Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 4

But neglect was not all Cowley had to endure; the royal party seemed disposed to calumniate him. When Cowley was young he had hastily composed the comedy of "The Guardian;" a piece which served the cause of loyalty. After the Restoration, he rewrote it under the t.i.tle of "Cutter of Coleman Street;" a comedy which may still be read with equal curiosity and interest: a spirited picture of the peculiar characters which appeared at the Revolution. It was not only ill received by a faction, but by those vermin of a new court, who, without merit themselves, put in their claims, by crying down those who, with great merit, are not in favour. All these to a man accused the author of having written a satire against the king's party. And this wretched party prevailed, too long for the author's repose, but not for his fame.[29] Many years afterwards this comedy became popular. Dryden, who was present at the representation, tells us that Cowley "received the news of his ill success not with so much firmness as might have been expected from so great a man." Cowley was in truth a great man, and a greatly injured man. His sensibility and delicacy of temper were of another texture than Dryden's. What at that moment did Cowley experience, when he beheld himself neglected, calumniated, and, in his last appeal to public favour, found himself still a victim to a vile faction, who, to court their common master, were trampling on their honest brother?

We shall find an unbroken chain of evidence, clearly demonstrating the agony of his literary feelings. The cynical Wood tells us that, "not finding that preferment he expected, while others for their money carried away most places, he retired discontented into Surrey." And his panegyrist, Sprat, describes him as "weary of the vexations and formalities of an active condition--he had been perplexed with a long compliance with foreign manners. He was satiated with the arts of a court, which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet. These were the reasons that moved him to follow the violent inclination of his own mind," &c. I doubt if either the sarcastic antiquary or the rhetorical panegyrist have developed the simple truth of Cowley's "violent inclination of his own mind." He does it himself more openly in that beautiful picture of an injured poet, in "The Complaint," an ode warm with individual feeling, but which Johnson coldly pa.s.ses over, by telling us that "it met the usual fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than pity."

Thus the biographers of Cowley have told us nothing, and the poet himself has probably not told us all. To these calumnies respecting Cowley's comedy, raised up by those whom Wood designates as "enemies of the muses," it would appear that others were added of a deeper dye, and in malignant whispers distilled into the ear of royalty. Cowley, in an ode, had commemorated the genius of Brutus, with all the enthusiasm of a votary of liberty. After the king's return, when Cowley solicited some reward for his sufferings and services in the royal cause, the chancellor is said to have turned on him with a severe countenance, saying, "Mr. Cowley, your pardon is your reward!"

It seems that ode was then considered to be of a dangerous tendency among half the nation; Brutus would be the model of enthusiasts, who were sullenly bending their neck under the yoke of royalty. Charles II. feared the attempt of desperate men; and he might have forgiven Rochester a loose pasquinade, but not Cowley a solemn invocation. This fact, then, is said to have been the true cause of the despondency so prevalent in the latter poetry of "the melancholy Cowley." And hence the indiscretion of the muse, in a single flight, condemned her to a painful, rather than a voluntary solitude; and made the poet complain of "barren praise" and "neglected verse."[30]

While this anecdote harmonises with better known facts, it throws some light on the outcry raised against the comedy, which seems to have been but an echo of some preceding one. Cowley retreated into solitude, where he found none of the agrestic charms of the landscapes of his muse. When in the world, Sprat says, "he had never wanted for constant health and strength of body;" but, thrown into solitude, he carried with him a wounded spirit--the Ode of Brutus and the condemnation of his comedy were the dark spirits that haunted his cottage. Ill health soon succeeded low spirits--he pined in dejection, and perished a victim of the finest and most injured feelings.

But before we leave _the melancholy Cowley_, he shall speak the feelings, which here are not exaggerated. In this Chronicle of Literary Calamity no pa.s.sage ought to be more memorable than the solemn confession of one of the most amiable of men and poets.

Thus he expresses himself in the preface to his "Cutter of Coleman Street."

"We are therefore wonderful wise men, and have a fine business of it; we, who spend our time in poetry. I do sometimes laugh, and am often angry with myself, when I think on it; and if I had a son inclined by nature to the same folly, I believe I should bind him from it by the strictest conjurations of a paternal blessing. For what can be more ridiculous than to labour to give men delight, whilst they labour, on their part, most earnestly to take offence?"

And thus he closes the preface, in all the solemn expression of injured feelings:--"This I do affirm, that _from all which I have written, +I never+ received the least benefit or the least advantage; but, on the contrary, have felt sometimes the effects of malice and misfortune_!"

Cowley's ashes were deposited between those of Chaucer and Spenser; a marble monument was erected by a duke; and his eulogy was p.r.o.nounced, on the day of his death, from the lips of royalty. The learned wrote, and the tuneful wept: well might the neglected bard, in his retirement, compose an epitaph on himself, living there "entombed, though not dead."

To this ambiguous state of existence he applies a conceit, not inelegant, from the tenderness of its imagery:

Hic sparge flores, sparge breves rosas, Nam vita gaudet mortua floribus; Herbisque odoratis corona Vatis adhuc cinerem calentem.

IMITATED.

Here scatter flowers and short-lived roses bring.

For life, though dead, enjoys the flowers of spring; With breathing wreaths of fragrant herbs adorn The yet warm embers in the poet's urn.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] My researches could never obtain more than one letter of Cowley's--it is but an elegant trifle--returning thanks to his friend Evelyn for some seeds and plants. "The Garden" of Evelyn is immortalised in a delightful Ode of Cowley's, as well as by Evelyn himself. Even in this small note we may discover the touch of Cowley. The original is in Astle's collection.

MR. ABRAHAM COWLEY TO JOHN EVELYN, ESQ.

"_Barn Elms, March 23, 1663._

"SIR,--There is nothing more pleasant than to see kindness in a person for whom we have great esteem and respect: no, not the sight of your garden in May, or even the having such an one; which makes me more obliged to return you my most humble thanks for the testimonies I have lately received of you, both by your letter and your presents. I have already sowed such of your seeds as I thought most proper upon a hot-bed; but cannot find in all my books a catalogue of these plants which require that culture, nor of such as must be set in pots; which defects, and all others, I hope shortly to see supplied, as I hope shortly to see your work of Horticulture finished and published; and long to be in all things your disciple, as I am in all things now,

"Sir, your most humble and most obedient Servant, "A. COWLEY."

[Barn Elms, from whence this letter is dated, was the first country residence of Cowley. It lies low on the banks of the Thames, and here the poet was first seized with a fever, which obliged him to remove; but he chose an equally improper locality for a man of his temperament, in Chertsey, where he died from the effects of a severe cold.]

Such were the ordinary letters which pa.s.sed between two men whom it would be difficult to parallel for their elegant tastes and gentle dispositions. Evelyn's beautiful retreat at Sayes Court, at Deptford, is described by a contemporary as "a garden exquisite and most boscaresque, and, as it were, an exemplar of his book of Forest-trees." It was the entertainment and wonder of the greatest men of those times, and inspired the following lines of Cowley, to Evelyn and his lady, who excelled in the arts her husband loved; for she designed the frontispiece to his version of Lucretius--

"In books and gardens thou hast placed aright (Things well which thou dost understand, And both dost make with thy laborious hand) Thy n.o.ble innocent delight; And in thy virtuous wife, where thou again dost meet Both pleasures more refined and sweet; The fairest garden in her looks, And in her mind the wisest books."

[28] A term the French apply to those _botches_ which bad poets use to make out their metre.

[29] This comedy was first presented very hurriedly for the amus.e.m.e.nt of Prince Charles as he pa.s.sed through Cambridge to York.

Cowley himself describes it, then, as "neither _made_ nor _acted_, but _rough-drawn_ by him, and _repeated_ by his scholars" for this temporary purpose. After the Restoration he endeavoured to do more justice to his juvenile work, by remodelling it, and producing it at the Duke of York's theatre. But as many of the characters necessarily retained the features of the older play, and times had changed; it was easy to affix a false stigma to the poet's pictures of the old Cavaliers; and the play was universally condemned as a satire on the Royalists. It was reproduced with success at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, as long afterwards as the year 1730.--ED.

[30] The anecdote, probably little known, may be found in "The Judgment of Dr. Prideaux in Condemning the Murder of Julius Caesar by the Conspirators as a most villanous act, maintained," 1721, p. 41.

THE PAINS OF FASTIDIOUS EGOTISM.

I must place the author of "The Catalogue of Royal and n.o.ble Authors,"

who himself now ornaments that roll, among those who have partic.i.p.ated in the misfortunes of literature.

HORACE WALPOLE was the inheritor of a name the most popular in Europe;[31] he moved in the higher circles of society; and fortune had never denied him the ample gratification of his lively tastes in the elegant arts, and in curious knowledge. These were particular advantages. But Horace Walpole panted with a secret desire for literary celebrity; a full sense of his distinguished rank long suppressed the desire of venturing the name he bore to the uncertain fame of an author, and the caprice of vulgar critics. At length he pretended to shun authors, and to slight the honours of authorship.

The cause of this contempt has been attributed to the perpetual consideration of his rank. But was this bitter contempt of so early a date? Was Horace Walpole a Socrates before his time? was he born that prodigy of indifference, to despise the secret object he languished to possess? His early a.s.sociates were not only n.o.blemen, but literary n.o.blemen; and need he have been so petulantly fastidious at bearing the venerable t.i.tle of author, when he saw Lyttleton, Chesterfield, and other peers, proud of wearing the blue riband of literature? No!

it was after he had become an author that he contemned authorship: and it was not the precocity of his sagacity, but the maturity of his experience, that made him willing enough to undervalue literary honours, which were not sufficient to satisfy his desires.

Let us estimate the genius of Horace Walpole by a.n.a.lysing his talents, and inquiring into the nature of his works.

His taste was highly polished; his vivacity attained to brilliancy;[32]

and his picturesque fancy, easily excited, was soon extinguished; his playful wit and keen irony were perpetually exercised in his observations on life, and his memory was stored with the most amusing knowledge, but much too lively to be accurate; for his studies were but his sports. But other qualities of genius must distinguish the great author, and even him who would occupy that leading rank in the literary republic our author aspired to fill. He lived too much in that cla.s.s of society which is little favourable to genius; he exerted neither profound thinking, nor profound feeling; and too volatile to attain to the pathetic, that higher quality of genius, he was so imbued with the petty elegancies of society that every impression of grandeur in the human character was deadened in the breast of the polished cynic.

Horace Walpole was not a man of genius,--his most pleasing, if not his great talent, lay in letter-writing; here he was without a rival;[33]

but he probably divined, when he condescended to become an author, that something more was required than the talents he exactly possessed. In his latter days he felt this more sensibly, which will appear in those confessions which I have extracted from an unpublished correspondence.

Conscious of possessing the talent which amuses, yet feeling his deficient energies, he resolved to provide various subst.i.tutes for genius itself; and to acquire reputation, if he could not grasp at celebrity. He raised a printing-press at his Gothic castle, by which means he rendered small editions of his works valuable from their rarity, and much talked of, because seldom seen. That this is true, appears from the following extract from his unpublished correspondence with a literary friend. It alludes to his "Anecdotes of Painting in England," of which the first edition only consisted of 300 copies.

"Of my new fourth volume I printed 600; but, as they can be had, I believe not a third part is sold. This is a very plain lesson to me, that my editions sell for their curiosity, and not for any merit in them--and so they would if I printed Mother Goose's Tales, and but a few. If I am humbled as an author, I may be vain as a printer; and when one has nothing else to be vain of, it is certainly very little worth while to be proud of that."

There is a distinction between the author of great connexions and the mere author. In the one case, the man may give a temporary existence to his books; but in the other, it is the book which gives existence to the man.

Walpole's writings seem to be constructed on a certain principle, by which he gave them a sudden, rather than a lasting existence. In historical research our adventurer startled the world by maintaining paradoxes which attacked the opinions, or changed the characters, established for centuries. Singularity of opinion, vivacity of ridicule, and polished epigrams in prose, were the means by which Horace Walpole sought distinction.

In his works of imagination, he felt he could not trust to himself--the natural pathetic was utterly denied him. But he had fancy and ingenuity; he had recourse to the _marvellous_ in imagination on the principle he had adopted the _paradoxical_ in history. Thus, "The Castle of Otranto," and "The Mysterious Mother," are the productions of ingenuity rather than genius; and display the miracles of art, rather than the spontaneous creations of nature.

All his literary works, like the ornamented edifice he inhabited, were constructed on the same artificial principle; an old paper lodging-house, converted by the magician of taste into a Gothic castle, full of scenic effects.[34]

"A Catalogue of Royal and n.o.ble Authors" was itself a cla.s.sification which only an idle amateur could have projected, and only the most agreeable narrator of anecdotes could have seasoned. These splendid scribblers are for the greater part no authors at all.[35]

His attack on our peerless Sidney, whose fame was more mature than his life, was formed on the same principle as his "Historic Doubts" on Richard III. Horace Walpole was as willing to vilify the truly great, as to beautify deformity; when he imagined that the fame he was destroying or conferring, reflected back on himself. All these works were plants of sickly delicacy, which could never endure the open air, and only lived in the artificial atmosphere of a private collection.

Yet at times the flowers, and the planter of the flowers, were roughly shaken by an uncivil breeze.

His "Anecdotes of Painting in England" is a most entertaining catalogue. He gives the feelings of the distinct eras with regard to the arts; yet his pride was never gratified when he reflected that he had been writing the work of Vertue, who had collected the materials, but could not have given the philosophy. His great age and his good sense opened his eyes on himself; and Horace Walpole seems to have judged too contemptuously of Horace Walpole. The truth is, he was mortified he had not and never could obtain a literary peerage; and he never respected the commoner's seat. At these moments, too frequent in his life, he contemns authors, and returns to sink back into all the self-complacency of aristocratic indifference.

This cold unfeeling disposition for literary men, this disguised malice of envy, and this eternal vexation at his own disappointments,--break forth in his correspondence with one of those literary characters with whom he kept on terms while they were kneeling to him in the humility of worship, or moved about to fetch or to carry his little quests of curiosity in town or country.[36]

The following literary confessions ill.u.s.trate this character:--

"_June, 1778._