summer, and, in the fading year, partially or wholly swallowed up by
autumnal mists, or covered, for a long duration, by winter’s snows; the
blue and narrow stream, rushing from the stony hills, frowning rocks,
broken and vast, silent and lonely vallies,--these were the objects that
met my infant eyes, and stampt on my young imagination an awful
reverence of their dignity.
Blended society has a very exhilarating effect upon my spirits. Under
its influence, I become heedless and volatile; but the instant I am
alone, or conversing freely with my sister, or with any friend, whose
taste has sympathy with mine, the sombre graces resume all their
influence, their original possession, in my mind.
You will imagine, then, how poetry of this kind must interest and charm
me. I feel myself at home upon the heaths of Malmor, by the roaring
torrents of Clutha, and on the green hills of Inisfail.
Adieu!
LICHFIELD, FEB. 1763.
You tell me I had but too faithfully conceived the situation of your
mind, on going into public circles; and you tell me also, that he, whose
image thus perpetually intrudes on your imagination, has been
repeatedly, by your order, denied admittance on his morning visits,
though you could not see him walk up to the door, and return from it, as
you sat reading in the parlour, without very distressing emotion; that,
but for my reasoning on the subject, you know not if you could have kept
your resolution. Ah! how it gratifies me to hope that I may have been
the means of preserving my friend from a destiny so unworthy of her
virtues.
You saw him afterwards at the play, and replied to the regrets he
expressed about never finding you at home, only by a distant curtsy.
Brava! my charming heroine! The victory, seldomest and hardest to be
obtained, will be yours.
Of what flowers shall I twine your wreath of triumph? The warrior has
his laurel, the poet his bays, and the lovers have their myrtle: but of
the amaranth, the unfading amaranth, should her garland be formed, in
whose consideration the peace of the future has prevailed over the
delights of the present.
You insist upon my saying more of myself in this letter; observe, that
you hear I have often written verses, and question me concerning their
subjects. There will be no great difficulty in obeying you. Self-love,
which has neither soul-harrowing sorrow, nor cutting mortification, to
reveal, seldom finds the path of egotism thorny. Your partial estimation
of my talents, and your question about my verses, now point to that
path. If your attention should grow weary in following me through its
mazes, you must thank yourself.
It is true that I have written verses, but it is not true that I have
written them often. A propensity of that sort appeared early in my
infancy. At first my father encouraged it, but my mother threw cold
water on the rising fires; and even my father ceased to smile
encouragement upon these attempts after my 16th year, in which Dr Darwin
unluckily told him, that his daughter’s verses were better than his; a
piece of arch injustice to my father’s muse, which disgusted him with
mine.
Some few people, besides yourself, have fancied that I had genius.
Whether they are, or are not mistaken, it cannot be for me to determine;
but certainly Lichfield is now an inauspicious soil for nourishing to
maturity that sensitive plant.
It is true I dwell on classic ground. Within the walls which my father’s
family inhabits, in this very dining-room, the munificent Mr Walmesley,
with the taste, the learning, and the liberality of Mæcenas,
administered to rising genius the kind nutriment of attention and
praise. Often to his hospitable board were the school-boys, David
Garrick and Samuel Johnson, summoned. The parents of the former were of
Mr Walmesley’s acquaintance; but those of the latter did not move in his
sphere.
It was rumoured that my mother’s father, Mr Hunter, had a boy of marked
ability upon his forms. The huge, over-grown, mis-shapen, and probably
dirty stripling was brought before the most able scholar and the finest
gentleman in Lichfield, or its environs, who, perceiving far more
ability than even rumour had promised, placed him at his table, not
merely to gratify a transient curiosity, but to assure him of a constant
welcome.
Two or three evenings every week, Mr Walmesley called the stupendous
stripling, and his livelier companion, David Garrick, who was a few
years younger, to his own plentiful board. There, in the hours of
convivial gaiety, did he delight to wave every restraint of superiority
formed by rank, affluence, polished manners, and the dignity of advanced
life; and there, “as man to man, as friend to friend,” he drew forth the
different powers of each expanding spirit, by the vivid interchange of
sentiment and opinion, and by the cheering influence of generous
applause.
Another circumstance combined to heighten the merit of this patronage.
Mr Walmesley was a zealous Whig. My grandfather, then master of the free
school, perceiving Johnson’s abilities, had, to his own honour, taken as
much pains with him as with the young gentlemen whose parents paid an
high price for their pupilage; but my grandfather was a Jacobite, and
Sam. Johnson had imbibed his master’s absurd zeal for the forfeit rights
of the house of Stuart; and this, though his father had very loyal
principles; but the anxiety attendant on penurious circumstances,
probably left old Johnson little leisure or inclination to talk on
political subjects.
His son, I am told, even at that early period of life, maintained his
opinions, on every subject, with the same sturdy, dogmatical, and
arrogant fierceness with which he now overbears all opposition to them
in company.
At present, we can well conceive the probability of his dogmatism being
patiently supported by attending admirers, awed by the literary
eminence on which he stands. But how great must have been Mr Walmesley’s
love of genius; how great his generous respect for its dependent
situation, that could so far restrain a naturally impetuous temper, as
to induce him to suffer insolent sallies from the son of an indigent
bookseller, and on a subject which, so handled by people of his own
rank, he would have dashed back in their faces with no small degree of
asperity!
My father wrote the following epitaph on Mr Walmesley: I send it to you,
because it is what epitaphs so seldom are,--characteristic. I am sure
you will be interested in conceiving a just idea of the first patron of
our modern Roscius, and of the illustrious author of the Rambler:
Reader, if Science, Truth, and Reason charm,
If social charities thy bosom warm;
If smiling Bounty ope thy heart and door,
If Justice style thee guardian of the poor;
Firm to Britannia’s liberties and laws,
If Freedom fire thee in their sacred cause,
With sympathetic grief these relics see,
Yet think not Walmesley dead--he lives in thee.
But, if thy country’s rights thou would’st betray,
And barter laws for arbitrary sway;
If, Briton-born, thy soul’s a Gallic slave,
Start from his tomb he would, and call thee fool and knave.
Prior tells us, that every man of ability should, either by the
compass, the pencil, the pen, or the sword, leave his name in life’s
visit. With all Mr Walmesley’s knowledge, accomplishments, taste, and
munificence, not having stept out in any public line of literature, his
name must have passed into oblivion, had he not been the first who
distinguished his illustrious townsmen.
By that circumstance, he rendered his memory immortal as the talents he
drew forth. While Johnson and Garrick are remembered, their first patron
will not be forgotten. Who is there of a soul so grovelling, as would
not wish for their memories an honourable immortality?
“Fame is the spur which the clear spirit doth raise,
That last infirmity of noble minds!”
How inconceivable, then, is the idiotism of short-sighted pride, which
affects to associate only with people of a certain rank, and which
induces the gentlemen, as they call themselves, to preclude from their
reputation the glory of having been able to discern genius, and to raise
it from obscurity!
I speak not from any selfish consideration. Whatever little talents I
may possess, they have not to struggle up to the notice of my neighbours
from the gloom of an inferior station. My father is a gentleman by birth
and by his profession; a scholar by education; and, being canon of this
cathedral, his daughter necessarily converses on terms of equality with
the proudest inhabitants of our little city; but they perceive nothing
of those uncommon talents with which your partiality has invested her.
Attention and praise are the summer-suns that must unfold and ripen the
germs of imagination, ere they can possibly produce fruit worthy the
taste of the public.
Had it been my lot to have been animated by the smiles, and sustained
and encouraged in my studies, and in my little sallies of poetic
invention, by the applause of a Walmesley, I might perhaps have ventured
myself among the candidates for the literary palms.
But may it not be better as it is? Let me be contented with being happy,
without sighing that I am not distinguished. Ah! who knows from what
painful solicitudes my obscurity may have preserved me!
My epistle grows long. You were, however, snatched from the mazes
through which the pleasure of talking about myself might have led you,
by my pen having started back into brighter and more interesting scenes;
scenes that, once passing beneath this roof, have stamped a local
distinction upon the palace of the Bishop of Lichfield, beyond the power
of the crosier or the mitre to bestow.
* * * * *
LICHFIELD, FEB. 1763.
You say you know many who profess to admire the Rambler, and yet declare
war against poetry.--’Tis very likely; the family of the pretenders is
numerous: but, be assured, the incapacity of comprehending the
excellencies of Johnson’s Essays must be inevitable to those who have no
taste for poetry.
It is not the rhymes or measures of poetry which are either
unintelligible or disgusting to the tribe of the prosers; but it is the
imagery, whose strength and grace they can no more perceive than they
can discern the beauty of Raphael’s, or the force of Michael Angelo’s
figures. It is the resemblance between objects, which, when shadowed
forth in metaphor, they cannot trace; it is these which puzzle, and make
them say, with truth, to the poet:
“Thou see’st a form I cannot see,
Which hurries thee away.”
Now, no poetry is more lavish in the use of imagery and metaphor than
the prose of Samuel Johnson.
I conceive the possibility even of people who have a tuneless ear, and
an insensible imagination, receiving genuine pleasure from Shakespeare’s
plays, provided such people possess strong common sense; and this
notwithstanding the higher poetic graces of figure and allusion, of
which they can have so little comprehension, and in which the plays of
Shakespeare so luxuriantly abound; since, to incident, to character, to
humour, sometimes to wit, and always to the force of those passions,
strongly delineated, and whose influence is universal, the merest
prosers are awakened. No palate, capable of relishing any intellectual
food, but may feed with avidity at the table of that mighty master, upon
which, kings and pedlars, ghosts and jesters, witches and tapsters,
pathos and obscenity, murder and fun, are served up in exhaustless
variety.
It is not so with Milton, or the Johnson of this century. Neither of
their writings contain any of that universally acceptable ingredient,
humour.--Their pens always remain in the higher latitudes of abstract
ideas, of ornamented and figurative language. The comprehension of the
prosers have neither respiration nor inspiration on these mental
heights.
If I have spoken ludicrously of that blended mass of character and style
which constitutes the drama of Shakespeare, you must not, therefore,
suppose that I meant any reflection on the greatest and dearest of our
fine writers.
The world is exactly that motley mixture; and, to the world, it is the
highest duty of the dramatic poet to hold a faithful mirror, which ought
to reflect something, at least, of all which is found there.
To every capacity, not fastidiously diseased by the senseless jargon of
the ancients respecting the dignity of the drama, and the
indispensability of its unities, how much more interesting is the
concourse of men and women in Shakespeare’s tragedies, than the synods
of heroes and heroines exhibited by those dramatic poets who bend their
vassal fancy to the despot Aristotle, as he sits on the shelves of the
pedants, his dusty throne clothed in the majesty of elapsed ages!
How coldly does that Grecian critic sacrifice the lively interest
created by a concentered display of more striking events than could have
happened in the course of a few hours, and by the introduction of the
varied manners resulting from a bold change of scene from city to city,
and from kingdom to kingdom!--How coldly, I say, does he sacrifice them
to the imaginary difficulty of an audience accompanying their poet
through his local transitions, and when he outstrips the slow foot of
Time!
Few are the instances, though there have been some, where any period of
any man’s life, not exceeding a few hours, has been sufficiently
eventful to preserve the dramatist, who represents it, from the
necessity of substituting common-place sentiments for awakening
incidents, and frigid declamation for the warm sallies of the heart,
kindling beneath the impression of new and trying situations. When I
first began to read, with a discriminating propensity, and to compare
the unfettered plans of Shakespeare with the more correct and regular,
though infinitely less interesting ones, of his celebrated rivals, it
appeared to me, that he was not more happy in the superiority of his
genius to theirs, than in his bold contempt of the restrictions to which
they submitted. It was this contempt which enabled him to shew us, in
the course of a single play, a group of characters, who, instead of
declaiming about and about one interesting event, occupying the space
only of a few hours, exhibit, in different views, their characteristic
peculiarities, beneath the animating force of various and contrasted
circumstances, which demand the supposed elapse of weeks, perhaps
months, and sometimes even years, that they may be arranged naturally,
and produce their proper effect.
Thus, when several striking events in the lives of interesting persons,
whether real or imaginary, are brought to the eye in a dramatic focus,
their effect is like that of the sun’s rays collected in a burning
glass, and the sensibilities of the audience catch fire.
The other day I conversed with a gentleman, who spoke to me of having
lately heard our great Johnson declaim, in a large circle, upon the
frigid consequences that must generally result from the poet’s adherence
to the Grecian rules for the drama.
Amongst other plain reasons against their necessity, this gentleman told
me, Johnson strongly insisted that it was more easy for the imagination
to pursue Posthumus from London to Rome, and back again as rapidly to
the British coast, than it was to consider the stage as the palace of
Cymbeline; that, if the imagination cannot accommodate itself to these
local changes, and pass, at will, over any given portion of time, it
will never, for a moment, present to us Mrs Cibber as Imogen, nor allow
us to shed one tear over sorrows, of whose fiction it will, with dull
vigilance, perpetually remind us.
It flatters me that my juvenile convictions on this subject meet the
sanction of his approbation whose reasoning is all truth and day-light,
when passion and prejudice do not warp its ingenuousness, and darken its
lustre.
* * * * *
LICHFIELD, FEB. 1763.
You say you are proud of the vivacity with which you have resumed your
employments, to the exclusion of tender musings. You have a right to be
so. It is beyond my hopes that you should so soon have shaken off this
unwholesome mist from the morning sun of your youth.
The last words of that sentence bring to my recollection a pleasing
little poem, to which, in infancy, I have often listened with delight
from the lips of my mother, who used frequently to repeat it as she sat
at work. She had learnt it from a lady who was the friend of her youth.
Wholly without literary curiosity, as she never saw it printed, so she
never asked after the author; consequently, could give me no information
on that subject. She had never taken the trouble of copying it;
therefore was it mine as it was hers, by oral tradition, before I
attained my tenth year. Its easy and tuneful numbers charmed my ear;
and, with a great deal of giddy vivacity on a thousand occasions, I had
yet an inherent fondness for seeing the perspectives of opening life
through the clare-oscure of a meditative fancy, particularly where the
sombre tints were ultimately prevalent.
Behold this little orphan ode, which I have searched for in vain through
the pages of our poets:
How gaily is, at first, begun
Our lives’ uncertain race!
While that sprightly morning sun,
With which we first set out to run,
Enlightens all the place!
How pleasing the world’s prospect lies;
How tempting to look through!
Parnassus to the poet’s eyes,
Nor Beauty, with her sweet surprise,
Can more inviting shew.
How promising the book of fate,
Till rightly understood!
While partial hopes such lots create,
As do the youthful fancy cheat,
With all that’s great and good!
How fair the first ideas move,
That wander in our mind!
How full the joy, how fair the love,
Which does that early season move,
Like flowers the western wind!
Our sighs are then but vernal air,
But April-drops our tears;
Which, swiftly passing, all grows fair,
While Beauty compensates our care,
And Youth each vapour clears.
But, ah! too soon, alas! we climb,
Scarce feeling we ascend,
The gently-rising hill of Time;
From whence, with grief, we view that prime,
And all its sweetness end.
The dye once cast--our fortune known,
Fond expectation past;
The seeds, that former years had sown,
To crops of late repentance grown,
Thro’ which we toil at last.
Then every care’s a driving harm
That helps to bear us down;
While fading smiles no more can charm,
But every tear’s a wintry storm,
And every look a frown.
Till, by succeeding ills opprest,
For joys we hoped to find,
By age all rumpled and undrest,
We gladly sink us down to rest,
Leave following crowds behind.
I do not apprehend this engaging poem to be either of very early or very
late date; for it has neither the stiff quaintness which we see in the
compositions of the second class of poets, in times long past, nor the
polished accuracy of those who stand high on that line in the present
century.
The ode opens beautifully, and the exclamations in the third and fourth
stanza have the force of truth, and all the charm of pathetic sweetness,
except that the pretty simile, which concludes the fourth verse, wants
verbal perspicuity. It means, evidently enough, that love and joy play
upon the mind in that early season of life, like the western wind upon
flowers; but,
“Like flowers the western wind,”
is a hard, and, under every license, an inadmissible inversion, while it
hints, not expresses, the sense.
Till within the last half-century, poets seemed content to convey their
ideas to the reader somewhat abortively. Shakespeare continually does
it, and has therefore given scope to commentators, _ad infinitum_. They
had spared themselves much fruitless trouble by recollecting that the
privilege of hinting, instead of expressing a similitude, an image, or a
reflection, was much claimed at that period, and, indeed, long after,
and that Shakespeare availed himself of it very lavishly.
The remaining stanzas in this my favourite little ode, appear to me
poetically faultless; as, alas! they are too certainly just. The eighth
forms a fine antithesis to the fifth.
By the words, “second class of poets,” in one of the above sentences, I
by no means meant those of moderate genius; but I think no writer can
justly, and, on deliberation, be deemed first-rate, if another, on his
own line, is confessedly his superior.
Among our English poets, and of those only, alas! can I judge, the first
class seems formed by those who are at the head of some particular
branch in their science;--as Spencer of the allegoric; Shakespeare of
the dramatic; Milton of the epic; Butler of the burlesque; Dryden, Pope,
and Sam. Johnson, of the ethic, heroic, and satiric; Thomson of the
descriptive; Prior of the narrative and epigrammatic; Gray of the lyric
and elegiac; Shenstone of the pastoral.
Admitting the justice of my criterion for the formation of the first
poetic classes amongst our authors, it must yet be confessed, that there
are, in the second, bards of more exalted genius than some whose names
have a right to be arranged in the first, as being first in their line
of writing. For instance, Collins and Mason are much greater poets than
Butler or Shenstone; but then they have, in Gray, a superior in their
line, the lyric; and Butler and Shenstone have no equal in theirs, the
burlesque and the pastoral. Pope’s pastorals are more brilliant, but
brilliance is out of character in that department.--They are less
tender, less simple, less easy, and, therefore, as pastorals, less
excellent. Gay’s are vulgar, without being humourous. There can be
nothing interesting to poetic readers in the genuine ideas of clodpoles
and blowsy milk-maids, if the characters themselves are not rendered at
least laughable amidst their coarse employments and rude wassaling.
In Shenstone’s poems we see the elegant, yet natural ideas of a man of
imagination, taste, and sensibility, who, though versed in polite
learning, is not ideally, but literally, devoted to the simplicity of
pastoral life; superintending the health and safety of his own flocks
and herds; leading the ductile pathway through the loveliest glade; the
vagrant rill in those winding channels, so dear to beauty; and
nourishing, in the bosom of his own vale, all the delicacy of social and
friendly intercourse, and all the sweetness of enamoured affection.
I do not attempt to send you news; since neither love nor marriage,
novel prosperity, or recent misfortune, have produced any change since I
wrote to you last, in the situation or sentiments of those who interest
you in our little city; and it is time to bid you adieu. My sister has
brought my work-bag, with her own, down stairs for the evening. My
father and mother are gone out to a card-party. The curtains are dropt,
and the chill white world shut out. The candles shine chearily, and the
fire burns bright in the clean hearth. Little Honora draws her chair to
the table as I write, Hawksworth’s Almoran and Hamet open in her hand.
What a beautiful story!--How sublime its moral! Honora looks at me, her
eyes sparkling with intellectual avidity.--The young mind must not be
deprived of its evening nutriment.
LICHFIELD, JUNE 1763.
* * * * *
My imagination paints, with all the animation of probable hope, the
venerable remains of Roman antiquity, and the finest paintings on the
globe; the beauty of Raphael, the grace of Guido, the tints of Titian,
and the majesty of Michael Angelo; and such landscapes!
“Whate’er Loraine light touch’d with softning hue,
Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew.”
While nature, in a climate which has been called her garden, shall show
me scenes transcending the utmost powers of the pencil. We shall find
them on the banks of the silver Arno, and in his glowing vallies
encircled by woods, compared to whose heights, variety, and extent, the
groves of Britain are thickets.
What a striking image of the sylvan luxuriance of Italy is presented to
us in a simile of Milton’s, for the fallen angels:
“Stretched on the oblivious pool of Erebus,
---- as they lay entranced,
Thick as autumnal leaves, that strew the brooks
Of Valambrosa, where the Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower.”
I have heard my father say, that, when he was in Italy with Lord Charles
Fitzroy, they travelled through Valambrosa in autumn, after the leaves
had began to fall, and that their guide was obliged to try what was land
and what water, by pushing a long pole before him, which he carried in
his hand, the vale being so very irriguous, and the leaves so totally
covering the surface of the streams.