affairs; and although he had not yet admitted me to the knowledge of his past, he evinced but little shyness in speaking of the present. At our interviews in his tent I seldom met his wife; indeed, I suspected him of contriving to keep her out of the way; for I was always told she had just stepped out;–or if by chance I found her there, she was never again vulgarly loquacious, but on some pretext or other at once took herself away. On the other hand, the child was rarely absent,–from which I argued that I was in favor; nor was his pretty prattle, even his boldest communicativeness, harshly checked, save when, as I guessed, he was approaching too near some forbidden theme. Then a quick flash from his father’s eye instantaneously imposed silence upon him: as if that eye were an evil one, and there were a malison in its glance, the whole demeanor of the child underwent at once a magical change; the foreboding look took possession of his beautiful eyes, the anxious lines appeared around his mouth, his lips and chin became tremulous, his head drooped, he let fall my hand which he was fond of holding as he talked, and quietly, penitently slunk away; and though he might presently be recalled by his father’s kindliest tones, his brightness would not be restored that time.
This mysterious, severe understanding between the father and the child affected me painfully; I was at a loss to surmise its nature, whence it proceeded, or how it could be; for Ferdy evinced in his every word, look, movement, an undivided fondness for his father. And in his tender-proud allusions to the boy, at times let fall to me,–in the anxious watchfulness with which he followed him with his eye, when an interval of peace and comparative happiness had set childhood’s spirit free, and lent a degree of graceful gayety to all his motions,–I saw the brimming measure of the father’s love. Could it be but his morbidly repellant pride, his jealous guarding of the domestic privacies, his vigilant pacing up and down forever before the close-drawn curtain of the heart?–was there no Bluebeard’s chamber there? No! Pride was all the matter,–pride was the Spartan fox that tore the vitals of Pintal, while he but bit his lips, and bowed, and passed.
Among the pictures in Pintal’s tent was one which had in an especial manner attracted my attention. It was a cabinet portrait, nearly full-length, of a venerable gentleman, of grave but benevolent aspect, and an air of imposing dignity. Care had evidently been taken to render faithfully the somewhat remarkable vigor of his frame; his iron-gray hair was cropped quite short, and he wore a heavy grizzled moustache, but no other beard; the lines of his mouth were not severe, and his eye was soft and gentle. But what made the portrait particularly noticeable was the broad red ribbon of a noble order crossing the breast, and a Maltese cross suspended from the neck by a short chain of massive and curiously wrought links. I had many times been on the point of asking the name of this singularly handsome and distinguished-looking personage; but an instinctive feeling of delicacy always deterred me.
One day I found little Ferdy alone, and singing merrily some pretty Spanish song. I told him I was rejoiced to find him in such good spirits, and asked him if he had not been having a jolly romp with the American carpenter’s son, who lived in the Chinese house close by. My question seemed to afflict him with puzzled surprise;–he half smiled, as if not quite sure but I might be jesting.
“Oh, no, indeed! I have never played with him; I do not know him; I never play with any boys here. Oh, no, indeed!”
“But why not, Ferdy? What! a whole month in this tiresome tent, and not make the acquaintance of your nearest neighbor,–such a sturdy, hearty chunk of a fellow as that is?–I have no doubt he’s good-natured, too, for he’s fat and funny, tough and independent. Besides, he’s a carpenter’s son, you know; so there’s a chance to borrow a saw to make the dog-house with. Who knows but his father will take a fancy to you,–I’m sure he is very likely to,–and make you a church dog-house, steeple and all complete and painted, and much finer than Charley Saunders’s martin-box?”
“Oh, I should like to, so much! And perhaps he has a Newfoundlander with a bushy tail and a brass collar,–that would be nicer than a kangaroo. But–but”–looking comically bothered,–“I never knew a carpenter’s son in my life. I am sure my father would not give me permission,–I am sure he would be very angry, if I asked him. Are they not very disagreeable, that sort of boys? Don’t they swear, and tear their clothes, and fight, and sing vulgar songs, and tell lies, and sit down in the middle of the street?”
Merciful Heaven! thought I,–here’s a crying shame! here’s an interesting case for professors of moral hygiene! An apt, intelligent little man, with an empty mind, and a by-no-means overloaded stomach, I’ll engage,–with a pride-paralyzed father, and a beer-bewitched slattern of a mother,–with his living to get, in San Francisco, too, and the world to make friends with,–who has never enjoyed the peculiar advantages to be derived from the society of little dirty boys, never been admitted to the felicity of popular songs, nor exercised his pluck in a rough-and-tumble, nor ventilated himself in wholesome “giddy, giddy, gout,”–to whom dirt-pies are a fable!
“Ferdy,” said I, “I’ll talk with your father myself. But tell me, now, what makes you so happy to-day.”
“My father got a letter this morning,”–a mail had just arrived; it brought no smile or tear for me,–no parallelogram of tragedy or comedy in stationery,–“such a pleasant one, from my uncle Miguel, at Florence, in Italy, you know. He is well, and quite rich, my father says; they have restored to him his property that he thought was all lost forever, and they have made him a chevalier again. But I am sure my father will tell you all about it, for he said he did hope you would come to-day; and he is so happy and so kind!”
“They have made him a chevalier again,” I wondered. “Your uncle Miguel is your father’s brother, then, Ferdy. And did you ever see him?”
Before he could reply, Pintal entered, stepping smartly, his color heightened with happiness, his eyes full of an extraordinary elation.
“Ah! my dear Doctor, I am rejoiced to find you here; I have been wishing for you. See! your picture is finished. Tell me if you like it.”
“Indeed, a work of beauty, Pintal.”
“To me, too, it never looked so well before; but I see things with glad eyes to-day. I have much to tell you. Ferdy, your mother is dining at the restaurant; go join her. And when you have finished your dinner, ask her to take you to walk. Say that I am engaged. Would you not like to walk, my boy, and see how fast the new streets spring up? When you return, you can tell me of all you saw.”
The boy turned up his lovely face to be kissed, and for a moment hung fondly on his father’s neck. The poor painter’s lips quivered, and his eyes winked quickly. Then the lad took his cap, and without another word went forth.
“I am happy to-day, Doctor,–Heaven save the mark! My happiness is so much more than my share, that I shall insist, will ye, nill ye, on your sharing it with me. I have a heart to open to somebody, and you are the very man. So, sit you down, and bear with my egotism, for I have a little tale to tell you, of who I am and how I came here. The story is not so commonplace but that your kindness will find, here and there, an interesting passage in it.
“I have seen that that picture,”–indicating the one I have last described,–“attracted your attention, and that you were prevented from questioning me about it only by delicacy. That is my father’s likeness. He was of English birth, the younger son of a rich Liverpool merchant. An impulsive, romantic, adventurous boy, seized early with a passion for seeing the world, his unimaginative, worldly-wise father, practical and severe, kept him within narrow, fretting bounds, and imposed harsh restraints upon him. When he was but sixteen years old, he ran away from home, shipped before the mast, and, after several long voyages, was discharged, at his own request, at Carthagena, where he entered a shipping-house as clerk, and, having excellent mercantile talents, was rapidly promoted.
“Meantime, through a sister, the only remaining child, except a half-witted brother, he heard at long intervals from home. His father remained strangely inexorable, fiercely forbade his return, and became violent at the slightest mention of his name by his sister, or some old and attached servant; he died without bequeathing his forgiveness, or, of course, a single shilling. But the young man thrived with his employers, whose business growing rapidly more and more prosperous, and becoming widely extended, they transferred him to a branch house at Malaga. Here he formed the acquaintance of the Don Francisco de Zea-Bermudez, whose rising fortunes made his own.
“Zea-Bermudez was at that time engaged in large commercial operations. Although, under the diligent and ambitious teaching of his famous relative, the profound, sagacious, patriotic, bold, and gloriously abused Jovellanos, he had become accomplished in politics, law, and diplomacy, he seemed to be devoting himself for the present to large speculations and the sudden acquisition of wealth, and to let the state of the nation, the Cortes, and its schemes, alone.
“Only a young, beautiful, and accomplished sister shared his splendid establishment in Malaga; and for her my father formed an engrossing attachment, reciprocated in the fullest, almost simultaneously with his friendship for her brother. Zea favored the suit of the high-spirited and clever young Englishman, whose intelligence, independence, and perseverance, to say nothing of his good looks and his engaging manners, had quite won his heart. By policy, too, no less than by pleasure, the match recommended itself to him;–my father would make a famous junior-partner. So they were married under the name of Pintal, bestowed upon his favorite English clerk by the adventurous first patron at Carthagena, who had found the boy provided with only a ‘purser’s name,’ as sailors term it.
“I will not be so disrespectful to the memory of my distinguished uncle, nor so rude toward your intelligence, my friend, as to presume that you are not familiar with the main points of his history,–the great strides he took, almost from that time, in a most influential diplomatic career: the embassy to St. Petersburg, and the Romanzoff-Bermudez treaty of amity and alliance in 1812, by which Alexander acknowledged the legality of the ordinary and extraordinary Cortes of Cadiz; the embassy to the Porte in 1821; his recall in 1823, and extraordinary mission to the Court of St. James; his appointment to lead the Ministry in 1824; my father’s high place in the Treasury; their joint efforts from this commanding position to counteract the violence of the Apostolical party, to meet the large requisitions of France, to cover the deficit of three hundred millions of reals, and to restore the public credit; the insults of the Absolutists, and their machinations to thwart his liberal and sagacious measures; his efforts to resign, opposed by the King; the suppression of a formidable Carlist conspiracy in 1825; the execution of Bessieres, and the ‘ham-stringing’ of Absolutist leaders; his dismissal from the Ministry in October, 1825, Ferdinand yielding to the Apostolic storm; the embassy to Dresden; his appointment as Minister at London.
“And here my story begins, for I was his Secretary of Legation then; while my brother Miguel, younger than I, was _attache_ at Paris, where he had succeeded me, on my promotion,–a promotion that procured for me congratulations for which I could with difficulty affect a decent show of gratitude, for I knew too well what it meant. It was not the enlightened, liberal Minister I had to deal with, but the hard, proud uncle, full of expediencies, and calculating schemes for family advancement, and the exaltation of a lately obscure name.
“In Paris I had been admitted first to the flattering friendship, and then to the inmost heart of–of a most lovely young lady, as noble by her character as by her lineage,”–and he glanced at the open sketch-book.
“The Lady Angelica,” I quietly said.
“Sir!” he exclaimed, quickly changing color, and assuming his most frigid expression and manner. But as quickly, and before I could speak, his sad smile and friendly tone returned, and he said,–
“Ah! I see,–Ferdy has been babbling of his visions and his dreams. Yes, the Lady Angelica. ‘Very charming,’ my uncle granted, ‘but very poor; less of the angel and more of the heiress was desirable,’ he said,–‘less heaven and more land. A decayed family was only a little worse than an obscure one,–a poor knight not a whit more respectable than a rich merchant. I must relinquish my little romance,–I had not time for it; I had occupation enough for the scant leisure my family duties’–and he laid stress on the words–‘left me in the duties of my post. He would endeavor to find arguments for the lady and employment for me.’
“It was in vain for me to remonstrate,–I was too familiar with my uncle’s temper to waste my time and breath so. I would be silent, I resolved, and pursue my honorable and gallant course without regard to his scandalous schemes. I wrote to the ‘Lady Angelica,’–since Ferdy’s name for her is so well chosen,–telling her all, giving her solemn assurances of my unchangeable purpose toward her, and scorn of my uncle’s mercenary ambition. She replied very quietly: ‘She, also, was not without pride; she would come and see for herself’;–and she came at once.
“The family arrived in London in the evening. Within two hours I was sent–after the fashion of an old-time courier, ‘Ride! ride! ride!–for your life! for your life! for your life!’–to Turin with despatches, and sealed instructions for my own conduct, not to be opened till I arrived; then I found my orders were, to remain at Turin until it should be my uncle’s pleasure to recall me.
“I had not been in Turin a month when a letter came from——the Lady Angelica. ‘It was her wish that all intercourse between us, by interview or correspondence, should cease at once and forever. She assumed this position of her own free will, and she was resolute to maintain it. She trusted that I would not inquire obtrusively into her motives,–she had no fear that I would doubt that they were worthy of her. Her respect for me was unabated,–her faith in me perfect. I had her blessing and her anxious prayers. I must go on my way in brave silence and patience, nor ever for one moment be so weak as to fool myself into a hope that she would change her purpose.’
“What should I do? I had no one to advise with; my mother, whose faith in her brother’s wisdom was sure, was in Madrid, and my father had been dead some years. At first my heart was full of bitter curses, and my uncle had not at his heels a heartier hater than I. Then came the merely romantic thought, that this might be but a test she would put me to,–that he might be innocent and ignorant of my misfortune. With the thought I flung my heart into writing, and madly plied her with one long, passionate letter after another. I got no answers; but by his spies my uncle was apprised of all I did.
“About this time,–it was in 1832,–Zea-Bermudez was recalled to Madrid in a grave crisis, and appointed to the administration of foreign affairs. Ferdinand VII. was apparently approaching the end of his reign and his life. The Apostolical party, exulting in their strength, and confiding in those well-laid plans which, with mice and men, ‘gang aft agley,’ imprudently showed their hand, and suffered their favorite project to transpire; which was, to set aside the ordinance by which the King had made null the Salic law, in favor of his infant daughter, and to support the pretensions of the King’s brother, Carlos, to the throne.
“By this stupid flourish the Apostolical party threw themselves bound at the feet of Zea. All of their persuasion who filled high places under government were without ceremony removed, and their seats filled by Liberals. Many of them did not escape without more crippling blows. As for me, I looked on with indifference, or at most some philosophic sneers. What had I to fear or care? In my uncle’s estimation, my politics had been always healthy, no doubt; and although he had on more than one occasion hinted, with sarcastic wit, that such a lady’s-man must, of his devoir, be a ‘gallant champion of the Salic law,’ and dropped something rude and ill-natured about my English blood,–still, that was only in his dyspeptic moods; his temper was sure to improve, I fancied, with his political and material digestion.
“But I deceived myself. When, in the name of the infant Queen, Isabella Segunda, and in honor of the reestablishment of order and public safety, the pleasant duty devolved upon Zea-Bermudez of awarding approbation and encouragement to all the officers, from an ambassador to the youngest _attache_ of foreign legations, and presenting them with tokens of the nation’s happiness in the shape of stars, and seals with heraldic devices, and curious chains of historic significance, not even a paltry ribbon fell to my share, but only a few curt lines of advice, ‘to look well to my opinions, and be modest,–obediently to discharge the duties prescribed to me, and remember that presumption was a fault most intolerable in a young gentleman so favored by chance as to be honored with the confidence of government.’
“That exhausted the little patience I had left. Savagely I tore the note into contemptible fragments, tossed into my travelling-boxes as much of my wardrobe as happened to be at hand, consigned to a sealed case my diplomatic instructions and all other documents pertaining to my office, placed them in the hands of a confidential friend, Mr. Ballard, the British Agent, and secretly took passage for England, where, without losing an hour, I made the best of my way to the abode of an ambitious cockney wine-merchant, to whose daughter I had not been disagreeable in other days, and within a fortnight married her. You have seen the lady, Sir,” he said, eyeing me searchingly as he spoke, with a sardonic smile,–the only ugly expression I ever saw him wear.
“Certain title-deeds and certificates of stock, part of my father’s legacy, which, as if foreseeing the present emergency, I had brought away with me, were easily converted into cash. I had then twenty thousand sterling pounds, to which my father-in-law generously added ten thousand more, by way of portion with his daughter.
“And now to what should I betake myself? I had small time to cast about me, and was easy to please; any tolerably promising enterprise, so the field of it were remote, would serve my purpose. The papers were full of Australian speculations, the wonderful prosperity of the several colonies there, the great fortunes suddenly made in wool. Good! I would go to Australia, and be a gentle shepherd on an imposing scale. But first I sought out my father’s old friends, my Lords Palmerston and Brougham, and the Bishop of Dublin, and besought the aid of their wisdom. With but slight prudential hesitation they with one accord approved my project. Observe: a first-rate Minister, especially if he be a very busy one, always likes the plan that pleases his young friend best,–that is, if it be not an affair of State, and all the risks lie with his young friend. They would have spoken of Turin and Zea-Bermudez; but I had been bred a diplomat and knew how to stick to my point, which, this time, was wool. In another fortnight I had sailed for Sydney with my shekels and my wife. But first, and for the first time, I caused the announcement of my marriage to appear in the principal papers of London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Madrid.
“Arrived in Australia, I at once made myself the proprietor of a considerable farm, and stocked it abundantly with sheep. Speculation had not yet burst itself, like the frog in the fable; and large successes, as in water-lot and steamboat operations here, to-day, were the rule. On the third anniversary of my landing at Sydney, I was worth three hundred thousand pounds, and my commercial name was among the best in the colony. Six months after that, the rot, the infernal rot, had turned my thriving populous pastures into shambles for carrion-mutton, and I had not sixpence of my own in the wide world. A few of the more generous of my creditors left me a hundred pounds with which to make my miserable way to some South American port on the Pacific.
“So I chose Valparaiso, to paint miniatures, and teach English, French, Italian, and German in. But earthquakes shook my poor house, and the storm-fiend shook my soul with fear;–for skies in lightning and thunder are to me as the panorama and hurly-burly of the Day of Wrath, in all the stupid rushing to and fro and dazed stumbling of Martin’s great picture. I shall surely die by lightning; I have not had that live shadow of a sky-reaching fear hanging over me, with its black wings and awful mutterings, so long for nothing; in every flash my eyes are scathed by the full blaze of hell. If I had been deaf and blind, I might have lived in Valparaiso. As it was, I must go somewhere where I need not sit all day and night stopping my ears and with my face covered, fearing that the rocks would fall upon me too soon.
“So, with my wife and the child,–we have had no other, thank God!–I got round Cape Horn–Heaven knows how! I dare not think of that time–to the United States. We were making for Boston; but the ship, strained by long stress of heavy weather, sprung a leak, and we put in at Baltimore. I was pleased with the place; it is picturesque, and has a kindly look; and as all places were alike to me then, save by the choice of a whim, I let go my weary anchor there.
“But the Baltimoreans only admired my pictures,–they did not buy them; they only wondered at my polyglot accomplishment, and were content with ringing silly-kind changes on an Encyclopaedic compliment about the Admirable Crichton, and other well-educated personages, to be found alphabetically embalmed in Conversations-Lexicons,–they did not inquire into my system of teaching, or have quarterly knowledge of my charges. So I fled from Baltimore, pretty speeches, and starvation, to San Francisco, plain talk, and pure gold. And now–see here, Sir!–I carry these always about with me, lest the pretty pickings of this Tom Tiddler’s ground should make my experience forget.”
He drew from his pocket an “illuminated” card, bearing a likeness of Queen Victoria, and a creased and soiled bit of yellow paper. The one was, by royal favor, a complimentary pass to a reserved place in Westminster Abbey, on the occasion of the coronation of her Britannic Majesty, “For the Senor Camillo Alvarez y Pintal, Chevalier of the Noble Order of the Cid, Secretary to His Catholic Majesty’s Legation near the Court of St. James,”–the other, a Sydney pawnbroker’s ticket for books pledged by “Mr. Camilla Allverris i Pintal.” He held these contrasted certificates of Fortune,–her mocking visiting-cards, when she called on him in palace and in cabin,–one in each hand for a moment; and bitterly smiling, and shaking his head, turned from one to the other. Then suddenly he let them fall to the ground, and, burying his face in his hands, was roughly shaken through all his frame by a great gust of agony.
I laid my hand tenderly on his shoulder: “But, Pintal,” I said,–“the Lady Angelica,–tell me why she chose that course.”
In a moment the man was fiercely aroused. “Ah, true! I had forgotten that delectable passage in my story. Why, man, Bermudez went to her, told her that my aspirations and my prospects were so and so,–faring, brilliant,–that she, only she, stood in the way, an impassable stumbling-block to my glorious advancement,–told her, (devil!) that, with all my fine passion for her, he was aware that I was not without embarrassment on this score,–appealed to her disinterested love, to her pride,–don’t you see?–to her pride.”
“And were is she now, Pintal?”
No anger now, no flush of excitement;–the man, all softened as by an angel’s touch, arose, and, with clasped hands and eyes unturned devoutly, smiled through big tears, and without a word answered me.
I, too, was silent. “Whittier had not yet written,–
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’
“Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes;
“And, in the hereafter, angels may
Roll the stone from its grave away!”
Then Pintal paced briskly to and fro a few turns across the narrow floor of his tent, and presently stopping, said,–his first cheerfulness, with its unwonted smile, returning,–
“But I must tell you why I should be happy today. I have a letter from my brother Miguel, who is Secretary to the Legation at the Porte. He has leave of absence, and is happy with his dearest friends in Florence. He shared my disgrace until lately, but bore it patiently; and now is reinstated in his office and his honors, a large portion of his property restored, which had been temporarily confiscated, while he was under suspicion as a Carlist. He is authorized to offer me pardon, and all these pretty things, if I will return and take a new oath of allegiance.”
“And you will accept, Pintal?”
“Why, in God’s name, what do you take me for?–Pardon! I forgot myself, Sir. Your question is a natural one. But no, I shall surely not accept. Zea-Bermudez is dead, but there is a part of me which can never die; and I am happy today because I feel that I am not so poor as I thought I was.”
Ferdy entered, alone. He went straight to his father and whispered something in his ear,–about the mother, I suspected, for both blushed, and Pintal said, with a vexed look,–“Ah, very well! never mind that, my boy.”
Then Ferdy threw off his cap and cloak, and, seating himself on a pile of books at his father’s feet, quietly rested his head upon his knee. I observed that his face was vividly flushed, and his eyes looked weary. I felt his pulse,–it indicated high fever; and to our anxious questions he answered, that his head ached terribly, and he was “every minute hot or cold.” I persuaded him to go to bed at once, and left anxious instructions for his treatment, for I saw that he was going to be seriously ill.
In three days little Ferdy was with the Lady Angelica in heaven. He died in my arms, of scarlet fever. In the delirium of his last moments he saw _her_, and he departed with strange words on his lips: “I am coming, Lady, I am coming!–my father will be ready presently!”
Some strangers from the neighborhood helped me to bury him; we laid him near the grave of the First Lady; but very soon his pretty bones were scattered, and there’s a busy street there now.
Pintal, when I told him that the boy was dead, only bowed and smiled. He did not go to the grave, he never again named the child, nor by the least word or look confessed the change. But when, a little later, a fire swept down Dupont Street and laid the poor tent in ashes, spoiling the desolate house whose beautiful _lar_ had flitted,–when his wife went moaning maudlinly among the yet warm ashes, and groping, in mean misery, with a stick, for some charred nothing she would cheat the Spoiler of, there was a dangerous quality in Pintal’s look, as, with folded arms and vacant eyes, he seemed to stare upon, yet not to see, the shocking scene. Presently the woman, poking with the stick, found something under the ashes. With her naked hands she greedily dug it out;–it was a tin shaving-case. Another moment, and Pintal had snatched it from her grasp, torn it open, and had a naked razor in his hand. I wrested it from him, as he fairly foamed, and dragged him from the place.
A few days after that, I took leave of them on board a merchant ship bound for England, and with a heavy-hearted prayer sped them on their way. On the voyage, as Pintal stood once, trembling in a storm, near the mainmast, a flash of lightning transfixed him.–That was well! He had been distinguished by his sorrows, and was worthy of that special messenger.
* * * * *
That picture,–it was the first and last he painted in California. I kept it long, rejoicing in the admiration it excited, and only grieved that the poor comfort of the praises I daily heard lavished upon it could never reach him.
Once, when I was ill in Sacramento, my San Francisco house was burned, but not before its contents had been removed. In the hopeless scattering of furniture and trunks, this picture disappeared,–no one knew whither. I sought it everywhere, and advertised for it, but in vain. About a year afterward, I sailed for Honolulu. I had letters of introduction to some young American merchants there, one of whom hospitably made me his guest for several weeks. On the second day of my stay with him, he was showing me over his house, where, hanging against the wall in a spare room, I found,–not the Pintal picture, but a Chinese copy of it, faithful in its every detail. There were the several alterations I had suggested, and there the rich, warm colors that Pintal’s taste had chosen. Of course, it was a copy. No doubt, my picture had been stolen at the fire, or found its way by mistake among the “traps” of other people. Then it had been sold at auction,–some Chinaman had bought it,–it had been shipped to Canton or Hong Kong,–some one of the thousand “artists” of China Street or the Victoria Road had copied it for the American market. A ship-load of Chinese goods–Canton crape shawls, camphor-boxes, carved toys, curiosities, and pictures–had been sold in Honolulu,–and here it was.
* * * * *
THE HOUSE THAT WAS JUST LIKE ITS NEIGHBORS.
Oh, the houses are all alike, you know,– All the houses alike, in a row!
You’ll see a hat-stand in the hall, Against the painted and polished wall;
And the threaded sunbeams softly fall On the long stairs, winding up, away
Up to the garret, lone and gray:
And you can hear, if you wait awhile, Odd little noises to make you smile;
And minutes will be as long as a mile;– Just as they would in the house below, Were you in the entry waiting to go.
Oh, the houses are all alike, you know,– All the houses alike, in a row!
And the world swings sadly to and fro,– Mayhap the shining, but sure the woe!
For in the sunlight the shadows grow Over the new name on the door,
Over the face unseen before.
Yet who shall number, by any art,
The chasms that keep so wide apart The dancing step and the weary heart?
Oh, who shall guess that the polished wall Is a headstone over his neighbor’s hall?
Yet the houses are just alike, you know,– All the houses alike, in a row!
And solemn sounds are heard at night, And solemn forms shut out the light,
And hideous thoughts the soul affright: Death and despair, in solemn state,
In the silent, vaulted chambers wait; And up the stairs as your children go,
Spectres follow them, to and fro,– Only a wall between them, oh!
And the darkest demons, grinning, see The fairest angels that dwell with thee!
For the houses are all alike, you know,– All the houses alike, in a row!
My chariot waited, gold and gay:
“I’ll ride,” I said, “to the woods to-day,– Out to the blithesome woods away,–
Where the old trees, swaying thoughtfully, Watch the breeze and the shadow’s glee.” I smiled but once, with my joy elate,
For a chariot stood at my neighbor’s gate,– A grim old chariot, dark as fate.
“Oh, where are you taking my neighbor?” I cried. And the gray old driver thus replied:–
“Where the houses are all alike, you know,– Narrow houses, all in a row!
Unto a populous city,” he saith:
“The road lies steep through the Vale of Death Oh, it makes the old steeds gasp for breath! There’ll be a new name over the door,
In a place where _he’s_ never been before,– Where the neighbors never visit, they say,– Where the streets are echoless, night and day, And the children forget their childish play. And if you should live next door, I doubt If you’d ever hear what they were about Who lived in the next house in the row,– Though the houses are all alike, you know!”
DAPHNAIDES:
OR THE ENGLISH LAUREL, FROM CHAUCER TO TENNYSON.
[Concluded.]
Dorset was still Lord Chamberlain when the death of Shadwell placed the laurel again at his disposal. Had he listened to Dryden, William Congreve would have received it. Of all the throng of young gentlemen who gathered about the chair of the old poet at Wills’s, Congreve was his prime favorite. That his advice was not heeded was long a matter of pensive regret:–
“Oh that your brows my laurel had sustained! Well had I been deposed, if you had reigned! The father had descended for the son;
For only you are lineal to the throne. Thus, when the state one Edward did depose, A greater Edward in his room arose.”[1]
The choice fell upon Nahum Tate:–
“But now not I, but poetry is cursed; For Tom the Second reigns like Tom the First.”
What particular quality recommended Tate we are not wholly able to explain. Dryden alleges “charity” as the single impulse of the appointment,–not the merit or aptitude of the candidate. But throughout life Dorset continued to countenance Nahum, serving as standing dedicatee of his works, and the prompter of several of them. We have remarked the want of judgment which Lord Dorset exhibited in his anxious patronage of the scholars and scribblers of his time,–a trait which stood the Blackmores, Bradys, and Tates in good stead.
But there was still another reason why Tate was preferred to Congreve. Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. Plays were therefore no longer wanted. A playwright could not amuse. Congreve was a dramatist who had never exhibited even passable talent for other forms of poetical composition. But Tate’s limited gifts, displayed to Dorset’s satisfaction in various encomiastic verses addressed to himself, were fully equal to the exigencies of the office under the new order of things; he was by profession a eulogist, not a dramatist. He was a Tory; and the King was out of humor with the Whigs. He was pretentiously moral and exemplary of life and pen, and so suited the Queen. The duties of the office were conformed, as far as practicable, to the royal tastes. Their scene was transferred from the play-house to the church. On the anniversaries of the birthdays of the two sovereigns, and upon New Year’s day, the Laureate was expected to have ready congratulatory odes befitting the occasion, set to music by the royal organist, and sung after service in the Chapel Royal of St. James. Similar duties were required when great victories were to be celebrated, or national calamities to be deplored. In short, from writing dramas to amuse a merry monarch and his courtiers, an office not without dignity, the Laureate sunk into a hired writer of adulatory odes; a change in which originated that prevalent contempt for the laurel which descended from the era of Tate to that of Southey.
And yet the odes were in no sense more thoroughly Pindaric than in the circumstance of their flatteries being bought and paid for at a stated market value. The triumphal lyrics of Pindar himself were very far from being those spontaneous and enthusiastic tributes to the prowess of his heroes, which the vulgar receive them for. Hear the painful truth, as revealed by the Scholiast.[2] Pytheas of AEgina had conquered in rough-and-tumble fight all antagonists in the Pancratium. Casting about for the best means of perpetuating his fame, he found the alternative to lie between a statuette to be erected in the temple of the hero-god, or one of the odes of the learned Theban. Choosing the latter, he proceeded to the poet’s shop, cheapened the article, and would have secured it without hesitation, had not the extortionate bard demanded the sum of three drachmas,[3] nearly equal to half a dollar, for the poem, and refused to bate a fraction. The disappointed bargainer left, and was for some days decided in favor of the brazen image, which could be had at half the price. But reflecting that what Pindar would give for his money was a draft upon universal fame and immortality, while the statue might presently be lost, or melted down, or its identity destroyed, his final determination was in favor of the ode,–a conclusion which time has justified. Nor was the Bard of the Victors ashamed of his mercenary Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,–a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, “money made the man.” With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate than that of their great original, found ample excuse for dealing out their wares at the best market. When such as Dryden and Pope lavished in preface and dedication their encomiums upon wealth and power, and waited eagerly for the golden guineas the bait might bring them, we have no right to complain of the Tates and Eusdens for prostituting their neglected Muses for a splendid sum certain _per annum_. Surely, if royalty, thus periodically and mercenarily eulogized, were content, the poet might well be so. And quite as certainly, the Laureate stipend never extracted from poet panegyric more fulsome, ill-placed, and degrading, than that which Laureate Dryden volunteered over the pall of Charles II.[4]
Tate had been known as a hanger-on at the court of Charles, and as a feeble versifier and pamphleteer of the Tory school, before an alliance with Dryden gave him a certain degree of importance. The first part of “Absalom and Achitophel,” in 1681, convulsed the town and angered the city. Men talked for a time of nothing else. Tate, who was in the secret of its authorship, talked of it to Dryden, and urged an extension of the poem. Were there not enough of Shaftesbury’s brisk boys running at large who deserved to be gibbeted? Were there not enough Hebrew names in the two books of Samuel to name each as appropriately as those already nomenclatured? But Dryden was indisposed to undertake a continuation which must fall short of what had been executed in the exact proportion that the characters left for it were of minor consequence. He recommended the task to Tate. Tate, flattered and nothing loath, accordingly sent to the press the second part of “Absalom and Achitophel,” embodying a contribution from Dryden of two hundred lines, which are as plainly distinguishable from the rest as a patch of cloth of gold upon cloth of frieze. The credit of this first alliance proved so grateful to Nahum, that he never after ventured upon literary enterprise without the aid of a similar coalition. His genius was inherently parasitic. In conjunction with Tory and Jesuit, he coalesced in the celebration of Castlemaine’s gaudy reception at Rome.
In conjunction with Nicholas Brady, he prepared that version of the Psalms still appended to the English Book of Common Prayer. In conjunction with Dryden and others, he translated Juvenal. In conjunction with Lord Dorset, he edited a praiseworthy edition of the poems of Sir John Davies, which might otherwise have been lost or forgotten. In conjunction with Garth, he translated the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid. And in conjunction with Dr. Blow, he prepared those Pindaric flights which set King William asleep, and made Godolphin ashamed that the deeds of Marlborough should be so unworthily sung.
So long as he continued to enjoy the patronage of his liberal Maecenas, Tate, with his aid, and these labors, and the income of his office, contrived to maintain the state of a gentleman. But Dorset died in 1706; the Laureate’s dull heroics found no vent; and ere the death of Queen Anne,–an event which he bewailed in the least contemptible of his odes,–his revenues were contracted to the official stipend. The accession of the house of Hanover, in 1714, was the downfall of Toryism; and Tate was a Tory. His ruin was complete. The Elector spared not the house of Pindar. The Laureate was stripped of the wreath; his only income confiscated; and after struggling feebly with fate in the form of implacable creditors, he took refuge in the Old Mint, the resort of thieves and debtors, where in 1715 he died,–it is said, of starvation. Alas, that the common lot of Grub Street should have precedent in the person of laurelled royalty itself!
The coronation of Laureate Rowe was simultaneous with that of George I. His immediate claim to the honor dated back to the year 1702, when his play of “Tamerlane” had caught the popular fancy, and proved of vast service to the ministry at a critical moment in stimulating the national antipathy to France. The effect was certainly not due to artistic nicety or refinement. King William, as _Tamerlane_, was invested with all virtues conceivable of a Tartar conqueror, united with the graces of a primitive saint; while King Louis, as _Bajazet_, fell little short of the perfections of Satan. These coarse daubs, executed in the broadest style of the sign-post school of Art, so gratified the mob, that for half a century their exhibition was called for on the night of November the fifth. Rowe, moreover, belonged to the straitest sect of Whiggery,–was so bigoted, indeed, as to decline the acquaintance of a Tory, and in play and prologue missed no chance of testifying devotion to liberal opinions.[5] His investiture with the laurel was only another proof that at moments of revolution extremists first rise to the surface. A man of affluent fortune, and the recipient of redundant favors from the new ministry, Rowe enjoyed the sunshine of life, while the dethroned Nahum starved in the Mint, as the dethroned James starved at Rome. Had the dramatic tribute still been exacted, there is little doubt that the author of the “Fair Penitent,” and of “Jane Shore,” would have lent splendid lustre to his office. His odes, however,–such, at least, as have been thought worthy of preservation among his works,–are a prodigious improvement upon the tenuity of his predecessor, and immeasurably superior in poetical fire and elegance to those of any successor antecedent to Warton.
For, following Nicholas Rowe, there were dark ages of Laureate dulness,–a period redeemed by nothing, unless by the ridicule and controversy to which the wearers of the leaf gave occasion. Rowe died in the last days of 1718. The contest for the vacant place is presumed to have been unusually active. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, imitating Suckling’s “Session of the Poets,” brings all the versifiers of the time into the canvas, and after humorously dispatching one after another, not sparing himself, closes,–
“At last, in rushed Eusden, and cried, ‘Who shall have it, But I, the true Laureate, to whom the King gave it?’ Apollo begged pardon, and granted his claim, But vowed, though, till then, he ne’er heard of his name.”[6]
This Laurence Eusden was a scribbling parson, whose model in Art was Sir Richard Blackmore, and whose morality was of the Puritanical stripe. He had assisted Garth in his Ovid, assuming, doubtless upon high moral grounds, the rendering of the impurest fables. He had written odes to great people upon occasions more or less great, therein exhibiting some ingenuity in varying the ordinary staple of adulation. He had addressed an epithalamium to the Duke of Newcastle upon his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin,–a tribute so gratifying to his Grace, then Lord Chamberlain, as to secure the poet the place of Rowe. Ensden’s was doubtless the least honorable name as yet associated with the laurel. His contemporaries allude to him with uniform disdain. Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, tells us,–
“Eusden, a laurelled bard, by fortune raised, By very few was read, by fewer praised,”
Pope, as cavalierly, in the “Dunciad”:–
“She saw old Prynne in restless Daniel shine, And Eusden eke out Blackmore’s endless line.”
Jacobs, in his “Lives of the Poets,” speaks of him as a multifarious writer of unreadable trash,–and names but few of his productions. The truth was, Eusden, secluding himself at his rectory among the fens of Lincolnshire, took no part in society, declined all association with the polite circles of the metropolis, thus inviting attacks, from which his talents were not respectable enough to screen him. That the loftiest revelations of poetry were not required of the Laureate of George I., who understood little or no English, there can be no question. George II. was equally insensible to the Muses; and had the annual lyrics been a mosaic of the merest gibberish, they would have satisfied his earlier tastes as thoroughly as the odes of Collins or Gray. A court, at which Pope and Swift, Young and Thomson were strangers, had precisely that share of Augustan splendor which enabled such as Eusden to shine lustrously.[7]
And so Eusden shone and wrote, and in the fulness of time–September, 1730–died and was buried; and his laurel others desired.[8] The leading claimants were Richard Savage and Colley Cibber. The touching story of Savage had won the heart of the Queen, and she had extracted from the King the promise of the Laureateship for its hero. But in the Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, Savage had an irreconcilable opponent. The apprehension of exciting powerful enmities, if he elevated the “Bastard” and his wrongs to so conspicuous a place, had, no doubt, an influence with the shrewd statesman. Possibly, too, so keen and practical a mind could not but entertain thorough contempt for the man, who, with brains, thews, and sinews of his own, a fair education, and as many golden opportunities of advancement as a reasonable being could desire, should waste his days in profitless mendicancy at the doors of great people, in whining endeavors to excite the sympathies of the indifferent, in poem and petition, in beastly drunkenness, or, if sober, in maudlin lamentations at the bitterness of his fortune. A Falconbridge would have better suited the ministerial taste. At all events, when his Majesty came to request the appointment of the Queen’s _protege_, he found that the patent had already been made out in the name of Cibber: and Cibber had to be Laureate. The disappointed one raved, got drunk, sober again, and finally wrote an ode to her Majesty, announcing himself as her “Volunteer Laureate,” who should repeat his congratulations upon each recurrence of her birthday. The Queen, in pity, sent him fifty pounds, with a promise of an equal amount for each of his annual verses. And although Cibber protested, and ridiculed the new title, as no more sensible than “Volunteer Duke, Marquis, or Prime Minister,” still Savage adhered to it and the pension tenaciously, sharing the Queen’s favor with Stephen Duck, the marvellous “Thresher,”[9] whose effusions were still more to her taste. That the yearly fifty pounds were expended in inexcusable riot, almost as soon as received, was a matter of course. Upon the demise of Queen Caroline, in 1738, Savage experienced another proof of Walpole’s dislike. The pensions found upon her Majesty’s private list were all continued out of the exchequer, one excepted. The pension of Savage was the exception. Right feelingly, therefore, might he mourn his royal mistress, and vituperate the insensible minister; and that he did both with some degree of animation, the few who still read his poems will freely admit.
Colley Cibber had recommended himself to promotion by consistent partisanship, and by two plays of fair merit and exceeding popularity. “The Careless Husband” even Pope had praised; “The Nonjuror,” an adaptation of Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” was one of the most successful comedies of the period. The King had been delighted with it,–a circumstance doubtless considered by Sir Robert in selecting a rival for Savage. Cibber had likewise been the manager, time out of mind, of Drury-Lane Theatre; and if now and then he had failed to recognize the exact direction of popular taste,–as in the instance of the “Beggar’s Opera,” which he rejected, and which, being accepted by Manager Rich of Covent Garden, made Rich gay and Gay rich,–he was generally a sound stage-tactician and judicious caterer. His career, however, had not been so profitable that an additional hundred pounds should be a thing of indifference; in fact, the sum seemed to be just what was needed to enable him to forsake active duty on the stage,–for the patent was no sooner signed than the veteran retired upon his laurels.
The annals of the Laureateship, during Cibber’s reign, are without incident.[10] The duties remained unchanged, and were performed, there is no reason to doubt, to the contentment of the King and court.[11] But the Laureate himself was peculiarly the object of sarcastic satire. The standing causes were of course in operation: the envy of rival poetasters, the dislike of political opponents, the enmities originating in professional disputes and jealousies. Cibber’s manners had not been studied in the school of Chesterfield, although that school was then open and flourishing. He was rude, presumptuous, dogmatic. To superiors in rank he was grudgingly respectful; to equals and inferiors, insupportably insolent. But when to these aggravating traits he added the vanity of printing an autobiography, exposing a thousand assailable points in his life and character, the temptation was irresistible, and the whole population of Grub Street enlisted in a crusade against him.[12] Fortunately, beneath the crust of insolence and vanity, there was a substratum of genuine power in the Laureate’s make, which rendered him not only a match for these, but for even a greater than these, the author of the “Dunciad.” Pope’s antipathy for the truculent actor dated some distance back.
Back to the ‘Devil,’ the last echoes roll, And ‘Coll!’ each butcher roars at Hockley-hole.
The latter accounts for it by telling, that at the first representation of Gay’s “Three Hours after Marriage,” in 1717, where one of the scenes was violently hissed, some angry words passed between the irritated manager and Pope, who was behind the scenes, and was erroneously supposed to have aided in the authorship. The odds of a scolding match must have been all in favor of the blustering Cibber, rather than of the nervous and timid Pope; but then the latter had a faculty of hate, which his antagonist had not, and he exercised it vigorously. The allusions to Cibber in his later poems are frequent. Thus, in the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”:–
“And has not Colley still his Lord and whore? His butchers Henley? his freemasons Moore?”
And again:–
“So humble he has knocked at Tibbald’s door, Has drunk with Colley, nay, has rhymed for Moore.”
And in the “Imitation of Horace,” addressed to Lord Fortescue:–
“Better be Cibber, I maintain it still, Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme, quadrille.”
“The Dunciad,” as originally published in 1728, had Lewis Theobald for its hero. There was neither sense nor justice in the selection. Pope hated Theobald for presuming to edit the plays of Shakspeare with greatly more ability and acuteness than himself had brought to the task. His dislike had no better foundation. Neither the works, the character, nor the associations of the man authorized his elevation to the throne of dulness. The disproportion between the subject and the satire instantly impresses the reader. After the first explosion of his malice, it impressed Pope; and anxious to redeem his error, he sought diligently for some plan of dethroning Tibbald, and raising another to the vacant seat. Cibber, in the mean time, was elevated to the laurel, and that by statesmen whom it was the fate of Pope to detest in secret, and yet not dare to attack in print. The Fourth Book of the “Dunciad” appeared in 1742, and its attacks were mainly levelled at the Laureate. The Laureate replied in a pamphlet, deprecating the poet’s injustice, and declaring his unconsciousness of any provocation for these reiterated assaults. At the same time he announced his determination to carry on the war in prose as long as the satirist should wage it in verse,–pamphlet for poem, world without end. Hostilities were now fairly established. Pope issued a fresh edition of his satire complete. The change he had long coveted he now made. The name of Cibber was substituted throughout for that of Theobald, the portraiture remaining the same. Johnson properly ridicules the absurdity of leaving the heavy traits of Theobald on the canvas, and simply affixing the name of his mercurial contemporary beneath; and, indeed, there is much reason to doubt whether the mean jealousy which inspired the first “Dunciad,” or the blundering rage which disfigured the second, is in the worse taste. Cibber kept his engagement, replying in pamphlet. The immediate victory was unquestionably his. Morbidly sensitive to ridicule, Pope suffered acutely. Richardson, who found him once with the Cibberine leaves in his hand, declared his persuasion, from the spectacle of rage, vexation, and mortification he witnessed, that the poets death resulted from the strokes of the Laureate. If so, we must concede him to have been the victor who laid his adversary at his feet on the field. Posterity, however, which listens only to the satirist, has judged differently and unjustly.[13] Theobald, though of no original talent, was certainly, in his generation, the most successful illustrator of Shakspeare, and the first, though Rowe and Pope had preceded him in the effort, who had brought a sound verbal criticism to bear on the text. It is to his credit, that many of the most ingenious emendations suggested in Mr. Collier’s famous folio were anticipated by this “king of the dunces”; and it must be owned, that his edition is as far superior to Warburton’s and Hanmer’s, which were not long after brought out with a deafening flourish of trumpets, as the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his. Yet, prompted by the “Dunciad,” it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history of the time.
As Laureate Cibber drew near the end of earthly things, a desire, common to poetical as well as political potentates, possessed him,–a desire to nominate a successor. In his case, indeed, the idea may have been borrowed from “MacFlecknoe” or the “Dunciad.” The Earl of Chesterfield, during his administration in Ireland, had discovered a rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently for his volume of “Poems upon Several Occasions”;[14] his tragedy, “The Earl of Essex,” in the composition of which his patron is said to have shared, was universally applauded. Its introduction to the stage was the work of Cibber; and Cibber, assisted by Chesterfield, labored zealously to secure the author a reversion of the laurel upon his own lamented demise.
The effort was unsuccessful. Cibber’s death occurred in December, 1757. The administration of the elder Pitt, which had been restored six months before, was insensible to the merits of the prodigious bricklayer. The wreath was tendered to Thomas Gray. It would, no doubt, have proved a grateful relief to royalty, obliged for twenty-seven years to listen twice yearly, if not oftener, to the monotonous felicitations of Colley, to hear in his stead the author of the “Bard,” of the “Progress of Poetry,” of the “Ode at Eton College.” But the relief was denied it. Gray, ambitious only of the historical chair at Cambridge, declined the laurel. In the mean time, the claims of William Whitehead were earnestly advocated with the Lord Chamberlain, by Lord and Lady Jersey, and by the Earl Harcourt. A large vote in the House of Commons might be affected by a refusal. Pitt, who cared nothing for the laurel, but much for the votes, gave his assent, and Whitehead was appointed. Whitehead was the son of a baker, and, as an eleemosynary scholar at Winchester School, had won a poetical prize offered to the students by Alexander Pope. Obtaining a free scholarship at Cambridge, he became in due time a fellow of Clare Hall, and subsequently tutor to the sons of Lord Jersey and Lord Harcourt, with whom he made the tour of the Continent. Two of his tragedies, “The Roman Father,” and “Creuesa,” met with more success than they deserved. A volume of poems, not without merit, was given to the press in 1756, and met with unusual favor through the exertions of his two noble friends. That he was not a personal applicant for the laurel, nor conscious of the movement in his behalf, he takes occasion in one of his poems to state:–
“Howe’er unworthily I wear the crown, unasked it came, and from a hand unknown.”[15]
From the warm championship of his friends, and the commendations of Mason, the friend of Gray, we infer that Whitehead was not destitute of fine social qualities. His verse, which is of the only type current a century ago, is elegantly smooth, and wearisomely tame,–nowhere rising into striking or original beauties. Among his merits as a poet modesty was not. His “Charge to the Poets,” published in 1762, drew upon him the wrath and ridicule of his fellow-verse-wrights, and perhaps deservedly. Assuming, with amusing vanity, what, if ever true, was only so a century before or a half-century after, that the laurel was the emblem of supremacy in the realm of letters, and that it had been granted him as a token of his matchless merit,–
“Since my king and patron have thought fit To place me on the throne of modern wit,–“
he proceeds to read the subject throng a saucy lecture on their vices and follies,–
“As bishops to their clergy give their charge.”
A good-natured dogmatism is the tone of the whole; but presumption and dogmatism find no charity among the _genus irritabile_, and Whitehead received no quarter. Small wits and great levelled their strokes at a hide which self-conceit had happily rendered proof. The sturdiest assailant was Charles Churchill. He never spares him,–
“Who in the Laureate chair–
By grace, not merit, planted there– In awkward pomp is seen to sit,
And by his patent proves his wit;
For favors of the great, we know,
Can wit as well as rank bestow;
And they who, without one pretension, Can get for fools a place or pension,
Must able be supposed, of course,
If reason is allowed due force,
To give such qualities and grace
As may equip them for the place.
“But he who measures as he goes
A mongrel kind of tinkling prose,
And is too frugal to dispense
At once both poetry and sense,–
Who, from amidst his slumbering guards, Deals out a charge to subject bards,
Where couplets after couplets creep, Propitious to the reign of sleep,” etc.
Again, in the “Prophecy of Famine,”–
“A form, by silken smile, and tone
Dull and unvaried, for the Laureate known, Folly’s chief friend, Decorum’s eldest son, In every party found, and yet of none,
This airy substance, this substantial shade.”
And elsewhere he begs for
“Some such draught…
As makes a Whitehead’s ode go down, Or slakes the feverette of Brown.”
But satire disturbed not the calm equanimity of the pensioner and placeman.
“The laurel worn
By poets in old time, but destined now In grief to wither on a Whitehead’s brow,”
continued to fade there, until a whole generation of poets had passed away. It was not until the middle of April, 1785, that Death made way for a successor.
The suddenness of Whitehead’s decease came near leaving a royal birthday unsung,–an omission scarcely pardonable with one of George the Third’s methodical habits. An impromptu appointment had to be made. It was made before the Laureate was buried. Thomas Warton, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, received the patent on the 30th of April, and his ode, married to fitting music, was duly forthcoming on the 24th of May. The selection of Warton was faultless. His lyrical verse was the best of a vicious school; his sonnets, according to that exquisite sonneteer, Sir Egerton Brydges, were the finest in the language; his “History of English Poetry,” of which three volumes had appeared, displayed an intimate acquaintance with the early English writers. Nor should we pass unnoticed his criticisms and annotations upon Milton and Spenser, manifesting as they did the acutest sensitiveness to the finest beauties of poetry. If the laurel implied the premiership of living poets, Warton certainly deserved it. He was a head and shoulders taller than his actual contemporaries.[16] He stood in the gap between the old school and the new, between the dead and the coming. Goldsmith and Johnson were no more; Cowper did not print his “Task” until the autumn of 1785; Burns made his _debut_ about the same moment; Rogers published his “Ode to Superstition” the next year; the famous “Fourteen Sonnets” of Bowles came two years later; while Wordsworth and Landor made their first appearance in 1793. Fortunate thus in time, Warton was equally fortunate in polities. He was an Oxford Tory, a firm believer in divine right and passive obedience, and a warm supporter of the new ministers. To the King, it may be added, no nomination could have given greater satisfaction. The official odes of Warton evince all the elegant traits which characterize his other writings. Their refined taste and exquisite modulation are admirable; while the matter is far less sycophantic than was to be expected from so devout a monarchist. The tender of the laurel certainly gratified him:–
“Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure Nor useless all my vacant days have flowed, From youth’s gay dawn to manhood’s prime mature, Nor with the Muse’s laurel unbestowed.”[17]
And, like Southey, he was not indisposed to enhance the dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers. The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks. Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of “Peter Pindar,” he escaped scathless,–gaining, on the other hand, a far more than ordinary proportion of poetical panegyric.
“Affection and applause alike he shared; All loved the man, all venerate the bard: E’en Prejudice his fate afflicted hears, And lettered Envy sheds reluctant tears. Such worth the laurel could alone repay, Profaned by Cibber, and contemned by Gray; Yet hence its Breath shall new distinction claim, And, though it gave not, take from Warton fame.”[18]
The last of Warton’s odes was written in his last illness, and performed three days after his death. Appositely enough, it was an invocation to Health, meriting more than ordinary praise for eloquent fervor. Warton died May 21st, 1790. The laurel was vacant for a month, when Henry James Pye was gazetted. There was hardly a hungry placeman in London who had not as just pretensions to the honor. What poetical gifts he had displayed had been in school or college exercises. His real claims consisted in having spent a fortune in electioneering for ministers; and these claims being pressed with unusual urgency at the moment of Warton’s death, he was offered the Laureateship as satisfaction in part.[19] He eagerly accepted it, and received the balance two years later in the shape of a commission as Police Magistrate of Middlesex. Thereafter, like Henry Fielding, or Gilbert A’Beckett, he divided his days between penal law and polite literature. His version of the “Poetics” of Aristotle, with illustrations drawn liberally from recent authors, was perhaps begotten of a natural wish to satisfy the public that qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of “The Haunted Island” was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary labors, which ripened yearly, Pye tried his hand at an epic,–the subject, King Alfred,–the plot and treatment not greatly differing from those which Blackmore brought to the same enterprise. The poem passed at once from the bookshop to the trunk-maker,–not, however, before an American publisher was found daring enough to reprint it. There are also to be mentioned translations from Pindar, Horace, and other classics, for Sharpe’s edition of the British Poets, a collection to which he lent editorial aid. “Poet Pye”[20] was fortunate in escaping contemporary wit and satire. Gifford alluded to him, but Gilford’s Toryism was security that no Tory Court-Poet would be roughly handled. Byron passed him in silence. The Smiths treated him as respectfully as they treated anybody. Moore’s wit at the expense of the Regent and his courtiers had only found vent in the “Two-Penny Post-Bag” when Pye was gathered to his predecessors.
That calamity occurred in August, 1813. With it ended the era of birthday songs and New-Year’s verses. The King was mad; his nativity was therefore hardly a rational topic of rejoicing. The Prince Regent had no taste for the solemn inanity of stipulated ode, the performance of which only served to render insufferably tedious the services of the two occasions in the year when imperative custom demanded his attendance at the Chapel. Consultation was had with John Wilson Croker, Secretary of the Admiralty. Croker’s sharp common-sense at once suggested the abolition of the Laureate duties, but the retention of the office as a sinecure. Walter Scott, to whom the place was offered, as the most popular of living poets, seconded the counsel of Croker, but declined the appointment, as beneath the dignity of the intended founder of a long line of border knights. He recommended Southey. He had already recommended Southey to the “Quarterly,” and through the “Quarterly” to Croker, then and still its most brilliant contributor; and this second instance of disinterested kindness was equally efficacious. Southey was appointed. The tierce of Canary ceased to be a perquisite of the office, the Laureate disclaiming it; and instead of annual odes upon set occasions, such effusions as the poet might choose to offer at the suggestion of passing events were to be accepted as the sum of official duty. These were to be said or read, not sung,–a change that completed the radical revolution of the office.
However important the salary of a hundred pounds may have been to Southey, it is very sure that the laurel seemed to infuse all its noxious and poisonous juices into his literary character. His vanity, like Whitehead’s, led him to regard his chaplet as the reward of unrivalled merit. His study-chair was glorified, and became a throne. His supremacy in poetry was as indubitable as the king’s supremacy in matters ecclesiastical. He felt himself constrained to eliminate utterly from his conscience whatever traces of early republicanism, pantisocracy, and heresy still disfigured it; and to conform unreservedly to the exactest requirements of high Toryism in politics and high Churchism in religion. He was in the pay and formed a part of the government; could he do else than toil mightily in his department for the service of a master who had so sagaciously anticipated the verdict of posterity, as to declare him, who was the least popular, the greatest of living poets? He found it a duty to assume a rigid censorship over as many of his Majesty’s lieges as were addicted to verse,–to enact the functions of minister of literary police,–to reprehend the levity of Moore, the impiety of Byron, the democracy of Leigh Hunt, the unhappy lapse of Hazlitt, the drunkenness of Lamb. Assumptions so open to ridicule, and so disparaging to far abler men, told as disadvantageously upon his fame as upon his character. He became the butt of contemporary satire. Horace Smith, Moore, Shelley, Byron, lampooned him savagely. The latter made him the hero of his wicked “Vision of Judgment,” and to him dedicated his “Don Juan.” The dedication was suppressed; but no chance offered in the body of that profligate rhapsody to assail Bob Southey, that was not vigorously employed. The self-content of the Laureate armed him, however, against every thrust. Contempt he interpreted as envy of his sublime elevation:–
“Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn! In honor it was given; with honor it is worn.”
Of course such matchless self-complacency defied assault.
Southey’s congratulatory odes appeared as often as public occasion seemed to demand them. There were in rapid succession the “Ode to the Regent,” the “Carmen Triumphale,” the “Pilgrimage to Waterloo,” the “Vision of Judgment,” the “Carmen Nuptiale,” the “Ode on the Death of the Princess Charlotte.” The “Quarterly” exalted them, one and all; the “Edinburgh” poured upon them volleys of keen but ineffectual ridicule. At last the Laureate desisted. The odes no longer appeared; and during the long and dark closing years of his life, the only production of the Laureate pen was the yearly signature to a receipt for one hundred pounds sterling, official salary.
Robert Southey died in March, 1843. Sir Robert Peel, who had obliged Wordsworth the year before, by transferring the post in the excise, which he had so long held, to the poet’s son, and substituting a pension for its salary, testified further his respect for the Bard of Rydal by tendering him the laurel. It was not to be refused. Had the office been hampered with any demands upon the occupant for popular lyric, in celebration of notable events, Wordsworth was certainly the last man to place in it. His frigid nature was incapable of that prompt enthusiasm, without which, poetry, especially poetry responsive to some strong emotion momentarily agitating the popular heart, is lifeless and worthless. Fortunately, there were no such exactions. The office had risen from its once low estate to be a dignified sinecure. As such, Wordsworth filled it; and, dying, left it without one poetical evidence of having worn the wreath.
To him, in May, 1850, succeeded, who, as the most acceptable poet of the day, could alone rightly succeed, Alfred Tennyson, the actual Poet-Laureate. Not without opposition. There were those who endeavored to extinguish the office, and hang up the laurel forever,–and to that end brought pregnant argument to bear upon government. “The Times” was more than usually decided in favor of the policy of extinguishment. Give the salary, it was urged, as a pension to some deserving writer of verse, whose necessities are exacting; but abolish a title degraded by association with names and uses so unworthy, as to confer shame, not honor, on the wearer. The laurel is presumed to be granted to the ablest living English poet. What vocation have the Tite Barnacles, red-tapists, vote-mongers, of Downing Street to discriminate and determine this supreme poetical excellence, in regard to which the nicest critics, or the most refined and appreciative reading public may reasonably differ among themselves as widely as the stars? On the other hand, it was argued, that the laurel had, from its last two wearers, recovered its lost dignity. They had lent it honor, which it could not fail to confer upon any survivor, however great his name. If, then, the old odium had disappeared, why not retain the place for the sake of the ancient worthies whom tradition had handed down as at one time or another connected with it? There was rarely difficulty in selecting from among contemporary poets one of preeminent talent, whose elevation to the laurel would offend none of his fellows. There was certainly no difficulty in the present case. There was palpable evidence that Tennyson was by all admission the hierophant of his order; and it would be time enough to dispense with the title when a future occasion should be at a loss to decide among contending candidates. The latter reasoning prevailed. Tennyson accepted the laurel, and with it a self-imposed obligation to make occasional acknowledgments for the gift.
The first opportunity presented itself in the issue of a fresh edition of his poems, in 1851. To these he prefixed some noble verses, dedicating the volumes to the Queen, and referring with as much delicacy as modesty to his place and his predecessor:–
“Victoria,–since your royal grace
To one of less desert allows
This laurel, greener from the brows Of him that uttered nothing base.”–
The next occasion was of a different order. The hero of Waterloo ended his long life in 1852, and a nation was in mourning. Then, if ever, poets, whether laurelled or leafless, were called to give eloquent utterance to the popular grief; and Tennyson, of all the poets, was looked to for its highest expression. The Threnode of the Laureate was duly forthcoming. The public was, as it had no right to be, disappointed. Tennyson’s Muse was ever a wild and wilful creature, defiant of rules, and daringly insubordinate to arbitrary forms. It could not, with the witling in the play, cap verses with any man. The moment its tasks were dictated and the form prescribed, that moment there was ground to expect the self-willed jade to play a jade’s trick, and leave us with no decent results of inspiration. For odes and sonnets, and other such Procrustean moulds into which poetic thought is at times cast, Tennyson had neither gift nor liking. When, therefore, with the Duke’s death, came a sudden demand upon his Muse, and that in shape so solemn as to forbid, as the poet conceived, any fanciful license of invention, the Pindaric form seemed inevitable; and that form rendered a fair exhibition of the poet’s peculiar genius out of the question. Strapped up in prescription, and impelled to move by official impulse, his Pegasus was as awkward as a cart-horse. And yet men did him the justice to say that his failure out-topped the success of others.
Far better–indeed, with the animating thrill of the war-trumpet–was “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and simply because the topic admitted of whatever novelty of treatment the bias of the bard might devise. This is the Laureate’s most successful attempt at strictly popular composition. It proves him to possess the stuff of a Tyrtaeus or a Koerner,–something vastly more stirring and stimulating than the usual staple of
“The dry-tongued laurel’s pattering talk.”[21]
Howbeit, late may he have call for another war-song!
With the name of Tennyson we reach the term of our Laureate calendar. Long ages and much perilously dry research must he traverse who shall enlarge these outlines to the worthier proportions of history. Yet will the labor not be wholly barren. It will bring him in contact with all the famous of letters and poetry; he will fight over again numberless quarrels of authors; he will soar in boundless Pindaric flights, or sink, sooth to say, in unfathomed deeps of bathos. With one moral he will be profoundly impressed: Of all the more splendid results of genius which adorn our language and literature,–for the literature of the English language is ours,–not one owes its existence to the laurel; not one can be directly or indirectly traced to royal encouragement, or the stimulus of salary or stipend. The laurel, though ever green, and throwing out blossoms now and then of notable promise, has borne no fruit. We might strike from the language all that is ascribable solely to the honor and emolument of this office, without inflicting a serious loss upon letters. The masques of Jonson would be regretted; a few lines of Tennyson would be missed. For the rest, we might readily console ourselves. It may certainly be urged, that the laurel was designed rather as a reward than as a provocative of merit; but the allegation has become true only within the last half-century. Antecedently to Southey, it was the consideration for which return in poetry was demanded,–in the first instance, a return in dramatic poetry, and then in the formal lyric. It was put forth as the stimulus to works good in their several kinds, and it may be justly complained of for never having provoked any good works. To represent it as a reward commensurate with the merits of Wordsworth and Tennyson, or even of Southey, is to rate three first-class names in modern poetry on a level with the names of those third-rate “poetillos” who, during the eighteenth century, obtained the same reward for two intolerable effusions yearly. Upon the whole, therefore, we incline to the opinion that the laurel can no longer confer honor or profit upon literature. Sack is palatable, and a hundred pounds are eminently useful; but the arbitrary judgments of queens and courtiers upon poetical issues are neither useful nor palatable. The world may, in fact, contrive to content itself, should King Alfred prove the last of the Laureates.
[Footnote 1: Schol. Vet. ad _Nem. Od._ 5.]
[Footnote 2: Commentators agree, we believe, that there was an error as to the sum. But we tell the story as we find it.]
[Footnote 3: DRYDEN, _Epistle to Wm. Congreve_, 1693.]
[Footnote 4: The _Threnodia Augustalis_, 1685, where the eulogy is equitably distributed between the dead Charles and the living James.]
[Footnote 5: Dr. Johnson tells the story of Rowe having applied to Lord Oxford for promotion, and being asked whether he understood Spanish. Elated with the prospect of an embassy to Madrid, Rowe hurried home, shut himself up, and for months devoted himself to the study of a language the possession of which was to make his fortune. At length, he reappeared at the Minister’s _levee_ and announced himself a Spanish scholar. “Then,” said Lord Oxford, shaking his hand cordially, “let me congratulate you on your ability to enjoy _Don Quixote_, in the original.” Johnson seems to throw doubt on the story, because Rowe would not even speak to a Tory, and certainly would not apply to a Tory minister for advancement. But Oxford was once a Whig, and was in office as such; and it was probably at that period the incident occurred.]
[Footnote 6: Battle of the Poets, 1725.]
[Footnote 7:
“Harmonious Cibber entertains
The court with annual birthday strains, Whence Gay was banished in disgrace,
Where Pope will never show his face, Where Young must torture his invention
To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.”
SWIFT, _Poetry, a Rhapsody,_ 1733.]
[Footnote 8:
“Know, Eusden thirsts no more for sack or praise; He sleeps among the dull of ancient days; Where wretched Withers, Ward, and Gildon rest, And high-born Howard, more majestic sire, With fool of quality completes the choir. Thou, Cibber! thou his laurel shalt support; Folly, my son, has still a friend at court.”
_Dunciad_, Bk. I.
Warburton, by-the-by, exculpates Eusden from any worse fault, as a writer, than being too prolix and too prolific.–See Note to _Dunciad_, Bk. II. 291.]
[Footnote 9: Duck stands at the head of the prodigious school in English literature. All the poetical bricklayers, weavers, cobblers, farmer’s boys, shepherds, and basket-makers, who have since astonished their day and generation, hail him as their general father.]
[Footnote 10: The antiquary may be pleased to know that the “Devil” tavern in Fleet Street, the old haunt of the dramatists, was the place where the choir of the Chapel Royal gathered to rehearse the Laureate odes. Hence Pope, at the close of _Dunciad I._,
“Then swells the Chapel-Royal throat; ‘God save King Gibber!’ mounts in every note. Familiar White’s ‘God save King Colley!’ cries; ‘God save King Colley!’ Drury-Lane replies;”]
[Footnote 11:
“On his own works with laurel crowned, Neatly and elegantly bound,–
For this is one of many rules
With writing Lords and laureate fools, And which forever must succeed
With other Lords who cannot read,
However destitute of wit,
To make their works for bookcase fit,– Acknowledged master of those seats,
Cibber his birthday odes repeats.”
CHURCHILL, _The Ghost_.]
[Footnote 12: Swift charges Colley with having wronged Grub Street, by appropriating to himself all the money Britain designed for its poets:–
“Your portion, taking Britain round, Was just one annual hundred pound;
Now not so much as in remainder,
Since Cibber brought in an attainder, Forever fixed by right divine,
A monarch’s right, on Grub-Street line.”
_Poetry, a Rhapsody_, 1733.]
[Footnote 13: Whatever momentary benefit may result from satire, it is clear that its influence in the long run is injurious to literature. The satirist, like a malignant Archimago, creates a false medium, through which posterity is obliged to look at his contemporaries,–a medium which so refracts and distorts their images, that it is almost out of the question to see them correctly. There is no rule, as is astronomy, by which this refraction may be allowed for and corrected.]
[Footnote 14: London, 1749, 8vo.]
[Footnote 15: Charge to the Poets, 1762.]
[Footnote 16: If the reader cares to hear the best that can be said of Thomas Warton, let him read the Life of Milton, prefixed by Sir Egerton Brydges to his edition of the poet. If he has any curiosity to hear the other side, let him read all that Ritson ever wrote, and Dr. Charles Symnions, in the Life of Milton, prefixed to the standard edition of the Prose Works, 1806. Symnions denies to Warton the possession of taste, learning, or sense. Certainly, to an American, the character of Joseph Warton, the brother of Thomas, is far more amiable. Joseph was as liberal as his brother was bigoted. While Thomas omits no chance of condemning Milton’s republicanism, in his notes to the Minor Poems, Joseph is always disposed to sympathize with the poet. The same generous temper characterizes his commentary upon Dryden.]
[Footnote 17: _Sonnet upon the River Lodon_.]
[Footnote 18: Dr. Huddersford’s _Salmagundi_.]
[Footnote 19: One of the earlier poems of Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist, was entitled, _The Laurel Disputed_, and was published in 1791. We have not met with it; but we apprehend, from title and date, that it is a _jeu d’esprit_, founded upon the recent appointment. The poetry of Wilson was characterized by much original humor.]
[Footnote 20:
“Come to our _fete_, and show again
That pea-green coat, thou pink of men! Which charmed all eyes, that last surveyed it; When Brummel’s self inquired, ‘Who made it?’ When Cits came wondering from the East, And thought thee Poet Pye at least.”
_Two-Penny Post-Bag_, 1812.]
[Footnote 21: TENNYSON, _Maud_.]
WATER-LILIES.
The inconstant April mornings drop showers or sunbeams over the glistening lake, while far beneath its surface a murky mass disengages itself from the muddy bottom, and rises slowly through the waves. The tasselled alder-branches droop above it; the last year’s blackbird’s nest swings over it in the grapevine; the newly-opened Hepaticas and Epigaeas on the neighboring bank peer down modestly to look for it; the water-skater (Gerris) pauses on the surface near it, casting on the shallow bottom the odd shadow of his feet, like three pairs of boxing-gloves; the Notonecta, or water-boatman, rows round and round it, sometimes on his breast, sometimes on his back; queer caddis-worms trail their self-made homesteads of leaves or twigs beside it; the Dytiscus, dorbug of the water, blunders clumsily against it; the tadpole wriggles his stupid way to it, and rests upon it, meditating of future frogdom; the passing wild-duck dives and nibbles at it; the mink and musk-rat brush it with their soft fur; the spotted turtle slides over it; the slow larvae of gauzy dragon-flies cling sleepily to its sides and await their change: all these fair or uncouth creatures feel, through the dim waves, the blessed longing of spring; and yet not one of them dreams that within that murky mass there lies a treasure too white and beautiful to be yet intrusted to the waves, and that for many a day that bud must yearn toward the surface, before, aspiring above it, as mortals to heaven, it meets the sunshine with the answering beauty of the Water-Lily.
Days and weeks have passed away; the wild-duck has flown onward, to dive for his luncheon in some remoter lake; the tadpoles have made themselves legs, with which they have vanished; the caddis-worms have sealed themselves up in their cylinders, and emerged again as winged insects; the dragon-flies have crawled up the water-reeds, and, clinging with heads upward, (not downward, as strangely described in a late “North British Review,”) have undergone the change which symbolizes immortality; the world is transformed from spring to summer; the lily-buds are opened into glossy leaf and radiant flower, and we have come for the harvest.
We lodged, last night, in the old English phrase, “at the sign of the Oak and Star.” Wishing, not, indeed, like the ancient magicians, to gather magic berry and bud before sunrise, but at least to see these treasures of the lake in their morning hour, we camped last night on a little island, which one tall tree almost covers with its branches, while a dense undergrowth of young chestnuts and birches fills all the intervening space, touching the water all around the circular, shelving shore. Yesterday was hot, but the night was cool, and we kindled a gypsy fire of twigs, less for warmth than for society. The first gleam made the dark lonely islet into a cheering home, turned the protecting tree to a starlit roof, and the chestnut-sprays to illuminated walls. Lying beneath their shelter, every fresh flickering of the fire kindled the leaves into brightness and banished into dark interstices the lake and sky; then the fire died into embers, the leaves faded into solid darkness in their turn, and water and heavens showed light and close and near, until fresh twigs caught fire and the blaze came up again. Rising to look forth, at intervals, during the night,–for it is the worst feature of a night out-doors, that sleeping seems such a waste of time,–we watched the hilly and wooded shores of the lake sink into gloom and glimmer into dawn again, amid the low plash of waters and the noises of the night.
Precisely at half-past three, a song-sparrow above our heads gave one liquid trill, so inexpressibly sudden and delicious, that it seemed to set to music every atom of freshness and fragrance that Nature held; then the spell was broken, and the whole shore and lake were vocal with song. Joining in this jubilee of morning, we were early in motion; bathing and breakfast, though they seemed indisputably in accordance with the instincts of the Universe, yet did not detain us long, and we were promptly on our way to Lily Pond. Will the reader join us?
It is one of those summer days when a veil of mist gradually burns away before the intense sunshine, and the sultry morning only plays at coolness, and that with its earliest visitors alone. But we are before the sunlight, though not before the sunrise, and can watch the pretty game of alternating mist and shine. Stray gleams of glory lend their trailing magnificence to the tops of chestnut-trees, floating vapors raise the outlines of the hills and make mystery of the wooded islands, and, as we glide through the placid water, we can sing, with the Chorus in the “Ion” of Euripides, “O immense and brilliant air, resound with our cries of joy!”
Almost every town has its Lily Pond, dear to boys and maidens, and partially equalizing, by its annual delights, the presence or absence of other geographical advantages. Ours is accessible from the larger lake only by taking the skiff over a narrow embankment, which protects our fairyland by its presence, and eight distant factories by its dam. Once beyond it, we are in a realm of dark Lethean water, utterly unlike the sunny depths of the main lake. Hither the water-lilies have retreated, to a domain of their own. Darker than these dark waves, there stand in their bosom hundreds of submerged trees, and dismasted roots still upright, spreading their vast, uncouth limbs like enormous spiders beneath the surface. They are remnants of border wars with the axe, vegetable Witheringtons, still fighting on their stumps, but gradually sinking into the soft ooze, and ready, perhaps, when a score of centuries has piled two more strata of similar remains in mud above them, to furnish foundations for a newer New Orleans; that city having been lately discovered to be thus supported.
The present decline in business is clear revenue to the water-lilies, and these waters are higher than usual because the idle factories do not draw them off. But we may notice, in observing the shores, that peculiar charm of water, that, whether its quantity be greater or less, its grace is the same; it makes its own boundary in lake or river, and where its edge is, there seems the natural and permanent margin. And the same natural fitness, without reference to mere quantity, extends to its children. Before us lie islands and continents of lilies, acres of charms, whole, vast, unbroken surfaces of stainless whiteness. And yet, as we approach them, every islanded cup that floats in lonely dignity, apart from the multitude, appears as perfect in itself, couched in white expanded perfection, its reflection taking a faint glory of pink that is scarcely perceptible in the flower. As we glide gently among them, the air grows fragrant, and a stray breeze flaps the leaves, as if to welcome us. Each floating flower becomes suddenly a ship at anchor, or rather seems beating up against the summer wind, in a regatta of blossoms.
Early as it is, the greater part of the flowers are already expanded. Indeed, that experience of Thoreau’s, of watching them open in the first sunbeams, rank by rank, is not easily obtained, unless perhaps in a narrow stream, where the beautiful slumberers are more regularly marshalled. In our lake, at least, they open irregularly, though rapidly. But, this morning, many linger as buds, while others peer up, in half-expanded beauty, beneath the lifted leaves, frolicsome as Pucks or baby-nymphs. As you raise the leaf, in such cases, it is impossible not to imagine that a pair of tiny hands have upheld it, or else that the pretty head will dip down again, and disappear. Others, again, have expanded all but the inmost pair of white petals, and these spring apart at the first touch of the finger on the stem. Some spread vast vases of fragrance, six or seven inches in diameter, while others are small and delicate, with petals like fine lace-work. Smaller still, we sometimes pass a flotilla of infant leaves, an inch in diameter. All these grow from the deep, dark water,–and the blacker it is, the fairer their whiteness shows. But your eye follows the stem often vainly into those sombre depths, and vainly seeks to behold Sabrina fair, sitting with her twisted braids of lilies, beneath the glassy, cool, but not translucent wave. Do not start, when, in such an effort, only your own dreamy face looks back upon you, beyond the gunwale of the reflected boat, and you find that you float double, self and shadow.
Let us rest our paddles, and look round us, while the idle motion sways our light skiff onward, now half-embayed among the lily-pads, now lazily gliding over intervening gulfs. There is a great deal going on in these waters and their fringing woods and meadows. All the summer long, the pond is bordered with successive walls of flowers. In early spring emerge the yellow catkins of the swamp-willow, first; then the long tassels of the graceful alders expand and droop, till they weep their yellow dust upon the water; then come the birch-blossoms, more tardily; then the downy leaves and white clusters of the medlar or shadbush (_Amelanchier Canadensis_ of Gray); these dropping, the roseate chalices of the mountain-laurel open; as they fade into melancholy brown, the sweet Azalea uncloses; and before its last honeyed blossom has trailed down, dying, from the stem, the more fragrant Clethra starts out above, the button-bush thrusts forth its merry face amid wild roses, and the Clematis waves its sprays of beauty. Mingled with these grow, lower, the spiraeas, white and pink, yellow touch-me-not, fresh white arrowhead, bright blue vervain and skullcap, dull snakehead, gay monkey-flower, coarse eupatoriums, milk-weeds, golden-rods, asters, thistles, and a host beside. Beneath, the brilliant scarlet cardinal-flower begins to palisade the moist shores; and after its superb reflection has passed away from the waters, the grotesque witch-hazel flares out its narrow yellow petals amidst the October leaves, and so ends the floral year. There is not a week during all these months, when one cannot stand in the boat and wreathe garlands of blossoms from the shores.
These all crowd around the brink, and watch, day and night, the opening and closing of the water-lilies. Meanwhile, upon the waters, our queen keeps her chosen court, nor can one of these mere land-loving blossoms touch the hem of her garment. In truth, she bears no sister near her throne. There is but this one species among us, _Nymphaea odorata_. The beautiful little rose-colored _Nymphaea sanguinea_, which once adorned the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, was merely an occasional variety of costume. She has, indeed, an English half-sister, _Nymphaea alba_, less beautiful, less fragrant, but keeping more fashionable hours,–not opening (according to Linnaeus) till seven, nor closing till four. Her humble cousin, the yellow Nuphar, keeps commonly aloof, as becomes a poor relation, though created from the selfsame mud,–a fact which Hawthorne has beautifully moralized. The prouder Nelumbium, a second-cousin, lineal descendant of the sacred bean of Pythagoras, keeps aloof, through pride, not humility, and dwells, like a sturdy democrat, in the Far West.
But, undisturbed, the water-lily keeps her fragrant court, with few attendants. The tall pickerel-weed (Pontederia) is her gentleman-usher, gorgeous in blue and gold through July, somewhat rusty in August. The water-shield (Hydropeltis) is chief maid-of-honor; she is a highborn lady, not without royal blood indeed, but with rather a bend sinister; not precisely beautiful, but very fastidious; encased over her whole person with a gelatinous covering, literally a starched duenna. Sometimes she is suspected of conspiring to drive her mistress from the throne; for we have observed certain slow watercourses where the leaves of the water-lily have been almost wholly replaced by the similar, but smaller, leaves of the water-shield. More rarely seen is the slender Utricularia, a dainty maiden, whose light feet scarce touch the water,–with the still more delicate floating white Water-Ranunculus, and the shy Villarsia, whose submerged flowers merely peep one day above the surface and then close again forever. Then there are many humbler attendants, Potamogetons or pond-weeds. And here float little emissaries from the dominions of land; for the fallen florets of the Viburnum drift among the lily-pads, with mast-like stamens erect, sprinkling the water with a strange beauty, and cheating us with the promise of a new aquatic flower.
These are the still life of this sequestered nook; but it is in fact a crowded thoroughfare. No tropic jungle more swarms with busy existence than these midsummer waters and their bushy banks. The warm and humming air is filled with insect sounds, ranging from the murmur of invisible gnats and midges, to the impetuous whirring of the great Libellulae, large almost as swallows, and hawking high in air for their food. Swift butterflies glance by, moths flutter, flies buzz, grasshoppers and katydids pipe their shrill notes, sharp as the edges of the sunbeams. Busy bees go humming past, straight as arrows, express-freight-trains from one blossoming copse to another. Showy wasps of many species fume uselessly about, in gallant uniforms, wasting an immense deal of unnecessary anger on the sultry universe. Graceful, stingless Sphexes and Ichneumon-flies emulate their bustle, without their weapons. Delicate lady-birds come and go to the milkweeds, spotted almost as regularly as if Nature had decided to number the species, like policemen or hack-drivers, from one to twenty. Elegant little Lepturae fly with them, so gay and airy, they hardly seem like beetles. Phryganeae, (_nes_ caddisworms,) laceflies, and long-tailed Ephemerae flutter more heavily by. On the large alder-flowers clings the superb _Desmocerus palliatus_, beautiful as a tropical insect, with his steel-blue armor and his golden cloak (_pallium_) above his shoulders, grandest knight on this Field of the Cloth of Gold. The countless fireflies which spangled the evening mist now only crawl sleepily, daylight creatures, with the lustre buried in their milky bodies. More wholly children of night, the soft, luxurious Sphinxes (or hawk-moths) come not here; fine ladies of the insect world, their home is among gardens and green-houses, late and languid by day, but all night long upon the wing, dancing in the air with unwearied muscles till long past midnight, and supping on honey at last. They come not here; but the nobler butterflies soar above us, stoop a moment to the water, and then with a few lazy wavings of their sumptuous wings float far over the oak-trees to the woods they love.
All these hover near the water-lily; but its special parasites are an elegant beetle (_Donacia metallica_) which keeps house permanently in the flower, and a few smaller ones which tenant the surface of the leaves,–larva, pupa, and perfect insect, forty feeding like one, and each leading its whole earthly career on this floating island of perishable verdure. The “beautiful blue damsel-flies” alight also in multitudes among them, so fearless that they perch with equal readiness on our boat or paddle, and so various that two adjacent ponds will sometimes be haunted by two distinct sets of species. In the water, among the leaves, little shining whirlwigs wheel round and round, fifty joining in the dance, till, at the slightest alarm, they whirl away to some safer ballroom, and renew the merriment. On every floating log, as we approach it, there is a convention of turtles, sitting in calm debate, like mailed barons, till, as we approach, they plump into the water, and paddle away for some subaqueous Runnymede. Beneath, the shy and stately pickerel vanishes at a glance, shoals of minnows glide, black and bearded pouts frisk aimlessly, soft water-lizards hang poised without motion, and slender pickerel-frogs cease occasionally their submerged croaking, and, darting to the surface with swift vertical strokes, gulp a mouthful of fresh air, and down again to renew the moist soliloquy.
Time would fail us to tell of the feathered life around us,–the blackbirds that build securely in these thickets, the stray swallows that dip their wings in the quiet waters, and the kingfishers that still bring, as the ancients fabled, halcyon days. Yonder stands, against the shore, a bittern, motionless in that wreath of mist which makes his long-legged person almost as dim as his far-off booming by night. There poises a hawk, before sweeping down to some chosen bough in the dense forest; and there fly a pair of blue-jays, screaming, from tree to tree. As for wild quadrupeds, the race is almost passed away. Far to the North, indeed, the great moose still browses on the lily-pads, and the shy beaver nibbles them; but here the few lingering four-footed creatures only haunt, but do not graze upon these floating pastures. Eyes more favored than ours may yet chance to spy an otter in this still place; there by the shore are the small footprints of a mink; that dark thing disappearing in the waters, yonder, a soft mass of drowned fur, is a “musquash.” Later in the season, a mound of earth will be his winter dwelling-place; and those myriad muscle-shells at the water’s edge are the remnant of his banquets,–once banquets for the Indians, too.
But we must return to our lilies. There is no sense of wealth like floating in this archipelago of white and green. The emotions of avarice become almost demoralizing. Every flower bears a fragrant California in its bosom, and you feel impoverished at the thought of leaving one behind. But after the first half-hour of eager grasping, one becomes fastidious, rather scorns those on which the wasps and flies have alighted, and seeks only the stainless. But handle them tenderly, as if you loved them. Do not grasp at the open flower as if it were a peony or a hollyhock, for then it will come off, stalkless, in your hand, and you will cast it blighted upon the water; but coil your thumb and second finger affectionately around it, press the extended forefinger firmly to the stem below, and with one steady pull you will secure a long and delicate stalk, fit to twine around the graceful head of your beloved, as the Hindoo goddess of beauty encircled with a Lotus the brow of Rama.
Consider the lilies. All over our rural watercourses, at midsummer, float these cups of snow. They are Nature’s symbols of coolness. They suggest to us the white garments of their Oriental worshippers. They come with the white roses and prepare the way for the white lilies of the garden. The white doe of Rylstone and Andrew Marvell’s fawn might fitly bathe amid their beauties. Yonder steep bank slopes down to the lake-side, one solid mass of pale pink laurel, but, once upon the water, a purer tint prevails. The pink fades into a lingering flush, and the white creature floats peerless, set in green without and gold within. That bright circle of stamens is the very ring with which Doges once wedded the Adriatic, Venice has lost it, but it dropped into the water-lily’s bosom, and there it rests forever. So perfect in form, so redundant in beauty, so delicate, so spotless, so fragrant,–what presumptuous lover ever dared, in his most enamored hour, to liken his mistress to a water-lily? No human Blanche or Lilian was ever so fair as that.
The water-lily comes of an ancient and sacred family of white-robed priests. They assisted at the most momentous religious ceremonies, from the beginning of recorded time. The Egyptian Lotus was a sacred plant; it was dedicated to Harpocrates and to the god Nofr Atmoo,–Nofr meaning _good_, whence the name of our yellow lily, Nuphar. But the true Egyptian flower was _Nymphaea Lotus_, though _Nymphaea caerulea_, Moore’s “blue water-lilies,” can be traced on the sculptures also. It was cultivated in tanks in the gardens; it was the chief material for festal wreaths; a single bud hung over the forehead of many a queenly dame; and the sculptures represent the weary flowers as dropping from the heated hands of belles, in the later hours of the feast. Rock softly on the waters, fair lilies! your Eastern kindred have rocked on the stormier bosom of Cleopatra. The Egyptian Lotus was, moreover, the emblem of the sacred Nile,–as the Hindoo species, of the sacred Ganges; and both the one and the other was held the symbol of the creation of the world from the waters. The sacred bull Apis was wreathed with its garlands; there were niches for water, to place it among tombs; it was carved in the capitals of columns; it was represented on plates and vases; the sculptures show it in many sacred uses, even as a burnt-offering; Isis holds it; and the god Nilus still binds a wreath of water-lilies around the throne of Memnon.
From Egypt the Lotus was carried to Assyria, and Layard found it among fir-cones and honeysuckles on the later sculptures of Nineveh. The Greeks dedicated it to the nymphs, whence the name _Nymphaea_. Nor did the Romans disregard it, though the Lotus to which Ovid’s nymph Lotis was changed, _servato nomine_, was a tree, and not a flower. Still different a thing was the enchanted stem of the Lotus-eaters of Herodotus, which prosaic botanists have reduced to the _Zizyphus Lotus_ found by Mungo Park, translating also the yellow Lotus-dust into a mere “farina, tasting like sweet gingerbread.”
But in the Lotus of Hindostan we find our flower again, and the Oriental sacred books are cool with water-lilies. Open the Vishnu Purana at any page, and it is a _Sortes Lilianae_. The orb of the earth is Lotus-shaped, and is upborne by the tusks of Vesava, as if he had been sporting in a lake where the leaves and blossoms float. Brahma, first incarnation of Vishnu, creator of the world, was born from a Lotus; so was Sri or Lakshmu, the Hindoo Venus, goddess of beauty and prosperity, protectress of womanhood, whose worship guards the house from all danger. “Seated on a full-blown Lotus, and holding a Lotus in her hand, the goddess Sri, radiant with beauty, rose from the waves.” The Lotus is the chief ornament of the subterranean Eden, Patala, and the holy mountain Meru is thought to be shaped like its seed-vessel, larger at summit than at base. When the heavenly Urvasi fled from her earthly spouse, Puruvavas, he found her sporting with four nymphs of heaven, in a lake beautified with the Lotus. When the virtuous Prahlada was burned at the stake, he cried to his cruel father, “The fire burneth me not, and all around I behold the face of the sky, cool and fragrant with beds of Lotus-flowers!” Above all, the graceful history of the transformations of Krishna is everywhere hung with these fresh chaplets. Every successive maiden whom the deity wooes is Lotus-eyed, Lotus-mouthed, or Lotus-cheeked, and the youthful hero wears always a Lotus-wreath. Also “the clear sky was bright with the autumnal moon, and the air fragrant with the perfume of the wild water-lily, in whose buds the clustering bees were murmuring their song.”
Elsewhere we find fuller details. “In the primordial state of the world, the rudimental universe, submerged in water, reposed on the bosom of the Eternal. Brahma, the architect of the world, poised on a Lotus-leaf, floated upon the waters, and all that he was able to discern with his eight eyes was water and darkness. Amid scenes so ungenial and dismal, the god sank into a profound reverie, when he thus soliloquized: ‘Who am I? Whence am I?’ In this state of abstraction Brahma continued during the period of a century and a half of the gods, without apparent benefit or a solution of his inquiries, a circumstance which caused him great uneasiness of mind.” It is a comfort, however, to know, that subsequently a voice came to him, on which he rose, “seated himself upon the Lotus in an attitude of contemplation, and reflected upon the Eternal, who soon appeared to him in the form of a man with a thousand heads”: a questionable exchange for his Lotus-solitude.
This is Brahminism; but the other great form of Oriental religion has carried the same fair symbol with it. One of the Bibles of the Buddhists is named “The White Lotus of the Good Laer.” A pious Nepaulese bowed in reverence before a vase of lilies which perfumed the study of Sir William Jones. At sunset in Thibet, the French missionaries tell us, every inhabitant of every village prostrates himself in the public square, and the holy invocation, “Oh, the gem in the Lotus!” goes murmuring over hill and valley, like the sound of many bees. It is no unmeaning phrase, but an utterance of ardent desire to be absorbed into that Brahma whose emblem is the sacred flower. The mystic formula or “mani” is imprinted on the pavement of the streets, it floats on flags from the temples, and the wealthy Buddhists maintain sculptor-missionaries, Old Mortalities of the water-lily, who, wandering to distant lands, carve the blessed words upon cliff and stone.
Having got thus far into Orientalism, we can hardly expect to get out again without some slight entanglement in philology. Lily-pads. Whence _pads_? No other leaf is identified with that singular monosyllable. Has our floating Lotus-leaf any connection with padding, or with a footpad? with the ambling pad of an abbot, or a paddle, or a paddock, or a padlock? with many-domed Padua proud, or with St. Patrick? Is the name derived from the Anglo-Saxon _paad_ or _petthian_, or the Greek [Greek: pateo]? All the etymologists are silent; Tooke and Richardson ignore the problem; and of the innumerable pamphlets in the Worcester and Webster Controversy, loading the tables of school-committee-men, not one ventures to grapple with the lily-pad.
But was there ever a philological trouble for which the Sanscrit could not afford at least a conjectural cure? A dictionary of that extremely venerable tongue is an ostrich’s stomach, which can crack the hardest etymological nut. The Sanscrit name for the Lotus is simply _Padma_. The learned Brahmins call the Egyptian deities Padma Devi, or Lotus-Gods; the second of the eighteen Hindoo Puranas is styled the Padma Purana, because it treats of the “epoch when the world was a golden Lotus”; and the sacred incantation which goes murmuring through Thibet is “Om mani padme houm.” It would be singular, if upon these delicate floating leaves a fragment of our earliest vernacular has been borne down to us, so that here the schoolboy is more learned than the _savans_.
This lets us down easily to the more familiar uses of this plant divine. By the Nile, in early days, the water-lily was good not merely for devotion, but for diet. “From the seeds of the Lotus,” said Pliny, “the Egyptians make bread.” The Hindoos still eat the seeds, roasted in sand; also the stalks and roots. In South America, from the seeds of the Victoria (_Nymphaea Victoria_, now _Victoria Regia_) a farina is made, preferred to that of the finest wheat,–Bonpland even suggesting to our reluctant imagination Victoria-pies. But the European species are used, so far as we know, only in dyeing, and as food (if the truth be told) of swine. Our own water-lily is rather more powerful in its uses; the root contains tannin and gallic acid, and a decoction of it “gives a black precipitate, with sulphate of iron.” It graciously consents to become an astringent, and a styptic, and a poultice, and, banished from all other temples, still lingers in those of AEsculapius.
The botanist also finds his special satisfactions in our flower. It has some strange peculiarities of structure. So loose is the internal distribution of its tissues, that it was for some time held doubtful to which of the two great vegetable divisions, exogenous or endogenous, it belonged. Its petals, moreover, furnish the best example of the gradual transition of petals into stamens,