Part 2

To this array of feminine virtue and feminine authorship, Lamb was singularly unresponsive. He was not one of the _literati_ honoured by Lady de Crespigny’s correspondence. He eluded the society of Miss Porter, though she was held to be handsome,--for a novelist. (“The only literary lady I ever knew,” writes Miss Mitford, “who didn’t look like a scarecrow to keep birds from cherries.”) He said unkindly of Miss Landon that, if she belonged to him, he would lock her up and feed her on bread and water until she left off writing poetry. And for Miss Wesley he entertained a cordial animosity, only one degree less lively than his sentiments towards Miss Benger. Miss Wesley had a lamentable habit of sending her effusions to be read by reluctant men of letters. She asked Lamb for Coleridge’s address, which he, to divert the evil from his own head, cheerfully gave. Coleridge, very angry, reproached his friend for this disloyal baseness; but Lamb, with the desperate instinct of self-preservation, refused all promise of amendment. “You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you,” he wrote tartly, “in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burs in the wind.”... “Of all God’s creatures,” he cries again, in an excess of ill-humour, “I detest letters-affecting, authors-hunting ladies.” Alas for Miss Benger when she hunted hard, and the quarry turned at bay!

An atmosphere of inexpressible dreariness hangs over the little coterie of respectable, unilluminated writers, who, to use Lamb’s priceless phrase, encouraged one another in mediocrity. A vapid propriety, a mawkish sensibility were their substitutes for real distinction of character or mind. They read Mary Wollstonecraft’s books, but would not know the author; and when, years later, Mrs. Gaskell presented the widowed Mrs. Shelley to Miss Lucy Aikin, that outraged spinster turned her back upon the erring one, to the profound embarrassment of her hostess. Of Mrs. Inchbald, we read in “Public Characters” for 1811: “Her moral qualities constitute her principal excellence; and though useful talents and personal accomplishments, of themselves, form materials for an agreeable picture, moral character gives the polish which fascinates the heart.” The conception of goodness then in vogue is pleasingly illustrated by a passage from one of Miss Elizabeth Hamilton’s books, which Miss Benger in her biography of that lady (now lost to fame) quotes appreciatively:--

“It was past twelve o’clock. Already had the active and judicious Harriet performed every domestic task; and, having completely regulated the family economy for the day, was quietly seated at work with her aunt and sister, listening to Hume’s ‘History of England,’ as it was read to her by some orphan girl whom she had herself instructed.”

So truly ladylike had the feminine mind grown by this time, that the very language it used was refined to the point of ambiguity. Mrs. Barbauld writes genteelly of the behaviour of young girls “to the other half of their species,” as though she could not bear to say, simply and coarsely, men. So full of content were the little circles who listened to the “elegant lyric poetess,” Mrs. Hemans, or to “the female Shakespeare of her age,” Miss Joanna Baillie (we owe both these phrases to the poet Campbell), that when Crabb Robinson was asked by Miss Wakefield whether he would like to know Mrs. Barbauld, he cried enthusiastically: “You might as well ask me whether I should like to know the Angel Gabriel!”

In the midst of these sentimentalities and raptures, we catch now and then forlorn glimpses of the Immortals,--of Wordsworth at a literary entertainment in the house of Mr. Hoare of Hampstead, sitting mute and miserable all evening in a corner,--which, as Miss Aikin truly remarked, was “disappointing and provoking;” of Lamb carried by the indefatigable Crabb Robinson to call on Mrs. Barbauld. This visit appears to have been a distinct failure. Lamb’s one recorded observation was that Gilbert Wakefield had a peevish face,--an awkward remark, as Wakefield’s daughter sat close at hand and listening. “Lamb,” writes Mr. Robinson, “was vexed, but got out of the scrape tolerably well,”--having had, indeed, plenty of former experiences to help him on the way.

There is a delightful passage in Miss Jane Porter’s diary which describes at length an evening spent at the house of Mrs. Fenwick, “the amiable authoress of ‘Secrecy.’” (Everybody was the amiable authoress of something. It was a day, like our own, given over to the worship of ink.) The company consisted of Miss Porter and her sister Maria, Miss Benger and her brother, the poet Campbell, and his nephew, a young man barely twenty years of age. The lion of the little party was of course the poet, who endeared himself to Mrs. Fenwick’s heart by his attentions to her son, “a beautiful boy of six.”

“This child’s innocence and caresses,” writes Miss Porter gushingly, “seemed to unbend the lovely feelings of Campbell’s heart. Every restraint but those which the guardian angels of tender infancy acknowledge was thrown aside. I never saw Man in a more interesting point of view. I felt how much I esteemed the author of the ‘Pleasures of Hope.’ When we returned home, we walked. It was a charming summer night. The moon shone brightly. Maria leaned on Campbell’s arm. I did the same by Benger’s. Campbell made some observations on _pedantic_ women. I did not like it, being anxious for the respect of this man. I was jealous about how nearly he might think _we_ resembled that character. When the Bengers parted from us, Campbell observed my abstraction, and with sincerity I confessed the cause. I know not what were his replies; but they were so gratifying, so endearing, so marked with truth, that when we arrived at the door, and he shook us by the hand, as a sign of adieu immediately prior to his next day’s journey to Scotland, we parted with evident marks of being all in tears.”

It is rather disappointing, after this outburst of emotion, to find Campbell, in a letter to his sister, describing Miss Porter in language of chilling moderation: “Among the company was Miss Jane Porter, whose talents my _nephew_ adores. She is a pleasing woman, and made quite a conquest of him.”

Miss Benger was only one of the many aspirants to literary honours whose futile endeavours vexed and affronted Charles Lamb. In reality she burdened him far less than others who, like Miss Betham and Miss Stoddart, succeeded in sending him their verses for criticism, or who begged him to forward the effusions to Southey,--an office he gladly fulfilled. Perhaps Miss Benger’s vivacity jarred upon his taste. He was fastidious about the gayety of women. Madame de Staël considered her one of the most interesting persons she had met in England; but the approval of this “impudent clever” Frenchwoman would have been the least possible recommendation to Lamb. If he had known how hard had been Miss Benger’s struggles, and how scanty her rewards, he might have forgiven her that sad perversity which kept her toiling in the field of letters. She had had the misfortune to be a precocious child, and had written at the age of thirteen a poem called “The Female Geniad,” which was dedicated to Lady de Crespigny, and published under the patronage of that honoured dame. Youthful prodigies were then much in favour. Miss Mitford comments very sensibly upon them, being filled with pity for one Mary Anne Browne, “a fine tall girl of fourteen, and a full-fledged authoress,” who was extravagantly courted and caressed one season, and cruelly ignored the next. The “Female Geniad” sealed Miss Benger’s fate. When one has written a poem at thirteen, and that poem has been printed and praised, there is nothing for it but to keep on writing until Death mercifully removes the obligation.

It is needless to say that the drama--which then, as now, was the goal of every author’s ambition--first fired Miss Benger’s zeal. When we think of Miss Hannah More as a successful playwright, it is hard to understand how any one could fail; yet fail Miss Benger did, although we are assured by her biographer that “her genius appeared in many ways well adapted to the stage.” She next wrote a mercilessly long poem upon the abolition of the slave-trade (which was read only by anti-slavery agitators), and two novels,--“Marian,” and “Valsinore: or, the Heart and the Fancy.” Of these we are told that “their excellences were such as genius only can reach”; and if they also missed their mark, it must have been because--as Miss Aikin delicately insinuates--“no judicious reader could fail to perceive that the artist was superior to the work.” This is always unfortunate. It is the work, and not the artist, which is offered for sale in the market-place. Miss Benger’s work is not much worse than a great deal which did sell, and she possessed at least the grace of an unflinching and courageous perseverance. Deliberately, and without aptitude or training, she began to write history, and in this most difficult of all fields won for herself a hearing. Her “Life of Anne Boleyn,” and her “Memoirs of Mary, Queen of Scots,” were read in many an English schoolroom; their propriety and Protestantism making them acceptable to the anxious parental mind. A single sentence from “Anne Boleyn” will suffice to show the ease of Miss Benger’s mental attitude, and the comfortable nature of her views:--

“It would be ungrateful to forget that the mother of Queen Elizabeth was the early and zealous advocate of the Reformation, and that, by her efforts to dispel the gloom of ignorance and superstition, she conferred on the English people a benefit of which, in the present advanced state of knowledge and civilization, it would be difficult to conceive or to appreciate the real value and importance.”

The “active and judicious Harriet” would have listened to this with as much complacence as to Hume.

In “La Belle Assemblée” for April, 1823, there is an engraving of Miss Smirke’s portrait of Miss Benger. She is painted in an imposing turban, with tight little curls, and an air of formidable sprightliness. It was this sprightliness which was so much admired. “Wound up by a cup of coffee,” she would talk for hours, and her friends really seem to have liked it. “Her lively imagination,” writes Miss Aikin, “and the flow of eloquence it inspired, aided by one of the most melodious of voices, lent an inexpressible charm to her conversation, which was heightened by an intuitive discernment of character, rare in itself, and still more so in combination with such fertility of fancy and ardency of feeling.”

This leaves little to be desired. It is not at all like the Miss Benger of Lamb’s letter, with her vapid pretensions and her stupid insolence. Unhappily, we see through Lamb’s eyes, and we cannot see through Miss Aikin’s. Of one thing only I feel sure. Had Miss Benger, instead of airing her trivial acquirements, told Lamb that when she was a little girl, bookless and penniless, at Chatham, she used to read the open volumes in the booksellers’ windows, and go back again and again, hoping that the leaves might be turned, she would have touched a responsive chord in his heart. Who does not remember his exquisite sympathy for “street-readers,” and his unlikely story of Martin B----, who “got through two volumes of ‘Clarissa,’” in this desultory fashion. Had he but known of the shabby, eager child, staring wistfully at the coveted books, he would never have written the most amusing of his letters, and Miss Benger’s name would be to-day unknown.

WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG

And give you, mixed with western sentimentalism, Some glimpses of the finest orientalism.

“Stick to the East,” wrote Byron to Moore, in 1813. “The oracle, Staël, told me it was the only poetic policy. The North, South, and West have all been exhausted; but from the East we have nothing but Southey’s unsaleables, and these he has contrived to spoil by adopting only their most outrageous fictions. His personages don’t interest us, and yours will. You will have no competitors; and, if you had, you ought to be glad of it. The little I have done in that way is merely a ‘voice in the wilderness’ for you; and if it has had any success, that also will prove that the public are orientalizing, and pave the way for you.”

There is something admirably business-like in this advice. Byron, who four months before had sold the “Giaour” and the “Bride of Abydos” to Murray for a thousand guineas, was beginning to realize the commercial value of poetry; and, like a true man of affairs, knew what it meant to corner a poetic market. He was generous enough to give Moore the tip, and to hold out a helping hand as well; for he sent him six volumes of Castellan’s “Mœurs des Ottomans,” and three volumes of Toderini’s “De la Littérature des Turcs.” The orientalism afforded by text-books was the kind that England loved.

From the publication of “Lalla Rookh” in 1817 to the publication of Thackeray’s “Our Street” in 1847, Byron’s far-sighted policy continued to bear golden fruit. For thirty years Caliphs and Deevs, Brahmins and Circassians, rioted through English verse; mosques and seraglios were the stage properties of English fiction; the bowers of Rochnabed, the Lake of Cashmere, became as familiar as Richmond and the Thames to English readers. Some feeble washings of this great tidal wave crossed the estranging sea, to tint the pages of the New York “Mirror,” and kindred journals in the United States. Harems and slave-markets, with beautiful Georgians and sad, slender Arab girls, thrilled our grandmothers’ kind hearts. Tales of Moorish Lochinvars, who snatch away the fair daughters--or perhaps the fair wives--of powerful rajahs, captivated their imaginations. Gazelles trot like poodles through these stories, and lend colour to their robust Saxon atmosphere. In one, a neglected “favourite” wins back her lord’s affection by the help of a slave-girl’s amulet; and the inconstant Moslem, entering the harem, exclaims, “Beshrew me that I ever thought another fair!”--which sounds like a penitent Tudor.

A Persian’s Heaven is easily made, ’Tis but black eyes and lemonade;

and our oriental literature was compounded of the same simple ingredients. When the New York “Mirror,” under the guidance of the versatile Mr. Willis, tried to be impassioned and sensuous, it dropped into such wanton lines as these to a “Sultana”:--

She came,--soft leaning on her favourite’s arm, She came, warm panting from the sultry hours, To rove mid fragrant shades of orange bowers, A veil light shadowing each voluptuous charm.

And for this must Lord Byron stand responsible.

The happy experiment of grafting Turkish roses upon English boxwood led up to some curious complications, not the least of which was the necessity of stiffening the moral fibre of the Orient--which was esteemed to be but lax--until it could bear itself in seemly fashion before English eyes. The England of 1817 was not, like the England of 1908, prepared to give critical attention to the decadent. It presented a solid front of denial to habits and ideas which had not received the sanction of British custom; which had not, through national adoption, become part of the established order of the universe. The line of demarcation between Providence and the constitution was lightly drawn. Jeffrey, a self-constituted arbiter of tastes and morals, assured his nervous countrymen that, although Moore’s verse was glowing, his principles were sound.

“The characters and sentiments of ‘Lalla Rookh’ belong to the poetry of rational, honourable, considerate, and humane Europe; and not to the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia. So far as we have yet seen, there is no sound sense, firmness of purpose, or principled goodness, except among the natives of Europe and their genuine descendants.”

Starting with this magnificent assumption, it became a delicate and a difficult task to unite the customs of the East with the “principled goodness” of the West; the “sound sense” of the Briton with the fervour and fanaticism of the Turk. Jeffrey held that Moore had effected this alliance in the most tactful manner, and had thereby “redeemed the character of oriental poetry”; just as Mr. Thomas Haynes Bayly, ten years later, “reclaimed festive song from vulgarity.” More carping critics, however, worried their readers a good deal on this point; and the nonconformist conscience cherished uneasy doubts as to Hafed’s irregular courtship and Nourmahal’s marriage lines. From across the sea came the accusing voice of young Mr. Channing in the “North American,” proclaiming that “harlotry has found in Moore a bard to smooth her coarseness and veil her effrontery, to give her languor for modesty, and affectation for virtue.” The English “Monthly Review,” less open to alarm, confessed with a sigh “a depressing regret that, with the exception of ‘Paradise and the Peri,’ no great moral effect is either attained or attempted by ‘Lalla Rookh.’ To what purpose all this sweetness and delicacy of thought and language, all this labour and profusion of Oriental learning? What head is set right in one erroneous notion, what heart is softened in one obdurate feeling, by this luxurious quarto?”

It is a lamentable truth that Anacreon exhibits none of Dante’s spiritual depth, and that la reine Margot fell short of Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. Nothing could make a moralist of Moore. The light-hearted creature was a model of kindness, of courage, of conjugal fidelity; but--reversing the common rule of life--he preached none of the virtues that he practised. His pathetic attempts to adjust his tales to the established conventions of society failed signally of their purpose. Even Byron wrote him that little Allegra (as yet unfamiliar with her alphabet) should not be permitted to read “Lalla Rookh”; partly because it wasn’t proper, and partly--which was prettily said--lest she should discover “that there was a better poet than Papa.” It was reserved for Moore’s followers to present their verses and stories in the chastened form acceptable to English drawing-rooms, and permitted to English youth. “La Belle Assemblée” published in 1819 an Eastern tale called “Jahia and Meimoune,” in which the lovers converse like the virtuous characters in “Camilla.” Jahia becomes the guest of an infamous sheik, who intoxicates him with a sherbet composed of “sugar, musk, and amber,” and presents him with five thousand sequins and a beautiful Circassian slave. When he is left alone with this damsel, she addresses him thus: “I feel interested in you, and present circumstances will save me from the charge of immodesty, when I say that I also love you. This love inspires me with fresh horror at the crimes that are here committed.”

Jahia protests that he respectfully returns her passion, and that his intentions are of an honourable character, whereupon the circumspect maiden rejoins: “Since such are your sentiments, I will perish with you if I fail in delivering you”; and conducts him, through a tangle of adventures, to safety. Jahia then places Meimoune under the chaperonage of his mother until their wedding day; after which we are happy to know that “they passed their lives in the enjoyment of every comfort attending on domestic felicity. If their lot was not splendid or magnificent, they were rich in mutual affection; and they experienced that fortunate medium which, far removed from indigence, aspires not to the accumulation of immense wealth, and laughs at the unenvied load of pomp and splendour, which it neither seeks, nor desires to obtain.”

It is to be hoped that many obdurate hearts were softened, and many erroneous notions were set right by the influence of a story like this. In the “Monthly Museum” an endless narrative poem, “Abdallah,” stretched its slow length along from number to number, blooming with fresh moral sentiments on every page; while from an arid wilderness of Moorish love songs, and Persian love songs, and Circassian love songs, and Hindu love songs, I quote this “Arabian” love song, peerless amid its peers:--

Thy hair is black as the starless sky, And clasps thy neck as it loved its home; Yet it moves at the sound of thy faintest sigh, Like the snake that lies on the white sea-foam.

I love thee, Ibla. Thou art bright As the white snow on the hills afar; Thy face is sweet as the moon by night, And thine eye like the clear and rolling star.

But the snow is poor and withers soon, While thou art firm and rich in hope; And never (like thine) from the face of the moon Flamed the dark eye of the antelope.

The truth and accuracy of this last observation should commend the poem to all lovers of nature.

It is the custom in these days of morbid accuracy to laugh at the second-hand knowledge which Moore so proudly and so innocently displayed. Even Mr. Saintsbury says some unkind things about the notes to “Lalla Rookh,”--scraps of twentieth-hand knowledge, _he_ calls them,--while pleasantly recording his affection for the poem itself, an affection based upon the reasonable ground of childish recollections. In the well-ordered home of his infancy, none but “Sunday books” might be read on Sundays in nursery or schoolroom. “But this severity was tempered by one of those easements often occurring in a world, which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other day; and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the drawing-room was fit Sunday reading. The consequence was that from the time I could read until childish things were put away, I used to spend a considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading a collection of books, four of which were Scott’s poems, ‘Lalla Rookh,’ ‘The Essays of Elia,’ and Southey’s ‘Doctor.’ Therefore it may be that I rank ‘Lalla Rookh’ too high.”

Blessed memories, and thrice blessed influences of childhood! But if “Lalla Rookh,” like “Vathek,” was written to be the joy of imaginative little boys and girls (alas for those who now replace it with “Allan in Alaska,” and “Little Cora on the Continent”), the notes to “Lalla Rookh” were, to my infant mind, even more enthralling than the poem. There was a sketchiness about them, a detachment from time and circumstance--I always hated being told the whole of everything--which led me day after day into fresh fields of conjecture. The nymph who was encircled by a rainbow, and bore a radiant son; the scimitars that were so dazzling they made the warriors wink; the sacred well which reflected the moon at midday; and the great embassy that was sent “from some port of the Indies”--a welcome vagueness of geography--to recover a monkey’s tooth, snatched away by some equally nameless conqueror;--what child could fail to love such floating stars of erudition?

Our great-grandfathers were profoundly impressed by Moore’s text-book acquirements. The “Monthly Review” quoted a solid page of the notes to dazzle British readers, who confessed themselves amazed to find a fellow countryman so much “at home” in Persia and Arabia. Blackwood authoritatively announced that Moore was familiar, not only “with the grandest regions of the human soul,”--which is expected of a poet,--but also with the remotest boundaries of the East; and that in every tone and hue and form he was “purely and intensely Asiatic.” “The carping criticism of paltry tastes and limited understandings faded before that burst of admiration with which all enlightened spirits hailed the beauty and magnificence of ‘Lalla Rookh.’”