HORACE SMITH OF THE “REJECTED ADDRESSES”
Horace Smith and his brother James are famous as the joint authors of the most successful parody ever perpetrated. Drury Lane Theatre was re-opened on October 10, 1812, having been rebuilt after the fire which destroyed it some three years previously. The Committee advertised a competition for the best address to be spoken at the re-opening. It is easy to imagine what occurred. Masses of poems were sent in, and in despair all of them were rejected, and Byron was invited to write a prologue. It occurred to the Smiths to produce a series of parodies in the style of the poets of their day. They pretended that all, or most of them, had been candidates for the prize, and on the very day of the re-opening was published the volume of Rejected Addresses, which, conceived, executed, printed, and published within the space of six weeks, continues in the general judgment of critics the finest jeu d’esprit of its kind.
Interesting enough it would be to linger over the general aspects of this book. We must, nevertheless, resist the temptation to recall the marvellous imitations of that genial friend of ours, the author of Ivanhoe—or of that crabbed foe of Jewish emancipation, William Cobbett. Capital, too, is the skit on Thomas Moore. Eve and the apple come into that effusion as a matter of course. To Moore, Eve was as Charles’ head to Mr. Dick. One could compile a fair-sized volume out of the Irish sentimentalist’s allusions to the first pair in Paradise. Moore used the allusion seriously and humorously. In the Lives of the Angels, Adam is driven not from but into Paradise, for as Eve had to go, it would have been the reverse of bliss for him to be left behind in Eden. In another poem, Moore plays on the rabbinic suggestion that woman was made out of the man’s tail, and so, comments the poet, man ever after has followed the original plan, and leaves his wife behind him whenever he can. Again and again, Moore in his poems claims close acquaintance with rabbinic lore, of which, in fact, he knew only a few scraps from second-hand sources.
So we might continue to glean thoughts from Rejected Addresses. It needs gleaning, because the direct references to contemporary Jews are very few. This negative point is not without interest. A dramatic squib nowadays would almost certainly have its hits against Jews. The Smiths only once refer to a Jew—the unfortunate Lyon Levi or Levy, who committed suicide by flinging himself over the London Monument. He was a merchant of Haydon Square, and the newspapers of January 19, 1810, record the event as having occurred on the previous day. It is not surprising that the incident should be fresh in men’s minds when the Smiths wrote three years later. For after an interval of thirty-seven years, we again find an allusion to it in the Ingoldsby Legends. Levi was neither the first nor the last to precipitate himself from the summit of Wren’s column; eventually the top was encaged, to bar others from a similar temptation.
It was remarked above that the Rejected Addresses were absolutely free from anti-Jewish gibes. Impossible would it have been for the Smiths to have acted otherwise. Horace, in particular, was an ardent admirer of Richard Cumberland, writer of The Jew, which at the end of the eighteenth century did so much to rehabilitate the Jews in English good-will. We can see Horace Smith’s tendency, negatively, in one of his other poems. In the “Culprit and the Judge,” he deals with a case of coin-clipping in medieval France. As with all of Horace’s verses, it is full of good points. The judge denounced as profanation the crime of filing the similitude of good King Pepin, and ordered the offender to be punished with decapitation. This is the clever reply of the culprit:
“As to offending powers divine,”
The culprit cried,—“be nothing said:
Yours is a deeper guilt than mine.
I took a portion from the head
Of the King’s image; you, oh fearful odds!
Strike the whole head at once from God’s!”
One wonders whether the author had ever heard of the closely parallel idea of the ancient Rabbi, who denounced the murderer as one who diminished the divine image in which man had been made. Observe, however, how Horace Smith refrains from making cheap capital out of the joke by describing the offender as a Jew. Smith knew the truth too well. He knew that, though some Jews were given to coin-clipping, there were many offenders who were not Jews. It is absolutely characteristic of Horace Smith that he should have refrained from libelling all Jews for the sins of some.
Horace Smith was, as already suggested, actuated in his philo-Semitism by knowledge. And this is the reason why, though his brother James wrote some of the best of the parodies in Rejected Addresses, this present article deals less with him than with Horace. For that the latter knew and understood Judaism can be demonstrated by the clearest evidence. In 1831 he published a prose volume, which ought to be better known to English Jews than it is. The title is “Festivals, Games, and Amusements, Ancient and Modern.” The second chapter deals with the ancient Jews. It reveals an almost perfect insight into the Jewish conception of life. Only one or two passages require amendment to make it quite perfect. I need not expound, it will suffice to quote a single passage:
“It is worthy of remark that the government he (Moses) established, the only one claiming a divine author, was founded on the most democratical and even levelling principles. It was a theocratical commonwealth, having the Deity Himself for its King. Agriculture was the basis of the Mosaic polity; all the husbandsmen were on a footing of perfect equality; riches conferred no permanent preeminence; there was neither peasantry nor nobility, unless the Levites may be considered a sort of priestly aristocracy, for they were entitled by their birth to certain privileges. But this is foreign to our purpose. The most distinguishing features of the government were the vigilant, the most anxious provisions made for the interests, enjoyments, and festivals of the nation; and that enlarged wisdom and profound knowledge of human nature, which led the inspired founder of the Hebrew commonwealth to exalt and sanctify the pleasures of the people by uniting them with religion, while he confirmed and endeared religion by combining it with all the popular gratifications.”
When Sir Walter Scott saw the verses attributed to him in Rejected Addresses, he exclaimed: “I certainly must have written this myself, though I forget on what occasion.” Some of us might say the same of certain of the phrases in the passage just quoted. The joyousness of Judaism has not been asserted with more sureness of touch by any Jewish writer than it was by Horace Smith. In another part of his book, he misconceived the attitude of the Pentateuch to the non-Jew, but otherwise he well understood Moses and the Law.
PART IV
Part IV
BYRON’S “HEBREW MELODIES”
No selection from Byron’s poetry is complete unless it contain some of the “Hebrew Melodies.” Matthew Arnold included five of the twenty-three pieces; Bulwer Lytton adopted them all. Swinburne, it is true, gave us a volume of selections without a Hebrew melody in it, but curiously enough he admits the verses beginning: “They say that Hope is happiness,” which, it would seem, were intended for the melodies, though they do not appear among them. Nathan duly adds the lines to his collection, where they form the last item of the fourth and final “Number.” The musician also includes “Francesca,” and, on the other hand, omits the “Song of Saul before his Last Battle.”
The “Melodies” first came out with settings by the Jewish musician, Isaac Nathan. The tunes, partly derived from the Synagogue, were not well chosen; hence, though the poems have survived, the settings are forgotten. In the same year (1815), John Murray also published the verses without the music. Before consenting to this step, Byron wrote to Nathan for permission to take it. He wished, he said, to oblige Mr. Murray, but “you know, Nathan, it is against all good fashion to give and take back. I therefore cannot grant what is not at my disposal.” Nathan readily consented, and the volume of poems was issued with this Preface: “The subsequent poems were written at the request of the author’s friend, the Hon. D. Kinnaird, for a selection of Hebrew melodies, and have been published with the music arranged by Mr. Braham and Mr. Nathan.” In point of fact, Braham had nothing to do with the musical arrangement. Though his name is associated with Nathan’s on the title page of the original edition, it is removed in the reprints.
TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF BYRON’S “HEBREW MELODIES”
It has been said above that the musical setting has not retained its hold on public taste. The Rev. Francis L. Cohen (in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. ix, p. 179) speaks of it as having “deservedly sunk into oblivion.” I have recently had several of them played over to me, and my verdict is the same as Mr. Cohen’s. In themselves the tunes are sometimes good enough, Maoz Zur appears among them. But the words and the airs rarely fit, and Nathan lost chances by ignoring the Sephardic music. Nathan’s contemporaries had, however, a higher opinion of the work. Perhaps it was because the composer sang his songs so well; Braham does not seem to have included them in his repertoire. But Nathan’s auditors were charmed by his renderings. Byron himself was most moved by “She Walks in Beauty”—to a modern ear Nathan’s is a commonplace and inappropriate setting—and “he would not unfrequently join in its execution.” The verses were really written for the tunes, and the poet often consulted the musician as to the style and metre of the stanzas. Nathan (in his Fugitive Pieces, 1829), records many conversations during the progress of the joint work. He tells us, for instance, how Byron refused to alter the end of “Jephtha’s Daughter.” As Nathan read the Scripture, and as many others also read it, Jephthah’s daughter did not perish as a consequence of her father’s vow; but Byron observed: “Do not seek to exhume the lady.” On another occasion, Nathan was anxious to know what biblical passages were in the poet’s mind when he wrote some of the verses, such as “O snatch’d away in beauty’s bloom!” Byron vaguely answered: “Every mind must make its own reference.” The local color of the poems, besides their substance, is in fact sometimes at fault. “Each flower the dews have lightly wet,” is not a Palestinian touch; the dews there are remarkable for their heaviness.
At this point let us for a moment interrupt Nathan’s reminiscences of Byron himself, and cite what he tells us of another famous poet’s appreciation of the “Melodies.” “When the Hebrew melodies were first published,” says Nathan, “Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, honoured me with a visit at my late residence in Poland Street. I sang several of the melodies to him—he repeated his visit, and requested that I would allow him to introduce his lady and his daughter. They came together, when I had the pleasure of singing to them ‘Jephtha’s Daughter,’ and one or two more of the favourite airs: they entered into the spirit of the music with all the true taste and feeling so peculiar to the Scotch.” Another admirer of Nathan’s singing of the melodies was Lady Caroline Lamb, herself the author of what the conventions of the period would have termed “elegant verses.” Once she wrote to Nathan: “I am, and have been, very ill; it would perhaps cure me if you could come and sing to me ‘Oh Mariamne’—now will you? I entreat you, the moment you have this letter come and see me.” The same lady translated for him a Hebrew elegy which he wrote on the death of his wife. Nathan must obviously have been an amiable companion and a charming renderer of his own music, or he would not have gained the applause of these distinguished judges.
As has been seen from the conversations recorded above, Byron and Nathan became very intimate in the course of their collaboration over the “Hebrew Melodies.” It was this work that brought them together, though they were contemporaries at Cambridge about 1805, Byron being a student at Trinity College, and Nathan a pupil at Solomon Lyon’s Jewish school in Cambridge town. But they naturally did not become acquainted then. Douglas Kinnaird (according to Mr. Prothero) introduced them to one another. Kinnaird was Byron’s banker and Cambridge friend. This mention of Mr. Prothero reminds me that in his edition of Byron’s Letters, he cites a note written by the poet to thank Nathan for a “seasonable bequest” of a parcel of matsos. Byron must have grown very attached to Nathan. An officious friend of the poet exhorted the musician to bring the melodies out in good style, so that his lordship’s name “might not suffer from scantiness in their publication.” Byron overheard the remark, and on the following evening said to Nathan: “Do not suffer that capricious fool to lead you into more expense than is absolutely necessary; bring out the book to your own taste. I have no ambition to gratify, beyond that of proving useful to you.” The poet was, indeed, so indignant that he generously offered to share in the cost of production, an offer which Nathan as generously declined.
Readers of the “Hebrew Melodies” must have been struck by the appearance of two poems based on Psalm 137. Byron first wrote: “We sate down and wept by the waters,” and later on another version beginning: “In the valley of waters we wept.” Byron himself observed the duplication, and wished to suppress the former copy. It is well that he yielded to Nathan’s importunities, for the first version is assuredly the finer. But the incident shows the close connection between the verses and the music. For Byron ended the discussion with these words: “I must confess I give a preference to my second version of this elegy; and since your music differs so widely from the former, I see no reason why it should not also make its public appearance.”
Such being the close bond between poet and musician, it is all the more regrettable that the latter did not make a more competent use of his opportunity. A better fate befell the earlier collaboration which (in 1807) resulted in Thomas Moore’s “Irish Melodies”—a title which suggested that given to Byron’s series. Stevenson served Moore better than Nathan was able to serve Byron. Yet it seems a pity to leave things in this condition. Such poems as those already alluded to—and such others as “Saul,” the “Vision of Belshazzar,” and the “Destruction of Sennacherib”—all bear the clearest marks of their design; they were written to be sung, not merely to be read or recited. Jeffrey spoke of their sweetness; Lytton of their depth of feeling; Nathan himself realized that “Oh! weep for those” reaches the acme of emotional sympathy for persecuted Israel. Here, then, there is a chance for a modern Jewish musician. S. Mandelkern, in 1890, gave us a spirited translation of the verses into the Hebrew language. Let a better artist than Nathan now translate them musically into the Hebrew spirit.