DR BURNEY was giving a “command” party at his house in St. Martin's
Street, Leicester Fields--the house which Sir Isaac Newton did
once inhabit, and which was still crowned with the most celebrated
observatory in Europe. In the early years of his musical career he had
had a patron, Mr. Fulk Greville, who had done a great deal for him,
and in later days he had never quite forgotten this fact, although
Dr. Burney had climbed high on the professional as well as the social
ladder, and was better known in the world than Mr. Greville himself. He
had become quite intimate with many great persons and several curious
ones. It is uncertain whether Mr. Greville regarded Dr. Johnson as
belonging to the former or the latter class, but at any rate he had
heard a great deal about Dr. Johnson, and did not think that, provided
he took every reasonable precaution, any harm could come to himself from
meeting such a notability. He accordingly instructed Dr. Burney to bring
him and Johnson together, and Burney promised to do so. Before the day
for this meeting was fixed Mrs. Greville--who, by the way, was Fanny
Burney's godmother--had signified her intention of viewing the huge
person also, and of bringing her daughter, the exquisite Mrs. Crewe, to
attend the promised exhibition of genius in bulk.
Of course Dr. Johnson was ready to lend himself to any plan that might
be devised to increase the circumference of his circle of admirers, and
besides, this Mr. Fulk Greville was a descendant of the friend of Sir
Philip Sidney, and had large possessions, as well as a magnificent
country seat, and altogether he would make a most desirable listener; so
he agreed to come to the party to be inspected by the Greville family.
Burney, however, wishing, as every responsible proprietor of a menagerie
should wish, to be on the safe side and exhibit his bear under the eye
and the controlling influence of his favourite keeper, invited Mr. and
Mrs. Thrale to the party.
These were to be the “principals” in the comedy of this entertainment;
and for the subordinates he selected his married daughter and her
husband--both admirable musicians--Mr. Davenant, Mr. Seward, and a
certain Italian musician, a vocalist as well as a performer on the
violin and that new instrument which was at first called the fortepiano,
then the pianoforte, and later on simply the piano. This person's name
was Gabrielli Piozzi.
Such were the harmonious elements which Dr. Burney proposed to bring
together for the gratification of Mr. Fulk Greville and his wife. Mr.
Greville was an amateur of some little capacity, and he had certainly at
one time been greatly interested in music. He had paid £300 to Burney's
master, the celebrated Dr. Arne, who composed in the masque of “Alfred”
the rousing anthem known as “Rule Britannia,” for the cancelling of
Burney's indentures as an apprentice to the “art of musick,” and had
taken the young man into his own house in a capacity which may best be
described as that of entertaining secretary. Dr. Burney may therefore
have thought in his wisdom that, should Johnson be in one of his
bearish moods and feel disinclined to exhibit his parts of speech to
Mr. Greville, the latter would be certain of entertainment from the
musicians. This showed forethought and a good working knowledge of Dr.
Johnson. But in spite of the second string to the musician's bow
the party was a fiasco--that is, from the standpoint of a social
entertainment; it included one incident, however, which made it the most
notable of the many of the Burney parties of which a record remains.
And what records there are available to any one interested in the
entertainments given by Dr. Burney and his charming family at that
modest house of theirs, just round the corner from Sir Joshua Reynolds'
larger establishment in Leicester Fields! Hundreds of people who
contributed to make the second half of the eighteenth century the most
notable of any period so far as literature and the arts were concerned,
since the spacious days of Elizabeth, were accustomed to meet together
informally at this house, and to have their visits recorded for all ages
to muse upon. To that house came Garrick, not to exhibit his brilliance
as a talker before a crowd of admirers, but to entertain the children
of the household with the buffooning that never flagged, and that
never fell short of genius in any exhibition. He was the delight of the
schoolroom. Edmund Burke and his brother, both fond of conversation when
oratory was not available, were frequently here; Reynolds came with
many of his sitters, and found fresh faces for his canvas among his
fellow-guests; and with him came his maiden sister, feeling herself more
at home with the simple Burney circle than she ever did with the company
who assembled almost daily under her brother's roof. Nollekens, the
sculptor; Colman, the dramatist and theatre manager, who was obliged to
run away from London to escape the gibes which were flung at him from
every quarter when Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, which he had
done his best to make a failure, became the greatest success of the
year; Cumberland, the embittered rival of Goldsmith, who was the person
who gave the solitary hiss during the first performance of the same
play, causing the timid author to say to the manager on entering the
playhouse, “What is that, sir--pray, what is that? Is it a hiss?” To
which Colman replied, “Psha! sir, what signifies a squib when we have
been sitting on a barrel of gunpowder all night?”
These were among the notabilities; and the “curiosities” were quite as
numerous. The earliest of Arctic voyagers, Sir Constantine Phipps, who
later became Lord Mulgrave, put in an appearance at more than one of the
parties; and so did Omai, the “gentle savage” of the poet Cowper, who
was brought by Captain Cook from the South Seas in the ship on which
young Burney was an officer. The sisters, who, of course, idolised the
sailor, sat open-mouthed with wonder to hear their brother chatting away
to Omai in his native language. Upon another occasion came Bruce, the
Abyssinian traveller, who told the story of how steaks were cut from the
live ox when needed by the inhabitants of one region. He was immensely
tall, as were some of his stories; but though extremely dignified, he
did not object to a practical joke. Another person of great stature who
visited the Burneys was the notorious Count Orloff, the favourite of the
Empress Catherine of Russia; and from the letters of one of the young
people of the household one has no difficulty in perceiving with what
interest he was regarded by the girls, especially since the report
reached them that he had personally strangled his imperial master at the
instigation of his imperial mistress.
These are but, a few names out of the many on the Burneys' visiting
list. Of course, as regards musical artists, the house was the
rendezvous of the greatest in London. While the opera-house in the
Haymarket was open there was a constant flow of brilliant vocalists to
these shores, and the young people had many opportunities of becoming
acquainted with the ignorance, the capriciousness, the affectations, and
the abilities which were to be found associated with the lyric stage in
the eighteenth century, as they are in the twentieth. Among the prime
donne who sang for the Burneys were the Agujari--a marvellous performer,
who got fifty pounds for every song she sang at the Pantheon--and her
great but uncertain rival, Gabrielli. The former, according to Mozart,
who may possibly be allowed to be something of a judge, had a vocal
range which was certainly never equalled by any singer before or after
his time. She won all hearts and a great deal of money during her visit
to London, and she left with the reputation of being the most marvellous
and most rapacious of Italians. Gabrielli seems to have tried to make up
by capriciousness what she lacked in expression. Her voice was, so far
as can be gathered from contemporary accounts, small and thin. But by
judiciously disappointing the public she became the most widely talked
of vocalist in the country. Then among the men were the simple and
gracious Pacchierotti--who undoubtedly became attached to Fanny
Burney--Rauzzini, and Piozzi.
[Illustration: 0049]
The Burneys' house was for years the centre of the highest intellectual
entertainment to be found in London, and the tact of the head of the
household, and the simple, natural manners of his daughters, usually
succeeded in preventing the intrusion of a single inharmonious note, in
spite of the fact that a Welsh harpist named Jones had once been among
the visitors.
But upon the occasion of this “command” party, when Greville was to meet
Johnson, and the latter had dressed himself with that extreme care which
we suspect meant that he tied up his hose, and put on a wig the front of
which had not yet been burnt away by coming in contact with his lighted
candle, Burney's tact overreached itself. Mr. Greville may have felt
that the Thrales had no business to be of the party, or Johnson may have
gained the impression that Burney's old patron was anxious to play the
same part, in an honorary sort of way, in regard to himself. At any
rate, he refused to be drawn out to exhibit his conversational powers
to a supercilious visitor; and after a brief space of time he turned his
back upon every one and his face to the fire, and there he sat, greatly
to the discomfiture, no doubt, of his host. In a very short time a gloom
settled down upon the whole party. Mr. Thrale, stiff and reserved, was
not the man to pull things together. He sat mute on his chair, making no
advance toward Mr. Greville, and Mr. Greville had probably his chin in
the air, having come to the conclusion that Dr. Johnson's powers as a
conversationalist had been greatly overrated by rumour.
It was when all hope of sociability had vanished that Dr. Burney,
who, when a church organist, may have had occasion to cover up the
shortcomings of the clergyman by a timely voluntary, begged Signor
Piozzi to oblige the company with a song. But Piozzi was a forlorn hope.
He was the last man in the world to save the situation. Had he been a
vocalist of the calibre of Pacchierotti he could have made no headway
against the funereal gloom that had settled down upon the party.
Piozzi had a sweet and highly trained voice, though some years earlier
he had lost its best notes, and he sang with exquisite expression;
but when playing his own accompaniment, with his back turned to his
audience, he was prone to exaggerate the sentiment of the music until
sentiment became lost in an exuberance of sentimentality.
This style of singing is not that to which any one would resort in order
to dissipate a sudden social gloom. As the singer went on the gloom
deepened.
It was just at this moment that one of those ironic little imps that
lurk in wainscot nooks looking out for an opportunity to influence an
unconscious human being to an act which the little demon, seeing the
end of a scene of which mortals only see the beginning, regards with
sardonic glee, whispered something in the ear of Mrs. Thrale, and in
an instant, in obedience to its prompting, she had left her chair and
stolen behind the singer at the piano. Raising her hands and turning
up her eyes in imitation of Piozzi, she indulged in a piece of mimicry
which must have shocked every one in the room except the singer, who had
his back to her, and Dr. Johnson, who, besides being too short-sighted
to be able to see her, was gazing into the grate.
No doubt the flippant little lady felt that a touch of farcical fun
was the very thing needed to make the party go with a snap; but such
flagrant bad taste as was involved in the transaction was more than
Dr. Burney could stand. Keeping his temper marvellously well in hand,
considering his provocation, he went gently behind the gesticulating
woman and put a stop to her fooling. Shaking his head, he whispered in a
“half joke whole earnest” way:
“Because, madam, you have no ear yourself for music, will you destroy
the attention of all who, in that one point, are otherwise gifted?”
Or words to that effect, it might be safe to add, for the phrases as
recorded in the diary of one of his daughters are a trifle too academic
for even Dr. Burney to have whispered on the spur of the moment. But he
certainly reproved the lady, and she took his remonstrance in good part,
and showed herself to be admirably appreciative of the exact pose to
assume in order to save the situation. She went demurely to her chair
and sat there stiffly, and with the affectation of a schoolgirl who has
been admonished for a fault and commanded to take a seat in silence and
apart from the rest of the class. It must be apparent to every one that
this was the precise attitude for her to strike in the circumstances,
and that she was able to perceive this in a rather embarrassing moment
shows that Mrs. Thrale was quite as clever as her friends made her out
to be.
But regarding the incident itself, surely the phrase, “the irony of
fate,” was invented to describe it. A better illustration of the sport
of circumstance could not be devised, for in the course of time the
lively little lady, who had gone as far as any one could go in making a
mock of another, had fallen as deep in love with the man whom she mocked
as ever Juliet did with her Romeo. She found that she could not live
without him, and, sacrificing friends, position, and fortune, she threw
herself into his arms, and lived happy ever after.
The conclusion of the first scene in this saturnine comedy which was
being enacted in the drawing-room in that house in St. Martin's Street,
was in perfect keeping with the _mise-en-scène_ constructed by Fate,
taking the rôle of Puck. It is admirably described in the diary of
Charlotte Burney. She wrote that Mr. Greville--whom she nicknamed “Mr.
Gruel”--assumed “his most supercilious air of distant superiority” and
“planted himself immovable as a noble statue upon the hearth, as if a
stranger to the whole set.”
By this time Dr. Johnson must have had enough of the fire at which
he had been sitting, and we at once see how utterly hopeless were the
social relations at this miserable party when we hear that the men “were
so kind and considerate as to divert themselves by making a fire-screen
to the whole room.” But Dr. Johnson, having thoroughly warmed himself,
was now in a position to administer a rebuke to the less fortunate ones,
and, when nobody would have imagined that he had known the gentlemen
were in the room, he said that “if he was not ashamed he would keep the
fire from the ladies too.”
“This reproof (for a reproof it certainly was, although given in a very
comical, dry way) was productive,” Charlotte adds, “of a scene as good
as a comedy, for Mr. Suard tumbled on to a sopha directly, Mr. Thrale on
to a chair, Mr. Davenant sneaked off the premises, seemingly in as great
a fright and as much confounded as if he had done any bad action, and
Mr. Gruel being left solus, was obliged to stalk off.”
A more perfect description of the “curtain” to the first act of this,
“as good as a comedy,” could not be imagined. In every scene of this
memorable evening the mocking figure of an impish Fate can be discerned.
There was the tactful and urbane Dr. Burney anxious to gratify his old
patron by presenting to him the great Dr. Johnson, and at the same time
to show on what excellent terms he himself was with the family of the
wealthy brewer, Mr. Thrale. Incidentally he has caused Johnson to put
himself to the inconvenience of a clean shirt and a respectable wig;
and, like a thoughtful general, lest any of his plans should fall short
of fulfilment, he has invited an interesting vocalist to cover up the
retreat and make failure almost impossible!
Dr. Burney could do wonders by the aid of his tact and urbanity, but he
is no match for Fate playing the part of Puck. Within an hour Johnson
has disappointed him and become grumpy--the old bear has found the buns
to be stale; Mr. Greville, the patron, is in a patronising mood, and
becomes stiff and aloof because Johnson, secure with his pension,
resents it; Mrs. Thrale, anxious to do her best for Burney, and at the
same time to show Mrs. Greville and her fine daughter how thoroughly
at home she is in the house and how delicate is her sense of humour,
strikes an appallingly false note, and only saves herself by a touch of
cleverness from appearing wholly ridiculous. This is pretty well for the
opening scenes, but the closing catastrophe is not long delayed. The men
huddle themselves together in stony silence; and they are reproved for
impoliteness by--whom? Dr. Johnson, the man who has studied boorishness
and advanced it to a place among the arts--the man who calls those who
differ from him dolts and fools and rascals--the man whose manners at
the dinner table are those of the sty and trough--the man who walks
about the streets ungartered and unclean--this is the man who has the
effrontery to rebuke for their rudeness such gentlemen as Mr. Fulk
Greville, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Thrale! Puck can go no further. Down comes
the curtain when one gentleman collapses upon a “sopha,” another into a
chair, a third sneaks off like a culprit, and the fourth stalks off with
an air of offended dignity!
It might be thought that the imp of mischief who had assumed the control
of this evening's entertainment would be satisfied at the result of his
pranks so far. Nothing of the sort. He was only satisfied when he
had made a match between the insignificant figure who was playing the
musical accompaniment to his pranks and the lady who thought that his
presence in the room was only justifiable on the ground that he made an
excellent butt for her mockery!
And the funniest part of the whole comedy is to be found in the fact
that the pair lived happy ever after!
The extraordinary influence which Boswell has had upon almost every
student of the life of the latter half of the eighteenth century is
shown in a marked way by the general acceptance of his view--which it is
scarcely necessary to say was Johnson's view--of the second marriage of
Mrs. Thrale. We are treating Boswell much more fairly than he treated
Mrs. Thrale when we acknowledge at once that his opinion was shared by a
considerable number of the lady's friends, including Dr. Burney and
his family. They were all shocked when they heard that the widow of
the Southwark brewer had married the Italian musician, Signor Gabrielli
Piozzi. Even in the present day, when one might reasonably expect
that, the miserable pettiness of Boswell's character having been made
apparent, his judgment on most points would be received with a smile, he
is taken very seriously by a good many people. It has long ago been made
plain that Boswell was quite unscrupulous in his treatment of every one
that crossed his path or made an attempt to interfere with the aim of
his life, which was to become the biographer of Johnson. The instances
of his petty malevolence which have come to light within recent years
are innumerable. They show that the opinion which his contemporaries
formed of him was absolutely correct. We know that he was regarded as a
cur who was ever at Johnson's heels, and took the insults of the great
man with a fawning complacency that was pathetically canine. He was
daily called a cur. “Oh, no,” said Goldsmith, “he is not a cur, only a
burr; Tom Davies flung him at Johnson one day as a joke, and he stuck to
him ever since”--a cur, and an ape and a spy and a Branghton--the last
by Dr. Johnson himself in the presence of a large company, that included
the creator of the contemptible Mr. Branghton. (The incident was not,
however, recorded by Mr. Boswell himself.) But as the extraordinary
interest in his _Life of Johnson_ began to be acknowledged, the force of
contemporary opinion gradually dwindled away, until Boswell's verdicts
and Boswell's inferences found general acceptance; and even now
Goldsmith is regarded as an Irish _omadhaum_, because Boswell did his
best to make him out to be one, and Mrs. Thrale is thought to have
forfeited her claims to respect because she married Signor Piozzi.
People forget the origin of Boswell's malevolence in both cases. He
detested Goldsmith because Goldsmith was a great writer, who was capable
of writing a great biography of Johnson, with whom he had been on the
most intimate terms long before Tom Davies flung his burr at Johnson; he
hated Baretti and recorded--at the sacrifice of Johnson's reputation for
humanity--Johnson's cynical belittling of him, because he feared that
Baretti would write _the_ biography; he was spiteful in regard to Mrs.
Thrale because she actually did write something biographical about
Johnson.
The impudence of such a man as Boswell writing about “honest Dr.
Goldsmith” is only surpassed by his allusions to the second marriage of
Mrs. Thrale. He was a fellow-guest with Johnson at the Thrales' house in
1775, and he records something of a conversation which he says occurred
on the subject of a woman's marrying some one greatly beneath her
socially. “When I recapitulate the debate,” he says, “and recollect what
has since happened, I cannot but be struck in a manner that delicacy
forbids me to express! While I contended that she ought to be treated
with inflexible steadiness of displeasure, Mrs. Thrale was all for
mildness and forgiveness and, according to the vulgar phrase, making the
best of a bad bargain.” This was published after the second marriage.
What would be thought of a modern biographer who should borrow a little
of Boswell's “delicacy,” and refer to a similar incident in the same
style?
In his own inimitable small way Boswell was for ever sneering at Mrs.
Thrale. Sometimes he did it with that scrupulous delicacy of which an
example has just been given; but he called her a liar more than once
with considerable indelicacy, and his readers will without much trouble
come to the conclusion that his indelicacy was preferable to his
delicacy--it certainly came more natural to him. He was small and mean
in all his ways, and never smaller or meaner than in his references to
Mrs. Thrale's second marriage.
But, it must be repeated, he did not stand alone in regarding her union
with Piozzi as a _mésalliance_. Dr. Burney was shocked at the thought
that any respectable woman would so far forget herself as to marry
a musician, and his daughter Fanny wept remorseful tears when she
reflected that she had once been the friend of a lady who did not shrink
from marrying a foreigner and a Roman Catholic--more of the irony of
Fate, for Fanny Burney was herself guilty of the same indiscretion later
on: she made a happy marriage with a Roman Catholic foreigner, who
lived on her pension and her earnings. Dr. Johnson was brutal when
the conviction was forced upon him that he would no longer have an
opportunity of insulting a lady who had treated him with incredible
kindness, or the guests whom he met at her table. Upon one of the last
occasions of his dining at Mrs. Thrale's house at Streatham, a gentleman
present--an inoffensive Quaker--ventured to make a remark respecting the
accuracy with which the red-hot cannon-balls were fired at the Siege of
Gibraltar. Johnson listened for some time, and then with a cold sneer
said, “I would advise you, sir, never to relate this story again. You
really can scarce imagine how very poor a figure you make in the telling
of it.” Later on he took credit to himself for not quarrelling with his
victim when the latter chose to talk to his brother rather than to the
man who had insulted him. Yes, it can quite easily be understood that
Johnson should look on the marriage as a sad _mésalliance_, and possibly
it is fair to assume from the letter which he wrote to the lady that he
felt hurt when he heard that it was to take place.
Mrs. Thrale wrote to tell him that she meant to marry Piozzi, and
received the following reply:
“Madam,--If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously
married; if it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If
you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your
wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your
folly do no further mischief!”
Possibly the lady may have gathered from the hint or two conveyed
to her, with Boswellian delicacy, in this letter, that Johnson was
displeased with her. At any rate, she replied, declining to continue the
correspondence.
In her letter she summed up the situation exactly as a reasonable
person, acquainted with all the facts, and knowing something of the
first husband, would do.
“The birth of my second husband is not meaner than that of my first,”
she wrote; “his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner;
and his superiority in what he professes acknowledged by all mankind. It
is want of fortune, then, that is ignominious; the character of the man
I have chosen has no other claim to such an epithet. The religion to
which he has always been a zealous adherent, will, I hope, teach him to
forgive insults he has not deserved; mine will, I hope, enable [me]
to bear them at once with dignity and patience. To hear that I have
forfeited my fame is indeed the greatest insult I ever yet received. My
fame is as unsullied as snow, or I should think it unworthy of him who
must henceforth protect it.”
This brought the surly burly mass of offended dignity to his proper
level; but still he would not offer the lady who had been his
benefactress for twenty years an apology for his brutality. He had the
presumption to offer his advice instead--advice and the story (highly
appropriate from his point of view) of Mary Queen of Scots and the
Archbishop of St. Andrews. He advised her to remain in England--he would
not relinquish his room in her house and his place at her table without
a struggle--as her rank would be higher in England than in Italy, and
her fortune would be under her own eye. The latter suggestion was a
delicate insult to Piozzi.
Mrs. Piozzi, as she then became, showed that she esteemed this piece of
presumption, under the guise of advice, at its true value. Immediately
after her marriage she went abroad with her husband, though eventually
she settled with him in England.
Now, most modern readers will, we think, when they have become
acquainted with the whole story of Mrs. Thrale's life, arrive at the
conclusion that it was her first marriage that was the _mésalliance_,
not her second.
[Illustration: 0065]
Henry Thrale was a man of humble origin--a fact that revealed itself
almost daily in his life--and he was incapable of loving any one except
himself. He certainly never made a pretence of devotion to his wife, and
it is equally certain that, although she did more for him than any other
woman would have done, she never loved him. It might be going too far,
considering the diversity of temperament existing among womankind, to
assert that he was incapable of being loved by any woman; but beyond
a doubt he was not a lovable man. He was a stiff, dignified, morose,
uncongenial man, and he was a Member of Parliament into the bargain.
What could a pretty, lively, brilliant girl of good family see in such a
man as Thrale to make her love him? She never did love him--at times she
must have detested him. But she married him, and it was a lucky day
for him that she did so. Twice she saved him from bankruptcy, and three
times she induced his constituents, who thoroughly hated him, to return
him to Parliament as their representative. He never did anything in
Parliament, and he did little out of it that was worth remembering. It
is customary to make large allowances for a man of business who finds
that his wealth and a charming wife serve as a passport into what is
called society, though latterly such men do not stand in need of such
a favour being shown to them. But if a man betrays his ignorance of
certain social usages--not necessarily refinements--his friends excuse
him on the ground that he is a first-rate business man. Thrale, however,
was unworthy of such a title. He inherited a great scientific business,
but he showed himself so incapable of appreciating the methods by which
it had been built up, that he brought himself within a week or two of
absolute ruin by listening to a clumsy adventurer who advocated the
adoption of a system of adulteration of his beer that even a hundred
and fifty years ago would have brought him within sight of a criminal
prosecution.
His literary wife, by her clever management, aided by the money of her
mother and of sundry of her own, not her husband's, friends, succeeded
in staving off the threatened disaster. But the pig-headed man did not
accept the lesson which one might imagine he would have learned. Seeing
the success that crowned other enterprises of the same character as his
own, he endeavoured to emulate this success, not by the legitimate way
of increasing his customers, but by the idiotic plan of over-production.
He had an idea that in the multiplying of the article which he had to
sell he was increasing his business. Once again he was helped from the
verge of ruin by his literary wife.
He must have been a dreadful trial to her, and to a far-seeing manager
whom he had--a man named Perkins. Of course it was inevitable that the
force of character possessed by this Mr. Perkins must eventually prevail
against the dignified incompetence of the proprietor. The inevitable
happened, and the name of Perkins has for more than a hundred years been
bracketed with Barclay as a going concern, while the name of Thrale has
vanished for ever from “the Borough.”
It was this Mr. Perkins who, when the brewery was within five minutes of
absolute disaster, displayed the tactics of a great general in the face
of an implacable enemy, and saved the property. As a reward for his
services his master authorised the presentation to him of the sum of
a hundred pounds. His master's wife, however, being a more generous
assessor of the value of the man's ability, ventured to present double
the sum, together with a silver tea-service for Mrs. Perkins; but she
did so in fear and trembling, failing to summon up sufficient courage to
acquaint her husband with her extravagance until further concealment was
impossible. She was so overjoyed at his sanctioning the increase that
she at once wrote to her friends acquainting them with this evidence of
his generosity.
This episode was certainly the most stirring in the history of Thrale's
brewery. The Gordon rioters had been terrorising London for several
days, burning houses in every direction, as well as Newgate and another
prison, and looting street after street. They had already overthrown one
brewery, and they found the incident so fascinating that they marched
across the bridge to the Southwark concern, raising the cry that Thrale
was a Papist. The Thrales were at this time sojourning at Bath, and
were in an agony of suspense regarding their property. They had left
Dr. Johnson comfortably ensconced at their Streatham house in order that
they might learn in dignified language how things were going on.
This is Johnson's thrilling account of the incident:
“What has happened to your house you all know. The harm is only a few
butts of beer, and I think you may be sure that the danger is over. Pray
tell Mr. Thrale that I live here, and have no fruit, and if he does not
interpose am not likely to have much; but I think he might as well give
me a little as give all to the gardener.”
There was a double catastrophe threatening, it would appear: the burning
of the brewery and the shortage in the supply of Dr. Johnson's peaches.
This is how Mrs. Thrale describes the situation:
“Nothing but the astonishing presence of mind shewed by Perkins in
amusing the mob, with meat and drink and huzzas, till Sir Philip
Jennings Clerke could get the troops, and pack up the counting-house,
bills, bonds etc. and carry them, which he did, to Chelsea College for
safety, could have saved us from actual undoing. The villains _had_
broke in, and our brew-house would have blazed in ten minutes, when
a property of £150,000 would have been utterly lost, and its once
flourishing possessors quite undone.”
It seems almost incredible that Johnson, living at Streatham as the
guardian of Mr. Thrale's interests, should require the lady to write to
him, begging him to thank Perkins for his heroism. But so it was.
“Perkins has behaved like an Emperor,” she wrote, “and it is my earnest
wish and desire--command, if you please to call it so--that you will go
over to the brew-house and express _your_ sense of his good behaviour.”
Mrs. Thrale was unreasonable. How could Johnson be expected to take any
action when he was deprived of his peaches?
It will strike a good many modern readers of the account of this and
other transactions that if it was Perkins who saved the brewery for Mr.
Thrale, it was Mrs. Thrale who saved Perkins for the brewery. Possibly
it was her prompt gift of the silver plate to Mrs. Perkins that induced
this splendid manager to pocket the insult of the beggarly two hundred
guineas given to him by Mrs. Thrale--though this was double the amount
authorised by the “master.” Thrale never sufficiently valued the
services of Perkins. If he had had any gratitude in his composition he
would never have made Johnson one of his executors. What a trial it
must have been to the competent man of business to see Johnson lumbering
about the place with a pen behind his ear and an ink-pot suspended from
a button of his coat, getting in the way of everybody, and yet feeling
himself quite equal to any business emergency that might crop up. He
felt himself equal to anything--even to improve upon the auctioneer's
style in appraising the value of the whole concern. “Beyond the dreams
of avarice” remains as the sole classic phrase born beneath the shadow
of a brew-house.
In the matter of the premium to Perkins, Thrale should have felt that he
had a treasure in his wife, to say nothing of all that she had done for
him upon another occasion, involving a terrible sacrifice. A quarrel had
broken out among the clerks at the brewery, which even the generalship
of Perkins was unable to mollify. Had Mrs. Thrale been an ordinary
woman she would not have jeopardised her own life and the life of her
child--her thirteenth--in her husband's interests. As it was, however,
she felt that the duty was imposed on her to settle the difficulties in
the counting-house, and she did so; but only after many sleepless nights
and the sacrifice of her child. “The men were reconciled,” she wrote,
“and my danger accelerated their reconcilement.”
If Henry Thrale was deficient in the best characteristics of a business
man, his qualifications to shine socially can scarcely be regarded as
abundant. There were stories of his having been a gay dog in his youth,
but assuredly he and gaiety had long been strangers when he married his
wife, and upon no occasion afterwards could he be so described even by
the most indulgent of his friends; so that one rather inclines to the
belief that the dull dog must have been a dull puppy. We know what
his eldest daughter was, and we are convinced that the nature of that
priggish, dignified, and eminently disagreeable young lady was inherited
from her father. In Miss Thrale as a girl one feels that one is looking
at Henry Thrale as a boy. The only story that survives of those mythical
gay days with which he was accredited is that relating to the arrival
of the Gunnings to take London by storm. It was said that he and Murphy
thought to make these exquisite creatures the laughing-stock of the town
by introducing them to a vulgar hanger-on of Murphy, in the character of
a wealthy man of title and distinction. Possibly the two young men were
put up to play this disgraceful prank upon the Gunnings by some jealous
female associate; but however this may be, it not only failed most
ignominiously, it recoiled upon the jesters themselves, for Mrs.
Gunning, herself the sister of a nobleman, and destined to become the
mother-in-law of two dukes and the grandmother of two more--the parent
of a peeress in her own right, and an uncommonly shrewd Irishwoman into
the bargain--“smoaked,” as the slang of the period had it, the trick,
and her footman bundled the trio into the street.
The story may be true; but as both the Gunning girls were married in
1752, and Thrale did not meet Hester Lynch Salusbury till 1763, it was
an old story then, and it was not remembered against him except by the
Duchess of Hamilton. If it represents the standard of his adolescent
wildness, we cannot but think that his youth was less meteoric than his
wife believed it to be. At any rate, we do not know much about his early
life, but we do know a great deal about his latter years, and it is
impossible to believe that his nature underwent a radical change within
a year or two of his marriage.
He became the host of a large number of the most notable people of that
brilliant period at which he lived, and we perceive from the copious
accounts that survive of the Streatham gatherings that he was greatly
respected by all his visitors. He never said anything that was worth
recording, and he never did anything memorable beyond stopping Johnson
when the latter was becoming more than usually offensive to his
fellow-guests. He had no ear for music any more than Johnson had, and it
does not appear that he cared any more for painting, although he became
a splendid patron of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he commissioned to paint
several portraits of his distinguished friends for the decoration of the
library at Streatham. To his munificence in this respect the world owes
its finest portraits of Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick, the painter himself,
and Mrs. Thrale.
The debt which we feel we owe to Thrale on this account is, however,
somewhat discounted when we learn that this enthusiastic patron of
art never paid the painter for his work. He left the pictures and the
obligation to pay for them as a legacy to his widow--and to pay for
them at more than the current rate for each into the bargain. Sir Joshua
Reynolds was as good a man of business as Thrale was an indifferent
one. At the time of his painting the portraits his price for a
three-quarter-length picture was £35, but in the course of a year or two
he felt it necessary to charge £50 for the same size, and this was the
price which the unfortunate widow had to pay for her husband's pose as
the munificent patron of the Arts.
Men of the stamp of Thrale usually have no vices.
They are highly respected. If they had a vice or two they would be
beloved. He had a solitary failing, but it did not win for him the
affection of any one: it was gluttony. For years of his life he gave
himself up to the coarsest form of indulgence. He was not a gourmet: he
did not aim at the refinements of the table or at those daintinesses of
cuisine which in the days of intemperate eaters and drinkers proved so
fatally fascinating to men of many virtues; no, his was the vice of the
trough. He ate for the sake of eating, unmindful of the nature of the
dish so long as it was plentiful enough to keep him employed for an hour
or two.
The dinner-table of the famous Streatham Park must have been a spectacle
for some of the philosophers who sat round it. We know what was the food
that Johnson's soul loved, and we know how he was accustomed to partake
of it. He rioted in pork, and in veal baked with raisins, and when he
sat down to some such dainty he fed like a wild animal. He used his
fingers as though they were claws, tearing the flesh from the bone
in his teeth, and swallowing it not wholly without sound. It is not
surprising to learn that his exertions caused the veins in his forehead
to swell and the beads of perspiration to drop from his scholarly brow,
nor can any one who has survived this account of his muscular feat at
the dinner-table reasonably be amazed to hear that when so engaged, he
devoted himself to the work before him to the exclusion of every other
interest in life. He was oblivious of anything that was going on around
him. He was deaf to any remark made by a neighbour, and for himself
articulation was suspended. Doubtless the feeble folk on whom he had
been trampling in the drawing-room felt that his peculiarities of
feeding, though revolting to the squeamish, were not without a bright
side. They had a chance of making a remark at such intervals without
being gored--“gored,” it will be remembered, was the word employed by
Boswell in playful allusion to the effect of his argumentative powers.
Thanks to the careful habits of some of the guests at this famous house
we know what fare was placed before the Gargantuan geniuses at one of
these dinners. Here is the _carte du jour_, “sufficient for twelve,” as
the cookery book says:
“First course, soups at head and foot, removed by fish and a saddle
of mutton; second course, a fowl they call galena at head and a capon
larger than some of our Irish turkeys at foot; third course, four
different sorts of ices, pine-apple, grape, raspberry and a fourth; in
each remove there were fourteen dishes.” The world is indebted to an
Irish clergyman for these details. It will be seen that they did not
include much that could be sneered at as bordering on the kickshaw.
All was good solid English fare--just the sort to make the veins in a
gormandiser's forehead to swell and to induce the lethargy from which
Thrale suffered. He usually fell asleep after dinner; one day he failed
to awake, and he has not awakened since.
Of course Johnson, being invariably in delicate health, was compelled to
put himself on an invalid's diet when at home. He gives us a sample of
a _diner maigre_ at Bolt Court. Feeling extremely ill, he wrote to Mrs.
Thrale that he could only take for dinner “skate, pudding, goose, and
green asparagus, and could have eaten more but was prudent.” He adds,
“Pray for me, dear Madam,”--by no means an unnecessary injunction, some
people will think, when they become aware of the details of the meal of
an invalid within a year or two of seventy.
It was after one of the Streatham dinners that Mrs. Thrale ventured to
say a word or two in favour of Garrick's talent for light gay poetry,
and as a specimen repeated his song in _Florizel and Perdita_, and dwelt
with peculiar pleasure on this line:
_I'd smile with the simple and dine with the poor._
This is Boswell's account of the matter, and he adds that Johnson cried,
“Nay, my dear lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with the
simple! What folly is that? And who would feed with the poor that can
help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise and feed with the rich!”
Quite so; beyond a doubt Johnson spoke from the bottom of his
heart--nay, from a deeper depth still.
Boswell was amazed to find that Garrick's “sensibility” as a writer was
irritated when he related the story to him, and in Mrs. Thrale's copy of
Johnson she made a note--“How odd to go and tell the man!”
It was not at all odd that Boswell, being a professional tale-bearer and
mischief-maker, should tell the man; but it is odd that Garrick should
be irritated, the fact being that the sally was directed against a
line which he did not write. What Garrick did write was something very
different. The verse, which was misquoted, runs thus:
That giant Ambition we never can dread;
Our roofs are too low for so lofty a head;
Content and sweet Cheerfulness open our door,
They smile with the simple and feed with the poor.
Such a muddle as was made of the whole thing can only be attributed to
the solidity of the Streatham fare.
It was inevitable that Thrale could not continue over-eating himself
with impunity. He was warned more than once by his doctors that he was
killing himself, and yet when he had his first attack every one was
shocked. He recovered temporarily, and all his friends implored him to
cultivate moderation at the dinner-table. A touch of humour is to be
found among the details of the sordid story, in his wife's begging
Johnson--Johnson of the swollen forehead and the tokens of his
submission to the primeval curse in the eating of his bread--to try to
reason the unhappy man out of his dreadful vice. After wiping from the
front of his coat the remains of the eighth peach which he had eaten
before breakfast, or the dregs of his nineteenth cup of tea from
his waistcoat, Johnson may have felt equal to the duty. He certainly
remonstrated with Thrale. It was all to no purpose, however; he had a
second attack of apoplexy in the spring of 1780, and we hear that he was
copiously “blooded.” He recovered and went to Bath to recruit. It was
during this visit to Bath that the brewery was attacked by the Gordon
rioters. On returning to London he failed to induce his constituents to
remain faithful to him, and he continued eating voraciously for another
year. He began a week of gorging on April 1st, 1781. His wife implored
him to be more moderate, and Johnson said very wisely, “Sir, after the
denunciation of your physicians this morning, such eating is little
better than suicide.” It was all to no purpose. He survived the gorge
of Sunday and Monday, but that of Tuesday was too much for him. He was
found by his daughter on the floor in a fit of apoplexy, and died the
next morning.
Such was the man whose memory was outraged by the marriage of his
widow with Piozzi, an Italian musician, whose ability was so highly
appreciated that his earnings, even when he had lost his voice, amounted
to £1200 a year, a sum equal to close upon £2500 of our money. And yet
Johnson had the effrontery to suggest in that letter of his to Mrs.
Thrale, which we have quoted, that she would do well to live in England,
so that her money might be under her own eye!
The truth is that Mrs. Thrale was in embarrassed circumstances when she
married Signor Piozzi. Her worthy husband left her an annuity of £2000,
which was to be reduced by £800 in the event of her marrying again; and
also £500 for her immediate expenses. Johnson wrote to her, making
her acquainted with this fact, in order, it would seem, to allay any
unworthy suspicion which she might entertain as to the extent of her
husband's generosity. But his last will and testament cannot have wholly
dispersed the doubt into which her experience of Mr. Thrale may have
led her. For a man who had been making from £16,000 to £20,000 a year
to leave his wife only £2000 a year, with a possibility of its being
reduced to £1200, would not strike any one as being generous to a point
of recklessness. When, however, it is remembered that Thrale's wife
plucked him and his business from the verge of bankruptcy more than
once, that she bore him fourteen children, and that she lived with him
for eighteen years, all question as to the generosity of his bequest to
her vanishes. But when, in addition, it is remembered that the lady's
fortune at her marriage to Thrale amounted to £10,000, all of which he
pocketed, and that later on she brought him another £500 a year, that
it was her mother's money, added to the sum which she herself collected
personally, which saved the brewery from collapse--once again at
the sacrifice of her infant--all question even of common fairness
disappears, and the meanness of the man stands revealed.
[Illustration: 0083]
It was through the exertions and by the business capacity of his widow
that the brewery was sold for £135,000. She was the only one of the
trustees who knew anything definite about the value of the property,
and had she not been on the spot, that astute Mr. Perkins could have so
worked the concern that he might have been able to buy it in a year or
two for the value of the building materials. And yet when she became
involved in a lawsuit that involved the paying of £7000, she had
difficulty in persuading her daughters' trustees to advance her the
money, although the security of the mortgage which she offered for
the accommodation would have satisfied any bankers. A wretch named
Crutchley, who was one of this precious band of incompetents, on the
completion of the deed bade her thank her daughters for keeping her out
of gaol. It is not recorded that the lady replied, though she certainly
might have done so, and with truth on her side, that if her daughters
had kept her out of a gaol she had kept her daughters out of a
workhouse. She would have done much better to have gone to her friends
the Barclays, whose bank had a hundred and fifty years ago as high a
reputation for probity combined with liberality as the same concern
enjoys to-day.
Enough of the business side of Mrs. Thrale's second marriage has
been revealed to make it plain that Piozzi was not influenced by any
mercenary motives in the transaction. On the contrary, it was he who
came to her assistance when she was in an extremity, and by the prompt
loan of £1000 extricated her from her embarrassment, and left the next
day for Italy, without having any hope of marrying her.
Johnson's verdict on Piozzi, communicated to Miss Seward, was that
he was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession.
Unfortunately for this musical enthusiast and devotee to beauty, Miss
Seward met Piozzi on his return from Italy with his wife. (His excellent
control of her money had resulted in every penny of the mortgage being
paid, and of the lodgment of £1500 to their credit in the bank). And
Miss Seward, writing from Lichfield--more of the irony of Fate--in 1787,
affirmed that the great Lichfield man “did not tell me the truth when
he asserted that Piozzi was an ugly dog, without particular skill in
his profession. M. Piozzi is a handsome man in middle life, with
gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his
profession. Though he has not a powerful or fine-toned voice, he sings
with transcending grace and expression. I was charmed with his perfect
expression on his instrument. Surely the finest sensibilities must
vibrate through his frame, since they breathe so sweetly through his
song.” From this verdict no person who was acquainted with Signor Piozzi
differed. Mrs. Thrale's marriage with Piozzi was as fortunate for her as
her first marriage was for Thrale.