CHAPTER XI.

ARTISTS AND WRITERS.

MEN who are not supposed to be mercenary often make a great deal of money. Most of our artists rose from very humble beginnings. Turner was the son of a hair-dresser. Wilkie was desperately poor; so was Barry; and William Etty, that great colourist, was the son of a baker in York—was bound apprentice, wholly against his will, to a printer in Hull; but he released himself from the shackles of so uncongenial a pursuit. He was greatly self-taught, for the help he derived for a hundred guineas, as a private pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, seems rather to have baffled him with despair; yet he became the most surprising and effective flesh-painter of his age. The nude style of his figures has often been a topic of remark with a certain order of critics. Etty himself was wont to say, “‘To the pure in heart, all things are pure.’ My aim in all my great pictures has been to paint some great moral on the heart.” He lived, in 1849, to find all his great works—130 pictures—in the great room of the Society of Arts: he died that year. By the universal acclamation of artists he is regarded as our English Titian, and some claim for him a still higher place, for his canvases have not only the wonderful colour of that master, but the splendour of Paul Veronese. He died in his beloved and native city of York; and the poor baker’s boy, by his industry and genius, had become the master of a considerable fortune.

Actors and actresses also have made much money. Amongst the money-making men may emphatically be placed David Garrick, who was fond of money, and careful about it to the last. Some of our earlier circus people seem to have made much money.—Batty was reputed to have died worth half a million.—Ducrow gave himself extraordinary airs. When the Master Cutler and Town Council of Sheffield paid Ducrow a visit, with the principal manufacturers and their families, Ducrow sent word that he only waited on crowned heads, and not upon a set of dirty knife-grinders.—Philip Astley was born in 1742, at Newcastle-under-Lyme, where his father carried on the business of a cabinet-maker. He received little or no education, and after working a few years with his father, enlisted in a cavalry regiment. His imposing appearance, being over six feet in height, with the proportions of a Hercules, and the voice of a Stentor, attracted attention to him; and his capture of a standard at the battle of Emsdorff made him one of the celebrities of his regiment. While serving in the army, he learned some feats of horsemanship from an itinerant equestrian named Johnson, perhaps the man under whose management Price introduced equestrian performances at Sadler’s Wells, and often exhibited them for the amusement of his comrades. On his discharge from the army, he was presented by General Elliot with a horse, and thereupon he bought another in Smithfield, and commenced those open-air performances in Lambeth which have already been noticed.

After a time he built a rude circus upon a piece of ground near Westminster Bridge, which had been used as a timber-yard, being the site of the theatre which has been known by his name for nearly a century. Only the seats were roofed over, the ring in which he performed being open to the air. One of his horses, which he had taught to perform a variety of tricks, he soon began to exhibit, at an earlier period of each day, in a large room in Piccadilly, where the entertainment was eked out with conjuring and _ombres Chinoises_—a kind of shadow pantomine.

Having saved some money out of these performances, Astley erected his amphitheatre. At the same time he had to contend with a fierce competition from what was then the Royal Circus, which afterwards was called the Surrey Theatre. Astley’s, however, soon became the popular place of amusement, and as such was visited and described by Horace Walpole. The fame of the place received a further illustration in the remark of Dr. Johnson, who, speaking of the popularity of certain preachers, and the ease with which they get a crowd to hear them, said, “Were Astley to preach a sermon standing on his head, or on a horse’s back, he would collect a multitude to hear him, but no wise man would say he had made a better sermon for that.”

Let us now turn to a master of homely English—a man whose name was, at one time, in every one’s mouth, and an author, whose books, at one time, every one read. His moral works excel in descriptive power. In politics his savage personalities encircle sarcasm; his faculty for inventing national nick-names, and mastery of a Saxon style of inimitable raciness, have given his writings historical reputation. He has never been equalled among political writers in his capacity of explaining what he understood. He was the first journalist who called attention to the condition of the working classes, I mean William Cobbett.

William Cobbett was born at Farnham, in Surrey, in 1776. His father was a very poor farmer, who knew enough to teach his boys to read, and had enough of intellectual originality to think that the triumph of Washington in the American War of Independence was just. William began as a mere child to do something towards earning his own livelihood, and took great delight in the flowers which, while weeding in great folks’ gardens, he saw. When eleven years old, he heard some one speak of the splendid flowers in the Royal Gardens at Kew. Without a word of announcement, and with sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, he set off to seek employment in that irresistible Paradise. When he reached Richmond his funds were reduced to threepence, and he was very hungry. In a shop-window, however, he saw the “Tale of a Tub,” price threepence. Mind triumphed over body; he bought the tale; and sat under a hay-stack reading it till he fell asleep. He was delighted beyond measure with the piece, and continued to read and re-read it for many years. The circumstance was not of happy omen. Swift’s terrible tale we should pronounce to be as well-fitted to sap the moral and religious principles of a lad as any book in the English language; and lack of moral principle was the fatal defect of Cobbett throughout life.

He found employment at Kew, and no doubt gloated over the floral splendours which he had come to see; but he returned to Farnham, and grew up in his father’s house. He made an appointment one day to meet some young friends and accompany them to Guildford Fair; but coming upon the high road as the London coach was passing in full career, he made up his mind on the spur of the moment to start for London. He arrived at the foot of Ludgate Hill with half-a-crown in his pocket. An honest hop-seller, who knew his father, took him by the hand, and he found work as an Attorney’s clerk. He speaks with unlimited abhorrence of the roguery he witnessed and the misery he endured in this place. “No part of my life,” he says, “has been totally unattended with pleasure except the eight or nine months I passed in Gray’s Inn. The office—for so the dungeon was called where I wrote—was so dark that on cloudy days we were obliged to burn candles. I worked like a galley-slave from five in the morning till eight or nine at night, and sometimes all night long. * * * When I think of the _saids_ and _so forths_, and the counts of tautology that I scribbled over—when I think of those sheets of seventy-two words, and those lines of two inches apart—my brain turns. Gracious Heaven! if I am doomed to be wretched, bury me beneath Iceland snows, and let me feed on blubber; stretch me under the burning Line, and deny me Thy propitious dews; nay, if it be Thy will, suffocate me with the infected and pestilential air of a democratic club-room; but save me, save me from the desk of an attorney!” Anything seemed better than this. William, acting again on the spur of the moment, enlisted. For more than a year he did duty at Chatham. Here he mastered grammar—an acquisition which he always regarded as the basis of his fortunes. He read also in a circulating library, swallowing enormous quantities of useful or useless knowledge, and laying it up in a memory of great tenacity. His father meanwhile was treated by him with heartless neglect. The old man had been offended by his running away, and appears to have made no effort to release him from the bondage of the attorney’s office. When he enlisted, however, his father relented, and wrote saying that the last hay-rick or pocket of hops at Farnham would be sold off to buy his discharge. But William vouchsafed no reply.

Cobbett’s regiment was ordered to Canada, and he accompanied it to St. John’s, New Brunswick. Here his conduct as a soldier was exemplary. His talent and activity made him conspicuous, and he became sergeant-major, raised, though he was still but about twenty, over the heads of thirty sergeants. In 1791 the regiment returned to England, and he procured his discharge “in consideration of his good behaviour, and the services he had rendered his regiment.” Then occurred one of the most strange and ambiguous episodes in his life. He lodged charges of pecuniary defalcation against four of his late officers. A day was appointed for their trial by court-martial. The functionaries met, the accused were present, all was ready for commencement, when it transpired that Cobbett was missing. As he was the accuser, the trial was adjourned to a stated day in order that an opportunity might be afforded him to appear. The court again met; he was again absent; the accused officers, accordingly, were acquitted. They made some show of a wish to proceed against Cobbett, and what looks very like a feint of arresting him in his refuge at Farnham. But the upshot was that he escaped to France, and passed from France, when the revolutionary atmosphere became too hot for him, to America. Mr. Watson very properly devotes a good deal of attention to these circumstances, and we are bound to say that we agree with him in thinking that Cobbett was bribed with a good round sum to suppress his charges. It was, of course, an act of flagrant and base dishonesty; but there is nothing in Cobbett’s life to prove that he shrank from dishonesty, or was superior to temptation. He was a most affectionate husband and father, and many of his advices to young men and to the poor are excellent. His talent was of a coarse kind, but very great. His activity and indomitable spirit deserve all admiration. He boasted, probably with truth, that he had never passed an idle day.

Cobbett first distinguished himself in America by publishing a fierce pamphlet against Priestley. He was soon a noted political writer, taking the side of ultra-Toryism, and denouncing with furious emphasis all that savoured of Radicalism or Republicanism. His talent was indubitable; and as vehement and able rhetoric on the Church-and-King side was then in demand, he attracted attention. On returning to England, he was welcomed by the authorities as an out-and-out Tory, and became the most violent, uncompromising, and popular of writers on the ministerial side. It is worthy of recollection that William Cobbett had his windows broken by the mob for the vehemence of his anti-popular utterances. According to his own account he met Pitt at dinner in Mr. Windham’s house; and the fact is not impossible, so highly did ministers at that time prize the aid of any one who could fight for them against the patriots.

By what steps it is needless to trace, Cobbett gradually sidled round, and left the cause of the king for that of the mob. His circumstances became embarrassed, and he fled to America, leaving behind him debts to the value of upwards of £33,000. He resided at Long Island, near New York, and continued to edit his _Register_. In a few years the irrepressible giant—he stood six foot two, with shoulders and chest and girth to match—returned to England. He had once denounced Tom Paine as a miscreant whom no words could blacken. He now brought Tom Paine’s bones with him, bent upon having a grand monument built over them in England. In this instance he signally misunderstood his countrymen. The dead man’s bones were laughed at, and declared to be those of an old nigger. Cobbett proposed to sell 20,000 hair-rings at a sovereign a-piece, with some of Paine’s hair in each; and he was reminded that when Paine died he was almost bald. Cobbett had at last to shuffle the bones underground, no one knows where. His own eloquence and sarcasm made him popular, and procured him a seat in parliament. He was now the fiercest of democrats. He assailed Protestantism and detested ministers of religion. His quackery grew worse and worse until he died in 1835.

Sir Francis Chantrey was a poor lad. He began his career by being a carver on wood. Rogers used to say—“One day Chantrey said to him, ‘Do you recollect that about twenty-five years ago a journeyman came to your house from the wood-carver employed by you and Mr. Hope, to talk about these ornaments (pointing to some on a mahogany sideboard), and that you gave him a drawing to execute them by.’ Rogers replied that he recollected it well. ‘Well,’ said Chantrey, ‘I was that journeyman.’” Chantrey practised portrait-painting both at Sheffield and after he came to London. It was in allusion to him that Lawrence said—“A broken-down painter will make a very good sculptor.”

In 1823, London society was much exercised on the subject of literary gains. Miss Wynn writes in her “Diaries of a Lady of Quality”—“I heard to-day from Mr. Rogers that Constable, the bookseller, told him last May that he paid the author of ‘Waverley’ the sum of £110,000. To that may now be added the produce of ‘Red Gauntlet,’ and ‘St. Ronan’s Well;’ for I fancy Quentin Durward’ was at least printed, if not published. I asked whether the ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ which do not bear the same name, were taken into calculation, and was told they were, but of course the poems were not. All this has been done in twenty years.” In 1803, an unknown Mr. Scott’s name was found as the author of three very good ballads in Lewis’s “Tales of Wonder.” This was his first publication.—Pope, who until now had been considered as the poet who had made the most by his works, died worth about £800 a-year.—Johnson, for his last and best work, his “Lives of the Poets,” published after the “Rambler” and the “Dictionary” had established his fame, got two hundred guineas, to which was added one hundred more. Mr. Hayward, in a note, adds—“‘Waverley’ having been published in 1814, the sum mentioned by Constable was earned in nine years, by eleven novels in three volumes each, and three series of ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ making nine volumes more; eight novels twenty-four volumes, being yet to come. Scott’s first publication, ‘Translations from the German,’ was in 1796. During the whole of his literary life he was profitably engaged in miscellaneous writing and editing; and whatever the expectations raised by has continued popularity and great profits, they were surpassed by the sale of the collected and illustrated edition of the novels commenced under his own revision in 1829. Altogether, the aggregate amount gained by Scott in his lifetime, very far exceeds any sum hitherto named as accruing to any other man from authorship. Pope inherited a fortune, saved and speculated; and we must come at once to modern times to find plausible subjects of comparison. T. Moore’s profits, spread over his life, yield but a moderate income. Byron’s did not exceed £20,000. Talfourd once showed me a calculation, by which he made out that Dickens, soon after the commencement of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ _ought_ to have been in the receipt of £10,000 a-year. Thackeray never got enough to live handsomely and lay by. Sir E. B. Lytton is said to have made altogether from £80,000 to £100,000 by his writings’. We hear of 500,000 francs (£20,000) having been given in France for Histories—to MM. Thiers and Lamartine for example; but the largest single payment ever made to an author for a book, was the cheque for £20,000, _on account_, paid by Messrs. Longman to Macaulay soon after the appearance of the third and fourth volumes of his History, the terms being that he should receive three-fourths of the net profits.” This note of Mr. Hayward’s, it should be remembered, was written in 1864. Macaulay cleared a fine sum by his History, and so did the publishers. During the nine years, ending with the 25th of June, 1857, Messrs. Longman disposed of 30,978 copies of the first volume of the History; 50,783 copies during the nine years ending with June, 1866; and 52,392 copies during the nine years ending with June, 1875. Within a generation of its first appearance, upwards of 150,000 copies of the History will have been printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone.

It is to be questioned, when her life comes to be written, whether any author has been more successful, in a pecuniary point of new, than Miss Braddon, whose “Lady Audley’s Secret” at once placed her on the pinnacle of fame and fortune, and yet she began the world as a ballet-girl.

Few Irishmen, in a literary and political point of view, did better than the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker. In his “Memoirs,” Charles Mayne Young thus speaks of his rise and progress:—

“I suspect few people now alive are aware of the commencement of Croker’s career in London. Horace Smith, James’s brother, and one of the joint authors of ‘Rejected Addresses,’ told me that he, his brother, and Cumberland, formed the staff of the _Morning Post_ when Colonel Mellish was its sole proprietor. On a certain quarter-day, when he was in the habit of meeting them at the office and paying them their salary, he took occasion to pass them unqualified commendation for the great ability they had brought to bear upon his journal. He assured them that the circulation of the paper had quadrupled since their connection with it; ‘but—but—that he was, nevertheless, under the necessity of dispensing with their pens for the future.’ The two Smiths were so utterly unprepared for such a declaration, that they were tongue-tied. Not so the testy Cumberland, who took care to make himself as clearly understood as if he had been the veritable Sir Fretful Plagiary.

“‘What,’ he asked his employer, ‘the d—l do you mean? In the same breath in which you laud your servants to the skies, and express your sense of obligation to them, you discharge them oven without the usual month’s warning!’

“Mellish, quite unmoved, replied—‘You must know, good sirs, that I care for my paper, not for its principles, but as an investment; and it stands to reason, that the heavier my outgoings, the less my profits. I do, as I have said, value your merits highly; but not as highly as you charge me for them. Now, in future, I can command the services of one man, who will do the work of three for the wage of one.’

“‘The deuce you can,’ said Cumberland. ‘He must be a phœnix. Where, pray, may this omniscient genius be met with?’

“‘In the next room! I will send him to you.’

“As he left, a young man entered, with a well-developed skull, a searching eye, and a dauntless address.

“‘So, sir,’ screamed out Cumberland, ‘you must have an uncommon good opinion of yourself! You consider yourself, I am told, three times as able as any one of us; for you undertake to do an amount of work, single-handed, which we have found enough for us all.’ ‘I am not afraid,’ said the young man, with imperturbable _sang froid_, ‘of doing all that is required of me.’ They all three then warned him of the tact, discretion, and knowledge of books and men required—of the difficulties of which he must expect to find an enterprise of such magnitude beset, &c., &c. They began then to sound his depth; but on politics, belles lettres, political economy, even the drama, they found him far from shallow. Cumberland, transported out of himself by his modest assurance, snatched up his hat, smashed it on his head, rammed snuff incontinently up his nose, and then rushed by Mellish, who was in the adjoining room, swearing, and saying as he left, ‘Confound the potato. He’s so tough, there’s no peeling him!’ The tough potato was John Wilson Croker.”

That Charles Dickens made a great deal of money, all the world is well aware. That in the tale of “David Copperfield,” a little of his childish life was outlined, was known, or rather suspected; but till his life appeared, no one had the least idea how low down in the world he and his family were, and how much more creditable to him was his rise.

If it is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth, Dickens certainly had this advantage. We have seldom read a more touching picture than that which is given of the life of the neglected, untaught, half-starved boy at this time. It is tragic and affecting enough in itself, but it is still more impressive as suggesting the possible lot of hundreds and thousands in this great London of ours. The one boy, by means of marvellous genius, forces his way to the front; but who is to tell the story of the obscure multitude who perish in the struggle? What imagination has ever pictured scenes as tragic as the following experiences?—

“It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.

“The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford-stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rose up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first, with a piece of oilpaper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in ‘Oliver Twist.’

“Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the dinner-hour—from twelve to one, I think it was—every day. But an arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away, from no fault of his or mine; and for the same reason, my small work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors, paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots, down stairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterwards, again to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’), worked generally side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in law, a waterman. Poll Green’s father had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was employed at Drury-lane Theatre; where another relation of Poll’s, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes.

“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless—of the shame I felt in my position—of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more—cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children—even that I am a man—and wander desolately back to that time of my life.

“My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from Chatham workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street North. It was a long way to go and return within the dinner-hour; and, usually, I either carried my dinner with me, or went and bought it at some neighbouring shop. In the latter case it was commonly a saveloy and a penny loaf; sometimes, a four-penny plate of beef from a cook’s shop; sometimes a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house over the way—the ‘Swan,’ if I remember right, or the ‘Swan’ and something else that I have forgotten. Once I remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and going into the best dining-room in Johnson’s alamode-beef-house in Charles Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode-beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition, coming in all alone, I don’t know; but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn’t taken it.”

It was thus Dickens was trained to fight the battle of life. After this one feels inclined to say, “How great are the blessings of poverty!” What an impulse it gives the man to raise himself above it, somehow or other. Hazlitt used to say that “the want of money often places a man in a very ridiculous position.” There is no doubt about that. It is also equally clear, that, without money, there can be little comfort, little independence of thought or action, little real manliness. Poverty is a wonderful tonic. Volumes might be written in its praise. Almost all the wonderful things that have been done in the world have been accomplished by men who were born and bred in poverty. She is the nurse of genius, the mother of heroes. She has garlanded the world with gold. Luxury and wealth have ever been the ruin alike of individuals and nations. The world’s greatest benefactors have been the money-getting men. Of course there are a few exceptions; but they are the exceptions that confirm the rule.