THE HOME-LIFE OF SOME EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS.
“The happiest lives,” says Southey, speaking of his own, “are those which have the least variety.” There never was a truer saying. All the knowledge of the world involved in a stormy life, whether of vice, adventure, poverty, or political prominence, is not worth the half of the quiet happiness of a home-life and of what people lightly and mistakenly call monotony. And not only in such a life does the soul grow and the higher part of man gradually and calmly ripen, but his mind grows, his art grows, his genius widens and deepens. There are no shocks to arrest the creations of his mind; no periods of untrue, feverish, excited joy, followed by a ghastly reaction and a sad blank, to disturb the rest that alone produces lasting works. Not all poets and artists understood this, because very few were perfect men; not all common men understand it, because if their inborn propensities do not (and they do in only exceptional cases) lead them to this quiet haven, it requires severe experiences and much repentance before they can enter such a state. It is true that the works universally reckoned the greatest have been accomplished by men whose lives were spent among storms; but since the men who wrote them could so heroically overcome this inner obstacle, what magnificent things might they not have done if their lives had been differently ordained! The Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, King Lear were the offspring of volcanic natures
and volcanic circumstances: Dante and Milton were both lone men, soured and discontented, unfortunate in their domestic, and uneasy in their political, life; Shakspere was poor and despised, long a wanderer and an adventurer, and not too well mated either. And this brings us to the consideration of the more accessible and human side of their nature, one which is intensely interesting to us; for the more we read, the more we think, the more do we see how alike mankind is at all stages of its career, how little difference there is in human relations between us and our forefathers—nay, our remotest ancestors, whether in other climes or in a totally different civilization. Modes of thought have grown antiquated, systems of philosophy have crumbled, faiths have disappeared, customs have changed, but man and his passions remain the same as when he was first made. And the men who are but names to us, whose record is in forgotten tablets and antique parchments, even those whose works and sayings are known to us in part, all lived the same common life to the eye of their contemporaries, shared the same lowly necessities and the same agitating feelings, and went through the same kind of outward, prescribed life as the rind of their inner and individual one, as our modern poets, artists, savants, discoverers, and even our single selves. For ourselves, we almost invariably care more for the life of a man than for his works; and as this century has
developed a peculiar turn for biography, even that of ordinary and obscure persons—which is often none the less interesting—it has been a liking easy to satisfy. If, however, readers of poets prefer to see their ideal with their own eyes and look upon him as a demigod, biography is not a thing likely to be pleasant to them. It is often disenchanting, and many people shrink from the true if it be not likewise in accordance with their preconceived notions. The English poets of the last century were emphatically men, good specimens of their time and surroundings, by no means souls stranded on a foreign world and accidentally fitted with clogging bodies whose necessities were a vexation to the spirit.
The earliest of the rising generation of that time who came prominently before the public, and has never since lost his place, is Dean Swift. He was “of the earth, earthy,” yet not a type of very common humanity. His life was full of strange incidents and extraordinary contradictions. He was, like Milton, by inclination rather a politician than a writer, and yet his poems have outlived his pamphlets. Sometimes he was coarse in language and brutal in manner—a fashion of his age, itself a contrast to the other extreme affected by society, that of a finical and artificial delicacy. Yet he won the almost unsolicited affection of pure-minded, sensitive, well-educated women. Now he was a miser, now a prodigal; now he entered a state which so many other poets conscientiously eschewed, himself worse fitted for it than they were; and now he showed a tenderness of feeling and a nobleness of soul which seemed inconsistent with this one life-act of defiant recklessness. For it was not hypocrisy; to that
lowest of depths he, at least, did not sink. His education was desultory and his early circumstances narrow. His first situation was a poor one, though in a refined home and with a great statesman—Sir William Temple, whose reader and secretary he was. He got only twenty pounds a year, but had the chance of a troop of horse which King William offered him when he came to visit the youth’s patron at Moor Park. His mind was inflamed by the stirring scenes during which his poor mother had fled from Ireland—the times following the Revolution and the Boyne—and he vindicated and abused his native country by turns, like an indignant lover, always ready fiercely to defend her if attacked by others, yet conscious of the unhappy state into which civilization and literature had fallen, consequent on the civil troubles since Elizabeth’s Reformation. At Richmond he owed an illness to his gluttony, as he boldly if exaggeratedly confesses: “About two hours before you were born,” he writes to a lady, “I got my giddiness by eating a hundred golden pippins at a time; and when you were four years and a quarter old, bating two days, having made a fine seat about twenty miles further in Surrey, where I used to read, there I got my deafness; and these two friends have visited me, one or other, every year since, and, being old acquaintance, have now thought fit to come together.” Dryden did not recognize the young poet as a brother, and wrote him his opinion most bluntly, which Swift never forgave or forgot, and for which once or twice he revenged himself on other hapless and obscure poets who better deserved the same criticism. One of the good deeds of his youth was his giving up an appointment in the National Church, worth £100
a year, in favor of a poor struggling curate with less than half that income and eight children to support; but some of his friends thought that the loss of congenial society which this small preferment involved somewhat moved him to this renunciation. Going back to Moor Park, he made acquaintance with “Stella”—Esther Johnson—a ward of his patron, a girl of fifteen, who loved him devotedly, and whose heart he broke. He became her tutor, and his genius, his appearance, and his manner captivated the child-woman. Engaged at the time to a Miss Waryng, whom he fancifully styled “Varina,” he broke his promise to her, and in the details of their quarrel showed himself as insolent as dishonorable. At this time of his life he was, if not a handsome, at least a very striking man. He was tall and well made, with deep-blue eyes and black hair and eyebrows, the last very bushy, and his expression stern and haughty—the very hero of a young girl’s dreams. After Sir William’s death he removed Stella to the neighborhood of his own parsonage, where she lived in a little cottage with an elderly companion, and never saw Swift except in the presence of a third person. Sir Walter Scott charitably attributes his avoidance of marriage with her to prudential reasons, and in this anomalous relation to the woman he loved he sees an attempt “in the pride of talent and of wisdom … to frame a new path to happiness”; and the consequences, he continues, were such as to render him “a warning, where the various virtues with which he was endowed ought to have made him a pattern.” In one of his visits to London he met “Vanessa”—Esther Vanhomrigh—to whom he offered the same Platonic
friendship, with nearly the same results. The girl died of grief and “hope deferred.” Another version of his luckless love-affairs asserts that he ultimately married Stella, but refused to live with her, and visited her formally the same as before.
Swift’s fits of avarice were great sources of amusement to his visitors. It is said that he occasionally allowed some guests of his, ladies of high rank, a shilling each to provide for themselves when asked to dine with him. Another such droll tale, but rather illustrating the contrary disposition, is told of him by Pope: “One evening Gay and I went to see him. On our coming in, ‘Heyday, gentlemen,’ says the doctor, ‘what’s the meaning of this visit? How came you to leave all the great lords you are so fond of, to come hither and see a poor dean?’ ‘Because we would rather see you than any of them!’ ‘Ay, any one that did not know so well might believe you. But since you are come, I must get some supper for you, I suppose?’ ‘No, doctor, we have supped already.’ ‘Supped already? That’s impossible! Why, it is not eight o’clock yet. That’s very strange; but if you had not supped, I must have got something for you. Let me see; what should I have had? A couple of lobsters; ay, that would have done very well—two shillings; tarts, a shilling. But you will drink a glass of wine with me, though you supped so much before your usual time only to spare my pocket.’ ‘No; we had rather talk with you than drink with you.’ ‘But if you had supped with me, as, in all reason, you ought to have done, you must then have drunk with me. A bottle of wine, two shillings. Two and two is four, and one is five—just two and sixpence
apiece. There, Pope, there’s half a crown for you, and there’s another for you sir; for I won’t save by you, I am determined.’ In spite of everything we could say to the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money.”
Among the literary practical jokes he sometimes played was a book of prophecies he published in ridicule of a yearly almanac of predictions by one Partridge. The chief event foretold was the astrologer’s own death on the 29th of March, 1708. As soon as the date was past an elaborate account of Partridge’s last moments and sayings came out in “a letter to a person of honor.” Partridge found it hard to persuade people of his continued existence, and, having once complained to a Doctor Yalden, was repaid by the latter by an additional account of his sufferings and end by his supposed attendant physician. The poor man was driven frantic; he says the undertaker and the sexton came to him “on business”; people taunted him in the streets with not having paid his funeral expenses; his wife was distracted by being persistently addressed as Widow Partridge, and was “cited once a term into court to take out letters of administration”; while “the very reader of our parish, a good, sober, discreet person, has two or three times sent for me to come and be buried decently, or, if I have been interred in any other parish, to produce my certificate, as the act requires.” Sir Walter Scott remarks, as an odd coincidence, that in 1709 the Company of Stationers obtained an injunction against any almanac published under the name of John Partridge, as if the poor man had been dead in sad earnest.
Unsatisfactory as was the homelife
of Dean Swift, Alexander Pope’s is scarcely more pleasant to look back upon. He was never married, and his best associations with home were through his mother, whom he loved dearly. But his continual ill-health and misshapen body made him miserable, and he himself calls his life “one long disease.” Fame he won early, but it did not sweeten his spirit. His early life was spent near Windsor Forest, at the village of Binfield, where his father, a prosperous tradesman, retired with his fortune of £20,000 when the boy was twelve years old. Instead of putting this money in the bank, he kept it in the house in a strong chest, and drew upon the sum for all he wanted for many years, by which method it was considerably lessened before his son inherited it. Many of the despicable traits or foolish weaknesses of Pope’s character were due to his sufferings. He was deformed in person, and so feeble that he had to be dressed and tended like a child. He was laced in stays to keep him erect, and was so small that at table it was necessary to place him in a high chair. Dr. Johnson says that “his legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help.” He wanted help even in the night, and would often call up a servant for coffee or for pen and paper; but he was lavish of money to compensate for the trouble he gave, and a servant in Lord Oxford’s house once declared that so long as it was her business to answer the poet’s bell she would not ask for wages. In other respects, however, Pope was absurdly miserly, and one of his habits—that
of writing his verses on the backs of letters and other loose leaves and scraps—got him the nickname of “paper-sparing Pope.” It was his friend Swift who originated this saying. He was hardly thirty when his Homer had gained him an independence, and he set up his own house at Twickenham, though he still passed half his time at his parents’ home at Binfield. Twickenham had the charm of society, which to Pope was a great solace. Here he gathered a circle of admiring friends; for the place was a kind of centre of literature and fashion. Lady Mary Montagu, with whom he fell in love and then quarrelled, was his neighbor; Bolingbroke lived at Dawley, and Lord Burlington at Chiswick. Fine court people and “elegant company,” as he writes, flocked to visit him, and, though he enjoyed it, he seems to have been partly discontented with it. It was the weak protest of the higher nature, dwarfed but not crushed by the lower. His filial piety shines out as a redeeming point in his selfish, narrow, loveless life, and it never wearied of its prolonged task; for his mother died at ninety-three (in 1733), at his house, and he mourned her deeply and tenderly. Another good and innocent trait was his love of gardening, though it was but the formal, lifeless gardening of his day, when the taste prevailed for grottoes and masonry and clipped trees. He writes to Swift: “The gardens extend and flourish.… I have more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have melons and pineapples of my own growth.” To another friend he writes: “I am now as busy planting for myself as I was lately in planting for another [his mother], and I thank God for every wet day and
for every fog that gives me the headache, but prospers my works. They will, indeed, outlive me, but I am pleased to think my trees will afford fruit and shade to others when I shall want them no more.” It is said that Pope introduced the weeping willow into England. The story runs that he discovered some twigs wrapped round an article sent from abroad, and planted one of them in his garden. A willow sprang up, from which numberless slips were taken, some to be planted in England, others to be sent abroad. The old tree died in 1801. Its life seems to have been but a short one. Pope’s grotto still remains, but the rest of the garden has been sadly changed and disfigured by partition and building. He also made a tunnel under the public road, on each side of which his property lay. This reminds us of a peculiar tunnel diving under the Parade at Ramsgate, on the Channel, and leading to a grotte, or series of catacomb-like passages in the chalk cliff overlooking the sea. This is on the Pugin property, and there are like galleries, we believe, a little further, leading from the gardens of Sir Moses Montefiore.
Richmond, adjoining Twickenham, is as classic ground in its literary associations. Here Thomson, the author of The Seasons, lived for the twelve last years of his life, at a pretty cottage called Rosedale House, now much altered and enlarged. But the summer-house in the garden remains the same as it was in the poet’s time. “It is,” says Mr. Howitt, “a simple wooden construction, with a plain back and two outward-sloping sides, a bench running round it within, a roof and boarded floor, so as to be readily removable all together. It is kept well painted of a dark green, and
in it stands an old, small walnut table, with a drawer, which belonged to Thomson.” A tablet let into the front of the alcove above bears the following inaccurate inscription:
Here
Thomson sang
“The Seasons”
and their change.
His famous poem was composed several years before, and begun when he had scarcely a roof over his head. The first part, “Winter,” was written in a lodging over a bookseller’s shop, to whose master he sold the poem for three guineas. It was neglected until a clergyman, “happening to turn his eye upon it, was so delighted that he ran from place to place celebrating its excellence.” Would such simple means be enough now to herald a new author, although literature is supposed nowadays to be so much more respected and lucrative a calling than in the last century? Before this stroke of luck Thomson had been drudging as a tutor, teaching his patron’s little boy of five years old his alphabet, and wasting his Scotch university education in such dreary pursuits. He had been brought up for the Presbyterian ministry, being himself a Scotch minister’s son; but he found himself unfit for that calling, and set out from Edinburgh for London “to seek his fortune,” with a little money and some letters of recommendation tied up in his pocket-handkerchief. He had no sooner reached London than both were stolen, and this misfortune was soon followed by a worse—the death of his widowed mother. After the happy hit of his “Winter,” however, he had no more trouble; the patrons of literature took him up, his poems sold fast, and he completed his Seasons, while also
throwing off minor works, all equally admired by his contemporaries, though not equally deserving. His writings were always moral and just; he never flatters or plays with vice, and it has been said of him with truth that he never wrote a line which, dying, he would wish to blot. We think the same could be said of Wordsworth. But if private morality did not suffer through him, public laxity in the sphere of politics did; that is, he was innocently part and parcel of a corrupt system of place-giving, irrespective of fitness for the office. It was the vice of the age, alike in church and state. He held at different times two sinecureships in the gift of government—one the Secretaryship of Briefs in the Court of Chancery, the other the general surveyorship of the Leeward Islands. In his private life he was fortunate; he travelled abroad with Sir Charles Talbot’s eldest son, he visited all the people worth knowing, and was flatteringly received by all, his means were ample, yet he was not altogether happy. He was crossed in love by a Miss Young, whom he addresses in his poems as Amanda, and who cast him off for an admiral. His love, to judge by his letters, was earnest and true; writing to her during their short engagement, he says: “If I am so happy as to have your heart, I know you have spirit to maintain your choice; and it shall be the most earnest study and pursuit of my life not only to justify but to do you credit by it.… Without you there is a blank in my happiness which nothing can fill up.” His disappointment increased his melancholy, and, indeed, made his faults come into worse relief; but he lived only five years after it. Like many whose struggles have not been very hard or lengthened, he believed
too much in luck and grew careless and indolent; his ambition was to live in peace, in luxurious dreams, in easy, social fellowship. He was kind but apathetic, and as careless of himself as of others, so that, though he had money enough to live more than comfortably, he was once arrested for a debt of seventy pounds. The actor Quin, as was often the case with friends of those detained in a “sponging-house” in those rollicking days when such confinement was not supposed to entail any disgrace, went to see him and ordered supper from a tavern close by. When they had done, Quin said seriously: “It is time now, Jemmy Thomson, we should balance our accounts.” The poet, with the instinct of a debtor, supposed that here was some further demand he had forgotten; but Quin went on to say “that he owed Thomson at least £100—the lowest estimate he could put upon the pleasure he had derived from reading his works; and that, instead of leaving it to him in his will, he insisted on taking this opportunity of discharging his debt. Then, putting the money on the table, he hastily left the room.”
A ludicrous anecdote is told of Thomson, which, if not true, is typical of his undoubted indolence—namely, that he would wander about his garden with his hands in his pockets, biting off the sunny side of the peaches that grew upon the wall. He was fond of walking, however. Laziness often brings dirt in its train, and Johnson, himself no Rhadamanthus on this score, calls Thomson slovenly in his dress, while other biographers aver that he took care only of his wig. His barber at Richmond said he was very extravagant about it, and had as many as a dozen wigs. One
other fault is hinted at: his love of drink, so that the moral poet was not so exemplary in his life as in his works; but he was honest, truth-telling, a good friend and master, as well as a clever, imaginative, and cultivated writer.
It is curious to note how many poets have been bachelors. Gray, too, was one. The son of a well-to-do London citizen, he was sent to Eton and Cambridge, and at the latter place spent many years of his later life. He was emphatically a student, rather cold and fastidious in manner, but a devoted son and a true friend. His mother “cheerfully maintained him [at college] on the scanty produce of her separate industry.” He travelled with Horace Walpole, and learned modern languages in his wanderings, and was one of the first English sight-seers at Herculaneum. On his return to England his father died, and he and his mother lived at West Stoke, near Windsor, where he wrote his famous Elegy. One of his early friends, Richard West, son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, a kindred spirit, learned, young, and poetical, but indolent, writes affectionately to Gray: “Next to seeing you is the pleasure of seeing your handwriting; next to hearing you is the pleasure of hearing from you.” Soon after the premature death of his young friend Gray went to live at Cambridge, and ten years later his happy, quiet life was disturbed by the death of his mother—a blow he never recovered. Towards the close of his life, thirteen years later, he writes to a friend: “I had written to you to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little known, which is that in one’s whole life one can never have more than a single mother. You may think this obvious,
and what you call a trite observation. You are a green gosling! I was, at the same age, very near as wise as you; and yet I never discovered this with full evidence and conviction—I mean till it was too late. It is thirteen years ago, and seems but as yesterday, and every day I live it sinks deeper into my heart.”
His favorite study at Cambridge—first at Peter-house College, then at Pembroke Hall, between which places he spent nearly forty years of his life—was Greek, taking, as he said, “verse and prose together, like bread and cheese”; but his only public office was the professorship of modern history, the duties of which he was, through ill-health, unable to fulfil. The stiffness of his bearing and fastidiousness of his dress made him a favorite butt of the undergraduates, and his real attainments, intellectual as well as moral, were wholly powerless to restrain within due bounds that spirit of mischief which the gravest “dons” themselves confess to in their own far-off youth and heyday. One of these jokes was the reason of his leaving Peter-house in indignation and removing to Pembroke Hall. Gray had a nervous dread of fire, and always kept a rope-ladder by him in case of danger. One night the “boys” “placed exactly under his bedroom window a large tub full of water, and some who were in the plot raised a cry of ‘fire’ at his door. Gray, terrified by the report of the calamity he most dreaded, rushed from his bed, threw himself hastily out of the window with his rope-ladder, and descended exactly into the tub.” The two bars to which he fastened his ladder are still to be seen at the window of the chambers he used. But in later years, when the fame
of his scholarship was greater, the men crowded to see him when he walked out. “Intelligence ran from college to college, and the tables in the different halls, if it happened to be the hour of dinner, were thinned by the desertion of young men thronging to behold him.” He is said to have been thoroughly versed in almost every branch of knowledge then cultivated. Besides the classics, European modern history and languages, painting, architecture, and gardening occupied his thoughts, and the more modern studies of criticism, political economy, and archæology were not forgotten. Metaphysics also were familiar to him. His taste in natural scenery was of a noble kind; mountains and heaths were his favorites. When in the Scottish Highlands, he writes to a friend: “A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen that have not been among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell grottoes, and Chinese rails.”
In that age of artificiality this was a great step forward. Men affected to be appalled by the savageness of life away from the capital; they magnified the fleeting, ignoble gossip of their taverns and coffee-houses into affairs of sublime importance. A country-house to them was a doll’s house, a toy near London, tricked out with fantastic imitations of foreign curiosities; a full, healthy, natural life was their horror. But Gray, though of this age, was not of this clique; he lived outside the world of fashion and coffee-houses; his travels, and especially his studies, gave his mind a wider range. This cannot be said of poor, jovial, unlucky Goldsmith, the jest of Fortune, the Micawber among
poets. There is a wonderful disparity between his miserable, shiftless life and the fame of his works, both prose and poetry. He is one of the most popular of poets and novelists, and his life was one of the most checkered, though uniformly unlucky, that ever were. Before he was twenty he wrote street ballads to earn bread, but was ready to share his pittance with any one poorer than himself. One winter night he gave the blankets off his bed to a shivering creature, and “crept into the ticking to shelter himself from the cold.” Never did avarice come near his heart; indeed, his indiscriminate charity often brought him into sore straits. He was for two or three years a sizar at Dublin University—a sad position since the old generous days when the church protected and encouraged poor students, and foundations that still remain were made for their support. They indeed remain, but the spirit of charity and Christian brotherhood that inspired them has gone, and poor scholars find the universities as worldly a place as any other, and have to go through a fiery ordeal to gain knowledge. At last Goldsmith, goaded by the contempt and insults he met with, even from his tutor, who once knocked him down, ran away to Cork with one shilling in his pocket. He once told Sir Joshua Reynolds “that of all the exquisite meals he had ever tasted, the most delicious was a handful of gray peas given him by a girl, after twenty-four hours’ fasting.” Refusing to become a clergyman, for which career he felt unfitted, he studied medicine with small success, though he managed to get a degree after such a tour through Europe as reminds one of the mediæval students’ doings. He started with
a guinea in his pocket, one shirt to his back, and a flute in his hand. He led village dances on the green, and beguiled the evening hours of the gossips at the village inn, a barn being often his sleeping-place. But he had also another resource—the mediæval one of supporting theses before the learned faculties of foreign universities. Having thus, as it was laughingly said by his friends, “disputed” his way through Europe, he came back to London, still a beggar, and found a wretched home among beggars in Axe Lane. How often must that tragedy of disenchantment have been played out before the eyes of those human moths who come to London and other great centres “to seek their fortune”! For one that swims a thousand sink, and each success is built upon the accumulated failures of others perhaps no less intellectually endowed. The weary tramp after situations, the timid offer of services that no one wants, the despairing hint that the lowest wages will be more than welcome, the cold dissympathy that need and shabby clothes almost always involve, and all this repeated two, three, four times a year, is enough to break the spirit of any man not endowed with the eagle’s courage. There is hardly much to choose between the miserable avocations which poor Goldsmith was driven to take up to keep himself from starving. Once he was a chemist’s assistant in Monument Yard; then a poor doctor on his own account, in the still poorer neighborhood of Southwark; then, worse than all, an usher (or under-master) in a small school. “I was up early and late; I was browbeat by the master, hated for my ugly face by the mistress, worried by the boys within, and never permitted to stir out to
meet civility abroad.” Then he turned to that most uncertain yet fascinating pursuit—letters, his old love. It barely kept him alive; he was dunned and worried; lived in a wretched attic, and wore clothes too shabby to go out in, except after nightfall. In these days of brilliant gas-lit shops and streets even that comfort would have been denied him. He was a bookseller’s hack, and wrote to order, and was naturally delighted at the chance of an appointment as surgeon on the coast of Coromandel; but this fell through, unluckily for himself, though not for posterity. Goldsmith had a dog, to whom he taught simple tricks, which were as great a vexation to the poor animal as his own troubles were to the master (selfish human beings, how little we follow the lesson. ‘Put yourself in his place’!), and this faithful companion was a great solace to him.
The way in which the Vicar of Wakefield was given to the world is too well known to be more than glanced at. Version and counterversion of the scene have been given by Johnson and others; it is pitiful to think that such a book should have depended upon the chance of his being able to get out to offer it to a publisher. While Goldsmith sat a prisoner in his own room (it is still shown at Islington, London) Johnson took the treasure and sold it for sixty pounds. It is to be hoped the author changed his landlady after her behavior to him in arresting him for his rent; but perhaps she had some provocation, for when he had money he did not always put it to the wisest purposes. Others, too, must have been either foolishly trusting or deliberately kind; for he owed £2,000 at his death, one of the bills being the
famous one at his tailor’s for the plum-colored coat made in elaborate fashion. “Was ever poet so trusted before?” exclaimed his friend Johnson. Among the friends who mourned his premature death (he was only forty-five) were some poor wretches whom out of his own poverty he had helped and befriended.
The year Goldsmith died, 1774, Robert Southey was born, a man whose life was in all respects different—shielded, domestic, happy, and uneventful. “I have lived in the sunshine,” he says of himself. He worked hard and was thoroughly happy, singularly unambitious, but imaginative and enthusiastic. He was born at Bristol, and his early school-life and holidays with an eccentric aunt were among his most cheerful reminiscences. This old lady, Miss Tyler, was one of those excruciatingly neat housekeepers who make every one about them uncomfortable. “I have seen her,” writes her nephew, “order the teakettle to be emptied and refilled because some one had passed across the hearth while it was on the fire preparing for her breakfast. She had a cup once buried for six weeks to purify it from the lips of one she accounted unclean. All who were not her favorites were included in that class. A chair in which an unclean person had sat was put out in the garden to be aired; and I never saw her more annoyed than on one occasion when a man who called on business seated himself in her own chair; how the cushion was ever again to be rendered fit for her use she knew not.” Dust was of course her pet aversion, and she took more precautions against it “than would have been needful against the plague in an infected city.” Southey was adoringly fond of his mother, from
whom he inherited “that alertness of mind and quickness of apprehension without which it would have been impossible for me to have undertaken half of what I have performed. God never blessed a human creature with a more cheerful disposition, a more generous spirit, a sweeter temper, or a tenderer heart.” In all this the happy poet was her counterpart. He went to Westminster School, then to Balliol College, Oxford, but distinguished himself rather by feats of physical prowess than by hard study. He learned to row and swim, and lived a healthy out-door life, as he had done in his childhood when he roamed the country round Bristol with Shad, his aunt’s servant-boy. Vice and dissipation had no attractions for him, though there were but too many opportunities for self-indulgence at the university. At nineteen he wrote his first epic poem, “Joan of Arc.” He was an enthusiastic republican, and one of the most eager supporters of the Pantisocracy scheme—a social Utopia, to be realized by a handful of young emigrants, who were to choose some tract of virgin soil in America, and support themselves by manual labor, while their wives would undertake all domestic duties. Their earnings were to go to a common fund, and their leisure hours be spent in intellectual exercises. Of course the pleasant dream faded away, and the group of destined companions dispersed; but three of the enthusiasts married three sisters at Bath, and some bond of the old time was kept up for many years by this connection. Southey’s marriage was not made public till the return of the bridegroom from Portugal, where he had promised to accompany his uncle, on the very day his marriage took place. His bride kept her maiden
name and wore her wedding-ring hung by a ribbon round her neck until her husband came back, when she went with him to London, where they bravely lived and struggled on a narrow and uncertain income. He too, like many other poets, had refused, from conscientious motives, the prospect of a comfortable provision in the National Church, and preferred to live by his own exertions. The consequence was that he too often lived from hand to mouth; yet his home circumstances were so bright that he never seems to have been in the same gloomy “circle” of the literary “Inferno” as most of his brothers. When he was thirty he settled at Greta Hall, Keswick, in the Lake country, among the mountains, and there, incessantly at work with his pen, he refused many a lucrative offer which would have drawn him from nature to the distractions of London life. He was as fond a father as he had been a son, romped and played with his children, wrote nonsense verses for them, like poor Thackeray, and yet never neglected their more serious education. “Every house,” he used to say, “should have in it a baby of six months and a kitten rising six weeks.” Once, when invited to London by some great man, he writes: “Oh! dear, oh! dear, there’s such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library; with a little girl climbing up to my neck and saying, ‘Don’t go to London, papa; you must stay with Edith’; and a little boy whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, jackasses, etc., before he can articulate a word of his own—there is such a comfort in all these things that transportation to London seems a heavier punishment than
any sins of mine deserve.” During an absence in Edinburgh he writes to his wife: “What I have now to say to you is that, having been eight days from home, with as little discomfort as a man can reasonably expect, I have yet felt so little comfortable, so great a sense of solitariness, and so many homeward yearnings, that certainly I will not go to Lisbon without you—a resolution which, if your feelings be at all like mine, will not displease you.” His happy life was as regular as clock-work: drudging, money-making work, reading, siesta, poetry, meals, long rambles, each had its appointed time, and his days were as full as they were happy. The domestic propensities which worldly men called his ruin and the marrers of his prospects of rank and wealth, were in reality what inspired his poetry, and thus made him immortal. His poetry belongs to our century, yet such a stride have we made—we will not say forward in the sense of greater excellence, but in that of utter difference—since his time that we venture to include him in this sketch, reckoning by his birth and early struggles, which after all made the man, and thus moulded the poet.
Melancholy, unhappy, restless Cowper was, with all the love and care he elicited from good and devoted women, a great contrast to Southey. He was terribly sensitive, clinging, loving, but somewhat weak. The picture of the boy of six years old playing with his young mother’s dress, pricking the pattern of her gown into paper with a pin, as he describes himself in the pathetic poem on the receipt of his mother’s picture, is a touching and suggestive one; for his mother died when he was a child, and he never forgot her for the fifty remaining years of
his lonely life. This portrait was sent to him by a cousin in his old age, and he writes thus in answer to the gift: “Every creature that bears any affinity to my mother is dear to me, and you, the daughter of her brother, are but one remove distant from her.… I kissed it [the picture] and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and of course the first on which I open my eyes in the morning.… I remember a multitude of the maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond expression.” Cowper’s house at Olney was not a cheerful one, and his frequent fits of madness, or monomania, lasted sometimes for months, and even years. They took the shape of religious despondency about his soul; he was “only in despair,” he said, and often attempted to kill himself. His second mother, who devoted her life to him, the widow of a clergyman, Mrs. Unwin, saved his life many times over; he could not bear any other companion, yet it was part of his delusion that she disliked him. Every one has heard of his fondness for his hares, the first of which came to him as a chance gift, to save the creature from being killed by a negligent little boy; so at one time he had a large “happy family” gathered around him, whose hutches, cages, and boxes he amused himself by making. Some of these contrivances were novel and ingenious. Three hares, five rabbits, two guinea-pigs, a magpie, a starling, a jay, two gold-finches, two canaries, two dogs, a squirrel, and a number of pigeons gave him plenty to do, besides his garden, of which he was equally fond. When he had succeeded in himself making two glass frames for his pines, he playfully wrote:
“A Chinese of ten times my fortune would avail himself of such an opportunity without scruple; and why should not I, who want money as much as any mandarin in China?” Cowper’s friends all had something to do with his poetry. His poem “To Mary,” in which he notes the constant clicking of her knitting-needles, was a tribute to Mrs. Unwin, and many of his early verses were suggested by her; the “Task” and “John Gilpin’s Ride” (written, he says, in the saddest mood, and as a forced antidote to that sadness) were subjects given him by Lady Austen, a warm-hearted, impulsive woman; and his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and her sister Theodora, his only love, from whom he was parted in his first youth, and who remained single for his sake, inspired some of his tenderest and most delicate verses.
Lady Hesketh, writing to Theodora from Olney, gives the following sketch of their friend’s life in its more tranquil and happy aspect: “Our friend delights in a large table and a large chair. There are two of the latter comforts in the parlor. I am sorry to say that he and I always spread ourselves out on them, leaving poor Mrs. Unwin to find all the comfort she can in a small one, half as high again as ours and considerably harder than marble.… Her constant employment is knitting stockings, which she does
with the finest needles I ever saw, and very nice they are—the stockings, I mean. Our cousin has not for many years worn any others than those of her manufacture. She knits silk, cotton, and worsted. She sits knitting on one side of the table, in her spectacles, and he on the other side reading to her (when he is not employed in writing), in his. In winter his morning studies are always carried on in a room by himself; but as his evenings are spent in winter in transcribing, he usually, I find, does it vis-à-vis Mrs. Unwin. At this time of the year he always writes in the garden, in what he calls his boudoir. This is in the garden. It has a door and a window, just holds a small table with a desk and two chairs, but, though there are two chairs, and two persons might be contained therein, it would be with a degree of difficulty. For this cause, as I make a point of not disturbing a poet in his retreat, I go not there.”
So the dreamy, strange, yet often too realistic life of Cowper passed away toward the last decade of the eighteenth century, and, like most poets, he has left behind him the immortalized memory of the pure and noble women who loved him with the love of a guardian angel. No man ever needed it more, and in this case indeed God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.