he been more than eight years old when it was written. Poor Coleridge,
always in need of a guinea or two, was bidden to write some descriptive
lines for the “Keepsake,” on an engraving by Parris of the Garden of
Boccaccio; a delightful picture of nine ladies and three gentlemen
picnicking in a park, with arcades as tall as aqueducts, a fountain
as vast as Niagara, and butterflies twice the size of the rabbits.
Coleridge, exempt by nature from an unserviceable sense of humour,
executed this commission in three pages of painstaking verse, and was
severely censured for mentioning “in terms not sufficiently guarded,
one of the most impure and mischievous books that could find its way
into the hands of an innocent female.”
The system of first securing an illustration, and then ordering a poem
to match it, seemed right and reasonable to the editor of the annual,
who paid a great deal for his engravings, and little or nothing for his
poetry. Sometimes the poet was not even granted a sight of the picture
he was expected to describe. We find Lady Blessington writing to Dr.
William Beattie,--the best-natured man of his day,--requesting “three
or four stanzas” for an annual called “Buds and Blossoms,” which was
to contain portraits of the children of noble families. The particular
“buds” whose unfolding he was asked to immortalize were the three sons
of the Duke of Buccleuch; and it was gently hinted that “an allusion
to the family would add interest to the subject”;--in plain words,
that a little well-timed flattery might be trusted to expand the sales.
Another year the same unblushing petitioner was even more hardy in her
demand.
“Will you write me a page of verse for the portrait of Miss Forester?
The young lady is seated with a little dog on her lap, which she looks
at rather pensively. She is fair, with light hair, and is in mourning.”
Here is an inspiration for a poet. A picture, which he has not seen, of
a young lady in mourning looking pensively at a little dog! And poor
Beattie was never paid a cent for these effusions. His sole rewards
were a few words of thanks, and Lady Blessington’s cards for parties he
was too ill to attend.
More business-like poets made a specialty of fitting pictures with
verses, as a tailor fits customers with coats. A certain Mr. Harvey,
otherwise lost to fame, was held to be unrivalled in this art. For many
years his “chaste and classic pen” supplied the annuals with flowing
stanzas, equally adapted to the timorous taste of editors, and to
the limitations of the “innocent females” for whom the volumes were
predestined. “Mr. Harvey embodies in two or three lines the expression
of a whole picture,” says an enthusiastic reviewer, “and at the same
time turns his inscription into a little gem of poetry.” As a specimen
gem, I quote one of four verses accompanying an engraving called
Morning Dreams,--a young woman reclining on a couch, and simpering
vapidly at the curtains:--
She has been dreaming, and her thoughts are still
On their far journey in the land of dreams;
The forms we call--but may not chase--at will,
And sweet low voices, soft as distant streams.
This is a fair sample of the verse supplied for Christmas annuals,
which, however “chaste and classic,” was surely never intended to be
read. It is only right, however, to remember that Thackeray’s “Piscator
and Piscatrix” was written at Lady Blessington’s behest, to accompany
Wattier’s engraving of The Happy Anglers; and that Thackeray told
Locker he was so much pleased with this picture, and so engrossed with
his own poem, that he forgot to shave for the two whole days he was
working at it. To write “good occasional verse,” by which he meant
verse begged or ordered for some such desperate emergency as Lady
Blessington’s, was, in his eyes, an intellectual feat. It represented
difficulties overcome, like those wonderful old Italian frescoes fitted
so harmoniously into unaccommodating spaces. Nothing can be more
charming than “Piscator and Piscatrix,” and nothing can be more insipid
than the engraving which inspired the lively rhymes:
As on this pictured page I look,
This pretty tale of line and hook,
As though it were a novel-book,
Amuses and engages:
I know them both, the boy and girl,
She is the daughter of an Earl,
The lad (that has his hair in curl)
My lord the County’s page is.
A pleasant place for such a pair!
The fields lie basking in the glare;
No breath of wind the heavy air
Of lazy summer quickens.
Hard by you see the castle tall,
The village nestles round the wall,
As round about the hen, its small
Young progeny of chickens.
The verses may be read in any edition of Thackeray’s ballads; but when
we have hunted up the “pictured page” in a mouldy old “Keepsake,” and
see an expressionless girl, a featureless boy, an indistinguishable
castle, and no village, we are tempted to agree with Charles Lamb, who
swore that he liked poems to explain pictures, and not pictures to
illustrate poems. “Your woodcut is a rueful _lignum mortis_.”
There was a not unnatural ambition on the part of publishers and
editors to secure for their annuals one or two names of repute, with
which to leaven the mass of mediocrity. It mattered little if the
distinguished writer conscientiously contributed the feeblest offspring
of his pen; that was a reasonable reckoning,--distinguished writers
do the same to-day; but it mattered a great deal if, as too often
happened, he broke his word, and failed to contribute anything. Then
the unhappy editor was compelled to publish some such apologetic note
as this, from the “Amulet” of 1833. “The first sheet of the ‘Amulet’
was reserved for my friend Mr. Bulwer, who had kindly tendered me his
assistance; but, in consequence of various unavoidable circumstances”
(a pleasure trip on the Rhine), “he has been compelled to postpone
his aid until next year.” On such occasions, the “reserved” pages
were filled by some veteran annualist, like Mr. Alaric Attila Watts,
editor of the “Literary Souvenir”; or perhaps Mr. Thomas Haynes Bailey,
he who wrote “I’d be a Butterfly,” and “Gaily the Troubadour,” was
persuaded to warble some such appropriate sentiment as this in the
“Forget-Me-Not”:--
It is a book we christen thus,
Less fleeting than the flower;
And ’twill recall the past to us
With talismanic power;
which was a true word spoken in rhyme. Nothing recalls that faded past,
with its simpering sentimentality, its reposeful ethics, its shut-in
standards, and its differentiation of the masculine and feminine
intellects, like the yellow pages of an annual.
Tom Moore, favourite of gods and men, was singled out by publishers as
the lode-star of their destinies, as the poet who could be best trusted
to impart to the “Amethyst” or the “Talisman” (how like Pullman cars
they sound!) that “elegant lightness” which befitted its mission in
life. His accounts of the repeated attacks made on his virtue, and the
repeated repulses he administered, fill by no means the least amusing
pages of his journal. The first attempt was made by Orne, who, in
1826, proposed that Moore should edit a new annual on the plan of the
“Souvenir”; and who assured the poet--always as deep in difficulties
as Micawber--that, if the enterprise proved successful, it would yield
him from five hundred to a thousand pounds a year. Moore, dazzled but
not duped, declined the task; and the following summer, the engraver
Heath made him a similar proposition, but on more assured terms. Heath
was then preparing to launch upon the world of fashion his gorgeous
“Keepsake”--“the toy-shop of literature,” Lockhart called it; and he
offered Moore, first five hundred, and then seven hundred pounds a
year, if he would accept the editorship. Seven hundred pounds loomed
large in the poet’s fancy, but pride forbade the bargain. The author of
“Lalla Rookh” could not consent to bow his laurelled head, and pilot
the feeble Fatimas and Zelicas, the noble infants in coral necklets,
and the still nobler ladies with pearl pendants on their brows, into
the safe harbour of boudoir and drawing-room. He made this clear to
Heath, who, nothing daunted, set off at once for Abbotsford, and laid
his proposals at the feet of Sir Walter Scott, adding to his bribe
another hundred pounds.
Scott, the last man in Christendom to have undertaken such an office,
or to have succeeded in it, softened his refusal with a good-natured
promise to contribute to the “Keepsake” when it was launched. He was
not nervous about his literary standing, and he had no sensitive fear
of lowering it by journeyman’s work. “I have neither the right nor
the wish,” he wrote once to Murray, “to be considered above a common
labourer in the trenches.” Moore, however, was far from sharing
this modest unconcern. When Reynolds, on whom the editorship of the
“Keepsake” finally devolved, asked him for some verses, he peremptorily
declined. Then began a system of pursuit and escape, of assault and
repulse, which casts the temptations of St. Anthony into the shade.
“By day and night,” so Moore declares, Reynolds was “after” him,
always increasing the magnitude of his bribe. At last he forced a check
for a hundred pounds into the poet’s empty pocket (for all the world
like a scene in Caran d’Ache’s “Histoire d’un Chèque”), imploring in
return a hundred lines of verse. But Moore’s virtue--or his vanity--was
impregnable. “The task was but light, and the money would have been
convenient,” he confesses; “but I forced it back on him again. The fact
is, it is my _name_ brings these offers, and my name would suffer by
accepting them.”
One might suppose that the baffled tempter would now have permanently
withdrawn, save that the strength of tempters lies in their never
knowing when they are beaten. Three years later, Heath renewed the
attack, proposing that Moore should furnish _all_ the letter-press,
prose and verse, of the “Keepsake” for 1832, receiving in payment
the generous sum of one thousand pounds. Strange to say, Moore took
rather kindly to this appalling suggestion, admitted he liked it
better than its predecessors, and consented to think the matter over
for a fortnight. In the end, however, he adhered to his original
determination to hold himself virgin of annuals; and refused the
thousand pounds, which would have paid all his debts, only to fall, as
fall men must, a victim to female blandishments. He was cajoled into
writing some lines for the “Casket,” edited by Mrs. Blencoe; and had
afterwards the pleasure of discovering that the astute lady had added
to her list of attractions another old poem of his, which, to avoid
sameness, she obligingly credited to Lord Byron;--enough to make that
ill-used poet turn uneasily in his grave.
Charles Lamb’s detestation of annuals dates naturally enough from the
hour he was first seduced into becoming a contributor; and every time
he lapsed from virtue, his rage blazed out afresh. When his ill-timed
sympathy for a bereaved parent--and that parent an editor--landed
him in the pages of the “Gem,” he wrote to Barton in an access of
ill-humour which could find no phrases sharp enough to feed it.
“I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates, the names of
contributors poked up into your eyes in the first page, and whistled
through all the covers of magazines, the bare-faced sort of emulation,
the immodest candidateship, brought into so little space; in short I
detest to appear in an annual.... Don’t think I set up for being proud
on this point; I like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity as well as
any one. But these pompous masquerades without masks (naked names or
faces) I hate. So there’s a bit of my mind.”
“Frippery,” “frumpery,” “show and emptiness,” are the mildest epithets
at Lamb’s command, as often as he laments his repeated falls from
grace; and a few years before his death, when that “dumb soporifical
good-for-nothingness” (curse of the Enfield lanes) weighted his pen,
and dulled the lively processes of his brain, he writes with poignant
melancholy:--
“I cannot scribble a long letter. I am, when not on foot, very
desolate, and take no interest in anything, scarce hate anything but
annuals.” It is the last expression of a just antipathy, an instinctive
clinging to something which can be reasonably hated to the end.
The most pretentious and the most aristocratic of the annuals was the
ever famous “Book of Beauty,” edited for many years by the Countess
of Blessington. Resting on a solid foundation of personal vanity (a
superstructure never known to fail), it reached a heroic measure of
success, and yielded an income which permitted the charming woman who
conducted it to live as far beyond her means as any leader of the
fashionable world in London. It was estimated that Lady Blessington
earned by the “gorgeous inanities” she edited, and by the vapid tales
she wrote, an income of from two thousand to three thousand pounds;
but she would never have been paid so well for her work had she not
supported her social position by an expenditure of twice that sum.
Charles Greville, who spares no scorn he can heap upon her editorial
methods, declares that she attained her ends “by puffing and stuffing,
and untiring industry, by practising on the vanity of some and the
good-nature of others. And though I never met with any one who had read
her books, except the ‘Conversations with Byron,’ which are too good to
be hers, they are unquestionably a source of considerable profit, and
she takes her place confidently and complacently as one of the literary
celebrities of her day.”
Greville’s instinctive unkindness leaves him often wide of the mark,
but on this occasion we can only say that he might have spoken his
truths more humanely. If Lady Blessington helped to create the demand
which she supplied, if she turned her friendships to account, and
made of hospitality a means to an end (a line of conduct not unknown
to-day), she worked with unsparing diligence, and with a sort of
desperate courage for over twenty years. Rival Books of Beauty were
launched upon a surfeited market, but she maintained her precedence.
For ten years she edited the “Keepsake,” and made it a source of
revenue, until the unhappy bankruptcy and death of Heath. In her
annuals we breathe the pure air of ducal households, and consort with
the peeresses of England, turning condescendingly now and then to
contemplate a rusticity so obviously artificial, it can be trusted
never to offend. That her standard of art (she had no standard of
letters) was acceptable to the British public is proved by the
rapturous praise of critics and reviewers. Thackeray, indeed, professed
to think the sumptuous ladies, who loll and languish in the pages of
the year-book, underclad and indecorous; but this was in the spirit
of hypercriticism. Hear rather how a writer in “Fraser’s Magazine”
describes in a voice trembling with emotion the opulent charms of one
of the Countess of Blessington’s “Beauties”:--
“There leans the tall and imperial form of the enchantress, with
raven tresses surmounted by the cachemire of sparkling red; while
her ringlets flow in exuberant waves over the full-formed neck; and
barbaric pearls, each one worth a king’s ransom, rest in marvellous
contrast with her dark and mysterious loveliness.”
“Here’s richness!” to quote our friend Mr. Squeers. Here’s something of
which it is hard to think a public could ever tire. Yet sixteen years
later, when the Countess of Blessington died in poverty and exile, but
full of courage to the end, the “Examiner” tepidly observed that the
probable extinction of the year-book “would be the least of the sad
regrets attending her loss.”
For between 1823 and 1850 three hundred annuals had been published in
England, and the end was very near. Exhausted nature was crying for
release. It is terrible to find an able and honest writer like Miss
Mitford editing a preposterous volume called the “Iris,” of inhuman
bulk and superhuman inanity; a book which she well knew could never,
under any press of circumstances, be read by mortal man or woman.
There were annuals to meet every demand, and to please every class
of purchaser. Comic annuals for those who hoped to laugh; a “Botanic
Annual” for girls who took country walks with their governess; an
“Oriental Annual” for readers of Byron and Moore; a “Landscape
Annual” for lovers of nature; “The Christian Keepsake” for ladies of
serious minds; and “The Protestant Annual” for those who feared that
Christianity might possibly embrace the Romish Church. There were
five annuals for English children; from one of which, “The Juvenile
Keepsake,” I quote these lines, so admirably adapted to the childish
mind. Newton is supposed to speak them in his study:--
Pure and ethereal essence, fairest light,
Come hither, and before my watchful eyes
Disclose thy hidden nature, and unbind
Thy mystic, fine-attenuated parts;
That so, intently marking, I the source
May learn of colours, Nature’s matchless gifts.
There are three pages of this poem, all in the same simple language,
from which it is fair to infer that the child’s annual, like its
grown-up neighbour, was made to be bought, not read.
OUR ACCOMPLISHED GREAT-GRANDMOTHER
Next to mere idleness, I think knotting is to be reckoned in the
scale of insignificance.--DR. JOHNSON.
Readers of Dickens (which ought to mean all men and women who have
mastered the English alphabet) will remember how that estimable
schoolmistress, Miss Monflathers, elucidated Dr. Watts’s masterpiece,
which had been quoted somewhat rashly by a teacher. “‘The little busy
bee,’” said Miss Monflathers, drawing herself up, “is applicable only
to genteel children.
In books, or work, or healthful play,
is quite right as far as they are concerned; and the work means
painting on velvet, fancy needlework, or embroidery.”
It also meant, in the good Miss Monflathers’s day, making filigree
baskets that would not hold anything, Ionic temples of Bristol-board,
shell flowers, and paper landscapes. It meant pricking pictures with
pins, taking “impressions” of butterflies’ wings on sheets of gummed
paper, and messing with strange, mysterious compounds called diaphanie
and potichomanie, by means of which a harmless glass tumbler or a
respectable window-pane could be turned into an object of desolation.
Indeed, when the genteel young ladies of this period were not reading
“Merit opposed to Fascination; exemplified in the story of Eugenio,”
or “An Essay on the Refined Felicity which may arise from the Marriage
Contract,” they were cultivating what were then called “ornamental
arts,” but which later on became known as “accomplishments.” “It is
amazing to me,” says that most amiable of sub-heroes, Mr. Bingley, “how
young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all
are. They paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know
any one who cannot do all this; and I am sure I never heard a young
lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was
very accomplished.”
We leave the unamiable Mr. Darcy snorting at his friend’s remark, to
consider the paucity of Mr. Bingley’s list. Tables, screens, and
purses represent but the first beginnings of that misdirected energy
which for the best part of a century embellished English homes. The
truly accomplished young lady in Miss More’s “Cœlebs” paints flowers
and shells, draws ruins, gilds and varnishes wood, is an adept in Japan
work, and stands ready to begin modelling, etching, and engraving. The
great principle of ornamental art was the reproduction of an object--of
any object--in an alien material. The less adapted this material was
to its purpose, the greater the difficulties it presented to the
artist, the more precious became the monstrous masterpiece. To take a
plain sheet of paper and draw a design upon it was ignominious in its
simplicity; but to construct the same design out of paper spirals,
rolling up some five hundred slips with uniform tightness, setting
them on end, side by side, and painting or gilding the tops,--that was
a feat of which any young lady might be proud. It was so uncommonly
hard to do, it ought to have been impossible. Cutting paper with
fine sharp scissors and a knife was taught in schools (probably in
Miss Monflathers’s school, though Dickens does not mention it) as
a fashionable pastime. The “white design”--animals, landscape, or
marine--was printed on a black background, which was cut away with
great dexterity, the spaces being small and intricate. When all the
black paper had been removed, the flimsy tracery was pasted on a piece
of coloured paper, thus presenting--after hours of patient labour--much
the same appearance that it had in the beginning. It was then glassed,
framed, and presented to appreciative parents, as a proof of their
daughter’s industry and taste.
The most famous work of art ever made out of paper was probably
the celebrated “herbal” of Mrs. Delany,--Mrs. Delany whom Burke
pronounced “the model of an accomplished gentlewoman.” She acquired
her accomplishments at an age when most people seek to relinquish
theirs,--having learned to draw when she was thirty, to paint when
she was forty, and to write verse when she was eighty-two. She also
“excelled in embroidery and shell-work”; and when Miss Burney made
her first visit to St. James’s Place, she found Mrs. Delany’s walls
covered with “ornaments of her own execution of striking elegance,
in cuttings and variegated stained papers.” The herbal, however, was
the crowning achievement of her life. It contained nearly a thousand
plants, made of thin strips of coloured paper, pasted layer over layer
with the utmost nicety upon a black background, and producing an effect
“richer than painting.”
Cold Winter views amid his realms of snow
Delany’s vegetable statues blow;
Smoothes his stern brow, delays his hoary wing,
And eyes with wonder all the blooms of Spring.
The flowers were copied accurately from nature, and florists all over
the kingdom vied with one another in sending Mrs. Delany rare and
beautiful specimens. The Queen ardently admired this herbal, and the
King, who regarded it with veneration not untinged by awe, expressed
his feelings by giving its creator a house at Windsor, and settling
upon her an annuity of three hundred pounds. Yet Miss Seward complained
that although England “teemed with genius,” George III was “no Cæsar
Augustus,” to encourage and patronize the arts. To the best of his
ability, he did. His conception of genius and art may not have tallied
with that of Augustus; but when an old lady made paper flowers to
perfection, he gave her a royal reward.
Mrs. Delany’s example was followed in court circles, and in the humbler
walks of life. Shell-work, which was one of her accomplishments, became
the rage. Her illustrious friend, the Duchess of Portland, “made shell
frames and feather designs, adorned grottoes, and collected endless
objects in the animal and vegetable kingdom.” Young ladies of taste
made flowers out of shells, dyeing the white ones with Brazil wood, and
varnishing them with gum arabic. A rose of red shells, with a heart
of knotted yellow silk, was almost as much admired as a picture of
birds with their feathers pasted on the paper. This last triumph of
realism presented a host of difficulties to the perpetrator. When the
bill and legs of the bird had been painted in water colours on heavy
Bristol-board, the space for its body was covered with a paste of gum
arabic as thick as a shilling. This paste was kept “tacky or clammy”
to hold the feathers, which were stripped off the poor little dead
bird, and stuck on the prepared surface, the quills being cut down
with a knife. Weights were used to keep the feathers in place, the
result being that most of them adhered to the lead instead of to the
Bristol-board, and came off discouragingly when the work was nearly
done. As a combination of art and nature, the bird picture had no rival
except the butterfly picture, where the clipped wings of butterflies
were laid between two sheets of gummed paper, and the “impressions”
thus taken, reinforced with a little gilding, were attached to a
painted body. It may be observed that the quality of mercy was then
a good deal strained. Mrs. Montagu’s famous “feather-room,” in her
house on Portman Square, was ornamented with hangings made by herself
from the plumage of hundreds of birds, every attainable variety being
represented; yet no one of her friends, not even the sainted Hannah
More, ever breathed a sigh of regret over the merry little lives that
were wasted for its meretricious decorations.