Gossip in a Library Part 6

There is no respite for the emotions from Eliza's first page to her last. The implacable Douxmoure (for such was her singular name) "continued for some time in a Condition little different from Madness; but when Reason had a little recovered its usual Sway, a deadly Melancholy succeeded Pa.s.sion." When Bevillia tried to explain to her cousin that Emilius was no fit suitor for her hand, the young lady swooned twice before she seized Bevillia's "cruel meaning;" and then--ah! then--"silent the stormy Pa.s.sions roll'd in her tortured Bosom, disdaining the mean Ease of raging or complaining. It was a considerable time before she utter'd the least Syllable; and when she did, she seem'd to start as from some dreadful Dream, and cry'd, 'It is enough--in knowing one I know the whole deceiving s.e.x'"; and she began to address an imaginary Women's Rights Meeting.

Plot was not a matter about which Eliza Haywood greatly troubled herself. A contemporary admirer remarked, with justice:

'_Tis Love Eliza's soft Affections fires; Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires; 'Tis Love that gives D'Elmont his manly Charms, And tears Amena from her Father's Arms_.

These last-named persons are the hero and heroine of _Love in Excess; or The Fatal Inquiry_, which seems to have been the most popular of the whole series. This novel might be called _Love Through a Window_; for it almost entirely consists of a relation of how the gentleman prowled by moonlight in a garden, while the lady, in an agitated disorder, peeped out of her lattice in "a most charming Dishabillee."

Alas! there was a lock to the door of a garden staircase, and while the lady "was paying a Compliment to the Recluse, he was dextrous enough to slip the Key out of the Door unperceived." Ann Lang!--"a sudden cry of Murder, and the noise of clashing Swords," come none too soon to save those blushes which, we hope, you had in readiness for the turning of the page! Eliza Haywood a.s.sures us, in _Idalia_, that her object in writing is that "the Warmth and Vigour of Youth may be temper'd by a due Consideration"; yet the moralist must complain that she goes a strange way about it. Idalia herself was "a lovely Inconsiderate" of Venice, who escaped in a "Gondula" up "the River Brent," and set all Vicenza by the ears through her "stock of Haughtiness, which nothing could surmount." At last, after adventures which can scarcely have edified Ann Lang, Idalia abruptly "remember'd to have heard of a Monastery at Verona," and left Vicenza at break of day, taking her "unguarded languishments" out of that city and out of the novel. It is true that Ann Lang, for 2s., bought a continuation of the career of Idalia; but we need not follow her.

The perusal of so many throbbing and melting romances must necessarily have awakened in the breast of female readers a desire to see the creator of these tender scenes. I am happy to inform my readers that there is every reason to believe that Ann Lang gratified this innocent wish. At all events, there exists among her volumes the little book of the play sold at the doors of Drury Lane Theatre, when, in the summer of 1724, Eliza Haywood's new comedy of _A Wife to be Lett_ was acted there, with the author performing in the part of Mrs. Graspall. The play itself is wretched, and tradition says that it owed what little success it enjoyed to the eager desire which the novelist's readers felt to gaze upon her features. She was about thirty years of age at the time; but no one says that she was handsome, and she was undoubtedly a bad actress, I think the disappointment that evening at the Theatre Royal opened the eyes of Ann Lang. Perhaps it was the appearance of Eliza in the flesh which prevented her old admirer from buying _The Secret History of Cleomina, suppos'd dead_, which I miss from the collection.

If Ann Lang lived on until the publication of _Pamela_--especially if during the interval she had bettered her social condition--with what ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all its shortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps she went to Vauxhall with it in her m.u.f.f, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of her acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novel after another break forth to lighten the darkness of life. She must have looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza Haywood, with their long-drawn palpitating intrigues, with positive disgust.

The English novel began in 1740, and after that date there was always something wholesome for Ann Lang and her sisters to read.

CATS

LES CHATS. _A Rotterdam, chez Jean Daniel Beman, MDCCXXVIII_.

An accomplished lady of my acquaintance tells me that she is preparing an anthology of the cat. This announcement has reminded me of one of the oddest and most entertaining volumes in my library. People who collect prints of the eighteenth century know an engraving which represents a tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of a gentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a volume. The volume is _Les Chats_, the book before us, and the portrait is that of the author, the amiable and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif. He was the son of English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so much in fashion in France. Somebody said of him, when he was famous as the laureate of the cats, that he had risen in life by never scratching, by always having velvet paws, and by never putting up his back, even when he was startled. Voltaire called him "my very dear Sylph," and he was the ideal of all that was noiseless, graceful, good-humoured, and well-bred. He slipped un.o.btrusively into the French Academy, and lived to be eighty-three, dying at last, like Anacreon, in the midst of music and dances and fair nymphs of the Opera, affecting to be a sad old rogue to the very last.

This book on Cats, the only one by which he is now remembered, was the sole production of his lifetime which cost him any annoyance. He was forty years of age when it appeared, and the subject was considered a little frivolous, even for such a _pet.i.t conteur_ as Moncrif. People continued to tease him about it, and the only rough thing he ever did was the result of one such twitting. The poet Roy made an epigram about "cats" and "rats," in execrable taste, no doubt; this stung our Sylph to such an excess that he waited outside the Palais Royal and beat Roy with a stick when he came out. The poet was, perhaps, not much hurt; at all events, he had the presence of mind to retort, "Patte de velours, patte de velours, Minon-minet!" It was six years after this that Moncrif was elected into the French Academy, and then the shower of epigrams broke out again. He wished to be made historiographer; "Oh, nonsense," the wits cried, "he must mean historiogriffe" and they invited him, on nights when the Academy met, to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimneypots. He had the weakness to apologise for his charming book, and to withdraw it from circulation. His pastoral tales and heroic ballets, his _Zelindors_ and _Zelodes_ and _Erosines_, which to us seem utterly vapid and frivolous, never gave him a moment's uneasiness. His crumpled rose-leaf was the book by which his name lives in literature.

The book of cats is written in the form of eleven letters to Madame la Marquise de B----. The anonymous author represents himself as too much excited to sleep, after an evening spent in a fashionable house, where the company was abusing cats. He was unsupported; where was the Marquise, who would have brought a thousand arguments to his a.s.sistance, founded on her own experience of virtuous p.u.s.s.ies? Instead of going to bed he will sit up and indite the panegyric of the feline race. He is still sore at the prejudice and injustice of the people he has just left. It culminated in the conduct of a lady who declared that cats were poison, and who, "when p.u.s.s.y appeared in the room, had the presence of mind to faint." These people had rallied him on the absurdity of his enthusiasm; but, as he says, the Marquise well knows, "how many women have a pa.s.sion for cats, and how many men are women in this respect."

So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its elegant pedantry, its paradoxical wit, its genuine touches of observation and its constant sparkle of anecdote. He is troubled to account for the existence of the cat. An Ottoman legend relates that when the animals were in the Ark, Noah gave the lion a great box on the ear, which made him sneeze, and produce a cat out his nose. But the author questions this origin, and is more inclined to agree with a Turkish Minister of Religion, sometime Amba.s.sador to France, that the ape, "weary of a sedentary life" in the Ark, paid his attentions to a very agreeable young lioness, whose infidelities resulted in the birth of a Tom-cat and a Puss-cat, and that these, combining the qualities of their parents, spread through the Ark _un esprit de coquetterie_--which lasted during the whole of the sojourn there. Moncrif has no difficulty in showing that the East has always been devoted to cats, and he tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted one day on a point of piety, preferred to cut off his sleeve, on which his favourite p.u.s.s.y was asleep, rather than wake her violently by rising.

From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good many curious tributes to the "harmless, necessary cat." I am seized with an ambition to put some fragments of these into English verse. Most of them are highly complimentary. It is true that Ronsard was one of those who could not appreciate a "matou." He sang or said:

_There is no man now living anywhere Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I; I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare, And when I see one come, I turn and fly_.

But among the _precieuses_ of the seventeenth century there was much more appreciation. Mme. Deshoulieres wrote a whole series of songs and couplets about her cat, Grisette. In a letter to her husband, referring to the attentions she herself receives from admirers, she adds:

_Deshoulieres cares not for the smart Her bright eyes cause, disdainful hussy, But, like a mouse, her idle heart Is captured by a p.u.s.s.y_.

Much better than these is the sonnet on the cat of the d.u.c.h.ess of Lesdiguieres, with its admirable line:

_Chatte pour tout le monde, et pour les chats tigresse_.

A fugitive epistle by Scarron, delightfully turned, is too long to be quoted here, nor can I pause to cite the rondeau which the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine addressed to her favourite. But she supplemented it as follows:

_My pretty puss, my solace and delight, To celebrate thy loveliness aright I ought to call to life the bard who sung Of Lesbia's sparrow with so sweet a tongue; But 'tis in vain to summon here to me So famous a dead personage as he, And you must take contentedly to-day This poor rondeau that Cupid wafts your way_.

When this cat died the d.u.c.h.ess was too much affected to write its epitaph herself, and accordingly it was done for her, in the following style, by La Mothe le Vayer, the author of the _Dialogues_:

_Puss pa.s.ser-by, within this simple tomb Lies one whose life fell Atropos hath shred; The happiest cat on earth hath heard her doom, And sleeps for ever in a marble bed.

Alas! what long delicious days I've seen!

O cats of Egypt, my ill.u.s.trious sires, You who on altars, bound with garlands green, Have melted hearts, and kindled fond desires,-- Hymns in your praise were paid, and offerings too, But I'm not jealous of those rights divine.

Since Ludovisa loved me, close and true, Your ancient glory was less proud than mine.

To live a simple p.u.s.s.y by her side Was n.o.bler far than to be deified_.

To these and other tributes Moncrif adds idyls and romances of his own, while regretting that it never occurred to Theocritus to write a _bergerie de chats_. He tells stories of blameless p.u.s.s.ies beloved by Fontanelle and La Fontaine, and quotes Marot in praise of "the green-eyed Venus." But he tears himself away at last from all these historical reminiscences, and in his eleventh letter he deals with cats as they are. We hasten as lightly as possible over a story of the disinterestedness of a feline Heloise, which is too pathetic for a nineteenth-century ear. But we may repeat the touching anecdote of Bayle's friend, Mlle. Dupuy. This lady excelled to a surprising degree in playing the harp, and she attributed her excellence in this accomplishment to her cat, whose critical taste was only equalled by his close attention to Mlle. Dupuy's performance. She felt that she owed so much to this cat, under whose care her reputation for skill on the harp had become universal, that when she died she left him, in her will, one agreeable house in town and another in the country. To this bequest she added a revenue sufficient to supply all the requirements of a well-bred tom-cat, and at the same time she left pensions to certain persons whose duty it should be to wait upon him. Her ign.o.ble family contested the will, and there was a long suit. Moncrif gives a handsome double-plate ill.u.s.tration of this incident. Mlle. Dupuy, sadly wasted by illness, is seen in bed, with her cat in her arms, dictating her will to the family lawyer in a periwig; her physician is also present.

This leads me to speak of the ill.u.s.trations to _Les Chats_, which greatly add to its value. They were engraved by Otten from original drawings by Coypel. In another edition the same drawings are engraved by Count Caylus. Some of them are of a charming absurdity. One, a double plate, represents a tragedy acted by cats on the roof of a fashionable house. The actors are tricked out in the most magnificent feathers and furbelows, but the audience consists of common cats.

Cupid sits above, with his bow and fluttering wings. Another plate shows the mausoleum of the d.u.c.h.ess of Lesdiguieres' cat, with a marble p.u.s.s.y of heroic size, upon a marble pillow, in a grove of poplars.

Another is a medal to "Chat Noir premier, ne en 1725," with the proud inscription, "Knowing to whom I belong, I am aware of my value." The profile within is that of as haughty a tom as ever shook out his whiskers in a lady's boudoir.

SMART'S POEMS

POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. _By Christopher Smart, A.M., Fellow of Pembroke-Hall, Cambridge. London: Printed for the Author, by W.

Strahan; And sold by J. Newbery, at the Bible and Sun, in St. Paul's Churchyard. MDCCLII_.

The third section of Robert Browning's _Parleyings with certain People of Importance in their Day_ drew attention to a Cambridge poet of whom little had hitherto been known, Christopher Smart, once fellow of Pembroke College. It may be interesting, therefore, to supply some sketch of the events of his life, and of the particular poem which Browning has aptly compared to a gorgeous chapel lying perdue in a dull old commonplace mansion. No one can afford to be entirely indifferent to the author of verses which one of the greatest of modern writers has declared to be unequalled of their kind between Milton and Keats.

What has. .h.i.therto been known of the facts of Smart's life has been founded on the anonymous biography prefixed to the two-volume Reading edition of his works, published in 1791. The copy of this edition in Trinity Library belonged to Dr. Farmer, and contains these words in his handwriting: "From the Editor, Francis Newbery, Esq.; the Life by Mr. Hunter." As this Newbery was the son of Smart's half-brother-in-law and literary employer, it may be taken for granted that the information given in these volumes is authoritative. We may therefore believe it to be correct that Smart was born (as he himself tells us, in _The Hop Garden)_ at Shipbourne, in Kent, on the 11th of April 1722, that his father was steward to the n.o.bleman who afterwards became Earl of Darlington, and that he was "discerned and patronised"

by the d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland. This great lady, we are left in doubt for what reason, carried her complaisance so far as to allow the future poet 40 a year until her death. In a painfully fulsome ode to another member of the Raby Castle family, Smart records the generosity of the dead in order to stimulate that of the living, and oddly remarks that

_dignity itself restrains By condescension's silken reins, While you the lowly Muse upraise_.

Smart pa.s.sed, already "an infant bard," from what he calls "the splendour in retreat" of Raby Castle, to Durham School, and in his eighteenth year was admitted of Pembroke Hall, October 30, 1739. His biographer expressly states that his allowance from home was scanty, and that his chief dependence, until he derived an income from his college, was on the bounty of the d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland.

From this point I am able to supply a certain amount of information with regard to the poet's college life which is entirely new, and which is not, I think, without interest. My friend Mr. R.A. Neil has been so kind as to admit me to the Treasury at Pembroke, and in his company I have had the advantage of searching the contemporary records of the college. What we were lucky enough to discover may here be briefly summarised. The earliest mention of Smart is dated 1740, and refers to the rooms a.s.signed to him as an undergraduate. In January 1743, we find him taking his B.A., and in July of the same year he is elected scholar. As is correctly stated in his Life, he became a fellow of Pembroke on the 3rd of July 1745. That he showed no indication as yet of that disturbance of brain and instability of character which so painfully distinguished him a little later on, is proved by the fact that on the 10th of October 1745, Smart was chosen to be Praelector in Philosophy, and Keeper of the Common Chest. In 1746 he was re-elected to those offices, and also made Praelector in Rhetoric. In 1747 he was not chosen to hold any such college situations, no doubt from the growing extravagance of his conduct.

In November 1747, Smart was in parlous case. Gray complains of his "lies, impertinence and ingrat.i.tude," and describes him as confined to his room, lest his creditors should snap him up. He gives a melancholy impression of Smart's moral and physical state, but hastens to add "not that I, nor any other mortal, pity him." The records of the Treasury at Pembroke supply evidence that the members of the college now made a great effort to restore one of whose talents it is certain they were proud. In 1748 we find Smart proposed for catechist, a proof that he had, at all events for the moment, turned over a new leaf.

Probably, but for fresh relapses, he would now have taken orders. His allusions to college life are singularly ungracious. He calls Pembroke

_this servile cell, Where discipline and dulness dwell_,

and commiserates a captive eagle as being doomed in the college courts to watch

_scholastic pride Take his precise, pedantic stride_;

words which painfully remind us of Gray's reported manner of enjoying a const.i.tutional. It is certain that there was considerable friction between these two men of genius, and Gray roundly prophesied that Smart would find his way to gaol or to Bedlam. Both alternatives of this prediction were fulfilled, and in October, 1751, Gray curtly remarks: "Smart sets out for Bedlam." Of this event we find curious evidence in the Treasury. "October 12, 1751--Ordered that Mr. Smart, being obliged to be absent, there will be allowed him in lieu of commons for the year ended Michaelmas, 1751, the sum of 10." There can be little question that Smart's conduct and condition became more and more unsatisfactory. This particular visit to a madhouse was probably brief, but it was possibly not the first and was soon repeated; for in 1749 and 1752 there are similar entries recording the fact that "Mr. Smart, being obliged to be absent," certain allowances were paid by the college "in consideration of his circ.u.mstances." The most curious discovery, however, which we have been able to make is recorded in the following entry:

"Nov. 27, 1753.--Ordered that the dividend a.s.signed to Mr. Smart be deposited in the Treasury till the Society be satisfied that he has a right to the same; it being credibly reported that he has been married for some time, and that notice be sent to Mr. Smart of his dividend being detained."

As a matter of fact, Smart was by this time married to a relative of Newbery, the publisher, for whom he was doing hack work in London. He had, however, formed the habit of writing the Seatonian prize poem, which he had already gained four times, in 1750, 1751, 1752, and 1753.

He seems to have clutched at the distinction which he brought on his college by these poems as the last straw by which to keep his fellowship, and, singular to say, he must have succeeded; for on the 16th of January 1754, this order was recorded:

"That Mr. Smart have leave to keep his name in the college books without any expense, so long as he continues to write for the premium left by Mr. Seaton."

How long this inexpensive indulgence lasted does not seem to be known.