The Book of Ballads Part 1

The Bon Gaultier Ballads.

by William Edmonstoune Aytoun, et al.

PREFACE.

A further edition of this book--the sixteenth--having been called for, I have been asked by the publishers to furnish a preface to it. For prefaces I have no love. Books should speak for themselves. Prefaces can scarcely be otherwise than egotistic, and one would not willingly add to the too numerous ill.u.s.trations of this tendency with which the literature of the day abounds. I would much rather leave the volume with the simple "Envoy" which I wrote for it when the Bon Gaultier Ballads were first gathered into a volume. There the products of the dual authors.h.i.+p of Aytoun and myself were ascribed to the Bon Gaultier under whose editorial auspices they had for the most part seen the light. But my publishers tell me that people want to know why, and how, and by which of us these poems were written,--curiosity, complimentary, no doubt, but which it is by no means easy for the surviving bard to satisfy. It is sixty years since most of these verses were written with the light heart and fluent pen of youth, and with no thought of their surviving beyond the natural life of ephemeral magazine pieces of humour. After a long and very crowded life, of which literature has occupied the smallest part, it is difficult for me to live back into the circ.u.mstances and conditions under which they were written, or to mark, except to a very limited extent, how far to Aytoun, and how far to myself, separately, the contents of the volume are to be a.s.signed. I found this difficult when I wrote Aytoun's Life in 1867, and it is necessarily a matter of greater difficulty now in 1903.

I can but endeavour to show how Aytoun and I came together, and how for two or three years we worked together in literature. Aytoun (born 21st June 1813) was three years older than myself, and he was known already as a writer in 'Blackwood's Magazine' when I made his acquaintance in 1841.

For some years I had been writing in Tait's and Fraser's Magazines, and elsewhere, articles and verses, chiefly humorous, both in prose and verse, under the _nom de guerre_ of Bon Gaultier. This name, which seemed a good one for the author of playful and occasionally satirical papers, had caught my fancy in Rabelais, {vii} where he says of himself, "A moy n'est que honneur et gloire d'estre diet et repute Bon Gaultier et bon Compaignon; en ce nom, suis bien venue en toutes bonnes compaignees de Pantagruelistes."

It was to one of these papers that I owed my introduction to Aytoun.

What its nature was may be inferred from its t.i.tle--"Flowers of Hemp; or, The Newgate Garland. By One of the Family." Like most of the papers on which we subsequently worked together, the object was not merely to amuse, but also to strike at some prevailing literary craze or vitiation of taste. I have lived to see many such crazes since. Every decade seems to produce one. But the particular craze against which this paper was directed was the popularity of novels and songs, of which the ruffians of the Newgate Calendar were the accepted heroes. If my memory does not deceive me, it began with Harrison Ainsworth's 'Rookwood,' in which the gallantries of d.i.c.k Turpin, and the brilliant description of his famous Ride to York, caught the public fancy. Encouraged by the success of this book, Ainsworth next wooed the sympathies of the public for Jack Sheppard and his a.s.sociates in his novel of that name. The novel was turned into a melodrama, in which Mrs Keeley's clever embodiment of that "marvellous boy" made for months and months the fortunes of the Adelphi Theatre; while the sonorous musical voice of Paul Bedford as Blueskin in the same play brought into vogue a song with the refrain,

"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"

which travelled everywhere, and made the patter of thieves and burglars "familiar in our mouths as household words." It deafened us in the streets, where it was as popular with the organ-grinders and German bands as Sullivan's brightest melodies ever were in a later day. It clanged at midday from the steeple of St Giles, the Edinburgh cathedral; {ix} it was whistled by every dirty "gutter-snipe," and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips, that, little knowing the meaning of the words they sang, proclaimed to their admiring friends--

"In a box of the stone jug I was born, Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn; My n.o.ble father, as I've heard say, Was a famous marchant of capers gay;"

ending with the inevitable and insufferable chorus,

"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"

Soon after the Newgate Calendar was appealed to for a hero by the author of 'Pelham,' who had already won no small distinction, and who in his 'Paul Clifford' did his best to throw a halo of romance around the highwayman's career. Not satisfied with this, Bulwer next claimed the sympathies of his readers for Eugene Aram, and exalted a very common type of murderer into a n.o.bly minded and highly sentimental scholar. Crime and criminals became the favourite theme of a mult.i.tude of novelists of a lower cla.s.s. They even formed the central interest of the 'Oliver Twist'

of Charles d.i.c.kens, whose f.a.gin and his pupil "the Artful Dodger," Bill Sykes and Nancy, were simultaneously presented to us in their habits as they lived by the genius of George Cruikshank, with a power that gave a double interest to d.i.c.kens's masterly delineation of these worthies.

The time seemed--in 1841--to have come to open people's eyes to the dangerous and degrading taste of the hour, and it struck me that this might be done by pus.h.i.+ng to still further extravagance the praises which had been lavishly bestowed upon the gentlemen whose career generally terminated in Newgate or on the Tyburn Tree, and by giving "the accomplishment of verse" to the sentiments and the language which formed the staple of the popular thieves' literature of the circulating libraries. The medium chosen was the review of a ma.n.u.script, supposed to be sent to the writer by a man who had lived so fully up to his own convictions as to the n.o.ble vocation of those who set law at defiance, and lived by picking pockets, burglary, and highway robbery, diversified by an occasional murder, that, with the finisher of the law's a.s.sistance, he had ended his exploits in what the slang of his cla.s.s called "a breakfast of hartichoke with caper sauce." How hateful the phrase! But it was one of many such popularly current in those days.

The author of my "Thieves' Anthology" was described in my paper as a well-born man of good education, who, having ruined himself by his bad habits, had fallen into the criminal ranks, but had not forgotten the _literae humaniores_ which he had learned at the Heidelberg University.

Of the purpose with which he had written he spoke thus in what I described as the fragments of a preface to his Miscellany:--

"To rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,'

and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim and the achievement of many recent authors of distinction. How they have succeeded, let the populous state of the public jails attest. The office of 'dubsman'

[hangman] has ceased to be a sinecure, and the public and Mr Joseph Hume have the satisfaction of knowing that these useful functionaries have now got something to do for their salaries. The number of their pupils has increased, is increasing, and is not likely to be diminished. But much remains to be done. Many an untenanted cell still echoes only to the sighs of its own loneliness. New jails are rising around us, which require to be filled. The Penitentiary presently erecting at Perth is of the most commodious description.

"In this state of things I have bethought myself of throwing, in the words of Goethe, 'my corn into the great seed-field of time,' in the hope that it may blossom to purposes of great public utility. The aid of poetry has. .h.i.therto been but partially employed in the spread of a taste for Conveyancing, especially in its higher branches. Or where the Muse has shown herself, it has been but in the evanescent glimpses of a song. She has plumed her wings for no sustained flight. . . .

"The power of poetry over the heart and impulses of man has been recognised by all writers from Aristotle down to Serjeant Talfourd.

In dexterous hands it has been known to subvert a severe chast.i.ty by the insinuations of a holy flame, to clothe impurity in vestments 'bright with something of an angel light,' to exalt spleen into elevation of soul, and selfishness into a n.o.ble scorn of the world, and, with the ringing cadences of an enthusiastic style, to enn.o.ble the vulgar and to sanctify the low. How much may be done, with an engine of such power, in increasing the numbers of 'The Family' may be conceived. The Muse of Faking, fair daughter of the herald Mercury, claims her place among 'The Mystic Nine.' Her language, erewhile slumbering in the pages of the Flash Dictionary, now lives upon the lips of all, even in the most fas.h.i.+onable circles. Ladies accost crossing-sweepers as 'dubsmen'; whist-players are generally spoken of in gambling families as '_dummy_-hunters'; children in their nursery sports are accustomed to 'nix their dolls'; and the all but universal summons to exertion of every description is 'Fake away!'

"'Words are things,' says Apollonius of Tyana. We cannot be long familiar with a symbol without becoming intimate with that which it expresses. Let the public mind, then, be in the habit of a.s.sociating these and similar expressions with pa.s.sages of poetical power, let the ideas they import be imbedded in their hearts and glorified in their imaginations, and the fairest results may with confidence be antic.i.p.ated."

In song and sonnet and ballad these views were ill.u.s.trated and enforced.

They served the purpose of the ridicule which it was hoped might operate to cure people of the prevailing toleration for the romance of the slums and the thieves' kitchen. Naturally parody was freely used. Wordsworth did not escape. His

"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour,"

found its echo in

"Turpin, thou shouldst be living at this hour, England hath need of thee," &c.

And his "Great men have been among us," &c., was perverted into

"Great men have been among us,--Names that lend A l.u.s.tre to our calling; better none; Maclaine, Duval, d.i.c.k Turpin, Barrington, Blueskin and others, who called Sheppard friend.

. . . Now, 'tis strange, We never see such souls as we had then; Perpetual larcenies and such small change!

No single cracksman paramount, no code, No master spirit, that will take the road, But equal dearth of pluck and highwaymen!"

Nor did even Sh.e.l.ley's magnificent sonnet "Ozymandias" escape the profane hand of the burglar poet. He wrote,--

"I met a cracksman coming down the Strand, Who said, 'A huge Cathedral, piled of stone, Stands in a churchyard, near St Martin's Le Grand, Where keeps Saint Paul his sacerdotal throne.

A street runs by it to the northward. There For cab and bus is writ 'No Thoroughfare,'

The Mayor and Councilmen do so command.

And in that street a shop, with many a box, Upon whose sign these fateful words I scanned: 'My name is Chubb, who makes the Patent Locks; Look on my works, ye burglars, and despair!'

Here made he pause, like one that sees a blight Mar all his hopes, and sighed with drooping air, 'Our game is up, my covies, blow me tight!'"

The versatile genius of the poet was equally at home in the simpler lyric region of the Haynes Bayley school. Taking for his model the favourite drawing-room ballad of the period, "She wore a wreath of roses the night that first we met," he made a parody of its rhythmical cadence the medium for presenting some leading incidents in the career of a Circe of "the boozing ken," as thus,--

"She wore a rouge like roses the night that first we met; Her lovely mug was smiling o'er mugs of heavy wet; Her red lips had the fulness, her voice the husky tone, That told her drink was of a kind where water was unknown."

Then after a few more glimpses of this charming creature in her downward progress, the bard wound up with this characteristic close to her public life,--

"I saw her but a moment, but methinks I see her now, As she dropped the judge a curtsey, and he made her a bow."

But it would be out of place to dwell longer upon those reckless imitations. The only poem which ultimately found a place in the Bon Gaultier volume was "The Death of Duval."

The paper was a success. Aytoun was taken by it, and sought an introduction to me by our common friend Edward Forbes the eminent Naturalist, then a leading spirit among the students of the Edinburgh University, beloved and honoured by all who knew him. Aytoun's name was familiar to me from his contributions to 'Blackwood's Magazine,' and I was well pleased to make his acquaintance, which rapidly grew into intimate friends.h.i.+p, as it could not fail to do with a man of a nature so manly and genial, and so full of spontaneous humour, as well as of marked literary ability. His fancy had been caught by some of the things I had written in this and other papers under the name of Bon Gaultier, and when I proposed to go on with articles in a similar vein, he fell readily into the plan and agreed to a.s.sist in it. Thus a kind of Beaumont and Fletcher partners.h.i.+p was formed, which commenced in a series of humorous papers that were published in Tait's and Fraser's Magazines during the years 1842, 1843, and 1844. In these papers appeared, with a few exceptions, the verses which form the present volume. They were only a portion, but no doubt the best portion, of a great number of poems and parodies which made the chief attraction of papers under such headings as "Puffs and Poetry," "My Wife's Alb.u.m," "The Poets of the Day," and "Cracknels for Christmas."

In the last of these the parody appeared under the name of "The Jilted Gent, by Theodore Smifzer," which, as "The Lay of the Lovelorn," has become perhaps the most popular of the series. I remember well Aytoun bringing to me some ten or a dozen lines of admirable parody of "Locksley Hall." That poem had been published about two years before, and was at the time by no means widely known, but was enthusiastically admired by both Aytoun and myself. What these lines were I cannot now be sure, but certainly they were some of the best in the poem. They were too good to appear as a fragment in the paper I was engaged upon, and I set to work to mould them into the form of a complete poem, in which it is now known.

It was introduced in the paper thus:--

"There is a peculiar atrocity in the circ.u.mstances which gave rise to the following poem, that stirs even the Dead Sea of our sensibilities. The lady appears to have carried on a furious flirtation with the bard--a cousin of her own--which she, naturally perhaps, but certainly cruelly, terminated by marrying an old East Indian nabob, with a complexion like curry powder, innumerable lacs of rupees, and a woful lack of liver. A refusal by one's cousin is a domestic treason of the most ruthless kind; and, a.s.suming the author's statement to be substantially correct, we must say that the lady's conduct was disgraceful. What her sensations must be on reading the following pa.s.sionate appeal we cannot of course divine; but if one spark of feeling lingers in her bosom, she must, for four-and-twenty hours at least, have little appet.i.te for mulligatawny."

The reviewer then quotes the poem down to the general commination, ending with

"Cursed be the clerk and parson,--cursed be the whole concern!"

He then resumes his commentary:--

"This sweeping system of anathema may be consonant to what the philosophers call a high and imaginative mood of pa.s.sion, but it is surely as unjust as any fulminations that ever emanated from the Papal Chair. No doubt Cousin Amy behaved shockingly; but why, on that account, should the Bank of England, incorporated by Royal Charter, or the most respectable pract.i.tioner who prepared the settlements, along with his innocent clerk, be handed over to the uncovenanted mercies of the foul fiend? No, no, Smifzer, this will never do! In a more manly strain is what follows."

The remainder of the poem is then given, ending with,

"Rest thee with thy yellow nabob, spider-hearted Cousin Amy!"

and the critic resumes:--