A PHILOSOPHER, TWO POETS, AND A NOVELIST
Everybody has heard of _Sandford and Merton_, and hardly anybody nowadays
has read it. I confess with shame that I am one who has not. But I have
come across so many parodies of it and so many references to it in various
books and articles that I am finding it more and more difficult to believe
that I have not actually read the story itself. Mr. Barlow, the boy's
tutor, lives in my mind as a large and solemn bore, but he was a bore of
real knowledge; he was heavy with learning; and the boys themselves were
dreadful little prigs, but underneath their priggishness they were manly
boys, and there was something fine in their ideals of honour. No doubt
they were largely modelled on their author, Thomas Day, who when he was a
schoolboy started a fight with another boy on quite justifiable grounds,
and soon finding that he completely outmatched his opponent, stopped the
fight, and insisted on shaking hands with the other and making peace.
That incident, and the queer originality of his whole outlook on life, has
made me more interested in Day himself than in his one famous book, and
has made me number 36 Wellclose Square, the house where he was born,
among the London literary shrines that must not be overlooked.
Wellclose Square is in Shadwell, on the skirts of Whitechapel, and is one
of those melancholy places that have obviously seen better days. Dreary
and drab and squalid as you see it now, when Day was born there on the
22nd June 1748 it must have been a fairly select and superior residential
quarter. Day's father was a collector of Customs who died a year after his
son's birth, leaving him a very comfortable fortune of twelve hundred a
year. The boy was educated at Charterhouse and at Oxford, and one way and
another acquired lofty Stoic principles and a somewhat original philosophy
that he lived up to obstinately all his life through, in spite of many
rebuffs and a good deal of ridicule. He dressed carelessly, was
indifferent to appearances, and scorned the "admiration of splendour which
dazzles and enslaves mankind." He preferred the society of his inferiors
because they were more unconventional, less artificial than the ladies and
gentlemen of his own rank; he was awkward in the company of women, and
regarded the sex with doubt as well as with diffidence. As you would
expect of the man who wrote _Sandford and Merton_, he had no sense of
humour; and his smallpox-pitted face and unattractive air and manner told
so much against him that he was rejected emphatically by the first one or
two women he proposed to. Withal, as was also fitting in the author of
that fearsomely moral schoolboy-book, he was, in the words of his friend
Edgeworth, "the most virtuous human being I have ever known."
[Illustration: THOMAS DAY. 36 WELLCLOSE SQUARE.]
I suppose he was a pioneer of the "simple life" theory; anyhow, he
persistently advocated simplicity in dress and living, and was determined
to find a wife who shared these tastes, who should, moreover, be fond of
literature and moral philosophy, "simple as a mountain girl in her dress,
diet, and manners, and fearless and intrepid as the Spartan wives and
Roman heroines." He was careful to state these requirements to the lady
before proposing to her, and this seems to have spoilt his chances. The
difficulty of discovering his ideal wife led to his making an odd
experiment. He adopted two young girls, one from the Foundling Hospital,
the other from the Shrewsbury Orphanage, and in deference to the
proprieties formally bound them apprentice to his friend Edgeworth, and
gave guarantees to the authorities that within one year he would make a
decision between the two and pay a premium of a hundred pounds to
apprentice one to a suitable trade, and send the other to be properly
educated with the ultimate object of marrying her. The girls were about
twelve years old. In order that they should not be influenced with wrong
ideas by the people about them, he took them into France, where, as they
only understood English, they could talk with nobody but himself; and
there he proceeded to teach them reading and writing, and by ridicule,
explanation, and reasoning sought "to imbue them with a deep hatred for
dress, for luxury, for fine people, for fashion and titles, all of which
inspired his own mind with such an unconquerable horror." In a letter
which he wrote home about them he says, "I am not disappointed in one
respect. I am more attached to and more convinced of the truth of my
principles than ever. I have made them, in respect of temper, two such
girls as, I may perhaps say without vanity, you have never seen at the
same age. They have never given me a moment's trouble throughout the
voyage, are always contented, and think nothing so agreeable as waiting
upon me (no moderate convenience for a lazy man)." Nevertheless, in
France, the girls proved very quarrelsome; he had to nurse them through a
severe attack of smallpox, and once when they were out boating they both
fell into the Rhone, and he risked his life to save them.
Within the year, he brought them back to England and had made his choice.
He apprenticed one, who was "invincibly stupid," to a milliner; and the
other, Sabrina Sidney, he carried with him to a house he had taken near
Lichfield and there "resumed his preparations for implanting in her young
mind the characteristic virtues of Arria, Portia and Cornelia." But she
disappointed him; he endeavoured in vain to steel her against shrinking
from pain and the fear of danger. "When he dropped melting sealing-wax on
her arms she did not endure it heroically; nor when he fired pistols at
her petticoats which she believed to be charged with balls could she help
starting aside or suppress her screams." She was not fond of science, and
was unable to keep a secret satisfactorily; so after a year's trial Day
sent her away to a boarding-school, and proceeded to pay his addresses to
a young lady living in the neighbourhood, who first put him on a period of
probation, and then, after he had made himself ridiculous in trying to
dress and behave as she wished, rejected him.
[Illustration: LORD BYRON]
Whereupon his thoughts turned again to Sabrina, who had a real affection
for him; but her failure to obey him in certain small details of dress
again displeased him, and finally deciding against her, he in the long run
married a Miss Milnes. His one objection to this lady was that she
possessed a considerable fortune, and would therefore probably refuse to
live the simple life; but when he had categorically put his requirements
to her, and she had consented to dispense with all luxuries, to cut
herself off from social gaieties, and reside in the country with him,
restricted in every way to the bare necessaries of existence, working and
spending for the behoof of the poor and needy, he ventured to make her
Mrs. Day, and never had occasion to regret it. Sabrina eventually married
a barrister, but refused to do so until she had Day's consent; and when,
after writing divers political, economic, and philosophical works that
nobody hears of now, and _Sandford and Merton_, which nobody reads any
longer, Day died of a fall from an unmanageable horse which he insisted
could be controlled by kindness, his wife was inconsolable, and died soon
after him of a broken heart.
So he must have been a man worth knowing, and, in spite of his
peculiarities and his oppressive earnestness, more likeable than most of
us, when you knew him. Anyhow, he thought for himself, and had opinions of
his own, and was not afraid to act upon them. And such men are so
uncommonly rare that I think the County Council should put a tablet on the
face of his birthplace at once, for the encouragement of all men who are
something more than cheap copies of their neighbours.
Across the other side of London, at 24 (then 16) Holles Street, Cavendish
Square, Lord Byron was born, on 22nd January 1788--a very different man,
but also unconventional, though in more conventional ways. But the house
here has been considerably altered to suit the requirements of the big
drapery establishment that at present occupies it, and of Byron's various
residences in London I believe the only one that survives in its original
condition is that at No. 4 Bennet Street, St. James's. Here he had rooms
on the first floor in 1813 and the early months of 1814, and it was in
those rooms that he wrote _The Giaour_, _The Bride of Abydos_, and _The
Corsair_. Writing to Moore from here on the 28th July 1813, he says, "I am
training to dine with Sheridan and Rogers this evening"; and in the Diary
he was keeping at this time he notes, on 16th November 1813, "Read Burns
to-day. What would he have been, if a patrician? We should have had more
polish--less force--just as much verse but no immortality--a divorce and
duel or two, the which had he survived, as his potations must have been
less spirituous, he might have lived as long as Sheridan, and outlived as
much as poor Brinsley."
From Bennet Street Byron carried on a correspondence with the lady he was
destined to marry, Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke. "I look upon myself," he
tells her in one of his letters, "as a very facetious personage, and may
appeal to most of my acquaintance in proof of my assertion. Nobody laughs
more, and though your friend Joanna Baillie says somewhere that 'Laughter
is the child of misery,' I do not believe her (unless indeed a hysteric),
though I think it is sometimes the parent." In another of the same
September 1813, evidently replying to one of hers, he protests: "'Gay'
but not 'content'--very true.... You have detected a laughter 'false to
the heart'--allowed--yet I have been tolerably sincere with you, and I
fear sometimes troublesome." In November he writes to her, "I perceive by
part of your last letter that you are still inclined to believe me a
gloomy personage. Those who pass so much of their time entirely alone
can't be always in very high spirits; yet I don't know--though I certainly
do enjoy society to a certain extent, I never passed two hours in mixed
company without wishing myself out of it again. Still, I look upon myself
as a facetious companion, well reputed by all the wits at whose jests I
readily laugh, and whose repartees I take care never to incur by any kind
of contest--for which I feel as little qualified as I do for the more
solid pursuits of demonstration."
[Illustration: BYRON. 4 BENNET STREET. ST. JAMES'S.]
As for his gloom or gaiety, Sir Walter Scott, who lunched with him and
Charles Mathews at Long's Hotel, in Old Bond Street, in 1815, said, "I
never saw Byron so full of fun, frolic, wit, and whim: he was as playful
as a kitten." Again, writing in his Journal, after Byron's death, Sir
Walter observes, "What I liked about Byron, besides his boundless genius,
was his generosity of spirit as well as purse, and his utter contempt of
all affectations of literature, from the school-magisterial style to the
lackadaisical"; and he relates an anecdote in illustration of Byron's
extreme sensitiveness: "Like Rousseau, he was apt to be very suspicious,
and a plain, downright steadiness of manner was the true mode to maintain
his good opinion. Will Rose told me that once, while sitting with Byron,
he fixed insensibly his eyes on his feet, one of which, it must be
remembered, was deformed. Looking up suddenly, he saw Byron regarding him
with a look of concentrated and deep displeasure, which wore off when he
observed no consciousness or embarrassment in the countenance of Rose.
Murray afterwards explained this by telling Rose that Lord Byron was very
jealous of having this personal imperfection noticed or attended to." He
goes on to say that Byron was a mischief-maker; he would tell one man the
unpleasant things that had been privately said of him by another; and he
loved to mystify people, "to be thought awful, mysterious and gloomy, and
sometimes hinted at strange causes."
So that if he had no literary affectations he clearly cultivated a pose of
mysterious misery both in his life and his poetry, and this it was that
exasperated Carlyle into calling him "the teeth-grinding, glass-eyed, lone
Caloyer." And the pose was helped out by his handsome and romantic
appearance. "Byron's countenance is a thing to dream of," Scott told
Lockhart. "A certain fair lady whose name has been too often mentioned in
connection with his told a friend of mine that when she first saw Byron it
was in a crowded room, and she did not know who it was, but her eyes were
instantly nailed, and she said to herself, 'That pale face is my fate.'
And, poor soul, if a god-like face and god-like powers could have made
excuse for devilry, to be sure she had one." He said on the same occasion,
"As for poets, I have seen, I believe, all the best of our own time and
country--and, though Burns had the most glorious eyes imaginable, I never
thought any of them would come up to an artist's notion of the character
except Byron." Mrs. Opie said, "His voice was such a voice as the devil
tempted Eve with"; and Charles Mathews once remarked that "he was the only
man I ever contemplated to whom I felt disposed to apply the word
beautiful."
Nevertheless, for a while Miss Milbanke was proof against his
fascinations. In November 1813, about the date of that last letter of his
to her from which I have quoted, he offered her his hand and was rejected.
He proposed to another lady in the following September, and was rejected
again, and almost immediately afterwards he called on Miss Milbanke at her
father's house, 29 Portland Place, and in the library there passionately
renewed his suit, and this time was successful. They were married in
January 1815, and went to live at 13 Piccadilly, and in January of the
next year, after twelve months of little happiness and much wretchedness,
separated for good, a month after the birth of their child.
This Piccadilly house has been pulled down. The Albany to which Byron
removed in 1814, and which he left on his marriage, still remains; and so,
too, does No. 8 St. James's Street, where he lived in 1809, when his
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ took the town by storm, but it has
undergone so much alteration that it no longer seems so intimately
reminiscent of Byron as Bennet Street does.
Whilst Byron was residing in St. James's Street, publishing the _English
Bards_ and writing the first canto of _Childe Harold_, Coleridge was
living in a house at Portland Place, Hammersmith, that is now known as No.
7 Addison Bridge Place. Somehow, one does not readily connect Coleridge
with London, even though he had lodged for many years at Highgate before
he died there. But one time and another he spent quite a large part of his
life in the metropolis. He was at school with Lamb, of course, at Christ's
Hospital; and are not Lamb's letters strewn with yearning remembrances of
the glorious evenings he and Coleridge and Hazlitt and others passed, in
later years, in the smoky parlour of "The Salutation and Cat," in Newgate
Street? At various dates, he lived at Buckingham Street, and at Norfolk
Street, Strand, in Pall Mall, and in King Street, Covent Garden, when he
was working on the staff of the _Morning Post_; to say nothing of visits
to London when he put up at one or another of Lamb's many homes in the
City; and there is still in one of the courts of Fetter Lane that Newton
Hall where he delivered a series of lectures in 1818.
By 1810, when he came to London and settled for a period at 7 Addison
Bridge Place, Coleridge had done all his great work as a poet, and under
stress of financial difficulties was turning more and more from poetry to
lecturing and journalism as sources of income. There is a letter of Lamb's
to Hazlitt, dated 28th November 1810, when Hazlitt was holidaying and
working at Winterslow, in which he mentions towards the close--"Coleridge
is in town, or at least at Hammersmith. He is writing or going to write in
the _Courier_ against Cobbett and in favour of paper money." Byron wrote
to a friend in the succeeding year, "Coleridge is lecturing. 'Many an old
fool,' said Hannibal to some such lecturer, 'but such as this, never'";
and to the same friend two days later, "Coleridge has been lecturing
against Campbell. Rogers was present, and from him I derive the
information. We are going to make a party to hear this Manichean of
poesy"; and on the same day to another friend, "Coleridge has attacked the
_Pleasures of Hope_, and all other pleasures whatsoever. Mr. Rogers was
present, and heard himself indirectly _rowed_ by the lecturer"; and next
week, "To-morrow I dine with Rogers, and am to hear Coleridge, who is a
kind of rage at present."
[Illustration: COLERIDGE. ADDISON BRIDGE PLACE.]
Coleridge was then only thirty-eight, and had another twenty-four years of
life before him. He was already, and had for long past, been struggling in
the toils of the opium habit, and his poetical inspiration was leaving
him, for though _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ were not published until
1816 they were written nearly ten years before. There are a number of
minor poems bearing later dates; several in 1809, many long after that,
but only one dated 1810, which may be supposed to have been written in
that Hammersmith house, and this is nothing but a respectable translation
of a passage in Ottfried's metrical paraphrase of the Gospels. But his
lectures were a wonder and a delight, Byron's disapproval notwithstanding.
He was always an eloquent preacher, and became a chief among lecturers as
he did among poets. "Have you ever heard me preach?" he asked Lamb, and
Lamb replied with his whimsical stammer, "I never heard you do anything
else!" But you remember that fine essay of Hazlitt's in which he recounts
his first acquaintance with Coleridge?--how he rose before daylight and
walked ten miles in the mud to hear him preach. "When I got there, the
organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done Mr. Coleridge
rose and gave out his text, 'And he went up into the mountain to pray,
HIMSELF, ALONE.' As he gave out his text his voice 'rose like a steam of
rich distilled perfumes,' and when he came to the two last words, which he
pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young,
as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if
that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe." He
describes the sermon, and goes on, "I could not have been more delighted
if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met
together.... I returned home well satisfied." Then Coleridge called to see
his father, a dissenting minister in the neighbourhood, and for two hours
he talked and Hazlitt listened spellbound, and when he went, Hazlitt
walked with him six miles on the road. "It was a fine morning," he says,
"in the middle of winter, and he talked the whole way." And with what a
fine generosity he acknowledges what that meeting and this talk of
Coleridge's had meant to him. "I was stunned, startled with it as from a
deep sleep.... I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a
worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting the
deadly bands that bound them--
'With Styx nine times round them,'
my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes catch the
golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original
bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart,
shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found nor will it
ever find a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not
remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself,
I owe to Coleridge." That was when Coleridge was twenty-six and Hazlitt
twenty. These twelve years after that, when Coleridge was lecturing in
London, his fancy and imagination were as dazzling and as powerful as
ever, and his voice and language had lost none of their magic. But his
thoughts were perhaps tending towards that transcendental obscurity that
reached its worst when he was established in his closing days at Highgate,
with his little group of worshipping disciples around him, and when
Carlyle went to hear and to ridicule him. Anyhow, here is an account
Rogers gives of a visit he paid to him when he had transferred himself
from Hammersmith to Pall Mall:--
"Coleridge was a marvellous talker. One morning when Hookham Frere also
breakfasted with me, Coleridge talked for three hours without
intermission, about poetry, and so admirably that I wish every word he
uttered had been written down. But sometimes his harangues were quite
unintelligible, not only to myself, but to others. Wordsworth and I called
upon him one afternoon, when he was in a lodging off Pall Mall. He talked
uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which Wordsworth listened to
him with profound attention, every now and then nodding his head, as if in
assent. On quitting the lodgings I said to Wordsworth, 'Well, for my part,
I could not make head or tail of Coleridge's oration; pray did you
understand it?' 'Not one syllable of it,' was Wordsworth's reply."
He talked like one inspired, but his looks, except whilst he was talking,
belied him. "My face," he said justly of himself, "unless when animated by
immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth and great, indeed almost
idiotic, good nature. 'Tis a mere carcase of a face, flat, flabby, and
expressive chiefly of unexpression. Yet I am told that my eye, eyebrows,
and forehead are physiognomically good." De Quincey says there was a
peculiar haze or dimness mixed with the light of his eyes; and when he was
roused to animation Lamb thought he looked like "an archangel a little
damaged." But whether that haze of his eyes got into his talk, whether his
thoughts were obscurely uttered, or whether it was they were too high and
great for his auditors to take in so easily as a listener expects to grasp
what is said to him is, at least, an open question. It may well be that
Shelley hit the truth in the _Letter to Maria Gisborne_ that he wrote from
Leghorn, in 1820:--
"You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightnings blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair--
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls."