I have spoken within the last few pages of David Hume--philosopher and
historian; he was kindly natured, witty, serene, with a capacity for
large and enduring friendships; yet with not much beguiling warmth in
him; leaving a much accredited history, and philosophical writings
eminent for their ingenuity, acuteness, and subtlety. Under our larger
and freer range of thinking to-day, it is hard to understand how he
became such a bugbear to so many, and was so unwisely set upon with
personal scourgings; even if a man's religious conclusions be all awry,
we shall make them no better, nor undo them, by tying a noisy kettle of
maledictions at his heels, and goading him into a yelping and maddened
gallop all down the high ways. He died unmarried in 1776; his elder
brother John, for some reasons of {180} property--which he counted
larger than the historian's large repute--changed his name to Home; so
that there is not now in Scotland any representative of the immediate
family of this Scotch metaphysician, who bears his name. I spoke of
Shenstone and gave some specimens of his rhythmic and tender graces;
but he never struck deeply into the poetic mine, whether of passion or
of mystery. William Collins, however, did; he was not among the very
foremost poets certainly, but he gave to us tingling and sonorous
echoes of the great utterances of olden times, and piquant foretaste of
nobler utterances that were to come. We had our little social brush
with the lively and chatty "Evelina" Burney; we paid our worship at the
shrine of Mistress Hannah More--and I tried hard to fix her quaint,
homely, kindly figure in your gallery of literary portraits.
She lived, like Mme. d'Arblay, to a very great age--eighty-eight, I
think, and was (with the exception of the last-named lady) the latest
survivor of all those whose lives and works we have thus far made
subject of comment in the present volume. And the life and works of
these people {181} about whom we have latterly spoken, have had steady
parallelism--longer or shorter--with the life and reign of George III.
_King George III._
[Sidenote: George III.]
We ought to know something of the personality of this king who came to
the head of the British household while all these keen brains were
astir in it, and within the limits of whose rule the American
Revolution began, and ended in the establishment of a new nationality;
while the French Revolution too gathered its seething forces, and shot
up its lurid flame and fell away into the fiery mastership of Napoleon.
You will remember that George II. was son of George I., who inherited
through his mother, Sophia (of Brunswick), who was granddaughter of old
King James I. of Scotland and England. George III. was not the
son--but a grandson--of George II. His father, Prince Frederic, who
lived to mature years, who wrote some poor poetry--who was generous,
wayward, incompetent, always at issue with father and mother {182}
both--was a man nobody much respected and nobody greatly mourned for.
It was of him that a squib-like epitaph was written, which I suppose
expressed pretty justly popular indifference respecting him and others
of his family:--
Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead.
Had it been his father
I had much rather;
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her.
But since 'tis only Fred
Who was alive and is dead,
There's no more to be said.
George III. was severely brought up by his mother and by old Lord Bute;
taught to be every inch a king; and he was royally stiff and obstinate
to the last. Two romantic episodes attaching to his young days belong
to the royal traditions--in which a pretty Quakeress, and that
beautiful Sarah Lennox--whose portrait by Reynolds now hangs in Holland
House--both figure; but these episodes are of vague and shadowy
outline, almost mythical, with issues only of the Maud Muller
sort--they sighing "it might have been," and he--not {183} sighing at
all. It is certain that he accepted complacently and contentedly the
bride Charlotte, who came over to him from Germany; and alone of all
the quartette of Georges, made a devoted and constant husband as long
as he reigned. But if he did not give his queen heart-aches in the
usual Georgian fashion, I have no doubt that he gave her many a
heart-ache of other sorts; for he was bigoted, unyielding, austere,
and, like most men, selfish. He had his notions about meal-times and
prayer-time, and getting-up time, and about what meals should be eaten
and what not eaten; under this discipline wife and children grew
up--until the boys made their escape, which they did actively. Yet
this old gentleman of the crown is considerate too--more perhaps
outside his palace than within: he purposes no unkindness; he indulges
in pleasant chit-chat with his humble neighbors at Windsor; has
sometimes half-crowns by him for poor favorites; cherishes homely
tastes; knows a good pig when he sees it, and can test the fat upon a
bullock with a punch of his staff. He professed a certain art
knowledge, too--but always loved the spectacular, melodramatic works of
our {184} Benjamin West (in which, art-heresy of the time he had
excellent company), better than the rare sweet faces of Reynolds, or
the picturesqueness of Gainsborough.
He was English in his speech (though familiar with French and German);
English, too, in his contempt for the mere graces of oratory; loving
better point-blank talk, fired with interrogation points and
interjections. Mme. d'Arblay, whose acquaintance we made, makes us a
party to some of this talk:--"And so you wrote 'Evelina,' eh? and they
didn't know; what--what? You didn't tell? eh? And you mean to write
another--eh--what?"
Yet withal, Dr. Franklin--whose name is entered in the London Directory
of 1770, as "Agent for Pennsylvania," Craven Street, Strand--says of
the king: "I can scarcely conceive a man of better disposition, of more
exemplary virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of
his subjects." Ten years later, I think Dr. Franklin would have
qualified the speech.
But he never could have gainsaid the exemplary virtues of that quiet
household--where king and {185} queen lived like Darby and Joan--going
before light through the chilly corridors to morning prayers; with
early dinners, no suppers, no gambling, no painted women coming between
them. Yet the king, as he grew old, loved plays and farces, and used
to laugh obstreperously at them, till Charlotte would tap him with her
fan and pray his majesty to be "less noisy."
He knew genealogies and geography; he could talk with courtiers about
their aunts and cousins, and stepfathers and mothers-in-law--which is a
great lift to conversation for some minds. He knew all parts of his
establishment--who cleaned the silver and the brass; and what both
cost. Like all such meddling, fussy masters of households, he believed
himself always right; prayed himself into accessions of that belief:
and on that belief went on pounding and pumelling the American branch
of his family into a state that proved explosive. In short he was one
of those methodic, obstinate, sober, stiffly religious, conventional,
straight backed, economic, terrific, excellent men whom we all like to
look at, and read about, rather than to live with.
{186}
As a school-master he would have set the old lessons in Cocker (if it
were Cocker) and recognized nothing better; and if the sums were not
done, you would hear of it. "What, what? not done? sums not done!" and
then the old red ruler, and the hand put out, and a spat, and another
spat. This was George III. "Those colonists not going to pay taxes,
eh? and throwing tea into Boston harbor? What--what? Zounds--punish
the rebels. Punish 'em well! I'll teach 'em. Flinging tea
overboard--what--eh?"
And so the war crept on; and all through it the great old stiff
school-master brandishing his red ruler and making cuts with it over
seas. But the time came when he couldn't reach his rebels; and then
the long ruler, which was the national power, got broken in half, and
it has stayed broken in half ever since.
There is interesting record of the first approaches of that insanity
which ultimately beset the king, in Mme. d'Arblay's Diary, which we
have already mentioned; but he made what seemed an entire recovery from
the early stroke of 1788; and was king, in all his headstrong and
kingly ways, once {187} more. It was in 1785 when John Adams was
presented to him as Envoy of the United States of America--not a
presentation, it would seem, that would have any soothing aspect.
Yet the old king received Mr. Adams courteously; and under the pretty
fustian of conventional speech the one covered his regrets and the
other covered his exultation. But it was not many years before the
distraught brain--after renewed threats--waylaid the monarch
again--this time with a surer grip; his speech, his sight, his hearing,
all lost their fineness of quality and went down in the general wreck;
in 1810, that mad-cap, that posture-master, that over-fine
gentleman--so far as dress and carriage and polite accomplishment could
make George IV. a gentleman--took rule; but for years thereafter, his
lunatic father, in white hair and long white beard, might be seen
stalking along the terrace at Windsor, babbling weak drivel, and
humming broken tunes, leading no whither.
{188}
_Two Orators._
[Sidenote: Charles James Fox.]
Among the younger members of the famous Literary Club, some ten years
after its foundation, was a muscular, swarthy young fellow[1]--full of
wit and humor, a great friend of Burke's until the bitterness of
politics parted them; shy of approaches to Dr. Johnson, with whom he
differed on almost all points; a man known now in literary ways only by
the fragment of British History which he wrote, but known in his own
times as the most brilliant of debaters, most liberal in his politics,
and always an ardent friend of America. This was Charles James Fox,
who could trace back his descent--if he had chosen--through a Duchess
of Gordon, to Charles II., and who was a younger son of a very rich
Lord Holland, owner and {189} occupant of that famous Holland House,
which with its remnant of evergreen garden (in whose alleys we found
Addison walking) still makes a venerable breakwater against the waves
of brick and mortar which are piling around it.
Lord Holland was over-indulgent to this son of his, allowing him, when
a boy on his first visit to Bath, five guineas a night to "risk" at
cards; and the boy took with great kindness to that order of training,
sending home to his father, when he came to travel (after a brief
career at Oxford) vouchers, and honest vouchers too, for gaming debts
of one hundred thousand dollars from the city of Naples alone. And he
matched these losses, and larger ones, at Brooks's in London. Old
stagers said that he was so sagacious and brilliant at whist, that he
could easily have won his five thousand a year; but he took to hazards
at dice that brought him losses--on one occasion at least--of four
times as much in a night. It is a wonder he ever became the man in
Parliament that he was, after such dandling as befell him in the lap of
luxury. Yet he was an accomplished Greek scholar; loving the finesse
of the language, and loving more {190} the exquisite tenderness of such
lamentations as that of Alcestis; his sympathies all alive indeed, in
youth and manhood, to humane instincts--the pains and pleasures of the
race touching his heart-strings, as winds touch an Eolian harp. Study
of exact sciences put him to sleep; he loved the game of Probabilities
better than the certainties of mathematics--gambling away great
estates, and put to keenest endeavor by the tears of a woman; speaking
with his heart on his tongue--too much there indeed--carrying the
comradery of the clubs into public life; sharp as a knife to those who
had done him, or his, injury; but unbosoming himself with reckless
freedom to those who had befriended him; never un-ready in debate;
warming easily into an eloquence that charmed men. But there must have
been much in the voice and eye to explain the force of speeches which
now seem almost dull;[2] the best elocutionist cannot read the
magnetism into them which electrified the Commons, and which made {191}
Burke declare him the "most brilliant debater the world ever saw."
Indeed we can only account for his great successes as an orator, his
amazing repute, and his exceptional popularity, when we sum up a half
score of contributory causes, which lie outside of the cold print of
the Parliamentary record; among these, we count--his Holland wealth and
training, his environments of rank and luxury, his picturesque bearing,
his _bonhomie_, his scorn of the rank he held, his accessibility to
all, his outspoken, democratic sympathies, that warmed him into
outbursts of generous passion, his fearlessness, his bearding of the
king, his earnestness whenever afoot, his very shortcomings too, and
the crowding disabilities that grew out of his trust--his
simplicities--his lack of forethought, his want of moneyed prudence,
his free-handedness, his little, unfailing, every-day kindnesses--these
all backed his speeches and put a tender under-tone, and a glow, and a
drawing power in them, which we look for vainly in the rhetoric or the
argumentation. He was often in Parliament--sometimes in the Ministry;
but his disorderly and reckless life (gaming was not his {192} worst
vice) made his fellow-politicians wary, and put a bar to any easy
confidences between himself and the old-fashioned, sober-sided, orderly
George III. We must think of him as an accomplished, generous-hearted,
impulsive, dissolute wreck of a man.
[Sidenote: William Pitt.]
If I mention Pitt,[3] it is only because you will find in your
historical reading, his name always coupled with that of Fox; but he
never went to our Literary Club; had little companionship with literary
men; yet he had keen scholarship--within a somewhat limited range--and
an insatiate ambition. He was tall, spare, pale-faced, haughty, with a
contempt for sentiment, and a contempt for money; and of intellect--all
compact. At an age when many are still at college, he had made amazing
speeches in Parliament; not profuse, not swollen with words, not
rhetorical--but clear, sharp, polished, strenuous, with now and then
the glitter of some apt and resonant line from his classics.[4]
{193}
His perspicuous and never-failing flow of language was due, not a
little, to an early habit of translating at sight, from Greek and Latin
orators, under direction of his father the Earl of Chatham--not taught
by this great master to give slavish word for word translation; but as
apt and polished and vigorous a rendering as he could accomplish,
without any surrender, or mal-presentment of the leading thoughts. Nor
do I know any class-room exercise, nowadays, which would so test and
amplify a young student's vocabulary, or teach him better the easy and
forcible use of his own language. But, to have its full disciplinary
power, it should be a loud, _ore rotunda_ rendering--not a {194} mere
lip-service; a launch, straight out from shores, into whatever waters
or wilds the heathen orators may be sailing upon, and a full showing of
their changing drift--whether in the eddies of a playful irony, or
under the driving sweep of their storms of denunciation.
Singularly apart from literary men, and most literary influences,
Macaulay has objected (perhaps with some reason) to Pitt's cruel
disregard of Dr. Johnson's needs and longings in his latter years; it
would have been a charming thing, for instance, for the son of Chatham
to put a Government ship at the service of the invalided philosopher,
for a voyage under Italian skies; but with Pitt, the large political
ends which were taking shape in his mind, and in process of evolution,
blinded him to lesser and personal or kindly interests. A nod of the
obstinate old king would have counted for more than a tragedy of
_Irene_. All his classicism was but a weapon to smite with, or from
which to forge the links of those shining parentheses by which he
strangled an opponent. Nothing beyond or below the cool, considerate
humanities of the cultured, self-poised gentleman {195} (unless we
except some rare outbreak of petulance) belongs to this great orator,
who could thrust one through with a rapier held by the best rules of
fence; and who never did or could say a word so warm as to touch a
friend or make an enemy forget his courtliness. Guiding the political
fate of England through a period of such strain, as demanded more nerve
and more discretion than any period of a century before, or of a
century thereafter--admired by all, and loved by very few, Pitt died
quite alone, in a little cottage on Wimbledon Common[5]--even his
servants had left;--died too of old age; an old age that grew out of
his tormenting labors and ambitions--before he was fifty.
_An Orator and Playwright._
[Sidenote: Sheridan.]
Sheridan is another name about which you have a better right to hear,
since he was a favorite member of the Turk's Head coterie, and is a
distinct literary survivor of that epoch.[6] He was {196} son of
Thomas Sheridan, author of a life of Swift and of a now rarely cited
English Dictionary. The son Richard, after studying at Harrow, and
afterward with his father, made a runaway match with a beautiful Miss
Linley; and he continued doing runaway things all his life. A duel
which his sharp marriage provoked, gave him material for his early play
of _The Rivals_,--a play which has come to renewed popularity in our
day, and country, under the pleasant humor of Jefferson. _The School
for Scandal_ is another of his comedies which makes its appearance from
year to year: and Charles Surface and Lady Teazle--no less than Mrs.
Malaprop, and Lydia Languish, are people who hang by, very
persistently, and with whom we are pretty sure to make acquaintance at
some time in our lives.
Mrs. Sheridan proved a much better wife than the conditions of the
marriage promised; and I suppose that she was, in a way, contented with
the ribbons and fine gowns, and equipages he {197} provided for her
(when he could); and with his unctuous, tender speeches, and his fame,
and an occasional tap under the chin,--and with his forgetfulness of
her when he went to the clubs, or the green-room, or the tavern--as he
did very often, and stayed very late. Indeed "staying late," was the
ruin of him. But this language into which I have fallen--not without
warrant--should not convey the idea that this man was a commonplace,
dissolute spendthrift; far from it. His spendings were sublimated by a
crazy splendor of ungovernable and ill-regulated generosities, in which
his Irish nature bubbled over; and his dissipation wore always the
blazon of high social cheer; his excesses not sordid or grovelling, but
they carried a quasi air of distinction, and were illuminated by the
glow of his easy talk and the flashes of his wit.
His wildest spendings were always made without shamefacedness; but, on
the contrary, with a bold alacrity, that gave assurance of riches as
heaped up as those of an Arabian Night's tale. That wife of his,
too--with her peachy tint, her faery grace, and her syren voice--seemed
{198} altogether a fit portion and adornment of the oriental profusion
he always coveted and always owed for. His longings and ambitions were
pitched upon a high key--a key to which his social aptitudes were
charmingly attuned; and there was a time early in his career when it
was a distinction to have the privilege of entree at his beautiful home
in Orchard Street, Portman Square, to share his sybaritic tastes, and
to listen to the siren who warbled there.
At twenty-four this favorite of fortune had written that play which
drew all London to see Captain Absolute; at twenty-five he had become
half owner of that great theatre of Drury Lane, from whose till the
hands of Garrick had drawn out a great fortune, and from which Richard
Sheridan was to draw, often--more than was fairly in it. Meantime he
had inspired, and, in connection with his father-in-law, had composed,
the comic opera of the _Duenna_, whose success was enormous, and whose
bouncing bits of lyrical jingle have come quivering through all the
_couloirs_ of intervening days, to ours: instance,--
{199}
"I ne'er could any lustre see
In eyes that would not look on me.
Is her hand so soft and pure?
I must press it to be sure."
Then comes the _School for Scandal_, and--two years later--the
_Critic_; and always the steaming suppers and the singing of many
sirens, and deeper thrusts into the till of Old Drury; stockholders may
wince and creditors too; but who shall gainsay or doubt the imperial
genius who is winged with victory? Garrick, whose days of conquest are
nearly over--is his friend; so is Burke, won by his wit, and by his
rolling Irish r's; Goldsmith acknowledges his sovereignty: Dr. Johnson
veils dislike of his radicalism and of his tirades against taxation, as
he welcomes him to the Club.
In 1780, while still under thirty, he entered Parliament (for Stafford)
and posed there for new conquests. There came frequent occasions for
the interjection of his witty collocation of apothegms, lighted by his
brilliant elocution; but there was not much in his parliamentary career
to attract national attention until the debates opened with reference
to the Warren Hastings impeachment. {200} These offered topics which
appealed to his emotional nature, and under the indoctrination and the
coaching of Burke, he made such appeal for the far-off, down-trodden
princesses of India as electrified the nation. "Whatever the acuteness
of the bar, the dignity of the Senate, or the morality of the pulpit
could furnish [in eloquence] had not been equal to it." This was the
verdict of so good a judge as Burke. Yet, reading this speech--or so
much of it as the records show--or those others which followed,[7] when
the great trial had opened in Westminster Hall, we find it hard to
understand the enthusiasm of the old plaudits. There is wit, indeed,
in whatever work warms him to a glow; old truisms get a setting in his
oratorio reaches which make them gleam like diamonds; but there is none
of that logical method {201} which wraps one around with convictions;
but in place of it a beautiful mass of rhetorical spray, that delights
and refreshes and passes--like a summer cloud.
Meanwhile the suppers abound, and so do the debts: that siren wife, who
had kept his accounts, and made extracts and filled his note-books (and
his flasks), passes away. It is a shock that does not rally his
forces, but rather disperses them. He is _lie_ in these times with the
Prince of Wales; dines with him; wines with him. Who shall say he does
not troll with him some of the piquant snatches of his own verse? As
this:
"A bumper of good liquor
Will end a contest quicker
Than justice, judge, or vicar;
So fill a cheerful glass
And let good humor pass.
But if more deep the quarrel,
Why, sooner drain the barrel
Than be the hateful fellow
That's crabbed when he's mellow."
He _did_ drain the barrel; he did fall from all his dizzy eminence; he
did die a drunkard of the grosser sort; without money, almost without
{202} friends.[8] There was a great rally of coronets at his funeral,
and a pompous procession of those who went to bury him at Westminster.
You will find his name there, in the Poets' Corner of the Abbey, and
will give to his memory your wonder and your pity; but not, I think,
much veneration.
_The Boy Chatterton._
[Sidenote: Chatterton.]
We shift the scenes now for a new episode in our little story of
letters, although we are under the same murky sky of London. George
the Third is just finishing the first decade of his long reign; most of
the clubmen of whom we have spoken are still alive, and go up, with
more or less of regularity, to pay their court to Dr. Johnson; but we
have our eye specially upon a pale, handsome-faced, long-haired lad,
not beyond the schooling age, who knows nothing of courts or clubs, who
has stolen away from the thraldom of a small {203} attorney's office in
Bristol, in the West of England, to come up to London and face the
world there, and try to conquer it. He does not know the task he has
undertaken. His brain, indeed, is full of fine fancies; he has the
poetic fervor in full flow upon him. He has left a mother and a
sister--whom he loves dearly--his only near relatives; and he writes to
that mother under date of May, 1770:
"I am settled, and in such a settlement as I would desire. I get four
guineas a month by one magazine; shall engage to write a History of
England, or other pieces, which will more than double that sum.
Occasional essays for the daily papers would more than support me.
What a glorious prospect!"
And, again, a few weeks later to his sister:
"I employ my money now in fitting myself fashionably, as my profession
(of letters) obliges me to frequent the places of best resort. But I
have engaged to live with a gentleman, the brother of a lord, who is
going to advance pretty deeply into the bookselling branches. I shall
have lodging and boarding, genteel and elegant, gratis. I shall have
likewise no inconsiderable premium. I will send you two silks this
summer, and expect, in answer to this, what colors you prefer....
Essay writing has this advantage: you are sure of constant pay; and
when you have once wrote a piece which makes the author inquired after,
you may bring the booksellers to your own terms."
{204}
Ah, how young he was! If only those first literary dreams and hopes
could be realized, which nestle in the brains of so many--what
silks--what houses--what gold--what fame! Yet this stripling not yet
eighteen could write. I will give you a taste of his quality--in
verses shorn of some of the old words he put in them for sake of
disguise:--
"The budding floweret blushes at the light,
The meads are sprinkled with the yellow hue,
In daisied mantles is the mountain dight,
The nesh young cowslip bendeth with the dew;
The trees enleafed, into heaven straught,
When gentle winds do blow, to whistling din are brought.
The evening comes and brings the dew along,
The ruddy welkin sheeneth to the eyne;
Around the ale stake minstrels sing their song;
Young ivy round the door-post doth entwine.
I lay me on the grass; yet, to my will
Albeit all is fair, there lacketh something still."[9]
And again, of a different order, this--from the same long poem:--
"O sing unto my Roundelay,
O drop the briny tear with me,
Dance no more at Holy day
Like a running river be.
{205}
My Love is dead,
Gone to his death bed,
All under the willow tree.
Come with acorn cup and thorn
Drain my hearte's blood away;
Life and all its good I scorn,
Dance by night or feast by day.
My love is dead
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow tree."
Well, this is the poetry of the marvellous boy
Chatterton[10]--fragments of which you will find in all the
anthologies. That last tender letter to his sister, which I set before
you--so gleeful, with promise of silks and of brilliant essays, was
written on the last day of the month of May, 1770; and on the 24th of
August--not three months later--after three days of starvation enforced
by a poverty of which his pride would not let him tell, he took poison
and made an end of his career.
Few knew of this; few knew that there had {206} been any such
adventurer in London; fewer yet, knew what poems--brimming, many of
them, with fine fancies--he had left behind him.
A few months after, at the first annual dinner of the newly founded
Royal Academy of Art, Goldsmith,[11] being present, talked at table of
a certain extraordinary lad who had come up the year before from
Bristol--and had died the summer past--literally of starvation--leaving
behind him certain wonderful poems, which in their phrases, he said,
had an air of great antiquity. And Horace Walpole being also
present--he never omitted being present at a Royal Society dinner, when
it was possible for him to go--overhearing the talk and the name, said
(we may fancy), "Bless me, young Chatterton, to be sure!--I had some
correspondence with the young man; nice poems--but apocryphal--poor
fellow; dead is he--starved, eh? dear me?--shocking--quite so!" and I
suppose that he took snuff and dusted his ruffles thereafter, and then
toyed with his delicate glass of fine old Sercial Madeira. This was
like {207} Walpole--wantonly like him. There had been a
correspondence, as he condescendingly admitted, that I will tell you of.
This Bristol boy, growing up in sight of Durdham downs, and the gorge
of the Avon and blue hills of Wales--with poetic visions haunting
him--had somehow come upon old parchments--perhaps out of the muniment
rooms of St. Mary's Redcliffe church, where his father had been sexton;
he had been captivated by the quaint lettering, and awed by the odor of
sanctity; and straightway imaged to himself an old mediaeval priest, to
be clothed upon with his own poetic sensibilities, and in the rusty
phrases of the fourteenth century, to unfold to the world the poetic
yearnings and aspirations that were seething in the brain of this
wonderful boy. The ancient Dictionaries and old copies of Chaucer
supplied the language; the antique parchments gave local allusions and
the nomenclature; and for inspiration and motive--the winds that blew
from over Chepstow and Tintern Abbey, and Caerleon, and whistled round
the buttresses of St. Mary's Redcliffe--supplied more than enough. So
began {208} the modern antique poems of Thomas Rowley; not a new device
in the literary world; for Macpherson, whom we shall encounter
presently, only a few years before had launched some of the "Ossian"
poems, to the great wonderment and puzzle of the literary world; and
Walpole, still earlier, had claimed a false antiquity and Neapolitan
origin for his _Castle of Otranto_. To Walpole, therefore, the eager
boy sent some fragments of his Rowley poems, which Walpole courteously
acknowledged, and asked for a continuance of such favors. Poor
Chatterton, presuming on this courtesy wrote again, declaring his
dependent condition--apprenticed to a scrivener, and with mother and
sister dependent on him--but believing that with God's help, and the
encouragement of his distinguished patron, he might find the way to
other and better Rowley poems.
Meantime Walpole, through his scholarly friend the poet Gray, had come
to doubt the antiquity of Rowley's verse; and the plebeianism of this
correspondent has shocked his gentility. He replies coolly, therefore;
expresses doubts of the Rowley authorship, and advises poor Chatterton
to keep {209} by his apprenticeship at the scriveners. This sets the
young poet's blood on fire; he will go to London; he will win his way;
he will smite the Philistines hip and thigh. And--as I have told
you--he did go; did work; did struggle. But it is a great self-seeking
world he has to face, full throughout of thwarting circumstance. Yet
courage and pride hold him up--hold him up for months against terrific
odds; at least he will tell nothing of his griefs. Thus his last
pennies, which should have gone for bread, go to carry little
love-tokens to the dear ones he has left. So lost is he in his little
Holborn chamber, in that great seething, turbulent whirl of London,
that he thinks--even as he mixes his death potion--they will never
know; they will never hear: "Gone"--that is all! But they do know: and
for them it is to chant broken-hearted the refrain of his own roundelay,
My love is dead,
Gone to his death bed
All under the willow tree.
It is not alone for reason of the romantic aspects of the story that I
have given you this glimpse of the boy Chatterton, but because there
was really {210} much literary merit and great promise in his work; in
some respects, he reminds us of our American Poe--the same disposition
to deal with mysteries, the same uncontrolled ardors, the same haughty
pride; and although Chatterton's range in all rhythmic art was far
below that of Poe, and although he did not carry so bold and venturous
a step as the American into the region of _diableries_, he had perhaps
more varied fancies and more homely tendernesses. The antique gloss
which he put upon his work was unworthy his genius; helping no way save
to stimulate curiosity, and done with a crudeness which, under the
light of modern philologic study, would have deceived no one. But
under this varnish of archaeologic fustian and mould, there is show of
an imaginative power and of a high poetic instinct, which will hold
critical respect[12] and regard as long as English poetry shall be read.
{211}
_Laurence Sterne._
[Sidenote: A sentimentalist.]
Just two years before Chatterton died in Holborn, another noted
literary character--Laurence Sterne[13]--died in Old Bond Street, at
what were fashionable lodgings then, and what is now a fashionable
tailor's shop; died there almost alone; for he was not a man who wins
such friendships as hold through all weathers. A well known friend of
the sick man--Mr. Crawford--was giving a dinner that day a few doors
off; and Garrick was a guest at his table; so was David Hume, the
historian; half through the dinner, the host told his footman to go
over and ask after the sick man; and this is the report the footman
gave to outsiders: "I went to the gentleman's lodgings, and the
mistress opened the door. Says I--'How is Mr. Sterne to-day?' She
told me to go up to the nurse; so I went, and he was just a-dying; I
waited a while; but in {212} five minutes he said, 'Now it's come.'
Then he put up his hand, as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.
The gentlemen were all very sorry." And all the sorrow anywhere--save
in the heart of his poor daughter Lydia--was, I suspect, of the same
stamp. His wife certainly would get on very well without him: she had
for a good many years already.
[Sidenote: Laurence Sterne.]
You know the name of Mr. Sterne, I daresay, a great deal better than
his works; and it is well enough that you should. A good many
fragments drift about in books of miscellany which you are very likely
to know and to admire; for some of them are surely of most exquisite
quality. Take for instance that talk of Corporal Trim with Uncle Toby
about the poor lieutenant, and of his ways and times of saying his
prayers:--
"When the Lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast he felt
himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me know
that in about ten minutes he would be glad if I would step upstairs.
'I believe,' said the landlord, 'he is going to say his prayers, for
there was a book laid on the chair by the bedside, and as I shut the
door I saw him take up a cushion.'
"'I thought,' said the curate, 'that you gentlemen of the army, Mr.
Trim, never said your prayers at all."
{213}
"'A soldier, an' please your Reverence,' said I, 'prays as often as a
parson; and when he is fighting for his king and for his own life, and
for his honor too, he has the most reason to pray to God of any one in
the whole world.'
"''Twas _well_ said of thee, Trim!' said my Uncle Toby.
"'But when a soldier,' said I, 'an' please your Reverence, has been
standing for twelve hours together in the trenches, up to his knees in
cold water, or engaged for months together in long and dangerous
marches--detached here--countermanded there; benumbed in his
joints;--perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, he must say his
prayers how and when he can.' 'I believe', said I, for I was piqued,
quoth the Corporal, 'for the reputation of the army--I believe, an't
please your Reverence--that when a soldier gets time to pray he prays
as heartily as a Parson--though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy."
"'Thou should'st not have said _that_, Trim,' said my uncle Toby; 'for
God only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not. At the great and
general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not
till then) it will be seen who have done their duties in this world and
who have not, and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly.'
"'I hope we shall,' said Trim.
"'It is the Scripture,' said my uncle Toby, 'and I will show it thee in
the morning.'"
Now this beautiful naturalness, this delightful, artistic abstention
from all rant or extravagance, makes us wish overmuch that the whole
guileless character of my uncle Toby had been as {214} charmingly and
as decently set in the text; but unfortunately, there is a continuous
embroidery of it all with ribald blotches, and far-fetched foulness of
speech; nor is his coarseness--like that of Fielding--half excused by
the coarseness of the age; it is inherent and vital: Fielding, indeed,
is vulgar and coarse, and obstreperous--with the scent of bad spirits
and bad company on him;[14] but this other, though a parson, and
perfumed, and wearing may-be, satin small-clothes, has vile and
grovelling tastes that overflow in double-meanings of lewdness: even
Goldsmith, who was not squeamish, calls him "the blackguard parson."
It is not probable that Goldsmith ever encountered him; nor did Dr.
Johnson. Beauclerk, Garrick, and Walpole would have been more in his
line; for he loved the glint, and the capital letters, and the showy
tag-rags of fashion. And on the strength of his literary reputation,
which had sudden and brilliant burst, and of his good family--since a
not far-off ancestor had been Archbishop of York--he {215} conquered
and enjoyed, for his little day, all that London fashion had to offer.
I suspect he took a solid comfort in dying in so respectable a quarter
as Old Bond Street. He was buried over Bayswater way, not far from the
Marble Arch, in the graveyard then pertaining to St. George's (Hanover
Square) church. And there was a story, supported by a good deal of
circumstantial evidence, that his body was spirited away and recognized
a few days afterward by a medical student among the spoils of a
dissecting-room. This story would horrify more than it did, had it
attached to an author whose humor had kindled love;--as if this man did
somehow deserve a more effective "cutting-up" after death than he ever
received before it.
The Rev. Laurence Sterne had--I should have told you--a church-living
down in Yorkshire, to which was afterward added, by adroit diplomacy of
his friends, an official position in connection with York Cathedral. I
do not think the people of his parish missed him much when he was away;
and I am very sure they missed him a good deal, whenever he
was--nominally--there: painting, {216} fiddling, shooting, and
dining-out, took very much of his parochial time; and _Tristram Shandy_
and its success, literary and pecuniary, introduced him to a career in
London, and in Paris afterward--for he was always an immense favorite
with the French (instance Tony Johannot's illustrations)--to which he
yielded himself with a graceful acquiescence that, I am afraid, put his
parishioners more out of mind than the fiddling and the shooting had
done.
I believe that he loved his daughter Lydia with an honest love; with
respect to his wife, one cannot be so sure; some of the most tender
letters he left, are addressed to a Mrs. Draper, who was his "dear
Eliza"--through a great many quires of paper. He was a Cambridge man
and well taught;--of abundant reading, which he made to serve his turn
in various ways, and conspicuously by his stealings; he stole from
Rabelais; he stole from Shakespeare; he stole from Fuller;[15] he stole
{217} from Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_; not a stealing of ideas
only, but of words and sentences and half-pages together, without a
sign of obligation; and yet he did so wrap about these thefts with the
strings and lappets of his own abounding humor and drollery, as to give
to the whole--thieving and Shandyism combined--a stamp of
individuality. Ten to one that these old authors who had suffered the
pilfering, would have lost cognizance of their expressions, in the new
surroundings of the Yorkshire parson; and joined in the common grin of
applause with which the world welcomed and forgave them.
But I linger longer on this name than the man deserves. Pathos there
is in his stories, to be sure, that makes you wilt in spite of
yourself; but a mile away from those Bond Street chambers where this
pale, thin, silk-stockinged clergyman lives, and has his dinner
invitations ten deep, is that old scar-faced Dr. Johnson about whom the
beggars crowd; who can put no such pathos into his {218} cumbrous
sentences indeed; but the presence of that old, blind, petulant woman
in his house--who had waited on his lost wife--is itself a bit of
pathos that I think will outlast the story of _Maria_--and that should
do so forty times over. I wish I could blot out the silk stockings,
the rustling cassock, the simper, the pestilent love letters, the
pretences, the artificialities of the man; they are oppressive; they
rob his words of weight. Wit--to be sure, and humor--truculent,
sparkling--more than enough; for the rest, there is hypocrisy,
pretension--beastliness--untruth--all pinned under a satinquilted cloak
of vague and unreal piety.
[1] Charles James Fox, b. 1749; d. 1806. Elected to club membership in
1774. His great great-grandmother was the Duchess of Portsmouth; and
the Lord Holland so well known for his entertainments at Holland House,
early in this century, was a nephew of Charles James Fox. Life by
George Otto Trevelyan.
[2] Instance, speech on French affairs and the question of making peace
with Napoleon--just then elected First Consul. Date of February, 1800.
[3] William Pitt, b. 1759; d. 1806. Younger son of the Earl of
Chatham. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1773.
[4] Wraxall in his Memoirs (p. 344) cites special instance in the
speech, where he deprecates new alliance between North and
Fox--alluding to personal results to himself:--
"Fortuna saevo laeta negotio et----"
(leaving out the _mea virtute_) then pounding on the table, and adding
with oratorical vim
"----probamque
Pauperiem sine dole quaero."
Here (says Wraxall, who was an auditor) he cast his eyes down--passing
his handkerchief across his lips--to recover breath only. Certainly he
was grandly clear of anything like avarice; no great statesman of
England (unless Gladstone) ever thought so little of money.
[5] See Francis Horner article in _Edinburgh Review_, October, 1843.
[6] Richard Brinsley Sheridan, b. 1751; d. 1816. Moore's Biography,
interesting but not authoritative. Mrs. Oliphant's sketch in the
Morley _Lives_, is one of that lady's most charming books.
[7] It was on February 7, 1787, that Sheridan made his first notable
speech on the Begum charge in the House of Commons; the second, in the
impeachment trial in Westminster Hall, in June, 1788. Others followed
of less interest toward the close of the trial in 1794. The best
reports are of the speeches made in 1788, published at the instigation
of Sir Cornewall Lewis, in 1859. See _Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox_, by
W. Fraser Rae. 1874.
[8] A fearful account of Sheridan's condition in his last days is to be
found in the _Croker Papers_ (1884), chap. x. It is embodied in what
purports to be a literal transcript of a conversational narrative by
George IV., J. Wilson Croker being interlocutor and listener.
[9] [OE]lia (Humphry Ward's version).
[10] Thomas Chatterton, b. 1752; d. 1770. Tyrwhitt's edition, "Poems
supposed to have been written by Thomas Rowley," etc., dates from 1777.
[11] Foster's Goldsmith, vol. ii., p. 248.
[12] Dr. Skeat--as a philologist--is naturally severe upon a thief of
archaisms, whose robberies and arrogance did puzzle for a while even
the archaeologists.
_Per contra_--there is a disposition among many recent critics to rank
him high among the pioneers of the "New Romantic" movement in England;
_Vid._ Rodin Noel--_Essays on the Poets_; also, _Athenaeum_, No. 3073.
[13] Sterne: b. 1713; d. 1768. _Life_, by H. D. Traill; a fuller one
by Percy Fitzgerald.
[14] Notwithstanding there was almost always evidence of gentlemanly
instincts at bottom; and under the scoriae of a dissipated life and
habits the sparkling of a soul of honor.
[15] In a sermon read by Corporal Trim (p. 209, _Tristram Shandy_, vol.
i., London, 1790) are a good many strong points taken, without
acknowledgment, from one of Richard Bentley's sermons, preached at
Cambridge against Popery, on November 5th--shortly after the first
attempt of "the Pretender." This strange similitude is not noticed in
Dr. Ferrier's summing up of Sterne's sinning in this line.
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