which his name lives in literature.
The book of cats is written in the form of eleven letters to Madame la
Marquise de B----. The anonymous author represents himself as too much
excited to sleep, after an evening spent in a fashionable house,
where the company was abusing cats. He was unsupported; where was
the Marquise, who would have brought a thousand arguments to his
assistance, founded on her own experience of virtuous pussies? Instead
of going to bed he will sit up and indite the panegyric of the feline
race. He is still sore at the prejudice and injustice of the people
he has just left. It culminated in the conduct of a lady who declared
that cats were poison, and who, "when pussy appeared in the room, had
the presence of mind to faint." These people had rallied him on the
absurdity of his enthusiasm; but, as he says, the Marquise well knows,
"how many women have a passion for cats, and how many men are women in
this respect."
So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its elegant pedantry,
its paradoxical wit, its genuine touches of observation and its
constant sparkle of anecdote. He is troubled to account for the
existence of the cat. An Ottoman legend relates that when the animals
were in the Ark, Noah gave the lion a great box on the ear, which made
him sneeze, and produce a cat out his nose. But the author questions
this origin, and is more inclined to agree with a Turkish Minister of
Religion, sometime Ambassador to France, that the ape, "weary of a
sedentary life" in the Ark, paid his attentions to a very agreeable
young lioness, whose infidelities resulted in the birth of a Tom-cat
and a Puss-cat, and that these, combining the qualities of their
parents, spread through the Ark _un esprit de coquetterie_--which
lasted during the whole of the sojourn there. Moncrif has no
difficulty in showing that the East has always been devoted to cats,
and he tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted one day on
a point of piety, preferred to cut off his sleeve, on which his
favourite pussy was asleep, rather than wake her violently by rising.
From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good many curious tributes
to the "harmless, necessary cat." I am seized with an ambition to put
some fragments of these into English verse. Most of them are highly
complimentary. It is true that Ronsard was one of those who could not
appreciate a "matou." He sang or said:
_There is no man now living anywhere
Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I;
I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare,
And when I see one come, I turn and fly_.
But among the _précieuses_ of the seventeenth century there was much
more appreciation. Mme. Deshoulières wrote a whole series of songs
and couplets about her cat, Grisette. In a letter to her husband,
referring to the attentions she herself receives from admirers, she
adds:
_Deshoulières cares not for the smart
Her bright eyes cause, disdainful hussy,
But, like a mouse, her idle heart
Is captured by a pussy_.
Much better than these is the sonnet on the cat of the Duchess of
Lesdiguières, with its admirable line:
_Chatte pour tout le monde, et pour les chats tigresse_.
A fugitive epistle by Scarron, delightfully turned, is too long to be
quoted here, nor can I pause to cite the rondeau which the Duchess of
Maine addressed to her favourite. But she supplemented it as follows:
_My pretty puss, my solace and delight,
To celebrate thy loveliness aright
I ought to call to life the bard who sung
Of Lesbia's sparrow with so sweet a tongue;
But 'tis in vain to summon here to me
So famous a dead personage as he,
And you must take contentedly to-day
This poor rondeau that Cupid wafts your way_.
When this cat died the Duchess was too much affected to write its
epitaph herself, and accordingly it was done for her, in the following
style, by La Mothe le Vayer, the author of the _Dialogues_:
_Puss passer-by, within this simple tomb
Lies one whose life fell Atropos hath shred;
The happiest cat on earth hath heard her doom,
And sleeps for ever in a marble bed.
Alas! what long delicious days I've seen!
O cats of Egypt, my illustrious sires,
You who on altars, bound with garlands green,
Have melted hearts, and kindled fond desires,--
Hymns in your praise were paid, and offerings too,
But I'm not jealous of those rights divine.
Since Ludovisa loved me, close and true,
Your ancient glory was less proud than mine.
To live a simple pussy by her side
Was nobler far than to be deified_.
To these and other tributes Moncrif adds idyls and romances of his
own, while regretting that it never occurred to Theocritus to write a
_bergerie de chats_. He tells stories of blameless pussies beloved
by Fontanelle and La Fontaine, and quotes Marot in praise of "the
green-eyed Venus." But he tears himself away at last from all these
historical reminiscences, and in his eleventh letter he deals with
cats as they are. We hasten as lightly as possible over a story of the
disinterestedness of a feline Heloise, which is too pathetic for a
nineteenth-century ear. But we may repeat the touching anecdote of
Bayle's friend, Mlle. Dupuy. This lady excelled to a surprising
degree in playing the harp, and she attributed her excellence in this
accomplishment to her cat, whose critical taste was only equalled by
his close attention to Mlle. Dupuy's performance. She felt that she
owed so much to this cat, under whose care her reputation for skill on
the harp had become universal, that when she died she left him, in her
will, one agreeable house in town and another in the country. To this
bequest she added a revenue sufficient to supply all the requirements
of a well-bred tom-cat, and at the same time she left pensions to
certain persons whose duty it should be to wait upon him. Her ignoble
family contested the will, and there was a long suit. Moncrif gives
a handsome double-plate illustration of this incident. Mlle. Dupuy,
sadly wasted by illness, is seen in bed, with her cat in her arms,
dictating her will to the family lawyer in a periwig; her physician is
also present.
This leads me to speak of the illustrations to _Les Chats_, which
greatly add to its value. They were engraved by Otten from original
drawings by Coypel. In another edition the same drawings are engraved
by Count Caylus. Some of them are of a charming absurdity. One, a
double plate, represents a tragedy acted by cats on the roof of a
fashionable house. The actors are tricked out in the most magnificent
feathers and furbelows, but the audience consists of common cats.
Cupid sits above, with his bow and fluttering wings. Another plate
shows the mausoleum of the Duchess of Lesdiguières' cat, with a marble
pussy of heroic size, upon a marble pillow, in a grove of poplars.
Another is a medal to "Chat Noir premier, né en 1725," with the proud
inscription, "Knowing to whom I belong, I am aware of my value." The
profile within is that of as haughty a tom as ever shook out his
whiskers in a lady's boudoir.
SMART'S POEMS
POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. _By Christopher Smart, A.M., Fellow of
Pembroke-Hall, Cambridge. London: Printed for the Author, by W.
Strahan; And sold by J. Newbery, at the Bible and Sun, in St. Paul's
Churchyard. MDCCLII_.