Pencillings by the Way Part 31

One of the first persons who came was Lord Byron's sister, a thin, plain, middle-aged woman, of a very serious countenance, and with very cordial and pleasing manners. The rooms soon filled, and two professed singers went industriously to work in their vocation at the piano; but, except one pale man, with staring hair, whom I took to be a poet, n.o.body pretended to listen.

Every second woman has some strong claim to beauty in England, and the proportion of those who just miss it, by a hair's breadth as it were--who seem really to have been meant for beauties by nature, but by a slip in the moulding or pencilling are imperfect copies of the design--is really extraordinary. One after another entered, as I stood near the door with my old friend Dr. Bowring for a nomenclator, and the word "lovely" or "charming," had not pa.s.sed my lips before some change in the att.i.tude, or unguarded animation had exposed the flaw, and the hasty homage (for homage it is, and an idolatrous one, that we pay to the beauty of woman), was coldly and unsparingly retracted.

From a G.o.ddess upon earth to a slighted and unattractive trap for matrimony is a long step, but taken on so slight a defect sometimes, as, were they marble, a sculptor would etch away with his nail.

I was surprised (and I have been struck with the same thing at several parties I have attended in London), at the neglect with which the female part of the a.s.semblage is treated. No young man ever seems to dream of speaking to a lady, except to ask her to dance. There they sit with their mamas, their hands hung over each other before them in the received att.i.tude; and if there happens to be no dancing (as at Bulwer's), looking at a print, or eating an ice, is for them the most enlivening circ.u.mstance of the evening. As well as I recollect, it is better managed in America, and certainly society is quite another thing in France and Italy. Late in the evening a charming girl, who is the reigning belle of Naples, came in with her mother from the opera, and I made the remark to her. "I detest England for that very reason,"

she said frankly. "It is the fas.h.i.+on in London for the young men to prefer everything to the society of women. They have their clubs, their horses, their rowing matches, their hunting and betting, and everything else is a _bore_! How different are the same men at Naples!

They can never get enough of one there! We are surrounded and run after,

"'Our poodle dog is quite adored, Our sayings are extremely quoted,'

"and really, one feels that one _is_ a belle." She mentioned several of the beaux of last winter who had returned to England. "Here I have been in London a month, and these very men that were dying for me, at my side every day on the _Strada Nuova_, and all but fighting to dance three times with me of an evening, have only left their cards! Not because they care less about me, but because it is 'not the fas.h.i.+on'--it would be talked of at the club, it is 'knowing' to let us alone."

There were only three men in the party, which was a very crowded one, who could come under the head of _beaux_. Of the remaining part, there was much that was distinguished, both for rank and talent. Sheil, the Irish orator, a small, dark, deceitful, but talented-looking man, with a very disagreeable squeaking voice, stood in a corner, very earnestly engaged in conversation with the aristocratic old Earl of Clarendon.

The contrast between the styles of the two men, the courtly and mild elegance of one, and the uneasy and half-bred, but shrewd earnestness of the other, was quite a study. Fonblanc of the Examiner, with his pale and dislocated-looking face, stood in the door-way between the two rooms, making the amiable with a ghastly smile to Lady Stepney.

The 'bilious Lord Durham,' as the papers call him, with his Brutus head, and grave, severe countenance, high-bred in his appearance, despite the worst possible coat and trowsers, stood at the pedestal of a beautiful statue, talking politics with Bowring; and near them, leaned over a chair the Prince Moscowa, the son of Marshal Ney, a plain, but determined-looking young man, with his coat b.u.t.toned up to his throat, unconscious of everything but the presence of the Honorable Mrs. Leicester Stanhope, a very lovely woman, who was enlightening him in the prettiest English French, upon some point of national differences. Her husband, famous as Lord Byron's companion in Greece, and a great liberal in England, was introduced to me soon after by Bulwer; and we discussed the Bank and the President, with a little a.s.sistance from Bowring, who joined us with a paean for the old general and his measures, till it was far into the morning.

LETTER LXXIII.

BREAKFAST WITH BARRY CORNWALL--LUXURY OF THE FOLLOWERS OF THE MODERN MUSE--BEAUTY OF THE DRAMATIC SKETCHES GAINS PROCTOR A WIFE--HAZLITT'S EXTRAORDINARY TASTE FOR THE PICTURESQUE IN WOMEN--COLERIDGE'S OPINION OF CORNWALL.

Breakfasted with Mr. Procter (known better as Barry Cornwall). I gave a partial description of this most delightful of poets in a former letter. In the dazzling circle of rank and talent with which he was surrounded at Lady Blessington's, however, it was difficult to see so shrinkingly modest a man to advantage, and with the exception of the keen gray eye, living with thought and feeling, I should hardly have recognised him, at home, for the same person.

Mr. Procter is a barrister; and his "whereabout" is more like that of a lord chancellor than a poet proper. With the address he had given me at parting, I drove to a large house in Bedford square; and, not accustomed to find the children of the Muses waited on by servants in livery, I made up my mind as I walked up the broad staircase, that I was blundering upon some Mr. Procter of the exchange, whose respect for his poetical namesake, I hoped would smooth my apology for the intrusion. Buried in a deep morocco chair, in a large library, notwithstanding, I found the poet himself--choice old pictures, filling every nook between the book-shelves, tables covered with novels and annuals, rolls of prints, busts and drawings in all corners; and, more important for the nonce, a breakfast table at the poet's elbow, spicily set forth, not with flowers or ambrosia, the canonical food of rhymers, but with cold ham and ducks, hot rolls and b.u.t.ter, coffee-pot and tea-urn--as sensible a breakfast, in short, as the most unpoetical of men could desire.

Procter is indebted to his poetry for a very charming wife, the daughter of Basil Montague, well known as a collector of choice literature, and the friend and patron of literary men. The exquisite beauty of the Dramatic Sketches interested this lovely woman in his favor before she knew him, and, far from worldly-wise as an attachment so grounded would seem, I never saw two people with a more habitual air of happiness. I thought of his touching song,

"How many summers, love, Hast thou been mine?"

and looked at them with an inexpressible feeling of envy. A beautiful girl, of eight or nine years, the "golden-tressed Adelaide," delicate, gentle and pensive, as if she was born on the lip of Castaly, and knew she was a poet's child, completed the picture of happiness.

The conversation ran upon various authors, whom Procter had known intimately--Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, and others, and of all he gave me interesting particulars, which I could not well repeat in a public letter. The account of Hazlitt's death-bed, which appeared in one of the magazines, he said was wholly untrue. This extraordinary writer was the most reckless of men in money matters, but he had a host of admiring friends who knew his character, and were always ready to a.s.sist him. He was a great admirer of the picturesque in women. He was one evening at the theatre with Procter, and pointed out to him an Amazonian female, strangely dressed in black velvet and lace, but with no beauty that would please an ordinary eye. "Look at her!" said Hazlitt, "isn't she fine!--isn't she magnificent? Did you ever see anything more t.i.tianesque?"[12]

After breakfast, Procter took me into a small closet adjoining his library, in which he usually writes. There was just room enough in it for a desk and two chairs, and around were piled in true poetical confusion, his favorite books, miniature likenesses of authors, ma.n.u.scripts, and all the interesting lumber of a true poet's corner.

From a drawer, very much thrust out of the way, he drew a volume of his own, into which he proceeded to write my name--a collection of songs, published since I have been in Europe, which I had never seen.

I seized upon a worn copy of the Dramatic Sketches, which I found crossed and interlined in every direction. "Don't look at them," said Procter, "they are wretched things, which should never have been printed, or at least with a world of correction. You see how I have mended them; and, some day, perhaps, I will publish a corrected edition, since I can not get them back." He took the book from my hand, and opened to "The Broken Heart," certainly the most highly-finished and exquisite piece of pathos in the language, and read it to me with his alterations. It was to "gild refined gold, and paint the lily." I would recommend to the lovers of Barry Cornwall, to keep their original copy, beautifully as he has polished his lines anew.

On a blank leaf of the same copy of the Dramatic Sketches, I found some indistinct writing in pencil, "Oh! don't read that," said Procter, "the book was given me some years ago, by a friend at whose house Coleridge had been staying, for the sake of the criticisms that great man did me the honor to write at the end." I insisted on reading them, however, and his wife calling him out presently, I succeeded in copying them in his absence. He seemed a little annoyed, but on my promising to make no use of them in England, he allowed me to retain them. They are as follows:

"Barry Cornwall is a poet, _me saltem judice_, and in that sense of the word, in which I apply it to Charles Lamb and W.

Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the authors of which, I should not yet feel impelled so to designate.

"The faults of these poems are no less things of hope than the beauties. Both are just what they ought to be: i. e. _now_.

"If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn him that as poetry is the ident.i.ty of all other knowledge, so a poet can not be a great poet, but as being likewise and inclusively an historian and a naturalist in the light as well as the life of philosophy. All other men's worlds are his chaos.

"Hints--Not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to seduce into effeminacy.

"Not to permit beauties by repet.i.tion to become mannerism.

"To be jealous of fragmentary composition as epicurism of genius--apple-pie made all of quinces.

"Item. That dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and pa.s.sion, not thought or pa.s.sion hid in the dregs of poetry.

"Lastly, to be economic and withholding in similes, figures, etc. They will all find their place sooner or later, each in the luminary of a sphere of its own. There can be no galaxy in poetry, because it is language, _ergo_, successive, _ergo_ every the smallest star must be seen singly.

"There are not five metrists in the kingdom whose works are known by me, to whom I could have held myself allowed to speak so plainly; but B. C. is a man of genius, and it depends on himself (_competence protecting him from gnawing and distracting cares_), to become a rightful poet--i. e. a great man.

"Oh, for such a man; worldly prudence is transfigured into the high spiritual duty. How generous is self-interest in him, whose true self is all that is good and hopeful in all ages as far as the language of Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, is the mother tongue.

"A map of the road to Paradise, drawn in Purgatory on the confines of h.e.l.l, by S. T. C. July 30, 1819."

I took my leave of this true poet after half a day pa.s.sed in his company, with the impression that he makes upon every one--of a man whose sincerity and kind-heartedness were the most prominent traits in his character. Simple in his language and feelings, a fond father, an affectionate husband, businessman of the closest habits of industry--one reads his strange imaginations, and pa.s.sionate, high-wrought, and even sublimated poetry, and is in doubt at which most to wonder--the man as he is, or the poet as we know him in his books.

FOOTNOTE:

[12] The following story has been told me by another gentleman.

Hazlitt was married to an amiable woman, and divorced after a few years, at his own request. He left London, and returned with another wife. The first thing he did, was to send to his first wife to borrow five pounds! She had not so much in the world, but she sent to a friend (the gentleman who told me the story), borrowed it, and sent it to him! It seems to me there is a whole drama in this single fact.

LETTER LXXIV.

AN EVENING AT LADY BLESSINGTON'S--ANECDOTES OF MOORE, THE POET--TAYLOR, THE PLATONIST--POLITICS--ELECTION OF SPEAKER--PRICES OF BOOKS.

I am obliged to "gazette" Lady Blessington rather more than I should wish, and more than may seem delicate to those, who do not know the central position she occupies in the circle of talent in London. Her soirees and dinner-parties, however, are literally the single and only a.s.semblages of men of genius, without reference to party--the only attempt at a republic of letters in the world of this great, envious, and gifted metropolis. The pictures of literary life, in which my countrymen would be most interested, therefore, are found within a very small compa.s.s, presuming them to prefer the brighter side of an eminent character, and presuming them (_is_ it a presumption?), not to possess that appet.i.te for degrading the author to the man, by an anatomy of his secret personal failings, which is lamentably common in England. Having premised thus much, I go on with my letter.

I drove to Lady Blessington's an evening or two since, with the usual certainty of finding her at home, as there was no opera, and the equal certainty of finding a circle of agreeable and eminent men about her.

She met me with the information that Moore was in town, and an invitation to dine with her whenever she should be able to prevail upon "the little Bacchus" to give her a day. D'Israeli, the younger, was there, and Dr. Beattie, the king's physician (and author, unacknowledged, of "The Heliotrope"), and one or two fas.h.i.+onable young n.o.blemen.

Moore was naturally the first topic. He had appeared at the opera the night before, after a year's ruralizing at "Sloperton cottage," as fresh and young and witty as he ever was known in his youth--(for Moore must be sixty at least). Lady B. said the only difference she could see in his appearance, was the loss of his curls, which once justified singularly his t.i.tle of Bacchus, flowing about his head in thin, glossy, elastic tendrils, unlike any other hair she had ever seen, and comparable to nothing but the rings of the vine. He is now quite bald, and the change is very striking. D'Israeli regretted that he should have been met, exactly on his return to London, with the savage but clever article in Fraser's Magazine on his plagiarisms.

"Give yourself no trouble about that," said Lady B., "for you may be sure he will never see it. Moore guards against the sight and knowledge of criticism as people take precautions against the plague.

He reads few periodicals, and but one newspaper. If a letter comes to him from a suspicious quarter, he burns it unopened. If a friend mentions a criticism to him at the club, he never forgives him; and, so well is this understood among his friends, that he might live in London a year, and all the magazines might dissect him, and he would probably never hear of it. In the country he lives on the estate of Lord Lansdowne, his patron and best friend, with half a dozen other n.o.blemen within a dinner-drive, and he pa.s.ses his life in this exclusive circle, like a bee in amber, perfectly preserved from everything that could blow rudely upon him. He takes the world _en philosophe_, and is determined to descend to his grave perfectly ignorant, if such things as critics exist." Somebody said this was weak, and D'Israeli thought it was wise, and made a splendid defence of his opinion, as usual, and I agreed with D'Israeli. Moore deserves a medal, as the happiest author of his day, to possess the power.

A remark was made, in rather a satirical tone, upon Moore's worldliness and pa.s.sion for rank. "He was sure," it was said, "to have four or five invitations to dine on the same day, and he tormented himself with the idea that he had not accepted perhaps the most exclusive. He would get off from an engagement with a Countess to dine with a Marchioness, and from a Marchioness to accept the later invitation of a d.u.c.h.ess; and as he cared little for the society of men, and would sing and be delightful only for the applause of women, it mattered little whether one circle was more talented than another.

Beauty was one of his pa.s.sions, but rank and fas.h.i.+on were all the rest." This rather left-handed portrait was confessed by all to be just, Lady B. herself making no comment upon it. She gave, as an offset, however, some particulars of Moore's difficulties from his West Indian appointment, which left a balance to his credit.

"Moore went to Jamaica with a profitable appointment. The climate disagreed with him, and he returned home, leaving the business in the hands of a confidential clerk, who embezzled eight thousand pounds in the course of a few months and absconded. Moore's politics had made him obnoxious to the government, and he was called to account with unusual severity; while Theodore Hook, who had been recalled at this very time from some foreign appointment, for a deficit of twenty thousand pounds in his accounts, was never molested, being of the ruling party, Moore's misfortune awakened a great sympathy among his friends. Lord Lansdowne was the first to offer his aid. He wrote to Moore, that for many years he had been in the habit of laying aside from his income eight thousand pounds, for the encouragement of the arts and literature, and that he should feel that it was well disposed of for that year, if Moore would accept it, to free him from his difficulties. It was offered in the most delicate and n.o.ble manner, but Moore declined it. The members of "White's" (mostly n.o.blemen) called a meeting, and (not knowing the amount of the deficit) subscribed in one morning twenty-five thousand pounds and wrote to the poet, that they would cover the sum, whatever it might be. This was declined. Longman and Murray then offered to pay it, and wait for their remuneration from his works. He declined even this, and went to Pa.s.sy with his family, where he economized and worked hard till it was cancelled."

This was certainly a story most creditable to the poet, and it was told with an eloquent enthusiasm, that did the heart of the beautiful narrator infinite credit. I have given only the skeleton of it. Lady Blessington went on to mention another circ.u.mstance, very honorable to Moore, of which I had never before heard. "At one time two different counties of Ireland had sent committees to him, to offer him a seat in parliament; and as he depended on his writings for a subsistence, offering him at the same time twelve hundred pounds a year, while he continued to represent them. Moore was deeply touched with it, and said no circ.u.mstance of his life had ever gratified him so much. He admitted, that the honor they proposed him had been his most cherished ambition, but the necessity of receiving a pecuniary support at the same time, was an insuperable obstacle. He could never enter parliament with his hands tied, and his opinions and speech fettered, as they would be irresistibly in such circ.u.mstances." This does not sound like "jump-up-and-kiss-me Tom Moore," as the Irish ladies call him; but her ladys.h.i.+p vouched for the truth of it. It was worthy of an old Roman.

By what transition I know not, the conversation turned on Platonism, and D'Israeli, (who seemed to have remembered the shelf on which Vivian Grey was to find "the latter Platonists" in his father's library) "flared up," as a dandy would say, immediately. His wild, black eyes glistened, and his nervous lips quivered and poured out eloquence; and a German professor, who had entered late, and the Russian Charge d'affaires who had entered later, and a whole ottoman-full of n.o.ble exquisites, listened with wonder. He gave us an account of Taylor, almost the last of the celebrated Platonists, who wors.h.i.+pped Jupiter, in a back parlor in London a few years ago, with undoubted sincerity. He had an altar and a brazen figure of the Thunderer, and performed his devotions as regularly as the most pious _sacerdos_ of the ancients. In his old age he was turned out of the lodgings he had occupied for a great number of years, and went to a friend in much distress to complain of the injustice. He had "only attempted to wors.h.i.+p his G.o.ds, according to the dictates of his conscience." "Did you pay your bills?" asked the friend. "Certainly."

"Then what is the reason?" "His landlady had taken offence at his _sacrificing a bull to Jupiter in his back parlor_!"