English stage. He took the pieces, but he fitted them with music by
himself. After all, this sort of thing has been done by composers
with reference to other composers of the same country. There was,
for instance, a ‘Barber of Seville,’ by Paisiello. Well, Rossini
appropriated the story, composed his own fresh and immortal music for
it, and extinguished Paisiello’s barber for ever. When Dibdin brought
out ‘Rose and Colin,’ a piece which had been ‘set’ by Philidor, he
was asked why he had not retained the clever Frenchman’s sparkling
music. ‘Because,’ answered Charles, ‘Philidor is famous enough, and
I have a reputation of my own to make!’ Philidor’s reputation is now
more connected with chess (for he was _the_ Philidor) than with music.
Nevertheless, he is bracketed with Duni and Monsigny as one of the
founders of modern comic French opera; and the song for Medusa, in his
opera of ‘Persée,’ ‘_J’ai perdu la beauté qui me rendait si vaine_,’
remains a masterpiece of harmony. Philidor was better known than Dibdin
himself, in London, where he died, indifferent that Charles and others
were ‘stealing his thunder,’ with the reputation of being one of the
best-tempered, most upright, and most disinterested men that ever lived.
From 1765 to 1775 was Dibdin’s best time in connection with the drama.
Subsequently he became erratic. He was proprietor, manager, at the
head of a company, or constituting a whole company in himself, now
with audiences, now sadly in want of them: now flourishing like a
prince, living like three, and falling into bankruptcy and rheumatic
gout. He has given an account of his wanderings, in which there is
an incident or two worth the telling, when they refer to musical or
to theatrical matters. From this book we learn that Shuter had an
amusingly sententious critical way with him. When Reddish (George
Canning’s stepfather) first played Posthumus (in ‘Cymbeline’), Shuter
simply remarked, ‘Henceforth, let every villain be called Posthumus
Leonatus.’ And, being asked what he thought of Macklin’s Macbeth, he
solemnly replied: ‘The time has been that when the brains were out the
man would die, and there an end!’
One day, when Dibdin was near the Land’s End, he passed through a
village where he saw several men carrying books and instruments to
church. To his questions, they replied that they were going to practise
for the Sunday service. ‘Very good,’ said sympathising Charley; ‘and
whose music do you sing?’ ‘Oh, Handel, Handel!’ was the rather bold
answer of the leader of the choir. ‘Handel!’ rejoined Dibdin, in much
amazement; ‘don’t you find him a _leetle_ difficult?’ ‘Well,’ replied
the Cornish minstrel, ‘we did at first; but, you see, we altered him,
and so we get on very well with him now.’ Charles, who hated Garrick
and despised Handel, changed the scene of his dramatic incident to
Bath; but it was originally told of the Cornish singers.
It was principally for Dibdin’s own entertainments, not for ‘Dibdin at
Home,’ that he wrote and composed his famous sea-songs. How Dibdin came
to write and compose sea-songs is accounted for by a tradition. Among
the crew of a ship which came into Southampton Water was a cabin-boy
who, disgusted with the tyranny of which he was daily the subject, took
the first opportunity to escape. The boy remained hid in Southampton
till his ship had sailed, and then he appeared in the streets singing
naval ditties for bread. The lad sang so sweetly that people got
interested in him. His name, he said, was Incledon, and he came from
near the Land’s End, Cornwall. Dibdin and Incledon became known to each
other, and the Cornish cabin-boy furnished the naval properties which
the Hampshire poet put into his naval songs.
But this yarn won’t hold water. Incledon, the silvery-toned son of
a Cornish doctor, was articled to the celebrated composer, Jackson
of Exeter, at eight years of age. The boy was the petted favourite
of the musical people of Exeter for about seven years. At the end of
that time, weary of the cathedral choir discipline, for which town
popularity could not compensate, Incledon, in 1779, entered as a common
sailor on board the _Formidable_. He served in the West Indies, took
part in hard fighting, and, after the lapse of about four years, he
determined to go upon the stage as a singer. It was about the year
1783 that Incledon made his first appearance in Southampton and on
its stage, at which time some of the best of Dibdin’s sea-songs had
long been familiar in the public ear. In 1790 Incledon first appeared
in London, as Dermot in ‘The Poor Soldier,’ and for thirty subsequent
years he shared with Braham the glory of being the first of English
melodists. No one ever did, or ever will, sing Stevens’s ‘Storm,’ or
Andrew Cherry’s ‘Bay of Biscay,’ as Incledon sang them and other manly
songs; and no couple of vocalists ever did or ever will sing as Braham
(Valentine) and Incledon (Fitzwalter) sang the former’s important duet,
‘All’s Well’ to Tom Dibdin’s words. There was so much of the sea in
Tom’s songs that some of the best have been frequently attributed to
his father.
It was lucky for that father and the nation that he quarrelled with
managers, wrote, sang, and played on his own hook, and composed the
naval ditties especially, that will make his name last till the New
Zealander seats himself on the ruined arch of London Bridge. These
songs caused Dibdin to be a power in the country, and his services were
not altogether without acknowledgment. Pitt encouraged and paid him to
write, sing, publish, and give away loyal war-songs in the old fighting
time--testimony enough of the minstrel’s value. George III. rewarded
his loyalty by granting him a pension, of which a succeeding Addington
ministry deprived him. The bust of the skilled son of song was
appropriately placed in Greenwich Hospital, where the singer himself
might as appropriately have found a home. Lord Minto patronised an
edition of Dibdin’s songs for the use of the navy. They have not been
quite slap-banged out of use by the crapulous music-halls. At public
dinners far better than the meat is it to hear Ransford sing ‘Yeo heave
ho!’ or Donald King ‘Tom Bowling’--the touching monody to the author’s
good brother the captain of an East Indiaman. It is said that our
Queen conferred a small pension on Dibdin’s suffering daughter, a lady
honourably connected with literature. If this be true, let us be glad
that all literary annuities, if we may so speak, are not granted to
persons far too well off to require them--or to receive them, one would
suppose, without a sense of humiliation.
The religion of Charles Dibdin’s sailors ebbs and flows like the sea,
and that even in one song. Take, for instance, ‘Poor Jack,’ which has
been praised on the very ground of its religious beauty. In the first
verse Jack has more comfort than faith. He is careless, on the chance
of others caring for him:--
Avast! nor don’t think me a milksop so soft
To be taken for trifles a-back;
For they say there’s a Providence sits up aloft,
To keep watch for the life of poor Jack!
In the second verse Jack has heard the chaplain palaver one day, ‘about
souls, heaven, mercy, and such.’ It was, Jack says, as unintelligible
to him as high Dutch. Nevertheless, Jack got at some instruction from
the reverend gentleman:--
For, he said, how a sparrow can’t founder, d’ye see,
Without orders that come down below;
And a many fine things that prov’d clearly to me
That Providence takes us in tow.
For, says he, d’ye mind me, let storms e’er so oft
Take the topsails o’ sailors a-back,
There’s a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft
To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.
In the next verse Jack is worldly again. When Poll is ‘sniv’ling and
piping her eye’ at the idea of parting from him, he says tenderly--and
we can hear the voice of T. P. Cooke saying it--‘Why, what a damn’d
fool you must be!’ Then comes the change in his religious philosophy:--
Can’t you see the world’s wide, and there’s room for us all,
Both for seamen, and lubbers ashore?
And if to Old Davy I _should_ go, dear Poll!
You never will hear of me more.
What then? all’s a hazard!... &c.
Perhaps he ‘may laughing come back,’ and he supports this doctrine of
chances by means of the doctrine of election, in the figure of the
cherub up aloft with his protective power over Jack; and which cherub,
in the last verse, is commissioned, at the end of all things, to ‘look
out a good berth’ for the same theological sailor.
To be sure, such loose theology was to be expected in sailors who had
such chaplains to teach them, as Dibdin delineates in another of his
songs, ‘There’s nothing like grog’:--
T’other day, as the chaplain was preaching,
Behind him I curiously slunk;
And while he our duty was teaching,
As how we should never get drunk,
I show’d him the stuff, and he twigg’d it,
And it soon set his rev’rence agog;
And he swigg’d, and Nick swigg’d,
And Ben swigg’d, and Dick swigg’d,
And I swigg’d, and all of us swigg’d it,
And swore there was nothing like grog!
At a time when old English ballads are supposed to portray English
history, we may point to the above as untruly reflecting naval manners
in England in the last century. It is more of a caricature than a
naval scene in a pantomime, and the morality is as ‘shaky’ as that in
another ballad, ‘When faintly gleams the doubtful day,’ where humanity
in hunting matters is illustrated by hunting the hare to the point of
death, but then protecting ‘the defenceless creature’ by calling off
‘the well-taught hounds:’--
For cruelty should ne’er disgrace
The well-earn’d pleasures of the chase!
Again, of the fox it is said, ‘Unpitied shall the culprit die’:--
To quell his cruel, artful race,
Is labour worthy of the chase;
as if the quelling was not the last thought of squires who breed foxes.
It was very good policy of Dibdin to teach that ‘Every bullet has its
billet,’ but in ‘A sailor and an honest heart’ war’s dangers are the
sailor’s chances, and his philosophy is to ask no more than ‘grog
aboard and girl ashore.’
Ben Backstay and Anna piping their eyes at parting are but sickly
sentimentalities. Bill Bobstay, with his purse always open and his
veins to the same tune, shedding his blood for the king, is like the
stagiest of stage sailors; and Jack Rattlin heaving a sigh as he sits
on the ‘pendant yard,’ and dying for love, with his eyes uplifted,
when he comes down from it, is not the man who could hand, reef, and
steer better than any mate afloat. Indeed Dibdin’s sailors in love are
generally great spooneys; in ‘The Boatswain calls’ there is a whole
shipload of them. Fancy an entire crew heaving ‘fervent sighs’ as
they leave looking at the girls ashore, to turn for consolation to
the windlass with ‘Yo heave ho!’ But even these soft ones are to be
preferred to the tipplers who declare that ‘the best sort of sounding
is sounding the bowl.’ The best side of Dibdin’s philosophy is where he
metrically teaches that ‘a brave British sailor should never despair,’
and pays a compliment to the bold royal tar, the Duke of Clarence, who
got it made into a law that ‘each tar of his rhino should have his
full share,’ and should no more be cheated of his pay, as he used to
be. But there was a lack of sincerity in most of Dibdin’s sentimental
sea-maxims for sailors, and for one who is cheered in dying for love
there are a dozen who are encouraged to find in every port a wife:--
I’ve a spanking wife at Portsmouth Gates,
A pigmy at Goree,
An orange-tawny up the Straits,
A black at St. Lucie;
Thus, whatsomdever course I bend,
I leads a jovial life;
In ev’ry mess I finds a friend,
In ev’ry port a wife.
To our thinking, Charles Dibdin, celebrated as he was for his sea
songs, deserves far higher praise for quite another sort of country
song, of which we will give an example. His sailors are too much
addicted, when storms rage and billows roll, to sling the flowing
bowl; landsmen might fancy that Jack’s life consisted of thinking of
Nancy afloat, hugging her ashore, drinking to her health unceasingly,
and taking a turn of duty with a hornpipe sort of air, as if the
galleries were clapping him enthusiastically. It is all good and
picturesque in its way, but tuneful Charley is more to our liking when
he gets into an English corn-field, strolls down an English lane,
or sits at the door of an English cottage. He is then as natural as
Moreland treating the same subjects on canvas. The fragrance of the
fields comes on the wings of his song, and his English home and peasant
are still more truly English than his English ships and sailors. Take,
for example:--
THE LABOURER’S WELCOME HOME.
The ploughman whistles o’er the furrow,
The hedger joins the vacant strain,
The woodman sings the woodland thorough,
The shepherd’s pipe delights the plain.
Where’er the anxious eye can roam,
Or ear receive the jocund pleasure,
Myriads of beings thronging, flock,
Of Nature’s song to join the measure;
Till, to keep time, the village clock
Sounds sweet the lab’rer’s welcome home!
The hearth swept clean, his partner smiling;
Upon the dining-table smokes
The frugal meal--which, time beguiling,
The ale the harmless jest provokes.
Ye inmates of the lofty dome,
Admire his lot. His children playing,
To share his smiles around him flock,
And faithful Tray, since morn, that straying,
Trudged with him, till the village clock
Proclaim’d the lab’rer’s welcome home.
The cheering faggot burnt to embers,
While lares around their vigils keep,
That Power that poor and rich remembers,
Each thanks, and then retires to sleep.
And now the lark climbs Heav’n’s high dome,
Fresh from repose, toil’s kind reliever;
And furnish’d with his daily stock--
His dog, his staff, his keg, his beaver--
He travels till the village clock
Sounds sweet the lab’rer’s welcome home!
Here the pictures are perfect; each is in its way a little Bewick. If
there is once or twice a slight roughness in the metre, it is such
as may be met with in Cowley; and if the introduction of ‘lares’ at
an English hearth startles us a little, it is just such surprises as
come upon us in Cowley and the poets of his time. The charm of the
above song is greatly enhanced by the music. We have no such songs nor
any such music for English people generally in these days. Music-hall
ruffianism woos the public ear with beastly innuendo, worse than
downright speaking, and the Hurlingham husseydoms, after assisting
at the butchery of doves, talk music-hall slang and play Champagne
Charley quadrilles.
Let us now add a word respecting another child of song, born in
Southampton, and still living when Charles Dibdin came there into the
world--Isaac Watts. Isaac Watts and Charles Dibdin! Why not? They are
not so far apart as you may think. Isaac, the Southampton Nonconformist
schoolmaster’s son, lived from 1674, reign of Charles the Second, to
1748, reign of the second George. Charles Dibdin was, at the latter
period, three years old. The piety of Watts is no more questionable
than the loyalty of Dibdin. Watts upheld piety by simple means in an
impious age. Dibdin sustained loyalty at a time when revolutionary
ideas were struggling into activity at home, and when there were
enemies abroad who found moral support in such a struggle. If Dibdin’s
allegiance found occasionally exaggerated expression, so Watts’s
piety sometimes found a rather arrogant utterance. Dibdin, however,
was--strange as it may appear--more humble and contented than Watts.
In a ballad in ‘The Old Woman of Eighty,’ Dibdin makes a crowd of poor
unlearned country folk sing:--
Come here, ye rich; come here, ye great;
Come here, ye grave: come here, ye gay;
Behold our blest, though humble fate,
Who, while the sun shines, make our hay.
Therein is Christian philosophy with content. Watts makes his well-born
Christian child an insufferable prig, who would have scorned Dibdin’s
half-starved wretch; for example, in the ‘Praise for Mercies’:--
While some poor wretches scarce can tell
Where they may lay their head,
I have a home wherein to dwell
And rest upon my bed.
In Dibdin’s ‘True Courage’ Bob Bounce is ready to eat an enemy alive,
but the minstrel humanises him, and inculcates the maxim that all men
are brothers:--
That my friend Jack or Tom I should rescue from danger,
Or lay my life down for each lad in the mess,
Is nothing at all; ’tis the poor wounded stranger,
And the poorer the more I shall succour distress.
This may be rough morality, but it is of better quality than the
following selfish sample in Watts:
Lord, I ascribe it to thy grace,
And not to chance, _as others do_,
That I was born of Christian race,
And not a heathen or a Jew.
While Dibdin’s Tom or Jack is for ever seeing, after his fashion, a
merciful Providence, Watts’s model child can discern only one armed
with terrors and tortures. Isaac had no idea of one of Charley’s
‘sweet little cherubs’ sitting aloft watchful to preserve; the
Nonconformist’s feverish eye beheld only a demon:--
’Tis dangerous to provoke a god!
His power and vengeance none can tell:
One stroke of his Almighty rod
Shall send young sinners quick to hell.
In the sailor’s philosophy all is harmony; but Watts finds discord
where other men find none. Jack does not believe that ‘dogs delight to
bark and bite,’ nor that ‘God hath made them so.’ A pat on the head
from a master’s hand is the supreme delight of the ever-faithful dog.
And if ‘bears and lions growl and fight,’ it is not that ‘it is their
nature to;’ any more, at least, than it is the nature of man. It was
Nelson who told the young midshipman, as part of his duties, to ‘hate a
Frenchman like the devil!’ Dibdin only allowed such feeling in the heat
and fury of battle:--
’Tis a furious lion in battle, so let it!
But, fury appeased, ’tis in mercy a lamb!
Watts is always readiest with unpleasant figures. Ordinary parents
forgive lovingly the faults of children, but Watts tells each little
angelic rebel that--
The ravens shall pick out their eyes,
And eagles eat the same!
Moreover, Watts forgets grace, occasionally, for chance, as in the
couplet:--
If we had been ducks, we might dabble in mud,
Or dogs, we might play till it ended in blood,
So foul and so fierce are their natures.
But Thomas and William, and such pretty names,
Should be cleanly and harmless, as doves or as lambs,
Those lovely, sweet, innocent creatures.
Watts’s intentions were as honest as Dibdin’s, and both, no doubt,
often erred; but the silversmith’s son was never so loose in logic,
philosophy, truth, and metre, as the dwarfish son of the schoolmaster
is in the sample just given. It must have been some such sample that
soured the spirit of ‘bold Bradbury,’ another dissenting minister,
who suspected Watts of not being a good Trinitarian. Once Bradbury’s
clerk gave out one of Watts’s hymns, to be sung before the sermon.
The minister looked down from the pulpit and said: ‘No, sir, none of
Watts’s whims here, if you please.’ In one of the anniversaries of 1688
Bradbury sang, at a public dinner, ‘The Roast Beef of Old England!’ Had
he lived long enough he would have sung with equally loyal zest, Tom
Dibdin’s famous anti-invasion song, ‘The tight little Island.’
We are not disposed to touch upon Dibdin’s domestic story. A good deal
is said in the words that his children loved, honoured, and reverenced
their mother. His life led him too much, too far, and too long away
from home for the fine domestic sympathies to have ardent play. Even
before his melancholy death in 1814, his sons, Charles and Thomas,
had distinguished themselves, but they lacked the grace and power
of musical composition so remarkable in the father. But in dramatic
composition they were his equals, and Tom especially was nearly equal
with, though not so prolific as, his father in song-writing.
How Charles the younger caught the ‘trick’ of his father may be seen in
a song (published as his in ‘My Spouse and I’), of which here is one
stanza:--
We tars have a maxim, your honours, d’ye see,
To live in the same way we fight;
We never give in, and when running a-lee,
We pipe hands the vessel to right.
It may do for a lubber to snivel and that,
If by chance on a shoal he be cast,
But a tar among breakers, or thrown on a flat,
Pull away, tug and tug, to the last;
With a yeo, yeo, yeo, &c.
It was the old Dibdin philosophy of ‘Never say die.’
Tom Dibdin is generally supposed to have adopted the stage for a
profession only after he had tried another calling--apprentice
to an upholsterer. This is not quite correct. Tom made his first
appearance on the stage before he went to school. He acted, or, rather,
represented, Cupid in a pageant in which Mrs. Siddons sat as the
goddess Venus. As the great actress took him in hand to rectify his
dress, little Tom heard the first words from her lips that ever fell on
his ear. They were directed to a female dresser, and they were solemnly
enunciated: ‘Ma’am, could you favour me with a pin?’ Tom, as he sat at
her feet in the pageant, felt a sort of stage-fright, but Sarah kept
him under control by repeated murmured promises that if he were a good
boy there was barley-sugar in store for him.
As an upholsterer’s apprentice Tom vexed his master’s soul and injured
all his materials. The lad was barely eighteen when he made his plunge
into the drama. Only the other day, we looked with interest on the
front of the old Eastbourne Theatre, in the centre of the village, away
from the modern sea-town. It has still, or had a little while ago,
a dramatic-looking exterior. Richland, one of the managing partners
of the house, had a nephew, a handsome lad of fourteen years of age,
who printed the bills, did general business, and was called ‘Little
Jerrold.’ When little Jerrold got to York as a manager, he put a fine
handle to his name, and was thenceforth known for some time as Mr.
Fitz-Jerrold. Tom Dibdin proposed to come out at the Eastbourne Theatre
as Norval. Jerrold, on preparing the play-bill, asked him in what name
Tom intended to appear. Dibdin replied, ‘My name is Norval!’ ‘I know it
is,’ said Jerrold, ‘on the Grampian hills, but what is it in Sussex?’
The name adopted was Merchant. After all, instead of ‘journeying with
this intent,’ and playing Norval, Dibdin ‘gilded his humble name’ by
playing Valentine, in one of his father’s numerous musical pieces, and
singing ‘Poor Jack,’ to the delight of the Eastbourne audience. The
handsome Jerrold above alluded to was the father of Douglas Jerrold,
whom John Kemble, as Rolla, once carried on his shoulder as Cora’s
child, and who ended his career too early, leaving behind him a
reputation for wit second to none.
The most amusing portion of Tom Dibdin’s reminiscences are the
illustrations of social as well as dramatic life with which it abounds.
Tom belonged to one of those Beef Steak Clubs (this one was theatrical)
which seem never to have had the dish on the table from which the name
was supposed to be derived. One of their intellectual sports consisted
in a member naming an actor, and then calling on another member for a
quotation which should be applicable to the actor named. In this way
some one named Incledon, whose talk was a bubbling talk, interlarded
with ‘my boy,’ and ‘my dear boy,’ as is the traditionary manner with
familiar players still. Incledon being named, Const, the magistrate,
being called upon, instantly quoted the line ‘Gratiano speaks an
infinite deal of nothing.’ Nothing could be apter. Then another
member, naming George Frederick Cooke, called on Irish Johnstone for
the illustration, and Jack, without hesitation, enunciated ‘Load o’
whisky,’ giving this appropriate turn to the name of an operatic drama
then in vogue--‘Lodoiska.’ Emery was once called upon in connection
with his own name; but he was tired and embarrassed, and at length
he stammered forth, apologetically, ‘Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this
troubles me!’ unconscious that he had fulfilled all conditions, and had
illustrated himself in a line from Shakespeare.