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THE GALAXY.
VOL. XXIII.--MARCH, 1877.--No. 3.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by SHELDON &
CO., in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
THE ENGLISH PEERAGE.
More than one reader must have felt impatient with Milton for spoiling
the fine epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester with such unfortunate
lines as "A Viscount's daughter, an Earl's heir," and "No Marchioness,
but now a queen." Probably the expressions sounded less absurd to his
contemporaries than they do to us, for titles of nobility, however
unworthily conferred, had more significance in the reign of James I.
than they bear in the reign of Queen Victoria. The memorable despatch in
which Collingwood announced the victory of Trafalgar, and which has been
described by great writers as a masterpiece of simple narration began
with these words: "Sir: The ever to be lamented death of Vice Admiral
Lord Viscount Nelson, in the moment of victory," etc. Now peers of all
ranks, except the highest, are commonly spoken of under the general
designation of "Lord So-and-So," and are rarely accorded in conversation
the honors of "my lord," or "your lordship." Generally speaking, it may
be said that in England titles, like decorations, are still greedily
sought after, but when won are not openly displayed. They are felt by
their bearers to be an anachronism, though no doubt a sufficiently
agreeable one to those most immediately concerned.
Successive governments give as large a share of patronage to the peers
and baronets, and their kinsfolk, as they reasonably can; while the
Premier is only too glad to select men of rank as his colleagues in the
Cabinet, if they are only possessed of decent abilities, and will
work--for a minister must be a hard worker in these days. Thus, Mr.
Gladstone's administration, the first which was ever designated as
"Radical," contained a large proportion of the aristocratic element in
its ranks, though it was even made a charge against Mr. Gladstone by
conservative and pseudo-liberal papers, that he unjustly deprived the
peerage of its due representation in the Cabinet.
As a matter of fact, when the Cabinet resigned it consisted of sixteen
members. Of these, eight were peers or sons of peers. Of the remaining
thirty-six Parliamentary members of the administration, fourteen were
peers or sons of peers. Mr. Disraeli's Cabinet numbers but twelve
ministers. Of these six are peers, another is heir presumptive to a
dukedom; while an eighth is a baronet; and of the remaining members of
the administration, nineteen out of thirty-eight are peers, baronets, or
sons of peers. In the army and navy, in the diplomatic service, the
peerage equally secures its full share of prizes; and even in the legal
profession it is far from being a disadvantage to a young barrister that
his name figures in the pages of Burke. In the Church a large proportion
of the best livings are held by members of the same privileged class,
and even the Stock Exchange lately showed itself eager to confer such
honors as were in its gift on a duke's son, who had been courageous
enough to "go into trade."
The British aristocracy is still, therefore, "a fact," if a favorite
term of Mr. Carlyle's may be permitted in such a connexion, as it
probably may, for the author of "The French Revolution" has himself been
one of the latest eulogists of the governing families of England, and
perhaps a few notes on the origin and history of some of the principal
houses may not be unacceptable to American readers.
The House of Lords, as at present constituted, consists of something
less than five hundred temporal peers. The first in order of hereditary
precedence, after the princes of the blood royal, is the Duke of
Norfolk, a blameless young gentleman of eight-and-twenty years, and a
zealous Catholic, as it is generally supposed that a Howard is compelled
to be by a mysterious law of his nature. As a matter of fact, however,
no family in England has changed its religion so often. Henry Charles,
thirteenth duke, seceded from the Church of Rome on the occasion of the
papal aggression. He declared himself convinced that "ultramontane
opinions were totally incompatible with allegiance to the sovereign and
the Constitution." The Duke's expression of opinion might have had more
weight with his coreligionists had his own reputation for wisdom stood
higher. But it stood very low. His Grace had made himself very
conspicuous during the agitation for the repeal of the corn laws by
recommending a curry powder of his own manufacture as a substitute for
bread, which singular piece of advice to a starving people earned him
the sobriquet of "Curry Norfolk." Charles, eleventh duke, also renounced
the old faith about the year 1780. He had not yet succeeded to his
title, but was known as the Earl of Surrey; was immediately returned to
Parliament for one of his father's boroughs. (The dukes of Norfolk had
eleven boroughs at their disposition before the passing of the reform
bill.) He was a notable personage in his day, and acted in concert with
the party of Fox. For giving the toast of "The people, our Sovereign,"
at a public dinner he was deprived of his lord-lieutenancy and of his
colonelcy of militia. He was remarkable, too, for a dislike of clean
linen, which his friends were grieved to see him carry to excess.[A]
Three other Howards of the same stock are more honorably distinguished
in their country's annals. They are the victor of Flodden and two of his
grandsons; the one the Surrey of history and romance, the other, Charles
Lord Howard of Effingham, the conqueror of the Spanish Armada. The
origin of the family is involved in obscurity, some maintaining that it
sprung from the famous Hereward, the Wake, of whose name they affirm
Howard to be a corruption; while others assert that the word Howard is
neither more nor less than a euphonious form of Hogward, and that the
premier duke and hereditary Earl Marshal of England might ultimately
trace his descent to a swineherd if he were disposed so to do. The first
Howard of whom genealogists can take serious cognizance was a
respectable judge of the court of common pleas in the reigns of Edward
I. and Edward II. (1297-1308). His descendant was ennobled in the reign
of Edward IV.
[Footnote A: "Did your Grace ever try a clean shirt?" Abernethy is said
to have asked the Duke, who had consulted him on some ailment.]
Next on the roll of the Lords to the Duke of Norfolk is Edward St. Maur,
the Duke of Somerset, an extremely clever man, "with a passion for
saying disagreeable things." He recently published a smart attack on the
evidences of Christianity, which occasioned not a little difficulty to
some worthy editors. They were sincere Christians, but it jarred against
their feelings to speak harshly of a duke. The St. Maurs (or Seymours)
are of genuine Norman descent, and began to be heard of in the
thirteenth century. They apparently remained estimable till the time of
Henry VIII., when that uxorious monarch married Jane, the daughter of
Sir John Seymour, by whom he became the father of Edward VI. Strangely
enough, Jane's brother, Lord Seymour of Sudeley, afterward married
Henry's widow, and the knot of family relationships becomes a little
complicated in consequence. More inauspicious unions were never
contracted. Lord Seymour was executed by order of his brother, the
Protector (and first Duke of Somerset), and three years later the
Protector's death-warrant was signed by his own nephew. From the close
of this short chronicle of blood, the Seymours practically disappear
from the pages of English history, though Macaulay has left a graphic
picture of that Sir Edward Seymour who was Speaker of the House of
Commons under Charles II., and who proudly replied to William III., when
asked if he belonged to the Duke of Somerset's family, that "the Duke of
Somerset belonged to his family." Francis, fifth duke, was the occasion
of a few days' gossip and much scandal. During his travels in Italy he
visited the convent of the Augustinians at Lerice, where he was foolish
enough to offer an impertinence to some ladies of the family of Botti,
and was shot by an angry Signor Botti a few hours later. His brother
Charles, who succeeded him, is the hero of a less tragic story. His
second wife, Lady Charlotte Finch, once tapped him with her fan, when he
is said to have rebuked her in these terms: "Madam, my first wife was a
Percy, and she never ventured to take such a liberty." He was known
among his contemporaries as "the proud Duke of Somerset."
The next of the ducal houses in order of precedence traces its descent
from Charles II. and Louisa de Querouaille, "whom our rude ancestors
called Madam Carwell." The Dukes of Richmond have always been known as
honorable gentlemen, but they have left no mark on the political history
of England. The present Duke is perhaps the most distinguished man of
his family, being leader of the Conservative party in the House of
Lords, and, as is generally thought, Mr. Disraeli's destined successor
in the Premiership. The third Duke held high office in the early part of
the reign of George III.; while his nephew, Colonel Lennox, who
afterward succeeded him in the title, had the honor of fighting a duel
with a son of George III. Neither of the combatants suffered any hurt,
and Colonel Lennox was reserved for the most melancholy of deaths;
falling, thirty years after, a victim to hydrophobia, caused by the bite
of a dog. His royal antagonist was Frederic, Duke of York, who
subsequently became Commander-in-Chief of the British army in the most
inglorious period of its annals. Indeed, so disgraceful was his Royal
Highness's conduct of the campaign of 1794, that Pitt demanded one of
two things from the King; viz., either that the Prince should be brought
before a court-martial, or that the Prime Minister should in future have
the right of appointing to great military commands. It must have cost
George III. a bitter pang to accept the latter alternative.
The Duke of Grafton, who holds the fourth place on Garter's Roll, is
equally descended from his Majesty, King Charles II., of happy memory.
Henry Fitzroy, son of Barbara Villiers (created Duchess of Cleveland),
was raised to the highest rank in the peerage, as Duke of Grafton, in
1675. He was one of the first to desert his uncle's cause in 1688, and
two years later he died a soldier's death under the walls of Cork,
fighting for William III. and the liberties of England. His great
grandson was Augustus Henry, third Duke of Grafton, who may still be
seen gibbeted in the pages of Junius. His Grace was a member of
Chatham's second ministry, and succeeded his chief in the Premiership.
Of other Dukes of Grafton history makes no special mention.
The fifth of the dukes in order of precedence quarters the royal arms of
France and England, but without the baton sinister. Henry Charles
Fitzroy Somerset, Duke of Beaufort, is lineally descended from "_old_
John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster" (third son of Edward III.) and
Catherine Swinford. John of Gaunt's children by this union were
afterward legitimatized by act of Parliament. Henry, the second son,
took holy orders, and became Bishop of Lincoln, and afterward of
Winchester, as well as Cardinal and Lord Chancellor. He is the Cardinal
Beaufort who figures in the stately Gallery of Shakespeare. He and his
brothers took the name they bore from the Castle of Beaufort, in Anjou,
the place of their nativity. The Cardinal's elder brother was created
Earl and afterward Marquis of Somerset. His descendant, Henry Beaufort,
Duke of Somerset, fell into the hands of the Yorkists, at the battle of
Hexham, and was succeeded in the family honors by his brother Edmund,
who was soon to share the same fate. With him the legitimate male line
of John of Gaunt became extinct. Duke Henry, however, had left a natural
son, who was called Charles Somerset, and who, to use the appropriate
language of chronological dictionaries, "flourished" in the reigns of
Henry VII. and Henry VIII. He was a brave soldier and a skilful
diplomatist; having been chosen a Knight of the Garter; he was also
appointed captain of the King's Guards for his services. Sir Charles
Somerset obtained in marriage Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of William
Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, and Lord Herbert of Rayland, Chepston, and
Gower; and, in his wife's right, was summoned to Parliament as Lord
Herbert, in the first year of Henry VIII. In 1514 he was advanced to the
Earldom of Worcester, having previously been constituted Lord
Chamberlain for life, as a reward for the distinguished part he had in
the taking of Terouenne and Tournay. He died in 1526, and was succeeded
by his son. Little is heard of the Somersets--Earls of Worcester--during
the sixteenth century, though the marriage of two ladies of that house
called forth the well-known Epithalamium of Spenser. Henry, the fifth
earl, created Marquis of Worcester by Charles I., is celebrated in
English history for his defence of Rayland castle against the forces of
the Parliament, under Sir Thomas Fairfax. On this subject, Mr. George
MacDonald's last novel of "St. George and St. Michael" may be consulted
with advantage.
The brave old cavalier did not long survive the surrender and
destruction of his ancestral home. The same year he died, and was
succeeded in his title by his son Edward, the famous author of the
"Century of Inventions." It is scarcely too much to say that had this
man been divested of rank and fortune, and had he been furnished with
the requisite motive for exertion, he might have anticipated the work of
Watt and Stephenson. As it was, the discoveries he made served but to
amuse his leisure hours. The Marquis of Worcester was well-nigh the last
of his race about whose doings his countrymen would much care to be
informed. His son was created Duke of Beaufort in 1682, and with the
attainment of the highest rank in the peerage came a cessation of mental
activity in the family. One more Somerset, however, deserves honorable
mention--Fitzroy, who was aide-de-camp to Wellington, and lost an arm at
Waterloo. Raised to the peerage in 1852 as Lord Raglan, he was named two
years later to the command of the English army in the Crimea. What he
did, and what he did not, in that post, is still remembered. In truth he
was a gallant soldier, distracted by contradictory instructions, feeling
keenly the criticisms of newspaper writers, who complained that one of
the strongest fortresses in the world was not taken in a few weeks. The
siege had lasted eight months, when Lord Raglan resolved to make one
desperate effort to carry the place by assault on the 18th of June, the
fortieth anniversary of Waterloo. The attack failed, and the allies were
repulsed with severe loss. Ten days later the English general succumbed
to sickness and chagrin.
The Dukes of St. Albans enjoy precedence after the Dukes of Beaufort.
William Amelius Aubrey De Vere Beauclerk, present and tenth duke, is
lineally descended from the Merry Monarch and Nell Gwynn, and through
the marriage of the first duke, from the De Veres, Earls of Oxford. His
Grace is Hereditary Grand Falconer, a pleasant little sinecure of some
$6,000 a year. Of the Dukes of Saint Albans history has nothing to say.
The ninth duke married the widow of Mr. Thomas Coutts, of banking
renown.
Next on Garter's roll comes the Duke of Leeds, lineally descended from
Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Lord High Treasurer under Charles II.,
whom Dutch William afterward made Duke of Leeds. Danby (for he is better
known by this title than by the one which he dishonored) must be
considered to have been an average statesman, and even a patriot, as
public spirit then went. He steadily opposed French influence under
Charles II., and afterward contributed to the success of the Revolution.
He was subsequently impeached by the Commons for taking bribes, but the
principal witness on whom the House relied to substantiate the charge
mysteriously disappeared when most wanted. From that day, however, the
Duke of Leeds was morally extinguished. The subsequent Dukes led worthy
and honorable lives, but were not otherwise notable. The seventh married
(24th of April, 1828) an American lady, Louisa Catharine, third daughter
of Mr. Richard Caton of Maryland, and widow of Sir Felton Bathurst
Hervey.
The two next of the ducal houses, those of Bedford and Devonshire, are
invested by Whig writers with almost a halo of glory, though in truth
they have produced respectable rather than great men. The beginnings of
the house of Russell are somewhat curious. One of the earliest ancestors
of the family of whom anything is accurately known was Speaker of the
House of Commons in the second and tenth years of Henry VI. His
grandson, John Russell, a gentleman of property, resided at Berwick,
about four miles from Bridport, in the county of Dorset. He was a
bookish man, and would probably never have gone to seek out fortune; but
fortune, as is her wont, came to him in the person of the Archduke
Philip of Austria. This Prince, the son of the reckless Maximilian,
having encountered a violent hurricane in his passage from Flanders to
Spain, was driven into Weymouth, where he landed, and was hospitably
received by a Sir Thomas Trenchard, who immediately wrote to court for
instructions. Meanwhile he deputed his first cousin, Mr. Russell, to
wait upon the Prince. His Highness was so fascinated by the conversation
of Mr. Russell, that he begged that gentleman to accompany him to
Windsor, where he spoke of him in such high terms to the King (Henry
VII.), that the monarch at once took him into his favor. He subsequently
accompanied Henry VIII. in his French wars, and afterward becoming a
supple instrument of his master's ecclesiastical policy, was rewarded
with a peerage and a grant of the Abbey of Tavistock, and the extensive
lands thereto belonging. To these possessions the Protector Somerset
added the monastery of Woburn and the Earldom of Bedford. Nor did the
star of John Russell grow dim under the reign of the Catholic Mary, who
named him Lord Privy Seal, and Ambassador to Spain, to conduct Philip
II. to England. He died in 1555. From him were descended various
Russells who enjoyed as many of the good things of this life as they
could decently lay hands upon, and two of whom were famous men in their
day. William, Lord Russell, is best known to posterity as the husband of
the admirable Rachael Wriothesley, daughter of Thomas, Earl of
Southampton, and widow of Francis, Lord Vaughan. With respect to his
execution there has been some difference of opinion; but the probability
is that it was a judicial murder of the worst kind. Immediately after
the Revolution, Lord Russell's attainder was reversed by Parliament. His
widow survived him forty years, and lived to see George I. on the throne
and the Protestant succession firmly established. What is not so
generally known, perhaps, is that the mother of Lord Russell was the
daughter of Carr, Earl of Somerset, by the divorced wife of Essex. She
was herself a virtuous lady, and is said to have fallen down in a fit
when she first learned the horrible details of her family history.
Lord Russell's cousin was the victor of La Hogue, created Earl of Orford
in 1697. He died in 1727 without issue, when the title became
extinct--to be renewed fifteen years later in favor of Sir Robert
Walpole.
Lord Russell's father was created Duke of Bedford by William III., May
11, 1694. He was succeeded by his grandson, Wriothesley, who was married
at the ripe age of fourteen and elevated to a separate peerage the same
year. He had previously been requested to come forward as a candidate
for the county of Middlesex; but the prudent Lady Russell refused to
allow him. In the then state of public opinion he would have been
elected without opposition.
The eighteenth century was the golden age of Whig families, at least
till George III. became king, and the house of Russell continued to
provide the country with a succession of dignified placemen. John IV.,
Duke of Bedford, was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1756. In 1762 his
Grace, as the plenipotentiary of England, signed the preliminaries of
peace at Fontainebleau with France and Spain--a work on which he can
scarcely be congratulated, seeing that by it England was juggled out of
nearly every advantage she had won by seven years of victory. The Duke's
son, Francis, called by courtesy Marquis of Tavistock, married Lady
Elizabeth Keppel, who literally died of grief when her husband was
killed by a fall from his horse. Dr. Johnson's characteristic comment on
this event was that if her ladyship had been a poor washerwoman with
twelve children to mind, she would have had no time to die of grief.
Lord Tavistock left three sons, Francis and John, successively fifth and
sixth Dukes of Bedford, and William (posthumous), the unfortunate
nobleman who, within living memory, was murdered by his French valet
Courvoisier.
John, Earl Russell, the distinguished statesman who "upset the coach,"
is a son of the sixth duke, Lord Odo Russell, one of the ablest of
modern diplomatists, a grandson of the same peer.
On the day after the head of the house of Russell was raised to ducal
rank, the head of the Cavendishes received the same honor, being created
Marquis of Hartington and Duke of Devonshire. This family claims descent
from Sir John Cavendish, Lord Chief Justice of England in 1366, 1373,
and 1377. "In the fourth year of Richard II. his lordship was elected
chancellor of the university of Cambridge, and was next year
commissioned, with Robert de Hales, treasurer of England, to suppress
the insurrection raised in the city of York, in which year the mob,
having risen to the number of fifty thousand, made it a point,
particularly in the county of Suffolk, to plunder and murder the
lawyers; and being incensed in a more than ordinary degree against the
Chief Justice Cavendish, his son John having killed the notorious Wat
Tyler, they seized upon and dragged him, with Sir John of Cambridge,
prior of Bury, into the marketplace of that town, and there caused both
to be beheaded." Thus far Burke, who has small sympathy to bestow on Wat
Tyler, albeit that reformer was murdered in a cowardly way, whether it
were Walworth or Cavendish who struck the blow. "For William Walworth,
mayor of London, having arrested him (Wat Tyler), he furiously struck
the mayor with his dagger, but being armed [_i.e._ the mayor being in
armor], hurt him not; whereupon the mayor, drawing his baselard,
grievously wounded Wat in the neck; in which conflict an esquire of the
King's house, called John Cavendish, drew his sword and wounded him
twice or thrice, even unto death. For which service Cavendish was
knighted in Smithfield, and had a grant of L40 per annum from the King."
The great-great-grandson of this Sir John Cavendish was gentleman usher
to Cardinal Wolsey; after the death of his master King Henry took him
into his own employment, to reward him for the fidelity with which he
had served his former patron. His elder brother William was in 1530
appointed one of the commissioners for visiting and taking the
surrenders of divers religious houses. Needless to add that from that
day Mr. Cavendish had but to do as the King told him and make his
fortune. Before his death he had begun to build the noble seat of
Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, which his descendants still possess. His
second son, and eventual heir, was created Earl of Devonshire by King
James I. in 1618. The first earl's nephew was the renowned cavalier
general created Marquis and subsequently Duke of Newcastle. He was at
one time governor of the Prince of Wales (afterward Charles II.), and
there is a touching epistle extant in which his youthful charge entreats
the Marquis that he may not be compelled to take physic, which he feels
sure would do him no good.
William, fourth earl of Devonshire, although raised to a dukedom by
William III., distinguished himself, as did his son, the Marquis of
Hartington, in the House of Commons, by vehement opposition to the
King's retention of his Dutch guards after the conclusion of peace in
1697; and for this uncourtly conduct the country owes them a deep debt
of gratitude. The Dutch guards were not likely to do much harm, but
foreign troops have no business in a free state.
Henry Cavendish, the eminent chemist and philosopher, was grandson to
the second duke (who married Rachel, daughter of William, Lord Russell).
The present duke was senior wrangler of his year; his eldest son is
leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons.
Of the dukes of Marlborough, who are next on the list, it is unnecessary
to say much. All the world knows the strange history of John Churchill,
the noblest and the meanest of mankind. The great duke's only son died
of the smallpox while yet a boy; but his honors were made perpetual in
the female as well as the male line. The present duke is lineally
descended on the father's side from a most worthy country gentleman, Sir
Robert Spencer, of Althorp, raised to the peerage as Lord Spencer by
James I. Lord Spencer's name should be dear to every American for the
friendship he showed his neighbors the Washingtons. The Washingtons had
at one time rather a severe struggle to make both ends meet, but they
saw better days. John Washington, the heir of the house, was knighted
and fought for Charles I. in the civil war. Disgusted with the
commonwealth, he emigrated to America, hearing that men were more loyal
on the other side of the Atlantic. He is commonly believed to have been
the ancestor of George Washington. Such is the irony of fate.
The second Duke of Marlborough who, when unwell, would limit himself to
a bottle of brandy a day, proved a real source of danger to his country.
When he succeeded to his grandfather's honors in 1733, the faults of the
victor of Blenheim were forgotten and only his surpassing military
achievements remembered. King and people were alike determined to honor
the man who bore his name, and, it was fondly deemed, inherited his
qualities. He was made lord lieutenant of two counties, a knight of the
garter, and promoted to high military command. Having conducted himself
without discredit at Dettingen, he was thought equal to anything, and in
the year 1758 Pitt, who felt kindly toward the Churchills, and who had
been left L10,000 by Duchess Sarah, was so rash as to name him
commander-in-chief of all the British forces in Germany destined to act
under Prince Ferdinand. After all, the appointment did no harm, for the
Duke died the same year. _Exeunt_ the Dukes of Marlborough into infinite
space. Henceforth they and their doings have no more human interest.
The Dukes of Rutland are another family dating their greatness from a
share in the spoil of the monasteries. Thomas Manners, first Earl of
Rutland, drew one of the best repartees ever made from Sir Thomas More,
then Lord Chancellor. "_Honores mutant mores_," said the Earl to Sir
Thomas in resent for some fancied affront. "Nay, my lord," replied More;
"the pun is better translated into English--Honors change Manners."
Among the descendants of this nobleman two are worthy a passing notice;
viz., John, Marquis of Granby, the most dashing of cavalry officers,
whose bluff features may still be seen on the signboards of many taverns
in England; and Lord John Manners, heir-presumptive to the Dukedom of
Rutland, and a member of the present Cabinet. Lord John is chiefly
famous as the author of a poem in which occur the oft-quoted lines:
Let arts and learning, laws and commerce die,
But keep us still our old nobility--
perhaps the most remarkable sentiment ever uttered even by a young man.
It is fair to Lord John Manners to add that he was a fairly successful
Minister of Public Works under two administrations, showing indeed a
good deal of taste and no contempt at all for the arts. Another Manners
was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1805 to 1828; but beyond having an
income of something like $130,000 punctually during nearly a quarter of
a century, this prelate cannot be considered to have done anything
noteworthy. The Archbishop's son was Speaker of the House of Commons
from 1817 to 1834, and was raised to the peerage in 1835 as Viscount
Canterbury--a peerage being the invariable termination of a modern
Speaker's career. The present Lord Canterbury (his son) has been
Governor of Victoria and two or three other colonies; for men do not
belong to a ducal family for nothing.
There are but eleven Dukes of England properly so called; that is, Dukes
sitting in the House of Lords as such, and deriving their titles from
creations before the union with Scotland. The Duke of Norfolk, as before
stated, is the first of these, and the Duke of Rutland the last in order
of precedence. The patent of the latter as Duke bears date March 29,
1703. There are also Dukes of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom,
as well as of Scotland and Ireland; but those of the two sister kingdoms
sit by inferior titles among their peers, and all the Dukes not of
England take precedence among each other by somewhat intricate rules of
precedence, into which it is not worth while to enter. The dukedoms are
twenty-eight in all, exclusive of those held by princes of the blood
royal. The honor has been very sparingly bestowed in late years. The
last conferred by George III. was that of Northumberland, the King
refusing to make any more creations, except in favor of his own
descendants. The Prince Regent made Lord Wellington a duke, and after
his accession to the throne raised Lord Buckingham to the same dignity.
William IV. made two more, and her present Majesty has added an equal
number to the list.
The history of one ducal family is the history of all. They generally
boast a founder of some abilities, and produce one or two men, seldom
more, who leave their mark on the annals of their country. It would be
strange if it were otherwise, considering the enormous opportunities
which a title, joined to fair means, gives to its possessor in England.
The privileges with which acts of Parliament and courtly lawyers in
bygone ages invested the nobility have long since become nominal. A peer
has now no right as such to tender advice to the Queen. If libelled, he
can no more terrify the offender with the penalties of _scandalum
magnatum_, but must content himself with the same remedies as do other
folk; if he cannot be arrested for debt, he shares that privilege with
all the Queen's subjects; and if he continues to be a hereditary member
of the Legislature, it is because the chamber in which he sits has been
reduced to a moderating committee of the sovereign assembly. But the
nameless privileges of persons of rank are great indeed. The army, the
navy, the Church are filled with them or their dependents. Till within
the last few years, the diplomatic service was regarded as their
peculiar property. In the present House of Commons, the second elected
by household suffrage, fully one-third of the members are sons of peers,
baronets, or closely allied by marriage, or otherwise, to the titled
classes. A fair proportion of these are Liberals; the Queen's
son-in-law, Lord Lorne, member for Argyllshire, being a professor of
"Liberal" opinions, as also Lord Stafford, son of the Duke of
Sutherland, and Lord de Gray, son of the Marquis of Ripon. Such Liberals
serve the useful function of "watering" the creed of their party, which
might otherwise prove too strong for the Constitution. Mr. Gladstone and
Mr. Bright would doubtless have gone much further in the path of reform
if unfettered by ducal retainers.
And yet, though England is still very far from the realization of that
political equality which American citizens enjoy among themselves, and
which is perhaps one of the few ascertainable benefits Frenchmen have
derived from the revolution, there can be no doubt as to the direction
in which England is advancing. Democracy is the goal of the future, and
it is even in sight, though a long way off. For instance, considerable
as is the parliamentary influence of certain noblemen in the present
day, it is influence and no more. Before the Reform act of 1832, the
parliamentary "influence" of a peer, as it was euphemistically termed,
meant that he had the absolute disposal of one or more seats in the
House of Commons. The Duke of Norfolk, as before mentioned, returned
eleven members, the Duke of Richmond three, Lord Buckingham six, the
Duke of Newcastle seven. In the year 1820, out of the twenty-six
prelates sitting in the House of Lords, only six were not directly or
indirectly connected with the peerage; while the value of some of the
sees was enormous. Now public opinion is too formidable to allow of
jobbery that is not very discreetly managed, and a great deal no doubt
is thus managed. But appearances must be kept up.
E. C. GRENVILLE MURRAY.
MISS MISANTHROPE.
BY JUSTIN MCCARTHY.
CHAPTER IV.
"OH, MUCH DESIRED PRIZE, SWEET LIBERTY!"
The summer had gone and much even of the autumn, and Miss Grey and her
companion were settled in London. Minola had had everything planned out
in her mind before they left Dukes-Keeton, and little Miss Blanchet was
positively awed by her leader's energy, knowledge, and fearlessness. The
first night of their arrival in town they went to a quiet, respectable,
old-fashioned hotel, well known of Keeton folk, where Miss Grey's father
used to stay during his visits to London for many years, and where his
name was still well remembered. Then the two strangers from the country
set out to look for lodgings, and Miss Grey was able to test her
knowledge of London, and satisfy her pride of learning, by conducting
her friend straightway to the region in which she had resolved to make a
home for herself. She had been greatly divided in mind for a while
between Kensington and the West Centre; between the neighborhood of the
South Kensington Museum, the glades of the gardens, and all the charms
of the old court suburb, and the temptations of the National Gallery,
the British Museum, and the old-fashioned squares and houses around the
latter. She decided for the British Museum quarter. Miss Blanchet would
have preferred the brightness and air of fashion which belonged to
Kensington, but Miss Grey ruled that to live somewhere near the British
Museum was more like living in London, and she energetically declared
that she would rather live in Seven Dials than out of London.
To find a pleasant and suitable lodging would ordinarily have been a
difficulty; for the regular London lodging-house keeper detests the
sight of women, and only likes the gentleman who disappears in the
morning and returns late at night. But luckily there are Keeton folk
everywhere. As a rule nobody is born in London, "except children," as a
lady once remarked. Come up to London from whatever little Keeton you
will, you can find your compatriots settled everywhere in the
metropolis. Miss Grey obtained from the kindly landlady of the
hotel--who had herself been born in Keeton, and was married to a Glasgow
man--a choice of Keeton folk willing to receive respectable and
well-recommended lodgers--"real ladies" especially. Miss Grey, being
cordially vouched for by the landlady as a real lady, found out a Keeton
woman in the West Centre who had a drawing-room and two bedrooms to let.
Had Miss Grey invented the place it could not have suited her better. It
was an old-fashioned street, running out of a handsome old-fashioned
square. The street was no thoroughfare. Its other end was closed by a
solemn, sombre structure with a portico, and over the portico a plaster
bust of Pallas. This was an institution or foundation of some kind which
had long outlived the uses whereto it had been devoted by its pious
founder. It now had nothing but a library, a lecture hall, an enclosed
garden (into which, happily for her, the windows of Miss Grey's bedroom
looked), an old fountain in the garden, considerable funds, a board of
trustees, and an annual dinner. This place lent an air of severe dignity
to the street, and furthermore kept the street secluded and quiet by
blocking up one of its ends and inviting no traffic. The house in which
our pair of wanderers was lodging was itself old-fashioned, and in a
manner picturesque. It had broad old staircases of stone, and a large
hall and fine rooms. It had once been a noble mansion, and the legend
was that its owner had entertained Dr. Johnson there and Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and that Mrs. Thrale had often been handed up and down that
staircase. Minola loved association with such good company, and it may
be confessed went up and down the stairs several times for no other
purpose whatever than the pleasure of fancying herself following in the
footsteps of bright Mrs. Thrale, with whose wrongs Miss Grey, as a
misanthrope, was especially bound to sympathize.
The drawing-room happily looked at least aslant over the grass and the
trees of the square. Minola's bedroom, as has been said, looked into the
garden of the institution, with its well-kept walks, its shrubs, and its
old-fashioned fountain, whose quiet plash was always heard in the
seclusion of the back of the house. Had the trunks of the trees been
just a little less blackened by smoke our heroine might well have
fancied, as she looked from her bedroom window of nights, that she was
in some quaint old abode in a quiet country town. But in truth she did
not desire to encourage any such delusion. To feel that she was in the
heart of London was her especial delight. This feeling would have
brightened and glorified a far less attractive place. She used to sit
down alone in her bedroom of nights in order to think quietly to
herself, "Now I am at last really in London; not visiting London, but
living in it." There at least was one dream made real. There was one
ambition crowned. "Come what will," she said to herself, "I am living in
London." In London and freedom she grew more and more healthy and happy.
As a wearied Londoner might have sought out say Keeton, and found new
strength and spirits there, so our Keeton girl, who was somewhat pale
and thin when she sat on the steps of the ducal mausoleum, grew stronger
and brighter every day in the West Centre regions of London.
A happier, quieter, freer life could hardly be imagined, at least for
her. She spent hours in the National Gallery and the Museum; she walked
with Mary Blanchet in Regent's Park, and delighted to find out new
vistas and glimpses of beauty among the trees there, and to insist that
it was ever so much better than any place in the country. As autumn came
on and the trees grew barer and the skies became of a heavier silver
gray, Minola found greater charms in their softened half tones than the
brighter lights of summer could give. Even when it rained--and it did
rain sometimes--who could fail to see the beauty, all its own, of the
green of grass, and the darker stems and branches of trees, showing
faintly through the veil of the mist and the soft descending shower? It
was, indeed, a delightful Arcadian life. Its simplicity can hardly be
better illustrated than by the fact that our adventurous pair of women
always dined at one o'clock--when they dined at all--off a chop, except
on Sundays, when they invariably had a cold fowl.
Much as Miss Grey loved London, however, it was still a place made up of
men whom she considered herself bound to dislike, and of women who
depended far too much on these men. Therefore she made studies of scraps
of London life, and amused herself by satirizing them to her friend.
"I have accomplished a chapter of London, Mary," she said one evening
before their reading had set in. "I have completed my social studies of
our neighbors in Gainsborough Place"--a little street of shops near at
hand. "I am prepared to give you a complete court guide as to the grades
of society there, Mary, so that you may know at once how to demean
yourself to each and all."
"Do tell me all about it; I should very much like to know."
"Shall we begin with the highest or the lowest?"
"I think," Miss Blanchet said with a gentle sigh, expressive of no great
delight in the story of the lower classes, "I would rather you begin low
down, dear, and get done with them first."
"Very well; now listen. The lowest of all is the butcher. He is a
wealthy man, I am sure, and his daughter, who sits in the little office
in the shop, is a good-looking girl, I think. But in private life nobody
in Gainsborough Place mixes with them on really cordial terms. Their
friends come from other places; from butchers' shops in other streets.
They do occasionally interchange a few courtesies with the family of the
baker; but the baker's wife, though not nearly so rich, rather
patronizes and looks down upon Mrs. Butcher."
"Dear me!" said the poetess. "What odd people!"
"Well, the pastry-cook's family will have nothing to do, except in the
way of business, with butcher or baker; but they are very friendly with
the grocer, and they have evenings together. Now the two little old
maids, who keep the stationer's shop where the post-office is, are very
genteel, and have explained to me more than once that they don't feel at
home in this quarter, and that their friends are in the West End. But
they are not well off, poor things, I fear, and they like to spend an
evening now and then with the family of the grocer and the pastry-cook,
who are rather proud to receive them, and can give them the best tea and
Madeira cake; and both the little ladies assure me that nothing can be
more respectable than the families of the pastry-cook and the
grocer--for their station in life, they always add."
"Oh, of course," Miss Blanchet said, who was listening with great
interest as to a story, having that order of mind to which anything is
welcome that offers itself in narrative form, but not having any
perception of a satirical purpose in the whole explanation. Minola
appreciated the "of course," and somehow became discouraged.
"Well," she said, "that's nearly all, except for the family of the
chemist, who live next to the little ladies of the post-office, and who
only know even them by sufferance, and would not for all the world have
any social intercourse with any of the others. It's delightful, I think,
to find that London is not one place at all, but only a cluster of
little Keetons. This one street is Keeton to the life, Mary. I want to
pursue my studies deeper though; I want to find out how the gradations
of society go between the mothers of the boy who drives the butcher's
cart, the baker's boy, and pastry-cook's boy."
"Oh, Minola dear!"
"You think all this very unpoetic, Mary, and you are shocked at my
interest in these prosaic and lowly details. But it is a study of life,
my dear poetess, and it amuses and instructs me. Only for chance, you
know, I might have been like _that_, and it is a grand thing to learn
one's own superiority."
"You never could have been like that, Minola; you belong to a different
class."
"Yes, yes, dear, that is quite true. I belong to the higher classes
entirely; my father was a country architect, my stepfather is a
Nonconformist minister--these are of the aristocracy everywhere."
"You are a lady--a woman of education, Minola," the poetess said almost
severely. She could not understand how even Miss Grey herself could
disparage Miss Grey and her parentage in jest.
"I can assure you, dear, that one of the pastry-cook's daughters, whom I
talked with to-day, is a much better educated girl than I am. You should
hear her talk French, Mary. She has been taught in Paris, dear, and
speaks so well that I found it very hard to understand her. She plays
the harp, and knows all about Wagner. I don't. I like her very much, and
she is coming here to take tea with us."
The poetess was not delighted with this kind of society, but she never
ventured to contradict her leader.
"You can talk to every one I do really believe," she said. "I find it so
hard to get on with people--with some people."
"I feel so happy and so free here. I can say all the cynical things that
please me--_you_ don't mind--and I can like or dislike as I choose."
"I am afraid you dislike more than you like, Minola."
"I think I could like any one who had some strong purpose in life; not
the getting of money, or making a way in society. There are such, I
suppose; I don't know."
"When you meet my brother I am sure you will acknowledge that he has a
purpose in life which is not the getting of money," said Miss Blanchet.
"But you don't like men."
Minola made no reply. Poor little Miss Blanchet felt so kindly to all
the race of men that she did not understand how any woman could really
dislike them.
"I am going to do something that will please you to-morrow," Miss Grey
said, feeling that she owed her companion some atonement for not warming
to the mention of her brother. "I am positively going to hunt out Lucy
Money. They must have returned by this time."
This was really very pleasant news for Miss Blanchet. She had been
longing for her friend to renew her acquaintance with Miss Lucy Money,
about whom she had many dreams. It did not occur to Mary Blanchet to
question directly even in her own mind the decrees of Miss Grey, or to
say to herself that the course of life which they were leading was not
the most delightful that could be devised. But, if the little poetess
could have ventured to translate vague yearnings into definite thoughts,
she would, perhaps, have acknowledged to herself a faint desire that the
brilliant passages of the London career she had marked out for herself
in anticipation should come rather more quickly than they just now
seemed likely to do. At present there was not much difference
perceptible to her between London and Duke's-Keeton. Nobody came to see
them. Even her brother had not yet presented himself. Her poem did not
make much progress; there was no great incentive to poetic work. Minola
and she did not know any poets, or artists, or publishers. Mary
Blanchet's poetic tastes were of a somewhat old-fashioned school, and
did not include any particular care for looking at trees, and fields,
and water, and skies, although these objects of natural beauty were made
to figure in the poems a good deal in connection with, and illustrative
of, the emotions of the poetess. Therefore the rambles in the park were
not so delightful to her as to her leader; and when the evening set in,
and Minola and she read to each other, Mary Blanchet was always rather
pleased if an opportunity occurred for interrupting the reading by a
talk. She was particularly anxious that Minola should renew her
acquaintance with her old schoolfellow, Miss Lucy Money, whose father
she understood to be somehow a great sort of person, and through whom
she saw dimly opening up a vista, perhaps the only one for her, into
society and literature. But the Money family were out of town when our
friends came to London, and Miss Blanchet had to wait; and, even when it
was probable that they had returned, Miss Grey did not seem very eager
to renew the acquaintance. Indeed, her resolve to visit Miss Money now
was entirely a good-natured concession to the evident desire of Mary
Blanchet. Minola saw her friend's little ways and weaknesses clearly,
and smiled now and then as she thought of them, and liked her none the
less for them--rather, indeed, felt her breast swell with kindliness and
pity. It pleased her generous heart to gratify her companion in every
way, to find out things that she liked and bring them to her, to study
her little innocent vanities, that she might gratify them. What little
dainties Mary Blanchet liked to have with her tea, what pretty ribbons
she thought it became her to wear--these Miss Grey was always perplexing
herself about. When she found that she liked to be alone sometimes, that
she must have a long walk unaccompanied, that she must have thoughts
which Mary would not care to hear, then she felt a pang of remorse, as
if she were guilty of a breach of true _camaraderie_, and she could not
rest until she had relieved her soul by some special mark of attention
to her friend. On the other hand, Mary Blanchet, for all her dreams and
aspirations, was a sensible and managing little person, who got for Miss
Grey about twice the value that she herself could have obtained out of
her money. This was a fact which Minola always took care to impress upon
her companion, for she dreaded lest Miss Blanchet should feel herself a
dependent. Miss Blanchet, however, in a modest way, knew her value, and
had besides one of the temperaments to which dependence on some really
loved being comes natural, and is inevitable.
So Minola set out next day, about three o'clock, to look up her
schoolfellow, Miss Lucy Money. She went forth on her mission with some
unwillingness, and with a feeling as if she were abandoning some purpose
or giving up a little of a principle in doing so. "I came to London to
live alone and independent," she said to herself sometimes, "and already
I am going out to seek for acquaintances. Why do I do that? I want
strength of purpose. I am just like everybody else"; and she began, as
was her wont, to scrutinize her own weaknesses, and bear heavily on
them. For, absurd as it may seem, this odd young woman really did
propose to live alone--herself and Mary Blanchet--in London until they
died--alone, that is, so far as social life and acquaintanceships in
society were concerned. Vast and vague schemes for doing good to her
neighbors, and for striving in especial to give a helping hand to
troubled women, were in Miss Grey's plans of life; but society, so
called, was to have no part in them. It did not occur to her that she
was far too handsome a girl to be allowed to put herself thus under an
extinguisher or behind a screen. When people looked after her as she
passed through the streets, she assumed that they noticed some rustic
peculiarity in her dress or her hat, and she felt a contempt for them.
Her love of London did not imply a love of Londoners, whom in general
she thought rude and given to staring. But even if she had thought
people were looking at her because of her figure, her face, her eyes,
her superb hair, she would have felt a contempt for them all the same.
She had a proud indifference to personal beauty, and looked down upon
men whose judgment could be affected by the fact that a woman had finer
eyes, or brighter hair, or a more shapely mould than other women.
Once Minola was positively on the point of turning back, and renouncing
all claim on the acquaintanceship of her former school companion. She
suddenly remembered, however, that in condemning her own fancied
weakness she had forgotten that her visit was undertaken to oblige Mary
Blanchet. "Poor Mary! I have only one little acquaintanceship that has
anything to do with society, and am I to deny her that chance if she
likes it?" She went on rapidly and resolutely. Sometimes she felt
inclined to blame herself for bringing Mary Blanchet away from Keeton,
although Mary had for years been complaining of her life and her work
there, and beseeching Miss Grey not to leave her behind when she went to
live in London.
It was a beautiful autumn day. London looks to great advantage on one of
these rare days, and Miss Grey felt her heart swell with mere delight as
she looked from the streets to the sky and from the sky to the streets.
She passed through one or two squares, and stopped to see the sun,
already going down, send its light through the bare branches of the
trees. The western sky was covered with gray, silver-edged clouds, which
brightened into blots of golden fire as they came closer in the track of
the sun. The air was mild, soft, and almost warm. All poets and painters
are full of the autumnal charms of the country; but to certain oddly
constituted minds some street views in London on a fine autumn day have
an unspeakable witchery. Miss Grey walked round and round one of the
squares, and had to remind herself of her purpose on Mary Blanchet's
behalf in order to impel herself on.
The best of the day had gone, and the early evening was looking somewhat
chill and gloomy between the huge ramparts of the Victoria street houses
by the time that Miss Grey stood in that solemn thoroughfare, and her
heart sank a little as she reached the house where her old school friend
lived.
"Perhaps Lucy Money is altogether changed," Miss Grey said to herself as
she came up to the door. "Perhaps she won't care about me; perhaps I
shan't like her any more; and perhaps her mamma will think me a dreadful
person for not honoring my stepfather and stepmother. Perhaps there are
brothers--odious, slangy young men, who think girls fall in love with
them. Oh, yes, here is one of them."
For just as she had rung the bell a hansom cab drove up to the door, and
a tall, dark-complexioned young man leaped out. He raised his hat with
what seemed to Miss Grey something the manner of a foreigner when he saw
her standing at the door, and she felt a momentary thrill of relief,
because, if he was a foreigner, he could not be Lucy Money's brother.
Besides, she knew very well that the great houses in Victoria street
were occupied by several tenants, and there was good hope that the young
man might have business with the upper story, and she with the ground
floor.
The young man was about to ring the bell, when he stopped and said:
"Perhaps you have rung already?"
"Yes, I have rung," Miss Grey coldly replied.
"This is Mr. Money's, I suppose?"
"Mr. Money lives here," she answered, with the manner of one resolute to
close the conversation. The young man did not seem in the least
impressed by her tone.
"Perhaps I have the honor of speaking to Miss Money?" he began, with
delighted eagerness.
"No. I am not Miss Money," she answered, still in her clear monotone.
No words could say more distinctly than the young man's expression did,
"I am sorry to hear it." Indeed, no young man in the world going to
visit Mr. Money could have avoided wishing that the young lady then
standing at the door might prove to be Miss Money.
The door opened, and the young man drew politely back to give Miss Grey
the first chance. She asked for Miss Lucy Money, and the porter rang a
bell for one of Mr. Money's servants. Miss Grey had brought a card with
her, on which she had written over her engraved name, "For Lucy Money,"
and beneath it, "Nola," the short rendering of "Minola," which they used
to adopt at school.
Then the porter looked inquiringly at the other visitor.
"If Mr. Money is at home," said the latter, "I should be glad to see
him. I find I have forgotten my card case, but my name is Heron--Mr.
Victor Heron; and do, please, try to remember it, and to say it
rightly."
CHAPTER V.
MISS GREY'S FIRST CALL.
Mr. Money's home, like Mr. Money himself, conveyed to the intelligent
observer an idea of quiet, self-satisfied strength. Mr. Money had one of
the finest and most expensive suites of rooms to be had in the great
Victoria street buildings, and his rooms were furnished handsomely and
richly. He had servants in sober livery, and a carriage for his wife and
daughters, and a little brougham for himself. He made no pretence at
being fashionable; rather indeed seemed to say deliberately, "I am a
plain man and don't care twopence about fashion, and I despise making a
show of being rich; but I am rich enough for all I want, and whatever
money can buy for me I can buy." He would not allow his wife and
daughters to aim at being persons of fashion had they been so inclined,
but they might spend as much money as ever they pleased. He never made a
boast of his original poverty, or the humbleness of his bringing up, nor
put on any vulgar show of rugged independence. The impression he made
upon everybody was that of a completely self-sufficing--we do not say
self-sufficient--man. It was not very clear how he had made his money.
He had been at the head of one of the working departments under the
Government, had somehow fancied himself ill treated, resigned his place,
and, it was understood, had entered into various contracts to do work
for the governments of foreign States. It was certain that Mr. Money was
not a speculator. His name never appeared in the directors' list of any
new company. He could not be called a city man. But it was certain that
he was rich.
Mr. Money was in Parliament. He was a strong radical in theory, and was
believed to have much stronger opinions than he troubled himself to
express. There was a rough, scornful way about him, as of one who dearly
considered all our existing arrangements merely provisional, and who in
the mean time did not care to occupy himself overmuch with the small
differences between this legislative proposition and that. It was not on
political subjects that he usually spoke. He was a very good speaker,
clear, direct, and expressive in his language, always using plain,
effective words, and always showing a perfect ease in the finishing of
his sentences. There was a savor of literature about him, and it was
evident in many indirect ways that he knew Greek and Latin much better
than most of the university men. The impression he produced was that of
a man who on most subjects knew more than he troubled himself to
display. It seemed as if it would take a very ready speaker indeed to
enter into personal contest with Mr. Money and not get the worst of it.
He was believed to be very shrewd and clever, and was known to be
liberal of his money. People consulted him about many things, and to
some extent admired him; some were a little afraid of him, and, in
homely phrase, fought shy of him. Perhaps he was thought to be
unscrupulous; perhaps his blunt way of going at the very heart of a
scruple in others made them fancy that he rather despised all moral
conventionalities. Whatever the reason was, a certain class of persons
always rather distrusted Mr. Money, and held aloof even while asking his
advice. No one who had come in his way even for a moment forgot him, or
was confused as to his identity, or failed to form some opinion about or
could have put clearly into words an exact statement of the opinion he
had formed.
On this particular day of autumn Mr. Money was in his study reading
letters. He was talking to himself in short, blunt sentences over each
letter as he read it, and put it into a pigeonhole, or tore it and threw
it into the waste-paper basket. His sentences were generally concise
judgments pronounced on each correspondent. "Fool." "Blockhead." "Just
so; I expected that of you!" "Yes, yes, he's all right." "That will do."
Sometimes a comment, begun rather gruffly, ended in a good-natured
smile, and sometimes Mr. Money, having read a letter to the close with a
pleased and satisfied expression, suddenly became thoughtful, and leaned
upon his desk, drumming with the finger tips of one hand upon his teeth.
A servant interrupted his work by bringing him a message and a name. Mr.
Money looked up, said quickly, "Yes, yes; show him in!" and Mr. Victor
Heron was introduced.
Mr. Money advanced to meet his visitor with an air of cordial welcome.
One peculiarity of Mr. Money's strong, homely face was the singular
sweetness of the smile which it sometimes wore. The full lips parted so
pleasantly, the white teeth shone, and the eyes, that usually seemed
heavy, beamed with so kindly an air, that to youth at least the
influence was for the moment irresistible. Victor Heron's emotional face
sparkled with responsive expression.
"Well, well; glad to see you, glad to see you. Knew you would come.
Shove away those blue books and sit down. We haven't long got back; but
I tried to find you, and couldn't get at your address. They didn't know
at the Colonial Institute even. And how are you, and what have you been
doing with yourself?"
"Not much good," Heron replied, thinking as usual of his grievance. "I
couldn't succeed in seeing anybody."
"Of course not, of course not. I could have told you so. People are not
yet coming back to town, except hard working fellows like me. Have you
been cooling your heels in the antechambers of the Colonial office?"
"Yes, I have been there a little; not much. I saw it was no use just
yet, and that isn't a kind of occupation I delight in." The young man's
face reddened with the bare memory of his vexation. "I hate that sort of
thing."
"To go where you know people don't want to see you? Yes, it tries young
and sensitive people a good deal. They've put you off?"
"As I told you, I have seen nobody yet. But I mean to persevere. They
shall find I am not a man to be got rid of in that way."
Mr. Money made no observation on this, but went to a drawer in his desk
and took out a little book with pages alphabetically arranged.
"I have been making inquiries about you," he said, "of various people
who know all about the colonies. Would you like to hear a summary
description of your personal character? Don't be offended--this is a way
I have; the moment a person interests me and seems worth thinking about,
I enter him in my little book here, and sum up his character from my own
observation and from what people tell me. Shall I read it for you? I
wouldn't, you may be sure, if I thought you were anything of a fool."
This compliment, of course, conquered Heron, who was otherwise a good
deal puzzled. But there was something in Mr. Money's manner with those
in whom he took any interest, that prevented their feeling hurt by his
occasional bluntness.
"I don't know myself," Heron said.
"Of course you don't. What busy man, who has to know other people, could
have time to study himself? That work might do for philosophers. I may
teach you something now, and save you the trouble."
"I suppose I ought to make my own acquaintance," said Heron resignedly,
while much preferring to talk of his grievance.
"Very good. Now listen.
"Heron, Victor.--Formerly in administration of St. Xavier's settlements.
Got into difficulty; dropped down. Education good, but literary rather
than businesslike. Plenty of pluck, but wants coolness. Egotistic, but
unselfish. Good deal of talent and go. Very honest, but impracticable. A
good weapon in good hands, but must take care not to be made a
plaything."
Heron laughed. "It's a little like the sort of thing phrenologists give
people," he said, "but I think it's very flattering. I can assure you,
however, no one shall make a plaything of _me_," he added with emphasis.
"So we all think, so we all think," Mr. Money said, putting away his
book. "Well, you are going on with this then?"
"I am going to vindicate my conduct, and compel them to grant me an
inquiry, if you mean that. Nothing on earth shall keep me from that."
"So, so. Very well. We'll talk about that another time--many other
times; and I may give you some advice, which you needn't take if you
don't like, and I shan't be offended. Now, I want to introduce you to my
wife and my girls, and you must have a cup of tea. Odd, isn't it, to
find men drinking tea at five o'clock in the afternoon? Up at the club,
any day about that hour, you might think we were a drawing-room full of
old spinsters, to hear the rattling of teacups that goes on all around."
He took Heron's arm in a friendly, dictatorial way, and conducted him to
the drawing-room on the same floor.
The drawing-room was entered, not by opening a door, but by withdrawing
some folds of a great, heavy, dark-green curtain. Mr. Money drew aside
part of the curtain to make way for his friend; and they both stopped a
moment on the threshold. A peculiar, sweet, half melancholy smile gave a
strange dignity for the moment to Mr. Money's somewhat rough face, and
he gently let the curtain fall.
"Wasn't there some great person, Mr. Heron--Burke, was it?--who used to
say that whatever troubles he had outside all ceased as he stood at his
own door? Well, I always feel like that when I lift this curtain."
It was a pretty sight, as he again raised the curtain and led Heron in.
The drawing-room was very large, and was richly, and, as it seemed to
Heron, somewhat oddly furnished. The light in the lower part was faint
and dim, a sort of yellowish twilight, procured by softened lamps. The
upper extremity was steeped in a far brighter light, and displayed to
Heron, almost as on a stage, a little group of women, among whom his
quick eye at once saw the girl who had come up to the door at the same
time with him. She was, indeed, a very conspicuous figure, for she was
seated on a sofa, and one girl sat at her feet, while another stood at
the arm of the sofa and bent over her. An elderly lady, with voluminous
draperies that floated over the floor, was reclining on a low arm-chair,
with her profile turned to Heron. On a fancy table near, a silver
tea-tray glittered. A daintily dressed waiting-maid was serving tea.
"Take care of the floors as you come along," said Money. "We like to put
rugs, and rolls of carpet, and stools now in all sorts of wrong places,
to trip people up. That shows how artistic we are! Theresa, dear, this
is my friend, Mr. Heron."
"I am glad to see you, Mr. Heron," said a full, deep, melancholy voice,
and a tall, slender lady partly rose from her chair, then sank again
amid her draperies, bowed a head topped by a tiny lace cap, and held out
to Heron a thin hand covered with rings, and having such bracelets and
dependent chainlets that when Heron gave it even the gentlest pressure,
they rattled like the manacles of a captive.
"We saw you in Paris, Mr. Heron," the lady graciously said, "but I think
you hardly saw us."
"These are my daughters, Mr. Heron, Theresa and Lucy. I think them good
girls, though full of nonsense," said Mr. Money.
Lucy, who had been on a footstool at Miss Grey's feet, gathered herself
up, blushing. She was a pretty girl, with brown, frizzy hair, and wore a
dress which fitted her so closely from neck to hip that she might really
have been, to all seeming, melted or moulded into it. The other young
lady, Theresa, slightly and gravely inclined her head to Mr. Heron, who
at once thought the whole group most delightful and beautiful, and found
his breast filled with a new pride in the loved old England that
produced such homes and furnished them with such women.
"Dear, darling papa," exclaimed the enthusiastic little Lucy, swooping
at her father, and throwing both arms round his neck, "we have had such
a joy to-day, such a surprise! Don't you see anybody here? Oh, come now,
do use your eyes."
"I see a young lady whom I have not yet the pleasure of knowing, but
whom I hope you will help me to know, Lucelet."
Mr. Money turned to Miss Grey with his genial smile. She rose from the
sofa and bowed and waited. She did not as yet quite understand the Money
family, and was not sure whether she ought to like them or not. They
impressed her at first as being far too rich for her taste, and odd and
affected, and she hated affectation.
"But this is Nola Grey, papa--my dearest old schoolfellow when I was at
Keeton; you must have heard me talk of Nola Grey a thousand times."
So she dragged her papa up to Nola Grey, whose color grew a little at
this tempestuous kind of welcome.
"Dare say I did, Lucelet, but Miss Grey, I am sure will excuse me if I
have forgotten; I am very glad to see you, Miss Grey--glad to see any
friend of Lucelet's. So you come from Keeton? That's another reason why
I should be glad to see you, for I just now want to ask a question or
two about Keeton. Sit down."
Miss Grey allowed herself to be led to a sofa a little distance from
where she had been sitting. Mr. Money sat beside her.
"Now, Lucelet, I want to ask Miss Grey a sensible question or two, which
I don't think you would care twopence about. Just you go and help our
two Theresas to talk to Mr. Heron."
"But, papa darling, Miss Grey won't care about what you call sensible
subjects any more than I. She won't know anything about them."
"Yes, dear, she will; look at her forehead."
"Oh, I have looked at it! Isn't it beautiful?"
"I didn't mean that," Mr. Money said with a smile; "I meant that it
looked sensible and thoughtful. Now, go away, Lucelet, like a dear
little girl."
Miss Grey sat quietly through all this. She was not in the least
offended. Mr. Money seemed to her to be just what a man ought to
be--uncouth, rough, and domineering. She was amused meanwhile to observe
the kind of devotion and enthusiasm with which Mr. Heron was entering
into conversation with Mrs. Money and her elder daughter. That, too, was
just what a man ought to be--a young man--silly in his devotion to
women, unless, perhaps, where the devotion was to be accounted for
otherwise than by silliness, as in a case like the present, where the
unmarried women might be presumed to have large fortunes. So Miss Grey
liked the whole scene. It was as good as a play to her, especially as
good as a play which confirms all one's own theories of life.
"England, Mr. Heron," said Mrs. Money in her melancholy voice, "is near
her fall."
"Oh, Mrs. Money, pray pardon me--England! you amaze me--I _am_
surprised--do forgive me--to hear an Englishwoman say so; our England
with her glorious destiny!" The young man blushed and grew confused. One
might have thought his mother had been called in question or his
sweetheart.
Mrs. Money shook her head and twirled one of her bracelets.
"She is near her fall, Mr. Heron! You cannot know. You have lived far
away, and do not see what _we_ see. She has proved faithless to her
mission."
"Something--yes--there I agree," Mr. Heron eagerly interposed, thinking
of the St. Xavier's settlements.
"She was the cradle of freedom," Mrs. Money went on. "She ought to have
been always its nursery and home. What have we now, Mr. Heron? A people
absolutely in servitude, the principle of caste everywhere
triumphant--corruption in the aristocracy--corruption in the city. No
man now dares to serve his country except at the penalty of suffering
the blackest ingratitude!"
Mr. Heron was startled. He did not know that Mrs. Money was arguing only
from the assumption that her husband was a very great man, who would
have done wonderful things for England if a perverse and base ruling
class had not thwarted him, and treated him badly.
"England," Theresa Money said, smiling sweetly, but with a suffusion of
melancholy, "can hardly be regenerated until she is once more dipped in
the holy well."
"You see we all think differently, Mr. Heron," said the eager Lucy.
"Mamma thinks we want a republic. Tessy is a saint, and would like to
see roadside shrines."
"And you?" Heron asked, pleased with the girl's bright eyes and winning
ways.
"Oh--I only believe in the regeneration of England through the
renaissance of art. So we all have our different theories, you see, but
we all agree to differ, and we don't quarrel much. Papa laughs at us all
when he has time. But just now I am taken up with Nola Grey. If I were a
man, I should make an idol of her. That lovely, statuesque face, that
figure--like the Diana of the Louvre!"
Mr. Heron looked and admired, but one person's raptures about man or
woman seldom awaken corresponding raptures in impartial breasts. He saw,
however, a handsome, ladylike girl, who conveyed to him a sort of
chilling impression.
"She was my schoolfellow at Keeton," Lucy went on, "and she was so good
and clever that I adored her then, and I do now again. She has come to
London to live alone, and I am sure she must have some strange and
romantic story."
Meanwhile Mr. Money, who prefaced his inquiries by telling Miss Grey
that he was always asking information about something, began to put
several questions to her concerning the local magnates, politics, and
parties of Keeton. Minola was rather pleased to be talked to by a man as
if she were a rational creature. Like most girls brought up in a
Nonconformist household in a country town, she had been surrounded by
political talk from her infancy, but unlike most girls, she had
sometimes listened to it and learned to know what it was all about. So
she gave Mr. Money a good deal of information, which he received with an
approbatory "Yes, yes" or an inquiring "So, so" every now and then.
"You know that there's likely to be a vacancy soon in the
representation-member of Parliament," he added by way of explanation.
"I know what a vacancy in the representation means," Miss Grey answered
demurely, "but I didn't know there was likely to be one just now. I
don't keep up much correspondence with Keeton. I don't love it."
"Why not?"
"Oh, I don't know."
He smiled.
"You are smiling because you think that a woman's answer? So it is, Mr.
Money, and I am afraid it isn't true; but I really didn't think of what
I was saying. I _do_ know why I don't care much about Keeton."
"Yes, yes; well, I dare say you do. But to return, as the books say--do
you know a Mr. Augustus Sheppard?"
She could not help coloring slightly. "Yes, I know him," and a faint
smile broke over her face in spite of herself.
"Is he strong in Keeton?"
"Strong?"
"Well liked, respectable, a likely kind of man to get good Conservative
support if he stood for Keeton? You don't know, perhaps?"
"Yes, I think I do know. I believe he wishes to get into Parliament, and
I am sure he is thought highly of. He is a very good man--a man of very
high character," she added emphatically, anxious to repair the mental
wrong doing of thinking him ridiculous and tiresome.
Just at this moment Mr. Heron rose to take his leave, and Mr. Money left
the room with him, so that the conversation with Miss Grey was broken
off. Then Lucy came to Nola again, and Nola was surrounded by the three
women, who began to lay out various schemes for seeing her often and
making London pleasant to her. Much as our lonely heroine loved her
loneliness, she was greatly touched by their spontaneous kindness, but
she was alarmed by it too.
A card was brought to Mrs. Money, who passed it on to Lucy.
"Oh, how delightful!" Lucy exclaimed. "So glad he has come, mamma. Nola,
dear, a poet--a real poet!"
But Nola would not prolong her visit that day even for a poet. A very
handsome, tall, dark-haired man, who at a distance seemed boyishly
young, and when near looked worn and not very young, was shown in. For
the moment or two that she could see him, Minola thought she had never
seen so self-conceited and affected a creature. She did not hear his
name nor a word he said, but his splendid, dark eyes, deeply set in
hollows, took in every outline of her face and form. She thought him the
poet of a schoolgirl's romance made to order.
Minola tore herself from the clinging embraces of Lucy, with less
difficulty, perhaps, because of the poet's arrival, to whose society
Lucy was clearly anxious to hasten back. It so happened that Mr. Money
had kept Mr. Heron for a few minutes in talk, and the result was that
exactly as Miss Grey reached the door Mr. Heron arrived there too. They
both came out together, and in a moment they were in the gray
atmosphere, dun lines of houses, and twinkling gaslights of Victoria
street. Minola would much rather have been there alone.
Victor Heron, however, was full of the antique ideas of man's chivalrous
duty and woman's sweet dependence, which still lingered in the
out-of-the-way colony where he had spent so much of his time. Also, it
must be owned that he had not yet quite got rid of the sense of
responsibility and universal dictatorship belonging to the chief man in
a petty commonwealth. For some time after his return to London he could
hardly see an omnibus horse fall in the street without thinking it was
an occasion which called for some intervention on his part. Therefore,
when Miss Grey and he stood in the street together Mr. Heron at once
assumed that the young woman must, as a matter of course, require his
escort and protection.
He calmly took his place at her side. Miss Grey was a little surprised,
but said nothing, and they went on.
"Do you live far from this, Miss Money?" he began.
"I am not Miss Money. My name is Grey."
"Of course, yes--I beg your pardon for the mistake. It was only a
mistake of the tongue, for I knew very well that you were not Miss
Money."
"Thank you."
"And your first name is so very pretty and peculiar that I could not
have easily forgotten it."
"I am greatly obliged to my godfathers and godmothers."
"Did you say that you lived in this quarter, Miss Grey?"
"No--I did not make any answer; I had not time."
"I hope you do not live very near," the gallant Heron observed.
"Why do you hope that?" Miss Grey said, turning her eyes upon him with
an air of cold resolution, which would probably have proved very trying
to a less sincere maker of compliments, even though a far more dexterous
person than Mr. Heron.
"Of course, because I should have the less of your company."
"But there is no need of your coming out of your way for me. I don't
require any escort, Mr. Heron."
"I couldn't think of letting a lady walk home by herself. That would
seem very strange to me. Perhaps you think me old-fashioned or
colonial?"
"I have heard that you are from the colonies. In London people have not
time to keep up all these pretty forms and ceremonies. We don't any
longer pretend to think that a girl needs to be defended against giants,
or robbers, or mad bulls, when crossing two or three streets in open
day."
"Well, it is hardly open day now; it is almost quite dark."
"The lamps are lighted," Miss Gray observed.
"Yes, if you call that being lighted! You have such bad gas in London.
Why does not somebody stir up people here, and put things to rights? You
seem to me the most patient people in all the world. I wish they would
give me the ruling of this place for about a twelvemonth."
"I wish they would."
"Do you?" and he looked at her with a glance of genuine gratitude in his
dark eyes, for he thought she meant to express her entire confidence in
his governing power, and her wish to see him at the head of affairs.
Miss Grey, however, only meant that if he were engaged in directing the
municipal government of London he probably would be rather too busy to
walk with her.
"Yes," he went on, "you should soon see a change. For instance"--they
were now at the end of Victoria street, near the Abbey--"I would begin
by having a great broad street, like this, running right up from here to
the British Museum. You know where the British Museum is, of course?"
"Yes; I live near it."
"Do you really? I am so glad to hear that. I have been there lately very
often. How happy you Londoners are to have such glorious places. In that
reading-room I felt inclined to bless England."
Miss Grey was now particularly sorry that she had said anything about
her place of residence. Still it did not seem as if much would have been
gained by any reticence unless she could actually dismiss her companion
peremptorily. Mr. Heron was evidently quite resolved to be her escort
all the way along. He was clearly under the impression that he was
making himself very agreeable. The good-natured youth believed he was
doing quite the right thing, and meant it all for the very best, and
therefore could not suppose that any nice girl could fail to accept his
attendance in a kindly spirit. That Miss Grey must be a nice girl he was
perfectly certain, for he had met her at Mr. Money's, and Money was
evidently a fine fellow--a very fine fellow. Miss Grey was very handsome
too, but that did not count for very much with Heron. At least he would
have made himself just as readily, under the circumstances, the escort
of little Miss Blanchet.
So he talked on about various things--the Moneys, and what charming
people they were! the British Museum, what a noble institution! the
National Gallery, how hideous the building!--why on earth didn't anybody
do something?--the glorious destiny of England--the utter imbecility of
the English Government.
It was not always quite easy to keep up with his talk, for the streets
were crowded and noisy, and Mr. Heron talked right on through every
interruption. When they came to crossings where the perplexed currents
and counter-currents of traffic on wheels would have made a nervous
person shudder, Mr. Heron coolly took Miss Grey's hand and conducted her
in and out, talking all the while as if they were crossing a ball-room
floor. Minola made it a point of honor not to hesitate, or start, or
show that she had nerves. But when he began to run into politics he
always pulled himself up, for he politely remembered that young ladies
did not care about politics, and so he tried to find some prettier
subject to talk about. Miss Grey understood this perfectly well, and was
amused and contemptuous.
"I suppose this man must be a person of some brains and sense," she
thought. "He was in command of something somewhere, and I suppose even
the Government he calls so imbecile would not have put him there if he
were a downright fool. But because he talks to a woman, he feels bound
only to talk of trivial things."
At last the walk came to an end. "Ah, I beg pardon. You live here," Mr.
Heron said. "May I have the honor of calling on your family? I sometimes
come to the Museum, and if I might call, I should be delighted to make
their acquaintance."
"Thank you," Miss Grey said coldly. "I have no family. My father and
mother are dead."
"Oh, I am so sorry! I wish I had not asked such a question." He looked
really distressed, and the expression of his eyes had for the first time
a pleasing, softening effect upon Miss Grey.
"We lodge here all alone--a lady--an old friend of mine--and I. We have
no acquaintances, unless Lucy Money's family may be called so. We read
and study a great deal, and don't go out, and don't see any one."
"I can quite understand," Mr. Heron answered with grave sympathy. "Of
course you don't care to be intruded on by visitors. I thank you for
having allowed me the pleasure of accompanying you so far."
He spoke in tones much more deferential than before, for he assumed that
the young lady was lonely and poor. There was something in his manner,
in his eyes, in his grave, respectful voice, which conveyed to Minola
the idea of genuine sympathy, and brought to her, the object of it, a
new conviction that she really was isolated and friendless, and the
springs of her emotions were touched in a moment, and tears flashed in
her eyes. Perhaps Mr. Heron saw them, and felt that he ought not to see
them, for he raised his hat and instantly left her.
Minola lingered for a moment on the doorstep, in order that she might
recover her expression of cheerfulness before meeting the eyes of Miss
Blanchet. But that little lady had seen her coming to the door, and seen
and marvelled at her escort, and now ran herself and opened the door to
receive her.
"My dear Minola, do tell me who that handsome young man was! What lovely
dark eyes he had! Where did you meet him? Is he young Mr. Money?"
The poetess's susceptible bosom still thrilled and throbbed at the
sight, or even the thought, of a handsome young man. She could not
understand how anybody on earth could avoid liking handsome young men.
But in this case a certain doubt and dissatisfaction suddenly dissolved
away into her instinctive gratification at the sight of Minola's escort.
A handsome and young Mr. Money might prove an inconvenient visitor just
at present.
Minola briefly told her when they were safe in their room. Miss Blanchet
was relieved to find that he was not a young Mr. Money, for a young Mr.
Money, if there were one, would doubtless be rich.
"Isn't he wonderfully handsome! Such a smile!"
"I hardly know," Minola said distressedly; "perhaps he is. I really
didn't notice. He goes to the Museum, and I must exile myself from the
place for evermore, or I shall be always meeting him, and be forced to
listen politely to talk about nothing. Mary Blanchet, our days of
freedom are gone! We are getting to know people. I foresaw it. What
shall we do? We must find some other lodgings ever so far away."
"Do you like Miss Money, dear?" Mary Blanchet asked timidly.
"Lucy? Oh, yes, very much. But there is Mr. Money; and they are going to
be terribly kind to us; and they have all manner of friends; and what is
to become of my independence? Mary Blanchet, I will _not_ bear it! I
_will_ be independent!"
"I have news for you, dear," Miss Blanchet said.
"If it please the destinies, not news of any more friends! Why, we shall
be like the hare in Gay's fable if we go on in this way."
"Not of any more friends, darling, but of one friend. My brother has
been here."
"Oh!"
"Yes; and he is longing to see you."
Minola sincerely wished she could say that she was longing to see him.
But she could not say it, even to please her friend and comrade.
"You don't want to see him," said Mary Blanchet in piteous reproach.
"But you do, dear," Miss Grey said; "and I shall like to see any one, be
sure, who brightens your life."
This was said with full sincerity, although at the very moment the
whimsical thought passed through her, "We only want Mr. Augustus
Sheppard now to complete our social happiness."
CHAPTER VI.
IS THIS ALCESTE?
Minola's mind was a good deal disturbed by the various little events of
the day, the incidents and consequences of her first visit in London.
She began to see with much perplexity and disappointment that her life
of lonely independence was likely to be compromised. She was not sure
that she could much like the Moneys, and yet she felt that they were
disposed and determined to be very kind to her. There was something
ridiculous and painful in the fact that Mr. Augustus Sheppard's name was
thrust upon her almost at the first moment of her crossing for the first
time a strange threshold in London; then there was Mary Blanchet's
brother turning up; and Mary Blanchet herself was evidently falling off
from the high design of lonely independence. Again, there was Mr. Heron,
who now knew where she lived, and who often went to the British Museum,
and who might cross her path at any hour. Sweet, lonely freedom, happy
carelessness of action, farewell!
Mr. Heron was especially a trouble to Minola. The kindly, grave
expression on his face when he heard of her living alone declared, as
nearly as any words could do, that he considered her an object of pity.
Was she an object of pity? Was that the light in which any one could
look at her superb project of playing at a lifelong holiday? And if
people chose to look at it so, what did that matter to her? Are women,
then, the slaves of the opinion of people all around them? "They are,"
Minola said to herself in scorn and melancholy--"they are; we are. I am
shaken to the very soul, because a young man, for whose opinion on any
other subject I should not care anything, chooses to look at me with
pity!"
The night was melancholy. When the outer world was shut out, and the gas
was lighted, and the two women sat down to work and talk, nothing seemed
to Minola quite as it had been. The evident happiness and passing high
spirits of the little poetess oppressed her. Mary Blanchet was so glad
to be making acquaintances, and to have some prospect of seeing the
inside of a London home. Then Minola's kindlier nature returned to her,
and she thought of Mary's delight at seeing her brother, and how unkind
it would be if she, Minola, did not try to enter into her feelings. Her
mind went back to her own brother, to their dear early companionship,
when nothing seemed more natural and more certain than that they two
should walk the world arm-in-arm. Now all that had come to an end--faded
away somehow; and he had gone into the world on his own account, and
made other ties, and forgotten her. But if he were even now to come
back, if she were to hear in the street the sound of the peculiar
whistle with which he always announced his coming to her--oh, how, in
spite of all his forgetfulness and her anger, she would run to him and
throw her arms around his neck! Why should not Mary Blanchet love her
brother, and gladden when he came?
"What is your brother like, Mary, dear?" she said gently, anxious to
propitiate by voluntarily entering on the topic dearest to her friend.
"Oh, very handsome--very, very handsome!"
Miss Grey smiled in spite of herself.
"Now, Minola, I know what you are smiling at; you think it is my
sisterly nonsense, and all that; but wait until you see."
"I'll wait," Minola said.
Miss Grey did not go out the next day as usual, although it was one of
the soft, amber-gray, autumnal days that she loved, and the Regent's
Park would have looked beautiful. She remained nearly all the morning in
her own room, and avoided even Mary Blanchet. Some singular change had
taken place within her, for which she could not account, otherwise than
by assuming that it was begotten of the fear that she would be drawn,
willingly or unwillingly, into uncongenial companionship, and must
renounce her liberty. She was forced into a strange, painful,
self-questioning mood. Was the whole fabric of her self-appointed
happiness and independence only a dream, or, worse than a dream, an
error? So soon to doubt the value and the virtue of the emancipation she
had prayed for and planned for during years? Not often, perhaps, has a
warm-hearted, fanciful, and spirited girl been pressed down by such
peculiar relationship as hers at Keeton lately; a twice removed
stepfather and stepmother, absolutely uncongenial with her, causing her
soul and her youth to congeal amid dull repression. What wonder that to
her all happiness seemed to consist in mere freedom and unrestricted
self-development? And now--so soon--why does she begin to doubt the
reality, the fulfilment of her happiness? Only because an impulsive and
kindly young man, whom she saw for the first time, looked pityingly at
her. This, she said to herself, is what our self-reliance and our
emancipation come to after all.
It was a positive relief to her, after a futile hour or so of such
questioning, when Mary Blanchet ran up stairs, and with beaming eyes
begged that Minola would come and see her brother. "He is longing to see
you--and you will like him--oh, you will like him, Minola dearest?" she
said beseechingly.
Miss Gray went down stairs straightway, without stopping to give one
touch to her hair, or one glance at the glass. The little poetess was
waiting a moment, with an involuntary look toward the dressing table, as
if Miss Grey must needs have some business there before she descended,
but Miss Grey thought nothing of the kind, and they went down stairs
together.
Minola expected, she could not tell why, to see a small and withered man
in Mary Blanchet's brother. When they were entering the drawing-room, he
was looking out of the window, and had his back turned, and she was
surprised to see that he was decidedly tall. When he turned around she
saw not only that he was handsome, but that she had recognized the fact
of his being handsome before. For he was unmistakably the ideal poet of
schoolgirls whom she had met at Mr. Money's house the day before.
The knowledge produced a sort of embarrassment to begin with. Minola was
about to throw her soul into the sacrifice, and greet her friend's
brother with the utmost cordiality. But she had pictured to herself a
sort of Mary Blanchet in trousers, a gentle, old-fashioned, timid
person, whom, perhaps, the outer world was apt to misprize, if not even
to snub, and whom therefore it became her, Minola Grey, as an enemy and
outlaw of the common world, to receive with double consideration. But
this brilliant, self-conceited, affected, oppressively handsome young
man, on whom she had seen Lucy Money and her mother hanging devotedly,
was quite another sort of person. His presence seemed to overcharge the
room; the scene became all compound of tall, bending form and dark eyes.
"I am glad to see you, Mr. Blanchet," Miss Grey began, determined not to
be put out by any self-conceited poet and ideal of schoolgirls. "I must
be glad to see you, because you are Mary's brother."
"You ought rather to be not glad to see me for that reason," he said,
with a deprecating bow and a slight shrug of the shoulders, "for I have
been a very neglectful brother to Mary."
"So I have heard," Miss Grey said, "but not from Mary. She always
defended you. But I have seen you before, Mr. Blanchet, have I not?"
"At Mrs. Money's yesterday? Oh, yes; I only saw you, Miss Grey. I went
there to see you, and only in the most literal way got what I wanted."
"But, Herbert, you never told me that you were going, or that you knew
Mrs. Money," his sister interposed.
"No, dear; that was an innocent deceit on my part. You told me that Miss
Grey had gone there, and as I knew the Moneys I hurried away there
without telling you. I wanted to know what you were like, Miss Grey,
before seeing my sister again. I hope you are not angry? She is so
devoted to you that she painted you in colors the most bewitching; but I
was afraid her friendship was carrying her away, and I wanted to see for
myself when she was not present."
Miss Grey remained resolutely silent. She thought this beginning
particularly disagreeable, and began to fear that she should never be
able to like Mary Blanchet's brother. "Oh, why do women have brothers?"
she asked herself. There seemed something dishonest in Mr. Blanchet's
proceeding despite the frank completeness of his confession.
"Well, Herbert, confess that I didn't do her justice; didn't do her
common justice," the enthusiastic Mary exclaimed.
"If Miss Grey would not be offended," her brother said, "I would say
that I see in her just the woman capable of doing the kind and generous
things I have heard of."
"Yes; but we mustn't talk about it," the poetess said, with tears of
gratefulness blinking in her eyes; "and we'll not say a word more about
it, Minola; not a word, indeed, dear." And she put a deprecating little
hand upon Minola's arm.
Then they all sat down, and Herbert Blanchet began to talk. He talked
very well, and he seemed to have put away most of the airs of
affectation which, even in her very short opportunity of observation,
Minola had seen in him when he was talking to the Money girls.
"You have travelled a great deal," Miss Grey said. "I envy you."
"If you call it travelling. I have drifted about the world a good deal,
and seen the wrong sides of everything. I make it pay in a sort of way.
When any place that I know is brought into public notice by a war or
something of the kind, I write about it. Or if a place is not brought
into any present notice by anything, I write about it, and take a
different view from anybody else. I have done particularly well with
Italy, showing that Naples is the ugliest place in all the world; that
the Roman women have shockingly bad figures, and that the climate is
wretched from the Alps to the Straits of Messina.
"But you don't think that?" Mary Blanchet said wonderingly.
"Don't I? Well, I don't know. I almost think I do for the moment. One
can get into that frame of mind. Besides, I really don't care about
scenery. I don't observe it as I pass along. And I like to say what
other people don't say, and to see what they don't see. Of course I
don't put my name to any of these things; they are only done to make a
living. I live _on_ such stuff as that. I live _for_ Art."
"It is glorious to live for art," his sister exclaimed, pressing her
thin, tiny hands together.
Mr. Blanchet did not seem to care much about his sister's approval.
"My art isn't yours, Mary," he said, with a pitying smile. "Pictures of
flowers and little children saying their prayers, and nice poems about
good young men and women, are your ideas of painting and poetry, I am
sure. You are a lover of the human race, I know."
"I hope I love my neighbors," Mary said earnestly.
"I hope you do, dear. All good little women like you ought to do that.
Do _you_ love your neighbor, Miss Grey?"
"I don't care much for any one," Miss Grey answered decisively, "except
Mary Blanchet. But I have no particular principle or theory about it,
only that I don't care for people."
Although Miss Grey had Alceste for her hero, she did not like sham
misanthropy, which she now fancied her visitor was trying to display.
Perhaps too she began to think that his misanthropy rather caricatured
her own.
Miss Blanchet, on the contrary, was inclined to argue the question, and
to pelt her brother with touching commonplaces.
"The more we know people," she emphatically declared, "the more good we
see in them. In every heart there is a deep spring of goodness. Oh,
yes!"
"There isn't in mine, I know," he said. "I speak for myself."
"For shame, Herbert! How else could you ever feel impelled to try and do
some good for your fellow creatures?"
"But I don't want to do any good to my fellow creatures. I don't care
about my fellow creatures, and I don't even admit that they are my
fellow creatures, those men and those women too that one sees about. Why
should the common possession of two legs make us fellow creatures with
every man, more than with every bird? No, I don't love the human race at
all."
"This is nonsense, Minola; you won't believe a word of it," the little
poetess eagerly said, divided between admiration and alarm.
"You good, little, innocent dear, is it not perfectly true? What did I
ever do for you, let me ask? There, Miss Grey, you see as kind an elder
sister as ever lived. I remember her a perfect mother to me. I dare say
I should have been dead thirty years ago but for her, though whether I
ought to thank her for keeping me alive is another thing. Anyhow, what
was my way of showing my gratitude? As soon as I could shake myself
free, I rambled about the world, a very vagrant, and never took any
thought of her. We are all the same, Miss Grey, believe me--we men."
"I can well believe it," Miss Grey said.
"Of course you can. In all our dealings with you women we are just the
same. Our sisters and mothers take trouble without end for us, and cry
their eyes out for us, and we--what do we care? I am not worse than my
neighbors. But if you ask me, do I admire my fellow man, I answer
frankly, no. Not I. What should I admire him for?"
"One must live for something," the poetess pleaded, much perplexed in
her heart as to what Miss Grey's opinion might be about all this.
"Of course one must live for art; for music and poetry, and colors and
decoration."
"And Nature?" Mary Blanchet gently insinuated.
"Nature--no! Nature is the buxom sweetheart of ploughboy poets. We only
affect to admire Nature because people think we can't be good if we
don't. No one really cares about great cauliflower suns, and startling
contrasts of blazing purple and emerald green. There is nothing really
beautiful in Nature except her decay; her rank weeds, and dank grasses,
and funereal evening glooms."
While he talked this way he was seated on the piano stool, with his face
turned away from the piano, on whose keys he touched every now and then
with a light and seemingly careless hand, bringing out only a faint note
that seemed to help the conversation rather than to interrupt it. He was
very handsome, Minola could not help thinking, and there was something
in his colorless face and deep eyes that seemed congenial with the talk
of glooms and decay. Still, true to her first feeling toward all men,
Minola was disposed to dislike him, the more especially as he spoke with
an air of easy superiority, as one who would imply that he knew how to
maintain his place above women in creation.
"I thought all you poets affected to be in love with Nature," she said.
"I mean you younger poets," and she emphasized the word "younger" with a
certain contemptuous tone, which made it just what it meant to
be--"smaller poets."
"Why younger poets?"
"Well, because the elder ones I think really were in love with Nature,
and didn't affect anything."
He smiled pityingly.
"No," he said decisively, "we don't care about Nature--our school."
"I am from the country; I don't think I know what your school is."
"We don't want to be known in the country; we couldn't endure to be
known in the country."
"But fame?" Minola asked--"does fame not go outside the twelve-mile
radius?"
"Oh, Miss Grey, do pray excuse me, but you really don't understand us;
we don't want fame. What is fame? Vulgarity made immortal."
"Then what do you publish for?"
He rose from his seat and seized his hair with both hands; then
constrained himself to endurance, and sat down again.
"My dear young lady, we don't publish; we don't intend to publish. No
man in his senses would publish for us if we were never so well
inclined. No one could sell six copies. The great, thick-headed public
couldn't understand us. We are satisfied that the true artist never does
have a public--or look for it. The public can have their Tennysons, and
Brownings, and Swinburnes, and Tuppers, and all that lot----"
"That lot!" broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified--"that lot!
Browning and Tupper put together!"
"My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another; I never
read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing to me. These
persons are not artists; they are only men trying to amuse the public.
Some of them, I am told, are positively fond of politics."
"Don't your school care for politics?" Miss Grey asked, now growing
rather amused.
"Oh, no; we never trouble ourselves about such things. What can it
matter whether the Reform bill is carried--is there a Reform bill going
on now?--I believe there always is--or what becomes of the Eastern
Question, or whether New Zealand has a constitution? These are questions
for vestrymen, not artists; we don't love man."
"There I am with you," Miss Grey said; "if that alone were qualification
enough, I should be glad to be one of your fraternity, for I don't love
man; I think he is a poor creature at his best."
"So do I," said the poet, turning toward her with eyes in which for the
moment a deep and genuine feeling seemed to light up; "the poorest
creature, at his best! Why should any one turn aside for a moment from
his path to help such a thing? What does it matter, the welfare of him
and his pitiful race? Let us sing, and play, and paint, and forget him
and the destiny that he makes such a work about. Wisdom only consists in
shutting our ears to his cries of ambition, and jealousy, and pain, and
being happy in our own way and forgetting him."
Their eyes met for a moment, and then Minola lowered hers. In that
instant a gleam of sympathy had passed from her eyes into his, and he
knew it. She felt a little humiliated somehow, like a proud fencer
suddenly disarmed at the first touch of his adversary. For, as he was
speaking scorn of the human race, she was saying to herself, "This man,
I do believe, has suffered deeply. He has found people cold, and mean,
and selfish--as _I_ have--and he feels it, and cannot hide it. I did him
wrong; he is not a fribble or sham cynic, only a disappointed dreamer."
The sympathy which she felt showed itself only too quickly in her very
eloquent eyes.
Herbert Blanchet rose after an instant of silence and took his leave,
asking permission to call again, which Miss Grey would have gladly
refused if she could have stood up against the appealing looks of Mary.
So she had to grant him the permission, thinking as she gave it that
another path of her liberty was closed.
Mary went to the door with her brother, and, much to Minola's
gratification, remained a long time talking with him there.
Miss Grey went to the piano and began to sing; softly to herself, that
she might not be heard outside. The short autumnal day was already
closing in London. Out in the country there would be two hours yet of
light before the round, red sun went down behind the sloping fields,
with the fresh upturned earth, and the clumps of trees, but here, in
West-Central regions of London, the autumn day dies in its youth. The
dusk already gathered around the singer, who sang to please or to soothe
herself. In any troubled mood Miss Grey had long been accustomed to
clear her spirits by singing to herself; and on many a long, dull Sunday
at home--in the place that was called her home--she had committed the
not impious fraud of singing her favorite ballads to slow, slow time,
that they might be mistaken for hymns and pass unreproved. Her voice and
way of singing made the song seem like a sweet, plaintive recitative,
just the singing to hear in the "gloaming," to draw a few people hushed
around it, and hold them in suspense, fearful to lose a single note, and
miss the charm of expression. In truth, the charm of it sprang from the
fact that the singer sang to express her own emotions, and thus every
tone had its reality and its meaning. When women sing for a listening
company, they sing conventionally, and in the way that some teacher has
taught, or in what they believe to be the manner of some great artist;
or they sing to somebody or at somebody, and in any case they are away
from that truthfulness which in art is simply the faithful expression of
real emotion. With Minola Grey singing was an end rather than a means; a
relief in itself, a new mood in itself; a passing away from poor and
personal emotions into ideal regions, where melancholy, if it must be,
was always divine; and pain, if it would intrude, was purifying and
ennobling. So, while the little poetess talked with her brother in the
dusk, at the doorway, with the gas lamps just beginning to light the
monotonous street, Minola was singing herself into the pure blue ether,
above the fogs, and clouds, and discordant, selfish voices.
She came back to earth with something like a heavy fall, as Mary
Blanchet ran in upon her in the dark and exclaimed--
"Now, do tell me--how do you like my brother?"
To say the truth, Miss Grey did not well know. "I wonder is he an
Alceste?" she asked herself. On the whole, his coming had made an
uncomfortable, anxious, uncanny impression upon her, and she looked back
with a kind of hopeless regret on the days when she had London all to
herself, and knew nobody.
WORDSWORTH'S CORRECTIONS.
When an author, in his later editions, departs from his earlier text, he
is apt to reveal some traits of his method and genius that might not
otherwise have been so evident, and a poet's corrections may thus have
more than a merely curious interest. Take Mr. Tennyson's, for instance:
"The Princess," to say nothing of his shorter emended poems, has been,
one might say, rewritten since the first edition, and his corrections
are always interesting. Yet they spring, I think, from a narrower range
of motive than Wordsworth's; they are directed more exclusively toward
the object of artistic finish; they commonly show the poet busied in
casting perfume upon the lily. Take this example from "The Miller's
Daughter." In the first version of that poem, as it appeared in 1842, we
are told that before the heroine's reflection became visible in the
mill-pool--
A water-rat from off the bank
Plunged in the stream.
Later editions give us this more graceful version of what occurred:
Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood
I watch'd the little circles die;
They passed into the level flood,
And there a vision caught my eye.
Unquestionably that is an improvement, and of a sort which Wordsworth
was continually making. But Wordsworth's corrections do not merely
illustrate the effort to reach artistic finish, though very many of them
are made with that intent; they have a relation to his theories, tastes,
creeds, to his temperament and training, to his manner of receiving
friendly or hostile criticism; and in comparing these textual variations
we seem to watch the artist at his work--to enter in some sort into his
very consciousness--as we see him manipulating the form or the thought
of his verses:
Ta de torneuei, ta de kollomelei,
Kai gnomotupei, k'autonomazei.
Nor is this to consider too curiously; Wordsworth himself has invited us
to the task. In his letters as well as in the notes to his poems,
frequent mention is made of these labors of emendation. Writing in 1837
to Edward Quillinan, he asks him to "take the trouble ... of comparing
the corrections in my last edition [that of 1836] with the text in the
preceding one," "in the correction of which I took great pains," as he
had written to Prof. Reed a month before. And there is ample opportunity
of this sort; I do not know an ampler one of the kind in the works of
any other poet. Tasso's _variae lectiones_ are numerous, but they were
mostly made to conciliate his critics; Milton's are of great interest,
but they are comparatively few in number, and Gray's are fewer still:
Pope's are numerous, but not often interesting; while Tennyson's, as I
have intimated, seem to me to spring from a less serious poetic faculty
than Wordsworth's, and are therefore less significant. But I am anxious
not to claim too much significance for Wordsworth's corrections, for I
can do little more here than to point out some of them, leaving for the
most part their interpretation to the reader. To attempt more than this
would be to enter upon an analysis of Wordsworth's genius, for which
this is not the occasion.
And yet we shall see, I think, that his genius might be in some sort
"restored," as naturalists say, were it necessary, from these
fragmentary data, for Wordsworth's corrections cover the whole term of
his literary activity. He preferred, one might say, to correct after
publication rather than before; and, revising his youthful writing
during a second and a third generation following, his final texts had
received the benefit of more than half a century of criticism by himself
and others. From the year 1793, in which his first volumes appeared, the
"Evening Walk" and the "Descriptive Sketches," to the year of his death,
1850, he put forth not fewer than twenty-four separate publications in
verse, each of which contained more or less of poetry previously
unpublished; and in the greater number of these texts may be found
variations from the previous readings. The larger part of them, indeed,
are slight--the change of single words, the alteration of phrases, the
transposition of verses or stanzas. And yet few of them, I think, are
quite without interest for persons in whose reading, as Wordsworth
himself expresses it, "poetry has continued to be comprehended as a
study." I have noted some thousands of his corrections; but a copious
citation of them might weary all but actual students of poetic
_technique_, a class that is hardly as numerous, I suspect, as that of
the actual practitioners of poetry, and I will therefore keep mainly to
such _variae lectiones_ as may be referred to motives of more general
interest.[B]
[Footnote B: After the early poems just mentioned and the "Lyrical
Ballads," 1798 to 1802, the chief editions to be consulted for the
changes of text are the complete editions of 1807, 1815, and 1836, and
the original issues of "The Excursion" (1814), of "The White Doe of
Rylston" (1815), of "Peter Bell," and of "The Waggoner" (1819).
Unfortunately I have not been able to get access to Mr. W. Johnston's
useful collection of Wordsworth's "Earlier Poems" (London, 1857): it
would have lightened the task of collecting the _variantes_, the more
important of which, for the period covered by the collection, are given
in it. But, having gone in nearly every case to the original texts, I
need hardly say that I have been careful to quote them accurately in the
present article.]
The first question which we naturally ask about Wordsworth's corrections
is this: Were they improvements? My readers will decide for themselves;
for my own part, it seems to me that they generally were improvements;
that Wordsworth bettered his text three times out of four when he
changed it. Nor is this surprising; few admirers of Wordsworth's poetry
will deny that there were many passages quite susceptible of amendment
in it; for that task there was ample room. But on the other hand, it
happened not infrequently, as we might expect, that when the poet
returned, in the critical mood, to mend his first form of expression, he
marred it instead. In the poem, for instance, beginning, "Strange fits
of passion have I known," the second stanza as originally published ran
thus:
When she I loved was strong and gay,
And like a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath the evening moon.
--_Lyrical Ballads_, 1800.
The passage stood thus for many years, and was finally altered to read:
When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.
Is there not some loss of vividness here? The later reading is perhaps
the more graceful, and yet the picture seems to me brighter in the early
version. This, too, seems a doubtful improvement; it occurs in "The
Farmer of Tilsbury Vale." Wordsworth wrote at first:
His staff is a sceptre--his gray hairs a crown:
Erect as a sunflower he stands, and the streak
Of the unfaded rose is expressed on his cheek.
--1815.
In later editions we read:
His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streak
Of the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.
Here the last line is bettered; but I, for one, am sorry to lose the
sunflower comparison; it is picturesque, and it aptly describes this
hearty child of the earth.
Look now at the poem "We are Seven," as it began in the "Lyrical
Ballads":
A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb--
What should it know of death?
It is now sixty years since "dear brother Jim" was dismissed from his
place in these lines--dismissed, perhaps, with the less compunction
because the stanza was written by another hand--Coleridge's--as an
introduction to the rest of the poem. But I think the lines were better
as the young poets first sent them forth. "Brother Jim" had, perhaps, no
clearly demonstrable business in the poem; and yet, having been there,
we miss him now that he is gone. That homely apostrophe had in it the
primitive impulses of the Lake school feeling; the phrase refuses to be
forgotten, and seems to have a persistent life of its own. I have seen
the missing words restored, in pencil marks, to their rightful place in
the text of copies belonging to old-fashioned gentlemen who remembered
the original reading. Nor can we easily deny existence to our "dear
brother Jim"; his name still lingers in our memories, haunting about the
page from which it was excluded long ago; he lives, and deserves to
live, as the symbol of immortal fraternity.
But as I have said, Wordsworth mended his text oftener than he marred
it, and first by refining upon his descriptions of outward nature. Among
the cases in point, one occurs in a poem entitled "Influences of Natural
objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood
and early Youth"--a cumbrous heading enough. May I digress for a moment
upon the unlucky titles which Wordsworth so often prefixed to his poems,
and the improvements occasionally made in them? Surely a less convenient
caption than the one just quoted is not often met with, or a less
attractive one than this other, prefixed to an inscription not very many
times longer than itself:
"Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name,
for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue
in the same Grounds."
Titles like these are not only fatiguing in the very reading, a
preliminary disenchantment, but they are not properly names at all; they
are headings, rubrics, captions which do not name. Wordsworth seems to
send forth these unlucky children of the muse with a full description of
their eyes, hair, and complexion, but forgets to christen them; and I
believe that this oversight, though it may not appear a very serious
one, has interfered more than a little with the effectiveness of his
minor poetry, and consequently with the fame and influence of the poet.
For it makes reference to them difficult, almost impossible: how is one
to refer to a favorite passage, for instance, in a poem "Written at the
Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn,
placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same
Grounds"? These titles are fit to discourage even the admirers of
Wordsworth, and to repel his intending students; nor will they attract
any one, for they are formless; they are the abstracts of essays, the
_precis_ of an argument, rather than fit designations for works of
poetic art. A considerable number, too, of Wordsworth's minor pieces
remain without name, title, or description of any kind whatever. If that
desirable thing, a satisfactory edition of his poems, should ever
appear, it will be given us by some editor who shall be sensitive to
this northern formlessness, and who may venture, perhaps, to improve the
state of Wordsworth's titles.
Let me end this digression by noting another singular title, with its
emendation. In the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798 appeared a poem with this
extraordinary caption:
"Anecdote for Fathers, shewing how the art of Lying may be taught."
Now, certainly, Wordsworth did not intend to teach the art of lying, yet
nothing can be clearer than his declaration. He failed to see the
ludicrous meaning of these words, and it took him thirty years,
apparently, to find out what he had said; but he saw it at last, and
dropped the explanatory clause of the title, quoting in its place an apt
motto from Eusebius; and we now read:
"Anecdote for Fathers. _Retine vim istam, falsa enim dicam, si coges_;"
and the charming story professes no longer to show how boys may be
taught to lie, but to point out the danger of making them lie when you
press them to give reasons for their sentiments.
And now, returning to the corrections of text in the descriptive
passages, let us note a curious change in the poem already mentioned,
"On the Influence of Natural Objects," etc. Wordsworth is describing the
pleasures of skating; and these are some of them, according to the
passage as originally published in "The Friend":
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay--or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
_To cut across the image of a Star
That gleamed upon the ice._
To do this is of course impossible, and the lines which I have
italicized are mere closet description. We cannot skate across the
reflection of a star until we can skate into the end of a rainbow; and
the curious thing is that the so-called "poet of nature" should ever
have fancied, even for a moment at his desk, that he had ever done it.
Clearly, Wordsworth's study was not always out of doors, to use a
favorite phrase of his; on the contrary, this passage is so unreal that
a critic unacquainted with the personal history of the poet might argue
that he had never been on skates--as Coleridge wrote the "Hymn in the
Valley of Chamouni" without ever visiting that valley. But Wordsworth
seems to have found out that his description was false; for he made a
compromise, in the later editions, with the optical law of incidence and
reflection; and we now see him attempting merely, but not achieving, the
impossible thing:
----Leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain.
But Wordsworth held stoutly, in the main, to his own experience, his own
impressions; and he did this even to the injury of his descriptions. He
was never, for instance, in sailor's phrase, "off soundings"; he never
saw the mid-ocean; and consequently, when he described Leonard, in the
first edition of "The Brothers," as sailing in mid-ocean, he says that
he gazed upon "the broad green wave and sparkling foam." But he found
out his mistake at last; he was fond of reading voyages and travels, and
he seems to have become convinced finally, perhaps by the testimony of
his sailor brother, that the deep sea was really blue and not green;
that the common epithet was the true one; for he corrected the line to
read "the broad blue wave."
Let us now examine some of those curiously prosaic passages which
Wordsworth strove faithfully to convert into poetry, and strove with
various success. And first, those famous arithmetical passages in "The
Thorn," one of which stands to-day as it stood in the "Lyrical Ballads."
We still read there, indeed, of
A beauteous heap, a hill of moss,
Just half a foot in height,
the precise altitude that Wordsworth gave it in 1798; not an inch to the
critics, he seems to have said. But these other peccant lines in the
preceding stanza he recast, and in a way that is curious to follow:
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy Pond
Of water never dry:
I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
Of these lines Crabb Robinson said to Wordsworth that "he dared not read
them aloud in company." "They ought to be liked," rejoined the poet.
Well, we may not like them; but they are interesting, for they present a
really instructive specimen of bad art. Clearly enough, here is a poet
in difficulties. The "little muddy pond" was not a pond in nature, but a
pool; and a pool it would have been in verse, but for the particular
exigency--the necessity of rhyming with the word _beyond_. Note now the
honesty of our poet. For rhyme's sake he has temporarily sacrificed
accuracy; he has called a pool a pond; but to show what the piece of
water actually was, that actually it was a pool, though the exigencies
of rhyme had forced him to call it provisionally by another name, he
goes on to give us its accurate measurement, not only from "side to
side," but from end to end as well. "'Tis three feet long and two feet
wide," he tells us; and now his northern conscience is satisfied; he
seems to say, "I was unfortunately compelled to use the wrong word in
this passage, but I make amends at once; these are the precise
dimensions of the object, and you can give it the right name yourself."
This devotion to the topographical truth of the matter was abated,
however, in later editions, perhaps by the derision of the critics.
Wordsworth rewrote the passage, one would say, to please the graces
rather than the mathematical verities; and the lines now read thus:
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry,
Though but of compass small, and bare
To thirsty suns and parching air.
Another considerable improvement was made, a little further on, in the
same poem. These are the lines as they ran in the "Lyrical Ballads":
Poor Martha! on that woful day
A cruel, cruel fire, they say,
Into her bones was sent;
It dried her body like a cinder,
And almost turned her brain to tinder.
--1798.
Certainly there was room for improvement here; and in the edition of
1815 we find the lines recast as follows:
A pang of pitiless dismay
Into her soul was sent;
A Fire was kindled in her breast,
Which might not burn itself to rest.
Or see again this prosaic passage from "The Brothers," as first
published in the "Lyrical Ballads." The lines describe the parting of
James from his companions at a certain rock:
----By our shepherds it is call'd the Pillar.
James, pointing to its summit, over which
They all had purposed to return together,
Inform'd them that he there would wait for them;
They parted, and his comrades pass'd that way
Some two hours after, but they did not find him
At the appointed place, a circumstance
Of which they took no heed.
--1800.
It would occur to few readers to call this poetry were it not visibly
divided into verse; and Wordsworth himself seems to have thought as
much, for after many years he rewrote the passage, condensing and
poetizing it as follows:
----By our shepherds it is called THE PILLAR.
Upon its airy summit crowned with heath
The loiterer, not unnoticed by his comrades,
Lay stretched at ease; but, passing by the place
On their return, they found that he was gone.
No ill was feared.
There are hundreds of corrections in this style; and we naturally ask
what made it necessary for Wordsworth to weed his poetic garden so
often, to amend with care and trouble what some other poets would have
done well at first? We need not hold with some of his critics that
Wordsworth had in any peculiar sense a dual nature, to explain the
amount of prosaic poetry, if I may call it so, that he wrote. No real
poet ever wrote, as I take it, a greater amount of prosaic poetry than
he; and no real poet ever published a greater number of verses that
might fairly be called not only poor poetry, but considered as proof
that their author could not write good poetry at all.
What critic would believe before the proof, that the poet who had
written the lines just quoted from "The Thorn," and others like them,
could have written also the "Lines to H. C." and "She Was a Phantom of
Delight"? But to inquire at length into this contrast is to inquire into
the deepest traits of Wordsworth's genius. One cause of his prosaic
verse, however, may be mentioned here. Wordsworth had injurious habits
of composition; he dictated his prose to an amanuensis, and he composed
his poems in the fields as he walked. He was thus a libertine of
opportunity, and though he strictly economized his subjects, and made
the least yield him up its utmost, yet he was prodigal in the quantity
of his expression. He did not wait for what are called moments of
inspiration; he was always ready to compose, and thus he composed too
much; he made verses whenever he was out of doors, "murmuring them out"
to the astonishment of the rustics. Doubtless the first factor of genius
is this abundance of power. But, on the other hand, the control, the
direction of power is the first essential to the beauty of the work of
art. "Good men may utter whatever comes uppermost; good poets may not,"
says Landor; and the aphorism touches upon a serious fault of
Wordsworth's method. He lacked due power of self-repression; he was too
much interested in his own thoughts to make a sufficiently jealous
choice among them when he came to write them down. Two qualities,
indeed, of his nature he kept in such abeyance, the amative and the
humorous--and he was not without a humorous side--as to express but
little of them in his writings. But he seems to have recorded almost
everything, not humorous or amatory, that came into his mind; and, in
consequence, we feel that his poetry comes perilously near being a
verbatim transcript of his processes of consciousness. But no man's
thought is always sufficiently valuable for a shorthand report; and we
often wish that Wordsworth had reflected, with Herrick, that the poet is
not fitted every day to prophesy:
No; but when the spirit fills
The fantastic pannicles
Full of fire--then I write
As the Godhead doth indite.
Does it seem an invidious task to recall the unhappy readings that I
have mentioned--readings abandoned by Wordsworth long ago, and unknown
to many of his younger students? To do it with slighting intent, or from
mere curiosity, would be unworthy; nor will the routine mind be
persuaded that there is anything more than a merely curious interest in
the comparison of editions. We, thinking that Wordsworth cannot really
be understood in a single edition, must leave the routine mind to its
conviction that one text contains all that there is of value in his
poetry. And to offset the ungraceful verses that we have just
considered, let us look at some changes by which Wordsworth has made
fine passages finer still. Of the sonnets published in 1819 with "The
Waggoner," none is more striking, as I think, than the one beginning,
"Eve's lingering clouds extend in solid bars." In it at first he spoke
as follows of the reflection of the heavens at night in perfectly still
water:
Is it a mirror?--or the nether sphere
Opening its vast abyss, while fancy feeds
On the rich show?--But list! a voice is near;
Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds.
In the later editions this passage is enriched by a grand stroke of
imagination:
Is it a mirror?--or the nether sphere
Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds
Her own calm fires?--But list! a voice is near;
Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds.
The following change is from the same sonnets; the passage describes a
bright star setting:
Forfeiting his bright attire,
He burns, transmuted to a sullen fire
That droops and dwindles; and, the appointed debt
To the flying moments paid, is seen no more.
So in 1819; in later editions we find the passage as follows:
He burns, transmuted to a dusty fire,
Then pays submissively the appointed debt
To the flying moments, and is seen no more.
That is scarcely an improvement; but the alteration of epithet is
curious: the substitution of fact for fancy in changing the low star's
"sullen fire" into a "dusty fire."
Here, again, is a case where the new reading has a fresher phrase than
the old. It occurs in the last stanza of "Rob Roy's Grave," where
Wordsworth spoke thus of the hero's virtues:
----Far and near, through vale and hill,
Are faces that attest the same;
And kindle, like a fire new-stirred,
At sound of ROB ROY's name.
Later, a new line was substituted as follows:
----Far and near, through vale and hill,
Are faces that attest the same;
The proud heart flashing through the eyes
At sound of ROB ROY's name.
And Wordsworth insisted, quite as strongly as his severest critics, upon
finish, upon literary art as discriminable from the substance. While he
was blaming Byron, Campbell, and other eminent poets for its lack, his
assailants were loud in the same charge against him; they protested that
whatever other merits the new poetry might have, that of artistic finish
was surely not one. Jeffrey wrote in 1807 that Wordsworth "scarcely ever
condescended to give the grace of correctness or melody to his
versification." But Wordsworth, in a letter lately first published,
criticises Campbell's "Hohenlinden" in a way that shows him by no means
unstudious of form. He writes thus to Mr. Hamilton:[C] "I remember
Campbell says, in a composition that is overrun with faulty language,
'And dark as winter was the _flow_ of Iser rolling rapidly'; that is,
'flowing rapidly.' The expression ought to have been 'stream' or
'current.' ... These may appear to you frigid criticisms," he adds; "but
depend upon it, no writings will live in which these rules are
disregarded." This is good doctrine, and we have seen Wordsworth
striving to realize it in his practice. He did realize it to a certain
extent; if his style was not always eloquent, not always poetical, it
was generally better English than that of his popular contemporaries.
And yet a critic in "The Dial," following, as recently as 1843, the lead
of Jeffrey in this blame of Wordsworth, could write of him as
follows:[D] "He has the merit of just moral perception, but not that of
deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip at such slip-shod
newspaper style! Many of his poems, as for example the 'Rylstone Doe,'
might be all improvised.... These are such verses as in a just state of
culture should be _vers de Societe_, such as every gentleman could
write, but none would think of printing." That passage is worth reading
twice; note the condescension of the praise, the flippancy of the blame,
the inaccurate English and French; and what a jaunty misquotation of
Wordsworth's title! It was not very profitable censure; but Wordsworth
received much criticism by which he was glad to profit. Let us look at
some of the cases in which he turned the strictures of friends or of
enemies to account. The changes that he made in deference to criticism
are striking, and so too are some of the cases in which he refused to
profit by criticism. I will speak of both.
[Footnote C: "Prose Works," III., 302.]
[Footnote D: "The Dial," Vol. III., p. 514.]
Of the former kind are the corrections in "Laodamia." That poem appeared
first in 1815, having been suggested during a course of classical
reading which Wordsworth had taken up for the purpose of directing the
studies of his son. Landor criticised this poem in the first volume of
his "Imaginary Conversations," and in the main very favorably; he makes
Porson say that parts of it "might have been heard with shouts of
rapture in the regions he describes"; he calls it "a composition such as
Sophocles might have delighted to own." But he points out blemishes in
two stanzas, the first and the seventeenth; he blames the execution of
one and the thought of the other. Wordsworth rewrote both of them, and I
quote the second passage as affording the more interesting change. In
the first edition Protesilaus, says the poet, returning from the shades
to visit Laodamia,
Spake, as a witness, of a second birth
For all that is most perfect upon earth.
On this Landor remarks, putting the words into Porson's mouth:
How unseasonable is the allusion to _witness_ and _second_
birth, which things, however holy and venerable in
themselves, come stinking and reeking to us from the
conventicle. I desire to see Laodamia in the silent and
gloomy mansion of her beloved Protesilaus; not elbowed by
the godly butchers in Tottenham court road, nor smelling
devoutly of ratafia among the sugar bakers' wives at
Blackfriars.
Wordsworth dropped these lines; and we now read instead, that the hero
Spake of heroic arts in graver mood
Revived, with finer harmony pursued.
In the first volume of his "Imaginary Conversations" Landor said of
Wordsworth: "Those who attack him with virulence or with levity are men
of no morality and no reflection." In a later volume, however, Landor
attacks him thus himself, with both virulence and levity, as I fear we
must say, and Wordsworth declined to profit by these later gibing
criticisms, though some of them, and especially those upon the "Anecdote
for Fathers," were valuable, and suggested real improvements of text. In
this attack, which is contained in the second conversation of Southey
and Porson, Landor had noticed Wordsworth's adoption of his earlier
criticism of Laodamia; and this circumstance was probably a reason why
Wordsworth refused to receive further critical favors at his hands. The
poem "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," for instance, sharply criticised by
Landor, stood almost untouched through the editions of fifty years. And
in a letter of 1843, recently published for the first time,[E]
Wordsworth speaks thus severely of an attack made upon his son-in-law,
Edward Quillinan, by Landor: "I should have disapproved of his
[Quillinan's] condescending to notice anything that a man so deplorably
tormented by ungovernable passion as that unhappy creature might eject.
His character may be given in two or three words: a madman, a bad man;
yet a man of genius, as many a madman is." That criticism seems rather
more than righteously severe; but Wordsworth, while he cared little for
the criticism of the reviews, felt keenly the lash of the violent
Landor. The violent Landor we must call him, for violence was the too
dominant trait of his noble genius; and he exasperated Wordsworth, as we
see. But compare what I have just quoted with his familiar remark about
the small critics: "My ears are stone dead to this idle buzz, and my
flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings." That Wordsworth said
at thirty-six years of age; and here is a striking reminiscence recorded
during his later years, and published in the "Prose Works." At
seventy-one he said to Lady Richardson:
It would certainly have been a great object to me to have
reaped the profits I should have done from my writings but
for the stupidity of Mr. Gifford and the impertinence of Mr.
Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books
which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy
earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was
sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my
writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr. Jeffrey did
me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that
kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no
consequence to me whatever; that it was only by the
influence his periodical exercised at the time in preventing
my poems being read and sold that he could injure me.... I
never, therefore, felt his opinion of the slightest value
except in preventing the young of that generation from
receiving impressions which might have been of use to them
through life.
[Footnote E: "Prose Works," III., 381.]
This is grand self-confidence; and it is in the same tone that elsewhere
he says:
Feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and
spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when
they must be known.
In this connexion the English reviews of that time are still interesting
reading, particularly the "Quarterly" and the "Edinburgh." What was
Jeffrey saying in his "organ" during the years of Wordsworth's earlier
fame? In 1807 he described the poem of "The Beggars" as "a very paragon
of silliness and affectation"; and he said of "Alice Fell," "If the
printing of such verses be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we
are afraid it cannot be insulted." Two years later he calls upon the
patrons of the Lake school of poetry to "think with what infinite
contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of
Alice Fell and her duffle cloak, of Andrew Jones and the half-crown, or
of little Dan without breeches and his thievish grandfather." Wordsworth
dropped the poem of "Andrew Jones," and never restored it--an omission
almost unique, as we shall see; for he stood by the substance of his
work, if not always by the form, with great pertinacity. He said of
"Alice Fell," in his old age, "It brought upon me a world of ridicule by
the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of
my poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends."
Wordsworth had no stancher friend, his poetry had no more delicate
critic, than Charles Lamb; and Lamb wrote thus in 1815 to Wordsworth
about "Alice Fell" and the assailants of the poem. He said: "I am glad
that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not
have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript
shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice: I would
not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls."
Jeffrey decried two other pieces that rank among the most perfect of
Wordsworth's minor poems, as "stuff about dancing daffodils and sister
Emmelines," and spoke of another, which we count for pure poetry to-day,
as "a rapturous, mystical ode to the cuckoo, in which the author,
striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity."
And he attacked these lines in the "Ode to Duty":
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong:
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.
This, Jeffrey said, is "utterly without meaning: at least we have no
sort of conception in what sense Duty can be said to keep the old skies
_fresh_, and the stars from wrong." We need not be surprised at
Jeffrey's failing to admire these lines: they are transcendentalism, and
it would have troubled Wordsworth himself to render them into the plain
speech which he recommended as the proper diction of poetry. For they
have not a definite translatable content of thought; and we cannot read
them as philosophy or ethics; but as poetry we may feel their power; we
are willing to enjoy them for their own sake, because beauty is enough.
But this Jeffrey did not admit; Jeffrey was not vulnerable by
magnificent phrases, and of course he could not foresee what a power
Wordsworth's transcendentalism was to exert. When the ode "Intimations
of Immortality" first appeared (with the edition of 1807), Jeffrey
called it "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the
publication."[F] The remark need not surprise us. Jeffrey looked for
logical thought in the poem, and logical thought it had not; whatever
else it may contain, it will hardly be said to propound any new
arguments for immortality. But Jeffrey wrote in all sincerity, and later
in his life he read Wordsworth's poetry a second time, with a view to
discover, if he could, the merits which he had failed to see when he
criticised it--the merits which the English public had then found out.
His effort was a failure: for him the primrose remained a primrose to
the last, and nothing more. The acute lawyer was not a poet, nor a judge
of poets; he had an erroneous notion of what the office of poetry is; of
what it has been and will be--to please, to elevate, to suggest, but not
to argue or convince; and to the last he did not get beyond his early
decision, which, in the article just quoted from, runs as follows:
We think there is every reason to hope that the lamentable
consequences which have resulted from Mr. Wordsworth's open
violation of the established laws of poetry, will operate as
a wholesome warning to those who might otherwise have been
seduced by his example, and be the means of restoring to
that ancient and venerable code its honor and authority.
[Footnote F: "Edinburgh Review," October, 1807.]
But the critic cannot always tell what the new "song is destined to, and
what the stars intend to do." It is now evident enough where the early
assailants of Wordsworth were mistaken; and yet which critic of to-day
would be sure of his ground in a similar case? For the faults of genius
are old, familiar, and easily to be discerned; while, on the other hand,
genius itself is always novel, and therefore may be easily mistaken. It
takes genius to recognize genius; and most of Wordsworth's critics were
not men of genius. Landor, who was one, made a wise remark upon this
point. He said, "To compositions of a new kind, like Wordsworth's, we
come without scales and weights, and without the means of making an
assay."
But by pointing out his faults, his critics did him and us a service;
and it was one by which the poet profited, as we have seen, in spite of
his independence.
Let us now look at some of Wordsworth's multiple readings, if we may
call them so--passages, namely, in which he has returned, year after
year, to certain peccant verses, changing them again and again in the
quest of adequate expression. After repeated experiments he sometimes
finds a reading to please himself; sometimes, having allowed a
provisional text to stand throughout many years, he discards it and
returns to the original form; and sometimes, again, he abandons a
passage entirely, after scarring it with a lifetime's emendations. Of
the first sort I will cite three readings of a stanza in "A Poet's
Epitaph." As first published in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, the poem
contained this adjuration to the philosopher "wrapped in his sensual
fleece":
O turn aside, and take, I pray,
That he below may rest in peace,
Thy pin-point of a soul away!
Lamb did not like this; and he wrote to Wordsworth: "The 'Poet's
Epitaph' is disfigured, to my taste, by the coarse epithet of
'pin-point' in the sixth stanza." In the edition of 1815 the "coarse
epithet" disappears, and the passage is modified as follows:
----Take, I pray,
That he below may rest in peace,
That abject thing, thy soul, away!
The years that "bring the philosophic mind" did not, however, reconcile
Wordsworth with the particular "philosopher" here in question. (Sir
Humphrey Davy, as Crabb Robinson, if I am not mistaken, tells us). On
the contrary, the poet devised a still more injurious epithet for that
unhappy physicist; and the passage now reads:
----Take, I pray,...
Thy ever-dwindling soul away!
Another of these multiple corrections has attracted much notice; it
occurs in the successive descriptions of the craft wherein the "Blind
Highland Boy" went sailing. In the first edition of that poem Wordsworth
called it
A Household Tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes!
It would seem difficult to defend this couplet upon any accepted theory
of aesthetics, rhyme, or syntax; and the "Household Tub" provoked quite
naturally a shout of derision from all the critics; it became the
poetical scandal of the day. Jeffery, mindful of "the established laws"
of poetic art, protested that there was nothing, down to the wiping of
shoes, or the evisceration of chickens, which may not be introduced in
poetry, if this is tolerated. The tub, in short, proved intolerable to
the reviewers; and when next the poem appeared in a new edition, that of
1815, Wordsworth transmuted the craft into a green turtle shell, noting
the change as made "upon the suggestion of a Friend":
The shell of a green Turtle, thin
And hollow: you might sit therein,
It was so wide and deep.
'Twas even the largest of its kind,
Large, thin, and light as birch tree rind;
So light a shell that it would swim,
And gaily lift its fearless brim
Above the tossing waves.
Lamb's comment upon this change was as follows:
I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat
falsification of the history) for the household implement,
as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the
beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good
honest tub in its place, and nothing could be fairly said
against it. You say you made the alteration for the
"friendly reader," but the "malicious" will take it to
himself. Damn 'em, if you give 'em an inch, etc.
Wordsworth, however, instead of restoring the old text, went on
amending, and with reason; the reading just given is diffuse. But see
now the third and final form which he gave to the passage. The
sublimation of the Household Tub is now completed; it becomes, at last,
A shell of ample size, and light
As the pearly car of Amphitrite,
That sportive dolphins draw.
And as a Coracle that braves
On Vaga's breast the fretful waves,
This shell upon the deep would swim.
Here again are some new readings that Wordsworth discarded after long
trial. A well-known sonnet, one of his earliest, began thus in 1807:
I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain
And an unthinking grief! The vital blood
Of that Man's mind, what can it be? What food
Fed his first hopes? What knowledge could he gain?
In 1815 we find the passage rewritten as follows:
I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain
And an unthinking grief! for, who aspires
To genuine greatness but from just desires,
And knowledge such as He could never gain?
But in the later editions the first reading was restored, except the
words "vital blood," and we now read:
The tenderest mood
Of that man's mind, what can it be?
In "The Nightingale" Wordsworth first called that bird "a creature of a
fiery heart"; but in the edition of 1815 it became "a creature of
ebullient heart," a flat disenchantment of the verse. The change was
questioned from the first, as Crabb Robinson tells us, and in later
editions the first reading was restored. A fortunate correction made in
the same edition was retained--the change of "laughing company" to
"jocund company," in "The Daffodils":
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company.
--1815.
The poem "Rural Architecture," in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, was
curtailed of its closing stanza in the edition of 1815:
Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works
In Paris and London, 'mong Christians and Turks,
Spirits busy to do and undo, etc., etc.
But in Lamb's correspondence of the same year he complains to Wordsworth
that the omission "leaves it [the poem] in my mind less complete," and
the lines were restored in the later editions. Not to differ hastily
with Lamb, the lines yet seem lines to be spared. In the same sentence
he complains that in the new edition there is another "admirable line
gone (or something come instead of it), 'the stone-chat, and the
glancing sandpiper,' which was a line quite alive. I demand these at
your hand." Wordsworth restored the line, and the three versions of the
passage are worth comparison. It is from the "Lines left upon a Seat in
a Yew Tree," and describes a wanderer in the solitude of the country:
His only visitants a straggling sheep,
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper:
And on these barren rocks, with juniper,
And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er,
Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour
A morbid pleasure nourished.
--"Lyrical Ballads."
In the second reading he corrects a bad assonance thus:
His only visitants a straggling sheep,
The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless bird,
Piping along the margin of the lake....
--1815.
Here the "line quite alive" is gone--to be restored in deference,
apparently, to Lamb's request. Another assonance is got rid of in the
later editions, the "thistle thinly sprinkled o'er," and the passage now
reads melodiously as follows:
His only visitants a straggling sheep.
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper:
And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath,
And juniper and thistle, sprinkled o'er,
Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour
A morbid pleasure nourished.
Wordsworth struck out many lines and stanzas in the course of his
revisions, besides main passages of considerable length, as from the
"Thanksgiving Ode" and the patriotic ode of January, 1816. These
omissions are too long to quote here; but the following lines dropped
from the ode on "Immortality" will have interest; they are not to be
found, I think, in any English edition since that of 1815. Addressing
the child over whom Immortality, in the language of the ode,
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by--
this earlier reading continues:
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light:
A place of thought where we in waiting lie.
Another notable omitted passage is the introduction to "Dion," published
in 1816:
Fair is the Swan, whose majesty, prevailing
O'er breezeless water on Locarno's lake....
Here nineteen lines full of beauty are sacrificed by Wordsworth in the
interest of the unity of the poem. He struck out, too, some lines from
"The Daisy," "The Thorn," and "Simon Lee," and eight stanzas have
disappeared from "Peter Bell" since the first edition of that poem.
Among them are these grotesque lines, favorites with Charles Lamb:
Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd--
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
All silent and all damn'd!
And here are some verses that have interest from the glimpse they give
of Wordsworth's faculty in a field that he declined to cultivate--the
amatory or "fleshly," as it has been conveniently named for us of late.
I quote from that rare book, the "Descriptive Sketches" of 1793; and as
the lines are not included in any edition of his poems, they are
unfamiliar to most readers. But two copies of this book, so far as I
know, exist in this country. One of them, which belonged to the late
Prof. Henry Reed, Wordsworth's American editor, is full of corrections
in Wordsworth's own handwriting; and it is by the courtesy of its
present owner that I am enabled to give here the early text with these
corrections, never before printed. The young Wordsworth takes leave of
Switzerland, at the conclusion of his pedestrian tour, with this glowing
apostrophe:
ye the
Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
your
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
Dark
Those stedfast eyes, that beating breasts inspire,
To throw the "sultry rays" of young Desire;
soft
=Those= lips whose ^ tides of fragrance come and go
Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;
Ye warm
Those shadowy breasts In love's soft light array'd
And rising by the moon of passion sway'd.[G]
[Footnote G:
I venture to note, in passing, a small class of corrections in which the
poet has cleared his text from certain innocencies of expression that
were liable to be misread by persons on the alert for double meanings.
The following are among the Wordsworthian simplicities that have been
amended in the later editions; the reference is made to the octavos of
1815, which may be compared with any of the editions since 1836:
Vol. I., page 111, "The Brothers," passage beginning, "James, tired
perhaps."
Vol. I., page 210, "Michael," passage beginning, "Old Michael, while he
was a babe in arms."
Vol. I., page 223, "Laodamia," stanza beginning, "Be taught, O faithful
Consort."]
Wordsworth thus dropped, for one reason or another, many passages from
his poems. But did he abandon entire poems? That did not often happen.
He strove patiently to perfect the form of his thought; but he was
unwilling to let the substance of it go. In the seven volumes of his
poetry, as they now stand, but two poems are lacking, to the best of my
knowledge, of all that he ever published. One of these, an unimportant
piece beginning, "The confidence of youth our only art," was printed
with the "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent" (1822), and no longer
appears in the collected editions. The other missing poem, "Andrew
Jones," was abandoned for reasons, as I think, of considerable critical
interest. In the "Lyrical Ballads" it began thus:
I hate that Andrew Jones: he'll breed
His children up to waste and pillage:
I wish the press-gang or the drum
With its tantara sound would come,
And sweep him from the village!
This poem may be found (with, slight emendations) as late as the edition
of 1815; but after that date I meet with it nowhere but in foreign
reprints. Why was it dropped? It is doubtless a story of unrelieved
though petty suffering; it corresponds, in small, to what Mr. Matthew
Arnold calls the "poetically faulty" situation of Empedocles, a
situation "in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be
done." But, on the other hand, that fragment of AEschylus, the
"Prometheus Bound," in which everything is endured and nothing done, yet
remains a work of the deepest interest: nor need we think that
Wordsworth abandoned his little poem for a reason so refined as that
which led Mr. Arnold to abandon one of his own. There was, as I take it,
a moral reason which led to Wordsworth's decision; namely, that the
story of "Andrew Jones" is told with bitterness of feeling from
beginning to end; and against bitterness of feeling Wordsworth had
recorded, during his earlier years, a striking protest. We shall read it
presently; but first let us couple with the poem a sentence from his
prose--a sentence full of the same feeling, and which was early dropped
for the same reason. We shall find it in the edition of 1815, in the
essay supplementary to the famous Preface of that date. There Wordsworth
turns upon his critics as follows:
"By what fatality the orb of my genius (for genius none of them seem to
deny me) acts upon these men like the moon upon a certain description of
patients, it would be irksome to enquire: nor would it consist with the
respect which I owe myself to take further notice of opponents whom I
internally despise."
This is not quite in the vein of the serenely meditative poet; and if we
look back to a time twenty years earlier than this, we shall find that
Wordsworth had reproved his heat beforehand. In 1795, when he first
chose definitely the poet's career, he had written these lines:
If thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure,
Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness: that he who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used: that thought with him
Is in its infancy.
That is the teaching of earlier and serener years, of the time when the
poet was still quietly embayed in youth, when jealous criticism, and
envy, and disappointment were still trials of the future. Youth has its
own passions; but it has also its peculiar serenity; and after
Wordsworth had passed through the stormy years which gave him fame, we
see the maturer man recalling the teaching of his calmer self. It was in
obedience to this, as I believe, that he cancelled the passages that
have just been mentioned; feeling their discord with the pure song of
that early time.
Let us now look at some of the passages which Wordsworth has emended,
not by taking away from the words of his book, but by adding to them. As
he wrote to Mr. Dyce, he diligently revised the "Excursion," in the
edition of 1827, and got the sense "in several instances, ... into less
room"; and minor changes are to be counted by hundreds. But he made some
additions to this poem, and for significant reasons.
Readers of Christopher North's essay, in the "Recreations," on "Sacred
Poetry," will remember the long indictment which he there brings against
the earlier poems of Wordsworth; he complains of them as being
irreligious. It is interesting to find the earthly Christopher
displaying the pious zeal of an inquisitor in the matter, declaring that
in all of Wordsworth's writings, up to the "Excursion," "though we have
much fine poetry, and some high philosophy, it would puzzle the most
ingenious to detect much, if any, Christian religion"; and lamenting its
absence even in the "Excursion," in the story of "Margaret," as told in
the first book. This tale Christopher North calls "perhaps the most
elaborate picture he [Wordsworth] ever painted of any conflict within
any one human heart;" but he adds, with how much sincerity we will not
now ask, that it "is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious
mind--_that_ being wanting without which the entire representation is
vitiated.... This utter absence of Revealed Religion ... throws over the
whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs an unhappy suspicion of
hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion which at the best
is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven."
That Wordsworth laid to heart this criticism, will appear on comparing
the original passage, as reprobated by Christopher North, with the form
which the poet gave it in the latter editions. Originally the peddler,
finishing the story of "Margaret," moralizes thus:
My Friend! enough to sorrow you have given;
The purposes of wisdom ask no more:
Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye;
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,
By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er,
As once I passed, into my heart convey'd
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which fill'd my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the griefs
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was. I turn'd away,
And walk'd along my road in happiness.
"What meditation?" cries out Christopher North. "Turn thou, O child of a
day, to the New Testament, and therein thou mayest find comfort." And
Wordsworth in his revision made the following additions to this fine
pagan passage:
----Enough to sorrow you have given;
The purposes of wisdom ask no more:
Nor more would she have craved as due to one
Who in her worst distress, had often felt
The unbounded might of prayer; and learned, with soul
Fixed on the cross, that consolation springs
From sources deeper far than deepest pain
For the meek sufferer. Why then should we read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye?
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
Then follow the beautiful lines about the weeds, the spear-grass, the
mist and rain-drops, as quoted above; but the close of the passage is
extended as follows:
----All the griefs
That passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream, that could maintain
Nowhere dominion o'er the enlightened spirit
Whose meditative sympathies repose
Upon the breast of Faith. I turned away,
And walked along my road in happiness.
It remains to be said that a certain number of Wordsworth's poems--and
these were, as we might expect, among his best--have stood unchanged in
all the editions from the first, running the gauntlet of their author's
critical moods for half a century, and coming out untouched at last. I
will not call them uncorrected poems, but rather poems in which all the
needed corrections were made before their first publication, for they
belong to that exquisite class of creations--too small a class, even in
the works of the greatest masters--in which the poet has fused
completely the refractory element of language before pouring it out into
the mould of poetic form. Among these untouched poems are three from the
"Lyrical Ballads"--"A slumber did my spirit seal," "Three years she grew
in sun and shower," and "She dwelt among the untrodden ways"--all
written at the age of twenty-nine; such are the "Yew Tree," written four
years later, and "She was a phantom of delight." Several of the best
sonnets, too, were unchanged; as that on "Westminster Bridge," and
"Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour."
And lastly, I may mention one or two changes of text which Wordsworth
did not make, but which belong to the class for which careless editors
or proofreaders are responsible. An edition well known to the American
public is especially peccant in this respect; that beautiful line, for
instance, in "The Pet Lamb"--
And that green corn all day is rustling in thy ears,
becomes,
That green cord all day is rustling in thy ears.
And here is a really interesting _erratum_; it occurs in the poem of
"The Idiot Boy," where it has stood unnoticed for twenty years and more.
Wordsworth's stanzas, describing the boy's night-long ride under the
moon, "from eight o'clock till five," hearing meanwhile "the owls in
tuneful concert strive," originally put these words into his mouth, the
actual words of his hero, as Wordsworth tells us in a note:
The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
And the Sun did shine so cold,
Thus answered Johnny in his glory.
But this reading puzzled the proofreader. How could the sun shine at
night? This being clearly impossible, he restored the idiot boy to
partial sanity. He made him say:
The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
And the Moon did shine so cold;
and the only wonder is that he did not also read,
The cocks did crow cock-a-doodle-doo.
Some one proposes, I believe, a similar emendation in "As You Like It,"
intending to make the Duke speak better sense than Shakespeare put into
his mouth. He is to say,
Sermons in books.
Stones in the running brooks, and good in everything.
But while in the main the text of Shakespeare is bettering under
criticism, Wordsworth is suffering miscorrection; and for the good that
he has to give us we cannot quite dispense with the original editions.
TITUS MUNSON COAN.
PORTRAIT D'UNE JEUNE FEMME INCONNUE,
GALERIE DE FLORENCE.
I saw a picture in a gallery:
Go where I will, it still abides with me.
The hair rich brown, one lovely golden tress
Strayed from the braid and touched the loveliness
Of the fair neck, so smooth, so white, so young,
It shamed the pearls a prince's hand had strung.
The dress is white, with here and there a gleam
Of amber brilliant, sunlight on a stream!
And hanging on her arm, a scarf; the thing
About that glorious head and neck to fling,
Protecting from the night, scarlet and black and gold,
And gems are woven in each gleaming fold.
The picture has that gracious air which tells
The hand that painted it was Raphael's.
They know she's beautiful, and know no more.
Thus questioned I, as many did before:
"Why art thou sad, thou delicate, proud face?
Thou art a Dame of bright and cheerful race,
Thy fortunes grand, thy home this Florence fair.
Does an unworthy heart thy palace share?
Or with a soft caprice dost turn from joy,
And play with sorrow as a costly toy?
Or has thy page forgotten, or done worse--
Failed he to find the fond expected verse
Thy lover promised thee? I know not why
I linger near thee, beautiful and sad,
Yet with such sorrow, who would have thee glad?"
(Is she not gifted with the anointed eye
That sees the trouble of the passer-by?)
"Is thine that great, that tender sympathy
That calls all heart-aches nearer unto thee?
Or a great soul with aspirations rife,
Feeling the insufficiency of this our life?
Thou hast attraction of a grander tone,
Some charm more subtle e'en than beauty's own!
"Though woman throws no greater lure than this,
The lip regretful which we fain would kiss,
The eye made softer by the unfallen tear,
And sunlight brighter for the shadow near.
Why do I ask? will woman ever tell
The secret of the charm that fits her well?"
She did not answer, sweet, mysterious Dame.
I left her sadly, locked in gilded frame.
M. E. W. S.
MISS TINSEL.
A GOLD-MINER'S LOVE STORY.--IN FIVE CHAPTERS.
CHAPTER I.
A GOLD-DIGGING RECLUSE.
On a knoll, not far from a running stream, was pitched a rough canvas
tent. It was of the "wall" sort, and was pegged to the ground with
strong fastenings. Inside were a hammock, a coarse table, two or three
stools, and some boxes and barrels. There were likewise a gridiron, a
"spider," an iron kettle, some tin dishes and cups, and a pair of
candlesticks of the same material. Outside there was a trench dug, by
way of drainage, so that the floor within was kept hard and dry; but the
floor was of earth merely. There was not a flower, or a picture, or the
least attempt at ornament whatever within the tent. Hence the interior
looked bare, sordid, and forbidding. And yet, grim as it was, the tent
had been the solitary abode of its occupant for many months. In the
midst of gold, in quantity outstripping the wildest dreams of his
boyhood, this man had chosen to be a miser. In the midst of a society
whose reckless joviality and wild profusion were perhaps without
precedent, he had chosen to be a recluse. For this self indulgence he
had to pay a price. But he consoled himself, remembering that a price
has to be paid for everything.
Chester Harding came to Bullion Flat about a year before. He had no
friends and no money. The former he could do without, he thought, but
the latter was indispensable. So he got work on the Flat, turning a
spade and plying a rocker for five dollars a day. Such work was then
better paid as a rule, but Harding, though diligent and strong, was not
used to toil, and hence was awkward and comparatively inefficient. He
improved with practice and strove doggedly on, never losing a day,
saving every penny, spending nothing for drink or good fellowship,
courting no man's smile, and indifferent to all men's frowns. He was
savagely bent on achieving independence, and in no long time, after a
fashion, he got it. Independence, in this sense, consisted in a share of
a paying claim, and in the whole of a "wall" tent. In the former he dug
and washed, morosely enough, with five or six partners; but he made up
for this enforced and distasteful social attrition by living in his tent
alone.
Harding was a man getting toward middle life, strongly built, but not
tall, with a grave, handsome face and speech studiously reserved and
cold. He seemed to fear lest he might be thought educated, and, as if to
disarm such a suspicion, his few words were apt to be abrupt and homely.
When he first came to the Flat he had two leathern trunks, and these in
due time were bestowed in the tent on the knoll. One Sunday Harding
opened them. The first contained some respectable garments, such as
might belong to the ordinary wardrobe of a gentleman. There were white
shirts among the rest, and some pairs of kid gloves. Of all these
articles Harding made a pile in the rear of his tent and then
deliberately set them on fire. "I couldn't afford it before," he
muttered. "They might have bought a meal or two if need were; but
now----" To be rich enough to gratify a caprice was clearly very
agreeable to the man; for presently he brought out a number of
books--old favorites obviously--and treated them in the same incendiary
manner. The Shakespeare and the Milton, the Macaulay and the Buckle
spluttered and crackled reproachfully in the flames; yet their destroyer
never winced, but added to the holocaust heaps of letters, and at last
two or three miniatures saved for the fire as a final tid-bit, and gazed
with grim joy as the whole crumbled in the end to powdery ashes. Chester
Harding reserved nothing but one little volume, bound in velvet with
gilt clasps, and one faded old daguerreotype, which he replaced in his
trunk side by side, and then covered quickly so that they should be out
of sight. It seemed to be his wish to hide and to forget every trace of
his past life.
That life had been a hard and bitter one. From his earliest childhood
Harding had been a victim of the weakness and cruelty of others. A
miserable home, made a hell by drink and contention, was at last broken
up in ruin, and the young man went forth into the world to meet coldness
and injustice at every turn. Suspicion and selfishness are among the
almost certain fruits of an experience like this, and the world is
naturally more ready to condemn such fruits than to find excuses for
them. When Harding found himself unpopular and distrusted he as
naturally shaped his conduct so as to justify its condemnation.
Surrounded from the beginning of his life by bad influences, and by
these almost exclusively, he found little to soften his harsh judgment
of men or to mitigate his resentment for their ill treatment. In time he
fell in with one who with greater strength and higher wisdom might
perhaps have led him up to nobler views and a loftier destiny. For he
loved her deeply and without reservation. But her charms of person found
no counterparts in her mind or heart, and Harding was cheated and
betrayed. To escape old thoughts and associations, and to mend if
possible broken fortunes, he sought the Land of Gold. He had heard that
men were more generous there than elsewhere, less cunning, tricky, and
censorious. Perhaps even he might find average acceptance among new
scenes and among a new people.
But on the day he landed at San Francisco Harding was robbed by a fellow
traveller, whom he had befriended, of the last penny he had in the
world. The man had shared his stateroom on board the steamer, and knew
that he had a draft on the agent of the Rothschilds. When Harding cashed
his draft he took the proceeds, in gold coin, to his hotel. That night
he was visited by his shipmate, who contrived to steal the belt
containing this little fortune, and to escape with it to the mines. Next
morning Harding sought a near relative, an older man of known wealth,
his sole acquaintance on the Pacific coast.
"I've come to you," he said, after receiving a somewhat icy greeting,
"to ask you to help me. A serious misfortune has overtaken me, and----"
"If it's money you want," interrupted the other brusquely, "I've got
none!"
This was not the usual fashion of the pioneers. Happily most of them
were made of sweeter and kindlier stuff. But the fates had woven out
poor Harding's earlier fortune, and it was all destined to be of the
same harsh, pitiless web. He bowed his head when these words were said
to him, and with the kind of smile angels must most hate to see on the
faces of those so near and so little below them, he went forth in
silence. Next morning he pawned his watch and made his way up into the
mines.
* * * * *
"He's cracked; that's what he is," decided Jack Storm. Since the great
find of gold at Bullion Flat there had been a great rush thither from
the immediate neighborhood, and among the rest quite a deputation
arrived from Boone's Bar. Jack was as great a dandy as ever, and still
wore his gaudy Mexican jacket, with its silver bell buttons, his
flapping trousers to match, and his gigantic and carefully nourished
moustache.
"Cracked!" repeated Mr. Copperas suavely. "Not he. He takes too good
care of his money for that. No, boys, that ain't the trouble. He's been
'chasing the eagle' in times past; the bird has been too many for him,
and now he's playing to get even."
"Stuff!" gurgled Judge Carboy, unwilling to part by expectoration with
even the smallest product of his favorite quid. "He's done sutthin' he's
ashamed of. No trifle like that, Cop. He's proberly committed a murder
out East. Bime by we'll hear all about it."
Jack Storm shook his head. "He's worked side by side with me for nigh a
year, and he wouldn't hurt a fly. Besides, it is his turn next week to
go to 'Frisco for stores."
"What's that to do with it?" queried Mr. Copperas.
"A durned sight," returned the other. "Ain't they after these cusses
with a sharp stick who've got in hot water at home? And ain't goin' to
'Frisco for such chaps jes' like walkin' into the lion's mouth? Why,
there's honest miners--and them as ain't honest miners, Cop--who'd a
_leetle_ rather not go down to the Bay jes' now, even among the quiet
folks over at Boone's Bar."
Mr. Copperas coughed uneasily. "So Harding's going down, is he?" he
inquired. "Right off?"
"Sartain. You'd better take a trip and keep him company."
There was a murmur of amusement at this. Everybody at the "Bella Union"
knew that something had been in the air touching chirographic exploits
of Mr. Copperas a few years back at New Orleans, and before he kept the
faro bank at Boone's Bar.
"For my part," put in Jim Blair, who liked to hear injustice done to no
man, "I s'pose there's reasons why a chap might want to live alone, and
yet mightn't a knifed anybody nor robbed 'em either."
"That's so, Jim," affirmed Judge Carboy oracularly. "No doubt on't. But
when it's so we usually hear what them reasons is. Now, who knows air a
word on 'em in the case afore us? Anyhow, I hope he's good--good as
gold--only we've had our sheer of troubles in the county, and it's well
to look sharp."
"When I was a little chap," proceeded Jim Blair with retrospective
deliberation, "I lived in a village on the further side o' the Ohio.
Most folks did their business on t'other bank, and went over generally
by the eight o'clock ferry in the mornin.' Now, there was two or three
that didn't; men whose work lay nigher home, or who went later. But the
crowd went over reg'lar at eight. Arter awhile they got awful sot agin
them who didn't go over at the same time. There weren't no hell's
delights you could think of them fellers didn't lay to the men who
didn't travel by the eight boat; and at last, damn me if they didn't
want to lynch 'em!"
"Lynch 'em for not goin' in the eight boat!" cried the Judge, whose
respect for the majesty of the law always asserted itself, as was meet,
on hearing any tale of its infringement.
Jim Blair nodded. "Not so much, I reckon, for not goin' in the eight
boat as for not doin' what other folks did. However, them who ever try
to trouble Ches Harding'll have a rough time, I guess."
"You think he's sech a game fighter?" inquired Jack Storm with lively
interest.
"That may be too. But what I meant was, there's them on the Flat who
believe in Ches for all his lonesome ways, and won't see him put upon.
For my part I reckon he's more sinned against than sinnin'."
"I guess you're half right, Jim," admitted Judge Carboy with diplomatic
concession; "more'n half right. But mark my words"--and the Judge's
voice rose to the orotund swell which denoted his purpose to be more
than commonly impressive--"thar'll be the devil's own time on the Flat
some day, and that air duck'll be king pin and starter of it. I never
know'd no such silent, sulky cuss as that moonin' round but that he
kicked up pettikiler h-- in the long run."
It will be seen from this that there were differences of opinion
respecting Chester Harding at Bullion Flat, and it cannot be denied that
there was some reason for it.