Adventures Among Books Part 7

CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830

The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long is one of the happier moments in life. Whatever we may think of life when we contemplate it as a whole, it is a delight to discover what one has sought for years, especially if the book be a book which you really want to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the fas.h.i.+on of collecting. Perhaps n.o.body ever collected before

THE DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY A NECROMAUNT

In Three Chimeras

BY THOMAS T. STODDART.

"Is't like that lead contains her?-- It were too gross To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."-- _Shakespeare_.

EDINBURGH: Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh, And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.

MDCCCx.x.xI.

This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent good reason, as will be shown. But first of the author. Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was born in 1810. He died in 1880. Through all his pilgrimage of three-score years and ten, his "rod and staff did comfort him," as the Scottish version of the Psalms has it; nay, his staff was his rod. He "was an angler," as he remarked when a friend asked: "Well, Tom, what are you doing now." He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like Scott, within hearing of the Tweed. His memoir, published by his daughter, in "Stoddart's Angling Songs" (Blackwood), is an admirable biography, _quo fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis_.

But it is with the "young Tom Stoddart," the poet of twenty, not with the old angling sage, that we have to do. Miss Stoddart has discreetly republished only the Angling Songs of her father, the pick of them being cla.s.sical in their way. Now, as Mr. Arnold writes:--

"Two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood, One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude."

The young Stoddart's two desires were poetry and fis.h.i.+ng. He began with poetry. "At the age of ten his whole desire was to produce an immortal tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers with which he worked, and with no meaner tool. Every other dramatic form he despised." It is curious to think of the schoolboy, the born Romanticist, labouring at these things, while Gerard de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile Gautier, and Petrus Borel were boys also--boys of the same ambitions, and with much the same romantic tastes. Stoddart had, luckily, another love besides the Muse. "With the spring and the May fly, the dagger dipped in gore paled before the supple rod, and the dainty midge." Finally, the rod and midge prevailed.

"Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing, Mouse body and laverock wing."

But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fis.h.i.+ng ditties, he wrote and published the volume whose t.i.tle-page we have printed, "The Death Wake." The lad who drove home from an angling expedition in a hea.r.s.e had an odd way of combining his amus.e.m.e.nts. He lived among poets and critics who were anglers--Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line, they say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De Quincey--

"No fisher But a well-wisher To the game,"

as Scott has it--these were his companions, older or younger. None of these, certainly not Wilson, nor Hogg, nor Aytoun, were friends of the Romantic school, as ill.u.s.trated by Keats and Sh.e.l.ley. None of them probably knew much of Gautier, De Nerval, Borel, le lycanthrope, and the other boys in that boyish movement of 1830. It was only Stoddart, unconsciously in sympathy with Paris, and censured by his literary friends, who produced the one British Romantic work of 1830. The t.i.tle itself shows that he was partly laughing at his own performance; he has the mockery of _Les Jeunes France_ in him, as well as the wormy and obituary joys of _La Comedie de la Mort_. The little book came out, inspired by "all the poetasters." Christopher North wrote, four years later, in _Blackwood's Magazine_, a tardy review. He styled it "an ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd t.i.tle, written in a strange, namby-pamby sort of style, between the weakest of Sh.e.l.ley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall." The book "fell dead from the Press,"

far more dead than "Omar Khayyam." Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss Stoddart kindly informs me, and it was doomed to the flames. The "remainder," the bulk of the edition, was returned to the poet in sheets, and by him was deposited in a garret. The family had a cook, one Betty, a descendant, perhaps, of "that unhappy Betty or Elizabeth Barnes, cook of Mr. Warburton, Somerset Herald," who burned, among other quartos, Shakespeare's "Henry I.," "Henry II.," and "King Stephen." True to her inherited instincts, Mr. Stoddart's Betty, slowly, relentlessly, through forty years, used "The Death Wake" for the needs and processes of her art. The whole of the edition, except probably a few "presentation copies," perished in the kitchen. As for that fell cook, let us hope that

"The Biblioclastic Dead Have diverse pains to brook, They break Affliction's bread With Betty Barnes, the Cook,"

as the author of "The Bird Bride" sings.

Miss Stoddart had just informed me of this disaster, which left one almost hopeless of ever owning a copy of "The Death Wake," when I found a brown paper parcel among many that contained to-day's minor poetry "with the author's compliments," and lo, in this unpromising parcel was the long-sought volume! Ever since one was a small boy, reading Stoddart's "Scottish Angler," and old _Blackwood's_, one had pined for a sight of "The Necromaunt," and here, clean in its "pure purple mantle" of smooth cloth, lay the desired one!

"Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought, It gave itself, and was not bought,"

being, indeed, the discovery and gift of a friend who fishes and studies the Lacustrine Muses.

The copy has a peculiar interest; it once belonged to Aytoun, the writer of "The Scottish Cavaliers," of "The Bon Gaultier Ballads," and of "Firmilian," the scourge of the Spasmodic School. Mr. Aytoun has adorned the margins with notes and with caricatures of skulls and cross-bones, while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet to the author, and a lyric in doggerel. Surely this is, indeed, a literary curiosity. The sonnet runs thus:--

"O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritest Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare, Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest And gropest in each death-corrupted lair?

Seek'st thou for maggots such as have affinity With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink?

Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity?

Here is enough of genius to convert Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare, Then why transform the diamond into dirt, And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair, Into a medley of creations foul, As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?"

No doubt Mr. Stoddart's other pa.s.sion for angling, in which he used a Scottish lat.i.tude concerning bait, {7} impelled him to search for "worms and maggots":--

"Fire and f.a.ggots, Worms and maggots,"

as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the matter of "The Death Wake."

Then, why, some one may ask, write about "The Death Wake" at all? Why rouse again the nightmare of a boy of twenty? Certainly I am not to say that "The Death Wake" is a pearl of great price, but it does contain pa.s.sages of poetry--of poetry very curious because it is full of the new note, the new melody which young Mr. Tennyson was beginning to waken. It antic.i.p.ates Beddoes, it coincides with Gautier and _Les Chimeres_ of Gerard, it answers the accents, then unheard in England, of Poe. Some American who read out of the way things, and was not too scrupulous, recognised, and robbed, a brother in Tom Stoddart. Eleven years after "The Death Wake" appeared in England, it was published in _Graham's Magazine_, as "Agatha, a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras," by Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro. Now Poe was closely connected with _Graham's Magazine_, and after "Arthur Gordon Pym," "Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro"

does suggest Edgar Allen Poe. But Poe was not Tasistro.

So much for the literary history of the Lunacy.

The poem begins--Chimera I. begins:--

"An anthem of a sister choristry!

And, like a windward murmur of the sea, O'er silver sh.e.l.ls, so solemnly it falls!"

The anthem accompanies a procession of holy fathers towards a bier;

"Agathe Was on the lid--a name. And who? No more!

'Twas only Agathe."

A solitary monk is prowling around in the moonlit cathedral; he has a brow of stony marble, he has raven hair, and he falters out the name of Agathe. He has said adieu to that fair one, and to her sister Peace, that lieth in her grave. He has loved, and loves, the silent Agathe. He was the son of a Crusader,

"And Julio had fain Have been a warrior, but his very brain Grew fevered at the sickly thought of death, And to be stricken with a want of breath."

On the whole he did well not to enter the service. Mr. Aytoun has here written--"A rum Cove for a hussar."

"And he would say A curse be on their laurels.

And anon Was Julio forgotten and his line-- No wonder for this frenzied tale of mine."

How? asks Aytoun, nor has the grammatical enigma yet been unriddled.

"Oh! he was wearied of this pa.s.sing scene!

But loved not Death; his purpose was between Life and the grave; and it would vibrate there Like a wild bird that floated far and fair Betwixt the sun and sea!"

So "he became monk," and was sorry he had done so, especially when he met a pretty maid,

"And this was Agathe, young Agathe, A motherless fair girl,"

whose father was a kind of Dombey, for

"When she smiled He bade no father's welcome to the child, But even told his wish, and will'd it done, For her to be sad-hearted, and a nun!"

So she "took the dreary veil."

They met like a blighted Isabella and Lorenzo:

"They met many a time In the lone chapels after vesper chime, They met in love and fear."