English Lands Letters and Kings Part 6

"Thoughtless of Beauty, she was beauty's self Recluse among the close embowering woods.

As in the hollow breast of Apennine, Beneath the shelter of encircling hills, A myrtle rises far from human eyes, And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild; So flourished, blooming, and unseen by all, The sweet Lavinia; till at length compelled By strong necessity's supreme command, With smiling patience in her looks, she went To glean Palemon's fields."

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There are more words, but the words gleam! Pope is the master, yet mastered by rules; Thomson less a master, but free from bonds.

He tried play-writing, in those days when Fielding was just beginning in the same line, but it was not a success. After a year or two of travel upon the Continent, on some tutoring business, he published an ambitious poem (1734-1736) ent.i.tled _Liberty_--never a favorite. He had made friends, however, about the Court; and he pleasantly contrived to possess himself of some of those pensioned places, which fed unduly his natural indolence. But all will forgive him this vice, who have read his fine poem of the _Castle of Indolence_ in Spenserian verse.

It was his last work--perhaps his best, and first published in 1748, the year of his death.

One stanza from it I must quote; and shall never forget my first hearing of it, in tremulous utterance, from the lips of the venerable John Quincy Adams, after he had bid adieu (as he thought) to public life and was addressing[13] a {78} large a.s.semblage in the university town of New Haven:

"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny!

You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns by living streams at eve; Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace And I their toys to the great children leave, Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."

Most readers will think kindly and well of this poet; and if you love the country, you will think yet more kindly of him; and on summer afternoons, when cool breezes blow in at your windows and set all the leaves astir over your head, his muse--if you have made her acquaintance--will coo to you from among the branches: but you will never and nowhere find in him the precision, the vigor, the point, the polish, we found in Pope; and which you may find, too, in the fine parcel-work {79} done by Thomas Gray, who was a contemporary of Thomson's, but younger by some fifteen years.

_Thomas Gray._

You will know of that first poem of his--_Ode to Eton College_; at least you know its terminal lines, which are cited on all the high-roads:--

"Where ignorance is bliss 'Tis folly to be wise!"

All the world knows, too, his _Elegy_, on which his fame princ.i.p.ally rests. Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us, and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a church tower slanted over it.

Gray[14] was, like Milton, a London boy--born on Cornhill under the shadow almost of St. Paul's. The father was a cross-grained man, living apart from Mrs. Gray, who, it is said, by the gains of some haberdashery traffic which she set up in {80} Cornhill, sent her boy to Eton and to Cambridge. At Eton he came to know Horace Walpole, travelled with him over Europe, after leaving Cambridge, until they quarrelled and each took his own path. That quarrel, however, was mended somewhat later and Walpole became as good a friend to Gray as he could be to anybody--except Mr. Walpole.

The poet, after his father's death, undertook, in a languid way, the study of law; but finally landed again in Cambridge, and was a dilettanteish student there nearly all his days, being made a Professor of History at last; but not getting fairly into harness before the gout laid hold of him and killed him. Probably no man in English literature has so large a reputation for so little work. Gibbon regretted that he should not have completed his philosophic poem on education and government; Dr. Johnson, who spoke halting praise of his poems, thought he would have made admirable books of travel; Cowper says, "I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be written, but I like Gray's better."

The truth is, he was a fastidious, scholarly man, whose over-nicety of taste was always in {81} the way of large accomplishment. He was content to do nothing, except he did something in the best possible way. He so cherished refinements that refinements choked his impulses.

A great stickler he was, too, for social refinements--distinctions, preferments, and clap-trap--wanting his courtesies, of which he was as chary as of his poems, to have the last stamp of gentility; thus running into affectations of decorum, which, one time, made him the b.u.t.t of practical jokers at his college. Some lovers of fun there sounded an alarm of fire for the sake of seeing the elegant Mr. Gray (not then grown famous, to be sure) slipping down a rope-ladder in undress, out of his window; which he did do, but presently changed his college in dudgeon. He had, moreover, a great deal of Walpole's affected contempt for authors.h.i.+p--wanted rather to be counted an elegant gentleman who only played with letters. He writes to his friend that the proprietors of a magazine were about to print his Elegy, and says:--

"I have but one bad way to escape the honor they would inflict upon me, and therefore desire you would make {82} Dodsley print it immediately, without my name, but on his best paper and type. _If he would add a line to say it came into his hands by accident, I should like it better_."

I think he caught this starched folly (if it were folly) from Walpole.

I have heard of over-elegant people in our day with the same affectation; but, as a rule, they do not write poems so good as the _Elegy_.

Gray died, after that quiet life of his, far down in the days of George III., 1771, leaving little work done, but a very great name. He was buried, as was fitting, beside his mother, in that churchyard at Stoke, out of which the Elegy grew. And if you ever have a half day to spare in London, it is worth your while to go out to Slough (twenty miles by the Great Western road), and thence, two miles of delicious walk among shady lanes and wanton hedges, to where Stoke-Pogis Church, curiously hung over with ivy, rises amongst the graves; and if sentimentally disposed, you may linger there, till the evening shadows fall, and repeat to yourself (or anybody you like)--

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea.

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way And leaves the world to darkness and to me."

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_A Courtier._

I have spoken of the a.s.sociation of Walpole with Gray; it was not an intimate one after the two had outgrown their youth-age; indeed Walpole's a.s.sociation with n.o.body was intimate; nor was he a man whose literary reputation ever was, or ever can be great. He was son[15] of that famous British Minister of State, Sir Robert Walpole, who for many long years held the fate of England in his hand. But his son Horace cared little for politics. He was unmarried, and kept so always; had money in plenty (coming largely from Government sinecures) and a fat place at Twickenham--called Strawberry Hill; which by his vagaries in architecture and his enormous collection of bric-a-brac, he made the show place of all that region. He established a private press at this country home, and printed, among a {84} mult.i.tude of other books, a catalogue of royal and n.o.ble authors--not reckoning others so worthy of his regard; indeed, he had a well-bred contempt for ordinary literary avocations; but he wrote and published (privately at first) a romance called _The Castle of Otranto_.[16] It was "a slight thing," he told his friends, which he had dashed off in an idle hour, and which he "had not put his name to; but which succeeded so well that he did not any longer entirely keep the secret." It is a tale, quite ingenious, of mingled mystery and chivalry; there are castles in it, and huge helmets, that only giants could wear; and there are dungeons, and forlorn maidens; ghosts, and sighing lovers; mysterious sounds, and pictures that come out of their frames and walk about in the moonlight--it is a pattern book to read at night in an old country house which has long corridors and deserted rooms, where the bats fly in and out, and the doors clang and clash.

But this strange creature, Horace Walpole, is {85} known best of all by his letters[17]--nine solid volumes of them, big octavo--covering nearly the whole of his life and addressed to a half score or so of men and women on all possible topics except any serious one; and all made ready, with curious care, for publication when his death should come.

On that one point he did have serious belief--he believed he should die. This great budget of his letters is one of the most extraordinary products--if we may call it so--of literature. It is hard to say what is not touched upon in them; if he is robbed, you hear how a voice out of the night said "stop"--how he slipped his watch under his waistband--how he gave up his purse with nine guineas in it--how Lady Browne was frightened and gave up _her_ watch; if the king has gout in his toe you hear of that; if he goes to the palace he tells you who was in the ante-room and how two fellows were sweeping the floor, dancing about in sabots; how the Duc of Richelieu was pale except his nose, "which is red and wrinkled." Great hoops with brocade dresses come sailing into {86} his letters; so do all the scandals about my lady _this_, or the d.u.c.h.ess _that_; so do the votes in Parliament and reports about the last battle, if a war is in progress; and the French news, and new things at Strawberry Hill--over and over. And he does not think much of Gibbon, and does not think much of Dr. Johnson--who "has no judgment and no taste;" and why doesn't his friend Mason[18] (a third-rate poet) "show up the doctor and make an end of him?"--which is much like saying that Mr. Wardle's fat boy should make an end of Mr.

Pickwick.

Yet do not think there is no art in all this, and that you would not like them: there is art of the highest gossipy kind; and I can readily understand how his correspondents all relished immensely his letters whenever they came. There is humor and sparkle, and there are delicate touches; he approaches his lighter topics as a humming-bird approaches flowers--a swift dart {87} at them--a sniff, a whirl of wings, and away again.

Then he has that rare literary instinct of knowing just what each correspondent would like best to hear of--that's the secret of writing letters that will be welcome. You cannot interchange his letters. He tickles Lady Ossory's ear with sheerest gossip, and Lady Suffolk with talk of dress and of the last great Paris ball, and the poet Mason with bookish plat.i.tudes, and Conway with the leakings of political talk, and Cole with twaddle on art or science. You want to turn your back on him again and again for his arrant sn.o.bbish pretensions or some weak and violent prejudice; yet you want to listen again and again. It is such a pretty, lively, brisk, frolicsome, _petillant_ small-beerish talk, that engages and does not fatigue, and piques appet.i.te yet feeds you with nothings.

He grew old there in his _gim-crack_ of a palace, cultivating his flowers and his complexion; tiptoeing while he could over his waxed floors in lavender suit, with embroidered waistcoat and "partridge silk stockings," with _chapeau bas_ held before him--very reverent to any visitor of {88} distinction--and afterward (he lived almost into this century), when gout seizes him, I seem to see still--as once before[19]--the fastidious old man shuffling up and down from drawing-room to library--stopping here and there to admire some newly arrived bit of pottery--pulling out his golden snuff-box and whisking a delicate pinch into his old nostrils--then dusting his affluent s.h.i.+rt-frills with the tips of his dainty fingers, with an air of grat.i.tude to Providence for having created so fine a gentleman as Horace Walpole, and of grat.i.tude to Horace Walpole for having created so fine a place as Strawberry Hill.

_Young Mr. Johnson._

And now what a different man we come upon, living just abreast of him in that rich English century and that beautiful English country! We go into Staffords.h.i.+re and to the old town of Lichfield, to find the boy who afterward became the great lexicographer[20] and the great talker.

The {89} house in which he was born is there upon a corner of the great broadened street, opposite St. Mary's Church. We get a pleasant glimpse of the house on a page of _Our Old Home_, by Hawthorne; and another glimpse of the colossal figure of Dr. Johnson, seated in his marble chair, upon that Lichfield market-place.

His father was a bookseller; held, too, some small magistracy; was eminently respectable; loved books as well as sold them, and had a corresponding inapt.i.tude for business. The son added to indifferent schooling, here and there, a habit of large browsing along his father's shelves; was a great, ungainly lout of a boy, but marvellously quick-witted. With some help from his father, and some from friends, and with a reputation for making verses, and tastes ranging above bookstalls, he entered at Oxford when nineteen; but {90} the stings of poverty smote him there early; and after three years of irregular attendance, he left--only to find his father lapsing into bankruptcy and a fatal illness. On the settlement of the old bookseller's estate, 20 only was the portion of the son. Then follow some dreary years; he is hypochondriac and fears madness; he is under-teacher in a school; he offers to do job-work for the book-makers; he translates the narrative of a Portuguese missionary about Abyssinia; he ponders over a tragedy of _Irene_. Not much good comes of all this, when--on a sudden, our hero, who is now twenty-six, marries a widow--who admired his talents--who is twenty years his senior and has 800. Johnson was not a person to regard closely such little discrepancies as that difference in age--nor she, I suppose.

The bride is represented as not over-comely, and as one--of good judgment in most matters--who resorted to some vulgar appliances for making the most of her "good looks." Lord Macaulay[21] uses a very rampant rhetoric in his encyclopaedic {91} mention of the paint she put upon her cheeks. With the aid of her 800, Johnson determined to set up a boarding-school for young gentlemen; a gaunt country-house three miles out of Lichfield was rented and equipped and advertised; but the young gentlemen did not come.

How could they be won that way? The mistress frowsy, simpering, ancient, painted, and becurled; and Mr. Johnson, gaunt, clumsy, squinting--one side of his face badly scarred with some early surgical cut; one eye involved and drooping, and a twitchy St. Vitus's dance making all uglier. What boy would not dread a possible whipping from such a master, and what mamma would not tremble for her boy? Yet I do not believe he ever whipped hard, when he had occasion; he was kind-hearted; but his scolds at a false syntax must have been terrific and have made the floors s.h.i.+ver.

Among the boys who did venture to that Edial school was one David Garrick, whose father had been a friend of the elder Johnson; and when the school broke up--as it did presently--Johnson and David Garrick set out together for London, to {92} seek their fortune--carrying letters to some booksellers there; and Johnson carrying that half-written tragedy of _Irene_ in his pocket. Garrick's rise began early, and was brilliant, but of this we cannot speak now. Johnson knocked about those London streets--translating a little, jobbing at books a little, starving and scrimping a great deal. He fell in early with a certain Richard Savage,[22] a wild, clever, disorderly poet, as hard pinched as Johnson. According to his story, he was the son of the Countess Macclesfield, but disowned by her--he only coming to knowledge of his parentage through accident, when he was grown to manhood. Johnson tells the pathetic tale of how Savage paced up and down, at night, in sight of his mother's palatial windows, gazing grief-smitten at them, and yearning for the maternal recognition, which the heartless, dishonored woman refused. So, this castaway runs to drink and all deviltries; Johnson staying him much as {93} he can--walking with him up and down through London streets till midnight--talking poetry, philosophy, religion; hungry both of them, and many a time with only ten pence between them.

Well, at last, Savage kills his man in a tavern broil; would have been hung--the mother countess (as the story runs) hoping it would be so; but he escapes, largely through the influence of that Queen Caroline, to whom Jeanie Deans makes her eloquent plea in Scott's ever-famous novel of _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_. Savage escapes, but 'tis only to go to other bad ways, and at last he died in a Bristol jail.

All this offered material for a pathetic story, and Johnson made the most of it in his _Life of Savage_--afterward incorporated in his _Lives of the Poets_, but first published in 1744, about seven years after his coming to London. The book appeared anonymously; but its qualities gave it great vogue; and its essential averments formed the basis of all biographic and encyclopaedic[23] notices for nearly a century thereafter.

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But was the story true? There were those who doubted at the time, and had an unpleasant sense that Johnson had been wheedled by an adventurer; but demonstration of the imposture of Savage did not come till the middle of the present century. The investigations of Moy Thomas[24] would go to show that the Savage friend of Johnson's early days in London was the most arrant of impostors; and that of all the shame that rests upon him, he can only justly be relieved of that which counts him a child of such a woman as the Countess of Macclesfield. I have dwelt upon the Savage episode, not alone because it provoked one of Johnson's best pieces of prose work, but because it shows how open were his sympathies to such tales of distress, and how quick he was to lift the rod of chastis.e.m.e.nt upon wrong-doers of whatever degree.

In _London_, too, that imitative cla.s.sic poem, there shone in a glitter of couplets (which provoked Pope's praises) the same righteous indignation, and the stings--p.r.i.c.king through all his big {95} Staffords.h.i.+re bulk--of supperless-days and of shortened means:--

"By numbers here from shame or censure free All crimes are safe, but hated Poverty; This, only this, the rigid Law pursues, This, only this, provokes the snarling muse.

"The sober trader at a tattered cloak Wakes from his dream, and labors for a joke; With brisker air the silken courtiers gaze And turn the varied taunt a thousand ways."

Better than this was that poem (_Vanity of Human Wishes_) in which, even now, some of us--admiringly--

"In full flown dignity see Wolsey stand, Law in his voice, and fortune in his hand."

And the couplet leads on through Wolsey's story to the poet's coupleted sermon, with its savors of a church-bell--