Gossip in a Library by Edmund Gosse

E >> Edmund Gosse >> Gossip in a Library

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

_Fancy's a term for every blackguardism_,

though this is much too severe. But rats, and they who catch them,
badgers, and they who bait them, cocks, and they who fight them, and,
above all, men with fists, who professionally box with them, come
under the category of the _Fancy_. This, then, is the theme which the
poet before us, living under the genial sway of the First Gentleman of
Europe, undertook to place beneath the special patronage of Apollo.
The attractions, however, of _The Learned Ring_, set all other
pleasures in the shade, and the name, Peter Corcoran, which is a
pseudonym, is, I suppose, chosen merely because the initials are
those of the then famous Pugilistic Club. The poet is, in short, the
laureate of the P.C., and his book stands in the same relation to
_Boxiana_ that Campbell's lyrics do to Nelson's despatches. To
understand the poet's position, we ought to be dressed as he was; we
ought

_to wear a tough drab coat
With large pearl buttons all afloat
Upon the waves of plush; to tie
A kerchief of the king-cup die
(White-spotted with a small bird's eye)
Around the neck,--and from the nape
Let fall an easy> fan-like cape_,

and, in fact, to belong to that incredible company of Corinthian Tom
and Jerry Hawthorn over whom Thackeray let fall so delightfully the
elegiac tear.

Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would
contain this very remarkable sonnet:

ON THE NONPAREIL.

"_None but himself can be his parallel."

With marble-coloured shoulders,--and keen eyes,
Protected by a forehead broad and white--
And hair cut close lest it impede the sight,
And clenched hands, firm, and of punishing size,--
Steadily held, or motion'd wary-wise
To hit or stop,--and kerchief too drawn tight
O'er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight
The inconstant wind, that all too often flies,--
The Nonpareil stands! Fame, whose bright eyes run o'er
With joy to see a Chicken of her own.
Dips her rich pen in_ claret_, Under the letter R, first on the score,
"Randall,--John,--Irish Parents,--age not known,--
Good with both hands, and only ten stone four!_"

Be not too hard on this piece of barbarism, virtuous reader! Virtue is
well revenged by the inevitable question! "Who was John Randall?"
In 1820 it was said: "Of all the great men in this age, in poetry,
philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendent talent
as Randall, no one who combines the finest natural powers with the
most elegant and finished acquired ones." Now, if his memory be
revived for a moment, this master of science, who doubled up an
opponent as if he were plucking a flower, and whose presence turned
Moulsey Hurst into an Olympia, is in danger of being confounded with
the last couple of drunken Irishwomen who have torn out each other's
hair in handfuls in some Whitechapel courtyard. The mighty have
fallen, the stakes and ring are gone forever, and Virtue is avenged.
The days of George IV. are so long, long gone past that a paradoxical
creature may be forgiven for a sigh over the ashes of the glory of
John Randall.

It is strange how much genuine poetry lingers in this odd collection
of verses in praise of prizefighting. There are lines and phrases that
recall Keats himself, though truly the tone of the book is robust
enough to satisfy the most impassioned of Tory editors. As it happens,
it was written by Keats's dearest friend, by John Hamilton Reynolds,
whom the great poet mentions so affectionately in the latest of all
his letters. Reynolds has been treated with scant consideration by the
critics. His verses, I protest, are no whit less graceful or sparkling
than those of his more eminent companions, Leigh Hunt and Barry
Cornwall. His _Garden of Florence_ is worthy of the friend of Keats.
We have seen how his _Peter Bell_, which was Peter Bell the First,
took the wind out of Shelley's satiric sails and fluttered the
dove-cotes of the Lakeists. He was as smart as he could be, too clever
to live, in fact, too light a weight for a grave age. In _The Fancy_,
which Keats seems to refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820,
Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom Moore's _Tom Crib_, but
if so, he vastly improves on that rather vulgar original. He takes as
his motto, with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, and
persuades us

_nor need we blame the licensed joys,
Though false to Nature's quiet equipoise:
Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive_.

We can fancy the countenance of the Cumbrian sage at seeing his words
thus nimbly adapted to be an apology for prize-fighting.

The poems are feigned to be the remains of one Peter Corcoran,
student at law. A simple and pathetic memoir--which deserved to be as
successful as that most felicitous of all such hoaxes, the life of
the supposed Italian poet, Lorenzo Stecchetti--introduces us to the
unfortunate young Irishman, who was innocently engaged to a charming
lady, when, on a certain August afternoon, he strayed by chance into
the Fives Court, witnessed a "sparring-exhibition" by two celebrated
pugilists, and was thenceforth a lost character. From that moment
nothing interested him except a favourite hit or a scientific
parry, and his only topic of conversation became the noble art of
self-defence. To his disgusted lady-love he took to writing eulogies
of the Chicken and the Nonpareil. On one occasion he appeared before
her with two black eyes, for he could not resist the temptation of
taking part in the boxing, and "it is known that he has parried the
difficult and ravaging hand of Randall himself." The attachment of the
young lady had long been declining, and she took this opportunity of
forbidding him her presence for the future. He felt this abandonment
bitterly, but could not surrender the all-absorbing passion which was
destroying him. He fell into a decline, and at last died "without a
struggle, just after writing a sonnet to _West-Country Dick_."

The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a kind of sporting
opera called _King Tims the First_, which is the tragedy of an
emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in _ottava rima_, called _The
Fields of Tothill_, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic
manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get
his story under weigh; and miscellaneous pieces. Some of these latter
are simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written in Peter
Corcoran's earlier days. The most characteristic and the best deal,
however, with the science of fisticuffs. Here are the lines sent
by the poet to his mistress on the painful occasion which we have
described above, "after a casual turn up":

_Forgive me,--and never, oh, never again,
I'll cultivate light blue or brown inebriety;[1]
I'll give up all chance of a fracture or sprain,
And part, worst of all, with Pierce Egan's[2] society.

Forgive me,--and mufflers I'll carefully pull
O'er my knuckles hereafter, to make them, well-bred;
To mollify digs in the kidneys with wool,
And temper with leather a punch of the head_.

_And, Kate!--if you'll fib from your forehead that frown,
And spar with a lighter and prettier tone;--
I'll look,--if the swelling should ever go down,
And these eyes look again,--upon you, love, alone!_

[Footnote 1: "Heavy _brown_ with a dash of _blue_ in it" was the fancy
phrase for stout mixed with gin.]

[Footnote 2: The author of _Boxiana_ and _Life in London_.]

It must be confessed that a less "fancy" vocabulary would here have
shown a juster sense of Peter's position. Sometimes there is no
burlesque intention apparent, but, in their curious way, the verses
seem to express a genuine enthusiasm. It is neither to be expected nor
to be feared that any one nowadays will seriously attempt to advocate
the most barbarous of pastimes, and therefore, without conscientious
scruples, we may venture to admit that these are very fine and very
thrilling verses in their own unexampled class:

_Oh, it is life! to see a proud
And dauntless man step, full of hopes,
Up to the P.C. stakes and ropes,
Throw in his hat, and with a spring
Get gallantly within the ring;
Eye the wide crowd, and walk awhile
Taking all cheerings with a smile;
To see him strip,--his well-trained form,
White, glowing, muscular, and warm,
All beautiful in conscious power,
Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;
His glossy and transparent frame,
In radiant plight to strive for fame!
To look upon the clean-shap'd limb
In silk and flannel clothed trim;--
While round the waist the kerchief tied
Makes the flesh glow in richer pride.
'Tis more than life, to watch him hold
His hand forth, tremulous yet bold,
Over his second's, and to clasp
His rival's in a quiet grasp;
To watch the noble attitude
He takes,--the crowd in breathless mood,--
And then to see, with adamant start,
The muscles set,--and the great heart
Hurl a courageous, splendid light
Into the eye,--and then--the_ FIGHT.

This is like a lithograph out of one of Pierce Egan's books, only much
more spirited and picturesque, and displaying a far higher and more
Hellenic sense of the beauty of athletics. Reynolds' little volume,
however, enjoyed no success. The genuine amateurs of the prize-ring
did not appreciate being celebrated in good verses, and _The Fancy_
has come to be one of the rarest of literary curiosities.

ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS

ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS; _a Satire on William Gifford. By Leigh Hunt.
London, 1823: printed for John Hunt, 22, Old Bond Street, and 38,
Tavistock Street, Covent Garden_.

If the collector of first editions requires an instance from which
to justify the faith which is in him against those who cry out that
bibliography is naught, Leigh Hunt is a good example to his hand. This
active and often admirable writer, during a busy professional life,
issued a long series of works in prose and verse which are of every
variety of commonness and scarcity, but which have never been, and
probably never will be, reprinted as a whole. Yet not to possess the
works of Leigh Hunt is to be ill-equipped for the minute study of
literary history at the beginning of the century. The original 1816
edition of _Rimini_, for instance, is of a desperate rarity, yet not
to be able to refer to it in the grotesqueness of this its earliest
form is to miss a most curious proof of the crude taste of the young
school out of which Shelley and Keats were to arise. The scarcest
of all Leigh Hunt's poetical pamphlets, but by no means the least
interesting, is that whose title stands at the head of this chapter.
Of _Ultra-crepidarius_, which was "printed for John Hunt" in 1823, it
is believed that not half a dozen copies are in existence, and it has
never been reprinted. It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere
despisers of first editions may allow a special interest.

From internal evidence we find that _Ultra-crepidarius; a Satire
on William Gifford_, was sent to press in the summer of 1823, from
Maiano, soon after the break-up of Hunt's household in Genoa, and
Byron's departure for Greece. The poem is the "stick" which had been
recently mentioned in the third number of the _Liberal_:

_Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick,
Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick?_

It had been written in 1818, in consequence of the famous review in
the _Quarterly_ of Keats's _Endymion_, a fact which the biographers of
Keats do not seem to have observed. Why did Hunt not immediately print
it? Perhaps because to have done so would have been worse than useless
in the then condition of public taste and temper. What led Hunt to
break through his intention of suppressing the poem it might be
difficult to discover. At all events, in the summer of 1823 he
suddenly sent it home for publication; whether it was actually
published is doubtful, it was probably only circulated in private to a
handful of sympathetic Tory-hating friends.

_Ultra-crepidarius_ is written in the same anapaestic measure as _The
Feast of the Poets_, but is somewhat longer. As a satire on William
Gifford it possessed the disadvantage of coming too late in the day to
be of any service to anybody. At the close of 1823 Gifford, in failing
health, was resigning the editorial chair of the _Quarterly_, which he
had made so formidable, and was retiring into private life, to die in
1826. The poem probably explains, however, what has always seemed a
little difficult to comprehend, the extreme personal bitterness with
which Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, since the
slayer of the Della Cruscans was not the man to tolerate being
treated as though he were a Della Cruscan himself. However narrow the
circulation of _Ultra-crepidarius_ may have been, care was no doubt
taken that the editor of the _Quarterly Review_ should receive one
copy at his private address, and Leigh Hunt returned from Italy in
time for that odd incident to take place at the Roxburgh sale, when
Barron Field called his attention to the fact that "a little man, with
a warped frame, and a countenance between the querulous and the angry,
was gazing at me with all his might." Hunt tells this story in the
_Autobiography_, from which, however, he omits all allusion to his
satire.

The latter opens with the statement that:

'_Tis now about fifty or sixty years since
(The date of a charming old boy of a Prince)--_

Mercury was in a state of rare fidget from the discovery that he had
lost one of his precious winged shoes, and had in consequence dawdled
away a whole week in company with Venus, not having dreamed that it
was that crafty goddess herself, who, wishing for a pair of them, had
sent one of Mercury's shoes down to Ashburton for a pattern. Venus
confesses her peccadillo, and offers to descend to the Devonshire
borough with her lover, and see what can have become of the ethereal
shoe. As they reach the ground, they meet with an ill-favoured boot
of leather, which acknowledges that it has ill-treated the delicate
slipper of Mercury. This boot, of course, is Gifford, who had been a
shoemaker's apprentice in Ashburton. Mercury curses this unsightly
object, and part of his malediction may here be quoted.

_I hear some one say "Murrain take him, the ape!"
And so Murrain shall, in a bookseller's shape;
An evil-eyed elf, in a down-looking flurry,
Who'd fain be a coxcomb, and calls himself_ Murray.
_Adorn thou his door, like the sign of the Shoe,
For court-understrappers to congregate to;
For_ Southey _to come, in his dearth of invention,
And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension;
For_ Croker _to lurk with his spider-like limb in,
And stock his lean bag with waylaying the women;
And Jove only knows for what creatures beside
To shelter their envy and dust-liking pride,
And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights,
In the dark take their shuffles, which they call then flights;
Be these the court-critics and vamp a Review.
And by a poor figure, and therefore a true,
For it suits with thy nature, both shoe-like and slaughterly
Be its hue leathern, and title the_ Quarterly,
_Much misconduct, and see that the others
Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers;
Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate,
Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate,
Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short,
Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court_.

* * * * *

_And finally, thou, my old soul of the tritical,
Noting, translating, high slavish, hot critical,
Quarterly-scutcheon'd, great heir to each dunce,
Be Tibbald, Cook, Arnall, and Dennis at once_

At the end, Mercury dooms the ugly boot to take the semblance of
a man, and the satire closes with its painful metamorphosis into
Gifford. The poem is not without cleverness, but it is chiefly
remarkable for a savage tone which is not, we think, repeated
elsewhere throughout the writings of Hunt. The allusions to Gifford's
relations, nearly half a century earlier, to that Earl Grosvenor
who first rescued him from poverty, the well-deserved scorn of his
intolerable sneers at Perdita Robinson's crutches:

_Hate Woman, thou block in the path of fair feet;
If Fate want a hand to distress them, thine be it;
When the Great, and their flourishing vices, are mention'd
Say people "impute" 'em, and show thou art pension'd;
But meet with a Prince's old mistress_ discarded,
_And_ then _let the world see how vice is rewarded_--

the indications of the satirist's acquaintance with the private life
of his victim, all these must have stung the editor of the _Quarterly_
to the quick, and are very little in Hunt's usual manner, though he
had examples for them in Peter Pindar and others. There is a very
early allusion to "Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley," where, "calm, up above
thee, they soar and they shine." This was written immediately after
the review of _Endymion_ in the _Quarterly_.

At the close is printed an extremely vigorous onslaught of Hazlitt's
upon Gifford, which is better known than the poem which it
illustrates. In itself, in its preface, and in its notes alike this
very rare pamphlet presents us with a genuine curiosity of literature.

THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S POEMS

ENGLAND'S TRUST AND OTHER POEMS. _By Lord John Manners. London:
printed for J.G. & J. Rivington, St. Paul's Church Yard, and Waterloo
Place, Pall Mall_. 1841.

My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord John Manners took his
seat last night, in the Upper House, as the Duke of Rutland. These
little romantic surprises are denied to Americans, who do not find
that old friends get new names, which are very old names, in the
course of a night. My Transatlantic readers will never have to grow
accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of Mount Auburn, and I
firmly believe that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastisement to
be hopelessly ennobled. But my thoughts went wanderting back at my
breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which
was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was
an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a
peer, and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Amphion.
So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, to that corner
of my library where the _peches de jeunesse_ stand--the little books
of early verses which the respectable authors of the same would
destroy if they could--and I took down _England's Trust_.

Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of them fresh from Oxford
and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good
families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic
democracy. They called themselves "Young England," and the chronicle
of them--is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's
_Coningsby_? In the hero of that novel people saw a portrait of the
leader of the group, the Hon. George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also
the poems now before us, _parvus non parvae pignus amicitiae_,
were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was
doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he
said: "Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never
irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." It was the
theory of Young England that the historic memory must be awakened in
the lower classes; that utilitarianism was sapping the very vitals of
society, and that ballads and May-poles and quaint festivities
and processions of a loyal peasantry were the proper things for
politicians to encourage. It was all very young, and of course it
came to nothing. But I do not know that the Primrose League is any
improvement upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland looks
back across the half-century he sees something to smile at, but
nothing to blush for.

One of the notions that Young England had got hold of was that famous
saying of Fletcher of Saltoun's friend about making the ballads of
a people. So they set themselves verse-making, and a quaint little
collection of books it was that they produced, all smelling alike
at this time of day, with a faint, faded perfume of the hay-stack,
countrified and wild. Mr. Smythe, who presently became the seventh
Viscount Strangford and one of the wittiest of Morning Chroniclers,
only to die bitterly lamented before the age of forty, wrote _Historic
Fancies_, Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University College, Oxford, and
afterwards a leading spirit among English Catholics, published _The
Cherwell Water-Lily_, in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet
volume came the poems of Lord John Manners.

When _England's Trust_ appeared, its author had just left Cambridge.
Almost immediately afterward, it was decided that Young England ought
to be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian chivalries, it was
believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly Lord John
Manners presented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Conservative
candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, and so was the
other Tory candidate, a man already distinguished, and at present
known to the entire world as Mr. W.E. Gladstone. On the hustings, Lord
John Manners was a good deal heckled, and in particular he was teased
excessively about a certain couplet in _England's Trust_. I am not
going to repeat that couplet here, for after nearly half a century
the Duke of Rutland has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary
indiscretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume for themselves,
which, of course, I have no power to prevent their doing, they will
probably exclaim:

"Was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote _that?_" for if frequency of
quotation is the hall-mark of popularity, his Grace must be one of the
most popular of our living poets.

There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume. Its
weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ignoble about
it, and what is weak without being in the least base has already a
negative distinction. The author hopes to be a Lovelace or a Montrose,
equally ready to do his monarch service with sword or pen. The Duke of
Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he has been something less
brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country,
through an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 1841,
thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a
return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith
over all its Paynim foes. "The worst evils," he writes, "from which we
are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect
of the rules of the Church." He was full of Newman and Pusey, of the
great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervour blowing through
England from the common-room of Oriel. Now all is changed past
recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception of Cardinal
Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic, in
his Birmingham cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through the
length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost
faces that fed the pure passion of his youth.

The hand which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar
was that of the Rev. Frederick William Faber, and a great number
of the poems in _England's Trust_ are dedicated to him openly or
secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant
to read:

_Dear Friend! thou askest me to sing our loves,
And sing them fain would I; but I do fear
To mar so soft a theme; a theme that moves
My heart unto its core. O friend most dear!
No light request is thine; albeit it proves
Thy gentleness and love, that do appear
When absent thus, and in soft looks when near.
Surely, if ever two fond hearts were, twined
In a most holy, mystic knot, so now
Are ours; not common are the ties that bind
My soul to thine; a dear Apostle thou,
I a young Neophyte that yearns to find
The sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow
The Cross, dread sign of his baptismal vow!_

The Apostle was only twelve months older than the Neophyte, who was
in his twenty-third year, but he was a somewhat better as well as
stronger poet. _The Cherwell Water-Lily_ is rather a rare book now,
and I may perhaps be allowed to give an example of Faber's style.
It is from one of many poems in which, with something borrowed too
consciously from Wordsworth, who was the very Apollo of Young England,
there Is yet a rendering of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and
of the delicate sylvan scenery which surrounds it, which is wholly
original;

_There is a well, a willow-shaded spot.
Cool in the noon-tide gleam,
With rushes nodding in the little stream,
And blue forget-me-not.

Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge
With big bright eyes of gold;
And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold
Their blossoms strange and large.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13