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Of fife of Cl)nrlc5 Jickrns.
A
biography which represents the many-sidedness of an individual
with any character at all is a performance given to few men to achieve
—a monument seldom erected to any of the great and memorable.
The “ subject ” is to his biographer what he sees him, and there is no
help for the public to whom the biographer tells his tale. It is for
him to choose, among the facts of the subject’s life, which he will put
forward or suppress—which among the feasible impressions of the
subject’s character he will suggest and substantiate. In no branch of
literature are the total failures more numerous—is the average of
imperfection and unsatisfactoriness larger. In certain cases, where
the “ life ” cannot be supposed to possess a widely-extended public
interest—where it is a demand as well as a product of cliqueism—
narrow views and extravagant estimates, foolish exaggerations and
eccentric theories, may be allowed to pass with a smile. They do not
hurt the public, who do not think about them ; they do not injure
their judgment, lower their standard of criticism, or do violence to
their common-sense.
The transports of the Mutual Admiration
Society harm nobody but the persons of talent who have established
it, whether they indulged so as to lead the rational rest of the world
to laugh at the living, or pity the dead. But it is a very different
case when a biography is put forward with such claims to general
importance and public interest as that of Mr. Dickens, written by
his friend Mr. Forster. These claims are more readily and heartily
acknowledged than those of the biographies of many men who were
great in spheres of more elevated influence, work and weight, than
that of any novelist. The interest and curiosity felt about even
such lives are much magnified by their writers, and, at their keenest,
are of brief duration, the books passing rapidly into the category of
mémoires pour servir. But the story of the life of the humourist who
had afforded them so much pleasure by the fanciful creations of his
brain, was eagerly welcomed by the public, coming from the pen of the
friend to whom Mr. Dickens had entrusted the task ; for he had, at a
very early stage of his career, foreseen that he should need a bio
grapher, and had no shrinking from what Mr. Palgrave, pleading the
poet’s right to immunity from it, calls the intrusion of “ biography.”
Regarded from the point of view of that disinterested and impartial
public whose eyes are not shut by the promptings of cliqueism nor
their ears beguiled by its jargon—who know nothing of the fatuous
A
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THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
flattery of “ sets,” but who hold literary men amenable to the same moral
and social laws as any other class of men who do their work in the
world and are paid for it—the book could hardly be more damaging
to the memory of its subject if it had been written by an enemy
instead of a friend. Without impeaching Mr. Forster’s sincerity in
any respect or degree—without imputing to him a particle of the
treacherous ingratitude and deadly damaging cunning which made
Leigh Hunt’s ‘ Life of Byron ’ notorious—it may be gravely doubted
whether the little poet dealt the great one’s memory a more cruel
blow than Mr. Forster, in the character of a mourning Mentor out of
work, has dealt the memory of Telemachus Dickens. To all un
prejudiced persons, with just notions of the relations of men with
their fellows, he presents the object of his preposterously inflated
praise in an aspect both painful and surprising. Who is to correct
this impression ? We are forced to believe that Mr. Forster, from his
long and close association with him, is the person who can best paint
Mr. Dickens as he was in reality; we are forced to accept the man
whose writings so charmed and delighted us on the evidence of a close
and long-sustained correspondence with Mr. Forster, to whom he
apparently assigned the foremost place in his literary and private life
as guide, friend, companion, and critic. Mr. Dickens might have had
no other intimate associate than his future biographer throughout the
long term of years during which he was constantly appealing to his
judgment, adopting his corrections, yielding to his advice, and gushing
about walks, rides, dinners, and drinks in his company. There are
no people in the book but these two; the rest are merely names, to
which casual reference is made in records of jovial dinners and meet
ings for purposes of unlimited flattery. Even Jeffrey is only occa
sionally permitted to offer a modest criticism in a foot-note. In one
instance Mr. Forster relates how Mr. Dickens pooh-pooh’d the criti
cism, and referred it to him, that he too might pooh-pooh as heartily
the idea of Jeffrey’s having presumed to pronounce an opinion on
Miss Fox and Major Bagstock while only three numbers of ‘ Dombey
and Son’ had yet been issued to the world. By every device of
omission, as well as by open assertion, Mr. Forster claims to represent
Mr. Dickens as he was—to be the only licensed interpreter of the
great novelist to the world. The world grants his claim, and, judging
his book by it, is surprised by the nature of the information which is
the outcome of so many years of close and unreserved intercourse.
Not only is the one-sidedness common to biographies conspicuous in this
one, but the two large volumes published up to the present time are as
scanty in one sense as they are diffuse in another. Did Mr. Dickens
correspond with no one but Mr. Forster ? Has no one preserved
letters from him to which his biographer might have procured access ?
Were there no side-lights to be had ? The most fantastic of his own
�THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
171
creations is hardly less like a living responsible man than the excited,
restless, hysterical, self-engrossed, quarrelsome, unreasonable egotist
shown to the world as the real Charles Dickens throughout at least
three-fourths of these two volumes; shown, it is true, upon the evi
dence of his own letters — perhaps the most wonderful records of
human vanity which have ever seen the light of print—but shown
also, through the fault of his biographer, in appalling nakedness, by
hisi strict limitation of Mr. Dickens’s “life” to the chronicle of his
relations with Mr. Forster.
It is a property of genius to raise up a high ideal of its possessors
in the minds of men who derive pleasure from its productions: it
seems to be too frequently the main business of its biographers to
pull this ideal down. That Mr. Forster has done so in the case of
Mr, Dickens every reader will admit who is not infected with the
arrogant ideas or carried away by the inflated jargon of the cliqueism
of light literature—an essentially insolent and narrow cliqueism
which, when contemplated from a philosophical or practical stand
point, seems to be the modern rendering of the satirical fable of the
fly upon the wheel. The members of this clique live in an atmosphere
of delusion, in which no sense is preserved of the true proportions
in which various employments of human intellect respectively aid
the development of human progress and social greatness. The people
who form the clique have no notion of the absurd effect they produce
on the big world outside it, which takes account of and puts its trust
in talent and energy of many kinds other than the literary; hence
it is generally a mistake that the life of a man of this kind of letters
should be written at all, and doubly so that it should be written by
one who has done it in the spirit of a clique inside a clique. The
reader’s notions of the life and character of a great humourist, who
was flattered, and who flattered himself, into the belief that he was
also a great moralist, are painfully disconcerted by Mr. Forster, who
leaves the most diverting of jesters, the most strained of sentimentalists,
no loophole of escape, by strongly insisting, in the before-mentioned
jargon, that he lived “ in ” his books and “ with ” his characters.
Thus the reader finds himself obliged to conclude that, if that state
ment be correct, Mr. Dickens was a foolish, and if it be not correct, he
was an affected person. His own letters confirm it; but then all the
letters he ever wrote to everybody were by no means so exclusively
occupied with himself and his sensations as those by which only he
is interpreted to the public, and which, instead of being quite repul
sive, would have been pardonable, and sometimes pleasing, if they had
been episodical—if the reader could believe that their writer had not
unconsciously sat for the portrait, drawn by his own pen, of the
individual who was “ so far down in the school of life, that he was
perpetually making figures of 1 in his copybook, and could not get
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THE LIFE OF CHAKLES DICKENS.
any further. A fair test of the effect of such a posthumous picture
of a man who deservedly gained a vast popularity is to imagine its
being drawn and exhibited in the case of any other man who had
achieved a similar reputation by similar means. Let us take, for
instance, the death of Colonel Newcome, the finest piece of pathos in
all Mr. Thackeray s writings, and try to imagine the author writing
to the closest of his friends, while the end was coming in the strain
of Mr. Dickens’s letters about the death of Nelly Trent: “ I went to
bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. All night I have been
pursued by the old man, and this morning I am unrefreshed and
miserable. I don’t know what to do with myself. I think the close
of the story will bo great. . . . The difficulty has been tremendous,
the anguish unspeakable. I think it will come favourably ; but I am
the wretchedest ol the wretched. It casts the most horrible shadow
upon me, and it is as much as I can do to keep moving at all.” In
the impossible case of Mr. Thackeray’s having written such effusive
rant, he would surely have cautioned his pre-ordained biographer
that it was not intended for publication. It is equally difficult to
imagine Mr. Trollope signing his letters, “ Yours truly, John Eames,”
or “ Ever yours, Phineas Finn.” But Mr. Forster prints letter after
letter in which Mr. Dickens calls himself “the inimitable” (a joke
which really does not bear so much repetition), quotes his own books
in illustration of all such incidents as, seeing that they concern him
self, he thinks worth mentioning, and signs himself “ Pickwick ” and
“Wilkins Micawber.” He is in “Dombeian spirits” or “Chuzzlewit
agonies,” or he is “ devilish sly,” or his wife is thrown from a carriage,
and laid on a sofa, “chock full of groans, like Squeers.” In short, he
is always quoting or suggesting quotations from himself, while his
voluminous letters are remarkable for their silence concerning any
other writer of the day. Then we have an overdone dedication of a
book to Mr. 1< orster, and a letter, accompanying a present of a claret
jug, which for pompousness might have been written in the Augustan
age. It is not wholly inconceivable that humour of this kind may
have had its charm for friends who conducted their relations on the
mutual admiration principle, but it is wholly inconceivable that Mr.
Forster should believe its details to be interesting to the public, and
surprising that he should fail to see that just in proportion as it is
*’ characteristic ” it is injurious to their ideal of Air. Dickens.
Was it also characteristic of Mr. Dickens to act, in all the grave
circumstances of life, with a hard self-assertion, an utter ignoring of
everybody’s rights, feelings, and interests except his own—an assump
tion of the holy and infallible supremacy of his own views’and his
own claims which are direct contradictions of all his finest and most
effusive sentimonts ? If not, then his biographer has to answer for
producing the impression upon the mind of the reader, who looks in
�THR LIFE OF CHABLES DICKENS.
173
vain throughout these volumes for any indication that Mr. Dickens’s
fine writing about human relations has any but a Pecksniffian sense.
In every reference to Mr. Dickens in his filial capacity there is
evident a repulsive hardness, a contemptuous want of feeling. His
parents were poor, in constant difficulties, and their son made capital
of the fact for some of his cleverest and some of his least pleasing
fictions; the Micawbers among the former, the Dorrits among the
latter. Every allusion to his father grates upon the reader’s feel
ings. A very amusing but exaggerated description of the difficulties of
stenography, and of the steam-engine-like strength and perseverance
with which Mr. Dickens worked at the art, is transferred from ‘ David
Copperfield’ to the biography, with such a flourish of trumpets
that readers unversed in the jargon of mutual admiration, might
suppose no man but Mr. Dickens had ever thoroughly mastered such
difficulties, and that he alone had invented and patented the “ golden
rules,” which he promulgates apropos of his becoming a shorthand
writer: “ Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all
my heart to do well. What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted
myself to completely. Never to put one hand to anything on which
I could not throw my whole self, and never to affect depreciation of my
work, whatever it was.” Of any inclination to depart from the second
of these “ golden rules,” no reader of Mr. Forster will suspect Mr.
Dickens; but of falling on the other side into an outrageous glorifi
cation of his work, whatever it was, he is convicted in countless
instances by his cruel biographer.
Voltaire’s cynical conceit of the chorus who sang incessant praises
of the poor prince until they made him laughable to all mankind
and loathsome to himself, is reflected in Mr. Forster. Pages are
devoted to the energy with which a young man of nineteen, with
a “ Dora ” in view to stimulate him, engaged in the acquisition of
an art which hundreds of quiet, industrious, well-educated gentle
men practised; but the fact that his father, who was not young,
and who had gone through much toil and care, had conquered
the same stubborn art, and was working hard at it, is mentioned
as “ his father having already taken to it, in those later years, in
aid of the family resourcesand again, as “ the elder Dickens having
gone into the gallery.” When Mr. Dickens writes to his friend that
he has been securing a house for his parents, the tone of the letter is
singularly unpleasant; and people who are not literary or gifted, but
merely simple folks, who hold that the God-formed ties of actual ¡life
should rank above the creations of even the brightest fancy, must
condemn the publication of the letter which Mr. Dickens wrote on the
31st of March, 1851, the very day of his fathers death, in which he
points out that he must not let himself be “ distracted by anything,”
though he has “ left a sad sight!”—(he was present when his father
�174
THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
expired)—from “ the scheme on which so much depends,” and “most
part of the proposed ^Iterations,” which he thinks “ good.” He is
going up to Highgate at two, and hopes Mr. Forster will go with him.
The scheme was the Guild of Literature and Art, and the chief matter
under discussion was Bulwer’s comedy, written in aid of it. Mr.
Forster was going to Knebworth, and the son, just come from the
father’s deathbed, and going to buy his father’s grave, would “ like to
have gone that way, if ‘ Bradshaw ’ gave him any hope of doing it.”
There are men of whom this might be published without conveying
the disappointing, disenchanting effect which it conveys in this instance,
though in itself it is hard and shocking; but in the case of Mr. Dickens
the terrible frankness of it is much to be regretted. Such testimony
as this to the practical want of feeling of the man who described him
self as utterly good for nothing, prostrated with anguish, pursued by
phantasmal misery when Little Nell and Paul Dombey were dying,
whose hysterical sensibility about every fancy of his imagination was
so keen, is overwhelming. Mr. Forster ought to have shown us
one side of the medal only—his friend in fantastic agonies over a
fiction—“ knocked over, utterly dejected,” for instance, by “ the Ham
and Steerforth chapter,” or his friend eminently business-like over one
of the most solemn events possible in a human life. When he exhibits
him in both characters to plain people, he, no doubt unintentionally,
paints the portrait of a charlatan.
In another instance the biographer shocks yet more profoundly the
moral sense of persons who believe that genius is not less, but more,
bound by the common law of duty in feeling and in action. There
is a vast amount of sentiment, there are numerous prettinesses about
mothers and babies, and about motherhood and sonhood in the abstract,
in Mr. Dickens’s works; and in this case also, he, for whom it is so
persistently claimed that he lived in and with his books that he must
needs incur the penalty of this praise, is made by Mr. Foster to
produce the effect of falseness and inconsistency. The slight mention
made of Mr. Dickens’s mother by the biographer is contemptuous,
and his own solitary direct allusion to her is unjust and unfilial.
Could not Mr. Forster recall anything, ever so slight, in all that long
intimacy, so close and constant that it seems to have left no room and
no time in the novelist’s life for any other, to counterbalance that
impression ? The temptation, which no doubt strongly beset the
litterateur, to colour as highly as possible the picture of the “ blacking
bottle period,” has been too strong for the biographer, who has failed
to perceive that in making the episode exceedingly interesting, very
alluring to public curiosity, he has made the subject of it con
temptible. The picture is a paintul one, not altogether and only
from the side on which alone it is contemplated by Mr. Dickens and
Mr, Forster ; it is pervaded by the characteristics of all the pictures
�THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
175
of Mr. Dickens’s earlier years, and of all dealings with everybody on
occasions when they did not turn out to his entire satisfaction.
Neither Mr. Dickens nor his biographer regard this period of the
celebrated novelist’s life justly ; they both look at it from the stand
point of accomplished facts, of mature life, developed genius, and
achieved fame. The truth is, that the poor parents of a large and
helpless family were naturally glad to accept the proposal of a rela
tive who offered to give the means of existence to one of their
children, a boy of weak frame, indifferent health, and odd “ ways,” in
which they were too dull, too troubled, and too busy to suspect arid
look for genius. They were not clever, literary, or fanciful; they
were struggling and common-place. Mrs. Dickens was promised
that the child should be taught something, and given the precedence
of a relative of the master among the boys in the blacking ware
house. Both promises were kept for a time ; when they came to be
disregarded the family turmoil had subsided into the temporary
repose of imprisonment for debt. It is very sad that respectable
decent people should be reduced to being glad to have one child lodged
and fed, ever so meagrely, away from them ; but the man who was that
child, who laid claim afterwards to an exceptional and emotional sym
pathy with poverty, and comprehension of all its straits, could not
sympathise with his parents’ poverty. He could not comprehend that
to them to be spared the lodging and the feeding of one child was an
important boon, and he has been so unfortunate as to find a biographer
who records, as the only utterance of Mr. Dickens concerning his
mother, this, deliberately spoken in his full manhood, when he was
relating how his father and the relative who had given him his
wretched occupation had quarrelled about him : “ My mother set her
self to accommodate the quarrel, and did so next day. She brought
home a request for me to return next morning, and a high character
of me, which I am very sure I deserved. My father said I should go
to school, and should go back no more. I do not write resentfully
or angrily, for I know how all these things have worked together to
make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall
forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being
sent back. . . . From that hour until this my father and my mother
have been stricken dumb upon it.”
A great deal of public feeling upon this point has been taken for
granted in perfect good faith by a great many people, for want of plain
matter-of-fact comprehension of the case on its real merits. Mr. and
Mrs. Dickens were in deep poverty. “ All our friends were tired
out ”—these are their son’s own words. His sister Fanny, who was
gifted with musical talent, was a pupil in an academy of music,
as a preparation for earning her own livelihood; and when he was
sent to the employment which he so bitterly resented afterwards he
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THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
describes the family home thus : “ My mother and my brothers and
sisters (excepting Fanny) were still encamped with a young servant
girl from Chatham workhouse in two parlours of the house in Gower
Street. Everything had gone gradually; until at last there was
nothing left but a few chairs, a broken table, and some beds.” The
mother who sent her child to earn seven shillings a week in a
blacking warehouse from such a home—to be exchanged only for
her husband’s prison—was not, we think, quite a monster. What
became of the “brothers and sisters”? Did any one outrage the
family by offering help equally ignoble to another individual in whom
Sam Weller’s “ double million gas-magnifying glasses ” themselves
could hardly then have detected an embryo genius? When Mr. '
Dickens left the prison it was as a bankrupt, and though he imme
diately began the toil which was merely “ praiseworthy industry ” in
him, while it was magnified to heroism m his son, there is nothing
heinous, to our thinking, in the mother’s endeavour to keep those
seven weekly shillings wherewith one child might be fed, and in her
demur to a “ cheap school,” which, however cheap, must be paid for
out of nothing. Stripped of verbiage, this is the literal truth, and
Mr. Forster makes one of his gravest mistakes when he dwells with
would-be pathos upon the effect of this childish expression upon Mr,
Dickens’s mind and manners in after life. The picture, if true, is a
sorry one, for it is full of vanity, self-engrossment, and morbid feeling.
That a man who had achieved such renown, had done such work,
had so employed his God-given genius, should be awkward and ill at
ease in the society of well-bred unpretending people, should go about
under a kind of self-compelled cloud, because, being the child of poor
parents, he had, in his childhood, pursued, for a short time, a lowly
but honest occupation, is, to simple minds, an incomprehensibly foolish
and mean weakness.
If Mr. Dickens were represented as having been proud of the fact
that as a small and feeble child he had worked for his own living
with the approbation of his employers, and thus eased off her shoulders
some of the burthen his 4 mother had to carry, it would be con
sistent with the self-reliance of David Copperfield, the devotion of
Little Nell, the helpfulness of Jenny Wren, in short, with a number
of the virtues of the personages “ with ” and “ in ” whom we are told
his real life was to be found. Mr. Forster looks upon the childhood
and youth of Mr. Dickens with the eyes of his fame and maturity,
and cries out against the ignoring of a prodigy before there had been
anything prodigious about him, just as Mr. Dickens himself complains
of the publishers, to whom he owed the opportunity of making a
reputation, for ill-treating a famous author, and fattening on his
brains. Mr. Foster is emphatic in his blame of every one who was
concerned in the matter-—or indeed who was not, for “ friends ” are
�THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
177
taken to task—that Charles Dickens was not given a good education,
and eloquent about the education which he afterwards gave himself.
Here, again, the besetting temptation of the biographer to invest his
subject with attributes which do not belong to him, as well as to
exaggerate those which do, assails Mr. Forster. There are no facts
in his narrative to prove that Mr. Dickens ever was an educated man,
and all the testimony of his works is against the supposition. No
trait of his genius is more salient than its entire self-dependence ; no
defects of it are more marked than his intolerance of subjects which
he did not understand, and his high-handed dogmatic treatment of
matters which he regarded with the facile contempt of ignorance.
This unfortunate tendency was fostered by the atmosphere of flattery
in which he lived ; a life which, in the truly educational sense, was
singularly narrow; and though he was not entirely to blame for the
extent, it affected his later works very much to their disadvantage.
As a novelist he is distinguished, as a humourist he is unrivalled in
this age; but when he deals with the larger spheres of morals, with
politics, and with the mechanism of state and official life, he is absurd.
He announces truisms and tritenesses with an air of discovery im
possible to a well-read man, and he propounds with an air of convic
tion, hardly provoking, it is so simply foolish, flourishing solutions of
problems, which have long perplexed the gravest and ablest minds in
the higher ranges of thought.
We hear of his extensive and varied reading. Where is the evidence
that he ever read anything beyond fiction, and some of the essayists ?
Certainly not in his books, which might be the only books in the
world, for any indication of study or book-knowledge in them. Not a
little of their charm, not a little of their wide-spread miscellaneous
popularity, is referable to that very thing. Every one can understand
them; they are not for educated people only ; they do not suggest com
parisons, or require explanations, or imply associations; they stand
alone, self-existent, delightful facts. A slight reference to Fielding
and Smollett, a fine rendering of one chapter in English history—
the Gordon riots—very finely done, and a clever adaptation of
Mr. Carlyle’s ‘ Scarecrows ’ to his own stage, in ‘ A Tale of Two
Cities,’ are positively the only traces of books to be found in the long
series of his works. His ‘ Pictures from Italy ’ is specially curious as
an illustration of the possibility of a man’s living so long in a country
with an old and famous history, without discovering that he might
possibly understand the country better if he knew something about
the history. He always caught the sentimental and humourous
elements in everything; the traditional, spiritual, philosophic, or
¿esthetic not at all. His prejudices were the prejudices, not of one
sided opinion and conviction, but of ignorance “ all round.” His mind
held no clue to the character of the peoples of foreign countries, and
vol. xxxviii.
N
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THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
their tastes, arts, and creed were ludicrous mysteries to him. His
vividness of mind, freshness and fun, constitute the chief charm of his
stories, and their entire originality is the ‘ note ’ which pleases most;
but when he writes “ pictures ” of a land of the great past of poetry,
art, and politics, with as much satisfied flippancy as when he describes
the common objects of the London streets (for which he yearned in
the midst of all the mediaeval glories of Italy), he makes it evident
that he had never been educated, and had not educated himself. If
we are to accept Mr. Forster’s version of his friend’s judgment and
intellectual culture, apart from his own art as a novelist, we get a sorry
notion of them from the following sentence, which has many fellows.
At page 82 of the first volume, Mr. Forster writes : “ His (Mr. Dickens’)
observations, during his career in the gallery, had not led him to form
any high opinion of the House of Commons or its heroes; and of the
Pickwickian sense, which so often takes the place of common sense,
in our legislature, he omitted no opportunity of declaring his contempt
at every part of his life.” This is unkind. We do not like to believe
that the famous novelist was so insolent and so arrogant as his
biographer makes him out to have been, and it is only fair to remark
that it is Mr. Forster who represents his ‘ subject’s ’ contempt for
men and matters entirely out of his social and intellectual sphere as
something serious for those men and those matters. That Mr. Dickens
was rather more than less unfortunate than other people when, like
them, he talked of things he did not understand, is abundantly
proved by his £ Hard Times,’ the silly Doodle business in ‘ Bleak
House,’ the ridiculous picture of an M.P. in ‘ Nickleby,’ and the in
variable association of rank with folly and power with incompetence
in all his works. He knew nothing of official life; he had no com
prehension of authority, of discipline, of any kind of hierarchical
system, and his very humour itself is dull, pointless, laboured, and
essentially vulgar, when directed against the larger order of politics;
it becomes mere flippant buzzing, hardly worth notice or rebuke.
It is not only in the education of books that we perceive Mr.
Dickens to have been defective. Mr. Forster’s account of him makes
it evident that he was deficient in that higher education of the mind, by
which men attain to an habitually nice adjustment of the rights of
others in all mutual dealings, and to that strictly-regulated considera
tion which is a large component of self-respect. If this biography is
true and trustworthy; if the public, to whom the author of books
which supplied them with a whole circle of personal friends was an
abstraction, are to accept this portrait of Mr. Dickens as a living
verity, then they are forced to believe that, though a spasmodically
generous, he was not a just man. According to the narrative before
the world, he had a most exacting, even a grinding estimate, of the
sacredness and inviolability of his own rights. To under-estimate his
�THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
179
claims was the unpardonable stupidity ; to stand against liis interests
was the inexpiable sin. This deplorable tendency was lamentably
encouraged by Mr. Forster—who in 1837 made his appearance on the
scene which thenceforward he occupied so very conspicuously as a party
to Mr. Dickens’s second quarrel in the course of a literary career then
recently commenced. He had already quarrelled with Mr. Macrone,
the publisher of ‘ Sketches by Boz,’ and his subsequent kindness to
that gentleman’s widow by no means blinds a dispassionate observer
to the fact that the strict right—not the fine feeling, not the genius
recognising disinterestedness, but the mere honest right—was, not
with the author, but with the publisher. His second quarrel was
with Mr. Bentley, his second publisher ; his third quarrel was with
Messrs. Chapman and Hall, his third publishers. His fourth quarrel
is recorded in the second volume ; with the proprietors of the Daily
News, after a very brief endurance of the ineffable stupidity, the
intolerable exaction, and the general unbearableness of everybody con
cerned in the management of that journal—qualities which, by an
extraordinary harmony of accident, invariably distinguished all per
sons who came into collision with Mr. Dickens in any situation of
which he was not absolutely the master. We know that there is a
fifth quarrel—that with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans—yet to be re
corded ; and we submit, that to plain people, who do not accord ex
ceptional privileges to men of genius with regard to their dealings
with their fellows, those facts indicate radical injustice and bad temper.
The pages of Temple Bar are not the place in which the merits of
the indictment of Mr. Bentley at the bar of public opinion by Mr.
Forster ought to be discussed. They form matter for fuller dis
closure and more abundant proof ; but the editor must permit us an
allusion to this case so pompously stated by Mr. Forster, because it
differs in kind from the subsequent instances. In 1836 Mr. Dickens
was what his biographer calls “ self-sold into bondage,” i.e. he was
employed by Mr. Bentley to edit the ‘ Miscellany,’ to supply a serial
story, and to write two others, the first at a specified early date, “ the
expressed remuneration in each case being certainly quite inadequate
to the claims of a writer of any marked popularity.” We have only
to refer to the letter written by Mr. George Bentley, and published
in the Times on the 7th of December, 1871, to perceive the absurdity
of this statement, unless Mr. Forster’s estimate of the claims of rising
young littérateurs be of quite unprecedented liberality, in which case
it is to be hoped he may make numerous converts among the pub
lishers ; while the notion that a man so keenly alive to his own value
would have made a bad bargain, is à priori totally inconsistent with
his whole portrait of Mr. Dickens. But Mr. Dickens never seems to
have understood practically at any time of his life that there were two
sides to any contract to which he was a party. The terms of the first
n 2
�180
THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
agreement which he made, and did not carry out, were as follows:
Mr. Dickens was to write two works of fiction, ‘ Oliver Twist,’ and
another, subsequently entitled ‘ Barnaby Budge,’ for £1000, and toedit the ‘ Miscellany’ for £20 a month; this sum of course not toinclude payment for any of his own contributions. No rational person
can entertain a doubt that these conditions were exceedingly advan
tageous to Mr. Dickens at the then stage of his career. The term»
of the second agreement which he made, and did not carry out, were,
that he should receive £30 a month as editor of the ‘ Miscellany?
The terms of the third agreement which he made, and did not carry
out, were, that he should receive £750 for each of the two novels and
£360 per annum as editor of the ‘ Miscellany.’ The story of the fourth
agreement which he made, and did not carry out, will be told elsewhere.
It suffices here to say that he had his own way in all. Throughout
the whole of this affair, as Mr. Forster relates it, Mr. Dickens was
childishly irritable and ridiculously self-laudatory; and it never seems
to have occurred to either of them that a writer of books, employed
by a publisher, is a man of business executing a commission, by
business rules and under business laws. If Mr. Dickens, writing
‘ Pickwick ’ for Messrs. Chapman and Hall and ‘ Oliver Twist ’ for
Mr. Bentley at the same time, “ was never even a week in advance
with the printer in either,” outsiders will think that neither Messrs?.
Chapman and Hall nor Mr. Bentley were to blame for the circum
stance, that it was no business whatever of theirs, and that it had
nothing to do with Mr. Dickens’s objection to furnish the works he
had contracted to write, at the price for which he had contracted to
write them. The truth is, that Mr. Dickens was not a famous author,,
on whose brains Mr. Bentley designed to fatten, when he made thefirst agreement of that “ network in which he was entangled ” (Mr.
Forster’s astounding description of a series of contracts, each made on
Mr. Dickens’s own terms, and each altered at his own request,) for
he had written nothing but the ‘ Sketches by Boz ’ (‘ Pickwick,’ had
not even been commenced) and he had never edited anything, or
given any indication of the kind of ability requisite in an editor,
while he was evidently not an educated man. In fact, the first bar
gain strikes impartial minds as a rather daring speculation on Mr.
Bentley’s part; and there can be only one opinion that, when the
whole matter was concluded, it was on extraordinarily advantageous
terms to Mr. Dickens. For £2250 Mr. Bentley ceded to him the
copyright of ‘Oliver Twist’ (with the Cruiksliank illustrations,
whose value and importance Mr. Forster vainly endeavours to decry,
but on which public opinion cannot be put down), the stock of an
addition of 1002 copies, and the cancelled agreement for ‘Barnaby
Budge.’ We have the progressive figures which tell us what Mr.
Dickens’ salary as editor of ‘ Bentley’s Miscellany ’ had been. We
�THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
181
have the records of his early experience, and of his exact position when
Mr. Bentley employed him in that capacity. Taking all these things
into account, the discretion of his biographer in recording his poor
joke when he relinquished the editorship, saying, “it has always
been literally Bentley’s miscellany, and never mine,” may be denied
without impertinence.
From a more general point of view than merely that of this bio
graphy and its subject, the story of Mr. Dickens’s frequent quarrels
with everybody with whom he made contracts is lamentable. Mr.
Forster seems seriously and genuinely to regard the persons who
expected Mr. Dickens to keep his engagements, merely because he
had made them, as heinous offenders. In vol. ii. page 42, we find
a story about Messrs. Chapman & Hall’s having ventured to hint
their expectation of his fulfilment of a contract by which, in the event
■of a certain falling off in a certain sale, which falling off actually did
take place, he was to refund a certain sum, and this conduct is de
scribed with a sort of “ bated breath ” condemnation, as though it were
a dreadful departure from honour and decency, which, having been
atoned for, is merely referred to, pityingly, under extreme pressure of
biographical obligation. And all this because one of the contracting
parties is a novelist, whose fame is built upon the very articles which
he has supplied by the contract! Why do publishers employ authors ?
Is it that they may write successful or unsuccessful books ? Fancy a
man undertaking to write a serial novel—which must be a venture for
his publisher, who purchases it unread, unwritten—for a certain sum of
money, writing it well, so that it succeeds, and that his publisher is a
gainer by it—the writer’s gain being of course, in the nature of things,
a foregone conclusion, and the transaction being described as “ an obli
gation incurred in ignorance of the sacrifices implied by it.” What an
absence of commercial morality and of a sense of fair dealing is implied
by the notion! If we could suppose this line of argument to be
transferred to the productions of other orders of genius than the
literary, its uncandidness would come out with startling distinctness.
Supposing an artist were to contract with a picture dealer to paint a
picture for him within a given time and for a stated sum, and that
during the painting of that picture the artist’s reputation were to rise
considerably, in consequence of his excellent execution of another task,
so that not only would the picture be of greater value to the purchaser
than he had had reason to believe it would be at the date of the com
mission, but the artist would be entitled to ask a larger sum for his
next work. What would be thought of the artist, if he denounced
the dealer as everything that was mean and dastardly, because he
proposed to pay him the price agreed upon, and not a larger price ?
What would be thought of the same artist if, an agreement to paint
a second picture on the same terms as the first having Leen changed
�182
THE LIFE OF CHALLES DICKENS.
at his request and to his advantage, he deliberately instructed a friend
to cancel that agreement also, and bemoaned himself in terms so un
manly and so unbusinesslike as the following: “The consciousness
that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another work on th©
same journeyman terms,” Azs own terms, “ the consciousness that my
work is enriching everybody connected with it but myself, and that i,
with such a popularity as 1 have acquired, am struggling in old toils,
and wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame
in the best part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those
who are nearest and dearest to me I can realise little more than a
genteel subsistence; all this puts me out of heart and spirits............
I do most solemnly declare that morally, before God and man, I hold
> myself released from such hard bargains as these, after I have done
so much for those who drove them.” It is impossible to conceive any
great man in the world of art or any other world, which involves
production and purchase, writing in such a style as this, and no
blame can be too severe for the indiscretion which has given to the
public such a picture of mingled vanity and lack of conscience. If
this view of the business relations of author and publisher were to be
accepted as the just view, the success of the author would be the
misfortune of the publisher, and the grand object of the trade would
be to supply Mr. Mudie with a placid flow of mediocrity, by which
they could count on a certain moderate profit without risk; but they
would shun rising geniuses like the plague. We protest against all
the unworthy, unbusinesslike, and untrue jargon in which this story,
and the others like it are set forth, not only because it gives an
impression of the character of Mr. Dickens extremely disappointing
to the admirers of his genius—of whom the present writer is one of the
most fervent—but also for a much more serious and far-reaching reason.
Everything of the kind which is believed and adopted by the public
as true of literary men, is degrading to their status and demoralising
to their class. Why should a business transaction to which a man of
letters is a party, be in any moral or actual sense different from any
other business transaction whatsoever ? The right divine of genius
is to be better, honester, higher minded, than mediocrity, because it
has truer insight, a nobler, loftier outlook and ideal, and greater aims.
At least this is the common notion of the great privileges of genius,
and to controvert or degrade it is to inflict on the public a misfortune
entailing a loss. No man can claim of himself or be held by his friends
to be outside, above, or released from any common moral law, without
a failure of true dignity, a violation of common sense, and an offence
to the great majority of respectable and reasoning people who make
up that public whose word is reputation. Seldom has a more un
fortunate phrase than “ the eccentricities of genius ” been invented.
It has to answer for many a moral declension, which, if the phrase
�THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
183
had not existed, would have been avoided, because toleration would not
have been expected—for many a social impertinence, which would have
been too promptly punished for repetition. The “eccentricities of
genius ” are always its blemishes, frequently its vices, and the suffer
ance of them by society is a mistake, the condonation of them is a
fault, the laudation of them is a treacherous sin.
Next to Mr. Dickens’s indignation that his publishers should
presume to make money by his work, Mr. Forster exposes most
mercilessly his disgust at the possibility of his illustrators getting any
credit in connection with his books. It would be unprofitable to reca
pitulate the controversy between Mr. Cruikshank and Mr. Forster
about the artist’s share in the production of ‘ Oliver Twist,’ but in
connection with the subject it may be observed, that if Mr. Cruikshank’s Bill Sykes and Nance did not realise Mr. Dickens’ wish, every
reader of ‘ Oliver Twist ’ thinks of the housebreaker and his victim as
Mr. Cruikshank drew them, and knows that, in the case of Nance, the
author’s was an impossible picture (a fact which no one, as Mr.
Thackeray ably pointed out, knew better than NIr. Dickens), while the
artist’s was the coarse, terrible truth. On which side the balance of
suggestion was most heavily weighted it is not easy or necessary to
determine, but nothing can be clearer than that Mr. Cruiksliank
followed no lead of Mr. Dickens, in his wonderful pictures, but
saw the villainous components of that partly powerful yet partly
feeble romance of crime with a vision entirely his own. Mr. Halbot
Browne is allowed a little credit; but, though Mr. Forster presides
over the production of each book in succession, and all he suggests
and says is received with effusive respect and gushing gratitude,
though he reads and amends sheets hardly dry, and makes alterations
which require separate foot notes to display their importance, and
italics to describe their acceptation, every hint of counsel from any one
else is treated with offensive disdain. To Mr. Forster the world is
indebted for the Marchioness’s saying about the orange-peel and water,
that it would “ bear more seasoning.” Mr. Dickens had made it
“ flavour,” but the censor considered that word out of place in the
“ little creature’s mouth,” though the little creature was a cook, and
so it was changed. What a pity he did not suggest that Dick
Swiveller might have been quite as delightful, and yet considerably
less drunken I To him the world owes Little Nell’s death, but Mr.
Dickens would probably have acknowledged the obligation on his own
part less warmly if he had foreseen the publication of the absurd
rhapsody in which he announced the event as imminent; declaring
that he trembles “ to approach the place more than Kit; a great deal
more than Mr. Garland; a great deal more than the Single Gentle
man.” Then with ingenuous vanity, and forgetting grammar in
gush, he protests: “ Nobody will miss her like I shall. What the
�184
THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
actual doing it will be, God knows. I can’t preach to myself the
schoolmaster’s consolation, though I try.” Only the pachydermatous
insensibility which comes of mutual admiration could have prevented
a biographer’s perception of the inappropriateness of such reve
lations, and of scores of similar ones; only such insensibility can
account for his complacent sacrifice of every one else to the glorifica
tion of that leviathan in whose jaws he could always put a hook.
That Mr. Dickens may be made to praise Mr. Mark Lemon patronisingly, Mr. Forster prints a statement concerning Mrs. Lemon, which
that lady has contradicted in the press; and that Mr. Dickens’s gene
rosity and delicacy may be duly appreciated, Mr. Forster tells how he
deputed Mr. Wills to make Mr. Sala a present of £20. It is neces
sary to keep constantly before one’s mind that it is Mr. Forster who
is speaking for Mr. Dickens, if one would escape from an overwhelm
ing conviction that the great novelist was a very poor creature, and
that it would have been far better for his fame had he been made
known to the public only by his novels. It is especially necessary to
remember this when we find a school of morals imputed to him, when
he is represented as a great teacher who adopted the method of
apologue, and we are gravely assured that “ many an over-suspicious
person will find advantage in remembering what a too liberal applica
tion of Foxey’s principle of suspecting everybody brought Mr. Sampson
Brass to; and many an over-hasty judgment of poor human nature
will unconsciously be checked, when it is remembered that Mr. Chris
topher Nubbles did come back to work out that shilling.”
When we read scores of similar passages, we ask ourselves, Can this
be in earnest ? Can it be possible that this is intended to be serious ?
Or is Mr. Forster, getting occasionally tired of the perpetual swing of
the censor of praise before the image of the friend who, in his lifetime,
never wearied of sniffing the enervating perfume, and swung lustily
for himself, poking ponderous fun at the public ? Even the humour of
the great humourist suffers by the handling of his ardent but undis
criminating worshipper. The rubbish by which the tradition of Mrs.
Gamp is continued, the silly letters in dubious French, which exhibit
Mr. Dickens’s absolute incapacity to comprehend any foreign country,
and the unpardonable nonsense, in which he was encouraged by wiser
men, of his pretended admiration for the Queen, are flagrant examples
of injudiciousness, which heavily punishes the folly it parades. Mr.
Dickens’s letter about her Majesty, written thirty years’ ago, was a
sorry jest. Mr. Forster’s publication of it now is supreme bad taste.
Mr. Dickens’s sentimentalism, always exaggerated and frequently
false, suffers at the hands of his biographer even more severely than
his humour. Mr. Forster as confidant, and Mr. Dickens as Tilburina, in intercommunicated hysterics over the ‘ Christmas Stories,’
‘ Dombey and Son,’ and ‘ David Copperfield,’ become so very weari
�THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
185
some, especially when Mr. Forster solemnly declares his belief that the
* Christmas Carol ’ “ for some may have realised the philosopher’s
famous experience, and by a single fortunate thought revised the whole
manner of a life,” that it is a positive relief when they are parted.
Mr. Dickens’s ‘ Letters from America ’ form the least disappointing
portion of this work ; in them his egotism is less persistently offensive
and his humour is displayed to great advantage. The reverse of this
is the case in his ‘ Letters from Italy.’ In them he is in a perpetual
state of ebullition, fussiness, impatience, effervescent vanity, and self
engrossment. It is amusing to observe that the great humourist was
so little accustomed to recognise humour in others, that it never oc
curred to him he could be quizzed. When a witty consul warned him
not to let his children out of doors, because the Jesuits would be on
the watch to lead their innocent feet into popish places, he swallowed
the warning with the docile credulity of a Vansittart.
It must be acknowledged that Mr. Forster’s advice was very sound
and valuable in many instances. Perhaps his consciousness of that
fact has blinded him to the extent to which his exposure of his friend’s
weaknesses has gone. Was it, for instance, worth while, in order to
record that he rejected the proposition, to let the public know that
Mr. Dickens ever proposed as a title for his projected weekly mis
cellany, “ Charles Dickens : A Weekly Journal, designed for the
instruction and amusement of all classes of readers. Conducted by
Himself ” ?
In one more volume this warmly-welcomed, eagerly-read biography
is to be completed. That volume must necessarily be a more difficult
and responsible task than its predecessors. It is to be hoped that it
will fulfil the expectations of the public more satisfactorily, and that
it will do more justice to Mr. Dickens by doing less injustice to all
with whom he was concerned. It is to be hoped that it will put before
the world a more substantial representation of the great novelist who
was so variously gifted; that it will leave its readers able in some
measure to respect and esteem its subject as a man, for real qualities,
while ceasing to urge an imaginary claim to misplaced consideration,
and especially that it will be free from the faint suggestion which
pervades the present volumes, that, essentially, “ Codlin was the friend,
not Short.”
�[
186
]
£ lluire from tlje pusl),
O ! milii prseteritos ....
High noon, and not a cloud in the sky to break this blinding sun!
Well, I’ve half the day before me still, and most of my journey
done.
There’s little enough of shade to be got, but I’ll take what I can get,
For I’m not as hearty as once I was, although I’m a young man yet.
Young ? Well, yes, I suppose so, as far as the seasons go,
Though there’s many a man far older than I down there in the town
below,—
Older, but men to whom, in the pride of their manhood strong,
The hardest work is never too hard, nor the longest day too long.
But I’ve cut my cake, so I can’t complain; and I’ve only myself to
blame.
Ah ! that was always their tale at home, and here it’s just the same.
Of the seed I’ve sown in pleasure, the harvest I’m reaping in pain.
Could I put my life a few years back would I live that life again ?
Would I? Of course I would ! What glorious days they were !
It sometimes seems but the dream of a dream that life could have been
so fair,
So sweet, but a short time back, while now, if one can call
This life, I almost doubt at times if it’s worth the living at all.
One of these poets—which is it ?—somewhere or another sings
That the crown of a sorrows’ sorrow is the remembering happier
things ;
What the crown of a sorrows’ sorrow may be I know not, but this I
know,
It lightens the years that are now, sometimes to think of the years
ago.
Where are they now, I wonder, with whom those years were passed ?
The pace was a little too good, I fear, for many of them to last;
And there’s always plenty to take their place when the leaders begin
to decline.
Still I wish them well, wherever they are, for the sake of ’auld lang
syne!
�A VOICE FROM THE BUSH.
187
L I Jack Villiers—Galloping Jack—what a beggar he was to ride!—
f I Was shot in a gambling row last year on the Californian side;
LI And Byng, the best of the lot, who was broke in the Derby of fifty
eight,
I ’ Is keeping sheep with Harry Lepell, somewhere on the Biver Plate.
Do they ever think of me at all, and the fun we used to share ?
It gives me a pleasant hour or so—and I’ve none too many to spare.
This dull blood runs as it used to run, and the spent flame flickers up,
As I think on the cheers that rung in my ears when I won the
Garrison Cup!
!
■
'
I. And how the regiment roared to a man, while the voice of the fielders
shook,
! As I swung in my stride, six lengths to the good, hard held over
Brixworth Brook;
Instead of the parrots’ screech, I seem to hear the twang of the horn,
As once again from Barkby Holt I set the pick of the Quorn.
Well, those were harmless pleasures enough; for I hold him worse than
an ass
Who shakes his head at a ‘ neck on the post,’ or a quick thing over
the grass.
Go for yourself, and go to win, and you can’t very well go wrong;—
Gad, if I’d only stuck to that I’d be singing a different song!
7
,
As to the one I’m singing, it’s pretty well known to all;
We knew too much, but not quite enough, and so we went to the wall;
While those who cared not, if their work was done, how dirty their
hands might be,
Went up on our shoulders, and kicked us down, when they got to the
top of the tree.
«
But though it relieves one’s mind at times, there’s little good in a
curse.
) I One comfort is, though it’s not very well, it might be a great deal worse.
A id A roof to my head, and a bite to my mouth, and no one likely
to know
In ‘ Bill the Bushman ’ the dandy who went to the dogs long years
ago-
I
Out there on the station, among the lads, I get along pretty well;
It’s only when I get down into town that I feel this life such a hell.
Booted, and bearded, and burned to a brick, I loaf along the street;
, I watch the ladies tripping by and I bless their dainty feet;
�188
A VOICE FROM THE BUSH.
I watch them here and there, with a bitter feeling of pain.
Ah! what wouldn’t I give to feel a lady’s hand again!
They used to be glad to see me once, they might have been so to-day;
But we never know the worth of a thing until we have thrown it away.
I watch them, but from afar, and I pull my old cap over my eyes,
Partly to hide the tears, that, rude and rough as I am, will rise,
And partly because I cannot bear that such as they should see
The man that I am, when I know, though they don’t, the man that I
ought to be.
Puff! With the last whiff of my pipe I blow these fancies away,
For I must be jogging along if I want to get down into town to-day.
As I know I shall reach my journey’s end though I travel not over
fast,
So the end to my longer journey will come in its own good time at
last.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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The life of Charles Dickens
Creator
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Hoey, Frances Sarah Johnston
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 169-188 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Article from Temple Bar magazine, May 1873; attribution from Virginia Clark catalogue. A review of vol. 1-2 of John Forster's biography of Dickens.
Publisher
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[Bentley]
Date
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[1873]
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G5571
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Literature
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The life of Charles Dickens), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Book Reviews
Charles Dickens
Conway Tracts
English Literature
Fiction in English
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When Hotspur treads the stage with passionate grace, the spectator
hardly dreams of the fact that the princely original lived, paid taxes,
and was an active man of his parish, in Aldersgate Street. There,
however, stood the first Northumberland House. By the ill-fortune
of Percy it fell to the conquering side in the serious conflict in which
Hotspur was engaged; and Henry the Fourth made a present of it
to his queen, Jane. Thence it got the name of the Queen’s Wardrobe.
Subsequently it was converted into a printing office; and, in the
course of time, the first Northumberland House disappeared altogether.
In Fenchurch Street, not now a place wherein to look for nobles,
the great Earls of Northumberland were grandly housed in the
time of Henry the Sixth; but vulgar citizenship elbowed the earls
too closely, and they ultimately withdrew from the City. The deserted
mansion and grounds were taken possession of by the roysterers.
Dice were for ever rattling in the stately saloons. Winners shouted
for joy, and blasphemy was considered a virtue by the losers. As
for the once exquisite gardens, they were converted into bowlinggreens, titanic billiards, at which sport the gayer City sparks breathed
themselves for hours in the summer time. There was no place of
entertainment so fashionably frequented as this second Northumber
land House; but dice and bowls were at length to be enjoyed in
more vulgar places, and “ the old seat of the Percys was deserted by
fashion.” On the site of mansion and gardens, houses and cottages
were erected, and the place knew its old glory no more. So ended
the second Northumberland House.
While the above mansions or palaces were the pride of all
Londoners and the envy of many, there stood on the strand of the
Thames, at the bend of the river, near Charing Cross, a hospital and
chapel, whose founder, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had
dedicated it to St. Mary, and made it an appanage to the Priory of
Boncesvalle, in Navarre. Hence the hospital on our river strand
was known by the name of “ St. Mary Rouncivall.” The estate went
the way of such property at the dissolution of the monasteries; and
the first lay proprietor of the" forfeited property was a Sir Thomas
Cawarden. It was soon after acquired by Henry Howard, Earl of
Northampton, son of the first Earl of Surrey. Howard, early in
the reign of James the First, erected on the site of St. Mary’s
Hospital a brick mansion which, under various names, has developed
�190
NOKTIIUMBEELAND HOUSE AND THE PEECYS.
into that third and present Northumberland House which is about to
fall under pressure of circumstances, the great need of London* and
the argument of half a million of money.
Thus the last nobleman who has clung to the Strand, which, on
its south side, was once a line of palaces, is about to leave it for ever.
The bishops were the first to reside on that river-bank outside the
City walls. Nine episcopal palaces were once mirrored in the then
clear waters of the Thames. The lay nobles followed, when they
felt themselves as safe in that fresh and healthy air as the prelates.
The chapel of the Savoy is still a royal chapel, and the memories of
time-honoured Lancaster and of John, the honest King 'of France,
still dignify the place. But the last nobleman who resided so far
from the now recognised quarters of fashion is about to leave what has
been the seat of the Howards and Percys for nearly three centuries,
and the Strand will be able no longer to boast of a duke. It will
still, however, possess an English earl; but he is only a modest
lodger in Norfolk Street.
When the Duke of Northumberland goes from the Strand, there
goes with him a shield with very nearly nine hundred quarterings;
and among them are the arms of Henry the Seventh, of the sovereign
houses of France, Castile, Leon, and Scotland, and of the ducal
houses of Normandy and Brittany I Nunquam minus solus quam
cum solus, might be a fitting motto for a nobleman who, when he
stands before a glass, may see therein, not only the Duke, but also the
Earl of Northumberland, Earl Percy, Earl of Beverley, Baron Lovaine
of Alnwick, Sir Algernon Percy, Bart., two doctors (LL.D, and D.C.L.)
a colonel, several presidents, and the patron of two-and-twenty livings.
As a man who deals with the merits of a book is little or nothing
concerned with the binding thereof, with the water-marks, or with
the printing, but is altogether concerned with the life that is within,
thatjs, with the author, his thoughts, and his expression of them, so,
in treating of Northumberland House, we care much less for notices
of the building than of its inhabitants—less for the outward aspect
than for what has been said or done beneath its roof. If we look
with interest at a mere wall which screens from sight the stage
of some glorious or some terrible act, it is not for the sake of the
wall or its builders: our interest is in the drama and its actors.
Who cares, in speaking of Shakespeare and Hamlet, to know the
name of the stage carpenter at the Globe or the Blackfriars ? Suffice
it to say, that Lord Howard, who was an amateur architect of some
merit, is supposed to have had a hand in designing the old house in
the Strand, and that Gerard Christmas and Bernard Jansen are
said to have been his “ builders.” Between that brick house and the
present there is as much sameness as in the legendary knife which,
after having had a new handle, subsequently received in addition a
�NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND THE PERCYS.^lOT
new blade. The old house occupied three sides of a square. The
fourth side, towards the river, was completed in the middle of the
Seventeenth century. The portal retains something of the old work,
but so little as to he scarcely recognisable, except to professional eyes.
From the date of its erection till 1614 it bore the name of
Northampton House. In that year it passed by will from Henry
Howard, Lord Northampton, to his nephew, Thomas Howard, Earl of
Suffolk, from whom it was called Suffolk House. In 1642, Elizabeth,
daughter of Theophilus, second Earl of Suffolk, married Algernon
Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, and the new master gave his
name to the old mansion. The above-named Lord Northampton was
the man who has been described as foolish when young, infamous
when old, an encourager, at threescore years and ten, of his niece,
the infamous Countess of Essex; and who, had he lived a few months
longer, would probably have been hanged for his share, with that niece
and others, in the mysterious murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Thus,
the founder of the house was noble only in name; his successor and
nephew has not left a much more brilliant reputation. He was con
nected, with his wife, in frauds upon the King, and was fined heavily.
The heiress of Northumberland, who married his son, came of a
noble but ill-fated race, especially after the thirteenth Baron Percy
was created Earl of Northumberland in 1377. Indeed, the latter title
had been borne by eleven persons before it was given to a Percy, and
by far the greater proportion of the whole of them came to grief. Of
one of them it is stated that he (Alberic) was appointed Earl in
1080, but that, proving unfit for the dignity, he was displaced, and a
Norman bishop named in his stead! The idea of turning out from
high estate those who were unworthy or incapable is one that might
suggest many reflections, if it were not scandalum magnatum to
make them.
In the chapel at Alnwick Castle there is displayed a genealogical
tree. At the root of the Percy branches is “ Charlemagne ”; and
there is a sermon in the whole, much more likely to scourge pride
than to stimulate it, if the thing be rightly considered. However this
may be, the Percys find their root in Karloman, the Emperor, through
Joscelin of Louvain, in this way: Agnes de Percy was, in the
twelfth century, the sole heiress of her house. Immensely rich, she
had many suitors. Among these was Joscelin, brother of Godfrey,
sovereign Duke of Brabant, and of Adelicia, Queen Consort of Henry
the First of England. Joscelin held that estate at Petworth which
has not since gone out of the hands of his descendants. This princely
suitor of the heiress Agnes was only accepted by her as husband on
condition of his assuming the Percy name. Joscelin consented; but
he added the arms of Brabant and Louvain to the Percy shield, in
order that, if succession to those titles and possessions should ever be
�192
NORTHUMBERLAND HOTSE AND THE PERCYS.
stopped for want of an heir, his claim might be kept in remembrance.
Now, this Joscelin was lineally descended from “ Charlemagne,^ and,
therefore, that greater name lies at the root of the Percy pedigree,
which glitters in gold on the walls of the ducal chapel in the castle
at Alnwick.
Very rarely indeed did the Percys, who were the earlier Earls of
Northumberland, die in their beds. The first of them, Henry, was
slain (1407) in the fight on Bramham Moor. The second, another
Henry (whose father, Hotspur, was killed in the hot affair near
Shrewsbury), lies within St. Alban’s Abbey Church, having poured
out his lifeblood in another Battle of the Boses, fought near that
town named after the saint. The blood of the third Earl helped to
colour the roses, which are said to have grown redder from the gore
of the slain on Towton’s hard-fought field. The forfeited title was
transferred, in 1465, to Lord John Nevill Montagu, great Warwick’s
brother; but Montagu soon lay among the dead in the battle near
Barnet. The title was restored to another Henry Percy, and that
unhappy Earl was murdered, in 1489, at his house, Cocklodge, near
Thirsk. In that fifteenth century there was not a single Earl of
Northumberland who died a peaceful and natural death.
In the succeeding century the first line of Earls, consisting of six
Henry Percys, came to an end in that childless noble whom Anne
Boleyn called “ the Thriftless Lord.” He died childless in 1537. He
had, indeed, two brothers, the elder of whom might have succeeded to
the title and estates; but both brothers, Sir Thomas and Sir Tngram,
had taken up arms in the “ Pilgrimage of Grace.” Attainder and
forfeiture were the consequences; and in 1551 Northumberland was
the title of the dukedom conferred on John Dudley, Earl of Warwick,
who lost the dignity when his head was struck off at the block, two
years later.
Then the old title, Earl of Northumberland, was restored in 1557,
to Thomas, son of that attainted Thomas who had joined the
“ Pilgrimage of Grace.” Ill-luck still followed these Percys. Thomas
was beheaded—the last of his house who fell by the hands of the
executioner—in 1572. His brother and heir died in the Tower in
1585.
None of these Percys had yet come into the Strand. The brick
house there, which was to be their own through marriage with an
heiress, was built in the lifetime of the Earl, whose father, as just
mentioned, died in the Tower in 1585. The son, too, was long a
prisoner in that gloomy palace and prison. While Lord Northampton
was laying the foundations of the future London house of the Percys
in 1605, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was being carried into
durance. There was a Percy, kinsman to the Earl, who was mixed
up in the Gunpowder Plot. Eor no other reason than relationship
�WOBTHUMBEKBEND HOUSE AND THE PEBCYS? 193
with the conspiring Percy the Earl was shut up in the Tower for
life, as his sentence ran, and he was condemned to pay a fine of thirty
thousand pounds. The Earl ultimately got off with fifteen years’ im
prisonment and a fine of twenty thousand pounds. He was popularly
known as the Wizard Earl, because he was a studious recluse,
company ing only with grave scholars (of whom there were three,
known as “ Percy’s Magi ”), and finding relaxation in writing rhymed
■satires against the Scots.
There was a stone walk in the Tower which, having been paved by
the Earl, was known during many years as “ My Lord of Northumber
land’s Walk.” At one end was an iron shield of his arms; and holes
in which he put a peg at every turn he made in his dreary exercise.
One would suppose that the Wizard Earl would have been very
grateful to the man who restored him to liberty. Lord Hayes
(Viscount Doncaster) was the man. He had married Northumber
land’s daughter, Lucy. The marriage had excited the Earl’s anger,
as a low match, and the proud captive could not u stomach ” a benefit
for which he was indebted to a son-in-law on whom he looked down.
This proud Earl died in 1632. Just ten years after, his son, Algernon
Percy, went a-wooing at Suffolk House, in the Strand. It was then
inhabited by Elizabeth, the daughter and heiress of Theophilus, Earl
of Suffolk, who had died two years previously, in 1640. Algernon
Percy and Elizabeth Howard made a merry and magnificent wedding
of it, and from the time they were joined together the house of the
bride has been known by the bridegroom’s territorial title of Northum
berland.
The street close to the house of the Percys, which we now know
as Northumberland Street, was then a road leading down to the
Thames, and called Hartshorn Lane. Its earlier name was Christopher
Alley. At the bottom of the lane the luckless Sir Edmundsbury
Godfrey had a stately house, from which he walked many a time and
oft to his great wood wharf on the river. But the glory of Hartshorn
Lane was and is Ben Jonson. No one can say where rare Ben was
born, save that the posthumous child first saw the light in Westmin
ster. “Though,” says Fuller, “I cannot, with all my industrious
inquiry, find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats.
When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, Charing Cross, where
his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband.” Mr. Fowler
was a master bricklayer, and did well with his clever stepson. We
can in imagination see that sturdy boy crossing the Strand to go to his
school within the old church of St. Martin (then still) in the Fields.
Kt is as easy to picture him hastening of a morning early to Westmin
ster, where Camden was second master, and had a keen sense of the
stuff that was in the scholar from Hartshorn Lane. Of all the
figures that flit about the locality, none attracts our sympathies so
von. xxxviii.
o
�194 NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND THE PERCYS.
warmly as that of the boy who developed into the second dramatic
poet of England.
Of the countesses and duchesses of this family, the most singular
was the widow of Algernon, the tenth Earl. In her widowhood she
removed from the house in the Strand (where she had given a home
not only to her husband, but to a brother) to one which occupied the
site on which White’s Club now stands. It was called Suffolk
House, and the proud lady thereof maintained a semi-regal state
beneath the roof and when she went abroad. On such an occasion
as paying a visit, her footmen walked bareheaded on either side of
her coach, which was followed by a second, in which her women were
seated, like so many ladies in waiting! Her state solemnity went so
far that she never allowed her son Joscelin’s wife (daughter of an
Earl) to be seated in her presence—at least till she had obtained per
mission to do so.
Joscelin s wife was, according to Pepys, “ a beautiful lady indeed.”
They had but one child, the famous heiress, Elizabeth Percy, who at
four years of age was left to the guardianship of her proud and wicked
old grandmother. Joscelin was dead, and his widow married Ralph,
afterwards Duke of Montague. The old Dowager Countess was a
matchmaker, and she contracted her granddaughter, at the age of twelve,
to Cavendish, Earl of Ogle. Before this couple were of age to live
together Ogle died. In a year or two after, the old matchmaker
engaged her victim to Mr. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat; but the
young lady had no mind to him. In the Hatton collection of manu
scripts there are three letters addressed by a lady of the Brunswick
family to Lord and Lady Hatton. They are undated, but they con
tain a curious reference to part of the present subject, and are
thus noticed in the first report of the Royal Com-mission
on Historical Manuscripts : “ Mr. Thinn has proved his marriage
with Lady Ogle, but she will not live with him, for fear of
being ‘rotten before she is ripe.’ Lord Suffolk, since he lost
his wife and daughter, lives with his sister, Northumberland.
They have here strange ambassadors—one from the King of Fez, the
other from Muscovett. All the town has seen the last; he goes to
the play, and stinks so that the ladies are not able to take their
muffs from their noses all the play-time. The lampoons that are
made of most of the town ladies are so nasty, that no woman would
read them, else she would have got them for her.”
“ Tom of Ten Thousand,” as Thynne was called, was murdered
(shot dead in his carriage) in Pall Mall (1682) by Konigsmark and
accomplices, two or three of whom suffered death on the scaffold.
Immediately afterwards the maiden wife of two husbands really
married Charles, the proud Duke of Somerset. In the same year
Banks dedicated to her (Illustrious Princess, he calls her) his ‘ Anna
�NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND THE PERCYS. 195
Bullen,’ a tragedy. He says: “ You have submitted to take a noble
partner, as angels have delighted to converse with menand “ there
is so much of divinity and wisdom in your choice, that none but the
Almighty ever did the like ” (giving Eve to Adam) “ with the world
and Eden for a dower.” Then, after more blasphemy, and very free
allusions to her condition as a bride, and fulsomeness beyond concep
tion, he scouts the idea of supposing that she ever should die. “ You
look,” he says, “ as if you had nothing mortal in you. Your guardian,
angel scarcely is more a deity than youand so on, in increase of
bombast, crowned by the mock humility of “ my muse still has no
other ornament than truth.”
The Duke and Duchess of Somerset lived in the house in the
Strand, which continued to be called Northumberland House, as
there had long been a Somerset House a little more to the east.
Anthony Henley once annoyed the above duke and showed his own
ill-manners by addressing a letter “ to the Duke of Somerset, over
against the trunk-shop at Charing Cross.” The duchess was hardly
more respectful when speaking of her suburban mansion, Sion House,
Brentford. “ It’s a hobbledehoy place,” she said; ££ neither town nor
country.” Of this union came a son, Algernon Seymour, who in
1748 succeeded his father as Duke of Somerset, and in 1749 was
created Earl of Northumberland, for a particular reason. He had no
sons. His daughter Elizabeth had encouraged the homage of a
handsome young fellow of that day, named Smithson. She was told
that Hugh Smithson had spoken in terms of admiration of her beauty,
and she laughingly asked why he did not say as much to herself.
Smithson was the son of “ an apothecary,” according to the envious,
but, in truth, the father had been a physician, had earned a baronetcy,
and was of the good old nobility, the landowners, with an estate, still
possessed by the family, at Stanwick, in Yorkshire. Hugh Smithson
married this Elizabeth Percy, and the earldom of Northumberland,
conferred on her father, was to go to her husband, and afterwards to
the eldest male heir of this marriage, failing which the dignity was
to remain with Elizabeth and her heirs male by any other marriage.
It is at this point that the present line of Smithson-Percys begins.
Of the couple who may be called its founders so many severe things
have been said, that we may infer that their exalted fortunes and best
qualities gave umbrage to persons of small minds or strong prejudices.
Walpole’s remark, that in the earl’s lord-lieutenancy in Ireland “ their
vice-majesties scattered pearls and diamonds about the streets,” is good
testimony to their royal liberality. Their taste may not have been
unexceptionable, but there was no touch of meanness in it. In 1758
they gave a supper at Northumberland House to Lady Yarmouth,
George the Second’s old mistress. The chief ornamental piece on the
supper table represented a grand chasse at Herrenhausen, at which
o 2
�196 NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND WE PERCYSl
there was a carriage drawn by six horses, in which was- seated an
august person wearing a blue ribbon, with a lady at his side. This
was not unaptly called “the apotheosis of concubinage.” Of the
celebrated countess notices vary. Her delicacy, elegance, and refine
ment are vouched for by some; her coarseness and vulgarity are
asserted by others. When Queen Charlotte came to England, Lady
Northumberland was made one of the ladies of the queen’s bed
chamber. Lady Townshend justified it to people who felt or feigned
surprise, by remarking, “ Surely nothing could be more proper. The
queen does not understand English, and can anything be more neces
sary than that she should learn the vulgar tongue ?” One of the
countess’s familiar terms for conviviality was “junkitaceous,” but
ladies of equal rank had also little slang words of their own, called
things by the very plainest names, and spelt physician with an “ f.”
There is ample testimony on record that the great countess never
hesitated at a jest on the score of its coarseness. The earl was dis
tinguished rather for his pomposity than vulgarity, though a vulgar
sentiment marked some of both his sayings and doings. For example,
when Lord March visited him at Alnwick Castle, the Earl of North
umberland received him at the gates with this queer sort of welcome:
“ I believe, my lord, this is the first time that ever a Douglas and a
Percy met here in friendship.” The censor who said, “ Think of this
from a Smithson to a true Douglas,” had ample ground for the excla
mation. George the Third raised the earl and countess to the rank
of duke and duchess in 1766. All the earls of older creation were
ruffled and angry at the advancement; but the honour had its draw
back. The King would not allow the title to descend to an heir by
any other wife but the one then alive, who was the true representative
of the Percy line.
The old Northumberland House festivals were right royal things
in their way. There was, on the other hand, many a snug, or uncere
monious, or eccentric party given there. Perhaps the most splendid
was that given in honour of the King of Denmark in 1768. His
majesty was fairly bewildered with the splendour. There was in the
court what was called “ a pantheon,” illuminated by 4000 lamps.
The King, as he sat down to supper, at the table to which he had
expressly invited twenty guests out of the hundreds assembled, said
to the duke, “ How did you contrive to light it all in time ?” “ I had
two hundred lamplighters,” replied the duke. “ That was a stretch,”
wrote candid Mrs. Delany; “ a dozen could have done the business
which was true.
The duchess, who in early life was, in delicacy of form, like one of
the Graces, became, in her more mature years, fatter than if the whole
three had been rolled into one in her person. With obesity came
“ an exposition to sleep,” as Bottom has it. At “ drawing-rooms ” she
�NOTTHUMBERLOTD EroWbrANDEn^ PEROVS? 197
no sooner sank on a sofa than she was deep in slumber; but while
she was awake she would make jokes that were laughed at and cen
sured the next day all over London. Her Grace would sit at a win
dow in Covent Garden, and be hail fellow well met with every one of
a mob of tipsy and not too cleanly-spoken electors. On these occa
sions it was said she “ signalised herself with intrepidity.” She could
bend, too, with cleverness to the humours of more hostile mobs; and
when the Wilkes rioters besieged the ducal mansion, she and the duke
appeared at a window, did salutation to their masters, and performed
homage to the demagogue by drinking his health in ale.
Horace Walpole affected to ridicule the ability of the Duchess as a
verse writer. At Lady Miller’s at Batheaston some rhyming words
were given out to the company, and any one who could, was re
quired to add lines to them so as to make sense with the rhymes
furnished for the end of each line. This sort of dancing in fetters
was called bouts rimes. “On my faith,” cried Walpole, in 1775,
“ there are loouts rimes on a buttered muffin by her Grace the
Duchess of Northumberland.” It may be questioned whether any
body could have surmounted the difficulty more cleverly than her
Grace. For example:
The pen. which I now take and
Has long lain useless in my
Know, every maid, from her own
To her who shines in glossy
That could they now prepare an
From best receipt of book in
Ever so fine, for all their
I should prefer a butter’d
A muffin, Jove himself might
If eaten with Miller, at
brandish,
standish.
patten
satin,
oglio
folio,
puffing,
muffin;
feast on,
Batheaston.
To return to the house itself. There is no doubt that no mansion
of such pretensions and containing such treasures has been so
thoroughly kept from the vulgar eye. There is one exception, how
ever, to this remark. The Duke (Algernon) who was alive at the
, period of the first Exhibition threw open the house in the Strand to
the public without reserve. The public, without being ungrateful,
thought it rather a gloomy residence. Shut in and darkened as it
now is by surrounding buildings—canopied as it now is by clouds of
London smoke—it is less cheerful and airy than the Tower, where the
Wizard Earl studied in his prison room, or counted the turns he made
when pacing his prison yard. The Duke last referred to was in his
youth at Algiers under Exmouth, and in his later years a Lord of
the Admiralty. As Lord Prudhoe, he was a traveller in far-away
countries, and he had the faculty of seeing what he saw, for which
many travellers, though they have eyes, are not qualified. At the
�198 NOETHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND THE’ KEHCyS.
pleasant Smithsonian house at Stanwick, when he was a bachelor, his
household was rather remarkable for the plainness of the female
servants. Satirical people used to say the youngest of them was a
grandmother. Others, more charitable or scandalous, asserted that
Lord Prudhoe was looked upon as a father by many in the country
round, who would have been puzzled where else to look for one. It
was his elder brother Hugh (whom Lord Prudhoe succeeded) who,
represented England as Ambassador Extraordinary at the coronation
of Charles the Tenth at Eheims. Paris was lost in admiration at the
splendour of this embassy, and never since has the hotel in the Eue
de Bac possessed such a gathering of royal and noble personages as
at the fetes given there by the Duke of Northumberland. His sister,
Lady Glenlyon, then resided in a portion of the fine house in the
Eue de Bourbon, owned and in part occupied by the rough but cheery
old warrior, the Comte de Lobau.
When that lady was Lady
Emily Percy, she was married to the eccentric Lord James Murray,
afterwards Lord Glenlyon. The bridegroom was rather of an
oblivious turn of mind, and it is said that when the wedding morn
arrived, his servant had some difficulty in persuading him that it was
the day on which he had to get up and be married.
There remains only to be remarked, that as the Percy line has
been often represented only by an heiress, there have not been wanting
individuals who boasted of male heirship.
Two years after the death of Joscelin Percy in 1670, who died the
last male heir of the line, leaving an only child, a daughter, who
married the Duke of Somerset, there appeared, supported by the Earl
of Anglesea, a most impudent claimant (as next male heir) in the
person of James Percy, an Irish trunkmaker. This individual pro
fessed to be a descendant of Sir Ingram Percy, who was in the Pil
grimage of Grace, and was brother of the sixth earl. The claim was
proved to be unfounded; but it may have rested on an illegitimate
foundation. As the pretender continued to call himself Earl of North
umberland, Elizabeth, daughter of Joscelin, “ took the law ” of him.
Ultimately he was condemned to be taken into the four law courts in
Westminster Hall, with a paper pinned to his breast, bearing these
words: “ The foolish and impudent pretender to the earldom of
Northumberland.”
In the succeeding century, the well-known Dr. Percy, Bishop of
Dromore, believed himself to be the true male representative of the
ancient line of Percy. He built no claims on such belief; but the
belief was not only confirmed by genealogists, it was admitted by the
second heiress Elizabeth, who married Hugh Smithson. Dr. Percy so
far asserted his blood as to let it boil over in wrath against Pennant
when the latter described Alnwick Castle in these disparaging words:
At Alnwick no remains of chivalry are perceptible; no respectable
�NOETHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND THE'PEED xS 199
|trainFof attendants; the furniture and gardens inconsistent; and
nothing, except the numbers of unindustrious poor at the castle gate,
excited any one idea of its former circumstances.”
“ Duke and Duchess of Charing Cross,” or “ their majesties of Mid
dlesex,” were the mock titles which Horace Walpole flung at the
ducal couple of his day who resided at Northumberland House,
London, or at Sion House, Brentford. Walpole accepted and satirised
the hospitality of the London house, and he almost hated the ducal
host and hostess at Sion, because they seemed to overshadow his
mimic feudal state at Strawberry I After all, neither early nor late
circumstance connected with Northumberland House is confined to
memories of the inmates. Ben Jonson comes out upon us from Hartshorn Lane with more majesty than any of the earls; and greatness
has sprung from neighbouring shops, and has flourished as gloriously
as any of which Percy can boast. Half a century ago, there was a
long low house, a single storey high, the ground floor of which was a
saddler’s shop. It was on the west side of the old Golden Cross, and
neariy opposite Northumberland House. The worthy saddler founded
a noble line. Of four sons, three were distinguished as Sir David, Sir
Frederick, and Sir George. Two of the workmen became Lord
Mayors of London; and an attorney’s clerk, who used to go in at
night and chat with the men, married the granddaughter of a king
and became Lord Chancellor.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Northumberland House and the Percys
Creator
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Doran, John
Description
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 189-199 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Article from Temple Bar magazine, May 1873; attribution from Virginia Clark catalogue.
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[Bentley]
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[1873]
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G5572
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Aristocracy
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Northumberland House and the Percys), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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English
Conway Tracts
London
Northumberland House
Percy Family
-
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®lje ®i)de of ffiitfllwlj Sang.
i.
ANCESTRY AND BIRTH.
When the Persian hosts, under the command of Datis and Artsphernes, threatened, neither for the first nor for the last time, the
independence of Attica, but the critical moment had arrived for vindi
cating Athenian freedom, each of the ten generals deputed to share
the guardianship of her liberties voted, firstly, that command should
be concentrated in his own hands, and, secondly/ in those of Miltiades.
Thus did f.be son of Cimon receive, even before Marathon, a conclusive
uperiority of his military and strategic
LIBRARY
South Place Ethical Society
ith English poetry. The gift of divine
, so universal a veneration is paid to its
ofty an estimate prevails of its intellectual
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itility, and of its part in shaping the desAck'd.........................................
ition would willingly confess itself a lagSource..... .
me a prize. To be a great poet is perhapsClass ____________________
may not command during life the loudest
t homage, ensures after death the most
c«t|.HQT..IlfflML..
jHH|------- J&970 r; and to be a nation which boasts the3 survive in the love and veneration of the
human race ages alter tne speeches of statesmen have ceased to beread and the discoveries of philosophers have ceased to be true;,
when the victories of kings have become but sounding brass, and
the soaring triumphs of laurelled architects but gaping ruins. Nor is
it only, as Horace has finely said, that ante-Agamemnonic heroes haveperished out of remembrance because no Homer has chanted their
praises, and that the greatest of active heroes must be forgotten unless
his deeds be embalmed in sounding verse. The patriotic bard in vain
strives to perpetuate the glories of his compatriots rather than his
own; it is his strains, rather than their struggles, which survive.
The rash and impetuous Ajax, the vindictive yet chivalrous Achilles,
the wise but crafty Ulysses, the sagacious Mentor, Agamemnon king
of men, the blustering Hector, the seductive Paris, even the fair glow
ing Helen herself—what are all these but shadows of shades, echoes
of an echo, invisible ghosts haunting an uncertain coast ? Whilst, for
all the erudition of critics, the doubts of Pyrrhonists, and the hammers
�218
THE CYCLE OFBENGLISH SONG.
of iconoclasts, there lives in this sublunary world no more actual, lasting,
immovable entity than
“ The blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle.”
In the long run it is by its literature that a people is glorified, and
poetry is the crown and summit of literature. What does the world
at large know of Tyre? What of Sidon? What of Carthage?
Carthage may thank a Roman historian that Hannibal’s name is still
in the mouths of men. What of Egypt ? It is due to the Bible of a
race she despised, that archaeologists are still fumbling amongst her
buried palaces. There have been conquerors as potent as Philip and
Alexander of Macedon, only they did not conquer Athenians, and his
tory knows them not. Leuctra, Marathon, Salamis, Thermopylae—
these are watchwords for all time; but only because the same blood
that coursed in the veins of Epaminondas, of Miltiades, of Themistocles and of Leonidas, warmed an Alcaeus, a Pindar, a Euripides,
and a Sappho. The triumphs of barbarians, be they ever so brilliant
or ever so faithfully recorded, linger only in the dusty and cobwebbed
corner of men’s minds, because barbarians can point to no literature,
no verse, that for ever enthralls human attention. Take away the
spice of song, and you will in vain attempt to embalm the past.
Well therefore may nations, whose passion for immortatity is yet
stronger and deeper than that of individuals, hug each the flattering
unction to its soul that it has produced great, nay the greatest, poets;
and it would be unnatural to expect them to take the laurel off their
own brows to encircle with it the head of a rival. Italy would be
slow to concede that the Muses have had a fairer offspring than
Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto. Spain would not willingly allow that
the genius of Calderon and Lope de Vega has ever been surpassed.
Germany would certainly refuse to rank Goethe and Schiller below
even the most favoured children of the Muses vaunted by other lands.
Even France would hesitate to own inferiority whilst she can cite
such names as Racine, Corneille, De Musset, and Victor Hugo. But
it is pretty certain—nay it is indubitable—that if competent Italians,
Spaniards, Germans, and Frenchmen were asked to name the country,
apart from their own, which had produced the greatest poets and the
greatest number of them, they would one and all point to this island,
which, though sung round by no syrens, has been a perfect nest and
woodland of song, now soft and melodious, now shrill and piercing,
now full and vocal, ever since the formation of the English language
gave English hearts a voice.
Of the correctness of this assertion we have some direct and much
presumptive evidence. Dante undoubtedly has been translated into
every civilised tongue, but it is only the mere truth that the world at
large is far more familiar with his name than with his works, and that
�THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG.
219
he is rather the favourite of scholars and the study of earnest lovers
of Italy than the companion of the average man or woman of culture.
Yet he is the only Italian poet who can be fairly said to have earned
for himself, on the mere strength of his works, a world-wide reputa
tion. The genius of Calderon is universally acknowledged, but that
of Lope de Vega has been questioned, and though, thanks to Goethe
and Schiller, their works have been more or less popularised in Ger
many, in England they are unread, in Italy they are unknown, and
in France they are unprized. It is probable that it is in this country
rather than in any other that Goethe and Schiller are studied and
appreciated by foreigners; yet, whilst no one here arrogates for the
latter an even rank with the first names in literature, the English
admirers of Goethe are to be found mainly in the ranks of those who
are critics, not to say pedants, rather than sympathising lovers of
poetry, and to whom philosophic poetry is the most agreeable form of
composition. As for Corneille and Racine, they have nowhere excited
enthusiasm out of their own country, whilst De Musset and M. Victor
Hugo, though widely and justly extolled, have not been entered
among the Olympians save by such prose rhapsodists as Mr. Swin
burne, and the source of their inspiration, as we shall see directly,
flows in this country and can scarcely be regarded as a native
fountain.
But it will be said, one nation may be more enlightened and
catholic in its tastes than another; and the fact of a poet not being
highly thought of in a foreign country may prove the crassness of the
country and not the inferiority of the poet. There is truth in the
observation, and we are far from wishing to imply that foreign esti
mates are conclusive, or anything approaching to conclusive, in any
particular case, though it must be rarely that they are of no value.
But the general foreign estimate—that is to say, the estimate of every
foreign country—of any particular poet, must necessarily count for
much; and the general foreign estimate, or the estimate of any foreign
country, of the entire body of a particular nation’s poetry, must neces
sarily be as valuable an opinion as is to be obtained outside that nation
itself. But by the very terms of our search the opinion of the nation
itself must perforce be excluded, since, as in the case of the Athenian
generals, every nation’s opinion would be given in its own favour. It
is an enormous testimony to the accuracy of the judgment of English
men that their body of poetic literature is the finest and most complete
ever yet produced, if we find that all other nations consider it, in those
respects, second only to their own. For no nation is smitten by
general blindness, or afflicted with undeviating special partiality or
affinity in the matter. Frenchmen may not care much for Shakespeare,
but they enthusiastically admire Milton, Pope, and Byron. They
may talk as Boileau did of “Ze clinquant de Tasse” but they entertain
�220
THE CIVILE OF ENGLISH SONCl
a genuine reverence for Dante. We may be more or less indifferent
to the stately tragedies of the time of the Grand Monarque, but we
recognise the signal poetical qualities of ‘ La Legende des Siecles y and
whilst the sonnets of Laura’s lover may be caviare to most Britons,
they incline their head when they hear the Divine Comedy mentioned.
We need not pursue our illustrations, for we have surely said enough
to establish the fact that nations are competent to form an opinion of
the relative value of each other’s poetic literature, and to corroborate
the theory that when they conspire to adjudge the second place to
one and the same nation, their own respectively alone excluding it
from the first, that nation’s claim to the first place is as conclusively
established as anything well can be in this world, outside the arena of
rigid demonstration.
That second place, which is practically the first, has assuredly been
adjudged by universal consent to English poetry; and it has, more
over, as would naturally be expected, more than any other exercised
the pens of foreign critics and translators. The whole of Chaucer has
been translated, and translated admirably, into French. Nearly the
whole of Shakespeare has been translated into German, some of the
most distinguished names in German literature busying themselves
with the task, and so successful have they been that some Germans
like to flatter themselves that their version of the greatest of dramas is
superior to the original. We may smile at the pretension; but it
testifies to the enthusiasm of those who advance it, for the author on
whom they thus attempt to fasten the character of complete acclima
tisation. It is no less a name in French annals than that of Chateau
briand with which we have to associate the continental triumphs of
Milton; the whole of the ‘ Paradise Lost ’ having been rendered into
his native tongue by that brilliant man of letters. Byron, the most
universally popular of all English poets, by reason of that cosmopoli
tanism which Goethe so shrewedly and accurately ascribed to his
works, has been translated into every European language, that of
Russia not excepted ; whilst his influence in moulding the style and
themes of foreign poets in Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France,
is one of the most remarkable facts in literary history. Indeed it may
be said that it is only since Byron died that France has boasted poets
proper at all: Lamartine, De Musset, and M. Victor Hugo, being his
natural children.
It has further to be remarked that critics have vied with trans
lators in doing justice to the splendid merits of our long line
of English bards. We cannot say that criticism is a lost art in
this country, for it never existed ; but on the Continent, and
notably in France and Germany, it has been cultivated and pursued
by some of the best-equipped intellects and some of the most accom
plished pens; and they have never been more enthusiastically, and we
�THE’CYCEE' OF ENGLISH1 SONG.
221
may add, more successfully and popularly employed, than when ab
sorbed in the endeavour to explain to their countrymen the meaning
and merits of English poetry. When we want an interpretation of
one of the subtleties of Shakespeare, we can turn to a Gervinus; and
when we are in need of an unanswerable testimony to the genius of
Byron against the stupidity or jealousy of some of his own compatriots,
we have only to turn to our shelf which holds the prose opinions of
Goethe.
The latest tribute, and the most important one of our time, to the
eminence of English poetry comes to us from France, the classic land
of criticism, and is to be found in that long and admirable work which
the author justly calls a ‘ History of English Literature.’* A scholar,
a traveller, a worshipper of the arts, a man of letters in the best sense
of the word, M. Taine has undertaken to survey the literary pro
ducts of this island, both in prose and verse, from the time of Chaucer
to our own day; but it is the poets on whom he chiefly and most
lovingly dwells, and we shall go beyond his example, not only by
dwelling exclusively upon poets, but by illustrating our theory solely
from the most salient and characteristic poets in each of the epochs
into which the cycle of national song naturally divides itself. Yet our
standpoint will be the same as his, whilst we pass over numberless
objects which have attracted his scrutiny; and we cannot give a better
account of the central idea upon which, as on a pivot, all our reflec
tions and conclusions will turn, than is to be found in the preface
written by M. Taine himself to the talented translator’s English
edition of his work.
“A nation,” writes M. Taine, “lives twenty, thirty centuries, and more,
a.nfi a man lives only sixty or seventy years. Nevertheless, a nation in
many respects resembles a man. For during a career so long and, so to
speak, indefinite, it also retains its special character, genius and soul, which,
perceptible from infancy, go on developing from epoch to epoch, and
exhibit the same primitive basis from their origin up to their decline.
This is one of the truths of experience, and whoever has followed the his
tory of a people, that of the Greeks from Homer to the Byzantine Caesars,
that of the Germans from the poem of the ‘ Niebelungen ’ down to Goethe,
that of the French from the first and most ancient versified story-tellers
down to Beranger and Alfred de Musset, cannot avoid recognising a con
tinuity as rigid in the life of a people as in the life of an individual. Suppose
one of the five or six individuals who have played a leading part in the
world’s drama—Alexander, Napoleon, Newton, Dante; assume that by ex
traordinary good chance we have a number of authentic paintings, intact and
fresh—water-colours, designs, sketches, life-size portraits, which represent
the man to us at every stage of life, with his various costumes, expressions,
* ‘ History of English Literature.’ By H. A. Taine. Translated by H. Van
Taun, one of the Masters at the Edinburgh Academy. Edinburgh :
Edmonston & Douglas.
�222
THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONGj
and attitudes, with all his surroundings, especially as regards the leading
actions- he has performed, and at the most telling crises of his interior I
development. Such are precisely the documents which we now possess
enabling us to know that big individual called a nation, especially when
that nation possesses an original and complete literature.”
Without expressing any opinion here as to how far a “ science of
history” may be constructed out of the accumulation of human
records, we may affirm our assent to so much of the scientific method
of regarding human affairs as is expressed in the foregoing passage.
A nation has a term of existence, a character, a development, a history,
and will therefore pass through those stages which mark the growth
and decline of a particular man; and if there be a nation peculiarly
endowed with the poetic temperament, and betraying at every period
of existence the rare possession of poetic faculties, we may be sure that
its poetic literature will be marked by that steady and continuous
progression, broken by definite landmarks, which we recognise in the
individual. We trust that before we desist from the task we have set
ourselves, it will be conceded that, in this instance, facts and theory
agree.
It is a fact deserving of note that the earliest specimen extant of
composition in the Saxon tongue is a fragment of Caedmon, a monk of
Whitby, who lived in the eighth century after Christ, and who, “ for
want of learning,” was compelled to write his for the most part reli
gious poetry in his mother tongue. Want of learning, as most people
understand that term, has far more often than not been the portion of
poets. On the one side we have a Dante and a Milton—and they were
not very learned, after all, the first more especially—and on the other,
all the world of great poetic names, whose owners, judged by any real
scholarly or scientific standard, were extremely ignorant. The late
Lord Lytton has argued, in one of uhis delightful ‘ Caxtoniana,’ that a
poet ought to know everything, and that the best poets have been
remarkable for the variety of their acquirements. We must dissent
from the doctrine; and though of course it would, logically, be incon
clusive to point to that great master’s learning and then to his poetry,
and to insist on the disproportion between the two, still we should be
disposed to go so far as to affirm that, for a poet, not a little, but a
great deal of learning, might possibly be a dangerous thing. Perhaps,
to the greatest poets of all nothing is dangerous. But what in our
opinion, distinguishes the poet from ordinary persons, what specifically
characterises his mind and stamps his productions, is, not a greater
knowledge than his neighbours, but a different sort of knowledge. He
knows the same things as the herd, only he knows them in a distinct
and peculiar fashion. He apprehends them differently, and in render
ing them gives a totally different account of them. He may be as
ignorant as a Burns, as superficial as a Keats; but what little he
�THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG.
223
knows, he knows poetically. There is a soul in his knowledge, and
you can never make mere library faggots of it. It is not lore got
from without; it is inner wisdom. There have been people stupid
enough to fancy that Bacon must have been the author of Shake
speare’s plays and poems on account of the amount of learning there
is in them. All the learning in Shakespeare could be got at a gram
mar-school, in the woods and fields, and in the streets of men, so that
there was the right person to get it. Eyes, heart, and tongue, with
or without a bookshelf, furnish forth a poet.
And so this Caedmon of whom we spoke, had, for want of ‘learning,’ to
write in his native homely Saxon language. There was as yet no other
for him. It was a case of Latin or mother tongue, and he knew only
the latter. By-and-by a finer and more familiar weapon was to be
forged for the use. of the great souls fired with the yearning to go out of
themselves and speak, not for themselves alone, but for their own
time; and not for their own class alone, but for all ranks of the
nation. But the nation had to be made first; and, as usual, it was a
small band of aristocrats who made it. In the tenth century the
bettermost folks of this country used to send their children to France
to be educated; but before another hundred years had passed away
the schoolmaster crossed the Channel and the necessity disappeared.
The Normans brought with them not only laws and the art of govern
ing, but likewise the art of elegant speaking and writing. Never,
however, that we know of, has Saxon blood or Saxon speech
utterly disappeared before the conqueror; there is something too
sturdy in them for that. The tongue of the French troubadours had
to accept an alliance with the tongue of Caedmon, the Saxon monk of
Whitby, before it could get itself accepted as the speech of the people,
and still more as the speech of the poet.
The alliance, moreover, was not one solely of speech. A union
likewise was effected, firstly of race and secondly of caste, which has
had an unspeakably profitable influence upon English song. In the
blending of races, moreover, we must not leave out of the account a
third stock, neither Saxon nor Norman, and singularly different from
either, and by no means abolished either then or now, though the
linguistic traces of it have almost wholly disappeared, and which lent
and still lends its valuable properties, as perhaps a minor but still
important, contribution towards the formation of the full-grown English
temperament, and therefore to the complete character of English
poetry. We allude, of course, to that despised and humbled race,
Celtic in origin and tongue, which first possessed our island; but
which, soon after the dawn of its history, was driven westwards and
northwards, and there- only now survives in visible and tangible shape.
Yet who'can doubt that neither extermination nor ostracism was
complete, and that Celtic units and even Celtic families remained
�224
THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG,
largely dotted over England during the period of Saxon domination,
and that their blood was already intermingled with that of the
Teutonic master, when the final lord, the Norman, arrived ? Both
fact and probability support the supposition, and English poetry is
perpetually sounding a note which reminds us that there runs in our
veins, be it in ever so small a degree, the blood and tears of a
pathetic, subdued, and melancholy people.
It is all the more necessary to dwell and to insist in this place,
before dealing with the origin and consequences of the amalga
mation of the Saxon and Norman elements, upon the Celtic drop in
our „ poetical compositions, since, after that amalgamation, several
centuries had to pass before its minor key was heard in English
literature. It is of the very nature of soft, gentle and melancholy
-characters, races, and feelings, to seem to be suppressed by the sterner
•and more practical ones, which are perpetually striving to extrude
■them or to trample them underfoot; but it is equally of their very
mature never in reality to be so. They bend, but they never break.
These are too supple, too elastic, too yielding, ever to be snapped in
twain and so disposed of. They survive neglect, contumely, persecu
tion, and get the upper hand of their conquerors in moments least
expected, moulding the speech, the modes of thought, even the
policy of the latter, when they cannot aspire to occupy the seats
of influence and authority. Thus Athens, as a Boman poet acknow
ledges, had its triumph over masterful Borne; thus, as we shall
see, the Celtic type of feeling, though utterly crushed and lost for
a long while under the waves of Saxon and Norman domination,
crept up again in the works which are the historical exponent of the
feelings of the English nation; and thus, in a minor degree, we are
beginning to see the “ mild Hindoo ” influencing, and destined yet
more to influence, the sturdy western conqueror of his country.
The Saxon crassness, which is at present so dominant amongst us,
caused a year or two ago a grin of self-sufficient stupidity to adorn
the faces of many of our journalistic wiseacres, when Mr. Disraeli,
peculiarly endowed with the faculty of comprehending ethnic idiosyncracies, alluded to the influence exercised upon the Irish people by the
melancholy sea with which their small island is surrounded. Yet the
fact—for fact unquestionably it is—had never escaped the observation
of anybody deserving the epithet of thinker. M. Benan, himself of
Celtic origin, speaks, in his essay upon Celtic Poetry, of the “ mer
presque toujours sombre,” which forms on the horizon of Brittany “ a
circle of eternal sighs.” “ Meme contraste,” he proceeds, “ dans les
hommes: a la vulgarite normande ”—of course the “vulgarite normande” here spoken of has nothing to do with the aristocratic
Norman element which exists in England, and of which we shall have
occasion to speak so often—“ a la vulgarite normande, a une popula
�THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG?
225
tion grasse et plantureuse, contente de vivre, pleine de ses interets,
egoiste comme tons ceux dont l’habitude est dejouir, succede une
race timide, reservee, vivant toute an dedans, pesante en apparence,
mais sentant profondement et portant dans ses instincts religienx une
adorable delicatesse. Le meme contraste frappe, dit-on, quand on
passe de l’Angleterre au pays de Galles, de la basse Ecosse, anglaise de
langage et de moeurs, au pays des Gaels du nord, et aussi, mais avec
une nuance sensiblement different, quand on s’enfonce dans les parties
de l’lrlande ou la race est restee pure de toute melange avec l’etranger.
Il semble que l’on entre dans les couches souterraines d’une autre age,
et l’on ressent quelque chose des impressions que Dante nous fait
eprouver quand il nous conduit d’-un cercle a un autre de son enfer.”*
It is this combined retreat and resistance, this apparent yielding
ness, ending in an obstinacy that never surrenders, which constitutes
the strong and enduring character of the Celtic influence. It can
not ever be said of it that it dies in a corner; for though it falls back
before every fresh inroad into nooks and retreats ever and ever more
obscure, it does not perish there. Roman civilisation drove Celtic
races before it, as it drove other races ; but these it ended by civilis
ing—the Celtic race, never. The great Teutonic invasion which
followed hurled the Celtic tribes back, but never really broke their
lines. Modern civilisation fares no better against them, and all the
efforts of England to impregnate the Irish people with modern ideas
of progress have generated nothing better than disgust and dis
affection. Without giving itself fine classical airs, or troubling itself
much with what to more ambitious people is exalted as philosophy,
the Celtic race is as sublime in its selection of sides as was the Roman
Cato. It loves the losing cause, and is invariably found shedding its
blood in campaigns that are desperate. Never to attack, but always
to defend—such seems its allotted part in history. It is the con
servative race, fated never to win, but never to be wholly conquered.
It has a delicate presentiment of its perpetual doom, and bears its
destiny with a fatalistic resignation. It believes unchangingly in
God, but does not expect God to fight for it. As has been finely
observed, one would hardly think, to see how slightly endowed it is
with audacious initiation, that it belongs to the race of Japhet—the
• Iapeti genus, audax omnia perpeti.
What is the character that we should expect to find in the poetry
of such a people? Precisely that which strikes the most cursory
observer. Celtic poetry, when undefiled with all alien admixture, is
lyrical and sad. It is for the most part a threnody; a dirge, like the
play and plash of melancholy waves. Not victories, but defeats,
are the theme of its bards; and its metrical stories are stories of
* ‘ Essais de Morale et de Critique.’ Par Ernest Renan, Membre de
1’Institut. Deuxieme edition. Paris : Michel Levy Freres.
vol. xxxvin.
Q
�226
THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG,
exile and flight. If gaiety for a moment intrudes, it appears only as
a relief to the deep current of melancholy tears. For the Celtic race
has too enduring a consciousness of the world we do not see ever to
accept gladness as the natural condition of man. It has the religious
fibre in a remarkable degree in its composition, and the air it breathes
is for ever haunted with shadows and intangible phantoms. It clings
to the infinite, and is “ an infant crying in the night.” Too devout,
too resigned, too averse from sustained and concentrated thought to
strive, like the laborious Teuton, to solve the mysteries which sur
round us, it is content to recognise their existence, to feel their influ
ence, to acknowledge them as a law of life, but humbly to respect
their insolubility. It never presumes to lift the veil, though it never
forgets how little there is on this side of the veil to satisfy the human
soul. Thus its melancholy, its undying sadness, the plaintiveness of
its poetry, ever remains vague and indefinite. Its most realistic strains
are but a wandering voice.
The melancholy natures are usually gentle; and the Celtic race,
besides being sad, and what in these days is called superstitious, has a
feminine quality in it especially noteworthy. Just as, though it
nourishes an undying reverence for the awful mysteries beyond the
tomb, its annals swarm with apparitions, with witchcraft; and all the
apparatus of demonology; so, whilst it can be wrought by the in
justice of the invader to stubborn defence and even to terrible re
prisals, it asks nothing better than to be left alone, and, womanlike,
to bury itself in the pursuits of home. The contrast between its early
compositions and those of the Germanic peoples can scarcely be ex
aggerated. In the Edda and the Niebelungen we find heroes who
rejoice in slaughter for slaughter’s sake, who revel in blood, as some
men have revelled in lust, and to whom carnage and the bloody reek
of battle are a goodly savour. Savage strength, gigantic rudeness,
horse-play in peace, unlimited and joyous vengeance in strife, these
are the main elements of early Teutonic grandeur. In the Celtic
Mabinogion, on the contrary, though bloodshed abounds, though the
recitals swarm with tales of pitiless cruelty, these are used only as the
foils to gentler sentiments and more feminine scenes.
But in the formation of what we know as the English tongue Celtic
influence had little or no share; and many generations were to elapse
after its formation before Celtic influence was to creep into its poetry.
Using the terminology of a science prevalent amongst us, we may
say that whenever and wherever we find the Celtic element in our
poetical literature, it is there by the law of reversion to a remote
and indirect ancestry. Its two immediate parents are the Saxon
and the Norman. If, as Mr. Coventry Patmore has asserted, meta
phorically embodying an old and popular theory, “ marriage-contracts
are the poles on which the heavenly spheres revolve,” the union
�THETYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG.
227
between the conquered Saxon and the conquering Norman, such as
we find them towards the close of the eleventh century, ought indeed
to have produced celestial results; and there are few who will deny
that it has done so. We need not here concern ourselves to inquire
whether the two were not, after all, not very far distant in blood.
Whatever their original consanguinity, circumstance, and that some
thing which, because we cannot thoroughly scrutinise it, we call acci
dent, had ended by placing them, in character, in habits, in tongue,
poles asunder.
“ Of all barbarians these are the strongest of body and heart, and
the most formidable.” Such is the testimony of a civilised contem
porary concerning the Saxons. Their own account of them selves
sounds over-flattering; but at bottom it tells the same tale and sig
nifies the same thing: “ The blast of the tempest aids our oars; the
bellowing of heaven, the howling of the thunder, hurt us not; the
hurricane is our servant, and drives us whither we wish to go. We
smite with our swords,” sings one narrator of the deeds of himself and
his fellow sea-kings. “ To me it was a joy like having my bright
bride by me on the couch. He who has never been wounded leads a
weary life.” To slay and be slain was with them the whole duty of
life. It was for that that they came into this world; that was their
raison d'etre; that alone reconciled them to existence. Death had no
terrors for them, unless it came upon a bed. “ What a shame for me
not to have been permitted to die in so many battles, and to end thus
by a cow’s death I At least put on my breastplate, gird on my sword,
set my helmet on my head, my shield in my left hand, so that a great
warrior like myself may die as a warrior.” So spoke Siegward, Duke
of Northumberland, Henry of Huntingdon tells us, when dysentery
overtook him in the midst of a brief truce.
Evidently a pugnacious and battle-loving race; ( cherishing their
bodies, not for the pleasure and blandishment of ease, but in order that
in the din and stress of battle they might press heavily against and
overbear the foe. For this they ate voraciously, drank hard, and slept
without turning. Their existence was an animal one, relieved only
by those furious passions known but to man. But the conquest by
them of an island kingdom slowly but surely wrought a modification
in their temperament. With a whole continent before them, they
would have gone on conquering, or at least ravaging, as long as there
was a rood of ground left not visited by their stormy footsteps; and in
England they never paused from the work of havoc, slaughter, and
the constant acquisition of sway, until they found themselves stopped
either by the mountains or the sea. Then they began to feel the
pinch of their own success. What were they to do next ? Were
they, like Alexander, to weep because there were no more worlds to
devastate ? Had they not better turn and rend each other ? Thev
q 2
�228
THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG.
found some relief in that course; and the whole world knows to
whom the reproach of their history being a history of kites and
crows was addressed. The Saxon Heptarchy was a praiseworthy
attempt to introduce peace and order among successful savages; but
that in the short space of a hundred years, out of fourteen kings
of Northumbria seven were slain and six deposed, is a conclusive
proof of what difficulties legislators and law-preservers had to contend
with.
Still, a something like settled government at length supervened;
and a wandering, adventure-seeking, battle-loving, brutal, though at
heart not unkindly people, had to find other vents for their turbid
temperaments than surprising their neighbours and dismaying their
foes. Generally they settled down into fixed families, villages, com
munistic states, kingdoms; and social life commenced. But society,
it long remained apparent, was not the natural condition of these
sturdy and moody children of the forest and the foam. Non-gregarious,
they isolated themselves whenever the opportunity arose, drawing a
sort of ring-fence round what they could call their own, and so dividing
it all from the outer world, which, by the law of inherited association,
they still regarded as their natural enemy. Tacitus hadj observed
how in Germany they lived the solitary life, each one near the wood
which pleased him. Self-detached and self-contained, each man would
fain be his own master, develop and give play to his own character,
and rule his own world. Neither law nor state should crush him.
War being no longer open to him, he would find his way out in some
other fashion, but still his own; or rather, since an outward vent for
his huge nature was denied him, he would nurse his feelings and
desires at home. Thus the active, vagrant, aggressive, despoiling
Saxon of the European mainland, gradually toned down to the domestic,
passive, silent, defensive, half-gloomy, meditative Saxon of this island.
He still indulged in enormous and frequent meals, still gave himself
the luxury of swinish intoxication, and corrected these excesses of
animal life by an out-door existence, hunting, and every sport that
field, or air, or river could afford him.
Man is not long in erecting his necessities into preferences, and
the step is not a far one which leads him to exalt his preferences into
virtues. Since he was compelled to lead the domestic life, this soon
became the English Saxon’s ideal; and with it naturally grew up a
great respect for property, for clear distinctions between meum and
tuum; a high regard for the usefulness and fidelity of women; a
strong sanction of reverence and of implicit obedience in children, and,
though to a less degree, in all subordinates. Home life thus estab
lished itself, and with it flourished home-keeping wits. Slow, deliberate,
cautious, practical, full of solid sense, with a strong sense of right and
justice; implacable, but from conscience, not from anger; exacting,
�THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG.
229
mot easily moved to pity, putting heavy burdens upon everybody,
but bearing them unflinchingly himself, the Saxon in England was
perhaps the noblest and the most respectable savage the world has
ever seen.
Indeed, it is only in deference to modern ideas that he can be
regarded as a savage at all. With all his stolidity, he had within
him a deep well of enthusiasm, and the seriousness of his temperament
compelled him to be religious. Thus Christianity found in him an
easy if not a tractable convert. He readily accepted the idea of one
God, for indeed he possessed it already; but for outward symbols
and expressions of each particular religious passion or sentiment he
manifested, even then, an unmistakable aversion. What the Roman
Catholic church calls piety and the Protestant church superstition
had no seductions for him. He was without idols when Augustine
found him; for his earnest nature regarded such minor objects of
veneration as childish trifling. He recognised the universe, the
necessity of things, the difficulties of life, duty, conscience, heroism,
and the obligation of asserting himself. Religion was to be serviceable
io him, not he to religion.
It is not difficult to see what must be the contribution of such a
race to a composite poetical literature. To the Celt English poetry
■owes its pathos, sweetness, sadness, its lyrical faculty, its touches of
ineffable melancholy, that returning of the singer upon himself, that
minor key struck ever and anon in the midst of the strain, its notes of
■wail, its cadence drowned in tears, its sighing for what is not. The
charm of our poetry is Celtic; but its force is Saxon. The Celt says
Ah! the Saxon says Oh ! From the first we get our sentiment,
from the second our sublimity. But as the Saxon is perhaps the most
complex of all known characters, so are his contributions to the
elements of our poetry the most numerous and the most varied. To
this source must be traced not only all that is sounding and soaring
an it, but all on the one hand that is didactic and all on the other
that is deeply tragic. Much of English poetry, in the opinion of
foreign critics, is spoiled by its too evident and intentional moral tone.
Th a Frenchman or an Italian, much of Cowper, more of Words
worth, and no little of Milton, are as tiresome as the lesson taught by
■a schoolmaster. They are perpetually discoursing, playing the peda
gogue, laying down the law, inculcating moral truths, or what they
believe to be such. Yet no Englishman at least will doubt that, here
and there, our didactic poets, Wordsworth more especially, have reached
rare heights of song, even in the act of preaching, and wherever they
have done this, they were indebted to their Saxon blood and spirit.
To the same source must be traced that almost savagely tragic
spirit which permeates our best and most famous dramas. The Greeks
Aid not shrink from supping of horrors; but then they threw the
�230
THE CYCLE OE ENGLISH SONGlI
responsibility of slaughter, of parricide, matricide, fratricide, upon the
gods, upon fate, upon Necessity; and the human agents were victims,
rather than instigators or willing perpetrators, of bloody deeds. The
pages of Shakespeare swarm with furies, but they are furies in
human shape, men, mere men, governed by human motives, forgetful
of heaven, uninfluenced by hell, needing 'no goad but their own
tremendous passions, no goal but their own insatiable desires. Here
we see the old sea-kings at work; fighting, slaying, conquering, dying,
stamping with rage, rolling out sesquipedalian periods, and venting
themselves in prodigious metaphors.
But the Saxons were essentially stutterers. They had much to say,
more especially when they were no longer allowed to act, or at least
to act on the large scale and in obedience to their big carnage-loving
promptings; but they experience almost unconquerable difficulty in
saying it.
“ Time after time,” M. Taine observes, “ they return to and repeat the same
idea. The sun on high, the great star, God’s brilliant candle, the noble
creation—four times they employ the same thought, and each time under
a new aspect. All its different aspects rise simultaneously before the bar
barian’s eyes, and each word was like a shock of the semi-hallucination
which excited him. Verily, in such a condition, the regularity of speech
and of ideas is disturbed at every turn. His phrases recur and change;
he emits the word that comes to his lips without hesitation; he leaps over
wide intervals from idea to idea. The more his mind is transported, the
quicker and wider are the intervals traversed. With one spring he visits
the poles of his horizon, and touches in one moment objects which seem to
have the world between them. His ideas are entangled; without notice,
abruptly the poet will return to the idea he has quitted, and insert in it
the thought to which he is giving expression. It is impossible to translate
these incongruous ideas, which quite disconcert oui' modern style. At
times they are unintelligible. Articles, particles, everything capable of
illuminating thought, of marking the connection of terms, are neglected.
Passion bellows forth like a great shapeless beast.”
We may perhaps suspect that M. Taine, a Frenchman in spite of
all his breadth and toleration of mind, had in his mind, when he
wrote the above passage on the Saxon literature, less the Anglo-Saxon
fragments made familiar to us by Turner, Gonybeare, Thorpe, and
others, than those tragedies of Shakespeare which so many of his
countrymen have found “ barbarian.” It is to our Saxon blood that
we mainly owe our genius, our extravagance, the “ eye in fine frenzy
rolling”—that, indeed, which distinguishes what is best in our poetical
literature above all the poetical literatures of the human race.
But it may well be doubted if it ever would have attained the height
on which it now sits enthroned before the eyes of men, had not
another and most necessary element been introduced, an indispensable
corrector, a chastiser, a moulder, a beneficent wielder of discipline.
From the Celt, as we have said, our sweetness; from the Saxon, our
�THE CYCLE Of ENGLISH SONG.
231
sn-ength; but from the Norman, to use Mr. Arnold’s phrase, our light.
The point may be put yet more clearly, though with every advance in
precision we necessarily exaggerate the truth. The Celt contributes
the spirit, the Saxon, the substance, the Norman, the form; and
without the latter, it may safely be affirmed, we should never have
succeeded in pleasing anybody but ourselves.
As it is, we have accepted it unwillingly, but it has proved a useful
and wholesome restraint, just as the conquered Saxons unwillingly
received Norman laws and discipline, but were enormously improved
by them. As Mr. Froude says, “ through all the arrangements of
the conquerors, one single aim was visible; and that was that every
man in England should have his definite 'place and definite duty
assigned to him, and that no human being should be at liberty to lead
at his own pleasure an unaccountable existence. The discipline of an
army was transferred to the details of social life ” For a long time the
conquered resented this uncongenial treatment, and it was in con
formity with their proud and sullen nature that they should display
their resentment rather in silence than in song. The Normans
brought their troubadours with them, and the Norman court in
England boasted its jongleurs, who were after all but feeble imitators \ '
of what was scarcely worth imitating. But they had at least the
secret of form and of articulate speech. They were devoid of ideas,
idle triflers, court sycophants, ticklers of the fancy of lords and fine
ladies, spurious glorifiers of spurious passions; but they could put
words and sounds together. They knew, moreover, what it was to be
joyous, and they gave to their craft the very name of “ the gay science.”
Witty moreover, and irreverent, they relieved their stilted and affected
sentiments with gibes and delicate laughter.
Hence, when the time came, which was so long in coming, when
Saxon and Norman were to be one in race, one in nation, one in
manners, one in language, the Saxon had given up nothing, and had
acquired much. One in language, do we say ? Whose language ? It
was mainly the Saxon; but the Norman had taught him how to use
it. Its ponderosity had been laid aside, and the conqueror had adopted
it as his own.
Thus was brought about a triple union ; a union of race, a union of
caste, and a union of tongue. Even by the time of Henry the Second
no one asked who was Norman and who was Saxon; all freemen were
Englishmen. The distinction was lost of subduer and subdued. The
former might yet retain more than his fair share of the soil and of the
administration of the laws, but he had practically confessed that the
latter were his equals. The places laid waste by the Conquest become
gradually repeopled. Charters are granted; arbitrary taxes are got
rid of; burgesses are summoned from the towns to Parliament; poli
tical as well as social life makes its appearance. So that an English
�232
THE CYCLE OF ENGLISH SONG.
king, speaking to a pope, uses as his argument that “ it is the custom
of the kingdom of England, that in all affairs relating to the state of
this kingdom, the advice of all who are interested should be taken.”
It was impossible that, under such circumstances as these, the
French verse imported at the Conquest should not disappear. At the
beginning of the twelfth century, Saxon was heard only among the
“ degraded franklins, outlaws of the forest, swineherds, peasants, the
lower orders.” It was no longer written; everybody who wrote, wrote
French, everybody who read, read French. Many did it clumsily
and ill, and eked out their imperfect knowledge with Saxon words.
Gower apologised for his bad French style, adding, “ Je suis Anglais."
Nevertheless, the stronger always wins in the long run; and the
despised and down-trodden tongue, slowly but surely, got the upper
hand. When the Norman Barons began to send their sons across the
Channel to prevent them from learning English from their nurses the
beginning of the end was near. The Saxons would not—perhaps
could not—learn the language of their masters. There was but one
alternative: in order that the two might communicate, the master
had to learn the language of his inferior. There were limits to the in
vasion of the one upon the other. Law, philosophy, and such science
as there was, requiring abstract terms, necessarily borrowed from the
tongue which was indebted to Latin for its culture and expression,
but the rude necessities of life and the simple emotions of the heart
refused to embody themselves, as far as the nation was concerned, in
any but native words. In two centuries or so, the process was
complete. There was an English nation and an English language,
and they only waited for an English poet.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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The cycle of English song
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 217-232 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Includes bibliographical references. Article from Temple Bar magazine, May 1873; attribution from Virginia Clark catalogue.
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[Bentley]
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[1893]
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G5570
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[Unknown]
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Music
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The cycle of English song), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Songs