the making of baskets, and no material, however unexpected, came amiss
to their patient hands. Allspice berries, steeped in brandy to soften
them and strung on wire, were very popular; and rice baskets had a
chaste simplicity of their own. These last were made of pasteboard,
lined with silk or paper, the grains of rice being gummed on in solid
diamond-shaped designs. If the decoration appeared a trifle monotonous,
as well it might, it was diversified with coloured glass beads.
Indeed, we are assured that “baskets of this description may be very
elegantly ornamented with groups of small shells, little artificial
bouquets, crystals, and the fine feathers from the heads of birds of
beautiful plumage”;--with anything, in short, that could be pasted
on and persuaded to stick. When the supply of glue gave out, wafer
baskets--wafers required only moistening--or alum baskets (made of wire
wrapped round with worsted, and steeped in a solution of alum, which
was coloured yellow with saffron or purple with logwood) were held in
the highest estimation. The modern mind, with its puny resources, is
bewildered by the multiplicity of materials which seem to have lain
scattered around the domestic hearth a hundred years ago. There is a
famous old receipt for “silvering paper without silver,” a process
designed to be economical, but which requires so many messy and alien
ingredients, like “Indian glue,” and “Muscovy talc,” and “Venice
turpentine,” and “Japan size,” and “Chinese varnish,” that mere silver
seems by comparison a cheap and common thing. Young ladies whose thrift
equalled their ingenuity made their own varnish by boiling isinglass in
a quart of brandy,--a lamentable waste of supplies.
Genteel parcels were always wrapped in silver paper. We remember how
Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond tries in vain to make one sheet cover the
famous “filigree basket,” which was her birthday present to her Cousin
Bell, and which pointed its own moral by falling to pieces before it
was presented. Rosamond’s father derides this basket because he is
implored not to grasp it by its myrtle-wreathed handle. “But what is
the use of the handle,” he asks, in the conclusive, irritating fashion
of the Edgeworthian parent, “if we are not to take hold of it? And
pray is this the thing you have been about all week? I have seen you
dabbling with paste and rags, and could not conceive what you were
doing.”
Rosamond’s half-guinea--her godmother’s gift--is spent buying filigree
paper, and medallions, and a “frost ground” for this basket, and she is
ruthlessly shamed by its unstable character; whereas Laura, who gives
her money secretly to a little lace-maker, has her generosity revealed
at exactly the proper moment, and is admired and praised by all the
company. Apart from Miss Edgeworth’s conception of life, as made up of
well-adjusted punishments and rewards, a half-guinea does seem a good
deal to spend on filigree paper; but then a single sheet of gold paper
cost six shillings, unless gilded at home, after the following process,
which was highly commended for economy:--
“Take yellow ochre, grind it with rain-water, and lay a ground with it
all over the paper, which should be fine wove. When dry, take the white
of an egg and about a quarter of an ounce of sugar candy, and beat
them together until the sugar candy is dissolved. Then strike it all
over the ground with a varnish brush, and immediately lay on the gold
leaf, pressing it down with a piece of fine cotton. When dry, polish it
with a dog’s tooth or agate. A sheet of this paper may be prepared for
eighteen pence.”
No wonder little Rosamond was unequal to such labour, and her
half-guinea was squandered in extravagant purchases. Miss Edgeworth,
trained in her father’s theory that children should be always
occupied, was a good deal distressed by the fruits of their industry.
The “chatting girls cutting up silk and gold paper,” whom Miss
Austen watched with unconcern, would have fretted Miss Edgeworth’s
soul, unless she knew that sensible needle-cases, pin-cushions, and
work-bags were in process of construction. Yet the celebrated “rational
toy-shop,” with its hand-looms instead of dolls, and its machines for
drawing in perspective instead of tin soldiers and Noah’s arks, stood
responsible for the inutilities she scorned. And what of the charitable
lady in “Lazy Lawrence,” who is “making a grotto,” and buying shells
and fossils for its decoration? Even a filigree basket, which had at
least the grace of impermanence, seems desirable by comparison with a
grotto. It will be remembered also that Madame de Rosier, the “Good
French Governess,” traces her lost son, that “promising young man of
fourteen,” by means of a box he has made out of refuse bits of shell
thrown aside in a London restaurant; while the son in turn discovers a
faithful family servant through the medium of a painted pasteboard dog,
which the equally ingenious domestic has exposed for sale in a shop. It
was a good thing in Miss Edgeworth’s day to cultivate the “ornamental
arts,” were it only for the reunion of families.
Pasteboard, a most ungrateful and unyielding material, was the basis
of so many household decorations that a little volume, published in
the beginning of the last century, is devoted exclusively to its
possibilities. This book, which went through repeated editions, is
called “The Art of Working in Pasteboard upon Scientific Principles”;
and it gives minute directions for making boxes, baskets, tea-trays,
caddies,--even candlesticks, and “an inkstand in the shape of a castle
with a tower,”--a baffling architectural design. What patience and
ingenuity must have been expended upon this pasteboard castle, which
had a wing for the ink well, a wing for the sand box, five circular
steps leading up to the principal entrance, a terrace which was a
drawer, a balcony surrounded by a “crenelled screen,” a tower to hold
the quills, a vaulted cupola which lifted like a lid, and a lantern
with a “quadrilateral pyramid” for its roof, surmounted by a real pea
or a glass bead as the final bit of decoration. There is a drawing of
this edifice, which is as imposing as its dimensions will permit; and
there are four pages of mysterious instructions which make the reader
feel as though he were studying architecture by correspondence.
Far more difficult of accomplishment, and far more useless when
accomplished,--for they could not even hold pens and ink,--were the
Grecian temples and Gothic towers, made of pasteboard covered with
marbled paper, and designed as “elegant ornaments for the mantelpiece.”
A small Ionic temple requires ten pages of directions. It is built of
“the best Bristol-board, except the shafts of the pillars and some
of the decorations, which are made of royal drawing-paper”; and its
manufacturers are implored not to spare time, trouble, or material,
if they would attain to anything so classic. “The art of working in
pasteboard,” says the preface of this engaging little book, “may
be carried to a high degree of usefulness and perfection, and may
eventually be productive of substantial benefits to young persons of
both sexes, who wisely devote their leisure hours to pleasing, quiet,
and useful recreations, preferably to frivolous, noisy, and expensive
amusements.”
A pleasing, quiet, and useful recreation which wasted nothing but
eyesight,--and that nobody valued,--was pricking pictures with pins.
The broad lines and heavy shadows were pricked with stout pins, the
fine lines and high lights with little ones, while a toothed wheel,
sharply pointed, was used for large spaces and simple decorative
designs. This was an ambitious field of art, much of the work being
of a microscopic delicacy. The folds of a lady’s dress could be
pricked in such film-like waves that only close scrutiny revealed the
thousand tiny holes of which its billowy softness was composed. The
cleanness and dryness of pins commend them to our taste after a long
contemplation of varnish and glue pots; of “poonah work,” which was a
sticky sort of stencilling; of “Japan work,” in which embossed figures
were made of “gum-water, thickened to a proper consistence with equal
parts of bole ammoniac and whiting”; of “Chinese enamel,” which was a
base imitation of ebony inlaid with ivory; and of “potichomanie,” which
converted a piece of English glass into something that “not one in a
hundred could tell from French china.” We sympathize with the refined
editor of the “Monthly Museum,” who recommends knotting to his female
readers, not only because it had the sanction of a queen,
Who, when she rode in coach abroad,
Was always knotting threads;
but because of its “pure nature” and “innocent simplicity.” “I cannot
but think,” says this true friend of my sex, “that shirts and smocks
are unfit for any lady of delicacy to handle; but the shuttle is an
easy flowing object, to which the eye may remove with propriety and
grace.”
Grace was never overlooked in our great-grandmother’s day, but took
rank as an important factor in education. A London schoolmistress,
offering in 1815 some advice as to the music “best fitted for ladies,”
confesses that it is hard to decide between the “wide range” of the
pianoforte and the harp-player’s “elegance of position,” which gives to
her instrument “no small powers of rivalry.” Sentiment was interwoven
with every accomplishment. Tender mottoes, like those which Miss
Euphemia Dundas entreats Thaddeus of Warsaw to design for her, were
painted upon boxes and hand-screens. Who can forget the white leather
“souvenir,” adorned with the words “Toujours cher,” which Miss Euphemia
presses upon Thaddeus, and which that attractive but virtuous exile
is modestly reluctant to accept. A velvet bracelet embroidered with
forget-me-nots symbolized friendship. A handkerchief, designed as a
gift from a young girl to her betrothed, had a celestial sphere worked
in one corner, to indicate the purity of their flame; a bouquet of
buds and blossoms in another, to mark the pleasures and the brevity of
life; and, in a third, Cupid playing with a spaniel, “as an emblem of
the most passionate fidelity.” Even samplers, which represented the
first step in the pursuit of accomplishments, had their emblematic
designs no less than their moral axioms. The village schoolmistress,
whom Miss Mitford knew and loved, complained that all her pupils
wanted to work samplers instead of learning to sew; and that all their
mothers valued these works of art more than they did the neatest of
caps and aprons. The sampler stood for gentility as well as industry.
It reflected credit on the family as well as on the child. At the
bottom of a faded canvas, worked more than a hundred years ago, and now
hanging in a great museum of art, is this inspiring verse:--
I have done this that you may see
What care my parents took of me.
And when I’m dead and in my grave,
This piece of work I trust you’ll save.
If the little girl who embodied her high hopes in the painful precision
of cross-stitch could but know of their splendid fulfilment!
THE ALBUM AMICORUM
She kept an album too, at home,
Well stocked with all an album’s glories,
Paintings of butterflies and Rome,
Patterns for trimmings, Persian stories.
PRAED.
Modern authors who object to being asked for their autographs, and who
complain piteously of the persecutions they endure in this regard,
would do well to consider what they have gained by being born in an age
when commercialism has supplanted compliment. Had they been their own
great-grandfathers, they would have been expected to present to their
female friends the verses they now sell to magazines. They would have
written a few playful and affectionate lines every time they dined
out, and have paid for a week’s hospitality with sentimental tributes
to their hostess. And not their hostess only. Her budding daughters
would have looked for some recognition of their charms, and her infant
son would have presented a theme too obvious for disregard. It is
recorded that when Campbell spent two days at the country seat of Mr.
James Craig, the Misses Craig kept him busy most of that time composing
verses for their albums,--a pleasant way of entertaining a poet guest.
On another occasion he writes to Mrs. Arkwright, lamenting, though with
much good-humour, the importunities of mothers. “Mrs. Grahame has a
plot upon me that I should write a poem upon her boy, three years old.
Oh, such a boy! But in the way of writing lines on lovely children, I
am engaged three deep, and dare not promise.”
It seems that parents not only petitioned for these poetic windfalls,
but pressed their claims hard. Campbell, one of the most amiable of
men, yielded in time to this demand, as he had yielded to many others,
and sent to little Master Grahame some verses of singular ineptitude.
Sweet bud of life! thy future doom
Is present to my eyes,
And joyously I see thee bloom
In Fortune’s fairest skies.
One day that breast, scarce conscious now,
Shall burn with patriot flame;
And, fraught with love, that little brow
Shall wear the wreath of fame.
There are many more stanzas, but these are enough to make us wonder
why parents did not let the poet alone. Perhaps, if they had, he would
have volunteered his services. We know that when young Fanny Kemble
showed him her nosegay at a ball, and asked how she should keep the
flowers from fading, he answered hardily: “Give them to me, and I will
immortalize them,”--an enviable assurance of renown.
Album verses date from the old easy days, when rhyming was regarded
as a gentlemanly accomplishment rather than as a means of livelihood.
Titled authors, poets wealthy and well-born--for there were always
such--naturally addressed themselves to the ladies of their
acquaintance. They could say with Lord Chesterfield that they thanked
Heaven they did not have to live by their brains. It was a theory,
long and fondly cherished, that poetry was not common merchandise, to
be bought and sold like meal and malt; that it was, as Burns admirably
said, either above price or worth nothing at all. Later on, when
poets became excellent men of business, when Byron had been seduced
by Murray’s generosity, when Moore drove his wonderful bargains, and
poetic narrative was the best-selling commodity in the market, we hear
a rising murmur of protest against the uncommercial exactions of the
album. Sonneteers who could sell their wares for hard cash no longer
felt repaid by a word of flattery. Even the myrtle wreaths which
crowned the victors of the Bath Easton contests appeared but slender
compensation, save in Miss Seward’s eyes, or in Mrs. Hayley’s. When
Mrs. Hayley went to Bath in 1781, and witnessed the solemn ceremonies
inaugurated by Lady Miller; when she saw the laurels, and myrtles,
and fluttering ribbons, her soul was fired with longing, and she set
to work to persuade her husband that the Bath Easton prize was not
wholly beneath his notice. The author of “The Triumphs of Temper”
was naturally fearful of lowering his dignity by sporting with minor
poets; and there was much wifely artifice in her assumption that such
playfulness on his part would be recognized as true condescension.
“If you should feel disposed to honour this slight amusement with a
light composition, I am persuaded you will oblige very highly.” The
responsive Hayley was not unwilling to oblige, provided no one would
suspect him of being in earnest. He “scribbled” the desired lines “in
the most rapid manner,” “literally in a morning and a half” (Byron did
not take much longer to write “The Corsair”), and sent them off to
Bath, where they were “admired beyond description,” and won the prize,
so that the gratified Mrs. Hayley appeared that night with the myrtle
wreath woven in her hair. The one famous contributor to the Bath Easton
vase who did _not_ win a prize was Sheridan. He, being entreated to
write for it some verses on “Charity,” complied in these heartless
lines:--
THE VASE SPEAKS
For heaven’s sake bestow on me
A little wit, for that would be
Indeed an act of charity.
Complimentary addresses--those flowery tributes which seem so ardent
and so facile--were beginning to drag a little, even in Walpole’s
day. He himself was an adept in the art of polite adulation, and wrote
without a blush the obliging comparison between the Princess Amelia and
Venus (greatly to the disparagement of Venus), which the flattered lady
found in the hand of the marble Apollo at Stowe. “All women like all
or any praise,” said Lord Byron, who had reason to know the sex. The
Princess Amelia, stout, sixty, and “strong as a Brunswick lion,” was
pleased to be designated as a “Nymph,” and to be told she had routed
Venus from the field. Walpole also presented to Madame de Boufflers a
“petite gentillesse,” when she visited Strawberry Hill; and it became
the painful duty of the Duc de Nivernois to translate these lines into
French, on the occasion of Miss Pelham’s grand fête at Esher Place.
The task kept him absorbed and preoccupied most of the day, “lagging
behind” while the others made a cheerful tour of the farms, or listened
to the French horns and hautboys on the lawn. Finally, when all the
guests were drinking tea and coffee in the Belvidere, poor Nivernois
was delivered of his verselets, which were received with a polite
semblance of gratification, and for the remaining hours his spirit was
at peace. But it does seem a hard return to exact for hospitality, and
must often have suggested to men of letters the felicity of staying at
home.
Miss Seward made it her happy boast that the number and the warmth
of Mr. Hayley’s tributes--inserted duly in her album--raised her to
a rivalry with Swift’s Stella, or Prior’s Chloe. “Our four years’
correspondence has been enriched with a galaxy of little poetic gems
of the first water.” Nor was the lady backward in returning compliment
for compliment. That barter of praise, that exchange of felicitation,
which is both so polite and so profitable, was as well understood by
our sentimental ancestors as it is in this hard-headed age. Indeed,
I am not sure that the Muse did not sometimes calculate more closely
then than she ventures to do to-day. We know that Canon Seward wrote
an elegiac poem on a young nobleman who was held to be dying, but
who--perversely enough--recovered; whereupon the reverend eulogist
changed the name, and transferred his heartfelt lamentations to
another youth whose death was fully assured. In the same business-like
spirit Miss Seward paid back Mr. Hayley flattery for flattery, until
even the slow-witted satirists of the period made merry over this
commerce of applause.
_Miss Seward._ Pride of Sussex, England’s glory,
Mr. Hayley, is that you?
_Mr. Hayley._ Ma’am, you carry all before you,
Trust me, Lichfield swan, you do.
_Miss Seward._ Ode, dramatic, epic, sonnet,
Mr. Hayley, you’re divine!
_Mr. Hayley._ Ma’am, I’ll give my word upon it,
You yourself are all the Nine.
Moore, as became a poet of ardent temperament, wrote the most gallant
album verses of his day; for which reason, and because his star of
fame rode high, he endured sharp persecution at the hands of admiring
but covetous friends. Young ladies asked him in the most offhand
manner to “address a poem” to them; and women of rank smiled on him
in ballrooms, and confided to him that they were keeping their albums
virgin of verse until “an introduction to Mr. Moore” should enable them
to request _him_ to write on the opening page. “I fight this off as
well as I can,” he tells Lord Byron, who knew both the relentlessness
of such demands and the compliant nature of his friend. On one occasion
Lady Holland showed Moore some stanzas which Lord Holland had written
in Latin and in English, on the subject of a snuff-box given her by
Napoleon; bidding him imperiously “do something of the kind,” and
adding that she greatly desired a corresponding tribute from Lord
Byron. Moore wisely declined to make any promises for Byron (one doubts
whether the four lines which that nobleman eventually contributed
afforded her ladyship much pleasure), but wrote his own verses before
he was out of bed the next morning, and carried them to Holland House,
expecting to breakfast with its mistress. He found her, however, in
such a captious mood, so out of temper with all her little world,
that, although he sat down to the table, he did not venture to hint
his hunger; and as no one asked him to eat or drink, he slipped off in
half an hour, and sought (his poem still in his pocket) the more genial
hospitality of Rosset’s restaurant. Had all this happened twenty years
earlier, Moore’s self-esteem would have been deeply wounded; but the
poet was by now a man of mark, and could afford to laugh at his own
discomfiture.
Moore’s album verses may be said to make up in warmth what they lack
in address. Minor poets--minims like William Robert Spencer--surpassed
him easily in adroitness; and sometimes won for themselves slender but
abiding reputations by expressing with consummate ease sentiments they
did not feel. Spencer’s pretty lines beginning,--
Too late I stayed,--forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours:
How noiseless falls the foot of time
That only treads on flowers!
--lines which all our grandmothers had by heart--may still be found in
compilations of English verse. Their dexterous allusions to the diamond
sparks in Time’s hour-glass, and to the bird-of-paradise plumage in his
grey wings, their veiled and graceful flattery, contrast pleasantly
with Moore’s Hibernian boldness, with his offhand demand to be paid in
kisses for his songs--
That rosy mouth alone can bring
What makes the bard divine;
Oh, Lady! how my lip would sing,
If once ’twere prest to thine.
A discreet young woman might have hesitated to show _this_ album page
to friends.
Byron’s “tributes,” when he paid them, were singularly chill. He may
have buried his heart at Mrs. Spencer Smith’s feet; but the lines
in her album which record this interment are eloquent of a speedy
resurrection. When Lady Blessington demanded some verses, he wrote
them; but he explained with almost insulting lucidity that his heart
was as grey as his head (he was thirty-one), and that he had nothing
warmer than friendship to offer in place of extinguished affections.
Moore must have wearied painfully of albums and of their rapacious
demands; yet to the end of his life he could be harassed into feigning
a poetic passion; but Byron stood at bay. He was a hunted creature, and
the instinct of self-preservation taught him savage methods of escape.
There are people who, from some delicacy of mental fibre, find it
exceedingly difficult to be rude; and there are people who--like
Charles Lamb--have a curious habit of doing what they do not want to
do, and what they know is not worth doing, for the sake of giving
pleasure to some utterly insignificant acquaintance. The first class
lacks a valuable weapon in life’s warfare. The second class is so
small, and the motives which govern it are so inscrutable, that we are
apt to be exasperated by its amiability. It is easy to sympathize with
Thackeray, who, being badgered to write in an album already graced
by the signatures of several distinguished musicians, said curtly:
“What! among all those fiddlers!” This hardy British superciliousness
commends itself to our sense of humour, no less than to our sense of
self-protection. A great deal has been said, especially by Frenchmen,
about the wisdom of polite denials; but a rough word, spoken in time,
is seldom without weight in England.