English Lands Letters and Kings Part 5

Yet, as I have said,[5] Addison could not find words n.o.ble enough to tell this man how Anne was dead and he was king; if Addison had made his letter as n.o.ble as the drama of _Cato_, George I. would have yawned and lighted his pipe with it.

This George I. had married in early life a beautiful cousin, and a rich one, but without much {59} character; perhaps he treated her brutally (it was certainly a Georgian fashion); and she, who was no saint, would have run away from that Hanover home--had plotted it all, and the night came, when suddenly her lover and the would-be attendant of her flight was savagely slain; and she, separated from her two children and speaking no word more to her grim husband, was consigned a prisoner to a gloomy fortress in the Aller valley, where she dragged out an embittered and disappointed life for thirty odd years; then, Death opened the gates and set the poor soul free.

This was the wife of George I., and the mother of George II.; this latter being over thirty at the time of his father's coming to England, and not getting on over-well with the king--the son, perhaps, resenting that confinement of his mother in the Ahlden fortress.

This Prince of Wales had no more love for letters than his father George I.; would have liked a jolly German drinking song better than anything Pope could do; was short, irascible, as good a fighter as the father, swore easily and often; had a good, honest wife though, who clung to him {60} through all his badnesses. He had a city home in Leicester Square and a lodge in Richmond Park, whence he used to ride, at a hard gait, with hunting parties (Pope speaks of meeting him with such an one) and come home to long dinners and heavy ones.

It was at this lodge in Richmond Park (which is now less changed than almost any park about London and so one of the best worth seeing) that a messenger came galloping in jack-boots one evening, thirteen years after George I. had come to the throne, to tell the Prince that old George was dead (over in Osnaburg, where he had gone on a visit) and that he, the Prince, was now King George II.[6]

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"Dat is one big lie"--said the new and incredulous King with an oath.

But it was not a lie; the King was wrathy at being waked too early, and wanted to swear at something or somebody. But having rubbed his eyes and considered the matter, he began then and there those thirty-three years of reign, which, without much credit to George II. personally, were, as the careful Mr. Hallam says in his history, the most prosperous years which England had ever known.

Remember please, then, that George I., who succeeded Anne, reigned some thirteen years; and after him came this short, sharp-spoken George II., who reigned thirty-three years--thus bringing us down to 1760. I have dwelt upon the personalities of these two monarchs, not because they are worthy of special regard, but rather that they may serve more effectively as finger-posts or clumsy mile-stones (with wigs upon them)--to show us just how far we are moving along upon the big high-road of English history.

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_Samuel Richardson._

Quite early in that century into which these royal people found their way, there lived over beyond Temple Bar, near to St. Bride's Church, in the City of London, a mild-mannered, round-faced, prim little man who was printer and bookseller--in both which callings he showed great sagacity and prudence. He was moreover very companionable, especially with bookish ladies, who often dropped in upon him--he loving to talk; and to talk much about himself, and his doings, and the characters he put in his books. For this was Samuel Richardson[7]--the very great man as many people thought him--who had written _Pamela_, _Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Sir Charles Grandison_. It is doubtful if he knew Pope or Swift or Berkeley; he was never of the "Spectator set." Pope we know read his {63} _Pamela_ and said there was as much good in it as in twenty sermons: yet I do not think he meant to compliment it--or the sermons. Neither did Bookseller Richardson know people in high position, except Hon. Mr. Onslow the Speaker, who gave him some of the public printing to do and put him in way of business by which he grew rich for these times and had a fine large house out by Hammersmith, where he kept a little court of his own in summer weather; the courtiers being worthy women, to whom he would read his books, or correspondence relating to them, by the hour. Possibly you have not read his novels; but I am sure your grandmothers or great-grandmothers have read some of them, and wept over them. He was not learned; was the son of a country carpenter, and in his early days was known for an easy letter-writing faculty he had; and he used to be set upon by sighing maidens--who were suffering under a prevalent contagious affection of young years--to write their love-letters for them; and so at last, in busy London, when his head was streaked with gray, he began to put together books of letters--written as if {64} some suffering or wishful one had whispered them all in his ear. There was no machinery, no plot, no cla.s.sicism, no style--but sentiment in abundance and vast prolixity, and ever-recurring villanies, and "pillows bedew'd with tears." The particularity and fulness of his descriptions were something wonderful; every b.u.t.ton on a coat, every ring on the fingers, every tint of a ribbon, every ruffle on a cap, every ruffle of emotion, every dimple in a cheek is pictured, and then--the "pillows bedew'd with tears."

There's a great budget of Richardson correspondence that shows us how the leaven of such stories worked; letters from Miss Suffern and Miss Westcomb, and Mr. Dunallan, and a dozen others, all interlaced with his own; for it does not appear that the old gentleman ever refused the challenge of a letter, or grew tired of defending and ill.u.s.trating his theories of literary art and of morals, which in his view were closely joined. The stories were published by himself--volume by volume, so that his correspondents had good chance to fire upon him--on the wing as it were: "Poor Clarissa," they say; "my heart bleeds for her, and what, {65} pray, is to become of her; and why don't you reform Lovelace, and sha'n't he marry Clarissa? And I do not believe there was ever such a man as Sir Charles in the world." The old gentleman enjoys this and writes back by the ream; has his own little sentiment of a sort too, even in the correspondence. Mme. Belfour wants to see him--"the delightful man"--without herself being observed; so entreats him to walk some day in the Park (St. James') at a given hour; and Richardson complies, giving these data for his picture:--

"I go through the Park, once or twice a week to my little retirement; but I will for a week together, be in it, every day three or four hours, till you tell me you have seen a person who answers to this description, namely, short--rather plump--fair wig, lightish cloth coat, all black besides; one hand generally in his bosom, the other a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts of his coat ...

looking directly fore-right as pa.s.sers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either hand of him; hardly ever turning back, of a light brown complexion, smoothish faced and ruddy cheeked--looking about sixty-five, a regular even pace, a gray eye sometimes lively--very lively if he have hope of seeing a lady whom he loves and honors."

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Then he writes to Miss Westbrook--an adopted daughter as he calls her:--

"You rally me on my fears for your safety, and yet I know you to be near a forest where lies a great wild bear: I am accused for these fears--I am accused for playing off a sheet-full of witticisms, which you, poor girl, can't tell what to do with. Witticism! Miss W. Very well, Miss W---- But I did not expect--but no matter;--what have I done with my handkerchief--I--I--I did not really expect; but no matter, Miss W----"

A man who can put tears so easily, and for so little cause, into a letter, can put them by the barrelful in his books: and so he did, and made Europe weep. Rousseau and Diderot from over in France, philosophers as they professed to be, blubbered their admiring thanks for _Clarissa Harlowe_.

I have spoken of him not because he is to be counted a great cla.s.sic (though Dr. Johnson affirmed it); not because I advise your wading through six or seven volumes of the darling _Sir Charles Grandison_--as some of our grandames did; but because he was, in a sense, the father of the modern novel; coming before Fielding; in fact, spurring the latter, by _Pamela_, to his great, {67} coa.r.s.e, and more wonderful accomplishment. And although what I have said of Richardson may give the impression of something paltry in the man and in his works, yet he was an honest gentleman, with good moral inclinations, great art in the dissection of emotional natures, and did give a fingering to the heart-strings which made them tw.a.n.g egregiously.

_Harry Fielding._

The British Guild of Critics is, I think, a little more disposed to _admit_ Richardson's claims to distinction than to be proud of them: it is not so, however, with Fielding;[8] if Richardson was "womanish,"

Fielding was masculine with a vengeance; gross, too, in a way, which always will, and always should, keep his books outside the pale of decent family reading. Filth is filth, and always deserves to be scored by its name--whatever blazon of genius may compa.s.s it about. I have no {68} argument here with the artists who, for art's sake, want to strip away all the protective kirtles which the Greek Dianas wore: but when it comes to the bare b.e.s.t.i.a.lities of such tavern-bagnios as poor Fielding knew too well,[9] there seems room for reasonable objection, and for a strewing of some of the fig-leaves of decency.

And yet this stalwart West-of-England man, "raised" in the fat meadows of Somersetshire, and who had read _Pamela_ as a stepping-stone for his first lift into the realms of romance, was a jovial, kind-hearted, rollicking, dare-devil of a man, with no great guile in him, and no hypocrisies and no snivelling laxities. He had a great lineage, tracing back to that Landgrave of Alsace, from whom are descended the kings and emperors of the House of Hapsburg: and what a warrant for immortality does this novelist carry in those words of Gibbon!--

"The successors of Charles V. may disdain their [Somersetshire]

brethren of England; but the romance of _Tom {69} Jones_--that exquisite picture of humor and manners--will outlive the Palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of Austria."

It was at home or near by that Henry Fielding found his first schooling; at the hand--a tradition runs--of that master who served as the original for his picture of Parson Trulliber: if this indeed be so, never were school-master severities so permanently punished. After this came Eton, where he was fellow of Lord Lyttleton, who befriended him later, and of William Pitt (the elder), and of Fox--the rattle-brain father of Charles James. Then came two or more years of stay at the University of Leyden, from which he laid his course straight for the dramatic world of London; for his father, General Fielding, had a good many spendthrift habits, with which he had inoculated the son. There was need for that son to work his own way; and the way he favored was by the green-room, where the sparkle of such lively elderly ladies as Mrs. Oldcastle and Mrs. Bracegirdle had not yet wholly gone out.

He wrote play upon play with nervous English, and pretty surprises in them; but not notable for {70} any results, whether of money-making or of moral-mending. He also had his experiences as stage manager; and between two of his plays (1735 or thereabout) married a pretty girl down in Salisbury; and with her dot, and a small country place inherited from his mother, set up as country gentleman, on the north border of Dorsetshire, determined to cut a new and larger figure in life--free from the mephitic airs of Drury Lane. There were stories--very likely apocryphal--that he ordered extravagant liveries; it is more certain that he gave himself freely, for a time, to hounds, horses, and friends. Of course such a country symposium devoured both his own and his wife's capital; and we find him very shortly back in London, buckling down to law study; very probably showing there or thereabout the "inked ruffles and the wet towel round his head," which appear in the charming retrospective gla.s.ses of Thackeray.[10]

But times are hard with him; those fast years of green-room life have told upon him; the "wet {71} towels" round the head are in demand; some of his later plays are condemned by the Lord Chancellor;[11] in 1742, however, he makes that lunge at the sentimentalism of Richardson which, in the shape of _Joseph Andrews_, gives him a trumpeting success. It encourages him to print two or three volumes of miscellanies. But shadows follow him; a year later, his wife dies in his arms; Lady Wortley Montagu (who was a cousin) tells us this; and tells us how other cousins were scandalized because, a few years afterward, the novelist, with an effusive generosity that was characteristic of him, married his maid, who had lamented her mistress so sincerely, and was tenderly attached to his children. At about the same period he accepted office as Justice of the Peace--thereby still further disgruntling his aristocratic Denbigh cousins. But the quick-coming volumes of _Tom Jones_ and their wonderful acclaim cleared the s.p.a.ce around him; he had room to breathe and {72} to play the magistrate; it is Henry Fielding, Esq., now,--of Bow Street, Covent Garden. _Amelia_ followed, for which he received 1,000; and we hear of a new home out in the pleasant country, by Baling, north of Brentford, and the Kew Gardens.

Finally on a June day of 1754 we see him leaving this home; "at twelve precisely," he says in his last Journal, "my coach was at the door, which I was no sooner told than I kissed my children all around, and went into it with some little resolution." There needed resolution; for he was an utterly broken-down man, the pace of his wild, young days telling now fearfully, and he bound away for a voyage to the sunny climate of Portugal--to try if this would stay the end.

But it does not; in October of the same year he died in Lisbon; and there his body rests in the pretty Cemetery of the Cypresses, where all visitors who love the triumphs of English letters go to see his tomb, among the myrtles and the geraniums. If he had only lived to pluck away some of those grosser stains which defile the pages where the characters of an Allworthy and of a Parson Adams will shine forever!

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_Poet of the Seasons._

It was just about the opening of the second quarter of the eighteenth century--when Fielding was fresh from Eton, fifteen years before _Pamela_ had appeared and while George II. was in waiting for the slipping off of Father George at Osnaburg--that a stout Scotch poet found his way to London to try a new style of verses with the public which was still worshipping at the shrine of Mr. Pope. This was the poet of _The Seasons_,[12] whose boyhood had been pa.s.sed and enriched in that bight of the beautiful Tweed valley which lies between Coldstream and the tall ma.s.s of Kelso's ruin,--with Melrose and Smailhome Tower and Ettrickdale not far away, and the Lammermuir hills glowering in the north. He had studied theology in Edinboro', till some iris-hued version of a psalm (which he had wrought) brought the warning from some grim orthodox friend--that {74} a good Dominie should rein up his imagination. So he set his face southward, with the crystal scenery of a winter on Tweed-side sparkling in his thought. He lived humbly in London, for best of reasons, near to Charing Cross; but by the aid of Northern friends, brought his _Winter_ to book, in the spring of 1726.

It delighted everybody; the tric-trac of Pope was lacking, and so was the master's arrant polish; but the change brought its own blithe welcome.

We will try a little touch from this first poem of his which he brought in his satchel, on the boy journey to London:--

"Thro' the hushed air the whitening shower descends, At first, thin, wavering, till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day With a continual flow....

Low, the woods Bow their h.o.a.r heads; and ere the languid sun Faint from the west emits his evening ray, Earth's universal face, deep hid and chill, Is one wide dazzling waste.

The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing stone....

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One alone, The red-breast, sacred to the household G.o.ds, Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky In joyless fields and th.o.r.n.y thickets, leaves His shivering mates.

Half afraid, he first Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights On the warm hearth; then hopping o'er the floor Eyes all the smiling family askance And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is."

That robin red-breast has hopped over a great many floors in his time; and now after a hundred and sixty years he comes brisk as ever out of that Winter poem of Thomson's. This Scotch poet is wordy; he draws long breaths; he is sometimes tiresome; but you will catch good honest glimpses of the country in his verse without going there--not true to our American seasons in detail, but always true to Nature. The sun never rises in the west in his poems; the jonquils and the daisies are not confounded; the roses never forget to blush as roses should; the oaks are st.u.r.dy; the hazels are lithe; the brooks murmur; the torrents roar a song; the winds carry waves across the grain-fields; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains.

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Thomson was befriended by Pope, who kindly made corrections in the first draught of some of his poems; and that you may see together the wordy ways of these two poets I give a sample of Pope's mending.

Thomson wrote--speaking of a gleaning girl:--

"Thoughtless of Beauty, she was beauty's self Recluse among the woods; if city dames Will deign their faith; and thus she went, compelled By strong necessity, with as serene And pleased a look as Patience ere put on, To glean Palemon's fields."

And this is the way in which Pope does the mending:--