Part 18

An address to the reader by Thomas Flatman, in 1682, describes him as “a man every way accomplished: To the advantages of his birth, his education had added whatsoever was necessary to fit him for conversation, and render him (as he was) desirable by the best wits of the age.” Some of his writings were not free from the moral blemishes which disfigure much of the writing of that period.

JOHN OLDHAM [1653–1683], though born in Gloucestershire, is often numbered among Nottinghamshire writers because of his connexion with the Earl of Kingston, who was his patron and gave him a home for a time at Holme Pierrepoint.

In the church of that village there is a tablet to the poet’s memory. That he was a man of distinction among his literary contemporaries is clear from the fact that both Waller and Dryden paid tribute to him at his death: and his work seems to have had considerable influence upon Pope and other eighteenth-century poets. He is called in the introduction to the _Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day_, “the late ingenious Mr. John Oldham,” and in a Dictionary published in 1694 in London he is described as “The darling of the Muses, a pithy, sententious, elegant, and smooth Writer.”

He wrote Satires and Pindaric Odes, and based his work largely on imitation of such classical authors as Horace and Juvenal.

His appreciation of the schoolmaster’s calling was not very high--

“A Dancing-Master shall be better paid, Though he instructs the Heels, and you the Head.”

Oldham’s works do not allow much satisfactory quotation; but these lines may be given as a specimen of him:--

“’T has ever been the top of my Desires, The utmost height of which my wish aspires, That Heaven would bless me with a small estate, Where I might find a close obscure retreat; There, free from noise and all ambitious ends, Enjoy a few choice books, and fewer friends; Lord of myself, accountable to none, But to my conscience and my God alone: There live unthought of, and unheard of die, And grudge mankind my very memory. But since the blessing is, I find, too great For me to wish for, or expect of Fate: Yet maugre all the spite of destiny, My thoughts and actions are, and shall be free.”

From the Pindaric Ode to the memory of Mr. Charles Morwent may be cited:--

“Thy soul within such silent pomp did keep, As if humanity were lulled asleep, So gentle was thy pilgrimage beneath Time’s unheard feet scarce make less noise, Or the soft journey which a planet goes. Life seemed all calm as its last breath; A still tranquillity so husht thy breast, As if some Halcyon were its guest, And there had built her nest: It hardly now enjoys a greater rest.”

The life of ROBERT DODSLEY [1703–1764], publisher and poet, has in it a touch of romance in that, by ability, perseverance, and integrity, he raised himself from the comparatively servile position of a footman to be the friend and helper of many of the greatest men of his age, men distinguished by high birth and position or by genius, or by all three combined; and it will appear from what follows that he played no small or insignificant part in the literary life of the eighteenth century.

Dodsley was born on the 13th February 1703. The date of his birth is not recorded in the Mansfield register, but has just been discovered in an old memorandum book kept by the parish clerk, John Lodes. The omission of his birth entry from the registers suggests that his parents were perhaps Dissenters.

He is said to have been apprenticed at first to a stocking-weaver, but, disliking the trade or the conditions in which he had to work, he gave it up and became a footman. At this period of his life he published a volume of verse entitled _The Muse in Livery_. He received encouragement and support from his employer and her friends. Ultimately, with the help of £100 from Pope, who befriended him also in other ways, he set up a bookseller’s shop in Pall Mall, and from the profits of this business and his writings he was able to retire towards the close of his life with a comfortable competence. He died at Durham and was buried there.

That Dodsley held a respectable position in the world of letters is evident from the fact that Pope patronised his play of _The Toyshop_, which was put on the stage in 1735; while of his tragedy of _Cleon_ Johnson says, “if Otway had written this play, no other of his pieces would have been remembered,” praise which even Dodsley himself thought rather above the merit of his work.

As a bookseller and publisher he succeeded well. It was Dodsley who discerned the merit of Johnson’s _London_ for which he paid the author ten guineas. Later on he paid fifteen guineas for _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, and he was one of the publishers who bought _Rasselas_. Johnson alludes to him affectionately as “Doddy my patron,” and says “Dodsley first mentioned to me the scheme of an English Dictionary.” To Dodsley’s enterprise the _Annual Register_, which is continued to this day, owed its origin. This is not the place to give a full list of his works, but mention must not be omitted of his two plays, _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_, and _Sir John Cockle at Court_, which show shrewd observation of men and affairs. Dodsley’s character seems to have been very agreeable and estimable. He is described by Boswell as “worthy, modest, and ingenious,” and we have it on the testimony of Johnson and Walpole that he had the manly merit of not being ashamed to recall “the limits of his narrower fate.” He honoured the memory of his friend Shenstone the poet by publishing an edition in two volumes of his works, both prose and verse.

One or two quotations must serve to illustrate his manner of thought and diction. In the _Miller of Mansfield_ he says: “Why we are all of us lost in the dark every day of our lives, knaves keep us in the dark by their cunning, and fools by their ignorance. Divines lose us in dark mysteries, lawyers in dark cases, and statesmen in dark intrigues. Nay, the light of reason, which we so much boast of, what is it but a dark lanthorn, which just serves to prevent us from running our nose against a post perhaps, but is no more able to lead us out of the dark mists of error and ignorance, in which we are lost, than an ignis fatuus would be to conduct us out of this wood.”

In the same play the countryman describes London:--

“O! ’tis a fine place! I have seen large houses with small hospitality, great men do little actions, and fine ladies do nothing at all. I have seen the honest lawyers of Westminster, and the virtuous inhabitants of Change Alley; the politic madmen of coffee-houses, and the wise statesmen of Bedlam. I have seen merry tragedies, and sad comedies; devotion at an opera, and mirth at a sermon; I have seen fine clothes at St. James’s, and long bills at Ludgate Hill. I have seen poor grandeur and rich poverty; high honours and low flattery; great pride and no merit. In short, I have seen a fool with a title, a knave with a pension, and an honest man with a thread-bare coat.”

He wrote several songs, one of the best known of which is “The Parting Kiss.”

Dodsley sat for his portrait to Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1760. From the interesting life of Dodsley, recently written by Mr. Ralph Straus, it is abundantly clear that the bookseller was a remarkable and very worthy man, and that English literature is greatly indebted to him in many ways. It is indeed a cause for surprise that his life has not been more fully written before. He not only had a keen discernment of the literary merit of work submitted to his judgment, but he had an equally keen discernment of what the public taste required at the moment. He therefore very seldom failed in his publishing ventures. He had also a high conception of the dignity of literature, and of his responsibility as author and publisher. His conduct in respect of his partnership in the _London Chronicle_ is deserving of the highest praise, and his letter announcing his intention of relinquishing his share in that periodical is worthy, for its manly sincerity and straightforwardness, to be compared with the famous letter of Dr. Johnson to Lord Chesterfield. Says Dodsley: “However, as I am but a single person, I desire you will take the sense of the Partners on all I have said, only assuring you that if the Paper cannot be carried on without giving any of these cause of offence, I shall desire to dispose of my share, being determined not to sacrifice my character to other people’s indiscretions, nor to any lucrative consideration whatsoever.” From the few private letters given in Mr. Straus’s book, we get a pleasing glimpse of his good nature and humour in the relations of ordinary family life, and can quite easily understand that he was popular and much esteemed by his friends. Shenstone said of him, “Of his simplicity, benevolence, humanity, and true politeness, I have had repeated and particular experience.” Though Dodsley had not the advantage of a good early education, yet, in the words of Mr. Straus, “a long life spent in the society of literary and artistic people, and much reading, had educated him more surely than a five years’ course at one of the universities might have done. The education that comes to the man in love with life is of far more importance than the forced, if polite, education that is given to the boy.” With the exception of his early want of opportunity, his life was singularly full and complete.

ERASMUS DARWIN [1731–1802], the bearer of a name which his illustrious grandson has made for ever famous in the history of scientific speculation, was himself a man of distinction, “the worthy grandfather of a far more eminent contributor to human knowledge.” He was born at Elston, near Newark, educated at Chesterfield and St. John’s College, Cambridge, and finished his medical education at Edinburgh. He practised in Lichfield and at Derby. His book, _The Botanic Garden_, appeared in 1781, and consists of two parts, the “Economy of Vegetation,” and “Loves of the Plants.” His work is full of classical allusions, and he may be looked upon as one of the last exponents of the classical tradition in English verse. As Ovid, in his _Metamorphoses_, had set forth the change of human beings into plants and animals, Darwin, reversing the process, undertook to “restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their vegetable mansions.” In other words, he personified and allegorised the forms and natural properties of plants. The effects, for instance, of a decoction of laurel or Laura, are represented in a figure of Nightmare.

One quotation from his lengthy poems must suffice:--

“Press’d by the ponderous air the Piston falls Resistless, sliding through its iron walls; Quick moves the balanced beam, of giant birth, Wields his large limbs, and nodding shakes the earth ... Soon shall thy arm, Unconquered Steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying chariot through the fields of air. Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move, Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd, And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.”

Mention should also be made of his _Song to May_.

The close of the eighteenth century brings us to the age of Byron and Kirke White, who were born within a year or two of each other.

GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON [1788–1824] is a man whose life and writings are so well known to educated Englishmen, and have been the theme of so much criticism and controversy, that it seems superfluous to set down many details in this short notice. He was born in London, educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, at Harrow, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He lived some time at the family home of Newstead, and after a life of much dissipation, disappointment, and varied travel, he died at Missolonghi, in Greece, while rendering chivalrous help to the Greeks in their struggle to recover what they had lost--the freedom which their forefathers had been able to preserve against seemingly overwhelming odds so many centuries before. It was fitting that his life should end in a country and amid a people for whose scenery and history he had so great an affection.

It cannot be said that he has been enthusiastically honoured in his own county. At Nottingham there is now a fine bronze bust of him at the entrance to the Castle Art Museum; but otherwise there is no conspicuous memorial, such as a statue or public building, to perpetuate openly his fame. Yet by the quality and boldness of his thought and the splendour of his diction he stands in the front rank of our national poets; and his genius is recognised and acclaimed far beyond the limits of his own island and Europe.

For this neglect he has perhaps mainly himself to blame. The irregularities of his life, and his disregard of conventional morality, so offended soberer minds and puritan instincts that the imperfections of his character have been allowed by many to overshadow the greatness of his poetic achievement. This is a pity. Where shall we find a finer poem than _Childe Harold_, impressive alike by the truth and beauty of its descriptions and the pathos of its reflexions?

Byron’s excesses and eccentricities were a not unnatural consequence from his ancestry and bringing up. His was a nature that needed from the very first wise guidance and discipline if it was to be nurtured to self-control and regulated usefulness. Such discipline he seems not to have had. Of his ancestry and inherited characteristics it is well said in _English Men of Letters_: “Burns had only the fire of his race: the same is true of Byron, whose genius, in some respects less genuine, was indefinitely and inevitably wider. His intensely susceptible nature took a dye from every scene, city, and society through which he passed; but to the last he bore with him the marks of a descendant of the sea-kings, and of the mad Gordons in whose domains he had first learned to listen to the sound of the two ‘mighty voices’ that haunted and inspired him through life.” He loved “the mountain’s shaggy side and sought the rocks where billows roll.” This love is connected with his passion for liberty. It will be remembered that he pleaded the cause in Parliament of the Luddite frame-breakers. It is dangerous to argue, in the case of a great poet or novelist, from their works to their personality. By their imagination they can realise adequately situations and characters of which they may have had no personal experience. Like the skilled anatomist they can construct the whole from a small part. Still it is possible that the gloom and self-abandonment and vivid pictures of remorse which we find in parts of Byron, may have been partly due to a remorseful feeling he was too proud to own except indirectly. Scott says:--

“High minds of native pride and force Most deeply feel thy pangs, Remorse. Fear for their scourge mean villains have: Thou art the torturer of the brave.”

Byron also says:--

“Full many a stoic eye and aspect stern Mask hearts where grief hath little left to learn; And many a withering thought lies hid, not lost, In smiles that least befit who wear them most.”

“None are all evil,” and whatever Byron’s faults may have been and their cause, the fact remains that he has enriched his country’s literature with noble poetry, and invested the ancestral home of Newstead with undying fame. He was not afraid that he would be forgotten:--

“But I have lived, and have not lived in vain: My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, And my frame perish even in conquering pain; But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and time, and breathe when I expire.”

Pollok’s estimate of his powers, given in _The Course of Time_, not inadequately sums up his wayward genius:--

“All passions of all men, The wild and tame, the gentle and severe; All thoughts, all maxims, sacred and profane; All creeds, all seasons, Time, Eternity; All that was hated, and all that was dear; All that was hoped, all that was feared by man, He tossed about, as tempest-withered leaves, Then smiling, looked upon the wreck he made. With terror now he froze the cowering blood, And now dissolved the heart in tenderness: Yet would not tremble, would not weep himself; But back into his soul retired, alone, Dark, sullen, proud, gazing contemptuously On hearts and passions prostrate at his feet.”

In a paper written for a book on Nottinghamshire, it is not inappropriate to add that plates to illustrate Murray’s edition of _Childe Harold_ were taken from sketches supplied by Sir Charles Fellows, the Lycian traveller, and a member of a well-known Nottingham family.

After Byron we may take HENRY KIRKE (or KIRK) WHITE [1785–1806], the son of a butcher, afterwards articled to a firm of solicitors, and for the last year of his short life a student at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He fell a victim to consumption, aggravated, it is thought, if not actually brought on, by premature and excessive devotion to his studies. Hence Byron’s beautiful and pathetic lines on him:--

“Unhappy White! while life was in its spring, And thy young muse just waved her joyous wing, The spoiler came; and all thy promise fair Has sought the grave, to sleep for ever there.”

In one of his letters White says of himself: “My mind is of a very peculiar cast. I began to think too early; and the indulgence of certain trains of thought, and too free an exercise of the imagination, have superinduced a morbid kind of sensibility; which is to the mind what excessive irritability is to the body.” Gray’s lines are particularly applicable to White:--

“Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own.”

Matthew Arnold remarks that “much good poetry is profoundly melancholy,” that condition of mind being natural to a sensitive and poetic temperament in contact with the difficulties and disappointments of life. “The eternal note of sadness” strikes too keenly on such a mind in view of the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery.”

But White’s melancholy is often due mainly to the depression of illness. This makes all the more admirable the spirit of resignation with which he faced his end:--

“God of the Just, Thou gavest the bitter cup; I bow to Thy behest, and drink it up.”

Speculations upon the “might have been” of a writer dying long before his prime are a somewhat useless exercise of the imagination, and it is impossible to say what White would have produced had his mind been filled, expanded, and matured by more reading, by travel and experience.

Keats, with whom White was “equalled in fate,” if not in renown, has left us an example of what genius can accomplish in even a short span of years; but his life was prolonged some four years longer than White’s, a not inconsiderable period in the years of growth, and he was happier in his early opportunities. White was barely past the time of imitative work, and shows many traces of the influence of Milton and Gray. He has, however, left enough to show that he was not a mere writer of pretty verse, but was capable of conceiving and sustaining a higher flight. His _Clifton Grove_, and _Christiad_ fragment will illustrate this statement. And he will always have a charm for Nottingham readers, because his inspiration, when not religious, was mainly derived from the sights and sounds and association of his own country side; he was a home-bred poet.

A poem “To an early primrose,” written, he says, at the age of thirteen, seems a natural outcome of his feelings and circumstances. The flower--

“Mild offspring of a dark and sullen sire! Whose modest form, so delicately fine, Was nurs’d in whirling storms, And cradled in the winds,”

is taken as symbolical of virtue hardened by “chill adversity.”

When his age and circumstances are duly considered, the extent and maturity of his production fully entitle White to be called a genius. His letters are well worth reading for their sound sense, and for the light they throw on his thoughtful regard for the best interests of his family.

The first half of the nineteenth century was remarkable for its output of local writings. In Wylie’s _Old and New Nottingham_, to which this paper is much indebted for information and suggestions, it is said: “Fifteen years ago, _i.e._ in 1838, Nottingham was the residence of a more brilliant literary circle than was probably ever drawn together in a town of the like extent.” Perhaps Norwich may be fitly compared with it in this respect, and it is singular that the migration thence of several families established what was in literary matters perhaps partially causal, a connexion between the two cities.

This literary activity need cause no great surprise. Men were living “mid the stir of the forces whence issued” the modern world. The French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the struggle for religious and political emancipation, scientific discoveries and inventions, the diffusion of cheap literature, were all having their effect upon the more thoughtful minds of the time. And there was less distraction of amusement and multitudinous publication. Men had to be content with fewer books; they made them, however, their own by study and quiet reflexion; life was less diffuse and “scrappy.” It is evident from the history of many of the writers that the literary life of Nottingham was much helped and stimulated by such papers as _Dearden’s Miscellany_, _Sutton’s Review_, and the _Nottingham Journal_, to the pages of which many fugitive pieces were contributed, as well as others which have survived in book form. Not much of the verse is of the type usually known as religious, though some of the writers handle religious topics. The ordinary religious poem is not difficult to write, dealing as it does with a stock-in-trade of emotions common to the race handed down through the ages, and to a large extent realized in each man’s personal experience, having besides a form of expression of the finest kind familiar to every Englishman from childhood. But to adapt by strenuous thought and long reflexion the old faith to new conditions, to state its eternal verities in terms of fresh science and advancing ideas is another and a more difficult matter; and such adaptation is what several of our local writers have attempted after the manner of Clough and Matthew Arnold.

A remarkable thing about many of the writers is the largeness of their conceptions, the ambitious scale on which they essayed to write. Another noteworthy fact is that many of them were of humble origin, and did their literary work in circumstances which might well have smothered their nascent aspirations. Millhouse, Ragg, and Miller are all examples of this pursuit of knowledge under difficulties. They “broke their birth’s invidious bar,” and of them may be truly said what Millhouse said of Richard Booker--

“In yonder humble grave there lies a Man.”

Chief of these nineteenth-century poets is Bailey, the son of Thomas Bailey [1785–1856], who was himself an industrious writer and journalist. Besides poems Thomas Bailey wrote the _Annals of Nottinghamshire_. Among his poems are _Ireton_, dedicated to Lord John Russell; the _Carnival of Death_; _What is Life?_ In business he was first in the stocking-trade, and afterwards a wine merchant.