who cross his path, but whom he regards for the most part with “that
lofty tranquillity which is inseparable from high rank when it is
accompanied by virtue.” In vain Miss Euphemia Dundas writes him amorous
notes, and entraps him into embarrassing situations. In vain Lady
Sara Roos--married, I regret to say--pursues him to his lodgings, and
wrings “her snowy arms” while she confesses the hopeless nature of her
infatuation. The irreproachable Thaddeus replaces her tenderly but
firmly on a sofa, and as soon as possible sends her home in a cab. It
is only when the “orphan heiress,” Miss Beaufort, makes her appearance
on the scene, “a large Turkish shawl enveloping her fine form, a modest
grace observable in every limb,” that the exile’s haughty soul succumbs
to love. Miss Beaufort has been admirably brought up by her aunt,
Lady Somerset, who is a person of great distinction, and who gives
“conversaziones,” as famous in their way as Mrs. Proudie’s.--“There
the young Mary Beaufort listened to pious divines of every Christian
persuasion. There she gathered wisdom from real philosophers; and, in
the society of our best living poets, cherished an enthusiasm for all
that is great and good. On these evenings, Sir Robert Somerset’s house
reminded the visitor of what he had read or imagined of the School of
Athens.”
Never do hero and heroine approach each other with such spasms of
modesty as Thaddeus and Miss Beaufort. Their hearts expand with
emotion, but their mutual sense of propriety keeps them remote from all
vulgar understandings. In vain “Mary’s rosy lips seemed to breathe balm
while she spoke.” In vain “her beautiful eyes shone with benevolence.”
The exile, standing proudly aloof, watches with bitter composure the
attentions of more frivolous suitors. “His arms were folded, his hat
pulled over his forehead; and his long dark eye-lashes shading his
downcast eyes imparted a dejection to his whole air, which wrapped her
weeping heart round and round with regretful pangs.” What with his
lashes, and his hidden griefs, the majesty of his mournful moods, and
the pleasing pensiveness of his lighter ones, Thaddeus so far eclipses
his English rivals that they may be pardoned for wishing he had kept
his charms in Poland. Who that has read the matchless paragraph which
describes the first unveiling of the hero’s symmetrical leg can forget
the sensation it produces?
“Owing to the warmth of the weather, Thaddeus came out this morning
without boots; and it being the first time the exquisite proportion
of his limb had been seen by any of the present company excepting
Euphemia” (why had Euphemia been so favoured?), “Lascelles, bursting
with an emotion which he would not call envy, measured the count’s fine
leg with his scornful eye.”
When Thaddeus at last expresses his attachment for Miss Beaufort, he
does so kneeling respectfully in her uncle’s presence, and in these
well-chosen words: “Dearest Miss Beaufort, may I indulge myself in the
idea that I am blessed with your esteem?” Whereupon Mary whispers to
Sir Robert: “Pray, Sir, desire him to rise. I am already sufficiently
overwhelmed!” and the solemn deed is done.
“Thaddeus of Warsaw” may be called the “Last of the Heroes,” and take
rank with the “Last of the Mohicans,” the “Last of the Barons,” the
“Last of the Cavaliers,” and all the finalities of fiction. With him
died that noble race who expressed our great-grandmothers’ artless
ideals of perfection. Seventy years later, D’Israeli made a desperate
effort to revive a pale phantom of departed glory in “Lothair,” that
nursling of the gods, who is emphatically a hero, and nothing more.
“London,” we are gravely told, “was at Lothair’s feet.” He is at once
the hope of United Italy, and the bulwark of the English Establishment.
He is--at twenty-two--the pivot of fashionable, political, and clerical
diplomacy. He is beloved by the female aristocracy of Great Britain;
and mysterious ladies, whose lofty souls stoop to no conventionalities,
die happy with his kisses on their lips. Five hundred mounted gentlemen
compose his simple country escort, and the coat of his groom of the
chambers is made in Saville Row. What more could a hero want? What more
could be lavished upon him by the most indulgent of authors? Yet who
shall compare Lothair to the noble Thaddeus nodding his hearse-like
plumes,--Thaddeus dedicated to the “urbanity of the brave,” and
embalmed in the tears of Poland? The inscrutable creator of Lothair
presented his puppet to a mocking world; but all England and much of
the Continent dilated with correct emotions when Thaddeus, “uniting
to the courage of a man the sensibility of a woman, and the exalted
goodness of an angel” (I quote from an appreciative critic), knelt at
Miss Beaufort’s feet.
Ten years later “Pride and Prejudice” made its unobtrusive appearance,
and was read by that “saving remnant” to whom is confided the
intellectual welfare of their land. Mrs. Elwood, the biographer of
England’s “Literary Ladies,” tells us, in the few careless pages
which she deems sufficient for Miss Austen’s novels, that there _are_
people who think these stories “worthy of ranking with those of Madame
d’Arblay and Miss Edgeworth”; but that in their author’s estimation
(and, by inference, in her own), “they took up a much more humble
station.” Yet, tolerant even of such inferiority, Mrs. Elwood bids
us remember that although “the character of Emma is perhaps too
manœuvring and too plotting to be perfectly amiable,” that of Catherine
Morland “will not suffer greatly even from a comparison with Miss
Burney’s interesting Evelina”; and that “although one is occasionally
annoyed by the underbred personages of Miss Austen’s novels, the
annoyance is only such as we should feel if we were actually in their
company.”
It was thus that our genteel great-grandmothers, enamoured of lofty
merit and of refined sensibility, regarded Elizabeth Bennet’s
relations.
ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS
Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he wrote it. We
are seldom tiresome to ourselves.--DR. JOHNSON.
It is commonly believed that the extinction of verse--of verse in the
bulk, which is the way in which our great-grandfathers consumed it--is
due to the vitality of the novel. People, we are told, read rhyme
and metre with docility, only because they wanted to hear a story,
only because there was no other way in which they could get plenty of
sentiment and romance. As soon as the novel supplied them with all
the sentiment they wanted, as soon as it told them the story in plain
prose, they turned their backs upon poetry forever.
There is a transparent inadequacy in this solution of a problem which
still confronts the patient reader of buried masterpieces. Novels were
plenty when Mr. William Hayley’s “Triumphs of Temper” went through
twelve editions, and when Dr. Darwin’s “Botanic Garden” was received
with deferential delight. But could any dearth of fiction persuade us
now to read the “Botanic Garden”? Were we shipwrecked in company with
the “Triumphs of Temper,” would we ever finish the first canto? Novels
stood on every English book-shelf when Fox read “Madoc” aloud at night
to his friends, and they stayed up, so he says, an hour after their
bedtime to hear it. Could that miracle be worked to-day? Sir Walter
Scott, with indestructible amiability, reread “Madoc” to please Miss
Seward, who, having “steeped” her own eyes “in transports of tears and
sympathy,” wrote to him that it carried “a master-key to every bosom
which common good sense and anything resembling a human heart inhabit.”
Scott, unwilling to resign all pretensions to a human heart, tried hard
to share the Swan’s emotions, and failed. “I cannot feel quite the
interest I would like to do,” he patiently confessed.
If Southey’s poems were not read as Scott’s and Moore’s and Byron’s
were read (give us another Byron, and we will read him with forty
thousand novels knocking at our doors!); if they were not paid for
out of the miraculous depths of Murray’s Fortunatus’s purse, they
nevertheless enjoyed a solid reputation of their own. They are
mentioned in all the letters of the period (save and except Lord
Byron’s ribald pages) with carefully measured praise, and they enabled
their author to accept the laureateship on self-respecting terms. They
are at least, as Sir Leslie Stephen reminds us, more readable than
Glover’s “Leonidas,” or Wilkie’s “Epigoniad,” and they are shorter,
too. Yet the “Leonidas,” an epic in nine books, went through four
editions; whereupon its elate author expanded it into twelve books; and
the public, undaunted, kept on buying it for years. The “Epigoniad”
is also in nine books. It is on record that Hume, who seldom dallied
with the poets, read all nine, and praised them warmly. Mr. Wilkie was
christened the “Scottish Homer,” and he bore that modest title until
his death. It was the golden age of epics. The ultimatum of the modern
publisher, “No poet need apply!” had not yet blighted the hopes and
dimmed the lustre of genius. “Everybody thinks he can write verse,”
observed Sir Walter mournfully, when called upon for the hundredth
time to help a budding aspirant to fame.
With so many competitors in the field, it was uncommonly astute in
Mr. Hayley to address himself exclusively to that sex which poets
and orators call “fair.” There is a formal playfulness, a ponderous
vivacity about the “Triumphs of Temper,” which made it especially
welcome to women. In the preface of the first edition the author
gallantly laid his laurels at their feet, observing modestly that it
was his desire, however “ineffectual,” “to unite the sportive wildness
of Ariosto and the more serious sublime painting of Dante with some
portion of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination, and the
moral graces of Pope; and to do this, if possible, without violating
those rules of propriety which Mr. Cambridge has illustrated, by
example as well as by precept, in the ‘Scribleriad,’ and in his
sensible preface to that elegant and learned poem.”
Accustomed as we are to the confusions of literary perspective,
this grouping of Dante, Ariosto, and Mr. Cambridge does seem a
trifle foreshortened. But our ancestors had none of that sensitive
shrinking from comparisons which is so characteristic of our timid and
thin-skinned generation. They did not edge off from the immortals,
afraid to breathe their names lest it be held lèse-majesté; they used
them as the common currency of criticism. Why should not Mr. Hayley
have challenged a contrast with Dante and Ariosto, when Miss Seward
assured her little world--which was also Mr. Hayley’s world--that
he had the “wit and ease” of Prior, a “more varied versification”
than Pope, and “the fire and the invention of Dryden, without any
of Dryden’s absurdity”? Why should he have questioned her judgment,
when she wrote to him that Cowper’s “Task” would “please and instruct
the race of common readers,” who could not rise to the beauties of
Akenside, or Mason, or Milton, or of his (Mr. Hayley’s) “exquisite
‘Triumphs of Temper’”? There was a time, indeed, when she sorrowed lest
his “inventive, classical, and elegant muse” should be “deplorably
infected” by the growing influence of Wordsworth; but, that peril past,
he rose again, the bright particular star of a wide feminine horizon.
Mr. Hayley’s didacticism is admirably adapted to his readers. The men
of the eighteenth century were not expected to keep their tempers;
it was the sweet prerogative of wives and daughters to smooth the
roughened current of family life. Accordingly the heroine of the
“Triumphs,” being bullied by her father, a fine old gentleman of the
Squire Western type, maintains a superhuman cheerfulness, gives up the
ball for which she is already dressed, wreathes her countenance in
smiles, and
with sportive ease,
Prest her Piano-forte’s favourite keys.
The men of the eighteenth century were all hard drinkers. Therefore Mr.
Hayley conjures the “gentle fair” to avoid even the mild debauchery of
siruped fruits,--
For the sly fiend, of every art possest,
Steals on th’ affection of her female guest;
And, by her soft address, seducing each,
Eager she plies them with a brandy peach.
They with keen lip the luscious fruit devour,
But swiftly feel its peace-destroying power.
Quick through each vein new tides of frenzy roll,
All evil passions kindle in the soul;
Drive from each feature every cheerful grace,
And glare ferocious in the sallow face;
The wounded nerves in furious conflict tear,
Then sink in blank dejection and despair.
All this combustle, to use Gray’s favourite word, about a brandy peach!
But women have ever loved to hear their little errors magnified. In the
matter of poets, preachers and confessors, they are sure to choose the
denunciatory.
Dr. Darwin, as became a scientist and a sceptic, addressed his
ponderous “Botanic Garden” to male readers. It is true that he offers
much good advice to women, urging upon them especially those duties and
devotions from which he, as a man, was exempt. It is true also that
when he first contemplated writing his epic, he asked Miss Seward--so,
at least, she said--to be his collaborator; an honour which she
modestly declined, as not “strictly proper for a female pen.” But the
peculiar solidity, the encyclopædic qualities of this masterpiece,
fitted it for such grave students as Mr. Edgeworth, who loved to
be amply instructed. It is a poem replete with information, and
information of that disconnected order in which the Edgeworthian soul
took true delight. We are told, not only about flowers and vegetables,
but about electric fishes, and the salt mines of Poland; about Dr.
Franklin’s lightning rod, and Mrs. Damer’s bust of the Duchess of
Devonshire; about the treatment of paralytics, and the mechanism of the
common pump. We pass from the death of General Wolfe at Quebec to the
equally lamented demise of a lady botanist at Derby. We turn from the
contemplation of Hannibal crossing the Alps to consider the charities
of a benevolent young woman named Jones.
Sound, Nymphs of Helicon! the trump of Fame,
And teach Hibernian echoes Jones’s name;
Bind round her polished brow the civic bay,
And drag the fair Philanthropist to day.
Pagan divinities disport themselves on one page, and Christian
saints on another. St. Anthony preaches, not to the little fishes of
the brooks and streams, but to the monsters of the deep,--sharks,
porpoises, whales, seals and dolphins, that assemble in a sort of
aquatic camp-meeting on the shores of the Adriatic, and “get religion”
in the true revivalist spirit.
The listening shoals the quick contagion feel,
Pant on the floods, inebriate with their zeal;
Ope their wide jaws, and bow their slimy heads,
And dash with frantic fins their foamy beds.
For a freethinker, Dr. Darwin is curiously literal in his treatment
of hagiology and the Scriptures. His Nebuchadnezzar (introduced as an
illustration of the “Loves of the Plants”) is not a bestialized mortal,
but a veritable beast, like one of Circe’s swine, only less easily
classified in natural history.
Long eagle plumes his arching neck invest,
Steal round his arms and clasp his sharpened breast;
Dark brindled hairs in bristling ranks behind,
Rise o’er his back and rustle in the wind;
Clothe his lank sides, his shrivelled limbs surround,
And human hands with talons print the ground.
Lolls his red tongue, and from the reedy side
Of slow Euphrates laps the muddy tide.
Silent, in shining troups, the Courtier throng
Pursue their monarch as he crawls along;
E’en Beauty pleads in vain with smiles and tears,
Not Flattery’s self can pierce his pendant ears.
The picture of the embarrassed courtiers promenading slowly after this
royal phenomenon, and of the lovely inconsiderates proffering their
vain allurements, is so ludicrous as to be painful. Even Miss Seward,
who held that the “Botanic Garden” combined “the sublimity of Michael
Angelo, the correctness and elegance of Raphael, with the glow of
Titian,” was shocked by Nebuchadnezzar’s pendant ears, and admitted
that the passage was likely to provoke inconsiderate laughter.
The first part of Dr. Darwin’s poem, “The Economy of Vegetation,” was
warmly praised by critics and reviewers. Its name alone secured for it
esteem. A few steadfast souls, like Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, refused to
accept even vegetation from a sceptic’s hands; but it was generally
conceded that the poet had “entwined the Parnassian laurel with the
balm of Pharmacy” in a very creditable manner. The last four cantos,
however,--indiscreetly entitled “The Loves of the Plants,”--awakened
grave concern. They were held unfit for female youth, which, being
then taught driblets of science in a guarded and muffled fashion, was
not supposed to know that flowers had any sex, much less that they
practised polygamy. The glaring indiscretion of their behaviour in
the “Botanic Garden,” their seraglios, their amorous embraces and
involuntary libertinism, offended British decorum, and, what was
worse, exposed the poem to Canning’s pungent ridicule. When the “Loves
of the Triangles” appeared in the “Anti-Jacobin,” all England--except
Whigs and patriots who never laughed at Canning’s jokes--was moved to
inextinguishable mirth. The mock seriousness of the introduction and
argument, the “horrid industry” of the notes, the contrast between
the pensiveness of the Cycloid and the innocent playfulness of the
Pendulum, the solemn headshake over the licentious disposition of
Optics, and the description of the three Curves that requite the
passion of the Rectangle, all burlesque with unfeeling delight Dr.
Darwin’s ornate pedantry.
Let shrill Acoustics tune the tiny lyre,
With Euclid sage fair Algebra conspire;
Let Hydrostatics, simpering as they go,
Lead the light Naiads on fantastic toe.
The indignant poet, frigidly vain, and immaculately free from any
taint of humour, was as much scandalized as hurt by this light-hearted
mockery. Being a dictator in his own little circle at Derby, he was
naturally disposed to consider the “Anti-Jacobin” a menace to genius
and to patriotism. His criticisms and his prescriptions had hitherto
been received with equal submission. When he told his friends that
Akenside was a better poet than Milton,--“more polished, pure, and
dignified,” they listened with respect. When he told his patients
to eat acid fruits with plenty of sugar and cream, they obeyed
with alacrity. He had a taste for inventions, and first made Mr.
Edgeworth’s acquaintance by showing him an ingenious carriage of his
own contrivance, which was designed to facilitate the movements of the
horse, and enable it to turn with ease. The fact that Dr. Darwin was
three times thrown from this vehicle, and that the third accident lamed
him for life, in no way disconcerted the inventor or his friends, who
loved mechanism for its own sake, and apart from any given results. Dr.
Darwin defined a fool as one who never in his life tried an experiment.
So did Mr. Day, of “Sandford and Merton” fame, who experimented in the
training of animals, and was killed by an active young colt that had
failed to grasp the system.
The “Botanic Garden” was translated into French, Italian, and
Portuguese, to the great relief of Miss Seward, who hated to think
that the immortality of such a work depended upon the preservation
of a single tongue. “Should that tongue perish,” she wrote proudly,
“translations would at least retain all the host of beauties which do
not depend upon felicities of verbal expression.”
If the interminable epics which were so popular in these halcyon days
had condescended to the telling of stories, we might believe that they
were read, or at least occasionally read, as a substitute for prose
fiction. But the truth is that most of them are solid treatises on
morality, or agriculture, or therapeutics, cast into the blankest of
blank verse, and valued, presumably, for the sake of the information
they conveyed. Their very titles savour of statement rather than of
inspiration. Nobody in search of romance would take up Dr. Grainger’s
“Sugar Cane,” or Dyer’s “Fleece,” or the Rev. Richard Polwhele’s
“English Orator.” Nobody desiring to be idly amused would read the
“Vales of Weaver,” or a long didactic poem on “The Influence of Local
Attachment.” It was not because he felt himself to be a poet that Dr.
Grainger wrote the “Sugar Cane” in verse, but because that was the form
most acceptable to the public. The ever famous line,
“Now Muse, let’s sing of rats!”
which made merry Sir Joshua Reynolds and his friends, is indicative of
the good doctor’s struggles to employ an uncongenial medium. He wanted
to tell his readers how to farm successfully in the West Indies; how
to keep well in a treacherous climate; what food to eat, what drugs
to take, how to look after the physical condition of negro servants,
and guard them from prevalent maladies. These were matters on which
the author was qualified to speak, and on which he does speak with
all a physician’s frankness; but they do not lend themselves to lofty
strains. Whole pages of the “Sugar Cane” read like prescriptions and
dietaries done into verse. It is as difficult to sing with dignity
about a disordered stomach as about rats and cockroaches; and Dr.
Grainger’s determination to leave nothing untold leads him to dwell
with much feeling, but little grace, on all the disadvantages of the
tropics.
Musquitoes, sand-flies, seek the sheltered roof,
And with fell rage the stranger guest assail,
Nor spare the sportive child; from their retreats
Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad.
The truthfulness and sobriety of this last line deserve commendation.
Cockroaches in the open _are_ displeasing to sensitive souls; and a
footnote, half a page long, tells us everything we could possibly
desire--or fear--to know about these insects. As an example of Dr.
Grainger’s thoroughness in the treatment of such themes, I quote with
delight his approved method of poisoning alligators.
With Misnian arsenic, deleterious bane,
Pound up the ripe cassada’s well-rasped root,
And form in pellets; these profusely spread
Round the Cane-groves where skulk the vermin-breed.
They, greedy, and unweeting of the bait,
Crowd to the inviting cates, and swift devour
Their palatable Death; for soon they seek
The neighbouring spring; and drink, and swell, and die.
Then follow some very sensible remarks about the unwholesomeness of the
water in which the dead alligators are decomposing,--remarks which Mr.
Kipling has unconsciously parodied:--
But ’e gets into the drinking casks, and then o’ course we dies.
The wonderful thing about the “Sugar Cane” is that it was read;--nay,
more, that it was read aloud at the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and
though the audience laughed, it listened. Dodsley published the poem in
handsome style; a second edition was called for; it was reprinted in
Jamaica, and pirated (what were the pirates thinking about!) in 1766.
Even Dr. Johnson wrote a friendly notice in the London “Chronicle,”
though he always maintained that the poet might just as well have sung
the beauties of a parsley-bed or of a cabbage garden. He took the same
high ground when Boswell called his attention to Dyer’s “Fleece.”--“The
subject, Sir, cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically
of serges and druggets?”
It was not for the sake of sentiment or story that the English public
read “The Fleece.” Nor could it have been for practical guidance; for
farmers, even in 1757, must have had some musty almanacs, some plain
prose manuals to advise them. They could never have waited to learn
from an epic poem that
the coughing pest
From their green pastures sweeps whole flocks away,
or that
Sheep also pleurisies and dropsies know,
or that
The infectious scab, arising from extremes
Of want or surfeit, is by water cured
Of lime, or sodden stave-acre, or oil
Dispersive of Norwegian tar.
Did the British woolen-drapers of the period require to be told in
verse about
Cheyney, and bayse, and serge, and alepine,
Tammy, and crape, and the long countless list
Of woolen webs.
Surely they knew more about their own dry-goods than did Mr. Dyer. Is
it possible that British parsons read Mr. Polwhele’s “English Orator”
for the sake of his somewhat confused advice to preachers?--
Meantime thy Style familiar, that alludes
With pleasing Retrospect to recent Scenes
Or Incidents amidst thy Flock, fresh graved
On Memory, shall recall their scattered Thoughts,
And interest every Bosom. With the Voice
Of condescending Gentleness address
Thy kindred People.