Catholic question. It was a showy topic for a young orator; it was an
easy exhibition of cheap patriotism; it gave an opportunity for
boundless metaphor--and it meant nothing. But, no politician has ever
sinned with Popery but under a penalty--the question hung about his neck
through every hour of his political existence. It encumbered his English
popularity, it alienated the royal favour, it flung him into the rear
rank of politicians. It made his English ambition fruitless and
secondary; and his Irish government unstable and unpopular. It
disqualified him for the noblest use of a statesman's powers, the power
of pronouncing an unfettered opinion; and it suffered a man to
degenerate into the antiquated appendage to a court, who might have been
the tutelar genius of an empire.
_Memoirs and Correspondence of the Most Noble Richard Marquess
Wellesley._ By ROBERT B. PEARCE, Esq. 3 vols. London: Bentley.
LETTER TO EUSEBIUS.
MY DEAR EUSEBIUS,--I have received yours from the hands of the bearer,
and such hands! Why write to consult me about railroads, of all things?
I know nothing about them, but that they all seem to tend to some
Pandemonium or another; and when I see of a dark night their
monster-engines, with eyes of flame and tongues of fire, licking up the
blackness under them, and snuffing up, as it were, the airs from Hades,
I could almost fancy the stoker a Mercury, conducting his hermetically
sealed convicts down those terrible passages that lead direct to the
abominable ferry. I said, "I know nothing of them;" but now I verily
believe you mean to twit me with my former experiment in railway
knowledge, and have no intention to purchase shares in the La Mancha
Company (and I doubt if there be any such) to countenance your Quixotic
pleasantry. I did speculate once, it is true, in one--London and
Falmouth Scheme--with very large promises. I was then living at W----,
when one day, just before I was going to sit down to dinner, a chaise
stops at my door, out steps a very "smart man," and is ushered into my
library. When I went into the room, he was examining, quite in a
connoisseur attitude, Eusebius, a picture; he was very fond of pictures,
he said; had a small but choice collection of his own, and I won't say
that he did not speak of the Correggiosity of Correggio. I was upon the
point of interrupting him, with the intimation that I did not mean to
purchase any, when, having thus ingratiated himself with me by this
reference to my taste, he suddenly turns round upon me with the most
business-like air, draws from under his cloak an imposingly official
portfolio, takes out his scrip, presenting me with a demand for fifty
pounds, the deposit of so many shares, looking positively certain that
in a few seconds the money would be in his pocket. People say, Eusebius,
that the five minutes before a dinner is the worst time in the world to
touch the heart, or to get any thing out of a man's pocket for
affection; but I do not know if it be not the best time for an attack,
if there be a speculation on foot which promises much to his interest,
for at that time he is naturally greedy. Had Belisarius, with his dying
boy in his arms, himself appeared at my gate, as seen in the French
print, crying, "Date obolum Belsario," I should have pronounced him at
once an impostor, and given him nothing, and, indeed, not pronounced
wrongly, for the whole story is a fiction. But at this peculiar moment
of hunger and of avarice, I confess I was too ready, and gave a check
for the amount. I had no sooner, however, satisfied myself with what
Homer calls [Greek: edetnos ede potetos], and we moderns, meat and
potatoes--than I began to suspect the soundness of the scheme, or the
company, who had gone to the expense of a chaise for eight miles merely
to collect this subscription of mine; and I was curious the next day to
trace the doings of this smart gentleman, when I found he had dined at
the inn at B---- on turtle, ducks, and green peas, and had recruited the
weariness of his day's journey with exhilarating champagne. I knew my
fate at once, and from that day to this have heard nothing of the London
and Falmouth project. Now, Eusebius, as you publish my letters, if this
should catch the eye of any of the directors of that company still
possessing any atom of conscience, I beg to remind them that I am still
minus fifty pounds; and as all claim seems to be quite out of the
question, excepting on their "known and boundless generosity," I beg to
wind up this little narrative of the transaction in the usual words of
the beggar's petition, "The smallest donation will be thankfully
received."
But the bearer, who was to consult me for your benefit--he hadn't a word
to say to me on the subject, but that he would call and consult with me
to-morrow. I found it in vain to question him, and I suspect it is a
hoax. But what a rural monster you have sent me! "Cujum pecus?--an
Melibei?" He cannot possibly herd with Eusebius; he had no modest
bearing about him. I had just opened your letter, and found you called
him a friend of yours, who had many observations to make about
poetry--so, as we were just going to tea, he was invited. It was most
fortunate I did not offer him a bed, for I should then have been bored
with him at this moment, when I am sitting down to write to you some
little account of his manners and conversation, which you know very
well, or you would not have sent him to me. I only now hope I shall not
see him to-morrow; and should I learn that he shall have departed in one
of those Plutonian engines to the keeping of Charon himself, I should
only regret that I had not put an obol into his hand, lest he should be
presented with a return-ticket. What did he say, and what did he not
say? He called my daughter "Miss," and said he should like music very
well but for the noise of it; and as to his ideas of poetry, that you
speak of, he treated it with the utmost contempt, and as a "very
round-about-way of getting to matter of fact." What else could I have
expected of him?--with his tight-drawn skin over his distended cheeks,
from which his nose scarcely protruded, as defying a pinch, with a
forehead like Caliban's, as villanously low, with his close-cut hair
sticking to it, and his little chin retiring, lest a magnanimous thought
should for a moment rest upon it. Such was never the image that
Cassandra had in her mind's eye when she cried, "O, Apollo--O, Apollo!"
And this was your friend, forsooth, with his novel ideas upon poetry!
Yet this vulgar piece of human mechanism is not without a little cunning
shrewdness, characteristically marked in his little pig-eye; and I must
tell you one piece of criticism of his, and an emendation, not unworthy
the great Bentley himself. Yet I know not why I tell you, for you know
it well already, I suspect; for he told me he had been talking with you
about a letter which you had published, and told him was written by me,
and which he had read while waiting in your library till you could see
him. He said he thought a little common sense, observation, and plain
matter of fact, would often either throw light upon or amend many
obscure passages of poets; for that even those of most name either made
egregious blunders, or they were made for them. I could not deny that
truth, Eusebius, and yet he wasn't a man to grant any thing to, if you
could help it; but I saw there was something rich to come, so I
encouraged him; and this remark of his, Eusebius, reminded me of a
misery occasioned in the mind of a very sensitive and reverend poet, who
preached weekly to a very particular congregation, by the printer's
devil mistaking an erasure for a hyphen, which gave to his sonnet a most
improper expression. It made him miserable then, and will ever give him
a twinge lest he should have suffered in reputation. He has so much
reason to be happy now, that to remind him of it, should he happen to
read this, is only to make his happiness the greater, by somewhat
reducing its quality; as the very atmosphere must be tempered for man's
use and health, by somewhat of a noxious ingredient. But I must return
to your friend. His cheeks seem ready to burst with common sense, and
polished with ruddy conceit. "Do you remember," said I, "any particular
passage upon which your observations will bear?" "Why," said he, "there
was one in that paper which first struck me as utter nonsense; but a
little alteration easily sets it to rights. There was a quotation from
Milton: I wasn't very well acquainted with his poems, but I have read
since, with much trouble to understand it, that whole scene and passage;
it is in a play of his called 'Comus;'--and, by the by, all that part of
the prose in the letter relating to the seashore and its treasures, is
all stuff; all the roads about the country are made and mended with
those pebbles--they are worth nothing. What Milton is supposed to have
said, when they wrote down for him, that the billows of the Severn "roll
ashore"--"the beryl and the golden ore"--never could have been written
by any one who knew the Severn. A beryl is a clear crystal, isn't it?
and if the billows should roll one ashore in the muddy Severn, I should
like to know who could find it! There are no billows but from the
Bristol Channel, and that's mud all the way, miles and miles up;--pretty
shores for a beryl to be _rolled_ on. Besides, now, what man of common
sense would talk of rolling a bit of a thing, not half so big as a
nutmeg, and that upon mud, in which it would sink like a bullet? _He_
would have said 'washed ashore;' but I'll tell you what it was: I
understand Milton was blind, and his daughters wrote what he dictated:
they say, too, he had a good deal of knowledge of things, and, without
doubt, knew very well the trade of the Bristol Channel, and from the
Severn into the Avon; and certainly meant '_barrel_ and the golden ore,'
and this word suggested the precious ornament which most women like to
think of, and as she, his daughter, minced it in her own mouth, a beryl
dropped from her pen. Now, only consider what was the great trade in
those parts; the West India and the African trade were both at their
height, and didn't one bring _barrels_ of sugar, and the other gold
dust--what can be clearer? There you see how proper the word _rolling_
is, for you must have often seen them rolling their _barrels_ from their
ships upon planks, and so on their quays; and the golden ore speaks for
itself, as plain as can be, gold dust; and there you have a reading that
agrees with fact. I don't exactly know _when_ Milton wrote; but I dare
say it was at the very time of that notorious merchandize; and don't you
think, sir, that the next edition of Milton ought to have this
alteration? I do. I forgot to say that the gold dust came over in little
barrels too; for no man in his senses would have thought of rolling or
washing dust ashore, excepting in a keg or barrel, and so it was, I make
no doubt."
I perfectly assented to every thing he said, Eusebius, by which happy
concession on my part, having no food for an obstinate discussion, he
soon withdrew. I sat awhile thinking, and now write to you. At least
make a marginal note in your Milton of this criticism; and when
posterity shall discover it, and forget that _Comus_ was written when
Milton was a young man, and had no daughters to write for him, then it
will be adopted, and admired as a specimen of the critical acumen of the
great and learned Eusebius.
It reminds me to tell you, that being the other day at the sea-side, and
wanting a Horace, I borrowed one from a student of Cambridge. It was a
Paris edition. I never should have dreamed of seeing an expurgated or
emasculated edition from French quarters; but so it was. I looked for
that beautiful little piece, the quarrel between Lydia and Horace. It
was not there.
"Donec gratus eram tibi,
Nec quisquam potior brachia candide
Cervici juvenis dabat."
I suppose the offence lay in these lines, which appear no worse than
that old song, (the lovers' quarrel too,)
"I've kiss'd and I've prattled with fifty fair maids."
An American lady must not be shocked with the word _leg_, and we are
told they put flounces upon those pedestals of pianofortes; but that a
lover throwing his arms around his mistress's neck should offend a
Frenchman, is an outrageous prudery from a very unexpected quarter. We
can imagine a scholar tutored to this affected purity, who should escape
from it, and plunge into the opposite immoralities of our modern French
novels, like him
"Qui frigidus AEtnam
Insiluit."
"Plunged cold into AEtnean fires."
There were many emendations, most of which I forget; but I could not
help laughing at an absurdity in the following ode:--
"Vixi puellis nuper idoneus."
The word _puellis_ is altered to _choreis_, which nevertheless, as a
mark of absurdity, ought to be supposed to contain the _puellis_; for to
say,
"I lately lived for dances fit,"
surely implies that the sayer had some one to dance with; or is there
any dancing sect of men in France so devoted to celibacy that they will
only dance with each other? We are certainly improved in this country,
where it should seem that once a not unsimilar practice was compulsory
upon the benchers, as will be seen from the following quotation from
_The Revels at Lincoln's Inn_:--
"The exercise of dancing was thought necessary, and much conducing to
the making of gentlemen, more fit for their books at other times; for by
an order (_ex Registro Hosp. sine._ vol. 71, 438 C) made 6th February, 7
Jac., it appears that the under barristers were, by decimation, put out
of Commons for example sake, because the whole bar offended by not
dancing on Candlemas-day preceding, according to the ancient order of
this Society, when the judges were present; with this, that if the like
fault was committed afterwards, they should be fined or disbarred."--(D,
_Revels at Lincoln's Inn_, p. 15.) Eusebius, you would go on a
pilgrimage, with unboiled peas, to Pump Court or more favourable
locality, for these little "brief authorities."
"To see how like are courts of law to fairs,
The dancing barristers to dancing bears;
Both suck their paws indulgent to their griefs,
These lacking provender, those lacking briefs."
Shame to him who does not agree with our own delightful Robert Burns, of
glorious memory, who "dearly lo'ed the lasses O!" So only "Let the merry
dance go round."
And now, as the dancers are off the stage, and it is the more proper
time for gravity and decorum, I feel that irresistible desire to be as
wicked as possible--a desire which I have heard you say tormented you in
your childhood; for, whenever you were admonished to be remarkably good,
you were invariably remarkably bad. So I yield to the temptation, and
voluntarily, and with "malice prepense" throw myself into the wickedness
of translating (somewhat modernizing I own) the "Tabooed" ode, in
defiance of, and purposely to offend, the Parisian, or other editor or
editors, who shall ever show themselves such incomparable ninnies as to
omit that or any other ode of Horace. Accept the following.
"Vixi puellis nuper idoneus."
CARMEN, 26, lib. iii.
For maiden's love I once was fit,
But now those fields of warfare quit,
With all my boast, content to sit
In easy-chair;
And here lay by (a lover's lances)
All poems, novels, and romances.
Ah! well a-day! such idle fancies
I well might spare.
There--on that shelf, behind the door,--
By all those works of Hannah More
And Bishop Porteus--Let a score
Of lectures guard them;
Take Bulwer, Moore, and Sand, and Sue,
The Mysteries, and the Wandering Jew;
May he who gives to all their due,
The Deil, reward them.
And Venus, if thou hast, as whilom,
For parted lovers an asylum,
To punish or to reconcile 'em,
Take Chloe to it;
And lift, if thou hast heart of flint,
Thy lash, and her fair skin imprint--
But ah! forbear--or, take the hint,
And let me do it.
Not a word, Eusebius, I know what you are going to say,--no shame at
all. You have all your life acquitted Horace; and if he never intended
Chloe to have a whipping, you may be quite sure the little turn that I
have ventured to give the affair, won't bear that construction; and
there will be no occasion to ask the dimensions of the rod, as the
ladies at the assize-town did of Judge Buller, requesting of him, with
their compliments, to send them the measure of his thumb.
Why should I not attempt this rejected ode? Here goes for the honour of
Lydia. "Kiss and be friends" be ever the motto to lovers' quarrels.
_"Donec gratus eram tibi."_
HORACE.
When I was all in all to you,
Nor yet more favour'd youthful minion
His arms around your fair neck threw;
Not Persia's boasted monarch knew
More bless'd a state, more large dominion.
LYDIA.
And whilst you loved but only me,
Nor then _your_ Lydia stood the second,
And Chloe first, in love's degree;
I thought myself a queen to be,
Nor greater Roman Ilia reckon'd.
HORACE.
Now Cretan Chloe rules me quite;
Skill'd in the lyre and every measure,
For whom I'd die this very night,
If but the Fates, in death's despite,
Would Chloe spare, my soul's best treasure.
LYDIA.
Me Calaeis, Ornytus' young heir!
(The flame is mutual _we_ discover,)
For whom to die _two_ deaths I'd dare,
If the stern Fates would only spare,
And _he could_ live, my youthful lover.
HORACE.
What--if our former love restore
Our bonds, too firm for aught to sever,--
I shake off Chloe; and the door
To Lydia open flies once more;
Returning Lydia, and for ever.
LYDIA.
He, though a beauteous star--you light
As cork, and rough as stormy weather,
That vexes Adria's raging might,
With you to live were my delight,
And willing should we die together.
So this is the offending ode! Was the proposition to be constant not
quite agreeable to the French editor? Or was he in Horace's probable
condition, getting a little up in years? See you, it is a youthful
rival, Juvenis, who troubles him. And Lydia takes care to throw in this
ingredient, the "sweet age." He is not _old_ Ornytus--a hint of
comparison with Horace himself--but his son; indeed, he is hardly
Juvenis, for she soon calls him her dear boy, as much as to say, "_You_
are old enough to be his father!" She carries out this idea, too,
seeming to say, "You may love Chloe--I dare say you do; but, does Chloe
love you? Whereas _our_ passion is mutual."
Our poet, delightful and wise as he generally is, was not wise to match
his wit against that of a woman, and an offended beauty. How miserably
he comes off in every encounter! He would die, forsooth! once--she would
die twice over! There is a hit in his very liver! And as to the
survivorship of Chloe, that she suggests, considering their ages, might
be very natural--but she doubts if her youth _could_ survive should
_she_ die; though she even came to life again, a second time to die, it
would be of no use. What could the foolish poet do after that?
Nothing--but make up the quarrel in the best way he might. He drops his
ears, is a little sulky still--most men are so in these affairs--seldom
generous in love. To pretend to be so is only to encroach on woman's
sweet and noble prerogative, and to assume her great virtue. No man
could keep it up long; he would naturally fall into his virile sulks. So
Horace does not at once open his arms that his Lydia may fall into
them--but stands hesitatingly, rather foolish, his hands behind him, and
puts forward the supposition _If_--that graceless peace-maker. Lydia, on
the contrary--all love, all generosity, is in his arms at once; for he
must at the moment bring them forward, whether he will for love or no,
or Lydia would fall. It is now she looks into his very eyes, and only
playfully, as quizzing his jealousy, reminds him of her Calaeis, her star
of beauty; thus sweetly reproving and as sweetly forgiving the temper of
her Horace--for he is her Horace still--and who can wonder at that? She
will bear with all--will live, will die with him. I look, Eusebius, upon
this ode as a real consolation to your lovers of an ambiguous and
querulous age. Seeing what we are daily becoming, it is a comfort to
think that, should such untoward persons make themselves disagreeable to
all else of human kind, there will be, nevertheless, to each, one
confiding loving creature, to put them in conceit with themselves, and
make them, notwithstanding their many perversities, believe that they
are unoffending male angels, and die in the bewildering fancy that they
are still loveable.
I have little more to say, but that, having been lately in a versifying
mood, I have set to rhyme your story of the cook and the lottery ticket;
and herein I have avoided that malicious propensity of our numerous
tellers of stories, whose only pleasure, as it appears to me, lies in
the plunging the heroes and heroines of their tales into inextricable
troubles and difficulties, and in continuing them in a state of
perplexity beyond the power of human sufferance; and who slur over their
unexpected, and generally ill-contrived escape, as a matter of small
importance; and with an envy of human happiness, like the fiend who sat
scowling on the bliss of Eden, either leave them with sinister
intentions, or absolutely drive them out of the Paradise which they have
so lately prepared for them.
I have lately been reading a very interesting, well conceived in many
respects, and pathetic novel, which, nevertheless, errs in this; and I
even think the pathos is injured by the last page, which is too painful
for _tenderness_, which appears the object of the able author. A
monumental effigy is but the mockery of all life's doings, which are
thus, with their sorrows and their joys, rendered nugatory; and all that
we have been reading, and are interested about, is unnecessarily
presented to us as dust and ashes. Such is the tale of Mount Sorrel.
Perhaps, too, I might say of this, and of other novels of the same kind,
that there is in them an unhealthy egotism; a Byronism of personal
feelings; an ingenious invention of labyrinth meandering into the mazes
of the mind and of the affections, in which there is always
bewilderment, and the escape is rather lucky than foreseen. Such was not
the mode adopted heretofore by more vigorous writers, who preferred
exhibiting the passions by action, and a few simple touches, which came
at once to the heart, without the necessity of unravelling the mismazes
of their course. If Achilles had made a long speech in Elysium about his
feelings, and attempted to describe them, when his question, if his son
excelled in glory, was happily answered, we should have thought less of
him for his egotism, and had much less perfect knowledge of the real
man's heart and soul. Homer simply tells us, that he walked away, with
great strides, greatly rejoicing. I can remember, at this moment, but
one tale in which this style of descriptive searchings into the feelings
is altogether justifiable--Godwin's "_Caleb Williams_;" for there the
ever instant terror, varying by the natural activity and ingenuity of
the mind, which, upon the one pressing point, feverishly hurries into
new, and all possible channels of thought, requires this pervading
absolutism. It is the Erynnis of a bygone creed, in a renovated form of
persecuting fatalism, brought to sport with the daily incidents and
characters of modern life.
I do not wish to be tempted by this course of thought into lengthened
criticism; which I should not have touched upon, had I not thought it
proper to tell you that I have added a conclusion to your tale. Ever
wishing a continuation of the happiness of two human beings, beyond that
location in the story, where most spiteful authors leave them, the
Church door.
* * * * *