Curiosities of Impecuniosity Part 14

"I am afraid, sir, I disgust you with this very drill narration, but believe me punished in the misery that occasions it. You will conclude that during this time I must have been at more expense than I could afford--indeed, the most parsimonious could not have avoided it. The printer deceived me, and my little business has had every delay. The people with whom I live perceive my situation and find me to be indigent and without friends. About ten days since I was compelled to give a note for seven pounds to avoid an arrest for about double that sum which I owe. I wrote to every friend I had, but my friends are poor likewise; the time of payment approached, and I ventured to represent my case to Lord Rochford. I begged to be credited for this sum till I received it of my subscribers, which I believe will be within one month: but to this letter I had no reply, and I have probably offended by my importunity. Having used every honest means in vain, I yesterday confessed my inability, and obtained with much entreaty and as the greatest favour a week's forbearance, when I am positively told that I must pay the money or prepare for a prison.

"You will guess the purpose of so long an introduction. I appeal to you, sir, as a good, and let me add, a great man. I have no other pretensions to your favour than that I am an unhappy one. It is not easy to support the thought of confinement, and I am coward enough to dread such an end to my suspense.

"Can you, sir, in any degree aid me with propriety?

"Will you ask any demonstration of my veracity?

"I have imposed upon myself, but I have been guilty of no other imposition. Let me, if possible, interest your compa.s.sion. I know those of rank and fashion are teased with frequent pet.i.tions, and are compelled to refuse the requests even of those whom they know to be in distress; it is therefore with a distant hope I ventured to solicit such favour, but you will forgive me, sir, if you do not think proper to relieve. It is impossible that sentiments like yours can proceed from any but a humane and generous heart.

"I will call upon you, sir, to-morrow, and if I have not the happiness to obtain credit with you I must submit to my fate. My existence is a pain to myself, and every one near and dear to me are distressed in my distress. My connections, once the source of happiness, embitter the reverse of my fortune, and I have only to hope a speedy end to a life so unpromisingly begun, in which (though it ought not to be boasted of) I can reap some consolation from looking to the end of it.

"I am, sir, with the greatest respect, "Your obedient and most humble servant, "GEORGE CRABBE."

Burke replied immediately, appointing an interview, from which dated the change in Crabbe's fortune. Money was given to him, apartments provided for him at Beaconsfield, where he was treated as if he belonged to the generous statesman's own family,--the very publisher who had refused his poems was ready enough to publish them when Edmund Burke suggested his doing so, and even Lord Thurlow gave him a hundred-pound note. Through his patron's influence the surgeon afterwards became a clergyman and chaplain to the Duke of Rutland. In 1807 the copyright of Crabbe's poems was sold for three thousand pounds.

Another article in Thackeray's belief was, that "without necessity," as he said in _Fraser's Magazine_ (1846), "men of genius would not work at all, or very little. It does not follow," said he, "that a man would produce a great work even if he had leisure. Squire Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon with his land, and his rents, and his arms over the porch, was not the working Shakespeare; and indolence, or contemplation if you like, is no unusual quality in literary men."

The reader will find, in my chapter on the "Impecuniosity of Artists," a curious contrast to this opinion in that expressed by Ruskin, in his 'Political Economy of Art.' Our great art critic draws a touching picture of the man of genius, toiling painfully through his early years of obscurity and neglect, yearning vainly for the peace and time requisite for producing great works. And Sir Bulwer Lytton, writing pathetically of poor Leman Blanchard, whom Thackeray knew personally, said,--

"Few men had experienced more to sour them, or had gone through the author's hardening ordeal of narrow circ.u.mstances, of daily labour, and of that disappointment in the higher aims of ambition, which must almost inevitably befall those who retain ideal standards of excellence _to be reached but by time and leisure_, and who are yet compelled to draw hourly upon immatured resources for the practical wants of life."

Blanchard's father was a painter and glazier in Southwark, who doubtless practised no little self-denial to give his son a good education, which could not but, as Sir Bulwer Lytton said, with a faint tinge of an old-world prejudice in his words, "unfit young Leman for the calling of his father;" "for it developed the abilities and bestowed the learning which may be said to lift a youth morally out of trade, and to refine him at once into a gentleman." He began life at the desk as a clerk in the office of Mr. Charles Pearson, a proctor in Doctors' Commons, and soon began to contribute some promising characteristic sketches to a publication called _The Drama_. As a clerk, he was not satisfactory nor satisfied; and his father was about to take him from it, and teach him his own trade, to avoid which Blanchard tried through the influence of the actor, Mr. Henry Johnston, to find an opening on the stage. The histrionic friend, however, painted the miseries and uncertainties of his profession in such gloomy and terrible colours, that the poor boy's heart sank within him, and he had turned with despair to obscurity and trade when the manager of the Margate Theatre offered him an engagement, which he accepted. "A week," says Mr. Buckstone, who was then on intimate terms with him, "was sufficient to disgust him with the beggary and drudgery of the country player's life, and as there was no 'Harlequin' steaming it from Margate to London Bridge at that day, he performed his journey back on foot, having on reaching Rochester but his last shilling--the poet's veritable last shilling--in his pocket."

Buckstone also wrote:

"At that time a circ.u.mstance occurred which my poor friend's fate has naturally brought to my recollection. He came to me late one evening in a state of great excitement, informed me that his father had turned him out of doors, that he was utterly hopeless and wretched, and was resolved to destroy himself. I used my best endeavours to console him, to lead his thoughts to the future, and hope in what chance and perseverance might effect for him. Our discourse took a livelier turn, and after making up a bed on a sofa in my own room I retired to rest.

I soon slept soundly, but was awakened by hearing a footstep descending the stairs. I looked towards the sofa and discovered he had left it. I heard the street-door close. I instantly hurried on my clothes and followed him. I called to him, but received no answer. I ran till I saw him in the distance, also running. I again called his name, I implored him to stop, but he would not answer me. Still continuing his pace, I became alarmed, and doubled my speed. I came up to him near Westminster Bridge; he was hurrying to the steps leading to the river. I seized him, he threatened to strike me if I did not release him. I called for the watch, I entreated him to return; he became more pacified, but still seemed anxious to escape from me. By entreaties, by every means of persuasion I could think of, by threats to call for help, I succeeded in taking him back."

After that desperate attempt, Blanchard obtained work as a printer's reader with Messrs. Bayliss, of Fleet Street.

Thackeray summed up his poor friend's condition at this time thus briefly:

"The young fellow, forced to the proctor's desk, quite angry with the drudgery, theatre-stricken, poetry-stricken, writing dramatic sketches in Barry Cornwall's manner, spouting 'Leonidas' before a manager, driven away starving from home, penniless and full of romance, courting his beautiful young wife.... Then there comes that pathetic little outbreak of despair, when the poor young fellow is nearly giving up, his father banishes him, no one will buy his poetry, he has no chance on his darling theatre, no chance of the wife that he is longing for. Why not finish life at once? He has read 'Werter,' and can understand suicide. 'None,' he says in a sonnet,

'None, not the h.o.a.riest sage, may tell of all The strong heart struggles, wills, before it fall.'

If respectability wanted to point a moral, isn't there one here?

Eschew poetry--avoid the theatre--stick to your business--do not read German novels--do not marry at twenty: and yet the young poet marries at twenty in the teeth of poverty and experience, labours away not unsuccessfully, puts Pegasus into harness, rises in social rank and public estimation, brings up happily an affectionate family, gets for himself a circle of the warmest friends, and thus carries on for twenty years, when a providential calamity visits him and the poor wife almost together, and removes them both."

The "providential calamity" came in the beginning of 1844, when Mrs.

Blanchard, the most tenderly-loving of wives, and a devoted mother, was attacked by paralysis, which affected the brain, and terminated in madness, speedily followed by death. Partial paralysis seized her husband, and in a burst of delirium, "having his little boy in bed by his side, and having said the Lord's prayer but a short time before, he sprang out of bed in the absence of his nurse (whom he had besought not to leave him), and made away with himself with a razor.... At the very moment of his death his friends were making the kindest and most generous exertions on his behalf." Thackeray, whom I have quoted, adds: "Such a n.o.ble, loving, and generous creature is never without such. The world, it is pleasant to think, is always a good and gentle world to the gentle and good, and reflects the benevolence with which they regard it." This is comfortable doctrine, and I would I were sure of its truthfulness. I wonder what poor Gerald Griffin would have said of it in the year 1825, when he was residing at 15, Paddington Street, Regent's Park, London, and, writing to his mother in Ireland, said:

"Until within a short time back I have not had, since I left Ireland, a single moment's peace of mind; constantly running backwards and forwards, and trying a thousand expedients, only to meet disappointments everywhere I turned.... I never will think or talk upon the subject again. It was such a year that I did not think it possible I could have outlived, and the very recollection of it puts me into the horrors.... When I first came to London my own self-conceit, backed by the opinion of one of the most original geniuses of the age, induced me to set about revolutionising the dramatic taste of the time by writing for the stage. Indeed, the design was formed and the first step taken (a couple of pieces written) in Ireland. I cannot with my present experience conceive anything more comical than my own views and measures at that time. A young gentleman totally unknown even to a single family in London coming into town with a few pounds in one pocket, and a brace of tragedies in the other, supposing that the one will set him up before the others are exhausted, is not a very novel, but a very laughable delusion. I would weary you, or I would carry you through a number of curious scenes into which it led me. Only imagine the model young Munsterman spouting his tragedy to a roomful of literary ladies and gentlemen; some of high consideration. The applause, however, of that circle on that night was sweeter, far sweeter, to me then than would be the bravos of a whole theatre at present, being united at the time to the confident antic.i.p.ation of it."

The result was his introduction to a manager--all the actors were eager to introduce him to their managers, and to one he went.

"He," continues poor Griffin, "let down the pegs that made my music.... He was very polite, talked, and chatted about himself, and Shiel, and my excellent friend Banim. He kept my play four months, wrote me some nonsensical apologies about keeping it so long, and cut off to Ireland, leaving orders to have it sent to my lodgings without any opinion. I was quite surprised at this, and the more so that Banim, who is one of the most successful dramatic writers, at the same time saying, what indeed I found every person who had the least theatric knowledge join in, that I acted most unwisely in putting a play into an actor's hands. It was then that I set about writing for those weekly publications, all of which, except the _Literary Gazette_, cheated me most abominably. Then finding this to be the case, I wrote for the great magazines. My articles were generally inserted, but on calling for payment, seeing that I was but a poor inexperienced devil, there was so much shuffling and shabby work, that it disgusted me, and I gave up the idea of making money that way. I now lost heart for everything, got into the cheapest lodging I could make out, and there worked on, rather to divert my mind from the horrible gloom that I felt growing on me, in spite of myself, than with any hope of being remunerated. This, and the recollection of the expense I had put William to, and the fears that every moment became conviction that I should never be able to fulfil his hopes, or my own expectations, all came pressing together upon my mind and made me miserable. A thousand and a thousand times I wished that I could lie down quietly and die at once, and be forgotten for ever. I can describe to you my state of mind at this time. It was not an indolent despondency, for I was working hard as I am now, and it is only receiving money for the labour of those dreadful hours. I used not to see a face that I knew, and after sitting writing all day, when I walked in the streets in the evening, it actually seemed to me as if I was a different species altogether from the people about me. The fact was, from pure anxiety alone, I was more than half dead, and would most certainly have given up the ghost, I believe, were it not that by the merest accident on earth the library friend (Mr. Forster), who had procured me the unfortunate introduction a year before, dropped in one evening to have a talk with me. I had not seen him, nor anybody else that I knew, for some months, and he frightened me by saying I looked like a ghost. In a few days, however, a publisher of his acquaintance had got me some things to do, works to arrange, regulate, and revise, so he asked me if I would devote a few hours in the middle of every day to the purpose for 50 a year. I did so, and among other things which I got to revise was a weekly fashionable journal."

In this letter to his mother he said nothing of being without the commonest necessaries of life, of being ashamed to go out by daylight because his clothes were so shabby, of pa.s.sing entire days without food--on one occasion no less than three.

There was in poor old Gerald Griffin no signs of that "indolence, or contemplation if you like," which Thackeray considered "no unusual quality in the literary man." With despair in his heart he still wrote on, simply because the labour in which he had delight physicked the pains of impecuniosity. But it was not under such conditions that even Griffin did his best work.

Mr. R. P. Gillies, in his 'Memoirs of a Literary Veteran,' tells how, when he was contemplating work of a higher and more ambitious character than he had then attempted, "in consequence of domestic anxieties little or nothing was accomplished." He merely built some grand literary castles in the air (for which he was ridiculed in the 'Noctes Ambrosianae,' under the name of "Kempferhausen"); but he says: "There were some awkward conditions attached to the basis of my aerial structures; for example, I must have unbroken tranquillity like that of an anch.o.r.et. There must be no shadow on the mind of worldly cares and perturbation, otherwise the spells would be broken." Bread was his incentive to work, but it was the hack work of which Scott so bitterly complained, not the great work he yearned to accomplish, and could not for want of "peace and time."

The above allusion is to Sir Walter in the zenith of his fame when, through "long-winded" publishers' money being in immediate demand, he contemplated abandoning original fiction for the more rapid work of compilation. He wanted that to secure not only bread, but the peace and time which in common with Ruskin he thought essential to the production of great work; and he wrote in his diary, under the date December 18th, 1825: "The general knowledge that an author must write for bread, at least for improving his pittance, degrades him and his productions in the public eye. He falls into the second rank of estimation,

"'When the harness sore galls, and the spurs his sides goad, And the high-mettled racer's a hack on the road.'

It is a bitter thought, but, if tears start, let them flow."

Thackeray, despite his self-satisfying opinion about the world's being always "so good and gentle" to the "gentle and good," here held Sir Walter's opinion, for under the signature of Michael Angelo t.i.tmarsh, Esq., he wrote:

"Our calling is only sneered at because it is not well paid. The world has no other criterion for respectability. In Heaven's name, what made the people talk of setting up a statue to Sir William Follet? What had he done? He had made thirty thousand pounds!... Directly the men of letters get rich they will come in for their share of honour too; and a future writer in this miscellany (Fraser's) may be getting his guineas where we get one, and dining at Buckingham Palace while you and your humble servant, dear Padre Francisco, are glad to smoke our pipes over the sanded floor of the little D----."

Sir Walter Scott's opinion of writing under peaceful and under troublous circ.u.mstances was also shown in the following entry, under the same date as the above. It runs as follows:

"Poor T. S. called again yesterday. Through his incoherent miserable tale I could see that he had exhausted each access to credit, and yet fondly imagines that, bereft of all his accustomed indulgences, he can work with a literary zeal unknown to his happier days. I hope he may labour enough to gain the mere support of his family."

Poverty is not, however, always fatal to the highest efforts of genius, even if it be not essential as an incentive to work; and there is often found in "the labour we delight in" that which "physics pain" (as Shakespeare said), even the pains of impecuniosity. Goldoni, speaking of his dramatic writings and consequent poverty, says, "Though in any other situation I might have been in easier circ.u.mstances, I should never have been so happy;" and who can doubt the happiness of the ill.u.s.trious Linnaeus when he was wandering a-foot with his stylus, magnifying-gla.s.s and baskets of plants, sharing the peasants' rustic meals and homely shelter, when he gave his own name to the little Lapland flower now called the Linnaeus Borealis, because it reminded him of his own position, being "a little northern plant, flowering early, depressed, abject, and long overlooked"?

Rousseau, writing of his works and life, says:

"It was in a small garret in the new street of St. Etienne du Mont, where I resided four years in the midst of physical suffering and domestic trouble, that I enjoyed the most exquisite pleasure of my life, that of writing and publishing my 'Studies of Nature.'"

The _Quarterly Review_ (vol. viii.), comparing the writer who goes to his work in a spirit of love for it, and pride in it, with him who labours at it merely for the money it produces, says: "The one is like a thirsty hart that comes joyously to refresh itself at the water-brooks, and the other to the same beast panting and jaded with the dogs of hunger and necessity behind."

When Olivet presented his elaborate edition of Cicero to the public, he said the glory and pleasure he had received in producing it were all he required by way of remuneration; money he refused. Pieresc, one of the most liberal and generous of men, although his fortune was a small one, loved learning only for its own sweet sake, and was never so happy as he was when shut up in his study amongst his books and MSS. "A literary man's true wealth," said he, "consists in works of art, the treasures of a library, and the affections of his fellow-students." Lord Wodehouse, when re-writing his 'Lectures on History,' said: "The task rewarded him with that peculiar delight which has often been observed in the latter years of literary men, the delight of returning again to the studies of their youth and of feeling under the snows of age the cheerful memories of their spring." Petrarch, writing of himself to a friend, said, "I read, I write, I think; such is my life and my pleasures as they were in my youth."

Beranger, when he was living on the fifth story in the Boulevard St.

Martin, "without money and with no certain prospect for the future," as he himself said, had installed himself in his garret "with inexpressible satisfaction" because, as he wrote, "To live alone and to compose verses at my leisure appeared to me the very summit of felicity." Speaking in the spirit of his "sky parlour," he said: "What a beautiful prospect I enjoyed from its window! What delight I had to sit there in the evening hovering as it were over the immense city, from which a loud, hoa.r.s.e murmur incessantly ascended, especially when there blended with it the noise and tumult of some great storm." But there were two sides to this life, and time revealed both. With peace and time, bread and cheese and dreams of glory, the poet was content and happy, even when thin and pale; he grew every day so weak that his father used to say frequently, "I shall soon bury you." But he was not dismayed, but starved and wrote on placidly enough until the fear of the conscription fell upon him. But even then, as he tells us, Providence befriended him and out of evil brought good. He says: "I was bald at twenty-three in consequence, as I suppose, of continuous headaches. When the gendarmes came in search for conscripts I removed my hat. They looked at my bald head and were satisfied. They went away without me."

Again he writes in his fragmentary autobiography:

"Fortune at last suffered herself to be touched by my sorrows. Three years had I been vainly seeking some humble form of employment, when, urged by a terrible necessity in the beginning of 1804, I sent a letter and verses to M. Lucien Bonaparte. My gold watch had been long where I left it pledged at the Mont de Piete. My wardrobe had dwindled to three old patched and often mended shirts, a threadbare overcoat also carefully adorned with patches, with one pair of trousers with a newly discovered hole in the knee, and a pair of boots which filled me with despair whenever I cleaned them, they grew so rapidly worse. I had posted to M. Bonaparte four or five hundred verses, and had told no one that I had done so, so many applications had been fruitless."

One day, while sitting in his garret, needle in hand, eyeing lugubriously the rent in his trousers, and thinking over some bitter misanthropical verses which he was then writing, a letter was brought to him. It seemed a letter of consequence--the handwriting was strange. Trembling with excitement, he broke the seal. Joy! joy! joy! The Senator Bonaparte desired to see him!

"It was not," he wrote, "my fortune that I first thought of, but Glory! My eyes were full of tears, and I thanked G.o.d, whom in my moments of prosperity I never forgot."

And yet of such men as these Thackeray wrote: "Bread is the main incentive. Do not let us try to blink this fact or imagine that the men of the press are working for their honour and glory or go onward impelled by the inevitable afflatus of genius."

The elder Disraeli, who said, "Great authors sustain their own genius by a sense of their own glory," when Dr. Johnson expressed views on this subject according to some extent with Thackeray's, called them "commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing views of human nature," and complained that they lowered genius to the level of a machine, only to be set in action by a force exterior to itself.

But doctors disagree, and opinions on every subject always differ. As mentioned by me elsewhere, one of the first poets who tried to live by his pen was Robert Greene, whose melancholy story is one of the most degrading and painful pa.s.sages in literary biography. He lived in the days of good Queen Bess, and has left his own records of forlorn and miserable experience. Isaac Disraeli calls him "the great patriarch and primeval dealer in English literature, the most facetious, profligate, and indefatigable of the Scribleri family." Quaint Anthony Wood, sneering at him and his entire fraternity, as he often did, said, "He wrote to maintain his wife and that high, loose course of living which poets generally follow;" one accusation being about as true as the other, for so far from maintaining his wife, he shamefully deserted both her and her child, leaving her foodless; and the Elizabethan poets are said on the whole to have been thrifty, G.o.d-fearing men, leading sober and steady lives. Charles Knight wrote of him as one who was made desperate and reckless by wrongs and neglect, but the pamphlet he wrote called 'The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts,' taken with his other confession, shows him to have been, as Mr. A. H. Wall said (in his 'Poets and Players of Shakespeare's Time'), "an entirely bad and worthless fellow, who disgusted his fellow-poets of the Bankside, and plunged into such disgraceful excesses that he became shunned and contemned by them, finding a welcome nowhere but in the lowest haunts of vice and profligacy." This was the man who fell foul of his fellow-players and the player-poets, calling them "apes," "rude grooms," "buckram gentlemen," and "painted monsters," who attacked young Shakespeare when he was dressing up, improving, and re-writing old plays, "as an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," and aroused our great bard's many friends to anger and indignation by saying he had "a tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, and was a bad actor, conceited enough to suppose himself as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best, one who was vain enough to imagine himself an absolute Johannes Factotum, the only Shakespeare in the country:" accusations which even Henry Cheetle, who was concerned in their publication, afterwards denounced as slanderous and spiteful, saying, "I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself hath seen his (Shakespeare's) demeanour no less civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes, besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art."

Greene spent his time now in debauchery and drunkenness, now homeless, penniless, and starving, one extreme following the other with fearful frequency and rapidity. A contemporary poet, Gabriel Harvey, wrote of him as follows:

"Who in London hath not heard of his (Greene's) dissolute and licentious living, his fond disguisinge of a Master of Arts with ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company, of his vaine glorious and Thrasonicall bra.s.singe; his piperly extemporising and Tarletonizing; his apeish counterfeiting of every ridiculous and absurd toy ... hys villainous cogging and foisting, his monstrous swearinge and horrible forswearing, his impious profaning of sacred textes; his other scandalous and blasphemous ravinge: his riotous and outrageous surfeitinge: his continual shifting of lodgings; his plausable musteringe and banquettynge of roysterly acquaintance at his first comminge; his beggarly departing in every hostesses debt; his infamous resorting to the Banckside, Sh.o.r.editch, Southwarke, and other filthy haunts; his obscure lurkinge in basest corners; his p.a.w.ning of his sword, cloake, and what not, when money came short?" etc.