Part 5

They grow faint with rapture when they enter her presence, and, when she repels their advances, they signify their disappointment by gnashing their teeth, and beating their heads against the wall. Rejection cannot alienate their faithful hearts; years and absence cannot chill their fervour. They belong to a race of men who, if they ever existed at all, are now as extinct as the mastodon.

It was Miss Jane Porter who successfully transferred to a conquering hero that exquisite sensibility of soul which had erstwhile belonged to the conquering heroine,--to the Emmelines and Adelinas of fiction. Dipping her pen “in the tears of Poland,” she conveyed the glittering drops to the eyes of “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” whence they gush in rills,--like those of the Prisoner of Chillon’s brother. Thaddeus is of such exalted virtue that strangers in London address him as “excellent young gentleman,” and his friends speak of him as “incomparable young man.” He rescues children from horses’ hoofs and from burning buildings. He nurses them through small-pox, and leaves their bedsides in the most casual manner, to mingle in crowds and go to the play. He saves women from insult on the streets. He is kind even to “that poor slandered and abused animal, the cat,”--which is certainly to his credit. Wrapped in a sable cloak, wearing “hearse-like plumes” on his hat, a star upon his breast, and a sabre by his side, he moves with Hamlet’s melancholy grace through the five hundred pages of the story. “His unrestrained and elegant conversation acquired new pathos from the anguish that was driven back to his heart: like the beds of rivers which infuse their own nature with the current, his hidden grief imparted an indescribable interest and charm to all his sentiments and actions.”

What wonder that such a youth is passionately loved by all the women who cross his path, but whom he regards for the most part with “that lofty tranquillity which is inseparable from high rank when it is accompanied by virtue.” In vain Miss Euphemia Dundas writes him amorous notes, and entraps him into embarrassing situations. In vain Lady Sara Roos--married, I regret to say--pursues him to his lodgings, and wrings “her snowy arms” while she confesses the hopeless nature of her infatuation. The irreproachable Thaddeus replaces her tenderly but firmly on a sofa, and as soon as possible sends her home in a cab. It is only when the “orphan heiress,” Miss Beaufort, makes her appearance on the scene, “a large Turkish shawl enveloping her fine form, a modest grace observable in every limb,” that the exile’s haughty soul succumbs to love. Miss Beaufort has been admirably brought up by her aunt, Lady Somerset, who is a person of great distinction, and who gives “conversaziones,” as famous in their way as Mrs. Proudie’s.--“There the young Mary Beaufort listened to pious divines of every Christian persuasion. There she gathered wisdom from real philosophers; and, in the society of our best living poets, cherished an enthusiasm for all that is great and good. On these evenings, Sir Robert Somerset’s house reminded the visitor of what he had read or imagined of the School of Athens.”

Never do hero and heroine approach each other with such spasms of modesty as Thaddeus and Miss Beaufort. Their hearts expand with emotion, but their mutual sense of propriety keeps them remote from all vulgar understandings. In vain “Mary’s rosy lips seemed to breathe balm while she spoke.” In vain “her beautiful eyes shone with benevolence.” The exile, standing proudly aloof, watches with bitter composure the attentions of more frivolous suitors. “His arms were folded, his hat pulled over his forehead; and his long dark eye-lashes shading his downcast eyes imparted a dejection to his whole air, which wrapped her weeping heart round and round with regretful pangs.” What with his lashes, and his hidden griefs, the majesty of his mournful moods, and the pleasing pensiveness of his lighter ones, Thaddeus so far eclipses his English rivals that they may be pardoned for wishing he had kept his charms in Poland. Who that has read the matchless paragraph which describes the first unveiling of the hero’s symmetrical leg can forget the sensation it produces?

“Owing to the warmth of the weather, Thaddeus came out this morning without boots; and it being the first time the exquisite proportion of his limb had been seen by any of the present company excepting Euphemia” (why had Euphemia been so favoured?), “Lascelles, bursting with an emotion which he would not call envy, measured the count’s fine leg with his scornful eye.”

When Thaddeus at last expresses his attachment for Miss Beaufort, he does so kneeling respectfully in her uncle’s presence, and in these well-chosen words: “Dearest Miss Beaufort, may I indulge myself in the idea that I am blessed with your esteem?” Whereupon Mary whispers to Sir Robert: “Pray, Sir, desire him to rise. I am already sufficiently overwhelmed!” and the solemn deed is done.

“Thaddeus of Warsaw” may be called the “Last of the Heroes,” and take rank with the “Last of the Mohicans,” the “Last of the Barons,” the “Last of the Cavaliers,” and all the finalities of fiction. With him died that noble race who expressed our great-grandmothers’ artless ideals of perfection. Seventy years later, D’Israeli made a desperate effort to revive a pale phantom of departed glory in “Lothair,” that nursling of the gods, who is emphatically a hero, and nothing more. “London,” we are gravely told, “was at Lothair’s feet.” He is at once the hope of United Italy, and the bulwark of the English Establishment. He is--at twenty-two--the pivot of fashionable, political, and clerical diplomacy. He is beloved by the female aristocracy of Great Britain; and mysterious ladies, whose lofty souls stoop to no conventionalities, die happy with his kisses on their lips. Five hundred mounted gentlemen compose his simple country escort, and the coat of his groom of the chambers is made in Saville Row. What more could a hero want? What more could be lavished upon him by the most indulgent of authors? Yet who shall compare Lothair to the noble Thaddeus nodding his hearse-like plumes,--Thaddeus dedicated to the “urbanity of the brave,” and embalmed in the tears of Poland? The inscrutable creator of Lothair presented his puppet to a mocking world; but all England and much of the Continent dilated with correct emotions when Thaddeus, “uniting to the courage of a man the sensibility of a woman, and the exalted goodness of an angel” (I quote from an appreciative critic), knelt at Miss Beaufort’s feet.

Ten years later “Pride and Prejudice” made its unobtrusive appearance, and was read by that “saving remnant” to whom is confided the intellectual welfare of their land. Mrs. Elwood, the biographer of England’s “Literary Ladies,” tells us, in the few careless pages which she deems sufficient for Miss Austen’s novels, that there _are_ people who think these stories “worthy of ranking with those of Madame d’Arblay and Miss Edgeworth”; but that in their author’s estimation (and, by inference, in her own), “they took up a much more humble station.” Yet, tolerant even of such inferiority, Mrs. Elwood bids us remember that although “the character of Emma is perhaps too manœuvring and too plotting to be perfectly amiable,” that of Catherine Morland “will not suffer greatly even from a comparison with Miss Burney’s interesting Evelina”; and that “although one is occasionally annoyed by the underbred personages of Miss Austen’s novels, the annoyance is only such as we should feel if we were actually in their company.”

It was thus that our genteel great-grandmothers, enamoured of lofty merit and of refined sensibility, regarded Elizabeth Bennet’s relations.

ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS

Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he wrote it. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves.--DR. JOHNSON.

It is commonly believed that the extinction of verse--of verse in the bulk, which is the way in which our great-grandfathers consumed it--is due to the vitality of the novel. People, we are told, read rhyme and metre with docility, only because they wanted to hear a story, only because there was no other way in which they could get plenty of sentiment and romance. As soon as the novel supplied them with all the sentiment they wanted, as soon as it told them the story in plain prose, they turned their backs upon poetry forever.

There is a transparent inadequacy in this solution of a problem which still confronts the patient reader of buried masterpieces. Novels were plenty when Mr. William Hayley’s “Triumphs of Temper” went through twelve editions, and when Dr. Darwin’s “Botanic Garden” was received with deferential delight. But could any dearth of fiction persuade us now to read the “Botanic Garden”? Were we shipwrecked in company with the “Triumphs of Temper,” would we ever finish the first canto? Novels stood on every English book-shelf when Fox read “Madoc” aloud at night to his friends, and they stayed up, so he says, an hour after their bedtime to hear it. Could that miracle be worked to-day? Sir Walter Scott, with indestructible amiability, reread “Madoc” to please Miss Seward, who, having “steeped” her own eyes “in transports of tears and sympathy,” wrote to him that it carried “a master-key to every bosom which common good sense and anything resembling a human heart inhabit.” Scott, unwilling to resign all pretensions to a human heart, tried hard to share the Swan’s emotions, and failed. “I cannot feel quite the interest I would like to do,” he patiently confessed.

If Southey’s poems were not read as Scott’s and Moore’s and Byron’s were read (give us another Byron, and we will read him with forty thousand novels knocking at our doors!); if they were not paid for out of the miraculous depths of Murray’s Fortunatus’s purse, they nevertheless enjoyed a solid reputation of their own. They are mentioned in all the letters of the period (save and except Lord Byron’s ribald pages) with carefully measured praise, and they enabled their author to accept the laureateship on self-respecting terms. They are at least, as Sir Leslie Stephen reminds us, more readable than Glover’s “Leonidas,” or Wilkie’s “Epigoniad,” and they are shorter, too. Yet the “Leonidas,” an epic in nine books, went through four editions; whereupon its elate author expanded it into twelve books; and the public, undaunted, kept on buying it for years. The “Epigoniad” is also in nine books. It is on record that Hume, who seldom dallied with the poets, read all nine, and praised them warmly. Mr. Wilkie was christened the “Scottish Homer,” and he bore that modest title until his death. It was the golden age of epics. The ultimatum of the modern publisher, “No poet need apply!” had not yet blighted the hopes and dimmed the lustre of genius. “Everybody thinks he can write verse,” observed Sir Walter mournfully, when called upon for the hundredth time to help a budding aspirant to fame.

With so many competitors in the field, it was uncommonly astute in Mr. Hayley to address himself exclusively to that sex which poets and orators call “fair.” There is a formal playfulness, a ponderous vivacity about the “Triumphs of Temper,” which made it especially welcome to women. In the preface of the first edition the author gallantly laid his laurels at their feet, observing modestly that it was his desire, however “ineffectual,” “to unite the sportive wildness of Ariosto and the more serious sublime painting of Dante with some portion of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination, and the moral graces of Pope; and to do this, if possible, without violating those rules of propriety which Mr. Cambridge has illustrated, by example as well as by precept, in the ‘Scribleriad,’ and in his sensible preface to that elegant and learned poem.”

Accustomed as we are to the confusions of literary perspective, this grouping of Dante, Ariosto, and Mr. Cambridge does seem a trifle foreshortened. But our ancestors had none of that sensitive shrinking from comparisons which is so characteristic of our timid and thin-skinned generation. They did not edge off from the immortals, afraid to breathe their names lest it be held lèse-majesté; they used them as the common currency of criticism. Why should not Mr. Hayley have challenged a contrast with Dante and Ariosto, when Miss Seward assured her little world--which was also Mr. Hayley’s world--that he had the “wit and ease” of Prior, a “more varied versification” than Pope, and “the fire and the invention of Dryden, without any of Dryden’s absurdity”? Why should he have questioned her judgment, when she wrote to him that Cowper’s “Task” would “please and instruct the race of common readers,” who could not rise to the beauties of Akenside, or Mason, or Milton, or of his (Mr. Hayley’s) “exquisite ‘Triumphs of Temper’”? There was a time, indeed, when she sorrowed lest his “inventive, classical, and elegant muse” should be “deplorably infected” by the growing influence of Wordsworth; but, that peril past, he rose again, the bright particular star of a wide feminine horizon.

Mr. Hayley’s didacticism is admirably adapted to his readers. The men of the eighteenth century were not expected to keep their tempers; it was the sweet prerogative of wives and daughters to smooth the roughened current of family life. Accordingly the heroine of the “Triumphs,” being bullied by her father, a fine old gentleman of the Squire Western type, maintains a superhuman cheerfulness, gives up the ball for which she is already dressed, wreathes her countenance in smiles, and

with sportive ease, Prest her Piano-forte’s favourite keys.

The men of the eighteenth century were all hard drinkers. Therefore Mr. Hayley conjures the “gentle fair” to avoid even the mild debauchery of siruped fruits,--

For the sly fiend, of every art possest, Steals on th’ affection of her female guest; And, by her soft address, seducing each, Eager she plies them with a brandy peach. They with keen lip the luscious fruit devour, But swiftly feel its peace-destroying power. Quick through each vein new tides of frenzy roll, All evil passions kindle in the soul; Drive from each feature every cheerful grace, And glare ferocious in the sallow face; The wounded nerves in furious conflict tear, Then sink in blank dejection and despair.

All this combustle, to use Gray’s favourite word, about a brandy peach! But women have ever loved to hear their little errors magnified. In the matter of poets, preachers and confessors, they are sure to choose the denunciatory.

Dr. Darwin, as became a scientist and a sceptic, addressed his ponderous “Botanic Garden” to male readers. It is true that he offers much good advice to women, urging upon them especially those duties and devotions from which he, as a man, was exempt. It is true also that when he first contemplated writing his epic, he asked Miss Seward--so, at least, she said--to be his collaborator; an honour which she modestly declined, as not “strictly proper for a female pen.” But the peculiar solidity, the encyclopædic qualities of this masterpiece, fitted it for such grave students as Mr. Edgeworth, who loved to be amply instructed. It is a poem replete with information, and information of that disconnected order in which the Edgeworthian soul took true delight. We are told, not only about flowers and vegetables, but about electric fishes, and the salt mines of Poland; about Dr. Franklin’s lightning rod, and Mrs. Damer’s bust of the Duchess of Devonshire; about the treatment of paralytics, and the mechanism of the common pump. We pass from the death of General Wolfe at Quebec to the equally lamented demise of a lady botanist at Derby. We turn from the contemplation of Hannibal crossing the Alps to consider the charities of a benevolent young woman named Jones.

Sound, Nymphs of Helicon! the trump of Fame, And teach Hibernian echoes Jones’s name; Bind round her polished brow the civic bay, And drag the fair Philanthropist to day.

Pagan divinities disport themselves on one page, and Christian saints on another. St. Anthony preaches, not to the little fishes of the brooks and streams, but to the monsters of the deep,--sharks, porpoises, whales, seals and dolphins, that assemble in a sort of aquatic camp-meeting on the shores of the Adriatic, and “get religion” in the true revivalist spirit.

The listening shoals the quick contagion feel, Pant on the floods, inebriate with their zeal; Ope their wide jaws, and bow their slimy heads, And dash with frantic fins their foamy beds.

For a freethinker, Dr. Darwin is curiously literal in his treatment of hagiology and the Scriptures. His Nebuchadnezzar (introduced as an illustration of the “Loves of the Plants”) is not a bestialized mortal, but a veritable beast, like one of Circe’s swine, only less easily classified in natural history.

Long eagle plumes his arching neck invest, Steal round his arms and clasp his sharpened breast; Dark brindled hairs in bristling ranks behind, Rise o’er his back and rustle in the wind; Clothe his lank sides, his shrivelled limbs surround, And human hands with talons print the ground. Lolls his red tongue, and from the reedy side Of slow Euphrates laps the muddy tide. Silent, in shining troups, the Courtier throng Pursue their monarch as he crawls along; E’en Beauty pleads in vain with smiles and tears, Not Flattery’s self can pierce his pendant ears.

The picture of the embarrassed courtiers promenading slowly after this royal phenomenon, and of the lovely inconsiderates proffering their vain allurements, is so ludicrous as to be painful. Even Miss Seward, who held that the “Botanic Garden” combined “the sublimity of Michael Angelo, the correctness and elegance of Raphael, with the glow of Titian,” was shocked by Nebuchadnezzar’s pendant ears, and admitted that the passage was likely to provoke inconsiderate laughter.

The first part of Dr. Darwin’s poem, “The Economy of Vegetation,” was warmly praised by critics and reviewers. Its name alone secured for it esteem. A few steadfast souls, like Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, refused to accept even vegetation from a sceptic’s hands; but it was generally conceded that the poet had “entwined the Parnassian laurel with the balm of Pharmacy” in a very creditable manner. The last four cantos, however,--indiscreetly entitled “The Loves of the Plants,”--awakened grave concern. They were held unfit for female youth, which, being then taught driblets of science in a guarded and muffled fashion, was not supposed to know that flowers had any sex, much less that they practised polygamy. The glaring indiscretion of their behaviour in the “Botanic Garden,” their seraglios, their amorous embraces and involuntary libertinism, offended British decorum, and, what was worse, exposed the poem to Canning’s pungent ridicule. When the “Loves of the Triangles” appeared in the “Anti-Jacobin,” all England--except Whigs and patriots who never laughed at Canning’s jokes--was moved to inextinguishable mirth. The mock seriousness of the introduction and argument, the “horrid industry” of the notes, the contrast between the pensiveness of the Cycloid and the innocent playfulness of the Pendulum, the solemn headshake over the licentious disposition of Optics, and the description of the three Curves that requite the passion of the Rectangle, all burlesque with unfeeling delight Dr. Darwin’s ornate pedantry.

Let shrill Acoustics tune the tiny lyre, With Euclid sage fair Algebra conspire; Let Hydrostatics, simpering as they go, Lead the light Naiads on fantastic toe.

The indignant poet, frigidly vain, and immaculately free from any taint of humour, was as much scandalized as hurt by this light-hearted mockery. Being a dictator in his own little circle at Derby, he was naturally disposed to consider the “Anti-Jacobin” a menace to genius and to patriotism. His criticisms and his prescriptions had hitherto been received with equal submission. When he told his friends that Akenside was a better poet than Milton,--“more polished, pure, and dignified,” they listened with respect. When he told his patients to eat acid fruits with plenty of sugar and cream, they obeyed with alacrity. He had a taste for inventions, and first made Mr. Edgeworth’s acquaintance by showing him an ingenious carriage of his own contrivance, which was designed to facilitate the movements of the horse, and enable it to turn with ease. The fact that Dr. Darwin was three times thrown from this vehicle, and that the third accident lamed him for life, in no way disconcerted the inventor or his friends, who loved mechanism for its own sake, and apart from any given results. Dr. Darwin defined a fool as one who never in his life tried an experiment. So did Mr. Day, of “Sandford and Merton” fame, who experimented in the training of animals, and was killed by an active young colt that had failed to grasp the system.

The “Botanic Garden” was translated into French, Italian, and Portuguese, to the great relief of Miss Seward, who hated to think that the immortality of such a work depended upon the preservation of a single tongue. “Should that tongue perish,” she wrote proudly, “translations would at least retain all the host of beauties which do not depend upon felicities of verbal expression.”

If the interminable epics which were so popular in these halcyon days had condescended to the telling of stories, we might believe that they were read, or at least occasionally read, as a substitute for prose fiction. But the truth is that most of them are solid treatises on morality, or agriculture, or therapeutics, cast into the blankest of blank verse, and valued, presumably, for the sake of the information they conveyed. Their very titles savour of statement rather than of inspiration. Nobody in search of romance would take up Dr. Grainger’s “Sugar Cane,” or Dyer’s “Fleece,” or the Rev. Richard Polwhele’s “English Orator.” Nobody desiring to be idly amused would read the “Vales of Weaver,” or a long didactic poem on “The Influence of Local Attachment.” It was not because he felt himself to be a poet that Dr. Grainger wrote the “Sugar Cane” in verse, but because that was the form most acceptable to the public. The ever famous line,

“Now Muse, let’s sing of rats!”

which made merry Sir Joshua Reynolds and his friends, is indicative of the good doctor’s struggles to employ an uncongenial medium. He wanted to tell his readers how to farm successfully in the West Indies; how to keep well in a treacherous climate; what food to eat, what drugs to take, how to look after the physical condition of negro servants, and guard them from prevalent maladies. These were matters on which the author was qualified to speak, and on which he does speak with all a physician’s frankness; but they do not lend themselves to lofty strains. Whole pages of the “Sugar Cane” read like prescriptions and dietaries done into verse. It is as difficult to sing with dignity about a disordered stomach as about rats and cockroaches; and Dr. Grainger’s determination to leave nothing untold leads him to dwell with much feeling, but little grace, on all the disadvantages of the tropics.

Musquitoes, sand-flies, seek the sheltered roof, And with fell rage the stranger guest assail, Nor spare the sportive child; from their retreats Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad.

The truthfulness and sobriety of this last line deserve commendation. Cockroaches in the open _are_ displeasing to sensitive souls; and a footnote, half a page long, tells us everything we could possibly desire--or fear--to know about these insects. As an example of Dr. Grainger’s thoroughness in the treatment of such themes, I quote with delight his approved method of poisoning alligators.