Part 12

Miss Seward made it her happy boast that the number and the warmth of Mr. Hayley’s tributes--inserted duly in her album--raised her to a rivalry with Swift’s Stella, or Prior’s Chloe. “Our four years’ correspondence has been enriched with a galaxy of little poetic gems of the first water.” Nor was the lady backward in returning compliment for compliment. That barter of praise, that exchange of felicitation, which is both so polite and so profitable, was as well understood by our sentimental ancestors as it is in this hard-headed age. Indeed, I am not sure that the Muse did not sometimes calculate more closely then than she ventures to do to-day. We know that Canon Seward wrote an elegiac poem on a young nobleman who was held to be dying, but who--perversely enough--recovered; whereupon the reverend eulogist changed the name, and transferred his heartfelt lamentations to another youth whose death was fully assured. In the same business-like spirit Miss Seward paid back Mr. Hayley flattery for flattery, until even the slow-witted satirists of the period made merry over this commerce of applause.

_Miss Seward._ Pride of Sussex, England’s glory, Mr. Hayley, is that you?

_Mr. Hayley._ Ma’am, you carry all before you, Trust me, Lichfield swan, you do.

_Miss Seward._ Ode, dramatic, epic, sonnet, Mr. Hayley, you’re divine!

_Mr. Hayley._ Ma’am, I’ll give my word upon it, You yourself are all the Nine.

Moore, as became a poet of ardent temperament, wrote the most gallant album verses of his day; for which reason, and because his star of fame rode high, he endured sharp persecution at the hands of admiring but covetous friends. Young ladies asked him in the most offhand manner to “address a poem” to them; and women of rank smiled on him in ballrooms, and confided to him that they were keeping their albums virgin of verse until “an introduction to Mr. Moore” should enable them to request _him_ to write on the opening page. “I fight this off as well as I can,” he tells Lord Byron, who knew both the relentlessness of such demands and the compliant nature of his friend. On one occasion Lady Holland showed Moore some stanzas which Lord Holland had written in Latin and in English, on the subject of a snuff-box given her by Napoleon; bidding him imperiously “do something of the kind,” and adding that she greatly desired a corresponding tribute from Lord Byron. Moore wisely declined to make any promises for Byron (one doubts whether the four lines which that nobleman eventually contributed afforded her ladyship much pleasure), but wrote his own verses before he was out of bed the next morning, and carried them to Holland House, expecting to breakfast with its mistress. He found her, however, in such a captious mood, so out of temper with all her little world, that, although he sat down to the table, he did not venture to hint his hunger; and as no one asked him to eat or drink, he slipped off in half an hour, and sought (his poem still in his pocket) the more genial hospitality of Rosset’s restaurant. Had all this happened twenty years earlier, Moore’s self-esteem would have been deeply wounded; but the poet was by now a man of mark, and could afford to laugh at his own discomfiture.

Moore’s album verses may be said to make up in warmth what they lack in address. Minor poets--minims like William Robert Spencer--surpassed him easily in adroitness; and sometimes won for themselves slender but abiding reputations by expressing with consummate ease sentiments they did not feel. Spencer’s pretty lines beginning,--

Too late I stayed,--forgive the crime! Unheeded flew the hours: How noiseless falls the foot of time That only treads on flowers!

--lines which all our grandmothers had by heart--may still be found in compilations of English verse. Their dexterous allusions to the diamond sparks in Time’s hour-glass, and to the bird-of-paradise plumage in his grey wings, their veiled and graceful flattery, contrast pleasantly with Moore’s Hibernian boldness, with his offhand demand to be paid in kisses for his songs--

That rosy mouth alone can bring What makes the bard divine; Oh, Lady! how my lip would sing, If once ’twere prest to thine.

A discreet young woman might have hesitated to show _this_ album page to friends.

Byron’s “tributes,” when he paid them, were singularly chill. He may have buried his heart at Mrs. Spencer Smith’s feet; but the lines in her album which record this interment are eloquent of a speedy resurrection. When Lady Blessington demanded some verses, he wrote them; but he explained with almost insulting lucidity that his heart was as grey as his head (he was thirty-one), and that he had nothing warmer than friendship to offer in place of extinguished affections. Moore must have wearied painfully of albums and of their rapacious demands; yet to the end of his life he could be harassed into feigning a poetic passion; but Byron stood at bay. He was a hunted creature, and the instinct of self-preservation taught him savage methods of escape.

There are people who, from some delicacy of mental fibre, find it exceedingly difficult to be rude; and there are people who--like Charles Lamb--have a curious habit of doing what they do not want to do, and what they know is not worth doing, for the sake of giving pleasure to some utterly insignificant acquaintance. The first class lacks a valuable weapon in life’s warfare. The second class is so small, and the motives which govern it are so inscrutable, that we are apt to be exasperated by its amiability. It is easy to sympathize with Thackeray, who, being badgered to write in an album already graced by the signatures of several distinguished musicians, said curtly: “What! among all those fiddlers!” This hardy British superciliousness commends itself to our sense of humour, no less than to our sense of self-protection. A great deal has been said, especially by Frenchmen, about the wisdom of polite denials; but a rough word, spoken in time, is seldom without weight in England.

Yet, for a friend, Thackeray found no labour hard. The genial tolerance of “The Pen and the Album” suggests something akin to affection for these pillaging little books when the right people owned them,--when they belonged to “Chesham Place.” Locker tells a pleasant story of meeting Thackeray in Pall Mall, on his way to Kensington, and offering to join him in his walk. This offer was declined, Thackeray explaining that he had some rhymes trotting through his head, and that he was trying to polish them off in the course of a solitary stroll. A few days later they met again, and Thackeray said, “I finished those verses, and they are very nearly being very good. I call them ‘Mrs. Katherine’s Lantern.’ I did them for Dickens’s daughter.”

“Very nearly being very good!” This is an author’s modest estimate. Readers there are who have found them so absolutely good that they leaven the whole heavy mass of album verse. Shall not a century of extortion on the one side and debility on the other be forgiven, because upon one blank page, the property of one thrice fortunate young woman, were written these lines, fragrant with imperishable sentiment:--

When he was young as you are young, When he was young, and lutes were strung, And love-lamps in the casement hung.

But when we turn to Lamb, and find him driving his pen along its unwilling way, and admitting ruefully that the road was hard, we see the reverse of the medal, and we resent that inexplicable sweetness of temper which left him defenceless before marauders.

My feeble Muse, that fain her best would Write at command of Frances Westwood, But feels her wits not in their best mood.

Why should Frances Westwood have commanded his services? Why should Frances Brown, “engaged to a Mr. White,” have wrung from him a dozen lines of what we should now call “copy”? She had no recognizable right to that copy; but Lamb confided to Mrs. Moxon that he had sent it to her at twenty-four hours’ notice, because she was going to be married and start with her husband for India. Also that he had forgotten what he had written, save only two lines:--

May your fame And fortune, Frances, Whiten with your name!

of which conceit he was innocently proud.

Mrs. Moxon (Emma Isola) was herself an old and hardened offender. Her album, enriched with the spoils of a predatory warfare, travelled far afield, extorting its tribute of verse. We find Lamb first paying, as was natural, his own tithes, and then actually aiding and abetting injustice by sending the book to Mr. Procter (Barry Cornwall), with an irresistible appeal for support.

“I have another favour to beg, which is the beggarliest of beggings; a few lines of verse for a young friend’s album (six will be enough). M. Burney will tell you who I want ’em for. A girl of gold. Six lines--make ’em eight--signed Barry C----. They need not be very good, as I chiefly want ’em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously obliged by any refuse scraps. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be ‘headstrong lovers of their own wills, having albums.’ I fled hither to escape the albumean persecution, and had not been in my new house twenty-four hours when a daughter of the next house came in with a friend’s album, to beg a contribution, and, the following day, intimated she had one of her own. Two more have sprung up since. ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be.’ New Holland has albums. The age is to be complied with.”

* * * * *

“Ask for this little book a token of remembrance from friends, and from fellow students, and from wayfarers whom you may never see again. He who gives you his name and a few kind words, gives you a treasure which shall keep his memory green.”

So wrote Goethe--out of the abyss of German sentimentality--in his son’s album; and the words have a pleasant ring of good fellowship and unforced fraternity. They are akin to those gracious phrases with which the French monarchy--“despotism tempered by epigram”--was wont to designate the taxes that devoured the land. There was a charming politeness in the assumption that taxes were free gifts, gladly given; but those who gave them knew.

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Beattie’s _Minstrel_.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.