Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman Part 15

In 1848 the son of the Shah, who had, through the a.s.sistance of Britain and Russia, obtained the throne, came into office, and he resolved to put forward claims to Afghanistan and Beluchistan. When the ruler of Herat agreed that the Shah had claims, the English Government made the Shah sign an agreement in 1853 that he would give up pressing his claims as regarded Herat. But in 1856 the Persians retook this city, because they declared that the Ameer of Kabul was planning an advance on Herat. Thereupon a British army, commanded by General Outram and Havelock, was sent to Persia, and defeat after defeat for the Persians followed their arrival, and in July, 1857, they were compelled to give up Herat. Since then Persia has not ventured to lay her hand on the "key to India."

"7 P.V.E., London, "_19th Dec._, 1856.

"Dr. Barth, the African traveller, has been re-seducing (me) into the Lingua Amazighana, which I had forsworn. I am not sure that something will not come of it--to me at least. I have already built a castle in the air, that sometime hereafter I shall become 'Professor of Libyan' to U.C.

"How dreadful is it that we should be able to get into a war with Persia, proclaimed _at Bombay_ on November 1st, and n.o.body here knows why it is or what it seeks after; and the country's honour is committed while Parliament is not even sitting. And for this we throw up Italy and ...

Switzerland? Have you seen Cobden's recent letters on Maritime War? I rejoice much in them, and think adversity has improved his tone. With hearty regards to Mrs. N. and all,

"I am, ever yours,

"F. W. N."

The letters at which we have now arrived are those written during 1857.

The first is dated March, and I quote some pa.s.sages from it to show the Professor's own views as regards evening home preparation for boys who are working at school during the day, because it seems to me that his opinion in this matter should carry weight:--

"I much dislike a boy having _both_ his work at school and _then_ evening work at home, when he is getting sleepy and ought to have relaxation. It is the nuisance of day schools, and quite hurtful to study, if there is n.o.body at home to answer questions. Besides, Harry" (this is Harry Nicholson, mentioned two or three times in these letters as attending University College School) "is so studious of himself that it is very much to be desired that he should have time for _voluntary_ work. I regard this as having been very beneficial to _me_ at school, where I never had work enough set me to fill up half my time."

The letter which follows is dated April, and in it we find that "Harry"

had just returned home, and that his report had testified to his diligence and progress. At the end of the letter comes this little touch as to some of the schoolboy belongings which had been left behind in Professor Newman's house. "Harry has left divers snail-sh.e.l.ls fastened on pasteboard. Perhaps he did not know how to carry them safely."

On 6th May mention of the owner of the snail-sh.e.l.ls recurs again:--

"Mrs. Newman was rather disappointed at the unceremoniousness of my parting with Harry. It seems like a dream his vanishing. I suppose she is like Hecuba, grieved that she could not make the funeral of Hector. (I did not even kiss Harry _by proxy_ for her!) Most gladly does she give him up to Mrs. Nicholson; and yet, I fancy, she wanted a funeral ceremony on losing him."

Throughout these letters belonging to the year 1857, there is no special mention of the Indian Mutiny. Yet it is impossible to doubt that it occupied a great place in Newman's thoughts. No one who has written on India and our relations with her as he has done, could have failed to have written his own strong views on the lamentable mismanagement which led to the Mutiny. But most probably the letters concerning it were either not kept by Dr. Nicholson, or else Newman asked for them back, as in so many cases he was accustomed to do with regard to his own letters towards the close of his life. He had a theory that letters should not be kept, and many people have told me that he asked for his letters back in order to destroy them. Happily, however, this is _not_ the theory which everyone holds. Indeed, to many of us, the Past lies so near the written word, that _almost_ it re-awakens between the folds of a letter; indeed, in many instances, the Past and Present only meet across it. In this sense it is the only thing that holds up the picture of the past before our tired eyes. _Litera scripta manet_ is a living truth. The next letter from Newman to Nicholson was written on 20th June, 1857. On 8th June of this year died Douglas Jerrold, dramatist, satirist, and author. Mr. Walter Jerrold tells us that, in 1852, he had accepted the editorship of _Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper_. It was said of this that he "found it in the street and annexed it to literature."

His fortune as a writer began when he was only sixteen. His capacity for work and his perseverance in working were enormous. In 1825 he wrote great numbers of plays and farces; but beside all these, he contributed, as is well known, to _Punch_ (at its first commencement in 1841), as well as to hosts of magazines and political tracts, etc. Newman alludes to Jerrold being in receipt of 2000 a year from _Lloyd's Weekly News_.

I pa.s.s over the discussion as regards the Newmans' proposed visit to the Lakes, and also his expressed delight in a book, many copies of which he had just given away--_Intuitive Morals and Religious Duty_.

"In truth, dear friend, I get happier and happier, and only am pent up and mourn to feel how I live for self alone. I sometimes think with a sort of envy how your knowledge of medicine and tender heart for young children puts you into near and kind contact with the poor. However, we have each his own talent, if only one can find the mode of wisely disposing it.

"I am sorry to see that Douglas Jerrold has not left sixpence to his family, though he was in receipt of 2000 a year (they say!) from _Lloyd's Weekly News_."

In November another letter alludes to his Latin translations. He says he has been gradually inclining to the belief that Terence, Virgil, and Horace had "damaged" the Latin language in very much the same way as Pope did the English, as regards arbitrary style and method of writing cadences.

It is universally conceded that Horace was not a great thinker. As one of our modern English critics has said: "His philosophy is that of the market-place rather than of the schools; he does not move among high ideals or subtle emotions.... He carried on and perfected the native Roman growth, satire, so as to make Roman life from day to day, in city and country, live anew under his pen.... Before Horace, Latin lyric poetry is represented almost wholly by the brilliant but technically immature poems of Catullus; after him it ceases to exist."

As regards Pope, the critics of the end of the eighteenth century considered his style eminently artificial and forced. But to-day, according to Father Gasquet, we cannot but recognize his services to English poetry as invaluable. "He was virtually the inventor and artificer who added a new instrument of music to its majestic orchestra, a new weapon of expression to its n.o.ble armoury.... But one must admit that to the taste of the present age there occurs a certain coldness and artificiality in his portrayals alike of the face of nature and of the pa.s.sions of man. He appeals rather to the brain than to the heart. Ideas and not emotions are his province.... To the metric presentment of ideas he imparts a charm of musical utterance unachieved before his time."

"_30th Nov._, 1857.

"My dear Nicholson,

"I have of late been urged by a particular circ.u.mstance to make various trials of translation into Latin (lyrical, etc.) verse--an exercise I always used to dislike, and have never much practised. I now find my dislike was largely caused by the unsuitable and over-stiff metres which used to be imposed on me when I was under orders.... In English and Greek versification I have long been aware of the essential importance of this; but I have looked on Latin as too inflexible a tongue to be worth the labour, since nearly all the translations I have seen, pall on me as mere flat imitations of the ancients instead of having a smack of the original.

I have been inclining to the belief that Terence, Virgil, and Horace have done damage to the Latin language, or at least to our taste; just as Pope was the ruin of English poetry so long as he was allowed to dictate the style and cadences. In Plautus, Lucretius, and Catullus the language has a flexibility and the metres a freedom which (as I think) academicians and schoolmasters have not duly appreciated, and which ought to impart to us (when we _do_ do anything so absurd as to write foreign verses) a freedom at which we have not generally aimed. As to metre, I think it really a _folly_ to insist on Horace's restrictions, which are entirely his own, being neither found in the Greek, which he copied, nor in Catullus; and which made the problem of _translation_ so much harder (and he did not translate), that one has to sacrifice too much. I think we ought to construct our metres by selection from the Greek, just as Catullus or Horace did, not imitate them slavishly. I send you one specimen of my translation, to ask whether so many as seven lines together the same is _too monotonous_. If there were only four or five it would be as one of Catullus's. I dare say you have the original....

"With truest regards to you all, "Your cordial friend,

"F. W. Newman."

Pulszky, the friend of Kossuth and also of Francis Newman, was a Hungarian author, politician, and patriot. In 1848 he was serving under Esterhazy in some Government post; but when he was suspected of revolutionizing in his native country, he took refuge in England. Pulszky went with Kossuth later to America. In 1852 he was condemned to death by the Austrian Government, but his fourteen years spent in Italy seem to have influenced the Ministers to pardon him in 1867. While in England (I do not know if he suffered from it elsewhere) he became a martyr to _tic douleureux_, that most trying form of facial neuralgia which attacks in such paroxysms of severe pain--attacks which seem brought on by the most trivial reasons, such as a knock at the door or by a sudden shake to the chair on which the patient is sitting, and which, as a rule, give no warning of their approach.

"My dear Nicholson,

"You remember that you kindly furnished me with your prescription for _tic douleureux_ to give to my friend Pulszky. He told me a few days back that he sent it (I think a year ago) to the poor girl at Ventnor who was a horrible sufferer from it, and heard no more of it until this autumn when he was at Ventnor again. He was delighted to find she had been immediately cured by it, had had no returns, was made competent for work, and is in a servant's place. On my naming this, I have two urgent applications for the prescriptions. If you will a second time take the trouble to copy out the prescription I will keep it myself, and give copies to my friends without further coming upon you.... I have ventured to a.s.sert that the Nicholson who is so talked of as promoting the ballot in Australia is _not_ your brother Mark.

"Do you know, when I saw in the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_ the face of the late lamented Brigadier Nicholson of the Punjaub, I thought it _very_ like you. Is he possibly a distant relative?

"Ever yours heartily,

"F. W. Newman, "7 P.V.E."

"_20th December_, 1857.

This remark of Newman's that he saw a strong likeness in "the face of the late lamented Brigadier Nicholson of the Punjaub" to his friend Dr.

Nicholson is one of those arresting suggestions which seem to strike sudden light out of the flints of ancestry which whiten the road of life along which we have come.

That there _is_ a distinct likeness in the two faces no one who had seen the portraits in Captain Lionel Trotter's _Life of John Nicholson_, and then looked at that of Dr. John Nicholson in this book, could have had a doubt. But, as it seems to me, there is even more ground for the likelihood of Newman's suggestion, if one tries to trace the lineage and land of the families of Nicholson in years gone by. I quote the following from Captain Trotter's _Life of John Nicholson_:--

"In the days of our Tudor sovereigns the family of which John Nicholson was to be the bright particular star had made their home in the border county of c.u.mberland." He goes on to say that the first to come over to Ireland was Rev. William Nicholson (in 1589), and he married the Lady Elizabeth Percy. Captain Trotter says there is a tradition that his two brothers went over to Ireland with William Nicholson. One settled in Derry, the other in Dublin. During McGuire's rebellion in 1641, his son's wife and her baby boy "were the only two in Cran-na-gael" [now known as Cranagill] "who escaped the common ma.s.sacre by hiding behind some brushwood. In their wanderings thence they fell in with a party of loyalist soldiers, who escorted them safely to Dromore, whence they made their way across sea to the widow's former home at Whitehaven...." What became of this Mrs. Nicholson does not appear. "Her son William, during his sojourn in c.u.mberland, had become a Quaker." This was very probably due to his having been influenced by his intercourse with George Fox.

Later on the former went back to Cranagill. There were three sons born to this William Nicholson, and Captain Trotter tells us that it was from the eldest (also a "William") that the famous John Nicholson was descended.

Now, it seems to me that it is not at all unlikely that there may have been some connection (as Francis Newman suggested) between the branch of the Nicholson family to which John Nicholson, of Mutiny fame, was related, who made their home in the "border county of c.u.mberland," and that to which Dr. John Nicholson, the lifelong friend of Francis Newman, belonged.

The latter also belonged to a north country family who, I believe, settled on the borders of England and Scotland. Dr. Nicholson himself lived for a great number of years at Penrith, in c.u.mberland. So that, all things considered, perhaps Newman's conjecture, after he had realized how strong a resemblance there was in his friend's face to that of the hero of Delhi, was correct.

The next letters belong to the year 1858. In August, 1858, Newman was again devoting much time to Latin versification:--

"My chief time this summer has been employed in a new _furor_--Latin versification. I find that by choosing and adapting metres from the Greek fountain and not sticking to Horace, or even to Catullus, the language admits of translation from English closer than I at all conceived. I think I have done 1500 lines in all. I only translate short pieces and pleasing ones. I have been led to it by a practical object. I used to hate Latin versification, and indeed the extreme poverty and ambiguity of the language is laid bare shockingly by the process. Perhaps not really worse than in prose translation, but every metre (or almost every) deprives you at once of a sensible fraction of the already scanty vocabulary. One learns also how essentially clumsy and prosaic the language is in its vocabulary, though so compact in its structure.

"The Atlantic Telegraph, no doubt, already excites wild and impatient hopes in our Australians, of which you will hear an echo. It is indeed a critical event, as determining an immense extension of the telegraphic system....

"Ever yours heartily,

"F. W. Newman."