A Letter Book Part 18

Your ever affectionate,

JANE WELSH CARLYLE.

FOOTNOTES:

[119] Clever as she was, she surely made a mistake here--unless she did it on purpose, which is quite possible. "Cadger" is of course only "beggar," and the proverb is the Scotch equivalent of ours about the "beggar on horseback," pretty frequently ill.u.s.trated now-a-days.

[120] The Deerbrook breakfasts refer to Miss Martineau's poor novel. (T.

C.)

[121] Turned. (T. C.)

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)

There are very few examples in biography where the publication of letters has had a happier effect on the general idea of the writer than in Macaulay's case. It is not here a question of historical trustworthiness, or even of literary-style, in both which respects he has come in for severe strictures and sometimes for rather half-hearted defence. Nor do the letters display any purely literary gifts in him (except perhaps a playfulness of humour or at least wit) which do not appear in the _History_ and the _Essays_. But, as the exception may perhaps partly indicate, they extend and improve the notion of his personality in the most remarkable fashion. Even those who did not quarrel with his views sometimes, before Sir George Trevelyan's book, disliked and regretted what have been called his "pistolling ways"--the positive, hectoring "hold-your-tongue" sort of tone which dominated his productions. With the very rarest exceptions, themselves sometimes of a revealing and excusable frankness, this tone is, if not quite absent[122]

from, much seldomer present in, his letters. He jokes without difficulty; talks without in the least monopolising the conversation; shows himself often willing to live and let live; and is on the whole as different a person as possible from the Macaulay who is sure that "every schoolboy" knows better than the author he is reviewing, and who finds Johnson guilty of superst.i.tion and Swift of apostasy. "Happy thrice and more also" are those whose letters thus vindicate them. I have purposely chosen the following example (written to his sister) from the most _mundane_ cla.s.s. "Appointment" was to the _Indian_ Council, which explains the "Cotton" and "Muslin" and other things.

"Ellis" (Thomas Flower), a friend of Macaulay's from Cambridge days and his literary executor in part.

"Lushington" (Stephen), a civilian lawyer of great eminence as a judge in Admiralty and ecclesiastical matters, but a rather violent politician. "Town"--Leeds. "Miss Berry" is annotated elsewhere. "Sir Stratford Canning," later Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, George Canning's cousin, and one of the most famous diplomatists of the nineteenth century, especially during his long tenure of the Emba.s.sy at Constantinople. _Vivian Grey_--Disraeli's first novel. "Lady Holland," the most famous hostess on the Whig side in the first half of the nineteenth century, but, by all accounts, a person now and then quite intolerable. "Allen" (John), an _Edinburgh Reviewer_, was familiarly called her "tame atheist" (All the company were of the Holland House "set").

"Bobus"--Robert Percy Smith, Sydney's elder brother, a great wit and scholar. "Cosher," an Irish word, is not always used in this sense of "chat."

41. TO HIS SISTER

LONDON: November 1833.

Dear Hannah,

Things stand as they stood; except that the report of my appointment is every day spreading more widely; and that I am beset by advertising dealers begging leave to make up a hundred cotton shirts for me, and fifty muslin gowns for you, and by clerks out of place begging to be my secretaries. I am not in very high spirits to-day, as I have just received a letter from poor Ellis, to whom I had not communicated my intentions till yesterday. He writes so affectionately and so plaintively that he quite cuts me to the heart. There are few indeed from whom I shall part with so much pain; and he, poor fellow, says that, next to his wife, I am the person for whom he feels the most thorough attachment, and in whom he places the most unlimited confidence.

On the 11th of this month there is to be a dinner given to Lushington by the electors of the Tower Hamlets. He has persecuted me with importunities to attend and make a speech for him; and my father has joined in the request. It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a man who represents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty thousand people to keep his own const.i.tuents in good humour; and the Spitalfields weavers and Whitechapel butchers are nothing to me. But, ever since I succeeded in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous attempt of the kind ever made,--I mean in persuading an audience of manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that the immediate alteration of the corn-laws was impossible,--I have been considered as a capital physician for desperate cases in politics. However, to return from that delightful theme, my own praises, Lushington, who is not very popular with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks that an oration from me would give him a lift. I could not refuse him directly, backed as he was by my father. I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the 11th, but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very probable that I should be out of town.

I shall go to-night to Miss Berry's _soiree_. I do not know whether I told you that she resented my article on Horace Walpole so much that Sir Stratford Canning advised me not to go near her. She was Walpole's greatest favourite. His Reminiscences are addressed to her in terms of the most gallant eulogy. When he was dying at past eighty, he asked her to marry him, merely that he might make her a Countess and leave her his fortune. You know that in _Vivian Grey_ she is called Miss Otranto. I always expected that my article would put her into a pa.s.sion, and I was not mistaken; but she has come round again, and sent me a most pressing and kind invitation the other day.

I have been racketing lately, having dined twice with Rogers, and once with Grant. Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state. She came to Rogers's, with Allen, in so bad a humour that we were all forced to rally, and make common cause against her. There was not a person at table to whom she was not rude; and none of us were inclined to submit.

Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless sport of her; Tom Moore looked excessively impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple straightforward rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous. When she and all the rest were gone, Rogers made Tom Moore and me sit down with him for half an hour, and we coshered over the events of the evening. Rogers said that he thought Allen's firing up in defence of his patroness the best thing that he has seen in him. No sooner had Tom and I got into the street than he broke forth: "That such an old stager as Rogers should talk such nonsense, and give Allen credit for attachment to anything but his dinner! Allen was bursting with envy to see us so free, while he was conscious of his own slavery."

Her Ladyship has been the better for this discipline. She has overwhelmed me ever since with attentions and invitations. I have at last found out the cause of her ill-humour, or at least of that portion of it of which I was the object. She is in a rage at my article on Walpole, but at what part of it I cannot tell. I know that she is very intimate with the Waldegraves, to whom the ma.n.u.scripts belong, and for whose benefit the letters were published. But my review was surely not calculated to injure the sale of the book. Lord Holland told me, in an aside, that he quite agreed with me, but that we had better not discuss the subject.

A note; and, by my life, from my Lady Holland: "Dear Mr. Macaulay, pray wrap yourself very warm, and come to us on Wednesday." No, my good Lady.

I am engaged on Wednesday to dine at the Albion Tavern with the Directors of the East India Company; now my servants; next week, I hope, to be my masters.

Ever yours,

T. B. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[122] Indeed it exemplifies Defoe's favourite proverb about "What is bred in the bone," etc.--as for instance when, while admitting Chesterfield's high position in some ways, he calls the _Letters_ "for the most part trash." It is scarcely too much to call such criticism itself "trashy."

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES (1803-1849)

Beddoes belongs to the small but remarkable company of authors who, making little mark in their own time and none at all for some time afterwards, before very long come into something like their due, though they never can be exactly popular. He was certainly very eccentric and possibly quite mad: the circ.u.mstances of his suicide do more than justify the hopes of charity and the convention of coroners' juries, as to the latter conclusion. But he was an extremely poetical poet and a letter-writer of remarkable individuality and zest. Little notice seems to have been taken, by any save a very few elect, of the first collected publication of his work just after his death: though a single piece, _The Bride's Tragedy_, not by any means his best, had obtained praise in 1822--a time between the great poetical outburst of the early nineteenth century and the revival of its middle period. But Mr. Gosse's reissue in completer form of the _Poems_ in 1890 and the _Letters_ four years later, lodged him at once in the affection of all competent critics. With something of the more eccentric spirit of the seventeenth century in him, and something of the Romantic revival as shown in Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, he had much of his own, though he never got it thoroughly or sustainedly organised and expressed. His mingled pa.s.sion and humour (especially the latter) "escape"--make fitful spurts and explosions--in his correspondence. Latterly this reflects his mental breakdown, increasingly in the prose; though only a few years before the end it contains wonderful verse such as the song, "The swallow leaves her nest," which is a link between Blake and Canon Dixon. But earlier, as in the following, there is nothing beyond oddity. Of this there may seem to be a good share, but a few notes will make it intelligible. It clearly heralds, though the thing is first definitely indicated in a later letter, Beddoes' marvellous tragedy _Death's Jest-book_, which he wrote and re-wrote till it became like the picture in Balzac's story an "Unknown [and Unknowable]

Masterpiece." The letter is further remarkable as combining intense admiration for the _old_ masterpieces with a quite "modern" insistence on "begetting" rather than "reviving"--on "giving the literature of the age a spirit of its own," etc. For details: "Sulky" (compare the French _desobligeante_, celebrated by Sterne)--an obsolete form of chaise. "Breaking Priscian's head" is familiar enough for "using bad grammar," which the book-keeper very likely did; but the explanation may be more remote. "Like a ghost from the tomb" though not "quoted" is, of course, his beloved Sh.e.l.ley's ("The Cloud"). "_Biped_ knock" = merely "double"--the peculiar rat-tat which postmen have mostly forgotten or not learnt--perhaps regarding it as a badge of slavery like "tips." _The Fatal Dowry_--attributed to (Field and) Ma.s.singer, and spoilt by Rowe into his nevertheless popular _Fair Penitent_,--is one of the finest examples of the second stage of Elizabethan drama. _Ultracrepidarian_--a term derived from the Latin proverb _ne sutor supra_ (or _ultra_) _crepidam_ and specially applied to the unpopular critic Gifford who had been a shoemaker--meaning generally "some one who _does_ go beyond his last and meddles with things he does not understand." "McCready's" (Macready, the famous actor and manager) friend Walker was probably Sidney Walker the Shakespearian critic.

42. TO THOMAS FORBES KELSALL

26 MALL, CLIFTON.

(Postmark, Jan. 11. 1825)

Dear Kelsall--

Day after day since Christmas I have intended to write or go to London, and day after day I have deferred both projects; and now I will give you the adventures and mishaps of this present sunday. Remorse, and startling conscience, in the form of an old, sulky, and a shying, horse, hurried me to the 'Regulator' coach-office on Sat.u.r.day: 'Does the Regulator and its team conform to the Mosaic decalogue, Mr.

Book-keeper?' He broke Priscian's head, and through the aperture, a.s.sured me that it did not: I was booked for the inside:--"Call at 26 Mall for me."--"Yes, Sir, at 1/2 past five, A.M."--At five I rose like a ghost from the tomb, and betook me to coffee. No wheels rolled through the streets but the inaudible ones of that uncreated hour. It struck six,--a coach was called,--we hurried to the office but _the_ coach was gone. Here followed a long Brutus-and-Ca.s.sius discourse between a shilling-b.u.t.toned-waistcoatteer of a porter and myself, which ended in my extending mercy to the suppliant coach-owners, and agreeing to accept a place for Monday. All well thus far. The biped knock of the post alighted on the door at twelve, and two letters were placed upon my German dictionary,--your own, which I at first intended to reply to viva voce, had not the second informed me of my brother's arrival in England, his short leave of absence, and his intention to visit me here next week. This twisted my strong purpose like a thread, and disposed me to remain here about ten days longer. On the 21st at latest I go to London. Be there and I will join you, or, if not, pursue you to Southampton.

The Fatal Dowry has been cobbled, I see, by some purblind ultra-crepidarian--McCready's friend, Walker, very likely; but nevertheless, I maintain 'tis a good play, and might have been rendered very effective by docking it of the whole fifth act, which is an excrescence,--re-creating Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more ghost-gaping and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out the most purple piece in the whole web--the end of the fourth Act--and shouldered himself into toleration through the prejudices of the pit, when he should have built his admiration on their necks. Say what you will, I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow, no creeper into worm-holes, no reviver even, however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster &c. are better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contemporary of ours, but they are ghosts; the worm is in their pages; and we want to see something that our great-grandsires did not know. With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we had better beget than revive; attempt to give the literature of this age an idiosyncrasy and spirit of its own, and only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with--just now the drama is a haunted ruin.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-1861)

Mrs. Browning was in the habit of using rather extravagant language herself: and she has certainly been the victim of language extravagant enough both in praise (the more damaging of the two) and blame from others. FitzGerald's unlucky exaggeration (see Introduction) in one way may be set off by such opposite a.s.sertions as that some of her poems are "the best of their kind in the English language."

But her letters need cause no such alarums and excursions.

If they are sometimes what is called by youth "Early Victorian"--"Early Anything," and "Middle Anything" and "Late Anything," are sure to be found sooner or later by all wise persons to have their own place in life and history.

And sentimentalism has, in private prose, an infinitely less provocative character than when it is displayed in published verse. A distinguished Scotch philosopher of the last generation laid it down that, in literature, for demonstrative exhibitions of affection and sorrow "the occasion should be adequate, and the actuality rare." But letter-writing, though it can be eminently literary, is always literature with a certain license attached to it: arising from the fact that it was not--or ought not to have been--intended for publication. And that naturalness of which so much has been said is displayed constantly and by no means disagreeably in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epistles. In fact, you cannot help liking her the better for them--which in one way at least is the supreme test. The following, written soon after her marriage--an elopement of a kind, but certainly justifiable if ever one was--is a very pleasant specimen in more ways than one, as regards taste, temper, and descriptive powers. It also contains no criticism, which in her case was apt to be extremely uncertain.

43. TO MRS. MARTIN

(PISA) November 5, (1846)

It was pleasant to me, my dearest friend, to think while I was reading your letter yesterday, that almost by that time you had received mine, and could not even seem to doubt a moment longer whether I admitted your claim of hearing and of speaking to the uttermost. I recognised you too entirely as my friend. Because you had put faith in me, so much the more reason there was that I should justify it as far as I could, and with as much frankness (which was a part of my grat.i.tude to you) as was possible from a woman to a woman. Always I have felt that you have believed in me and loved me, and, for the sake of the past and of the present, your affection and your esteem are more to me than I could afford to lose, even in these changed and happy circ.u.mstances. So I thank you once more, my dear kind friends, I thank you both--I never shall forget your goodness. I feel it, of course, the more deeply, in proportion to the painful disappointment in other quarters.... Am I bitter? The feeling, however, pa.s.ses while I write it out, and my own affection for everybody will wait patiently to be 'forgiven' in the proper form, when everybody shall be at leisure properly. a.s.suredly, in the meanwhile, however, my case is not to be cla.s.sed with other cases--what happened to me could not have happened, perhaps, with any other family in England.... I hate and loathe everything too which is clandestine--we _both_ do, Robert and I; and the manner the whole business was carried on in might have instructed the least acute of the bystanders. The flowers standing perpetually on my table for the last two years were brought there by one hand, as everybody knew; and really it would have argued an excess of benevolence in an unmarried man with quite enough resources in London, to pay the continued visits he paid to me without some strong motive indeed. Was it his fault that he did not a.s.sociate with everybody in the house as well as with me? He desired it; but no--that was not to be. The endurance of the pain of the position was not the least proof of his attachment to me. How I thank you for believing in him--how grateful it makes me! He will justify to the uttermost that faith. We have been married two months, and every hour has bound me to him more and more; if the beginning was well, still better it is now--that is what he says to me, and I say back again day by day. Then it is an 'advantage' to have an inexhaustible companion who talks wisdom of all things in heaven and earth, and shows besides as perpetual a good humour and gaiety as if he were--a fool, shall I say? or a considerable quant.i.ty more, perhaps. As to our domestic affairs, it is not to _my_ honour and glory that the 'bills' are made up every week and paid more regularly 'than bard beseems,' while dear Mrs. Jameson laughs outright at our miraculous prudence and economy, and declares that it is past belief and precedent that we should not burn the candles at both ends, and the next moment will have it that we remind her of the children in a poem of Heine's who set up housekeeping in a tub, and inquired gravely the price of coffee.

Ah, but she has left Pisa at last--left it yesterday. It was a painful parting to everybody. Seven weeks spent in such close neighbourhood--a month of it under the same roof and in the same carriages--will fasten people together, and then travelling _shakes_ them together. A more affectionate, generous woman never lived than Mrs. Jameson[123] and it is pleasant to be sure that she loves us both from her heart, and not only _du bout des levres_. Think of her making Robert promise (as he has told me since) that in the case of my being unwell he would write to her instantly, and she would come at once if anywhere in Italy. So kind, so like her. She spends the winter in Rome, but an intermediate, month at Florence, and we are to keep tryst with her somewhere in the spring, perhaps at Venice. If not, she says that she will come back here, for that certainly she will see us. She would have stayed altogether perhaps, if it had not been for her book upon art which she is engaged to bring out next year, and the materials for which are to be _sought_.

As to Pisa, she liked it just as we like it. Oh, it is so beautiful and so full of repose, yet not _desolate_: it is rather the repose of sleep than of death. Then after the first ten days of rain, which seemed to refer us fatally to Alfieri's 'piove e ripiove' came as perpetual a divine sunshine, such cloudless, exquisite weather that we ask whether it may not be June instead of November. Every day I am out walking while the golden oranges look at me over the walls, and when I am tired Robert and I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards. We have been to your seash.o.r.e, too, and seen your island, only he insists on it (Robert does) that it is not Corsica but Gorgona, and that Corsica is not in sight.

_Beautiful_ and blue the island was, however, in any case. It might have been Romero's instead of either. Also we have driven up to the foot of the mountains, and seen them reflected down in the little pure lake of Ascuno, and we have seen the pine woods, and met the camels laden with f.a.ggots all in a line. So now ask me again if I enjoy my liberty as you expect. My head goes round sometimes, that is all. I never was happy before in my life. Ah, but, of course, the painful thoughts recur! There are some whom I love too tenderly to be easy under their displeasure, or even under their injustice. Only it seems to me that with time and patience my poor dearest papa will be melted into opening his arms to us--will be melted into a clear understanding of motives and intentions; I cannot believe that he will forget me, as he says he will, and go on thinking me to be dead rather than alive and happy. So I manage to hope for the best, and all that remains, all my life here, _is_ best already, could not be better or happier. And willingly tell dear Mr. Martin I would take him and you for witnesses of it, and in the meanwhile he is not to send me tantalising messages; no, indeed, unless you really, really, should let yourselves be wafted our way, and could you do so much better at Pau? particularly if f.a.n.n.y Hanford should come here. Will she really? The climate is described by the inhabitants as a 'pleasant spring throughout the winter,' and if you were to see Robert and me threading our path along the shady side everywhere to avoid the 'excessive heat of the sun' in this November (?) it would appear a good beginning. We are not in the warm orthodox position by the Arno because we heard with our ears one of the best physicians of the place advise against it. 'Better,' he said, 'to have cool rooms to live in and warm walks to go out along.' The rooms we have are rather over-cool perhaps; we are obliged to have a little fire in the sitting-room, in the mornings and evenings that is; but I do not fear for the winter, there is too much difference to my feelings between this November and any English November I ever knew. We have our dinner from the Trattoria at two o'clock, and can dine our favourite way on thrushes and Chianti with a miraculous cheapness, and no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet Elijah or the lilies of the field took as little thought for their dining, which exactly suits us. It is a continental fashion which we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee, and rolls of milk, made of milk, I mean, and at nine our supper (call it supper, if you please) of roast chestnuts and grapes. So you see how primitive we are, and how I forget to praise the eggs at breakfast. The worst of Pisa is, or would be to some persons, that, socially speaking, it has its dullnesses; it is not lively like Florence, not in that way. But we do not want society, we shun it rather. We like the Duomo and the Campo Santo instead. Then we know a little of Professor Ferucci, who gives us access to the University library, and we subscribe to a modern one, and we have plenty of writing to do of our own. If we can do anything for f.a.n.n.y Hanford, let us know. It would be too happy, I suppose, to have to do it for yourselves. Think, however, I am quite well, quite well. I can thank G.o.d, too, for being alive and well. Make dear Mr. Martin keep well, and not forget himself in the Herefordshire cold--draw him into the sun somewhere. Now write and tell me everything of your plans and of you both, dearest friends. My husband bids me say that he desires to have my friends for his own friends, and that he is grateful to you for not crossing that feeling. Let him send his regards to you. And let me be throughout all changes,

Your ever faithful and most affectionate,