Chapter 12
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 clothèd 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 _péchés 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.
That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find Beauties so rich and rare, Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden's hair And dog-grass richly twined.
A sloping bank ran round it like a crown, Whereon a purple cloud Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd, Had settled softly down.
And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells From Oxford's holy towers Came down the stream, and went among the flowers, And died in little swells_.