unconsciously inhaled some of its influences, even where they did not
submit themselves to its positive teaching. But for all this, no word,
no allusion of Plutarch's, testifies to his knowledge of the existence
of these churches, or to the slightest acquaintance on his part with the
Christian books." Suetonius, a contemporary of Plutarch, calls the
Christians "a sort of people who held a new and impious superstition."
Pliny, another contemporary, pronounces the Christian religion "a
depraved, wicked, and outrageous superstition;" Tacitus, "a foreign and
deadly superstition.") That John Stuart Mill, who found time and space
in his autobiography to make careful lists of the incredible number of
books he read between the ages of three and fourteen, to note the
languages and sciences he acquired in the same time, as well as his
associations and relations with his father, his brothers, and his
sisters; who accepted his wife, during her life-time, as his divinity,
and, after her death, confessed her memory to have been his
religion,--omitted to say one word about his mother. That Jonathan
Edwards, the great theologian and thinker,--in the opinion of Robert
Hall, "the greatest of the sons of men,"--never had the degree of doctor
of divinity or doctor of laws conferred on him, while they were showered
on scores of his commonplace contemporaries. That Sir John Suckling and
Richard Lovelace, so famous as courtiers and poet cavaliers, the pets of
the king and the people, the much admired and adored by the female sex,
died in wretchedness and despair,--the former taking poison, and the
latter dying in rags in a miserable alley in London. That Milton,
advanced in years, blind, and in misfortune, entered upon the
composition of his immortal epic, achieving it in six years. That Scott,
also advanced in years, his private affairs in ruin, undertook to
liquidate, by intellectual labors alone, a debt of more than half a
million of dollars, nearly accomplishing it in the same time. That Dr.
Lardner published a treatise to prove that a steamboat could never cross
the Atlantic (the steamship Sirius, which crossed soon after, carrying
over his pamphlet), and staked his reputation as a man of science to a
committee of the House of Commons that no railway train could ever be
propelled faster than ten miles in an hour, as the slightest curve would
infallibly throw it off the rails. That Babinet, the French calculator,
also risked his reputation upon the declaration that no telegram would
ever be transmitted through the Atlantic to America. That Renous, a
German collector in natural history, having left in a house in San
Fernandino, Chili, some caterpillars under charge of a girl to feed that
they might turn into butterflies, was arrested upon returning to the
house, his extraordinary conduct having been rumored through the town
till it reached the padres and governor, who consulted together and
determined to punish the pernicious heresy. That Socrates learned music,
Cato the Greek language, Plutarch Latin, and Dr. Johnson Dutch, after
they were seventy years old. That Robert Hall sought relief in Dante
from the racking pains of spinal disease; and Sydney Smith resorted to
the same poet for comfort and solace in his old age. That De Foe, the
author of two hundred and ten books and pamphlets--some of them
immortal--died insolvent. That Sheridan got Woodfall to insert in his
paper a calumnious article, and neglected to answer it afterward, as he
intended--expending, according to Moore, all his activity in assisting
the circulation of the poison, and not having industry enough left to
supply the antidote. That Hugh Miller, who had such healthy views of
life, as shown in his autobiography, voluntarily left it by means of a
pistol. That Lloyd, one of the early friends and literary associates of
Lamb and Coleridge, took lodgings at a working brazier's shop in Fetter
Lane, to distract his mind from melancholy and postpone his madness.
That Hazlitt said that Mary Lamb was the wisest and most rational woman
he had ever known. That Professor Wilson, soon after he was selected to
fill the moral philosophy chair at Edinburgh, and the poet Campbell,
were seen one morning leaving a tavern in that city, both "haggard and
red-eyed, hoarse and exhausted, having sat tete-a-tete for twenty-four
hours discussing poetry and wine to the top of their bent." That Richard
Baxter, the stern Calvinist, and author of one hundred and sixty-eight
works upon theology, wrote at the end of his long life, "I now see more
good and more evil in all men than heretofore I did. I see that good men
are not so good as I once thought they were, and I find that few are so
bad as either malicious enemies or censorious separating professors do
imagine." That Theodore de Beza, the apostle of John Calvin, put to
press at the same time his coarse amorous poems (Juvenilia) and his
intolerant apology for the trial and execution of Servetus. That the
"mighty Dr. Hill, who was not a very delicate feeder, could not make a
dinner out of the press till by a happy transformation into Hannah Glass
he turned himself into a cook, and sold receipts for made dishes to all
the savory readers in the kingdom--the press then acknowledging him
second in favor only to John Bunyan; his feasts kept pace in sale with
Nelson's fasts, and when his own name was fairly written out of credit,
he wrote himself into immortality under an alias." That Madame de
Montespan, who found it for her interest and vanity to live in habitual
violation of the seventh commandment, was so rigorous in her devotions
as to weigh her bread in Lent. That Cardinal Bernis, the most worthless
of abbes, who owed his advancement in the church to Madame de Pompadour,
the most worthless of women, refused to communicate in the dignity of
the purple with a woman of so unsanctimonious a character. That
Rousseau, whose preaching made it fashionable for women of rank to nurse
their own children, sent his own, as soon as born, to the foundling
hospital. That Coleridge and Goldsmith wrote The House that Jack Built
and Goody Two Shoes: more than all it is curious, and wonderful, that
these two simple trifles seem destined to outlive their more elaborate
productions--The Ancient Mariner and The Vicar of Wakefield. Christabel
and The Deserted Village may hardly be preserved amongst the curiosities
of literature, when the famous nursery rhymes--joyously ringing upon the
tongues of silver-voiced children--will be immortally fresh and new.
X.
CONTRASTS.
The world will never be tired reading and talking of the peculiarities
and struggles of some of its literary worthies, they seem so incredible.
Poor Goldsmith, for example: every incident relating to him is
interesting, even if colored by envy--as most of the contemporaneous
gossip about him was. "I first met Goldsmith," says Cumberland, "at the
British Coffee House. He dined with us as a visitor, introduced by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, and we held a consultation upon the naming of his
comedy, which some of the company had read, and which he detailed to the
rest after his manner with a great deal of good-humor. Somebody
suggested She Stoops to Conquer, and that title was agreed upon.... 'You
and I,' said he, 'have very different motives for resorting to the
stage. I write for money, and care little about fame.'... The whole
company pledged themselves to the support of the poet, and faithfully
kept their promise to him. In fact, he needed all that could be done for
him, as Mr. Colman, then manager of Covent Garden Theatre, protested
against the comedy, when as yet he had not struck upon a name for it.
Johnson at length stood forth in all his terror, as champion for the
piece, and backed by us, his clients and retainers, demanded a fair
trial. Colman again protested, but, with that salvo for his own
reputation, liberally lent his stage to one of the most eccentric
productions that ever found its way to it, and She Stoops to Conquer was
put into rehearsal. We were not over-sanguine of success, but perfectly
determined to struggle hard for our author; we accordingly assembled our
strength at the Shakespeare Tavern in a considerable body for an early
dinner, where Samuel Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table,
and was the life and soul of the corps: the poet took post silently by
his side, with the Burkes, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fitzherbert, Caleb
Whitefoord, and a phalanx of North British predetermined applauders,
under the banner of Major Mills, all good men and true. Our illustrious
president was in inimitable glee, and poor Goldsmith that day took all
his raillery as patiently and complacently as my friend Boswell would
have done any day or every day of his life. In the meantime, we did not
forget our duty, and though we had a better comedy going, in which
Johnson was chief actor, we betook ourselves in good time to our
separate and allotted posts, and waited the awful drawing up of the
curtain. As our stations were preconcerted, so were our signals for
plaudits arranged and determined upon in a manner that gave every one
his cue where to look for them and how to follow them up. We had amongst
us a very worthy and sufficient member, long since lost to his friends
and the world at large, Adam Drummond, of amiable memory, who was gifted
by nature with the most sonorous, and, at the same time, the most
contagious, laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs. The neighing of
the horse of the son of Hystaspes was a whisper to it; the whole thunder
of the theatre could not drown it. This kind and ingenuous friend fairly
forewarned us that he knew no more when to give his fire than the cannon
did that was planted on a battery. He desired, therefore, to have a
flapper at his elbow, and I had the honor to be deputed to that office.
I planted him in an upper box, pretty nearly over the stage, in full
view of the pit and galleries, and perfectly well situated to give the
echo all its play through the hollows and recesses of the theatre. The
success of our manoeuvres was complete. All eyes were upon Johnson,
who sat in a front row of a side box, and when he laughed everybody
thought themselves warranted to roar. In the meantime, my friend
followed signals with a rattle so irresistibly comic that, when he had
repeated it several times, the attention of the spectators was so
engrossed by his person and performances that the progress of the play
seemed likely to become a secondary object, and I found it prudent to
insinuate to him that he might halt his music without any prejudice to
the author; but, alas, it was now too late to rein him in; he had
laughed upon my signal where he found no joke, and now unluckily he
fancied that he found a joke in almost everything that was said; so that
nothing in nature could be more malapropos than some of his bursts every
now and then were. These were dangerous moments, for the pit began to
take umbrage; but we carried our play through, and triumphed, not only
over Colman's judgment, but our own." It is related that Goldsmith,
during the performance of the comedy, walked all the time in St. James's
Park, in great uneasiness; and when he thought it must be over, he
hastened to the theatre. His ears were assailed with hisses as he
entered the green-room, when he eagerly inquired of Mr. Colman the
cause. "Pshaw! Pshaw!" said Colman, "don't be afraid of squibs, when we
have been sitting on a barrel of gun-powder these two hours." The fact
was, that the comedy had been completely successful, and that it was the
farce which had excited those sounds so terrific to Goldsmith.
A scene very different from that occurred at another "first acting"--as
remarkable if not as famous. It was on the occasion of the first
presentation of Lamb's farce of Mr. H., thirty years later, at Drury
Lane. That acute dramatic scholar and critic had written a
tragedy,--John Woodvil,--the fate of which his friend Procter has
pleasantly narrated: "It had been in Mr. Kemble's hands for about a
year, and Lamb naturally became urgent to hear his decision upon it.
Upon applying for this he found that his play was--lost! This was at
once acknowledged, and a 'courteous request made for another copy, if I
had one by me.' Luckily, another copy existed. The 'first runnings' of a
genius were not, therefore, altogether lost, by having been cast,
without a care, into the dusty limbo of the theatre. The other copy was
at once supplied, and the play very speedily rejected. It was afterward
facetiously brought forward in one of the early numbers of the Edinburgh
Review, and there noticed as a rude specimen of the earliest age of the
drama, 'older than AEschylus.'" But the condemnation of his tragedy did
not discourage him; he now tried his genius upon a farce. Its
acceptance, Talfourd says, gave Lamb some of the happiest moments he
ever spent. He wrote joyously to Wordsworth about it, even carrying his
humorous anticipations so far as to indulge in a draft of the "orders"
he should send out to his friends after it had had a successful run:
"Admit to Boxes. Mr. H. Ninth Night. Charles Lamb." Hear what he says
about it to his friend Manning, then in China: "The title is Mr. H., no
more; how simple, how taking! A great H-- sprawling over the play-bill,
and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is a coxcomb appearing at
Bath, vastly rich--all the ladies dying for him--all bursting to know
who he is--but he goes by no other name than Mr. H.; a curiosity like
that of the dames of Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I
won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you any
idea how I have done it. I'll just tell you that after much vehement
admiration, when his true name comes out,--'Hogsflesh,'--all the women
shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change her name for
him--that's the idea: how flat it is here, but how whimsical in the
farce! And only think how hard upon me it is that the ship is
dispatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the
Wednesday after; but all China will ring of it by and by.... I shall get
two hundred pounds from the theatre if Mr. H. has a good run, and I hope
one hundred pounds for the copyright.... Mary and I are to sit next the
orchestra in the pit, next the dweedle dees." The Wednesday came, the
wished-for evening, which decided the fate of Mr. H. "Great curiosity,"
says Talfourd, "was excited by the announcement; the house was crowded
to the ceiling, and the audience impatiently awaited the conclusion of
the long intolerable opera by which it was preceded. At length the hero
of the farce entered, gayly dressed, and in happiest spirits,--enough,
not too much, elated,--and delivered the prologue with great vivacity
and success. The farce began; at first it was much applauded; but the
wit seemed wire-drawn; and when the curtain fell on the first act, the
friends of the author began to fear. The second act dragged heavily on,
as second acts of farces will do; a rout at Bath, peopled with
ill-dressed and over-dressed actors and actresses, increased the
disposition to yawn; and when the moment of disclosure came, and nothing
worse than the name Hogsflesh was heard, the audience resented the long
play on their curiosity, and would hear no more. Lamb, with his sister,
sat, as he anticipated, in the front of the pit; and having joined in
encoring the epilogue, the brilliancy of which injured the farce, he
gave way with equal pliancy to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted
as loudly as any of his neighbors!" Away went the poet's fame, and the
hoped-for three hundred pounds! Not even the autocratic countenance of
Johnson, and the big, contagious laugh of Drummond, could have saved
them. The next morning's play-bill contained a veracious announcement,
that "the new farce of Mr. H., performed for the first time last night,
was received by an overflowing audience with universal applause, and
will be repeated for the second time to-morrow;" but the stage lamps
never that morrow saw! An amusing, sad spectacle the whole thing was;
Lamb, especially,--the dramatic scholar, critic, and wit, the
theatre-goer, the associate of playwrights and actors,--hissing and
hooting his own bantling! In a letter afterward to Manning, he labors to
be amusing over the catastrophe in this ghastly and extravagant manner:
"So I go creeping on since I was lamed by that cursed fall from off the
top of Drury Lane Theatre into the pit, something more than a year ago.
However, I have been free of the house ever since, and the house was
pretty free with me upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed! It
was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
congregation of mad geese; with roaring sometimes like bears; mows and
mops like apes; sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'Twas
like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us! that God should give his
favorite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally,
to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to
counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that
they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and
whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations
of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their
fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to
make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore! Make them a reproach, and
all that pass by them to loll out their tongues at them! Blind mouths!
as Milton somewhere calls them."
Poor Elia! Of crazy stock; himself in a mad-house for six weeks at the
end of his twentieth year; his sister insane at intervals throughout her
life; his mother hopelessly bed-ridden till killed by her daughter in a
fit of frenzy; his father pitifully imbecile; his old maiden aunt home
from a rich relation's to be nursed till she died--all dependent upon
him, his more prosperous brother declining to bear any part of the
burden; his work for more than thirty years monotonous, and most of it
performed at the same desk in the same back office; pinched all the time
by adversity; with no ear for music; the list of his few friends, to use
his own words, "in the world's eye, a ragged regiment,"--including the
poet Lloyd, who died insane, and the scholar Dyer, who was so
absent-minded as at one time to empty the contents of his snuff-box into
the tea-pot when he was preparing breakfast for a hungry friend, at
another, with staff in hand, and at noonday, to walk straight into the
river,--the humor, we say, of dear, wretched, gentle Charles Lamb must
stand a wonder in English literature.
Not less incredible was the steady growth of the prodigious genius of
Charlotte Bronte, under circumstances hardly less awfully depressing.
Think of the woful life of that suffering prodigy, in that cheerless
village of forbidding stone houses, whose grim architecture illustrated
the rigid hardness of their inhabitants. Above, below, all around, were
rocks and moors, "where neither flowers nor vegetables would flourish,
and where even a tree of moderate dimensions might be hunted far and
wide; where the snow lay long and late; and where often, on autumnal and
winter nights, the four winds of heaven seemed to meet and rage
together, tearing round the houses as if they were wild beasts striving
to find an entrance." Stone dikes were used in place of hedges. The cold
parsonage, at the top of the one desolate street, with its stone stairs
and stone floors in the passages and parlors, was surrounded on three
sides by the "great old church-yard," which was "terribly full of
upright tomb-stones," and which poisoned the water-springs of the pumps.
The funeral bells, tolling, tolling, and the "chip, chip" of the mason,
as he cut the grave-stones in a shed close by, were habitual sounds. The
pews in the old church were of black oak, with high divisions, with the
names of the owners painted in white letters on the doors. Her father,
the clergyman, harsh, hard, and unsocial; at all times denying flesh
food to his puny children; at dinner permitting them only potatoes, and
rarely or never taking his meals with them; with a temper so violent and
distrustful as to cause him always to carry a pistol, which he was in
the habit of discharging from an upper window whenever in a fit of
passion; who burned the little colored shoes of his children, presented
by their mother's cousin, lest they should foster a love of dress; who
cut in strips the silk gown of his wife because its color was not suited
to his puritanical taste--at the time, too, when she was slowly dying of
an internal cancer. Sent from home to be educated at a miserable school
provided for the daughters of clergymen, where were bad air and bad
food, and which caused the speedy death of both her elder sisters. So
short-sighted that "she always seemed to be seeking something, moving
her head from side to side to catch a sight of it." Having no visitors;
visiting, during her childhood, but at one house, and that for but a
short time. Her only intimate associates her two younger sisters.
Wonderful trio! "At nine o'clock they put away their work, and began to
pace the room backward and forward, up and down, over the stone
floors,--as often with the candles extinguished, for economy's sake, as
not,--their figures glancing in the firelight, and out into the shadow,
perpetually. At this time they talked over past cares and troubles; they
planned for the future, and consulted each other as to their plans. In
after years, this was the time for discussing together the plots of
their novels. And again, still later, this was the time for the last
surviving sister (Charlotte) to walk alone, from old accustomed habit,
round and round the desolate room, thinking sadly upon the 'days that
were no more.'" Is there anything in books more sad and touching? Her
only pet was a fierce bull-dog, and her only male associate her
brilliant, drunken brother (who willfully died upon his feet, in an
upright position, to fulfill an oft-declared purpose), a continual
disgrace and terror as long as he lived. And much of the time, poor
thing, in an agony about the fate of her soul! How the little, pinched
victim of all this misery and wretchedness could have written a
narrative which at once took its place, in spite of faithless and
unsympathizing critics, and securely kept it, too, amongst the highest
and best productions of the age, is a startling marvel in literature.
Out of her own life she wrought her wonderful works. "The fiery
imagination that at times eats me up," she wrote to her friend. In her
stories she but told her own agonies, as Cowper noted the progress of
his insanity, and the French physiologist his ebbing pulse under the
deadly influence of burning charcoal.