ideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listened
to these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was "not critically nor
sceptically inclined." Others, we know, were deeply scandalised. I
have little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798,
his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of _Peter
Bell_, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowed
the MS. and lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter "found nothing good in
it." Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of _Peter Bell_ at
that time, and he was irritated at Lamb's indifference. Yet his own
opinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819)
he calls it "this _unfortunate_ book."[1] In another place (June 12,
1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the book
was printed, to omit "the party in a parlour," and also the banging of
the ass's bones, but, of course, in vain.
[Footnote 1: The word _unfortunate_ is omitted by the editor,
Thomas Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth's
descendants.]
In 1819 much was changed. The poet was now in his fiftieth year. The
epoch of his true productiveness was closed; all his best works,
except _The Prelude_, were before the public, and although Wordsworth
was by no means widely or generally recognised yet as a great poet,
there was a considerable audience ready to receive with respect
whatever so interesting a person should put forward. Moreover, a new
generation had come to the front; Scott's series of verse-romances was
closed; Byron was in mid-career; there were young men of extraordinary
and somewhat disquieting talent--Shelley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt--all
of whom were supposed to be, although characters of a very
reprehensible and even alarming class, yet distinctly respectful in
their attitude towards Mr. Wordsworth. It seemed safe to publish
_Peter Bell_.
Accordingly, the thin octavo described at the head of this chapter
duly appeared in April 1819. It was so tiny that it had to be eked out
with the Sonnets written to W. Westall's Views, and it was adorned
by an engraving of Bromley's, after a drawing specially made by
Sir George Beaumont to illustrate the poem. A letter to Beaumont,
unfortunately without a date, in which this frontispiece is discussed,
seems to suggest that the engraving was a gift from the artist to the
poet; Wordsworth, "in sorrow for the sickly taste of the public
in verse," opining that he cannot afford the expense of such a
frontispiece as Sir George Beaumont suggests. In accordance with these
fears, no doubt, an edition of only 500 was published; but it achieved
a success which Wordsworth had neither anticipated nor desired. There
was a general guffaw of laughter, and all the copies were immediately
sold; within a month a ribald public received a third edition, only to
discover, with disappointment, that the funniest lines were omitted.
No one admired _Peter Bell_. The inner circle was silent. Baron Field
wrote on the title-page of his copy, which now belongs to Mr. J. Dykes
Campbell, "And his carcass was cast in the way, and the Ass stood by
it." Sir Walter Scott openly lamented that Wordsworth should exhibit
himself "crawling on all fours, when God has given him so noble a
countenance to lift to heaven." Byron mocked aloud, and, worse than
all, the young men from whom so much had been expected, _les
jeunes feroces_, leaped on the poor uncomplaining Ass like so many
hunting-leopards. The air was darkened by hurtling parodies, the
arrangement of which is still a standing _crux_ to the bibliographers.
It was Keats's friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who opened the attack.
His parody _(Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad_. London, Taylor and Hessey,
1819) was positively in the field before the original. It was said, at
the time, that Wordsworth, feverishly awaiting a specimen copy of his
own _Peter Bell_ from town, seized a packet which the mail brought
him, only to find that it was the spurious poem which had anticipated
Simon Pure. _The Times_ protested that the two poems must be from the
same pen. Reynolds had probably glanced at proofs of the genuine poem;
his preface is a close imitation of Wordsworth's introduction, and the
stanzaic form in which the two pieces are written is identical. On the
other hand, the main parody is made up of allusions to previous poems
by Wordsworth, and shows no acquaintance with the story of _Peter
Bell_. Reynolds's whole pamphlet--preface, text, and notes--is
excessively clever, and touches up the bard at a score of tender
points. It catches the sententious tone of Wordsworth deliciously, and
it closes with this charming stanza:
_He quits that moonlight yard of skulls,
And still he feels right glad, and smiles
With moral joy at that old tomb;
Peter's cheek recalls its bloom,
And as he creepeth by the tiles,
He mutters ever--"W.W.
Never more will trouble you, trouble you_."
_Peter Bell the Second_, as it is convenient, though not strictly
accurate, to call Reynold's "antenatal Peter," was more popular than
the original. By May a third edition had been called for, and this
contained fresh stanzas and additional notes.
Another parody, which ridiculed the affection for donkeys displayed
both by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was called _The Dead Asses: A
Lyrical Ballad_; and an elaborate production, the author of which I
have not been able to discover, was published later on in the year,
_Benjamin the Waggoner_ (Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, 1819), which,
although the title suggests _The Waggoner_ of Wordsworth, is entirely
taken up with making fun of _Peter Bell_. This parody--and it is
certainly neither pointless nor unskilful--chiefly deals with the
poet's fantastic prologue. Then, no less a person than Shelley,
writing to Leigh Hunt from Florence in November of the same year,
enclosed a _Peter Bell the Third_ which he desired should be printed,
yet in such a form as to conceal the name of the author. Perhaps Hunt
thought it indiscreet to publish this not very amusing skit, and it
did not see the light till long after Shelley's death. Finally, as
though the very spirit of parody danced in the company of this strange
poem, Wordsworth himself chronicled its ill-fate in a sonnet imitated
from Milton's defence of "Tetrachordon," singing how, on the
appearance of _Peter Bell_,
_a harpy brood
On Bard and Hero clamourously fell_.
Of the poem which enjoyed so singular a fate, Lord Houghton has
quietly remarked that it could not have been written by a man with a
strong sense of humour. This is true of every part of it, of the stiff
and self-sufficient preface, and of the grotesque prologue, both of
which in all probability belong to 1819, no less than of the story
itself, in its three cantos or parts, which bear the stamp of Alfoxden
and 1798. The tale is not less improbable than uninteresting. In the
first part, a very wicked potter or itinerant seller of pots, Peter
Bell, being lost in the woodland, comes to the borders of a river, and
thinks to steal an ass which he finds pensively hanging its head over
the water; Peter Bell presently discovers that the dead body of the
master of the ass is floating in the river just below. (The poet, as
he has naively recorded, read this incident in a newspaper.) In the
second part Peter drags the dead man to land, and starts on the ass's
back to find the survivors. In the third part a vague spiritual
chastisement falls on Peter Bell for his previous wickedness. Plot
there is no more than this, and if proof were wanted of the inherent
innocence of Wordsworth's mind, it is afforded by the artless
struggles which he makes to paint a very wicked man. Peter Bell has
had twelve wives, he is indifferent to primroses upon a river's brim,
and he beats asses when they refuse to stir. This is really all the
evidence brought against one who is described, vaguely, as combining
all vices that "the cruel city breeds."
That which close students of the genius of Wordsworth will always turn
to seek in _Peter Bell_ is the sincere sentiment of nature and the
studied simplicity of language which inspire its best stanzas. The
narrative is clumsy in the extreme, and the attempts at wit and
sarcasm ludicrous. Yet _Peter Bell_ contains exquisite things. The
Primrose stanza is known to every one; this is not so familiar:
_The dragon's wing, the magic ring,
I shall not covet for my dower.
If I along that lowly way
With sympathetic heart may stray
And with a soul of power_.
Nor this, with its excruciating simplicity, its descriptive accent of
1798:
_I see a blooming Wood-boy there,
And, if I had the power to say
How sorrowful the wanderer is,
Your heart would be as sad as his
Till you had kiss'd his tears away!
Holding a hawthorn branch in hand,
All bright with berries ripe and red;
Into the cavern's mouth he peeps--
Thence back into the moonlight creeps;
What seeks the boy?--the silent dead!_
It is when he wishes to describe how Peter Bell became aware of the
dead body floating under the nose of the patient ass that Wordsworth
loses himself in uncouth similes. Peter thinks it is the moon, then
the reflection of a cloud, then a gallows, a coffin, a shroud, a stone
idol, a ring of fairies, a fiend. Last of all the poet makes the
Potter, who is gazing at the corpse, exclaim:
_Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd--
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damned!_
So deplorable is the waggishness of a person, however gifted, who has
no sense of humour! This simile was too much for the gravity even of
intimate friends like Southey and Lamb, and after the second edition
it disappeared.
THE FANCY
THE FANCY: _A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter
Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, student at law. With a brief Memoir of his
life. London: printed for Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street_. 1820.
The themes of the poets run in a very narrow channel. Since the old
heroic times when the Homers and the Gunnlaugs sang of battle with the
sleet of lances hurtling around them, a great calm has settled down
upon Parnassus. Generation after generation pipes the same tune of
love and Nature, of the liberal arts and the illiberal philosophies;
the same imagery, the same metres, meander within the same polite
margins of conventional subject. Ever and anon some one attempts to
break out of the groove. In the eighteenth century they made a valiant
effort to sing of The Art of Preserving Health, and of The Fleece and
of The Sugar-Cane, but the innovators lie stranded, like cumbrous
whales, on the shore of the ocean of Poesy. Flaubert's friend, Louis
Bouilhet, made a inartful attempt to tune the stubborn lyre to music
of the birthday of the world, to battles of the ichthyosaurus and the
plesiosaurus, to loves of the mammoth and the mastodon. But the public
would have none of it, though ensphered in faultless verso, and the
poets fled back to their flames and darts, and to the primrose at the
river's brim. There is, however, something pathetic, and something
that pleasantly reminds us of the elasticity of the human intellect in
these failures; and the book before us is an amusing example of such
eccentric efforts to enlarge the sphere of the poetic activity.
This little volume is called _The Fancy_, and it does not appear to me
certain that the virtuous American conscience know what that means. If
the young ladies from Wells or Wellesley inquire ingenuously, "Tell us
where is Fancy bred?" we should have to reply, with a jingle, In the
fists, not in the head. The poet himself, in a fit of unusual candour,
says:
_Fancy's a term for every blackguardism_,
though this is much too severe. But rats, and they who catch them,
badgers, and they who bait them, cocks, and they who fight them, and,
above all, men with fists, who professionally box with them, come
under the category of the _Fancy_. This, then, is the theme which the
poet before us, living under the genial sway of the First Gentleman of
Europe, undertook to place beneath the special patronage of Apollo.
The attractions, however, of _The Learned Ring_, set all other
pleasures in the shade, and the name, Peter Corcoran, which is a
pseudonym, is, I suppose, chosen merely because the initials are
those of the then famous Pugilistic Club. The poet is, in short, the
laureate of the P.C., and his book stands in the same relation to
_Boxiana_ that Campbell's lyrics do to Nelson's despatches. To
understand the poet's position, we ought to be dressed as he was; we
ought
_to wear a tough drab coat
With large pearl buttons all afloat
Upon the waves of plush; to tie
A kerchief of the king-cup die
(White-spotted with a small bird's eye)
Around the neck,--and from the nape
Let fall an easy> fan-like cape_,
and, in fact, to belong to that incredible company of Corinthian Tom
and Jerry Hawthorn over whom Thackeray let fall so delightfully the
elegiac tear.
Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would
contain this very remarkable sonnet:
ON THE NONPAREIL.
"_None but himself can be his parallel."
With marble-coloured shoulders,--and keen eyes,
Protected by a forehead broad and white--
And hair cut close lest it impede the sight,
And clenchèd hands, firm, and of punishing size,--
Steadily held, or motion'd wary-wise
To hit or stop,--and kerchief too drawn tight
O'er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight
The inconstant wind, that all too often flies,--
The Nonpareil stands! Fame, whose bright eyes run o'er
With joy to see a Chicken of her own.
Dips her rich pen in_ claret_, <and writes down
Under the letter R, first on the score,
"Randall,--John,--Irish Parents,--age not known,--
Good with both hands, and only ten stone four!_"
Be not too hard on this piece of barbarism, virtuous reader! Virtue is
well revenged by the inevitable question! "Who was John Randall?"
In 1820 it was said: "Of all the great men in this age, in poetry,
philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendent talent
as Randall, no one who combines the finest natural powers with the
most elegant and finished acquired ones." Now, if his memory be
revived for a moment, this master of science, who doubled up an
opponent as if he were plucking a flower, and whose presence turned
Moulsey Hurst into an Olympia, is in danger of being confounded with
the last couple of drunken Irishwomen who have torn out each other's
hair in handfuls in some Whitechapel courtyard. The mighty have
fallen, the stakes and ring are gone forever, and Virtue is avenged.
The days of George IV. are so long, long gone past that a paradoxical
creature may be forgiven for a sigh over the ashes of the glory of
John Randall.
It is strange how much genuine poetry lingers in this odd collection
of verses in praise of prizefighting. There are lines and phrases that
recall Keats himself, though truly the tone of the book is robust
enough to satisfy the most impassioned of Tory editors. As it happens,
it was written by Keats's dearest friend, by John Hamilton Reynolds,
whom the great poet mentions so affectionately in the latest of all
his letters. Reynolds has been treated with scant consideration by the
critics. His verses, I protest, are no whit less graceful or sparkling
than those of his more eminent companions, Leigh Hunt and Barry
Cornwall. His _Garden of Florence_ is worthy of the friend of Keats.
We have seen how his _Peter Bell_, which was Peter Bell the First,
took the wind out of Shelley's satiric sails and fluttered the
dove-cotes of the Lakeists. He was as smart as he could be, too clever
to live, in fact, too light a weight for a grave age. In _The Fancy_,
which Keats seems to refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820,
Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom Moore's _Tom Crib_, but
if so, he vastly improves on that rather vulgar original. He takes as
his motto, with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, and
persuades us
_nor need we blame the licensed joys,
Though false to Nature's quiet equipoise:
Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive_.
We can fancy the countenance of the Cumbrian sage at seeing his words
thus nimbly adapted to be an apology for prize-fighting.
The poems are feigned to be the remains of one Peter Corcoran,
student at law. A simple and pathetic memoir--which deserved to be as
successful as that most felicitous of all such hoaxes, the life of
the supposed Italian poet, Lorenzo Stecchetti--introduces us to the
unfortunate young Irishman, who was innocently engaged to a charming
lady, when, on a certain August afternoon, he strayed by chance into
the Fives Court, witnessed a "sparring-exhibition" by two celebrated
pugilists, and was thenceforth a lost character. From that moment
nothing interested him except a favourite hit or a scientific
parry, and his only topic of conversation became the noble art of
self-defence. To his disgusted lady-love he took to writing eulogies
of the Chicken and the Nonpareil. On one occasion he appeared before
her with two black eyes, for he could not resist the temptation of
taking part in the boxing, and "it is known that he has parried the
difficult and ravaging hand of Randall himself." The attachment of the
young lady had long been declining, and she took this opportunity of
forbidding him her presence for the future. He felt this abandonment
bitterly, but could not surrender the all-absorbing passion which was
destroying him. He fell into a decline, and at last died "without a
struggle, just after writing a sonnet to _West-Country Dick_."
The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a kind of sporting
opera called _King Tims the First_, which is the tragedy of an
emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in _ottava rima_, called _The
Fields of Tothill_, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic
manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get
his story under weigh; and miscellaneous pieces. Some of these latter
are simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written in Peter
Corcoran's earlier days. The most characteristic and the best deal,
however, with the science of fisticuffs. Here are the lines sent
by the poet to his mistress on the painful occasion which we have
described above, "after a casual turn up":
_Forgive me,--and never, oh, never again,
I'll cultivate light blue or brown inebriety;[1]
I'll give up all chance of a fracture or sprain,
And part, worst of all, with Pierce Egan's[2] society.
Forgive me,--and mufflers I'll carefully pull
O'er my knuckles hereafter, to make them, well-bred;
To mollify digs in the kidneys with wool,
And temper with leather a punch of the head_.
_And, Kate!--if you'll fib from your forehead that frown,
And spar with a lighter and prettier tone;--
I'll look,--if the swelling should ever go down,
And these eyes look again,--upon you, love, alone!_
[Footnote 1: "Heavy _brown_ with a dash of _blue_ in it" was the fancy
phrase for stout mixed with gin.]
[Footnote 2: The author of _Boxiana_ and _Life in London_.]
It must be confessed that a less "fancy" vocabulary would here have
shown a juster sense of Peter's position. Sometimes there is no
burlesque intention apparent, but, in their curious way, the verses
seem to express a genuine enthusiasm. It is neither to be expected nor
to be feared that any one nowadays will seriously attempt to advocate
the most barbarous of pastimes, and therefore, without conscientious
scruples, we may venture to admit that these are very fine and very
thrilling verses in their own unexampled class:
_Oh, it is life! to see a proud
And dauntless man step, full of hopes,
Up to the P.C. stakes and ropes,
Throw in his hat, and with a spring
Get gallantly within the ring;
Eye the wide crowd, and walk awhile
Taking all cheerings with a smile;
To see him strip,--his well-trained form,
White, glowing, muscular, and warm,
All beautiful in conscious power,
Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;
His glossy and transparent frame,
In radiant plight to strive for fame!
To look upon the clean-shap'd limb
In silk and flannel clothèd trim;--
While round the waist the kerchief tied
Makes the flesh glow in richer pride.
'Tis more than life, to watch him hold
His hand forth, tremulous yet bold,
Over his second's, and to clasp
His rival's in a quiet grasp;
To watch the noble attitude
He takes,--the crowd in breathless mood,--
And then to see, with adamant start,
The muscles set,--and the great heart
Hurl a courageous, splendid light
Into the eye,--and then--the_ FIGHT.
This is like a lithograph out of one of Pierce Egan's books, only much
more spirited and picturesque, and displaying a far higher and more
Hellenic sense of the beauty of athletics. Reynolds' little volume,
however, enjoyed no success. The genuine amateurs of the prize-ring
did not appreciate being celebrated in good verses, and _The Fancy_
has come to be one of the rarest of literary curiosities.
ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS
ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS; _a Satire on William Gifford. By Leigh Hunt.
London, 1823: printed for John Hunt, 22, Old Bond Street, and 38,
Tavistock Street, Covent Garden_.
If the collector of first editions requires an instance from which
to justify the faith which is in him against those who cry out that
bibliography is naught, Leigh Hunt is a good example to his hand. This
active and often admirable writer, during a busy professional life,
issued a long series of works in prose and verse which are of every
variety of commonness and scarcity, but which have never been, and
probably never will be, reprinted as a whole. Yet not to possess the
works of Leigh Hunt is to be ill-equipped for the minute study of
literary history at the beginning of the century. The original 1816
edition of _Rimini_, for instance, is of a desperate rarity, yet not
to be able to refer to it in the grotesqueness of this its earliest
form is to miss a most curious proof of the crude taste of the young
school out of which Shelley and Keats were to arise. The scarcest
of all Leigh Hunt's poetical pamphlets, but by no means the least
interesting, is that whose title stands at the head of this chapter.
Of _Ultra-crepidarius_, which was "printed for John Hunt" in 1823, it
is believed that not half a dozen copies are in existence, and it has
never been reprinted. It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere
despisers of first editions may allow a special interest.
From internal evidence we find that _Ultra-crepidarius; a Satire
on William Gifford_, was sent to press in the summer of 1823, from
Maiano, soon after the break-up of Hunt's household in Genoa, and
Byron's departure for Greece. The poem is the "stick" which had been
recently mentioned in the third number of the _Liberal_:
_Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick,
Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick?_
It had been written in 1818, in consequence of the famous review in
the _Quarterly_ of Keats's _Endymion_, a fact which the biographers of
Keats do not seem to have observed. Why did Hunt not immediately print
it? Perhaps because to have done so would have been worse than useless
in the then condition of public taste and temper. What led Hunt to
break through his intention of suppressing the poem it might be
difficult to discover. At all events, in the summer of 1823 he
suddenly sent it home for publication; whether it was actually
published is doubtful, it was probably only circulated in private to a
handful of sympathetic Tory-hating friends.