Beyond Dunkeld--which is the southern gateway of the Scottish
Highlands--there stretches a great wood, within the domain of the Duke
of Athole, where one can wander for miles; the path sometimes mossy,
always inviting; now threading dark glens, and again winding under
hoary forest trees that grow on uplands; now giving glimpses of brook
or pool, and now of grassy glade on which some group of century-old
larches slant their shadows; one may hear noises of chattering
squirrels, of whirring pheasants, of roaring wood-streams, of pines
soughing in the wind; and at last, going up a side-path, the visitor
will come to the door of a Hermitage, bedded in densest mass of
foliage. Fifty years ago--to a month--the guide opened that door for
me, entered with me, and closed it behind us. I then {258} observed
that the whole inner surface of the door was one great mirror, and that
there were other mirrors around; while directly opposite was a
life-size painting of Ossian fingering his harp; and as I was scanning
the details of this picture, the guide touched some hidden spring;
Ossian straightway disappeared, sliding into the wall, and through the
chasm one looked out upon clouds of spray, behind which an Alpine
water-fall with roar and foam plunged down sheer forty feet into a
seething pool below. The water-fall through an artful collocation of
mirrors seemed to pour down behind you as well; and from the ceiling to
pour down above you, and to gird you all about with its din and splash
and spray. With the cliffs and the pine boughs it made a pretty
grouping of Ossianic charms; and I am sorry to hear that since 1869 or
thereabout, the Hermitage, by reason of some vandal outrage, has wholly
disappeared.
The only memorial the traveller will find now in that region of the
Ossianic harping, of which we spoke in the last chapter, is the
Macpherson Stone, which some twenty-five miles farther northward, {259}
on the Highland trail, peers out from green copses in the upper valley
of the Spey.
I spoke also in our last talk of the literary ferment that had declared
itself, and was in active progress along the Scottish border, and in
Edinboro'. We had somewhat to say of the poet Crabbe, and of his long
and successful poems--now little read; and of those other poems by
Cowper, some of which will be always read, and which, when their art
shall grow old-fashioned and out of date, will show a tender humanity
and a kindly purpose, which I trust will never go out of date.
_Parson White._
[Sidenote: White of Selborne.]
You will remember that we found both of the last-named poets in the
country; and that their work concerned itself largely with country life
and with country scenes. And now we sidle into the country again, for
our first studies to-day;--into the county of Hampshire, where lived,
toward the close of the last century, two personages--not far apart in
that pleasant region of rolling downs; unknown to each other; their
ages, indeed, {260} differing by more than a score of years; but both
leaving books you ought to know something about.
The first of these personages was a quiet clergyman[1] of very simple
tastes and simple habits, who lived in a beautiful parsonage--still
standing, and still overgrown with ivies and banked about with great
waving heaps of foliage--where he wrote _The Natural History of
Selborne_. It is not a formal book or an ambitious book; it is simply
a bundle of short letters extending over dates that cover twenty years
in their stretch; and yet the book is so small you could carry it in
your pocket. Its title describes the book; it tells what this quiet
old gentleman saw and learned through twenty odd years of observation,
about the birds, the beasts, the fishes, the trees, the flowers, the
storms, the sunshine and the clouds of that little country parish of
Selborne. And yet that simple story is told with such easy frankness,
such delicacy, such simplicity, such truthfulness, such tender feeling
for all God's creatures, whether beast or bird, that the little book
has become almost as much a classic {261} as _Walton's Complete
Angler_; and the name of Gilbert White, which scarce a hundred
Londoners knew when he died, is now known to every well-equipped
English library everywhere. I have compared it with _Walton's Complete
Angler_, though it has not the old fisherman's dalliance with the
muses; nor has it much literary suggestiveness. There are no milkmaids
courtesying to its periods, nor any songs, except those of the birds.
Good old Parson White is simpler (if maybe); he is more homely; he is
more direct; and by his tender particularity of detail he has given to
the winged and creeping creatures of his pleasant Hampshire downs the
freedom of all lands.
It is true, indeed--as I have said in another connection--that we
Americans do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and his titlarks;
his daws and his fern-owl are strange to us; and his robin
red-breast--though undoubtedly the same which in our nursery days
flitted around the dead "Children in the Wood" (while tears stood in
our eyes) and
"Painfully
Did cover them with leaves,"
{262} is by no means our American red-breast. For one, I wish it were
otherwise; I wish with all my heart that I could identify the old
pitying, feathered mourners in the British wood, with the rollicking,
joyous singer who perches every sunrise, through all the spring, upon
some near tree, within stone's throw of my window, and stirs the dewy
air with his loud _bravura_.
Another noticeable thing about this old country parson is his freedom
from all the artifices and buckram and abbreviations of learning, so
that he is delightfully comprehensible by everybody. If only we could
have an edition of Gray's Botany--for instance--with some ten lines of
Parson White's homely descriptive English about the height and bigness,
and color and habit of the flowers, instead of symbols and Latin
genealogies and scholastic reticence--what a God-send it would be to
the average country gentleman or country woman!
I want specially to call the attention of those young people in whose
interest I am supposed to talk--to that homely truthfulness, and
unabating care of this old gentleman, as giving value to a {263} book
or to any literary work whatever. They are not qualities, to be sure,
which of themselves carry performance to a high poetic level; but they
are qualities which give to it practical and picturesque values, and
which--well laid in--will make work survive.
If I were to undertake on any occasion the direction of the
composition-writing of young people, I should surely counsel
painstaking and minute description of homely natural objects. Nature
is better than millinery. Yet out of ten young ladies of average
culture you shall be able to pick nine who shall tell a listener
flowingly of the last new dress she has seen, and the stuff, and the
train, and the lace, and the sleeves, and the trimmings, and all the
mysteries of its fit--to one who shall give a simple, clear-drawn, and
intelligible account of a new flower, or new tree, or a strange bird.
Thus you will perceive that I have made of this old gentleman--whom I
greatly respect--a stalking horse, to fire a sermon at my readers; and
I am strongly of opinion that there are a great many country clergymen
of our time and day, who, if they would bring old Parson White's zeal
to the {264} encouragement of a love and a study of natural objects,
would do as much thereby to humanize and Christianize the younger
members of their flocks as they can possibly do by Vanity Fairs or
parochial oyster suppers.
The modest house of Gilbert White[2] was occupied very many years by
the venerable Professor Bell, late president of the Linnean Society,
who died in 1880. The study of the old naturalist remained long as the
master left it; his oaken book-case was still there; so was the
thermometer attached to the shelves by which he made his observations;
his dial by which he counted the hours stands at the foot of the
garden; and in the churchyard near by is his grave; while within the
quaint old church, to the right of the altar, is a tablet in his honor;
and in his honor, too, all the birds of Selborne will sing night and
morning year after year.
{265}
_A Hampshire Novelist._
[Sidenote: Jane Austen.]
And now for that other Hampshire personage, of whom I gave you a hint,
as being also guiltless of London life and almost of London
acquaintances; it is a lady now of whom I have to speak,[3] and one who
deserves to be well known. She lived, when her books were published,
only three or more miles away from Selborne, across the hills
northward--at the village of Chawton, which lies upon the old coach
road from Farnham to Winchester. Miss Austen was much younger--as I
have said--than our old friend the parson; indeed she was only
beginning to try her pen when Gilbert White was ready to lay his down.
She had all his simplicities of treatment and all his acuteness of
observation--to which she added a charming humor and large dramatic
power; but her subjects were men and women, and not {266} birds. She
wrote many good old-fashioned novels which people read now for their
light and delicate touches, their happy characterizations, their
charming play of humor, and their lack of exaggeration. She makes you
slip into easy acquaintance with the people of her books as if they
lived next door, and would be pulling at your bell to-morrow, or
to-night. And you never confound them; by the mere sound of their
voices you know which is Ellinor, and which is Marianne; and as for the
disagreeable people in her stories, they are just as honestly and
naturally disagreeable as any neighbor you could name--whether by
talking too much, or making puns, or prying into your private affairs.
Walter Scott, who read her books over and over, says, "That young lady
had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and
characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever
met with." Macaulay, too, admired her intensely; ventured even to
speak of her amazing, effective naturalness--in the same paragraph with
Shakespeare. Miss Mitford confided to a young niece of the authoress,
that "she would {267} give her hand," if she could write a story like
Miss Austen. We may not and must not doubt her quality and her genius,
whatever old-time stiffness we may find in her conversations. One book
of hers at least you should read, if only to learn her manner; and as
you read it remember that it was written by a young woman who had
passed nearly her whole life in Hampshire--who knew scarce any of the
literary people of the day; who had only made chance visits to London,
and a stay of some four years in the lively city of Bath. She was very
winning and beautiful--if her portrait[4] is to be relied upon--with a
piquant, mischievous expression--looking very capable of making a great
many hearts ache, beside those which ache in her books.
It would be impossible to cite fragments from her stories that would
give any adequate notion of her manner and accomplishment; it would be
very like showing the feather of a bird, to give an {268} idea of its
swoop of wing. Perhaps _Pride and Prejudice_, though her first written
work, is the one most characteristic. You do not get lost in its
sentimental strains; you do not find surfeit of immaculate conduct.
There are fine woods and walks; but there is plenty of mud, and
bad-going. The very heroines you often want to clutch away from their
uncomely surroundings; and as for the elderly Mrs. Bennett, whose
tongue is forever at its "click-clack," you cannot help wishing that
she might--innocently--get choked off the scene, and appear no more.
But that is not the deft Miss Austen's way; that gossiping, silly,
irritating _mater familias_, goes on to the very end--as such people do
in life--making your bile rise; and when the rainbows of felicity come
at last to arch over the scenes of _Pride and Prejudice_, Mrs.
Bennett's clacking tongue is still strident, and still reminds you in
the strongest possible way, that Miss Austen has been busy with the
veriest actualities of life, and not with its pretty, shimmering vapors.
_Persuasion_ is a less interesting book, and less complete than _Pride
and Prejudice_; its heroine, {269} Anne Eliot, is not possessed of very
salient qualities; hardly gaining or holding very earnest attention;
yet with a quiet sense of duty, and such every-day fulfilment of it, as
makes her righteously draw toward her all the triumphs of the little
drama; a lost love is reclaimed by these quiet forces, and victory
comes to crown her easy gentleness. _Northanger Abbey_ is weaker, but
with bold, striking naturalism in it; all the littlenesses and
plottings and vain speech of the Bath Pump-Room seem to come to life in
its pages; to just such life as we may find about our Cape Mays, and
Pequod, and Ocean houses, every blessed summer's day! Miss Austen's
earlier novels, which made her reputation, were written before she was
twenty-five, and published later, and under many
difficulties--anonymously; so she had none of that public incense
regaling her, which was set ablaze for the less capable Miss Burney;
and it was almost as an unknown, strange, quiet gentlewoman that she
went down, in the later years of her life, to the shores of the
beautiful Southampton Waters--seeking health there; and again, on the
same search to the higher lands of the {270} Hampshire downs--where she
died, only forty-two, and lies buried under a black marble slab, which
you may find under the vaults of the interesting old Cathedral of
Winchester.
The recognition of her high qualities was not so extended in her
life-time, as it is now; and thirty years after her death, a visitor to
the great Hampshire Cathedral was asked by the respectable verger:
"What there was _particular_ about Miss Austen, that so many people
should want to see her grave?" Even the most wooden of vergers would
hardly ask the question now; her extraordinary quickness and justness
of observation astonish every intelligent reader. All the more, since
her life was lived within narrow lines; but what she saw, she saw true,
and she remembered. That wonderful masterly Shakespearian alertness of
mind in seizing upon traits and retaining their relations and colors,
is what distinguishes her, as it distinguishes every kindred genius. I
can understand how many people cannot overmuch relish the stories of
Miss Austen--because they do not relish the people to whom she
introduces us; but I cannot understand how any reader can fail to be
{271} impressed and electrified by her marvellous photographic
reproduction of social shades of conduct. How delightful is that
indignation of Sir John Middleton, when he learns of the villainy and
falsity of Willoughby. "To think of it! and he had offered the
scoundrel one of Follies' puppies!" And then--reflectively--"A pretty
man he was too, and owner of one of the finest pointer bitches in
England! The devil take him!" What a synopsis of the man's qualities,
and of Sir John's measurement of them!
_Old Juvenilia._
[Sidenote: Sandford & Merton.]
I cannot pass from this epoch, without saying somewhat concerning that
tide of literature for young people which set in strongly about those
times. There was _Sandford and Merton_, for instance; can it be that
the moderns are growing up to maturity without a knowledge of the wise
inculcations of that eminently respectable work? Sixty years ago it
was a stunning book for all good boys, and for the good sisters of good
boys. Whoever was at the head of his class was pretty apt to {272} get
_Sandford and Merton_; whoever had a birthday present was very likely
to get _Sandford and Merton_; if a good aunt was in search of a proper
New Year's gift for a lad the bookseller was almost sure to recommend
_Sandford and Merton_; and when a boy went away to school, some
considerate friend was very certain to pop a copy of _Sandford and
Merton_ into his satchel.
It is in the guise of a great lumbering narrative--supposed to be
true--into which are whipped a score or more of little stories, each
one capped with a bouncing moral. Thus, there is an ill-natured boy
going out for a day's scrimmage, and playing his tricks--on a poor
girl, and a blind beggar, and a lame beggar, and a farmer, and a
donkey. This goes on very well for awhile; but at last the tables are
turned, and he gets bitten by the blind beggar, and beaten by the lame
beggar, and thrashed by the farmer, and is thrown by the donkey, and a
large dog seizes him by the leg; this latter is printed in capitals,
and there is a picture of it. At last, in bed, and with watery eyes,
the boy reflects--that "no one can long hurt others with impunity;" so
he determined to "behave {273} better for the future." Is it any
wonder that those who had access to such instructive tales a half a
century ago should have grown up to be excellent men!
This book of _Sandford and Merton_ was written by Thomas Day,[5] an
eccentric rich man (the world of to-day would have called him a crank),
who had a fine place near to Putney on the Thames, who sympathized
strongly with Americans in Revolutionary times; who was also a disciple
of Rousseau, and undertook to educate a young girl--two of them in
fact, one being a foundling--so that he might have a wife of his own
training, after the Rousseau standard; but the young persons did not
train as he wished; so he found his mate otherwheres.
Another comfit of a book for young people, but with fewer plums of
romance in it, was _Evenings at Home_ by Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld.
I am sure the very name must bring up tender memories to a great many;
for it was a current book down to a time when respectable, and even
mirth-loving {274} people, _did_ pass their evenings at home, and
enjoyed doing so. The book commands even now, in some old-fashioned
households, about the same sort of consecration which is given to an
antique blue and white china tea-pot--not nearly so fine as the newer
French ones--but which by the aid of a little imagination can be put to
very pretty simmer of old times and tunes.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Barbauld.]
Mrs. Barbauld[6] was worthier than this book; she was a sister of Dr.
Aikin--had distinction for great beauty in her youth; married a French
clergyman of small parts and weak mind, whose intellect, in his later
years, went wholly awry and made her home a martyrdom for her, against
which she struggled bravely. That home was for a time out at
Hampstead, only a half hour's drive from London, and she knew people
worth knowing there; Fox and Johnson among the rest--though {275}
Johnson did give her a big slap for marrying as she did and for
teaching an infant school.[7] She wrote poetry too, one verse at least
which Wordsworth greatly admired, and with condescension declared that
he would have liked to be the author of such a verse himself. I cite
the verse (with some of the context), which is from an apostrophe to
_Life_; doubtless suggested by the
"Animula, vagula, blandula"
of Adrian, to which allusion has been made in a previous chapter; but
the good woman's evolution of the thought is curiously different from
that of Pope:--
"Life! I know not what thou art.
But know that thou and I must part;
And when, or how, or where we met,
I own to me's a secret yet.
But this I know, when thou art fled
Where'er they lay these limbs, this head,
No clod so valueless shall be
As all that then remains of me.
O whither, whither dost thou fly,
Where bend unseen thy trackless course,
{276}
And in this strange divorce,
Ah, tell where I must seek this compound I?
* * * * *
Life! we've been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;
Then--steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not--Good night; but in some brighter clime
Bid me--Good morning."
I cannot part from this excellent old friend of British boys, without
calling to mind her ardent Whiggism, and her very pronounced advocacy
of the American cause, in her last poem of _Eighteen hundred and
eleven_; the republican sympathies alienated a good many of her Tory
friends, and brought to her temporary disrepute. Wherefor, I think,
patriotic American boys may, on some coming fourth of July, fling their
caps into the air for the kindly, brave-speaking Mrs. Barbauld, and for
her _Evenings at Home_!
{277}
_Miss Edgeworth._
[Sidenote: An Irish story-teller.]
You may be sure that I have not forgotten Miss Edgeworth, who was a
good friend of Mrs. Barbauld, and who scored Dr. Johnson and Boswell
too, for the printing of their slurs upon Miss Aikin.[8]
I suspect it would not be an easy task to bring young people, nowadays,
to much enthusiasm about Miss Edgeworth[9] and her books; and yet if I
were to tell all that "we fellows" used to think about her when her
_Popular Tales_, and her delightful _Parent's Assistant_, with its
stories exactly of the right length--about Lazy Lawrence, and Simple
Susan, and the False Key, and Tarlton--were in vogue, I am afraid you
would give me very little credit for critical sagacity. A most proper
and interesting old lady we reckoned her, and do still. I for one
never counted on her being {278} young; it seemed to me that she must
have been born straight into the severities of middle age and of
story-telling. I could never imagine her at a game of romps, or buying
candies on the sly. Though I had never seen her portrait--and no one
else, for that matter--yet I knew the face--as well as that of my own
grandmother; and what a good, kind, serene, motherly face it was!
There was dignity in it, however; no boy would have thought of
approaching her without a study of his deportment; he would see to it
that his shoe-lacings were tied and his waistcoat buttons all in
place--else, a shake of the head that would have made the cap-strings,
and the frisette, and the starched ruffles shiver. But we must not
speak lightly of the authoress, to whom thousands of elderly people owe
so much of instruction and of entertainment.
[Sidenote: Miss Edgeworth.]
She was the daughter of an Irish gentleman who made a runaway match at
Gretna Green, Maria Edgeworth being a child of that irregular marriage;
and her father being widowed shortly after, married three other
wives[10] successively, whose {279} children filled the great house at
Edgeworthtown in Ireland, where the authoress grew up (though born in
England), and where she came to that knowledge of Irish character and
habit which gives distinction and the greatest charm to her books.
Scott read them gleefully and admiringly, and as he himself confesses,
took a hint from them, to put Scottish character into story, as this
English-Irish lady had put Irish character into hers; and he says in
his first outspoken preface to the _Waverley_ series--that Miss
Edgeworth in "making the English familiar with the character of their
gay and kind-hearted neighbors may truly be said to have done more
toward completing the union than perhaps all the legislative enactments
by which it has been followed up." Such laurels were enough for her
fame--did not braver ones grow out of the thumb-worn edges of her
books. I think it would be safe to distrust the honor and directness
of purpose of any boy or man who, after reading--has either scorn or
dread of Maria Edgeworth.
One will not find startling things in her {280} writing; nor will you
find great brilliancy of execution--nor the pretty banter and delicate
English humor, and finer touches which belong to Miss Austen: but you
will find orderly progress and a good orderly story--illuminated by
flashes of Irish wit, and glowing through and through with the kindness
of a heart which never saw suffering without sympathy, and never any
joys of even the most vulgar, without a tender satisfaction. Add to
this a shrewd common sense--which never lost its way in romantic
pitfalls, and an unblinking honesty, and charity of purpose--always
making itself felt, and always driving a nail--and you have an array of
qualities which will, I think, keep good Miss Edgeworth's name alive
for a long period to come. Few people will have the courage to invest
in the whole of her score of volumes octavo. It is hardly to be
advised; but you may wisely choose a sprinkling of them; her _Frank_,
for instance--her _Rackrent_--her _Ormond_, and a volume or two of her
shorter tales, which will bravely hold their own amongst all the goody
books of a later generation.
Two specimens of that Irish humor, which she {281} is so apt at
reporting, and which shine by their pretty flicker of unconsciousness,
I must cite: the first is that of the politician--a charming type of
our municipal Milesians--who resented highly his non-appointment to
some fat place, after unwearied support of the government, "against his
conscience, in a most honorable manner." The second is that of the
hopeful old Irish dame, who trusted she might die upon a fete day, when
the gates of Heaven were opened wide, and a poor "body might slip in
unbeknownst."
For our good friend, Miss Edgeworth, we believe that those gates were
wide open, on every day of the year.
_Some Early Romanticism._
[Sidenote: Early Romanticism.]
While that clever and attractive Miss Jane Austen was engaged upon her
stories in her quiet study in Steventon, Hampshire, there was opened
upon England, by certain other ladies, a new sluice of literature--from
which some phosphorescent sparkles are still distinguishable in our
{282} time--in brilliant red and yellow covers. I allude to the
_Children of the Abbey_, by Miss Roche[11] (an Irish-French lady, who
lived in Waterford, Ireland), to _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and the _Scottish
Chiefs_ by Miss Jane Porter, and the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ by Mrs.
Radcliffe, of London.[12]
Very few middle-aged readers have passed their lives without hearing of
these books; the chances are strong that most of such readers have
dipped into them; and if people dipped at all, before the age of
fourteen, they were pretty apt to undergo complete submergence.
From ten to twelve was--as nearly as I now recollect--about the
susceptible age for the _Children of the Abbey_; and if the book came
into the {283} hands of one of a bevy of boys or girls, in such tender
years, it was pretty apt to run through them all, eruptively--like
measles.
It was a book that even young people had an inclination to put under
cover, if detected or liable to be detected in the reading of it; and
elderly people so caught were understood to be only "glancing at it;"
the sentiment is so very profuse and gushing. None of us like to make
a show of our allegiance to Master Cupid. Miss Roche wrote other
books--but none beside the _Children of the Abbey_ have come down to us
in the yellow and red of sixpenny form; for which we ought to be
thankful.
_Thaddeus of Warsaw_ had more excuse in the expression of tender
sympathies for Poland and all Polish people, at a crisis in the history
of that unfortunate kingdom. The success of the book was immense.
Kosciusko sent his portrait and a medal to the author; she was made
member of foreign societies, received gold crosses of honor; and oddly
enough, even from America there came, under the guiding providence of
Mr. John {284} Harper,[13] then I believe Mayor of the City of New
York, an elegant carved armchair, trimmed with crimson plush, to
testify "the admiring gratitude of the American people" to the author
of _Thaddeus of Warsaw_. The book, by its amazing popularity, and by
the entertaining way in which it marshals its romantic effulgencies in
favor of a great cause, may very naturally suggest that other, later
and larger enlistment of all the forces of good story-telling,
which--fifty years thereafter--in the hands of an American lady (Mrs.
Stowe) contributed to a larger cause, and with more abiding results.
_The Scottish Chiefs_ has less of gusto than the Polish novel--and as I
took occasion to say when we were at that date of Scottish history--is
full of bad anachronisms, and of historical untruths. Yet there is a
good bracing air of the Highlands in parts of it, and an ebullient
martial din of broadswords and of gathering clans which go far to
redeem its maudlin sentiment. Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_
had more of the {285} conventionally artistic qualities than either of
those last named, though never so infectiously popular. There are
gloomy Italian chieftains in it, splendid dark fellows with swords and
pistols and plumes to match; and there are purple sunsets and massive
castles with secret passages and stairs; and marks of bloody fingers,
and papers that are to be signed--or not signed; and one ineffable
young lady--Emily, I think, is her name--who by her spiritual presence
and lovely features serves to light up all the gloom and the mystery
and makes the castle, and the dark woods, and the reeking vaults, and
the secret paths all blossom like a rose. I cannot advise the reading
of the book.
_Vathek._
[Sidenote: Wm. Beckford.]
When poor Chatterton--of whom we had speech not far back--was near to
starving in London, he made one desperate effort to secure the favor
and patronage of the Lord Mayor of the city, who was a very rich West
India merchant, by the name of Beckford. Chatterton did gain an
interview; did get promise of aid, and win strongly upon the {286} good
will of the Lord Mayor; but unfortunately his honor died only a few
days thereafter. Had he lived, the young poet might have had a totally
different career; and had he lived, the only son and heir of this
benevolent Mayor,--William Beckford,[14] then a boy of ten,--would have
had a different bringing up. At twenty, this youth printed--though he
did not publish--some journals of continental travel which he had
conducted in the spirit and with the large accompaniments of a young
man who loves the splendor of life, and who had at command an annual
revenue of six hundred thousand dollars, at that day said to be the
largest moneyed income in England. What a little fragment of this sum
which was squandered upon that splendid trail of travel through Europe
would have made poor Chatterton happy! But young Beckford was by no
means a brainless spendthrift; he had strong intellectual aptitudes;
was a scholar in a certain limited yet true sense; and when twenty-two
only, had written (in French) {287} that strange, weird romance of
_Vathek_; well worth your reading on a spare day, and which in its
English version has made his fame, and keeps his name alive, now that
his great houses and moneys are known and reverenced no more.
It is an Eastern story, with all the glow, color, and splendors of the
days of the good _Haroun al Raschid_ in it. There are crime and love
in it too; and phantoms and beautiful women, and terrific punishment of
the wicked. Vathek, the hero, who might be Beckford himself, wanders
through a world of delights, where evil phantoms and genii assail him,
and fascinating maidens allure him; and after adventures full of
escapes and dangers and feastings, in which he listens to the melody of
lutes and quaffs the delicious wine of Schiraz, he reaches at last, in
company with the lovely Mironihar, the great hall of Eblis; here we
come to something horrific and Dantesque--something which I am sure had
its abiding influence upon the work of Edgar Poe.
"The place, though roofed with a vaulted ceiling, was so spacious and
lofty that at first they took it for an immeasurable plain. But their
eyes at length growing familiar with {288} the grandeur of surrounding
objects, they extended their view to those at a distance, and
discovered rows of columns and arcades which gradually diminished till
they terminated in a point radiant as the sun when he darts his last
beams athwart the ocean.... The pavement, which was strewed over with
gold-dust and saffron, exhaled so subtle an odor as almost overpowered
them.... In the midst of this immense hall a vast multitude was
incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their
hearts, without once regarding anything around them. They had all the
livid paleness of death. Their eyes deep sunk in their sockets,
resembled those phosphoric meteors that glimmer by night in places of
interment."
And afterward, when a royal sufferer, who from livid lips had made
warning exhortation to these wanderers, lifts his right hand in
supplication, Vathek sees--through his bosom which was "transparent as
crystal"--his heart enveloped in flames. Perhaps Hawthorne, in certain
passages of the _Scarlet Letter_, may have had these red, burning
hearts of this famous Hall of Eblis in mind.
Beckford wrote also a very interesting account of certain religious
houses in Portugal which were the wonder of old days and are a wonder
now. At Cintra, the picturesque suburb of Lisbon, he {289} established
a great Moorish country house within sight of the sea. Byron gives a
glimpse of this in _Childe Harold_:--
"Here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan,
Beneath yon mountain's ever beauteous brow;
But now, as if a thing unblest by man,
Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou!
Here giant weeds a passage scarce allow
To halls deserted, portals gaping wide.
Fresh lessons to the thinking bosom, how
Vain are the pleasaunces on earth supplied,
Swept into wrecks anon by Time's ungentle tide."
Byron would now have to mend his description, since the estate is at
present owned by a London merchant, who has bought a title from the
weak king-folk of Portugal, and keeps the great house in Pimlico order.
It is one of the show places of Cintra; and if Moorish domes, and
marble halls, and sculpture delicate as that of the Alhambra, and
fountains, and palms, and oranges, and bowers of roses, and century-old
oaks, and cliffs, and wooded dells, and far-off sight of sails from the
Bay of Biscay are deserving of show, surely this old palace of the rich
Englishman is.
Another palace--for Beckford had an {290} architectural mania--was
built at Fonthill, the place of his birth, not far east of Salisbury.
Here was a great ancestral estate, around which he caused to be erected
a huge wall of masonry, some ten or twelve miles in length, to secure
privacy and protect his birds. Within he built courts, towers, and
halls--some six hundred men often working together night and day on
these constructions--which he equipped with the rare and munificent
spoils brought back from his travel. To this Fairy land, however,
Byron's lament would better apply; the walls are down and the towers
have fallen; the property is divided; only here and there and blended
with new structures and new offices can you see traces of the old
architectural extravagance. The spoiled plantations of Jamaica--whence
the Vathek revenue mostly came--brought the change; enough, however,
remained for the erection of a costly home in Bath, portions of which
may still be seen.
A daughter of Beckford's became Duchess of Hamilton; another daughter,
who declined Ducal overtures which the father favored, was treated
therefor with severities that would have become an {291} Eastern
caliph--for which, maybe, he now, like the poor creatures of Eblis
Hall, is holding his right hand over "a burning heart."
_Robert Burns._
[Sidenote: Burns.]
We go now out of England, northward of the Solway, to find that peasant
poet[15] at whose career I hinted in the last chapter, and whose burst
of Scotch song was a new wakening for that kingdom of the highlands and
the moors. I dare not, and will not speak critically of his verses;
there they are--in their little budget of gilt-bound, or paper-bound
leaves; rhythmic, tender, coarse, glowing, burning, with a grip in many
of them at our heart-strings which we may not and cannot shake off. To
tell you about these poems and of their special melodies would be like
taking you to the sea and telling you how the waves gather and
roll--with murmurs that you know--along all the shore.
{292}
Nor can I hope to tell any more of what will be new to you about his
life and fate. We all know that white-washed, low, roadside cottage--a
little drive out from the old Scotch town of Ayr--where he was born; we
have been there perhaps; we have seen other Scottish peasants boozing
there over their ale; and have noted the names scribbled over tables
and cupboards and walls to testify to the world's yearnings and to its
pilgrimages thither. We know, too, that other low cottage of Mossgiel,
where his poor father--a gospel abiding man--made his last struggle
against the fates--and who of a Saturday night--
"Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does homeward bend."
We all know what a brave fight the two Burns boys, Gilbert and Rob,
made of it when Death, "the poor man's dearest friend," took off the
father; Gilbert the elder; but Robert the brighter and keener--making
verselets in the fields which the elder brother approves, and says
would "bear {293} to be printed;" and so presently after, the first
poor, thin, dingy volume finds it way to the light, and gives to
far-away Edinboro' people their earliest hint of this strange, fine,
new, human plant which has begun to blossom under the damps of
Mossgiel. But the farm life is hard; the poet is wayward; his jolly
friends near by who chant his songs are not helpful; his love affairs,
of which he has overstock in his young wildness, run to confusion;
quarrels threaten; so he books himself with what moneys the thin, dingy
volume of poems have brought him, for America.
What if he had come!
But no; one low, wee encouraging voice--the piping answer to those
poems--reaches him from Edinboro', and the poet goes thither in his
best gear; Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Blacklock the blind poet, and
Mackenzie, of whom I have already made mention, all befriend him. The
gentlewomen of Edinboro' entertain him, and admire him, and flatter
him; and he, in best blue and buff, with his dark, rolling eyes, and
lips that command all shapes of language, holds his dignity with these
fine ladies of the Northern capital; {294} gives compliments that make
them tremble; prints other and fuller edition of his poems; goes
northward amongst the highlands--dropping jewels of verse as he
goes--to beautiful women, to waterfalls, to noble patrons. The next
season in Edinboro', however, is no longer the same; that brilliant
series of fetes and of conquests has gone by; the new lion is too
audacious; he shakes his fetters with a bold rage that intimidates. So
we find him with some three hundred pounds only, saved out of the new
book and the junketings of the Capital, going off to lease quietly the
farm of Ellisland, near to Dumfries, and turn ploughman once more.
It is a poor place, but very beautiful; it is in Nithsdale, and the
murmur of the river through its wooded banks makes the poet forget the
crop of pebbles which every ploughing turns to the top. He is
presently in the Excise too (1789): so gets some added pence by the
gauging of beer-barrels and looking after frauds upon the revenue;
married too--having out of all the loose love-strings, which held him
more or less weakly, at last knotted one, which ties the quiet, pretty,
womanly, much injured Jean Armour to his hearth and {295} home,
forever. And he begins that Ellisland life bravely well; has prayers
at night; teaches the "toddlin' wee things" their catechism; has hope
and faith, and sings--and sings; and this, amongst other things, was
what he sang--
"O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
And Bob and Allen cam to see;
Three blither hearts that lee-lang night
Ye wad na find in Christendie.
We are na fou, we're na that fou,
But just a drappie in our e'e;
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And ay we'll taste the barley bree.
It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That's blinkin in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright, to wyle us hame;
But, by my sooth, she'll wait a wee.
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And aye we'll taste the barley bree."
No wonder the pebbles began to show more and more in the plough-land;
no wonder the jolly fellows of Dumfries came oftener and oftener; the
long bouts too amongst the hills chilled him; the crops grew smaller
and smaller; the "barley bree" better and better; he has no tact at
bargaining; a stanza of Tam O'Shanter is worth more than ten {296}
plough-days, yet he makes gifts of his best songs. Household affairs
go all awry, let poor Jeanie Armour struggle as she may; the cottage
palings are down; debts accumulate; and so do those rollicking nights
at the Globe, or in a shieling amongst the hills. Yet from out all the
impending want, and the gloom, and the desperation, come such sweet
notes as these, reaching the ear of humanity everywhere:--
"John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a canty day, John,
W've had wi' ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo."
At last Ellisland must be given up--crops, beasties and all; and never
more the wooded banks of Nithsdale shall feel his tread, or hear his
chant mingling with the river murmurs. He, and they all--five souls
now--just of an age to relish most the woods, the range, the fields,
the daisies of Ellisland, must go to one of the foulest and least
attractive streets of Dumfries, and to a {297} home as little
attractive as the street. Fifty years thereafter I went over that
house and found it small, pinched, and pitifully meagre in all its
appointments; twenty years later, Hawthorne speaks of both house and
street as _filthy_. What could or should supply the place now--to the
peasant poet--of the fields, the open sky, the gentle fret and murmurs
of the streams of Nithsdale?
The foul fiends who taunted him in the woods now lay hold upon him in
earnest; every day his fame is flying over straits and seas; every day
his poems, old and new, are planting themselves in fresh hearts and
brains; every day his wild passions are dealing him back-handed blows.
Old neighbors have to pass him by; modest women look away; he has
forfeited social position; and I suspect, welcomed in those days of
July, 1796, the approaches of the disease which he knew was sapping his
life:--
"Oh, Martinmas wind! when wilt thou blaw
And shake the dead leaves frae the tree?
Oh gentle death! when wilt thou come
And tak a life that wearies me?"
{298}
And it comes, in that dismal, miserable upper chamber that you can see
when you go there;--his wife ill; his little children wandering
aimlessly about; it comes sharply; he is on his back--"uneasy" the
nurse said, and "chafing"; when suddenly by a great effort--as if at
last he would shake off all the beleaguerments of sense, and the
haunting phantoms swarming about him--he rallied all his powers--rose
to his full height from the bed--tottered for a moment, then fell prone
forward a dead man.
This was in the month of July, 1796; Burns being then only
thirty-seven. Walter Scott, a young fellow of twenty-five, living in
Edinboro', had just printed his translation of _Leonora_.
Wordsworth--unknown save for a thin booklet of indifferent verse--was
living down in Dorsetshire, enjoying the "winding wood-walks green,"
with that sister Dorothy, who "added sunshine to his daylight." These
two had not as yet made the acquaintance of that coming man, S. T.
Coleridge, who is living at Clevedon, over by Bristol Channel, with
that newly married wife, who has decoyed him from his schemes of
American migration; {299} and the poet of the Ancient Mariner (as yet
unwritten) has published his little booklet with Mr. Cottle, of
Bristol, in which are some modest verses signed C. L. And Charles Lamb
(for whom those initials stand) is just now in his twenty-first year,
and is living in humble lodgings in Little Queen Street, London, from
which he writes to Coleridge, saying that "Burns was a God of my
idolatry." And in that very year (1796) the dismalest of tragedies is
to overshadow those humble lodgings of Little Queen Street. Of this
and of Coleridge and of Wordsworth, we shall have somewhat to say in
the chapter we open upon next.
[1] Gilbert White, b. 1720; d. 1793. Oxford man; Fellow in 1744;
curate of Faringdon 1758; after 1784, at Selborne.
[2] A charmingly illustrated edition of _The Natural History of
Selborne_--showing his ivy-covered home and other objects of interest,
was published by Macmillan & Co. in 1875 (edited by Frank Buckland). I
am indebted for a copy to my friend, Wm. Robinson, of the London
_Garden_.
[3] Jane Austen, b. 1775; d. 1817. _Sense and Sensibility_, published
1811. Life was written by her nephew J. Austen-Leigh. Her _Letters_,
edited by Lord Brabourne, 1884.
[4] Not the dreadful, seamy, photographic reproduction of an old oil
painting that Lord Brabourne gives, which must be wholly unfair to her;
but the earlier engravings.
[5] Thomas Day, b. 1748; d. 1789. Oxford man; married, 1778; _Sandford
and Merton_ published 1783.
[6] Mrs. Barbauld (Anna Letitia Aikin), b. 1743; d. 1825. There is a
pleasant sketch of Mrs. Barbauld and (for a wonder) an approving and
commendatory notice of her in Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, vol.
i., pp. 228-39.
Miss Martineau's father, it appears, had been a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld.
[7] Boswell's Johnson, vol. vi., p. 28.
[8] The circumstances are given in _Crabb Robinson's Diary_.
[9] Maria Edgeworth, b. 1767; d. 1849. First volume of _Parent's
Assistant_ was published, 1796; _Castle Rackrent_, 1800; _Popular
Tales_, 1804.
[10] Miss Honora Sneyd among them, in 1773.
[11] Maria Regina Roche, b. 1766; d. 1845. The _Grand Dict. Universal
du XIX. Siecle_ enumerates no less than thirteen other romances by
her--in forty odd volumes, all translated, and now utterly forgotten!
[12] Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann Ward), b. 1764; d. 1823; _Romance of the
Forest_, 1791; _Mysteries of Udolpho_, 1794.
Miss Jane Porter, b. 1776; d. 1850; _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, published
1803; _Scottish Chiefs_, 1810; _Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative_ (in
concert with her sister Anna Maria Porter), published in 1826.
[13] Senior member of the old firm of J. & J. Harper, 82 Cliff Street.
[14] William Beckford, b. 1759; d. 1844. _Vathek_, published (in
French), 1787; better known by an unauthentic English translation,
published 1784.
[15] Robert Burns, b. 1759; d. 1796. Poems published 1786. First
collected edition, 1800; Cunningham edition, with life, in 1834, 4 vols.
{300}