MR. BAXTER'S OFFICES. MILLER'S CHARACTER OF MASON; WITH A FEW REMARKS
IN VINDICATION OF GRAY'S FRIEND AND THE DOCTOR'S ACQUAINTANCE.
——_Te sonare quis mihi
Genîque vim dabit tui?
Stylo quis æquor hocce arare charteum,
En arva per papyrina
Satu loquace seminare literas?_
JANUS DOUSA.
That dwelling house which the reader may find represented in Miller's
History of Doncaster, as it was in his time, and in the Doctor's, and
in mine,—that house in which the paper-hangers and painters were
employed during the parenthesis, or to use a more historical term, the
Interim of this part of our history,—that house which when, after an
interval of many years, I saw it last, had the name R. Dennison on the
door, is now, the Sheffield Mercury tells me, occupied as Mr. Baxter's
Offices. I mean no disrespect to Mr. R. Dennison. I mean no disrespect
to Mr. Baxter. I know nothing of these gentlemen, except that in 1830
the one had his dwelling there, and in 1836 the other his offices. But
for the house itself, which can now be ascertained only by its site,
totally altered as it is in structure and appearance, without and
within,—when I think of it I cannot but exclaim, in what Wordsworth
would call “that inward voice” with which we speak to ourselves in
solitude, “If thou be'est it,” with reference to that alteration,—and
with reference to its change of tenants and present appropriation I
cannot but carry on the verse, and say—“but oh how fallen, how
changed!”
In that house Peter Hopkins had entertained his old friend Guy; and
the elder Daniel once, upon an often pressed and special invitation,
had taken the longest journey he ever performed in his life, to pass a
week there. For many years Mr. Allison and Mr. Bacon made it their
house of call whenever they went to Doncaster. In that house Miller
introduced Herschel to Dr. Dove; and Mason when he was Mr. Copley's
guest never failed to call there, and enquire of the Doctor what books
he had added to his stores,—for to have an opportunity of conversing
with him was one of the pleasures which Mason looked for in his visits
at Netherhall.
Miller disliked Mason: described him as sullen, reserved, capricious
and unamiable; and this which he declared to be “the real character of
this celebrated poet,” he inserted, he said, “as a lesson to mankind,
to shew them what little judgement can be formed of the heart of an
author, either by the sublimity of his conceptions, the beauty of his
descriptions, or the purity of his sentiments.”
Often as Miller was in company with Mason, there are conclusive proofs
that the knowledge which he attained of Mason's character, was as
superficial as the poet's knowledge of music, for which as has
heretofore been intimated, the Organist regarded him with some
contempt.
He says that the reason which Mason assigned for making an offer to
the lady whom he married, was, that he had been a whole evening in her
company with others, and observed, that during all that time she never
spoke a single word. Mason is very likely to have said this; but the
person who could suppose that he said it in strict and serious
sincerity, meaning that it should be believed to the letter, must have
been quite incapable of appreciating the character of the speaker.
Mason whom Gray described, a little before this offer, as repining at
his four and twenty weeks residence at York, and longing for the
flesh-pots and coffee-houses of Cambridge, was notwithstanding in his
friend and fellow-poet's phrase, a long while _mariturient_, “and
praying to heaven to give him a good and gentle governess.” “No man,”
says Gray, “wants such a thing more in all senses; but his greatest
wants do not make him move a foot faster, nor has he, properly
speaking, any thing one can call a passion about him, except a little
malice and revenge.” Elsewhere he speaks of Mason's “insatiable
repining mouth.” Yet there was no malice in these expressions. Gray
loved him, taking him for all in all, and to have been the friend of
Gray will always be considered as evidence of no ordinary worth; for
it is not on intellect alone that the friendship of so good and wise a
man as Gray could be founded.
When Gray first became acquainted with Mason he wrote concerning him
thus. “He has much fancy, little judgement, and a good deal of
modesty. I take him for a good and well-meaning creature; but then he
is really in simplicity a child, and loves every body he meets with:
he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design
to make his fortune by it.” In another letter “Mason grows apace in my
good graces; he is very ingenious, with great good-nature and
simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and so comical a way
that it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so
ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in
one's opinion. So sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a
spark of generosity would ever think of hurting him, he lies so open
to injury; but so indolent that if he cannot overcome this habit, all
his good qualities will signify nothing at all.”
This surely is the character of an amiable and very likeable man.
Mason said when he printed it, “my friends, I am sure will be much
amused at this; my enemies (if they please) may sneer at it, and say
(which they will very truly,) that twenty-five years have made a very
considerable abatement in my general philanthropy. Men of the world
will not blame me for writing from so prudent a motive, as that of
making my fortune by it; and yet the truth I believe, at the time was,
that I was perfectly well satisfied if my publications furnished me
with a few guineas to see a Play, or an Opera.”
During the short time that his wife lived after his marriage, Miller
observed that he appeared more animated and agreeable in his
conversation, that is to say, he was cheerful because he was happy.
After her death (and who has ever perused her epitaph without
emotion?) he relapsed into a discontented habit of mind, as might be
expected from one who had remained unmarried too long, and who
although he might be said in the worldly sense of the word to have
been a fortunate man, was never, except during the short duration of
his marriage, a happy one. He had no near relations, none to whom he
was in any degree attached; and in Gray he lost the most intimate of
his friends, probably the only one towards whom he ever felt anything
approaching to a warmth of friendship. This produced a most
uncomfortable effect upon him in the decline of life; for knowing that
he was looked upon as one who had wealth to leave for which there were
no near or natural claimants, he suspected that any marks of attention
which were shewn him, whether from kindness or from respect, proceeded
from selfish views. That in many cases such suspicions may be
well-founded, any one who knows what the world is, will readily
believe; and if they made him capricious, and rendered him liable to
be accused of injustice and want of feeling, the effect is not so
extraordinary as it is pitiable. It is one of the evils attendant upon
the possession of riches where there is no certain heir; it is part of
the punishment which those persons bring upon themselves who
accumulate unnecessary wealth, without any just or definite object.
But Mason is chargeable with no such sin. When a young man he made a
resolution that if he came into possession of an estate which was
entailed upon him, he would accept of no additional preferment; and he
adhered to that resolution, though many offers were made to him which
might have induced a worldly man to depart from it. The first thing he
did after the inheritance fell to him was to resign his King's
Chaplainship: “a priest in that situation,” he said, “could not help
looking forward to a bishoprick, a species of ambition incompatible
with the simplicity and purity of the Christian character, for, the
moment a man aspires to the purple that moment virtue goes out of
him.” Mr. Greville who after a visit to Mason, related this in a
letter to his friend Polwhele, was informed that his income was about
£1500 a-year, and that of this one third was appropriated to patronage
and charity.
He had made another resolution, which was not kept, because it was not
reasonable. When the Earl of Holdernesse offered him the Rectory of
Aston, he was not in orders, and he called upon Warburton to ask his
advice. “I found him,” says Warburton, “yet unresolved whether he
should take the Living. I said, was the question about a mere secular
employment, I should blame him without reserve if he refused the
offer. But as I regarded going into orders in another light, I frankly
owned to him he ought not to go, unless he had a _call_: by which I
meant, I told him, nothing fanatical or superstitious; but an
inclination, and, on that, a resolution, to dedicate all his studies
to the service of religion, and totally to abandon his poetry. This
sacrifice, I said, I thought was required at any time, but more
indispensably so in this, when we are fighting with infidelity _pro
aris et focis_. This was what I said; and I will do him the justice to
say, that he entirely agreed with me in thinking that decency,
reputation, and religion, all required this sacrifice of him; and
that, if he went into orders, he intended to give it.” “How much shall
I honour him,” says Warburton in another letter, “if he performs his
promise to me of putting away those idle baggages after his sacred
espousals!” This unwise promise explains Mason's long silence as a
poet, and may partly account for his uncomfortable state of mind as
long as he considered himself bound by it.
There were other circumstances about him which were unfavourable to
happiness; he seems never to have been of a cheerful, because never of
a hopeful temper; otherwise Gray would not have spoken of his
“insatiable repining mouth,”—the lively expression of one who clearly
perceived his constitutional faults, and yet loved him, as he deserved
to be loved, in spite of them. The degree of malice also, which Gray
noticed as the strongest passion in his nature, is to be reckoned
among those circumstances. By far the most popular of his compositions
were those well known satires which he never owned, and which
professional critics with their usual lack of acumen, pronounced not
to be his because of their sarcastic humour and the strength of their
language. He had a great deal of that sarcastic humour, and this it
was which Gray called malice; in truth it partakes of maliciousness,
and a man is the worse for indulging it, if he ever allows himself to
give it a personal direction, except in cases where strong provocation
may warrant and strict justice require it. That these satires were
written by Mason will appear upon the most indisputable proof whenever
his letters shall be published; and it is earnestly hoped those
letters may not be allowed to perish, for in them and in them only
will the character of the writer appear in its natural lights and
shades.
Mason would not (especially after their signal success,) have
refrained from acknowledging these satires, which are the most
vigorous of his compositions, unless he had been conscious that the
turn of mind they indicated was not that which ought to be found in a
member of his profession. And it can only have been the same feeling
which induced the Editor to withhold them from the only collective
edition of his works. That edition was delayed till fourteen years
after his death, and then appeared without any memoir of the author,
or any the slightest prefatory mark of respect: it seems therefore
that he had left none by whom his memory was cherished. But though
this may have been in some degree his fault, it was probably in a far
greater degree his misfortune.
Mason had obtained preferment for his literary deserts, and in such
just measure as to satisfy himself, and those also who would wish that
ecclesiastical preferment were always so properly bestowed. But he was
not satisfied with his literary fame. Others passed him upon the
stream of popularity with all their sails set, full speed before the
wind, while he lay quietly upon his oars in a pleasant creek; and he
did not sufficiently bear in mind that he was safe at his ease, when
some of those who so triumphantly left him behind were upset and went
to the bottom. He had done enough to secure for himself a respectable
place among the poets of his country, and a distinguished one among
those of his age. But more through indolence than from any deficiency
or decay of power, he had fallen short of the promise of his youth,
and of his own early aspirations. Discontent, especially when mingled
with self-reproach, is an uneasy feeling, and like many others he
appears to have sought relief by projecting it, and transferring as
much of it as he could upon the world. He became an acrimonious whig,
and took an active part in the factious measures by which Yorkshire
was agitated about the close of the American war. Gray if he had been
then living might perhaps have been able to have rendered him more
temperate and more reasonable in his political views; certainly he
would have prevailed upon him not to write, or having written not to
publish or preserve, the last book of his English Garden, which is in
every respect miserably bad; bad in taste as recommending sham castles
and modern ruins; bad in morals, as endeavouring to serve a political
cause and excite indignation against the measures of Government by a
fictitious story, (which if it had been true could have had no bearing
whatever upon the justice or injustice of the American war;) and bad
in poetry because the story is in itself absurd. Not the least absurd
part of this puerile tale is the sudden death of the heroine, at the
unexpected sight of her betrothed husband, whom she was neither glad
nor sorry to see; and the description of the _facies Hippocratica_ is
applied to this person, thus dying in health, youth and beauty! Dr.
Dove used to instance this as a remarkable example of knowledge
ignorantly misapplied.
Yet though the Doctor did not rank him higher as a physiologist than
Miller did as a musician, or than Sir Joshua must have done as a
painter, he found more pleasure than the organist could do in his
conversation; partly because there was an air of patronage in Mason's
intercourse with Miller at first, and afterwards an air of
estrangement, (a sufficient reason;) and partly because Mason was more
capable of enjoying the richness of the Doctor's mind, and such of its
eccentricities as were allowed to appear in company where he was not
wholly without reserve, than he was of appreciating the simplicity of
Miller's. That vein of humour which he indulged in his correspondence
opened when he was conversing with one, like the Doctor, upon whom
nothing was lost; at such times the heavy saturnine character of
Mason's countenance, which might almost be called morose, seemed to be
cast off; and pleasantry and good-nature animated its intellectual
strength. But according to Polwhele's friend, there was a “sedate
benignity in his countenance, which taught me,” says Mr. Greville,
“instantaneously to rely on him as a man the leading traits of whose
disposition were feeling and reflection. This immediate impression of
his character I found afterwards to be strictly just. I never yet met
with a human being whose head and heart appear to act and re-act so
reciprocally, so concordantly upon each other as his.—In his style of
conversation, you can trace nothing of the _vis vivida_ of the poet.
Here his inventive powers apparently lie dormant. Those flashes of
genius, those intellectual emanations which we are taught to believe
great men cannot help darting forward in order to lighten up the gloom
of colloquial communication, he seems to consider as affected; he
therefore rejects them whenever they occur, and appears to pride
himself on the preference which he gives to simplicity and
perspicuity. Conversation (if you will excuse a pedantic allusion,)
with him resembles the style of painting mentioned in the earlier part
of the Athenian History, which consisted in representing the artist's
ideas in a simple unaffected point of view, through the medium of one
colour only; whereas his writings are like the pictures of Polygnotus.
They glow with all the warmth of an invigorated imagination, an
animated diction, and a rich luxuriant phraseology.
“His manners, too, are equally as chaste and unaffected as his
conversation. The stream that winds its easy way through woods and
verdant meads, is not less artificial or more insinuating than he is
in doing the honours of the table, or promoting the graces of the
drawing room. That peculiar happiness which some few I have met with
possess, of reconciling you implicitly to their superiority, he enjoys
in an eminent degree, by the amiability of his sentiments, the
benignity of his attention, and particularly by an indescribable way
with him, of making you appear to advantage, even when he convinces
you of the erroneousness of your opinions, or the inconclusiveness of
your reasoning.
“In regard to his morals, I believe from what I have collected, that
few can look back upon a period of sixty years existence, spent so
uniformly pure and correct. In the course of our chit chat, he
informed me, in an unostentatious unaffected manner, that he never was
intoxicated but once.”
There was another point of resemblance, besides their vein of humour,
between Mason and the Doctor, in their latter days; they were nearly
of the same age, and time had brought with it to both the same sober,
contemplative, deep feeling of the realities of religion.
The French Revolution cured Mason of his whiggery, and he had the
manliness to sing his palinode. The fearful prevalence of a false and
impious philosophy made him more and more sensible of the inestimable
importance of his faith. On his three last birth-days he composed
three sonnets, which for their sentiment and their beauty ought to be
inserted in every volume of select poems for popular use. And he left
for posthumous publication a poem called RELIGIO CLERICI: as a whole
it is very inferior to that spirited satire of Smedley's which bears
the same title, and which is the best satire of its age; but its
concluding paragraph will leave the reader with a just and very
favourable impression of the poet and the man.
FATHER, REDEEMER, COMFORTER DIVINE!
This humble offering to thy equal shrine
Here thy unworthy servant grateful pays,
Of undivided thanks, united praise,
For all those mercies which at birth began,
And ceaseless flow'd thro' life's long-lengthened span,
Propt my frail frame thro' all the varied scene,
With health enough for many a day serene;
Enough of science clearly to discern
How few important truths the wisest learn;
Enough of arts ingenuous to employ
The vacant hours, when graver studies cloy;
Enough of wealth to serve each honest end,
The poor to succour, or assist a friend;
Enough of faith in Scripture to descry,
That the sure hope of immortality,
Which only can the fear of death remove,
Flows from the fountain of REDEEMING LOVE.
One who visited York a few years after the death of the Poet, says,
“the Verger who showed us the Minster upon my inquiring of him
concerning Mason, began an encomium upon him in an humble way indeed,
but more honourable than all the factitious praises of learned
ostentation; his countenance brightened up when I asked him the
question; his very looks told me that Mason's charities did not
evaporate in effusions of sensibility; I learned that he was humble,
mild, and generous; the father of his family; the delight of all that
came within the sphere of his notice. Then he was so good in his
parish. My soul contemplates, with fond exultation, the picture of a
man, endowed with genius, wit and every talent to please the great,
but _suâ se virtute involventem_, resigning himself with complacency
to the humble duties of a country pastor,—turning select Psalms into
Verse to be sung in his Church; simplifying and arranging, and
directing to the purposes of devotion his church music; and performing
his duties as a minister with meekness, perseverance, and brotherly
love.”
Enough has now been adduced to vindicate Mason's character from
Miller's aspersion. They who desire to see his merits as a poet
appreciated with great ability and equal justice should peruse his
life in Hartley Coleridge's Boreal Biography,—what a boisterous title
for a book in which there is not one blustering sentence, and so many
sweet strains of feeling and of thought!