By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects

‘But this we all knewThat a Scotchman can do —Make a small piece of metal go awfully far.’

Then there was Lord Eldon, whose nearness was proverbial, and whose unwillingness to spend displayed itself markedly in his commissariat department. An anonymous epigram professed to record an ‘Inquest Extraordinary’:

‘Found dead, a rat – no case could sure be harder:Verdict – Confined a week in Eldon’s larder.’

We are also told that, when Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott quarrelled over the proper pronunciation of the legal term ‘lien’ – the former calling it ‘lion,’ and the latter ‘lean’ – Jekyll produced the following:

‘Sir Arthur, Sir Arthur, why what do you meanBy saying the Chancellor’s lion is lean?D’ye think that his kitchen’s so bad as all that,That nothing within it can ever get fat?’

Of Lord Kenyon, another judge of like inhospitable tendencies, someone said that in his house it was always Lent in the kitchen and Passion Week in the parlour. On another occasion it was remarked that ‘in his lordship’s kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits are always bright;’ to which Jekyll, pretending to be angry, replied, ‘Spits! in the name of common-sense, don’t talk about his spits – for nothing turns on them!’ When his lordship died, the words ‘Mors Janua Vita’ were by an error of the undertaker painted on the coffin; but, someone commenting on the substitution of ‘Vita’ for ‘Vitæ,’ Lord Ellenborough protested that there was no mistake. Kenyon, he declared, had directed that it should be ‘Vita,’ so that his estate might be saved the expense of a diphthong.

Most people know the story of Foote and Lord Stormont, the latter of whom had asked the former to dinner, and had placed before him wine served in the smallest of decanters and dispensed in the smallest of glasses. The peer enlarged upon the growth and age of the liquor; whereupon the player, holding up one of the glasses, demurely said, ‘It is very little of its age!’ This recalls an experience of Theodore Hook, when invited to dine with an unnamed nobleman, at the Star and Garter, Richmond. There were four of the party, and when covers were removed it was found that the fare consisted of four loin chops, four mealy potatoes, and a pint of sherry. These things despatched, the peer asked Hook for a song, and the wit responded with, of all things in the world, the National Anthem, which he gave correctly until, arriving at the line ‘Happy and glorious,’ he added – as if under the influence of drink – ‘A pint between four of us – God save the King!’ A different form of stinginess, it would seem, was shown by Brigham Young, when (if we may believe the tale) he gave as a reason for marrying a certain male-garbed lady-doctor, that he would be able to have her clothes ‘made down’ for his boys.

The mean host has always been a special target for the scorn of his fellows. It was a Greek satirist who related how

‘A miser in his chamber saw a mouse,And cry’d, dismay’d, “What dost thou in my house?”She, with a laugh, “Good landlord, have no fear,’Tis not for board, but lodging, I came here.”’

And since then the flood of banter has rolled on. Herrick complains of an unknown person that he invited him home to eat, and showed him there much plate but little meat. Garrick (who had evidently again forgotten the mote and the beam) wrote of a certain nobleman who had built a big mansion:

‘A little house would best accordWith you, my very little lord!And then exactly matched would beYour house and hospitality!’

Much in the same way, Richard Graves wrote of the master of a house which was well kept but not open to company:

‘If one may judge by rooms so neat,It costs you more in mops than meat!’

Note, again, Egerton Warburton’s versification of a remark attributed to Lord Alvanley. A gentleman had drawn attention to the fact that his house was furnished à la Louis Quatorze:

‘“Then I wish,” said a guest, “when you ask us to eat,You would furnish your board à la Louis Dixhuit.The eye, can it feast when the stomach is starving?Pray less of your gilding and more of your carving.”’

John Headley, describing dinner at one Lady Anne’s, tells us that

‘A silver service loads the board,Of eatables a slender hoard;’

and the sarcasm reminds one of the address with which Theodore Hook once bore himself under somewhat similar circumstances. Invited to dine with an old lady, he was horrified when the servant, lifting the cover, displayed a couple of chops. ‘Mr. Hook,’ said the hostess, ‘you see your dinner.’ ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ observed Hook; ‘but where’s yours?’

The niggardliness which displays itself in smaller subscriptions to public or private objects than the donor’s means will justify has naturally met with keen reproach. Herrick has a quatrain directed against the failing; and everyone remembers the lines about the man who declared that at the sound of woe his hand was always open:

‘Your hand is open, to be sure,But there is nothing in it.’

Perhaps the happiest satire on meanness of this sort is contained in the anonymous couplet ‘On Close-fist’s Subscription’:

‘The charity of Close-fist, give to fame:He has at last subscribed – how much? – his name.’

DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD

A leading Review lately contained a contribution entitled ‘The Old School of Classics and the New.’ It was, as regards its literary form, a ‘Dialogue of the Dead’ – a discussion supposed to take place between the famous scholars Bentley and Madvig, with a brief intervention on the part of Euripides and Shakespeare. It was written with much smartness, and one could wish that such lucubrations were more common nowadays than they are. Not that they are by any means rare. It was only the other day that Mr. Marion Crawford published a work which had the conventional shape of fiction, but which was really little more than a series of colloquies in which some famous men of the past took part, talking throughout with a characteristic flavour which did the author considerable credit. Dialogues of the dead, pure and simple, have also been written of recent years by Mr. H. D. Traill, some of the best of whose efforts were republished in a volume called ‘The New Lucian.’

In the less immediate past, dialogue-writing after the fashion of the witty and audacious Syrian was not very frequently adventured. Just twenty years ago some writer or writers supplied to a weekly miscellany a few imaginative conversations between deceased worthies; but these were not particularly brilliant. They were in verse – in the heroic couplet, to which a good deal of point might have been imparted; but advantage was not taken of the opportunity. There was one ‘dialogue’ in which Shakespeare, Thackeray, and a critic were supposed to be engaged, and in the course of which Thackeray was made to say to the critic:

‘Don’t crack your jokes, but flit.’

To which the critic:

‘Your pardon, sir; I took you for a wit.’

To which Thackeray again:

‘Did you, indeed? Then, compliments to pass,I took you just for what you are – an ass.’

But this, which one hesitates to pronounce Thackerayan, was surely even trite. However, these dialogues at least remind us of what English society was saying and doing in the year of grace 1868. Thus, Thackeray tells Shakespeare that his dramas are played but scarcely acted:

‘For I won’t denyThat people now are tickled through the eye.No one to thought a deep attention lends,And if a play’s successful it dependsFar less upon the language than the scene.’

Again, in another colloquy, Meyerbeer informs Mozart that

‘The “Traviata” and the “Trovatore”Of “Il Barbiere” have eclipsed the glory.As Margarita Patti fills the stage,And Marta sung by Nilsson is the rage.’

He who dips into Colburn’s New Monthly for the year 1822 or thereabouts will be rewarded (or otherwise) by coming across a ‘Dialogue of the Dead’ in prose, and there may be other such fugitive lucubrations. But so far as the English literature of the past is concerned, ‘dialogues of the dead’ were written by only two persons worthy of celebration – Walter Savage Landor and George, Lord Lyttelton, the author of ‘Letters from a Persian in England to his friend in Ispahan.’ Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversations’ are among those numerous works which everybody is supposed to have read, and, having read them, to admire. And unfortunate indeed would be he who could not recognise and appreciate the varied beauty and charm of these prose masterpieces. Here Menelaus and Helen, Æsop and Rhodope, Tiberius and Vipsania, Leofric and Godiva, Roger Ascham and Jane Grey, and a hundred other heroes and heroines of the past, converse not only with dramatic appropriateness, but with rhetorical force – with amplitude of thought and spontaneity of image. By the side of such a wonderful flower-show (as one of our poets said of a selection from a brother poet’s lyrics), Lyttelton’s trim parterre shows, no doubt, but dimly; nevertheless, to that accomplished nobleman there is due something more than the small credit of having been Landor’s predecessor in this form of English composition. Of that form Lyttelton says, in the preface to his ‘Dialogues,’ that

‘It sets before us the history of all times and all nations, presents to the choice of a writer all characters of remarkable persons which may be best opposed to, or compared with, each other; and is, perhaps, one of the most agreeable methods that can be employed of conveying to the mind any critical, moral, or political observations.’

Lyttelton brings together in his work such people as Plato and Fénelon, Lucian and Rabelais, Addison and Swift, Boileau and Pope; and, if he scarcely has the power to make these masters talk as we know they wrote, still he puts into their mouths much which it might be worth the while of the modern reader to assimilate.

Early in the eighteenth century there appeared a little brochure called ‘English Lucian,’ but it proved to be nothing more edifying than a few ‘modern dialogues’ between a vintner and his wife, between ‘a reformer of manners,’ his wife and a captain of the guards, and between a Master of Arts and ‘a lady’s woman.’ Of the humorous satire of Lucian himself there was no jot or tittle.

The works of Lucian have, in various ways, found many translators in England – notably Dr. Thomas Francklin, who prefaced his version with a dialogue (in prose) in which Lucian and Lyttelton, after an exchange of compliments, proceed to discuss the writings of the former at some length and with much dulness. Dulness is certainly not the characteristic of the rhyming paraphrases of certain dialogues of Lucian which Charles Cotton wrote and published late in the seventeenth century under the title of ‘Burlesque upon Burlesque, or the Scoffer Scoft.’ ‘We bring you here,’ said Cotton, ‘a fustian-piece, Writ by a merry Wag of Greece’ – ‘a piece of raillery writ,’ as he went on to say, ‘when Paganism was in fashion’:

‘Wherein his meaning further isTo take away th’ authoritiesOf lies and fables, which did pigeonThe rabble into false religion.’

Herein the mission and the achievement of Lucian – first and greatest of the writers of ‘Dialogues of the Dead’ – are not inaptly stated. Fontenelle and Fénelon both derived inspiration for their ‘Dialogues’ from the brilliant pages of the Syrian, and within recent years his abounding merits have been sung in eloquent prose by Mr. Froude. There is yet room, however, for someone who shall prove himself the ‘new Lucian’ indeed, by writing dialogues in which the illustrious dead shall be made to express themselves (as they have not yet been made to do in English colloquy) with superlative sarcasm and inimitable scorn.

SERMONS IN FLOWERS

Every year a ‘flower-sermon’ is preached in London, in accordance with an admirable custom; and the orator, we may be sure, has no difficulty in ‘improving the occasion.’ The materials lie rich and ready to his hand. The Laureate, indeed, has asked to what uses we shall put the wildweed flower which simply blows, and has inquired further if there be any moral shut within the bosom of the rose. He was answered long ago by Horace Smith:

‘Your voiceless lips, O Flowers! are living preachers,Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book;’

and a living poetess has assured us, likewise, that flowers will preach to us if we will hear, the rose telling us that all her loveliness is born upon a thorn, and the poppy urging that, though her scarlet head is held in scorn,

‘Yet juice of subtle virtues liesWithin my cup of curious dyes.’

There is one lesson which the flowers have been made to teach with rather wearisome iteration. The poets have never been tired of dwelling upon their brief existence and seeing in it a reflection of our own. This rather trite melody has been sounded from the earliest to the latest times. Drummond of Hawthornden draws attention to the flower ‘which lingeringly doth fade,’ and sees in it a type of his own life, which ‘scarce shows now what it hath been.’ Herrick, apostrophizing blossoms, deduces from them the fact that all things have their end, though ne’er so brave. ‘Fade, flowers, fade!’ cries Waller; ‘’Tis but what we must in our autumn do.’ And so Dryden:

‘The rose is fragrant, but it fades in time…Such is your blooming youth, and withering so.’

‘Youth’s withered flowers’ made John Clare sigh to think that in him they would never bloom again.

But this, which may be said to be the orthodox teaching of the flowers, has found many influential questioners, who have dwelt upon the brighter side of the contention. And it is pleasant to listen to their more cheerful voices. ‘Not an opening blossom breathes in vain,’ wrote Thomson; and the sentiment is heartily corroborated by Mr. Lowell:

‘There never yet was flower fair in vain;Let classic poets rhyme it as they will.’

If the flowers have a short career, they make no complaint of it, says Landor:

‘Fast fall the leaves; this never saysTo that, “Alas! how brief our days!”All have alike enjoyed the sun,And each repeats, “So much is won.”’

They enjoy life, and they help to make it enjoyable for others.

‘Gay without toil and lovely without art,They spring to clear the sense and glad the heart.’

So Mrs. Barbauld; while Mrs. Howitt similarly proclaims it to be their business as well as pleasure to minister delight to man, to beautify the earth.

The present Lord Lytton has remarked of flowers that their scent outlives their bloom, and has expressed the aspiration that, in like manner, his mortal hours may ‘grow sweeter towards the tomb.’ But the main point made by the more optimistic observers of Nature is that, though blossoms fade, they revive again, in equal beauty, by-and-by. ‘Ye are to me,’ wrote Horace Smith, ‘a type of resurrection and second birth.’ To W. C. Bryant the delicate flower, arising from the shapeless mould, seemed

‘An emanation of the indwelling Life,A visible token of the upholding Love,That are the soul of this wide universe.’

Mrs. Hemans – a little unnecessarily, perhaps – dwells upon the fact that though the flowers sleep in dust through the wintry hours, they break forth in glory in the spring. For Longfellow, as for Horace Smith, they are ‘emblems of our own great resurrection.’ George Morine, in verses little known, reminds us that while cities fall away, and arts flourish and decay, these ‘frailer things’ will continue to adorn the world ‘unchangingly the same.’ Though covered for a time by ‘the wee white fairies of the snow,’ they come back, says Gerald Massey, ‘with their fragrant news,’ and tell in a thousand hues their dream of beauty. For their annual disappearance from our midst, Thomas Westwood gives a poetical explanation:

‘Wearied out with shine and shade,It rejoiced them, one and all,To escape from daylight’s kenTo their chambers subterrain,There to rest awhile, and thenWeave them fresh, and weave them fair,And their fragrant spells prepare.’

Alas! there are those who must needs draw a melancholy moral from the most consolatory phenomena. And so Charlotte Smith, while admitting that

‘Another May new buds and flowers shall bring,’

must needs exclaim,

‘Ah! why has happiness no second Spring?’

And the dismal reflection finds an echo in the heart of D. M. Moir:

‘Green Spring again shall bidYour boughs with bloom be crown’d;But alas! to Man,In earth’s brief span,No second Spring comes round!’

The truth is, the imagination derives from Nature precisely what the former’s capacity and quality admit of. As the Laureate said, years ago, any man may find in bud, or blade, or bloom, a meaning suited to his mind. Spenser, pondering on the rose and its thorns, and other such floral combinations, was led to remark that

‘Every sweet with sour is tempered still.’

Equally impressed was he by the bounteous ease with which Nature scatters flowers all over the world. In Barry Cornwall’s view, this facile profusion is Earth’s expression of gratitude for the effulgence of the Sun:

‘When on earth he smileth, she bursts forthIn beauty like a bride, and gives him back,In sweet repayment for his warm bright love,A world of flowers.’

Beddoes had a quaint and curious fancy that ‘when the dead awake or talk in sleep’ the flowers ‘hear their thoughts, and write them on their leaves, for heaven to look on.’ Campbell seems to have loved flowers most for the associations they called up. ‘I dote upon you,’ he wrote, in an address to them, ‘for ye waft me to summers of old;’

‘I love you for lulling me back into dreamsOf the blue Highland mountains and echoing streams.’

And we find another Scotchman, William Anderson, giving utterance to a similar expression of feeling.

There is a lesson which the flowers have taught to at least two of our poets, which, though it may have sympathizers, will scarcely find many practical adherents. It is embodied in a little lyric by Mrs. Webster, in which that lady, celebrating the beauty of a solitary blossom, describes how it is seen and gathered, and adds, ironically:

‘Why should a flower be fair for its own?Choose it, pluck it to die.’

But the moral has been pointed even more effectively by the Rev. Gerard Lewis in some excellent verses. ‘A gathered flower,’ he says, ‘is but a fading thing’:

‘Let woman’s beauty wear the sterling gold,The imperishable gem.They give to her a brightness manifold,She adds a charm to them.‘But flowers that strew the earth with fragrant grace,As stars the welkin fill,Look loveliest, live the longest, in their place;To pluck them is to kill.’

That is true, and yet the gathering of flowers will go on. And, after all, what more can a blossom desire than to ‘exist beautifully’ and exhale its sweetness, whether it lies hidden by the wayside hedge, or decks the bosom of a woman as sweet and beautiful as itself?

‘DON QUIXOTE’ IN ENGLAND

The announcement that Mr. W. G. Wills had completed his dramatic version of ‘Don Quixote’ naturally excited much interest, and no doubt set many minds at play upon the general subject of the history of ‘Don Quixote’ in this country. That the renowned romance has appeared in many prose translations, from that of Shelton in 1620 to that of Mr. Ormsby only two or three years ago, is known to most people. It will be remembered that an early English version was prepared by the nephew of Milton; the once-famous Peter Motteux made himself responsible for one ‘by several hands’; that by Jarvis, which dates from the middle of last century, has lately been reproduced by Professor Morley; and then there are those by Smollett, the novelist, and Mr. A. J. Duffield. There is no lack of them, any more than there has been of pictorial illustrations. Shelton’s translation, revised by Stevens, was republished with ‘cuts’ by Coypel. When Lockhart prefixed his well-known essay to Motteux’s version, the work was accompanied by etchings by De Los Rios. Jarvis’s rendering exercised successively the skill of Westall, Cruickshank, Johannot, Doré, and Mr. A. B. Houghton; another was illuminated by R. Smirke, R.A.; and in later years there have been the drawings contributed by Sir John Gilbert and by Kenny Meadows.

So much for the story as it has been read in English and adorned by English (and other) artists. But how about Mr. Wills’s predecessors? How about ‘Don Quixote’s’ previous connection with the English stage? Well, it was scarcely to be expected that so popular a tale would never excite the attention of the playwright or the musician. Sooner or later, everything which has vogue finds its way, somehow, to the boards, and it is a little surprising that seventy-four years should have elapsed, after the publication of the first English translation, before ‘Don Quixote’ received the distinction of dramatization. Was it, indeed, a distinction? There’s the rub. The dramatist was Thomas d’Urfey; and what could be looked for from that free-speaking worthy? The original is not without a certain breadth in certain passages, and what Cervantes made broad D’Urfey might be trusted to make broader. That, again, was only according to the practice of the day; and if the virtuous Collier fulminated against the trilogy which D’Urfey wrought out of the epical extravaganza – if some ladies of the time were found to object to the coarser humours of Mary the Buxom (a creation on which D’Urfey prided himself) – there can be no doubt of the success of the venture. The third of the three plays had not, it seems, quite the acceptability of the other two, but the author’s explanation of its virtual failure – that the piece was not adequately presented – was possibly, for once, well founded, and the fact that the third play was produced at all speaks volumes for the triumphs of its precursors.

A ‘Don Quixote’ – probably D’Urfey’s ‘second part’ – held the stage, more or less firmly, till the eighteenth century was well upon its way; and then there suddenly appeared a rival, in the shape of a farce or vaudeville by Fielding, entitled ‘Don Quixote in England,’ and bringing both the Don and Sancho upon English soil. The author was well aware of his temerity, and, indeed, apologized for it. The piece, he pleaded, was

‘originally writ for his private amusement, as it would, indeed, have been little less than Quixotism itself to hope any other fruits from attempting characters wherein the inimitable Cervantes so far excelled.’

He found it, he says, infinitely more difficult than he imagined to give his knight an opportunity of displaying himself in a different manner from that wherein he appears in the romance. However, he was induced to allow his work to be performed, and then it was seen that he had brought the Don and Sancho to an English inn, where the landlord, Guzzle, tries in vain to get the former to pay his bill, and whither comes one Dorothea Loveland to meet her sweetheart, Fairlove, spending the interval between her coming and his arrival in persuading the Don that she is a persecuted princess and that her maid Jezebel is Dulcinea. Dorothea is promised by her father to one Squire Badger, but the squire proves to be a sot, and at the Don’s especial request the lady and her lover are united. The piece is by no means without humour, and it would deserve to live in remembrance if only because it was for ‘Don Quixote in England’ that Fielding wrote the song of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ which consisted of two verses only until Richard Leveridge added five more and wrote the music for the whole.

‘Don Quixote’ has made other appearances on the English boards, but none of any very great importance. There was an entertainment written in verse, and ‘sung at Marybone Gardens,’ for which Dr. Arnold wrote the music, and in which the Don, Sancho, Nicholas, Teresa, and Maritornes figure. There was a pantomime at Covent Garden, ‘Harlequin and Quixote; or, The Magic Arm,’ for which Reeve composed the melodies, and in which Harlequin, the son of Inca, carries off Columbine, the daughter of a Spanish grandee, to whom Don Quixote is affianced. There was, too, a ‘ballad-farce’ called ‘Don Quixote in Barcelona; or, The Beautiful Moor,’ which, however, was never represented; and there were at least two other efforts of the kind, an ‘opera-comedy’ and a ‘farce-comedy,’ which had the illustrious Sancho for their hero, portraying him in the character of ‘the mock Governor’ of Barataria.

It was, no doubt, inevitable that ‘Don Quixote,’ having been translated into English prose, should make its appearance also in English verse. And so it did – early in the eighteenth century – in the form of ‘The Life and Notable Adventures of that Renown’d Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Merrily translated into Hudibrastick Verse.’ Mr. Edward Ward was the perpetrator of this work, in which various episodes of the original were reproduced with a vulgarity, not to say a coarseness, not unworthy of the great D’Urfey himself. The bard was tolerable enough in such passages as this, descriptive of the knight’s appearance: