Eighteenth Century Vignettes

Whether Gray's library ever again broke silence, his biographers have not related. But if his books were pressed for space while in his possession, they have since enjoyed ample opportunities for change of air and scene. When he died he left them, with his manuscripts, to Mason, who in turn bequeathed them to the poet's friend Stonehewer, from whom they passed, in part, to a relative, Mr. Bright of Skeffington Hall. At Mr. Bright's death, being family property, they were sold by auction. In August, 1851, they were again offered for sale; and three years later a number of them, which had apparently been reserved or bought in, once more came under the hammer at Sotheby and Wilkinson's. We have before us the catalogue of the second sale, which is naturally much fuller than that of 1854. What strikes one first is the care with which the majority of the volumes had been preserved by their later possessors. Many of the Note-Books were cushioned on velvet in special cases, while the more precious manuscripts had been skilfully inlaid, and bound in olive morocco with leather joints and linings of crimson silk. Like Prior, Gray must have preserved almost everything, 'e'en from his boyish days.' Among the books is 'Plutarch's Lives,' with Dacier's notes, and the inscription, 'E libris Thomæ Gray, Scholæ Eton: Alumn. Januar. 22, 1733' – a year before he left for Cambridge; there is also his copy of Pope's 'Iliad,' with autograph date a year earlier; there is a still more youthful (though perhaps more suspicious) possession – namely, three volumes of Dryden's 'Virgil,' which were said to have actually belonged to Pope. 'Ex libris A. Pope, 1710,' was written at the back of the portrait, and the same inscription recurred in each volume, though in the others some Vandal, probably a classmate, by adding a tail to the 'P' and an 'r' at the end, had turned the 'Pope' into 'Roper.' Another of Gray's Eton books was a Waller, acquired in 1729, in which favourite poems and passages were underlined.

Of the classics he must have been a most unwearied and sedulous student. Euripides he read in the great folio of Joshua Barnes (Cantab. 1694), which is marked throughout by a special system of stars, inverted commas, and lines in red crayon; and his note-books bristle with extracts, neatly 'arranged and digested,' from all the best Greek authors – Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, and even that Isocrates whom Goldsmith, from the critical altitudes of the 'Monthly Review,' recommended him to study. At other 'classics' he worked with equal diligence. His 'Decameron' – the London quarto of 1725 – was filled with marginalia identifying Boccaccio's sources of inspiration and principal imitators, while his Milton – the two-volume duodecimo of 1730-8 – was interleaved, and annotated profusely with parallel passages drawn from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and 'the ancients.'' He had crowded Dugdale's 'Baronage' with corrections and additions; he had largely 'commented' the four folio volumes of Clarendon's 'Rebellion;' and he had followed everywhere, with remorseless rectifications, the vagrant utterances of gossiping Gilbert Burnet. His patience, accuracy, research, were not less extraordinary than his odd, out-of-the-way knowledge. In the 'Voyages de Bergeron' (quarto) that author says: 'Mango Cham fut noie.' No, comments Gray, decisively, 'Muncacâ or Mangu-Khanw was not drowned, but in reality slain in China at the siege of Hochew in 1258.' Which of us could oblige an inquisitive examiner with the biography of this Eastern potentate! Which of us would not be reduced to 'combining our information' (like the ingenious writer on Chinese Metaphysics) as to 'mangoes' and 'great Chams'!

But the two most interesting items of the Catalogue are yet unmentioned. One is the laborious collection of Manuscript Music that Gray compiled in Italy while frivolous Horace Walpole was eating iced fruits in a domino to the sound of a guitar. Zamperelli, Pergolesi, Arrigoni, Galuppi – he has ransacked them all, noting the school of the composer and the source of the piece selected – copying out religiously even the 'Regole per l'Accompagnamento.' The other, which we who write have seen, is the famous Linnaeus exhibited at Cambridge in 1885 by Mr. Ruskin. It is an interleaved copy of the 'Systema Naturae,' two volumes in three, covered as to their margins and added pages with wonderful minute notes in Latin, and illustrated by Gray himself with delicately finished pen-and-ink drawings of birds and insects. During the later part of his life these volumes, we are told, were continually on his table, and his absorbing love for natural history is everywhere manifested in his journals and pocket-books. When he is in the country, he classes the plants; when in town, he notes the skins of birds in shops; and when he eats whitebait at Greenwich, he straightway describes that dainty in the language of Tacitus. Nullus odor nisi Piscis; farina respersus, frixusque editur.

Among the manuscripts proper of this collection, the place of honour belongs to one which Mason had labelled 'Original Copy of the Elegy in a Country Church Yard.' In addition to other variations from the printed text, erased words in this MS. showed that Cato stood originally for Hampden, and Tully and Cæsar for Milton and Cromwell:

'Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood.'

Here, too, were found those well-known but rejected 'additional' stanzas:

'The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow,Exalt the brave, and idolize Success;But more to Innocence their Safety oweThan Pow'r and Genius e'er conspir'd to bless.'And thou, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead,Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate,By Night and lonely Contemplation ledTo linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate:'Hark! how the sacred Calm that broods around,Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease;In still small Accents whisp'ring from the Ground,A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace.'No more, with Reason and thyself at Strife,Give anxious Cares and endless Wishes room;But thro' the cool sequester'd Vale of LifePursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.' *

Another additional stanza, perhaps better known than the above, does not occur in the 'Original Copy' of the Elegy, but in a later MS. at Pembroke College: —

'There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the Year,By Hands unseen, are Show'rs of Violets found:The Red-breast loves to build, & warble there,And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.'His bushy beard, and shoe-strings green,His high-crown'd hat, and sattin-doublet,Mov'd the stout heart of England's Queen,Tho' Pope and Spaniard could not trouble it.'

Or again:

'Who prowl'd the country far and near,Bewitch'd the children of the peasants,Dried up the cows, and lam'd the deer,And suck'd the eggs, and kill'd the pheasants.'

Another group of autographs in this volume had a special interest. The first was the notelet, or 'spell,' which Lady Schaub and Miss Speed left for Gray upon that first call when the nervous poet was 'not at home' to his unexpected visitors. Next to this came the poem which the note elicited – that charming 'Long Story,' with its echo of Matthew Prior, which has set their tune to so many later verse-spinners:

Does not one seem to catch in this the coming cadences of another haunter of the 'Poets' Walk' at Eton – of Winthrop Mackworth Praed; nay, an it be not lèse majesté, even of the lighter strains of Lord Tennyson himself! To the 'Long Story' followed Miss Speed's polite little acknowledgment with its invitation to dinner, and a few pages further on the verses beginning —

Midst Beauty and Pleasure's gay Triumphs to languish,'

which Gray probably wrote for her – verses in which there is more of poetic ardour than genuine passion. Gray was not a marrying man. Yet one feels half sorry that he was never united to 'Your oblig'd & obedient Henrietta Jane Speed,' with her £30,000, her house in town, and her 'china and old japan infinite.' Still more to be resented is the freak of Fate which transformed the delightful Melissa of the 'Long Story' into the berouged French Baronne who, sixteen years later, in company with her lap-dogs, piping bullfinch, and cockatoo, arrived from the Hague as Madame de la Perrière, and 'Ministress at London.'

The large quarto volume containing the above poems also included the first sketch in red crayon of Gray's unfinished Latin Poem, 'De Principiis Cogitandi,' and a copy of the translation of the Ugolino episode from the 'Inferno,' first printed by Mr. Gosse in 1884. Of the volumes of miscellaneous MSS. (where was found the 'Dialogue of Books') it is impossible to speak here. But among the rest comes a copy of the 'Strawberry Hill' edition of the 'Odes by Mr. Gray' – those Odes which at first he had so obstinately refused to annotate. 'If a thing cannot be understood without notes,' he told Walpole, 'it had better not be understood at all.' He must, however, have subsequently recanted, since this copy is filled with carefully written explanations of the allusions, and with indications of the sources of information. This book and the Note-books of Travel and Reading, with their methodical arrangement, their scrupulous accuracy, their unwearied pains, all help us to understand that leisurely fastidiousness, that hesitating dilettanteism, that endless preluding to unachieved performance, which make of the most literary, exact, and polished of poets, at the same time the least copious of writers. In his bust in the Pembroke College, Mr. Hamo Thorny-croft has happily succeeded in accentuating these qualities of refinement and intellectual precision. For the rest, is not Gray wholly contained in the vignette of Rogers to Mitford?

Gray, he says, saw little society in London. He had 'a nice dinner from the Tavern brought to his lodgings, a glass or two of sweet wine, and [here is a delightful touch!] as he sippd it talked about great People.' It needs but to fill the room with those scarlet martagon-lilies and double stocks for which he trudged daily to Covent Garden, to spread a meteorological register upon the writing-table, to open Gavin Douglas his 'Palice of Honour' in the window-seat – and the picture is finished.

XIII. THE NEW CHESTERFIELD

LORD CHESTERFIELD detested proverbs. For him they were not so much the wit of one man and the wisdom of many, as the cheap rhetoric of the vulgar, to which no person of condition could possibly condescend. Yet it is his Lordship's misfortune to suggest one of the homeliest. Nothing so well describes the state of his modern reputation as the familiar adage, 'Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.' Dr. Johnson, who had more or less valid reasons for antagonism, characterized the famous letters in one of those vigorous verdicts, the compactness of which has sometimes been allowed to condone injustice. They taught, he declared, 'the morals of a courtesan, 23 and the manners of a dancing-master.'

Cowper followed suit. Addressing the author in the 'Progress of Error' as Petronius, he informed him that the tears of the Muses would 'scald his memory;' and after apostrophizing him as a 'graybeard corrupter of our listening youth,' and a 'polish'd and high-finish'd foe to Truth,' adjured him finally (and rather fatuously) to send from the shades some message of recantation, – in all of which there is more of poetic phraseology than energy of reproach. With the novelists Lord Chesterfield has hardly fared better. Dickens, who drew upon him for Sir John Chester in 'Barnaby Rudge,' makes that personage declare enthusiastically that 'in every page of this enlightened writer, he finds some captivating hypocrisy which had never occurred to him before, or some superlative piece of selfishness to which he was utterly a stranger.' The picture in Thackeray's 'Virginians' is quieter and more lifelike. We are shown Lord Chesterfield at Tunbridge, when Harry Warrington makes his debut there – 'a little beetle-browed, hook-nosed, high-shouldered gentleman,' much like his portrait by Gainsborough, sitting over his wine at the White Horse with M. de Pollnitz, rallying and ironically complimenting that ambiguous adventurer, making magnificent apology to Mr. Warrington when he has unwittingly insulted him, and, at a later period, with his customary composure, losing six hundred pounds to him at cards. As to this last detail there may be doubts. Thackeray probably counted upon human frailty and the inveteracy of an ancient habit, but Lord Carnarvon says that Lord Chesterfield gave up play when he accepted office, and he had been Ambassador at the Hague and Viceroy in Ireland years before he met Colonel Esmond's grandson at M. Barbeau's much-frequented ordinary in the Wells.

Turning to the two quarto volumes which, in March, 1774, were sent forth from Golden Square by that not entirely discreet and certainly rapacious representative, his Lordship's daughter-in-law, one's first impression is that they have been more talked about in the light of Johnson's epigram than read by that of their own merits. No one, of course, would affirm, even allowing for the corrupt state of the society in which they were written, that their moral tone, in one respect especially, is defensible; nor can it be denied, even supposing them to emanate from a friend rather than a parent, that they contain passages which, to our modern taste, are more than unpleasant. But without in the least attempting to extenuate these objectionable features of the correspondence, it is but just to its author to remember that it was never intended either for the public instruction or for the public eye. When Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope trusted the letters would be of use 'to the Youth of these Kingdoms,' she was palpably overlooking this obvious fact. If Lord Chesterfield had published them himself, he would no doubt have considerably edited them; but it is extremely unlikely that he would ever have published them at all. The principles which he desired to instil into Philip Stanhope were the principles of the society in which Philip Stanhope was moving – they were those of his patron, Lord Albemarle, and his preceptress, Lady Hervey. They were intended not for the world at large, but for the narrower world of fashion.

The systematic dissimulation which they appear to inculcate has also been urged against them. But here again it seems to have been forgotten that young Stanhope was intended for a politician and statesman, – that what his father most desired for him was the successes of a court and the rewards of diplomacy. After all, the volto sciolto and pensieri stretti, the 'looks loose' and 'thoughts close,' 24 which he so persistently enjoins, are no more than the unimpeachable Sir Henry Wotton impressed upon the equally unimpeachable John Milton.

Lord Chesterfield puts his points coldly and cynically; but by his excellent sermon on the suaviter in modo and the fortiter in re, he preaches in reality little beyond that necessary conciliation of the feelings of others which is inculcated by almost every manual of ethics. Again, if he harps somewhat wearisomely upon 'les manières, les bienséances, les agrémens, it is precisely because these were the weak points of his pupil, who, master at twenty of Latin, Greek, and political history, speaking readily German, French, and Italian, having a remarkable memory and a laudable curiosity, still retained an awkwardness of address which neither Marcel nor Desnoyers could wholly overcome, 25 and a defective enunciation which would have resisted all the pebbles of Demosthenes.

For the rest, Lord Chesterfield's teaching is, in great measure, unexceptionable. Its worst fault, in addition to those already mentioned, is that it too frequently confuses being with seeming, and the assumption of a virtue with the actual possession of it. But many of its injunctions are most praiseworthy, and even admirable as aphorisms; and those to whom their note of worldly wisdom is distasteful must blame not so much the writer, as Horace and Cicero, Bolingbroke and La Bruyère, De Retz and La Rochefoucault, from whom he had compiled his rules for conduct, and shaped his scheme of life.

When Philip Stanhope died at six-and-thirty, neither 'paitri [sic] de graces' as Lord Chesterfield hoped, nor particularly distinguished in statecraft (he was simply Envoy at Dresden), it was discovered that he had so far adopted the policy of 'pensieri stretti as to have been married privately for some years. Probably the shock of this discovery was softened to his father (who nevertheless behaved liberally to the widow) by the fact that, in the failure of his plans for his son, he had already begun to interest himself in the training of another member of his family, a little boy who was destined to be his successor in the earldom. Seven years before Philip Stanhope's death he had opened a new series of letters with a godchild, also Philip Stanhope, and the son of Mr. Arthur Stanhope, of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire. Beginning when the boy was five and a half, the correspondence was continued for nine years, following him from 'Mr. Robert's boarding School at Marybone by London' to the house in Southampton Row of his tutor, the notorious Dr. Dodd. When the first letter was written, Lord Chesterfield was sixty-seven, and the last was penned only three years before his death. This is the collection which, after being mislaid for a long period, was published in 1889 by the late Lord Carnarvon, to whom it had been presented by his father-in-law, the sixth Earl of Chesterfield. It contributes not a little to the revision of the popular idea formed of the writer, – an idea, it may be added, which, upon re-examination of the earlier correspondence, had already been considerably modified by such critics as Mr. Abraham Hayward and M. Sainte-Beuve. Superficially, the letters resemble their predecessors, and the outline of education is much the same. Little Philip was to be 'perfectly master' of that French which his godfather loved so dearly, and in which he wrote so often and so well; he was to be thoroughly grounded in History, Geography, Dancing, Italian, German; he was to be proficient in Greek and Latin, and he was to complete his studies in the 'well-regulated republic' of Geneva, the salutary austerity of which was then usefully tempered by the presence of Voltaire and the French refugees. Many of the new letters reproduce the old precepts; there are even similarities of thought and phraseology; and though the volto sciolto is not obtruded, the suaviter in modo is still persistently advocated. But age has brought its softening influences – the moral tone is ostensibly higher, and the old worldly savoir-faire has lost much of its ancient cynicism. Some of the axioms which Lord Carnarvon quotes are remarkable for their accent of earnestness; others, as he observes, are 'almost theological' in tone. Saint Augustine, for example, could hardly say more than this: 'Si je pouvois empêcher qu'il n'y eut un seul malheureux sur la Terre, j'y sacrifierois avec plaisir mon bien, mes soins, et même ma santé. C'est le grand devoir de l'homme, surtout de l'homme chrétien.' The next is nearer to the elder manner: 'Ayez une grande Charité pour l'amour de Dieu et une extrême politesse pour l'amour de vous même.' And here is a graver utterance than either: 'God has been so good as to write in all our hearts the duty that He expects from us, which is adoration and thanksgiving and doing all the good we can to our fellow creatures.'

It is extraordingry to note what an infinity of trouble Lord Chesterfield took to arouse and amuse his little pupil. Sometimes the letter is an anecdote, biographical or historical; sometimes a cunningly contrived French vocabulary, one of which, inter alia, comprehensively defines 'Les Graces' as 'Something gracefull, genteel, and engaging in the air and figure.' Others (like the admirable papers in 'The World') denounce the prevailing vice of drunkenness. 'Fuyez le vin, car c'est un poison lent, mais sur.' Occasionally a little diagram aids the exposition, as when a rude circle, with a tiny figure at top, stands for 'le petit Stanhope' and 'ses antipodes;' in other cases, the course of instruction in politeness and public speaking is diversified by definitions of similes and metaphors, epigrams, anagrams, and logogriphes. Finally, there is a complete treatise, in fourteen epistles, on the 'Art of Pleasing,' from which we extract the following on wit and satire:

'When wit exerts itself in satyr it is a most malignant distemper; wit it is true may be shown in satyr, but satyr does not constitute wit, as most fools imagine it does. A man of real wit will find a thousand better occasions of showing it. Abstain therefore most carefully from satyr, which though it fall upon no particular person in company, and momentarily from the malignity of the human heart, pleases all; upon reflexion it frightens all too, they think it may be their turn next, and will hate you for what they find you could say of them more, than be obliged to you for what you do not say. Fear and hatred are next door neighbours. The more wit you have the more good nature and politeness you must show, to induce people to pardon your superiority, for that is no easy matter.'

Alas! and alas! that so much labour and patience should have been lost. For Philip the Second, though he made no secret marriage, was not a much greater success than Philip the First. He turned out a commonplace country gentleman, amiable, methodical, agricultural, but wholly overshadowed and obliterated by the fame of the accomplished statesman and orator who had directed his studies.

'The bows of eloquence are buried with the Archers.' It is impossible, even with the aid of the phonograph, to recapture the magnetic personality, the fervour of gesture that winged the words and carried conviction to the hearer. Equally impossible is it, in this age of egotisms and eccentricities that pass for character, to realize the fascination of those splendid manners for which Lord Chesterfield was celebrated.

The finished elegance, the watchful urbanity, the perfect ease and self-possession, which Fielding commended, and Johnson could not contest, are things too foreign to our restless overconsciousness to be easily intelligible. But we can at least call up – not without compassionate admiration – the pathetic picture of the deaf old gentleman who had been the rival of 'silver-tongued Murray' and the correspondent of Montesquieu, sitting down at seventy in his solitary study at Babiole 26 to write, in that wonderful hand of which Lord Carnarvon gives a facsimile, his periodical letter of advice to a petit bout d'homme at Parson Dodd's in Southampton Row, concerning whose career in life he had formed the fondest – and the vainest – expectations.

XIV. A DAY AT STRAWBERRY HILL

TO the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism it may seem an almost hopeless task to revive the details of a day in a Twickenham Villa when George the Third was King. And yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's letters, of the 'Walpoliana' of Pinkerton, and, above all, of the catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its owner in 1774, there is no insurmountable difficulty in deciding what must probably have been the customary course of events. Nothing is needed at the outset but to assume that you had arrived, late on the previous night, at the embattled Gothic building on the Teddington Road, and that the fatigues of your journey had left you little more than a vague notion of your host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast hour was nine. Then, after carrying with you into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber an indistinct recollection of Richardson's drawings of Pope and his mother, and of Bermingham's 'owl cut in paper,' which you dimly make out with your candle on the walls, you would be waked at eight next morning by Colomb, the Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master as his compatriot Canton in the 'Clandestine Marriage'), and in due time would repair to the blue-papered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, looking pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coasting leisurely round the apartment, you would probably pause before M. de Carmontel's double picture of your host's dead friend, Madame du Deffand, and her relative the Duchesse de Choiseul, or you would peer curiously at the view of Madame de Sevigné's hotel in the 'Rue Coulture St. Catherine.' Presently would come a patter of tiny feet, and a fat, and not very sociable, little dog, which had once belonged to the said Madame du Deffand, would precede its master, whom you would hear walking, with the stiff tread of an infirm person, from his bedroom on the floor above. Shortly afterwards would enter a tall, slim, frail-looking figure in a morning-gown, with a high, pallid forehead, dark brilliant eyes under drooping lids, and a friendly, but forced and rather unprepossessing smile. Tonton (as the little dog was called), after being cajoled into a semblance of cordiality, would be lifted upon a small sofa at his master's side, the teakettle and heater would arrive, and tea would be served in cups of fine old white embossed Japanese china. And then, the customary salutations exchanged and over, would gradually begin, in a slightly affected fashion, to which you speedily grow accustomed, that wonderful flow of talk which (like Praed's Vicar's)