And ’twill recall the past to us
With talismanic power;
which was a true word spoken in rhyme. Nothing recalls that faded past, with its simpering sentimentality, its reposeful ethics, its shut-in standards, and its differentiation of the masculine and feminine intellects, like the yellow pages of an annual.
Tom Moore, favourite of gods and men, was singled out by publishers as the lode-star of their destinies, as the poet who could be best trusted to impart to the “Amethyst” or the “Talisman” (how like Pullman cars they sound!) that “elegant lightness” which befitted its mission in life. His accounts of the repeated attacks made on his virtue, and the repeated repulses he administered, fill by no means the least amusing pages of his journal. The first attempt was made by Orne, who, in 1826, proposed that Moore should edit a new annual on the plan of the “Souvenir”; and who assured the poet—always as deep in difficulties as Micawber—that, if the enterprise proved successful, it would yield him from five hundred to a thousand pounds a year. Moore, dazzled but not duped, declined the task; and the following summer, the engraver Heath made him a similar proposition, but on more assured terms. Heath was then preparing to launch upon the world of fashion his gorgeous “Keepsake”—“the toy-shop of literature,” Lockhart called it; and he offered Moore, first five hundred, and then seven hundred pounds a year, if he would accept the editorship. Seven hundred pounds loomed large in the poet’s fancy, but pride forbade the bargain. The author of “Lalla Rookh” could not consent to bow his laurelled head, and pilot the feeble Fatimas and Zelicas, the noble infants in coral necklets, and the still nobler ladies with pearl pendants on their brows, into the safe harbour of boudoir and drawing-room. He made this clear to Heath, who, nothing daunted, set off at once for Abbotsford, and laid his proposals at the feet of Sir Walter Scott, adding to his bribe another hundred pounds.
Scott, the last man in Christendom to have undertaken such an office, or to have succeeded in it, softened his refusal with a good-natured promise to contribute to the “Keepsake” when it was launched. He was not nervous about his literary standing, and he had no sensitive fear of lowering it by journeyman’s work. “I have neither the right nor the wish,” he wrote once to Murray, “to be considered above a common labourer in the trenches.” Moore, however, was far from sharing this modest unconcern. When Reynolds, on whom the editorship of the “Keepsake” finally devolved, asked him for some verses, he peremptorily declined. Then began a system of pursuit and escape, of assault and repulse, which casts the temptations of St. Anthony into the shade. “By day and night,” so Moore declares, Reynolds was “after” him, always increasing the magnitude of his bribe. At last he forced a check for a hundred pounds into the poet’s empty pocket (for all the world like a scene in Caran d’Ache’s “Histoire d’un Chèque”), imploring in return a hundred lines of verse. But Moore’s virtue—or his vanity—was impregnable. “The task was but light, and the money would have been convenient,” he confesses; “but I forced it back on him again. The fact is, it is my name brings these offers, and my name would suffer by accepting them.”
One might suppose that the baffled tempter would now have permanently withdrawn, save that the strength of tempters lies in their never knowing when they are beaten. Three years later, Heath renewed the attack, proposing that Moore should furnish all the letter-press, prose and verse, of the “Keepsake” for 1832, receiving in payment the generous sum of one thousand pounds. Strange to say, Moore took rather kindly to this appalling suggestion, admitted he liked it better than its predecessors, and consented to think the matter over for a fortnight. In the end, however, he adhered to his original determination to hold himself virgin of annuals; and refused the thousand pounds, which would have paid all his debts, only to fall, as fall men must, a victim to female blandishments. He was cajoled into writing some lines for the “Casket,” edited by Mrs. Blencoe; and had afterwards the pleasure of discovering that the astute lady had added to her list of attractions another old poem of his, which, to avoid sameness, she obligingly credited to Lord Byron;—enough to make that ill-used poet turn uneasily in his grave.
Charles Lamb’s detestation of annuals dates naturally enough from the hour he was first seduced into becoming a contributor; and every time he lapsed from virtue, his rage blazed out afresh. When his ill-timed sympathy for a bereaved parent—and that parent an editor—landed him in the pages of the “Gem,” he wrote to Barton in an access of ill-humour which could find no phrases sharp enough to feed it.
“I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates, the names of contributors poked up into your eyes in the first page, and whistled through all the covers of magazines, the bare-faced sort of emulation, the immodest candidateship, brought into so little space; in short I detest to appear in an annual.... Don’t think I set up for being proud on this point; I like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity as well as any one. But these pompous masquerades without masks (naked names or faces) I hate. So there’s a bit of my mind.”
“Frippery,” “frumpery,” “show and emptiness,” are the mildest epithets at Lamb’s command, as often as he laments his repeated falls from grace; and a few years before his death, when that “dumb soporifical good-for-nothingness” (curse of the Enfield lanes) weighted his pen, and dulled the lively processes of his brain, he writes with poignant melancholy:—
“I cannot scribble a long letter. I am, when not on foot, very desolate, and take no interest in anything, scarce hate anything but annuals.” It is the last expression of a just antipathy, an instinctive clinging to something which can be reasonably hated to the end.