ON VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ
To Mr. Gifted Hopkins.
Dear Gifted,—If you will permit me to use your Christian, and prophetic, name—we improved the occasion lately with the writers of light verse in ancient times. We decided that the ancients were not great in verses of society, because they had, properly speaking, no society to write verses for. Women did not live in the Christian freedom and social equality with men, either in Greece or Rome—at least not “modest women,” as Mr. Harry Foker calls them in “Pendennis.” About the others there is plenty of pretty verse in the Anthology. What you need for verses of society is a period in which the social equality is recognized, and in which people are peaceable enough and comfortable enough to “play with light loves in the portal” of the Temple of Hymen, without any very definite intentions, on either part, of going inside and getting married.
Perhaps we should not expect vers de société from the Crusaders, who were not peaceable, and who were very earnest indeed, in love or war. But as soon as you get a Court, and Court life, in France, even though the times were warlike, then ladies are lauded in artful strains, and the lyre is struck leviore plectro. Charles d’Orleans, that captive and captivating prince, wrote thousands of rondeaux; even before his time a gallant company of gentlemen composed the Livre des Cent Ballades, one hundred ballades, practically unreadable by modern men. Then came Clément Marot, with his gay and rather empty fluency, and Ronsard, with his mythological compliments, his sonnets, decked with roses, and led like lambs to the altar of Helen or Cassandra. A few, here and there, of his pieces are lighter, more pleasant, and, in a quiet way, immortal, such as the verses to his “fair flower of Anjou,” a beauty of fifteen. So they ran on, in France, till Voiture’s time, and Sarrazin’s with his merry ballade of an elopement, and Corneille’s proud and graceful stanzas to Marquise de Gorla.
But verses in the English tongue are more worthy of our attention. Mr. Locker begins his collection of them, Lyra Elegantiarum (no longer a very rare book in England), as far back as Skelton’s age, and as Thomas Wyat’s, and Sidney’s; but those things, the lighter lyrics of that day, are rather songs than poems, and probably were all meant to be sung to the virginals by our musical ancestors.
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” says the great Ben Jonson, or sings it rather. The words, that he versified out of the Greek prose of Philostratus, cannot be thought of without the tune. It is the same with Carew’s “He that loves a rosy cheek,” or with “Roses, their sharp spines being gone.” The lighter poetry of Carew’s day is all powdered with gold dust, like the court ladies’ hair, and is crowned and diapered with roses, and heavy with fabulous scents from the Arabian phoenix’s nest. Little Cupids flutter and twitter here and there among the boughs, as in that feast of Adonis which Ptolemy’s sister gave in Alexandria, or as in Eisen’s vignettes for Dorat’s Baisers:
“Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love did Heaven prepare
These powders to enrich your hair.”
It would be affectation, Gifted, if you rhymed in that fashion for the lady of your love, and presented her, as it were, with cosmical cosmetics, and compliments drawn from the starry spaces and deserts, from skies, phoenixes, and angels. But it was a natural and pretty way of writing when Thomas Carew was young. I prefer Herrick the inexhaustible in dainties; Herrick, that parson-pagan, with the soul of a Greek of the Anthology, and a cure of souls (Heaven help them!) in Devonshire. His Julia is the least mortal of these “daughters of dreams and of stories,” whom poets celebrate; she has a certain opulence of flesh and blood, a cheek like a damask rose, and “rich eyes,” like Keats’s lady; no vaporous Beatrice, she; but a handsome English wench, with
“A cuff neglectful and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note
In the tempestuous petticoat.”
Then Suckling strikes up a reckless military air; a warrior he is who has seen many a siege of hearts—hearts that capitulated, or held out like Troy-town, and the impatient assailant whistles:
“Quit, quit, for shame: this will not move,
This cannot take her.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her—
The devil take her.”
So he rides away, curling his moustache, hiding his defeat in a big inimitable swagger. It is a pleasanter piece in which Suckling, after a long leaguer of a lady’s heart, finds that Captain honour is governor of the place, and surrender hopeless. So he departs with a salute:
“March, march (quoth I), the word straight give,
Let’s lose no time but leave her:
That giant upon air will live,
And hold it out for ever.”
Lovelace is even a better type in his rare good things of the military amorist and poet. What apology of Lauzun’s, or Bussy Rabutin’s for faithlessness could equal this?—
“Why dost thou say I am forsworn,
Since thine I vowed to be?
Lady, it is already morn;
It was last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.”
Has “In Memoriam” nobler numbers than the poem, from exile, to Lucasta?—
“Our Faith and troth
All time and space controls,
Above the highest sphere we meet,
Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet.”
How comes it that in the fierce fighting days the soldiers were so tuneful, and such scholars? In the first edition of Lovelace’s “Lucasta” there is a flock of recommendatory verses, English, Latin, even Greek, by the gallant Colonel’s mess-mates and comrades. What guardsman now writes like Lovelace, and how many of his friends could applaud him in Greek? You, my Gifted, are happily of a pacific disposition, and tune a gentle lyre. Is it not lucky for swains like you that the soldiers have quite forsworn sonneting? When a man was a rake, a poet, a warrior, all in one, what chance had a peaceful minor poet like you or me, Gifted, against his charms? Sedley, when sober, must have been an invincible rival—invincible, above all, when he pretended constancy:
“Why then should I seek further store,
And still make love anew?
When change itself can give no more
’Tis easy to be true.”
How infinitely more delightful, musical, and captivating are those Cavalier singers—their numbers flowing fair, like their scented lovelocks—than the prudish society poets of Pope’s day. “The Rape of the Lock” is very witty, but through it all don’t you mark the sneer of the contemptuous, unmanly little wit, the crooked dandy? He jibes among his compliments; and I do not wonder that Mistress Arabella Fermor was not conciliated by his long-drawn cleverness and polished lines. I prefer Sackville’s verses “written at sea the night before an engagement”:
“To all you ladies now on land
We men at sea indite.”
They are all alike, the wits of Queen Anne; and even Matt Prior, when he writes of ladies occasionally, writes down to them, or at least glances up very saucily from his position on his knees. But Prior is the best of them, and the most candid:
“I court others in verse—but I love thee in prose;
And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.”
Yes, Prior is probably the greatest of all who dally with the light lyre which thrills to the wings of fleeting Loves—the greatest English writer of vers de société; the most gay, frank, good-humoured, tuneful and engaging.
Landor is great, too, but in another kind; the bees that hummed over Plato’s cradle have left their honey on his lips; none but Landor, or a Greek, could have written this on Catullus:
“Tell me not what too well I know
About the Bard of Sirmio—
Yes, in Thalia’s son
Such stains there are as when a Grace
Sprinkles another’s laughing face
With nectar, and runs on!”
That is poetry deserving of a place among the rarest things in the Anthology. It is a sorrow to me that I cannot quite place Praed with Prior in my affections. With all his gaiety and wit, he wearies one at last with that clever, punning antithesis. I don’t want to know how
“Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoils a curry”—
and I prefer his sombre “Red Fisherman,” the idea of which is borrowed, wittingly or unwittingly, from Lucian.
Thackeray, too careless in his measures, yet comes nearer Prior in breadth of humour and in unaffected tenderness. Who can equal that song, “Once you come to Forty Year,” or the lines on the Venice Love-lamp, or the “Cane-bottomed Chair”? Of living English writers of verse in the “familiar style,” as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Locker when he is tender and not untouched with melancholy, as in “The Portrait of a Lady,” and Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the “Song of Four Seasons” and “The Dead Letter.” He has ingenuity, pathos, mastery of his art, and, though the least pedantic of poets, is “conveniently learned.”
Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of Mr. Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the “Heathen Chinee,” as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of children that slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte’s poems have never (at least in this country) been sufficiently esteemed. Mr. Lowell has written (“The Biglow Papers” apart) but little in this vein. Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful godfather, Gifted, has written much with perhaps some loss from the very quantity. A little of vers de société, my dear Gifted, goes a long way, as you will think, if ever you sit down steadily to read right through any collection of poems in this manner. So do not add too rapidly to your own store; let them be “few, but roses” all of them.
RICHARDSON
By Mrs. Andrew Lang.
Dear Miss Somerville,—I was much interested in your fruitless struggle to read “Sir Charles Grandison,”—the book whose separate numbers were awaited with such impatience by Richardson’s endless lady friends and correspondents, and even by the rakish world—even by Colley Cibber himself. I sympathize entirely with your estimate of its dulness; yet, dull as it is, it is worth wading through to understand the kind of literature which could flutter the dove-cotes of the last century in a generation earlier than the one that was moved to tears by the wearisome dramas of Hannah More.
There is only one character in the whole of “Sir Charles Grandison” where Richardson is in the least like himself—in the least like the Richardson of “Pamela” and “Clarissa.” This character is Miss Charlotte Grandison, the sister of Sir Charles, and later (after many vicissitudes) the wife of Lord G. Miss Grandison’s conduct falls infinitely beneath the high standard attained to by the rest of Sir Charles’s chosen friends. She is petulant and loves to tease; is uncertain of what she wants; she is lively and sarcastic, and, worse than all, abandons the rounded periods of her brother and Miss Byron for free, not to say slang, expressions. “Hang ceremony!” she often exclaims, with much reason, while “What a deuce!” is her favourite expletive.
The conscientious reader heaves a sigh of relief when this young lady and her many indiscretions appear on the scene; when Miss Grandison, like Nature, “takes the pen from Richardson and writes for him.” But I gather that you, my dear Miss Somerville, never got far enough to make her acquaintance, and therefore are still ignorant of the singular qualities of her brother, Sir Charles—Richardson’s idea of a perfect man, for both brother and sister are introduced at almost the same moment.
Now it is nearly as difficult to realize that Sir Charles is a young man of twenty-six, as it is to feel that his antithesis, the adorable Pepys of the “Diary,” was of that precise age. Sir Charles might be borne with good-naturedly for a short time as an old gentleman who had become garrulous from want of contradiction, but in any other aspect he would be shunned conscientiously. Yet Richardson is not content with putting into his mouth lengthy discourses tending chiefly, though expressed with mock humility, to his own glorification; but he keeps all the other characters perpetually dancing round the Baronet in a chorus of praise. “Was there ever such a man, my Harriet, so good, so just, so noble in his sentiments?” “Ah, my Lucy, dare I hope for the affection of the best of men?” Some people would have begged their friends to cease making them ridiculous, but not so Sir Charles.
But, my dear, trying as Sir Charles is at all moments, he is infinitely at his worst when he attempts to be jocose, when he rallies the step-mother of his friend Beauchamp in a sprightly manner, or exchanges quips with Harriet’s cousins at the house of “that excellent ancient,” her grandmother. It is a mammoth posing as a kitten, though whatever he says or does, his audience throw up their hands and eyes and ask: “Was there ever such a man?” “Thank Heaven, never!” the nineteenth century replies unanimously.
Secure as he is of the contemporary public verdict, Sir Charles does not attempt to repress his love of “pawing” all his female acquaintances. He is eternally taking their hands, putting his arm round their waists, leading them up and down, and permitting himself liberties that in a less perfect character would be considered intolerable. It is also interesting to note that he never addresses any of his female friends without the prefix “my.” “My Harriet,” “my Emily,” “my Charlotte,” are his usual forms, and he is likewise very much addicted to the use of the third person, which may, however, have been the result of his long residence in Italy.
Little as you read of the book, no doubt you were struck—you must have been—by the singular practice in this very matter of Christian names, and also by the enormous satisfaction with which every one promptly adopts every one else as his brother or sister. As regards names, no sooner has Sir Charles rescued Harriet from the clutches of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, than he calls her “his Harriet,” though, when he is once engaged to her, then this is changed into “infinitely obliging Miss Byron.” His eldest sister, one year his senior, is always “Lady L.” to him, and on her marriage “his Charlotte,” aged twenty-four, becomes “Lady G.;” but no one ever ventures to address him with anything more familiar than “Sir Charles.” Harriet, indeed, once gets as far as “my Cha-” but this was in a moment of extreme emotion—one of the excesses of youth.
Of course the method of telling his story in letters necessitates the acceptance of various improbabilities; reticence has sometimes to be violated, and confidences to be unduly made. Still, with all these allowances, the gossip of every one with regard to the likelihood of Sir Charles returning Harriet’s very thinly veiled attachment is highly undignified, and often indecent. The Object himself, for whom no less than seven ladies were at that time openly sighing, alone ignores Harriet’s love, or, at any rate, appears to do so. But his sisters freely and frequently charge her with having fallen in love with him. She writes pages to her whole family as to his behaviour on particular occasions, while his ward, Emily Jervois, begs permission to take up her abode with Harriet when she and Sir Charles are married.
Miss Jervois, who is Richardson’s idea of a jeune personne bien élevée, is a compound of tears, of servility, and of undisguised love for her guardian. She is much more like the heroine of a French drama than an English girl of fourteen, and I dread to think what effect she would have on a free-born American! Harriet, as you know, is not quite hopeless at first, but the descent is easy, and, in the end, we quite agree with all the admiring circle, that they were made for each other. They were equally pompous, and used stilts of equal height.
“Sir Charles Grandison” was the last, the most socially ambitious, and much the worst of Richardson’s novel’s. Smollett came to his best in his last, “Humphrey Clinker.” Fielding sobered down into the kind excellence of his last, “Amelia.” Neither had been flattered and coddled by literary ladies, like Richardson. What of “Pamela” and “Clarissa”? May a maiden read the book that the young lady studied over Charles Lamb’s shoulder? Well, I think, as you have now passed your quarter of a century, it would do you no harm to read the other two, which are infinitely better than “Sir Charles.” The worthy Miss Byron, aged only twenty, indeed, writes to her Lucy to remind her that “their grandmother had told them twenty and twenty frightful stories of the vile enterprises of men against innocent creatures,” and that they can both “call to mind stories which had ended much worse than hers (the affair with Sir Hargrave Pollexfen) had done.”
Grandmothers now choose other topics of conversation for their descendants, but in those old days when sedan-chairs made enlèvements so very easy, it was considered necessary to caution girls against all the possible wiles of man. Even little boys, strange as it may sound, were given “Pamela” to read after the Bible. More than this, one small creature, Harry Campbell by name, so young that he always spoke of himself as “little Harry,” obtained the book by stealth in his guardian’s house, and never stopped till he finished it. When Richardson, on being told of this, sent him a copy for his own, he nearly went out of his senses with delight.
Of course you know the outline of Pamela’s story. How at eleven she was taken and educated by a lady, who on her death, when Pamela was sixteen, left her not only more beautiful, but more accomplished than any girl of her years. How Pamela’s young master fell in love with her, persecuted her, and after moving adventures of all kinds, being convinced that she was not to be overcome, married her, and they lived happy, with one brief exception, ever after. The proper frame of mind in which to read “Pamela” is to consider it in the light of an historical joke.
The absolute want of dignity that is almost as marked a characteristic in Richardson as his lack of humour, shows itself again and again. After all, Mr. B. would never have married Pamela if he could have persuaded her to live with him in any other way; so the cringing gratitude expressed by Pamela and her parents to the “good gentleman” and the “dear obliger” is only revolting. No woman with any delicacy of feeling could have sat complacently at her own table, while her husband entertained his company with prolonged and minute accounts of his attempts on her virtue. Can you fancy Fielding composing such a scene, Fielding whom Richardson scouts as a profligate? It is impossible not to laugh at the bare idea; and no less funny are Pamela’s poetical flights, especially when, like Hamilton of Bangour in exile, she paraphrases the paraphrase of the 137th Psalm, about her captivity in Lincolnshire. All through one has to remind one’s self perpetually that Pamela must not be expected to behave like a lady, and that if her father had done as he ought and removed her from her place when she first told him of her uneasiness, there would have been no story at all, and some other book would have had to rank in the opinion of Richardson’s adorers “next to the Bible.”
Still, whatever may have to be said as to Richardson’s subjects, he is never coarse in his treatment of them. The pursuit of Pamela by Mr. B., or of Clarissa by Lovelace, through eight volumes, may weary; it does not corrupt. No man or maid on earth could lay it to his charge that he or she had been corrupted by these books, while no man on earth could read “Clarissa” without being touched by the noble ending. If “Clarissa” had never been written we should have said that the good-natured, fussy, essentially middle-class bookseller, Samuel Richardson, was unable to draw a lady; and it is curious to see how Clarissa stands out, not only among Richardson’s female characters, but among the female characters of all time; eminent she is for purity of soul, and nobility of feeling. There is no cant about her anywhere, no effort to pose or to strain after a state of mind which she cannot naturally experience. The business-like manner in which she makes her preparations for death have nothing sentimental about them, nothing that even faintly suggests the pretty death-beds with which Mr. Dickens and others have made us familiar; but I doubt if the most practical money-maker in Wall Street could read it without feeling uncomfortable.
How, after describing such a character as Clarissa, Richardson could turn to the whale-bone figures in “Sir Charles Grandison” is quite incomprehensible. Had he been ruined by his numerous female admirers and correspondents, or by his desire to become fashionable, or, as is most likely, by the wish to create in Sir Charles a virtuous foil to him whom he thought the wicked, witty, delightful, and detestable Lovelace? Whatever the reason, it is a thousand pities that he gave way to his impulse.
It would interest you as well as me to note little points of manners that are to be gathered from the three books. I have not time to write much more, but will tell you two or three that have struck me. If you read them, as I still hope you may, you will see what early risers they all are, even the wicked Mr. B.; while Clarissa, when in Dover Street, usually gives Lovelace his interviews at six in the morning. One hears of two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. How much more wonderful is love that rises at six!
Richardson was a woman’s novelist, as Fielding was a man’s. I sometimes think of Dr. Johnson’s mot: “Claret for boys, port for men, and,” smiling, “brandy for heroes.” So one might fancy him saying: “Richardson for women, Fielding for men, Smollett for ruffians,” though some of his rough customers were heroes, too. But we now confine ourselves so closely to “the later writers” of Russia, France, England, America, that the woman who reads Richardson may be called heroic. “To the unknown heroine” I dedicate my respect, as the Athenians dedicated an altar to “the unknown hero.” Will you be the heroine? I am afraid you won’t!
GÉRARD DE NERVAL
To Miss Girton, Cambridge.
Dear Miss Girton,—Yes, I fancy Gérard de Nerval is one of that rather select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will allow you to read. But even if you read him, I do not think you will care very much for him. He is a man’s author, not a woman’s; and yet one can hardly say why. It is not that he offends “the delicacy of your sex,” as Tom Jones calls it; I think it is that his sentiment, whereof he is full, is not of the kind you like. Let it be admitted that, when his characters make love, they might do it “in a more human sort of way.”
In this respect, and in some others, Gérard de Nerval resembles Edgar Poe. Not that his heroes are always attached to a belle morte in some distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in the family sepulchre; not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud—no, Aurélie and Sylvie, in Les Filles de Feu, are nice and natural girls; but their lover is not in love with them “in a human sort of way.” He is in love with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly remind him. He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the old château, or the farmer’s cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can make him pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who rested never, rests in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding them true.
All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, but for me the man and his work have an attraction I cannot very well explain, like the personal influence of one who is your friend, though other people cannot see what you see in him.
Gérard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) was a young man of the young romantic school of 1830; one of the set of Hugo and Gautier. Their gallant, school-boyish absurdities are too familiar to be dwelt upon. They were much of Scott’s mind when he was young, and translated Bürger, and “wished to heaven he had a skull and cross-bones.” Two or three of them died early, two or three subsided into ordinary literary gentlemen (like M. Maquet, lately deceased), two, nay three, became poets—Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval. It is not necessary to have heard of Gérard; even that queer sham, the lady of culture, admits without a blush that she knows not Gérard. Yet he is worth knowing.
What he will live by is his story of “Sylvie;” it is one of the little masterpieces of the world. It has a Greek perfection. One reads it, and however old one is, youth comes back, and April, and a thousand pleasant sounds of birds in hedges, of wind in the boughs, of brooks trotting merrily under the rustic bridges. And this fresh nature is peopled by girls eternally young, natural, gay, or pensive, standing with eager feet on the threshold of their life, innocent, expectant, with the old ballads of old France on their lips. For the story is full of those artless, lisping numbers of the popular French Muse, the ancient ballads that Gérard collected and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl.
Do you know what it is to walk alone all day on the Border, and what good company to you the burn is that runs beside the highway? Just so companionable is the music of the ballads in that enchanted country of Gérard’s fancy, in the land of the Valois. All the while you read, you have a sense of the briefness of the pleasure, you know that the hero cannot rest here, that the girls and their loves, the cottage and its shelter, are not for him. He is only passing by, happy yet wistful, far untravelled horizons are alluring him, the great city is drawing him to herself and will slay him one day in her den, as Scylla slew her victims.
Conceive Gérard living a wild life with wilder young men and women in a great barrack of an old hotel that the painters amused themselves by decorating. Conceive him coming home from the play, or rather from watching the particular actress for whom he had a distant, fantastic passion. He leaves the theatre and takes up a newspaper, where he reads that tomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to meet the Archers of Loisy. These were places in his native district, where he had been a boy. They recalled many memories; he could not sleep that night; the old scenes flashed before his half-dreaming eyes. This was one of the visions.
“In front of a château of the time of Henri IV., a château with peaked lichen-covered roofs, with a facing of red brick varied by stonework of a paler hue, lay a wide, green lawn set round with limes and elms, and through the leaves fell the golden rays of the setting sun. Young girls were dancing in a circle on the mossy grass, to the sound of airs that their mothers had sung, airs with words so pure and natural that one felt one’s self indeed in that old Valois land, where for a thousand years has beat the heart of France.
“I was the only boy in the circle whither I had led my little friend, Sylvie, a child of a neighbouring hamlet; Sylvie, so full of life, so fresh, with her dark eyes, her regular profile, her sunburnt face. I had loved nobody, I had seen nobody but her, till the daughter of the château, fair and tall, entered the circle of peasant girls. To obtain the right to join the ring she had to chant a scrap of a ballad. We sat round her, and in a fresh, clear voice she sang one of the old ballads of romance, full of love and sadness . . . As she sang, the shadow of the great trees grew deeper, and the broad light of the risen moon fell on her alone, she standing without the listening circle. Her song was over, and no one dared to break the silence. A light mist arose from the mossy ground, trailing over the grass. We seemed to be in Paradise.”
So the boy twisted a wreath for this new enchantress, the daughter of a line of nobles with king’s blood in her veins. And little brown, deserted Sylvie cried.
All this Gérard remembered, and remembering, hurried down to the old country place, and met Sylvie, now a woman grown, beautiful, unspoiled, still remembering the primitive songs and fairy tales. They walked together through the woods to the cottage of the aunt of Sylvie, an old peasant woman of the richer class. She prepared dinner for them, and sent De Nerval for the girl, who had gone to ransack the peasant treasures in the garret.
Two portraits were hanging there—one that of a young man of the good old times, smiling with red lips and brown eyes, a pastel in an oval frame. Another medallion held the portrait of his wife, gay, piquante, in a bodice with ribbons fluttering, and with a bird perched on her finger. It was the old aunt in her youth, and further search discovered her ancient festal-gown, of stiff brocade. Sylvie arrayed herself in this splendour; patches were found in a box of tarnished gold, a fan, a necklace of amber.
The holiday attire of the dead uncle, who had been a keeper in the royal woods, was not far to seek, and Gérard and Sylvie appeared before the aunt, as her old self, and her old lover. “My children!” she cried and wept, and smiled through her tears at the cruel and charming apparition of youth. Presently she dried her tears, and only remembered the pomp and pride of her wedding. “We joined hands, and sang the naïve epithalamium of old France, amorous, and full of flowery turns, as the Song of Songs; we were the bride and the bridegroom all one sweet morning of summer.”
I translated these fragments long ago in one of the first things I ever tried to write. The passages are as touching and fresh, the originals I mean, as when first I read them, and one hears the voice of Sylvie singing:
“A Dammartin, l’y a trois belles filles,
L’y en a z’une plus belle que le jour!”
So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marion in the “Ballad of Forty Years,” “Adrienne’s dead” in a convent. That is all the story, all the idyll. Gérard also wrote the idyll of his own delirium, and the proofs of it (Le Rêve et la Vie) were in his pocket when they found him dead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.
Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the grace of his favourite old ballads. One cannot translate things like this:
“Où sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau!
Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un sêjour plus beau.”
But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air:
“Neither good morn nor good night.”
The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone;
Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed;
But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn,
And night shall bring forgetfulness at last!
Gérard’s poems are few; the best are his vision of a lady with gold hair and brown eyes, whom he had loved in an earlier existence, and his humorous little piece on a boy’s love for a fair cousin, and on their winter walk together, and the welcome smell of roast turkey which greets them on the stairs, when they come home. There are also poems of his madness, called Chimères, and very beautiful in form. You read and admire, and don’t understand a line, yet it seems that if we were a little more or a little less mad we would understand:
“Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron:
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.”
Here is an attempt to translate the untranslatable, the sonnet called—
“El Desdichado.”
I am that dark, that disinherited,
That all dishonoured Prince of Aquitaine,
The Star upon my scutcheon long hath fled;
A black sun on my lute doth yet remain!
Oh, thou that didst console me not in vain,
Within the tomb, among the midnight dead,
Show me Italian seas, and blossoms wed,
The rose, the vine-leaf, and the golden grain.Say, am I Love or Phoebus? have I been
Or Lusignan or Biron? By a Queen
Caressed within the Mermaid’s haunt I lay,
And twice I crossed the unpermitted stream,
And touched on Orpheus’ lyre as in a dream,
Sighs of a Saint, and laughter of a Fay!
ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN
To Richard Wilby, Esq., Eton College, Windsor.
My Dear Dick,—It is very good of you, among your severe studies at Eton, to write to your Uncle. I am extremely pleased to hear that your football is appreciated in the highest circles, and shall be happy to have as good an account of your skill in making Latin verses.
I am glad you like “She,” Mr. Rider Haggard’s book which I sent you. It is “something like,” as you say, and I quite agree with you, both in being in love with the heroine, and in thinking that she preaches rather too much. But, then, as she was over two thousand years old, and had lived for most of that time among cannibals, who did not understand her, one may excuse her for “jawing,” as you say, a good deal, when she met white men. You want to know if “She” is a true story. Of course it is!
But you have read “She,” and you have read all Cooper’s, and Marryat’s, and Mr. Stevenson’s books, and “Tom Sawyer,” and “Huckleberry Finn,” several times. So have I, and am quite ready to begin again. But, to my mind, books about “Red Indians” have always seemed much the most interesting. At your age, I remember, I bought a tomahawk, and, as we had also lots of spears and boomerangs from Australia, the poultry used to have rather a rough time of it.
I never could do very much with a boomerang; but I could throw a spear to a hair’s breadth, as many a chicken had occasion to discover. When you go home for Christmas I hope you will remember that all this was very wrong, and that you will consider we are civilized people, not Mohicans, nor Pawnees. I also made a stone pipe, like Hiawatha’s, but I never could drill a hole in the stem, so it did not “draw” like a civilized pipe.
By way of an awful warning to you on this score, and also, as you say you want a true book about Red Indians, let me recommend to you the best book about them I ever came across. It is called “A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, during Thirty Years’ Residence among the Indians,” and it was published at New York by Messrs. Carvill, in 1830.
If I were an American publisher, instead of a British author (how I wish I was!) I’d publish “John Tanner” again, or perhaps cut a good deal out, and make a boy’s book of it. You are not likely to get it to buy, but Mr. Steevens, the American bookseller, has found me a copy. If I lend you it, will you be kind enough to illustrate it on separate sheets of paper, and not make drawings on the pages of the book? This will, in the long run, be more satisfactory to yourself, as you will be able to keep your pictures; for I want “John Tanner” back again: and don’t lend him to your fag-master.
Tanner was born about 1780; he lived in Kentucky. Don’t you wish you had lived in Kentucky in Colonel Boone’s time? The Shawnees were roaming about the neighbourhood when Tanner was a little boy. His uncle scalped one of them. This made bad feeling between the Tanners and the Shawnees; but John, like any boy of spirit, wished never to learn lessons, and wanted to be an Indian brave. He soon had more of being a brave than he liked; but he never learned any more lessons, and could not even read or write.
One day John’s father told him not to leave the house, because from the movements of the horses, he knew that Indians were in the woods. So John seized the first chance and nipped out, and ran to a walnut tree in one of the fields, where he began filling his straw hat with walnuts. At that very moment he was caught by two Indians, who spilled the nuts, put his hat on his head, and bolted with him. One of the old women of the tribe had lost her son, and wanted to adopt a boy, and so they adopted Johnny Tanner. They ran with him till he was out of breath, till they reached the Ohio, where they threw him into a canoe, paddled across, and set off running again.
In ten days’ hard marching they reached the camp, and it was worse than going to a new school, for all the Indians kicked John Tanner about, and “their dance,” he says, “was brisk and cheerful, after the manner of the scalp dance!” Cheerful for John! He had to lie between the fire and the door of the lodge, and every one who passed gave him a kick. One old man was particularly cruel. When Tanner was grown up, he came back to that neighbourhood, and the first thing he asked was, “Where is Manito-o-geezhik?”
“Dead, two months since.”
“It is well that he is dead,” said John Tanner. But an old female chief, Net-ko-kua, adopted him, and now it began to be fun. For he was sent to shoot game for the family. Could anything be more delightful? His first shot was at pigeons, with a pistol. The pistol knocked down Tanner; but it also knocked down the pigeon. He then caught martins—and measles, which was less entertaining. Even Indians have measles! But even hunting is not altogether fun, when you start with no breakfast and have no chance of supper unless you kill game.
The other Red Indian books, especially the cheap ones, don’t tell you that very often the Indians are more than half-starved. Then some one builds a magic lodge, and prays to the Great Spirit. Tanner often did this, and he would then dream how the Great Spirit appeared to him as a beautiful young man, and told him where he would find game, and prophesied other events in his life. It is curious to see a white man taking to the Indian religion, and having exactly the same sort of visions as their red converts described to the Jesuit fathers nearly two hundred years before.
Tanner saw some Indian ghosts, too, when he grew up. On the bank of the Little Saskawjewun there was a capital camping-place where the Indians never camped. It was called Jebingneezh-o-shin-naut—“the place of two Dead Men.” Two Indians of the same totem had killed each other there. Now, their totem was that which Tanner bore, the totem of his adopted Indian mother. The story was that if any man camped there, the ghosts would come out of their graves; and that was just what happened. Tanner made the experiment; he camped and fell asleep. “Very soon I saw the two dead men come and sit down by my fire opposite me. I got up and sat opposite them by the fire, and in this position I awoke.” Perhaps he fell asleep again, for he now saw the two dead men, who sat opposite to him, and laughed and poked fun and sticks at him. He could neither speak nor run away. One of them showed him a horse on a hill, and said, “There, my brother, is a horse I give you to ride on your journey home, and on your way you can call and leave the horse, and spend another night with us.” So, next morning, he found the horse and rode it, but he did not spend another night with the ghosts of his own totem. He had seen enough of them.
Though Tanner believed in his own dreams of the Great Spirit, he did not believe in those of his Indian mother. He thought she used to prowl about in the daytime, find tracks of a bear or deer, watch where they went to, and then say the beast’s lair had been revealed to her in a dream. But Tanner’s own visions were “honest Injun.” Once, in a hard winter, Tanner played a trick on the old woman. All the food they had was a quart of frozen bears’ grease, kept in a kettle with a skin fastened over it. But Tanner caught a rabbit alive and popped him under the skin. So when the old woman went for the bears’ grease in the morning, and found it alive, she was not a little alarmed.
But does not the notion of living on frozen pomatum rather take the gilt off the delight of being an Indian? The old woman was as brave and resolute as a man, but in one day she sold a hundred and twenty beaver skins and many buffalo robes for rum. She always entertained all the neighbouring Indians as long as the rum lasted, and Tanner had a narrow escape of growing up a drunkard. He became such a savage that when an Indian girl carelessly allowed his wigwam to be burned, he stripped her of her blanket and turned her out for the night in the snow.
So Tanner grew up in spite of hunger and drink. Once, when starving, and without bullets, he met a buck moose. If he killed the moose he would be saved, if he did not he would die. So he took the screws out of the lock of his rifle, loaded with them in place of bullets, tied the lock on with string, fired, and killed the moose.
Tanner was worried into marrying a young squaw (at least he says he did it because the girl wanted it), and this led to all his sorrows—this and a quarrel with a medicine-man. The medicine-man accused him of being a wizard, and his wife got another Indian to shoot him. Tanner was far from surgeons, and he actually hacked out the bullet himself with an old razor. Another wounded Indian once amputated his own arm. The ancient Spartans could not have been pluckier. The Indians had other virtues as well as pluck. They were honest and so hospitable, before they knew white men’s ways, that they would give poor strangers new mocassins and new buffalo cloaks.
Will it bore you, my dear Dick, if I tell you of an old Indian’s death? It seems a pretty and touching story. Old Pe-shau-ba was a friend of Tanner. One day he fell violently ill. He sent for Tanner and said to him: “I remember before I came to live in this world, I was with the Great Spirit above. I saw many good and desirable things, and among others a beautiful woman. And the Great Spirit said: ‘Pe-shau-ba, do you love the woman?’ I told him I did. Then he said, ‘Go down and spend a few winters on earth. You cannot stay long, and you must remember to be always kind and good to my children whom you see below.’ So I came down, but I have never forgotten what was said to me.
“I have always stood in the smoke between the two bands when my people fought with their enemies . . . I now hear the same voice that talked to me before I came into the world. It tells me I can remain here no longer.” He then walked out, looked at the sun, the sky, the lake, and the distant hills; then came in, lay down composedly in his place, and in a few minutes ceased to breathe.
If we would hardly care to live like Indians, after all (and Tanner tired of it and came back, an old man, to the States), we might desire to die like Pe-shau-ba, if, like him, we had been “good and kind to God’s children whom we meet below.” So here is a Christmas moral for you, out of a Red Indian book, and I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
APPENDIX I
Reynolds’s Peter Bell.
When the article on John Hamilton Reynolds (“A Friend of Keats”) was written, I had not seen his “Peter Bell” (Taylor and Hessey, London, 1888). This “Lyrical Ballad” is described in a letter of Keats’s published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in Macmillan’s Magazine, August, 1888. The point of Reynolds’s joke was to produce a parody before the original. Reynolds was annoyed by what Hood called “The Betty Foybles” of Wordsworth, and by the demeanour of a poet who was serious, not only in season, but out of season. Moreover, Wordsworth had damned “a pretty piece of heathenism” by Keats, with praise which was faint even from Wordsworth to a contemporary. In the circumstances, as Wordsworth was not yet a kind of solemn shade, whom we see haunting the hills, and hear chanting the swan song of the dying England, perhaps Reynolds’s parody scarce needs excuse. Mr. Ainger calls it “insolent,” meaning that it has an unkind tone of personal attack. That is, unluckily, true, but to myself the parody appears remarkably funny, and quite worthy of “the sneering brothers, the vile Smiths,” as Lamb calls the authors of “Rejected Addresses.” Lamb wrote to tell Wordsworth that he did not see the fun of the parody—perhaps it is as well that we should fail to see the fun of jests broken on our friends. But will any Wordsworthian deny to-day the humour of this?—
“He is rurally related;
Peter Bell hath country cousins,
(He had once a worthy mother),
Bells and Peters by the dozens,
But Peter Bell he hath no brothers,
Not a brother owneth he,
Peter Bell he hath no brother;
His mother had no other son,
No other son e’er called her ‘mother,’
Peter Bell hath brother none.”
As Keats says in a review he wrote for The Examiner, “there is a pestilent humour in the rhymes, and an inveterate cadence in some of the stanzas that must be lamented.” In his review Keats tried to hurt neither side, but his heart was with Reynolds; “it would be just as well to trounce Lord Byron in the same manner.”
People still make an outcry over the trouncing of Keats. It was bludgeonly done, but only part of a game, a kind of horseplay at which most men of letters of the age were playing. Who but regrets that, in his “Life of Keats,” Mr. Colvin should speak as if Sir Walter Scott had, perhaps, a guilty knowledge of the review of Keats in Blackwood! There is but a tittle of published evidence to the truth of a theory in itself utterly detestable, and, to every one who understands the character of Scott, wholly beyond possibility of belief. Even if Lockhart was the reviewer, and if Scott came to know it, was Scott responsible for what Lockhart did in 1819 or 1820, the very time when Mrs. Shelley thought he was defending Shelley in Blackwood (where he had praised her Frankenstein), and when she spoke of Sir Walter as “the only liberal man in the faction”? Unluckily Keats died, and his death was absurdly attributed to a pair of reviews which may have irritated him, and which were coarse, and cruel even for that period of robust reviewing. But Keats knew very well the value of these critiques, and probably resented them not much more than a football player resents being “hacked” in the course of the game. He was very willing to see Byron and Wordsworth “trounced,” and as ready as Peter Corcoran in his friend’s poem to “take punishment” himself. The character of Keats was plucky, and his estimate of his own genius was perfectly sane. He knew that he was in the thick of a literary “scrimmage,” and he was not the man to flinch or to repine at the consequences.
APPENDIX II
Portraits of Virgil and Lucretius.
In the Letter on Virgil some remarks are made on a bust of the poet. It is wholly fanciful. Our only vestiges of a portrait of Virgil are in two MSS.; the better of the two is in the Vatican. The design represents a youth, with dark hair and a pleasant face, seated reading. A desk is beside him, and a case for manuscript, in shape like a band-box. (See Visconti, “Icon. Rom.” i. 179, plate 13.) Martial tells us that portraits of Virgil were illuminated on copies of his “Æneid.” The Vatican MS. is of the twelfth century. But every one who has followed the fortunes of books knows that a kind of tradition often preserves the illustrations, which are copied and recopied without material change. (See Mr. Jacobs’s “Fables of Bidpai,” Nutt, 1888.) Thus the Vatican MS. may preserve at least a shadow of Virgil.
If there be any portrait of Lucretius, it is a profile on a sard, published by Mr. Munro in his famous edition of the poet. The letters LVCR are inscribed on the stone, and appear to be contemporary with the gem. This, at least, is the opinion of Mr. A. S. Murray, of the late Mr. C. W. King, Braun, and Müller. On the other hand, Bernouilli (“Rom. Icon.” i. 247) regards this, and apparently most other Roman gems with inscriptions, as “apocryphal.” The ring, which was in the Nott collection, is now in my possession. If Lucretius were the rather pedantic and sharp-nosed Roman of the gem, his wife had little reason for the jealousy which took so deplorable a form. Cold this Lucretius may have been, volatile—never! {11}
FOOTNOTES
{1} This was written during the lifetime of Mr. Arnold and Mr. Browning.
{2} Since this was written, Mr. Bridges has made his lyrics accessible in “Shorter Poems.” (G. Bell and Sons: 1890)
{3} Macmillans.
{4} Reynolds was, perhaps, a little irreverent. He anticipated Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell” by a premature parody, “Peter Bell the First.”
{5} Appendix on Reynolds’s “Peter Bell.”
{6} “Aucassin and Nicolette” has now been edited, annotated, and equipped with a translation by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon (Kegan Paul & Trench, 1887).
{7} Edinburgh, 1862.
{8} The Elzevir piracy was rather earlier.
{9} Pindar, perhaps, in one of his fragments, suggested that pretty Cum regnat Rosa.
{10} See next letter.
{11} Mr. Munro calls the stone “a black agate,” and does not mention its provenance. The engraving in his book does no justice to the portrait. There is another gem representing Lucretius in the Vatican: of old it belonged to Leo X. The two gems are in all respects similar. A seal with this head, or one very like it, belonged to Evelyn, the friend of Mr. Pepys.