Transcribed from the 1907 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
IMMORTAL MEMORIES
By
CLEMENT SHORTER
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON MCMVII
Butler and Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
PREFATORY
The following addresses were delivered at the request of various literary societies and commemorative committees. They amused me to write, and they apparently interested the audiences for which they were primarily intended. Perhaps they do not bear an appearance in print. But they are not for my brother-journalists to read nor for the judicious men of letters. I prefer to think that they are intended solely for those whom Hazlitt styled “sensible people.” Hazlitt said that “the most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world.” I am hoping that these will buy my book and that some of them will like it.
It is recorded by Sir Henry Taylor of Samuel Rogers that when he wrote that very indifferent poem, Italy, he said, “I will make people buy. Turner shall illustrate my verse.” It is of no importance that the biographer of Rogers tells
us that the poet first made the artist known to the world by these illustrations. Taylor’s story is a good one, and the moral worth taking to heart. The late Lord Acton, most learned and most accomplished of men, wrote out a list of the hundred best books as he considered them to be. They were printed in a popular magazine. They naturally excited much interest. I have rescued them from the pages of the Pall Mall Magazine. Those who will not buy my book for its seven other essays may do so on account of Lord Acton’s list of books being here first preserved “between boards.” I shall be equally well pleased.
CLEMENT SHORTER.
Great Missenden,
Bucks.
I. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON
A toast proposed at the Johnson Birthday Celebration held at the Three Crowns Inn, Lichfield, in September, 1906.
In rising to propose this toast I cannot ignore what must be in many of your minds, the recollection that last year it was submitted by a very dear friend of my own, who, alas! has now gone to his rest, I mean Dr. Richard Garnett. [3] Many of you who heard him in this place will recall, with kindly memories, that venerable scholar. I am one of those who, in the interval have stood
beside his open grave; and I know you will permit me to testify here to the fact that rarely has such brilliant scholarship been combined with so kindly a nature, and with so much generosity to other workers in the literary field. One may sigh that it is not possible to perpetuate for all time for the benefit of others the vast mass of learning which such men as Dr. Garnett are able to accumulate. One may lament even more that one is not able to present in some concrete form, as an example to those who follow, his fine qualities of heart and mind—his generous faculty for ‘helping lame dogs over stiles.’
Dr. Garnett had not only a splendid erudition that specially qualified him for proposing this toast, he had also what many of you may think an equally exceptional qualification—he was a native of Lichfield; he was born in this fine city. As a Londoner—like Boswell when charged with the crime of being a Scotsman I may say that I cannot help it—I suppose I should come to you with hesitating footsteps. Perhaps it was rash of me to come at all, in spite of an invitation so kindly worded. Yet how gladly does any lover, not only of Dr. Johnson, but of all good literature,
come to Lichfield. Four cathedral cities of our land stand forth in my mind with a certain magnetic power to draw even the most humble lover of books towards them—Oxford, Bath, Norwich, Lichfield, these four and no others. Oxford we all love and revere as the nourishing mother of so many famous men. Here we naturally recall Dr. Johnson’s love of it—his defence of it against all comers. The glamour of Oxford and the memory of the great men who from age to age have walked its streets and quadrangles, is with us upon every visit. Bath again has noble memories. Upon house after house in that fine city is inscribed the fact that it was at one time the home of a famous man or woman of the past. Through its streets many of our great imaginative writers have strolled, and those streets have been immortalized in the pages of several great novelists, notably of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
For the City of Norwich I have a particular affection, as for long the home in quite separate epochs of Sir Thomas Browne and of George Borrow. I recall that in the reign of one of its Bishops—the father of Dean Stanley—there
was a literary circle of striking character, that men and women of intellect met in the episcopal palace to discuss all ‘obstinate questionings.’
But if he were asked to choose between the golden age of Bath, of Norwich, or of Lichfield, I am sure that any man who knew his books would give the palm to Lichfield, and would recall that period in the life of Lichfield when Dr. Seward resided in the Bishop’s Palace, with his two daughters, and when they were there entertaining so many famous friends. I saw the other day the statement that Anna Seward’s name was unknown to the present generation. Now I have her works in nine volumes [6]; I have read them, and I doubt not but that there are many more who have done the same. Sir Walter Scott’s friendship would alone preserve her memory if every line she wrote
deserved to be forgotten as is too readily assumed. Scott, indeed, professed admiration for her verse, and a yet greater poet, Wordsworth, wrote in praise of two fine lines at the close of one of her sonnets, that entitled ‘Invitation to a Friend,’ lines which I believe present the first appearance in English poetry of the form of blank verse immortalized by Tennyson.
Come, that I may not hear the winds of night,
Nor count the heavy eave-drops as they fall.
“You have well criticized the poetic powers of this lady,” says Wordsworth, “but, after all, her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of Mrs. Barbauld, who, with much higher powers of mind, was spoiled as a poetess by being a dissenter.”
Less, however, can be said for her poetry to-day than for her capacity as a letter writer. A letter writing faculty has immortalized more than one English author, Horace Walpole for example, who had this in common with Anna Seward, that he had the bad taste not to like Dr. Johnson.
Sooner or later there will be a reprint of a selection of Anna Seward’s correspondence; you will find in it a picture of country life in the
middle of the eighteenth century—and by that I mean Lichfield life—that is quite unsurpassed. Anna Seward, her friends and her enemies, stand before us in very marked outline. As with Walpole also, she must have written with an eye to publication. Veracity was not her strong point, but her literary faculty was very marked indeed. Those who have read the letters that treat of her sister’s betrothal and death, for example, will not easily forget them. The accepted lover, you remember, was a Mr. Porter, a son of the widow whom Johnson married; and Sarah Seward, aged only eighteen, died soon after her betrothal to him. That is but one of a thousand episodes in the world into which we are introduced in these pages. [8]
The Bishop’s Palace was the scene of brilliant symposiums. There one might have met Erasmus Darwin of the Botanic Garden, whose fame has been somewhat dulled by the extraordinary genius of his grandson. There also came Richard Edgeworth, the father of Maria, whose Castle Rackrent and The Absentee are still among the most delightful books that we read; and there were the two young girls, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, who were destined in succession to become Richard Edgeworth’s wives. There, above all, was Thomas Day, the author of Sanford and Merton, a book which delighted many of us when we were
young, and which I imagine with all its priggishness will always survive as a classic for children. There, for a short time, came Major André, betrothed to Honora Sneyd, but destined to die so tragically in the American War of Independence. It is to Miss Seward’s malicious talent as a letter writer that we owe the exceedingly picturesque account of Day’s efforts to obtain a wife upon a particular pattern, his selection of Sabrina Sidney, whom he prepared for that high destiny by sending her to a boarding school until she was of the right age—his lessons in stoicism—his disappointment because she screamed when he fired pistols at her petticoats, and yelled when he dropped melted sealing-wax on her bare arms; it is a tragi-comic picture, and one is glad that Sabrina married some other man than her exacting guardian. But we would not miss Miss Seward’s racy stories for anything, nor ignore her many letters with their revelation of the glories of old-time Lichfield, and of those ‘lunar meetings’ at which the wise ones foregathered. Now and again these worthies burst into sarcasm at one another’s expense, as when Darwin satirizes the publication
of Mr. Seward’s edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Dr. Johnson’s edition of Shakspere
From Lichfield famed two giant critics come,
Tremble, ye Poets! hear them! Fe, Fo, Fum!
By Seward’s arm the mangled Beaumont bled,
And Johnson grinds poor Shakspere’s bones for bread.
But perhaps after all, if we eliminate Dr. Johnson, the lover of letters gives the second place, not to Miss Seward and her circle, but to David Garrick. Lichfield contains more than one memento of that great man. The actor’s art is a poor sort of thing as a rule. Johnson, in his tarter moments, expresses this attitude, as when he talked of Garrick as a man who exhibited himself for a shilling, when he called him ‘a futile fellow,’ and implied that it was very unworthy of Lord Campden to have made much of the actor and to have ignored so distinguished a writer as Goldsmith, when thrown into the company of both. Still undoubtedly Johnson’s last word upon Garrick is the best—‘his death has eclipsed the gaiety of nations and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasure.’ We who live more than a hundred years later are able to recognize that Garrick has been the one
great actor from that age to this. As a rule the mummers are mimics and little more, and generations go on, giving them their brief but glorious hour of fame, and then leaving them as mere names in the history of the stage. Garrick was preserved from this fate, not only by the circumstance that he had an army of distinguished literary friends, but by his interesting personality and by his own writings. Many lines of his plays and prologues have become part of current speech. Moreover his must have been a great personality, as those of us who have met Sir Henry Irving in these latter days have realized that his was also a great personality. It is fitting, therefore, that these two great actors, the most famous of an interesting, if not always an heroic profession, should lie side by side in Westminster Abbey.
I now come to my toast “The memory of Dr. Johnson.” After all, Johnson was the greatest of all Lichfieldians, and one of the great men of his own and of all ages. We may talk about him and praise him because we shall be the better for so doing, but we shall certainly say nothing new. One or two points, however, seem to me worthy of emphasis in this company of Johnsonians.
I think we should resent two popular fallacies which you will not hear from literary students, but only from one whom it is convenient to call “the man in the street.” The first is, that we should know nothing about Johnson if it were not for Boswell’s famous life, and the second that Johnson the author is dead, and that our great hero only lives as a brilliant conversationalist in the pages of Boswell and others. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is the greatest biography in the English language; we all admit that. It is crowded with incident and anecdote. Neither Walter Scott nor Rousseau, each of whom has had an equal number of pages devoted to his personality, lives so distinctly for future ages as does Johnson in the pages of Boswell. Understanding all this, we are entitled to ask ourselves what we should have thought of Dr. Johnson had there been no Boswell; and to this question I do not hesitate to answer that we should have loved him as much as ever, and that there would still have been a mass of material with the true Boswellian flavour. He would not have made an appeal to so large a public, but some ingenious person
would have drawn together all the anecdotes, all the epigrams, all the touches of that fine humanity, and given us from these various sources an amalgam of Johnson, that every bookman at least would have desired to read and study. In Fanny Burney’s Letters and Diaries the presentation of Johnson is delightful. I wonder very much that all the Johnson fragments that Miss Burney provides have not been published separately. Then Mrs. Thrale has chatted about Johnson copiously in her “Anecdotes,” and these pleasant stories have been reprinted again and again for the curious. I recall many other sources of information about the great man and his wonderful talk—by Miss Hawkins, Miss Reynolds, Miss Hannah More for example—and many of you who have Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s Johnson Miscellanies have these in a pleasantly acceptable form.
My second point is concerned with Dr. Johnson’s position apart from all this fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettable epigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr. Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is room for some disagreement as to his position as a poet.
On that question of poetry unanimity is ever hard to seek; so many mistake rhetoric for poetry. Only twice at the most, it seems to me, does Dr. Johnson reach anything in the shape of real inspiration in his many poems, [15] although it must be admitted that earlier generations admired them greatly. To have been praised ardently by Sir Walter Scott, by Byron, and by Tennyson should seem sufficient to demonstrate that he was a poet, were it not that, as I could prove if time allowed, poets are almost invariably bad critics of poetry. Sir Walter Scott read The Vanity of Human Wishes with “a choking sensation in the throat,” and declared that he had more pleasure in reading that and Johnson’s other long poem, London, than any other poetic compositions he could mention. But then I think it was always the sentiment in verse, and not its quality, that attracted Scott. Byron also declared that The Vanity of Human Wishes was “a great poem.”
Certainly these poems are quotable poems. Who does not recall the line about “surveying mankind from China to Peru,” or think, as Johnson taught us, to:—
Mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.
Or remember his epitaph on one who:—
Left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.
One line—“Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage” has done duty again and again. I might quote a hundred such examples to show Johnson, whatever his qualities as a poet, is very much alive indeed in his verse. It is, however, as a great prose writer, that I prefer to consider him. Here he is certainly one of the most permanent forces in our literature. Rasselas, for example, while never ranking with us moderns quite so high as it did with the excellent Miss Jenkins in Cranford, is a never failing delight. So far from being a dead book, is there a young man or a young woman setting out in the world of to-day, aspiring to an all-round literary cultivation, who
is not required to know it? It has been republished continually. What novelist of our time would not give much to have so splendid a public recognition as was provided when Lord Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, after the Abyssinian Expedition, pictured in the House of Commons “the elephants of Asia dragging the artillery of Europe over the mountains of Rasselas.”
Equally in evidence are those wonderful Lives of The Poets which Johnson did not complete until he was seventy-two years of age, literary efforts which have always seemed to me to be an encouraging demonstration that we should never allow ourselves to grow old. Many of these ‘Lives’ are very beautiful. They are all suggestive. Only the other day I read them again in the fine new edition that was prepared by that staunch Johnsonian, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. The greatest English critic of these latter days, Mr. Matthew Arnold, showed his appreciation by making a selection from them for popular use. From age to age every man with the smallest profession of interest in literature will study them. Of how many books can this be said?
Greatest of all was Johnson as a writer in his least premeditated work, his Prayers and Meditations. They take rank in my mind with the very best things of their kind, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, The Confessions of Rousseau, and similar books. They are healthier than any of their rivals. William Cowper, that always fascinating poet and beautiful letter writer, more than once disparaged Johnson in this connexion. Cowper said that he would like to have “dusted Johnson’s jacket until his pension rattled in his pocket,” for what he had said about Milton. He read some extracts, after Johnson’s death, from the Meditations, and wrote contemptuously of them. [18] But if Cowper had always possessed, in addition to his
fascinating other-worldliness the healthy worldliness of Dr. Johnson, perhaps we should all have been the happier. To me that collection of Prayers and Meditations seems one of the most helpful books that I have ever read, and I am surprised that it is not constantly reprinted in a handy form. [19] It is a valuable inspiration to men to keep up their spirits under adverse conditions, to conquer the weaknesses of their natures; not in the stifling manner of Thomas à Kempis, but in a breezy, robust way. Yes, I think that these three works, Rasselas, The Lives of the Poets, and the Prayers and Meditations, make it quite clear that Johnson still holds his place as one of our greatest writers, even if we were not familiar with his many delightful letters, and had not read his Rambler—which his old enemy, Miss Anna Seward, insisted was far better than Addison’s Spectator.
All this is only to say that we cannot have too much of Dr. Johnson. The advantage of such a gathering as this is that it helps us to keep that
fact alive. Moreover, I feel that it is a good thing if we can hearten those who have devoted themselves to laborious research connected with such matters. Take, for example, the work of Dr. Birkbeck Hill: his many volumes are a delight to the Johnson student. I knew Dr. Hill very well, and I have often felt that his work did not receive half the encouragement that it deserved. We hear sometimes, at least in London, of authors who advertise themselves. I rather fancy that all such advertisement is monopolized by the novelist, and that the newspapers do not trouble themselves very much about literary men who work in other fields than that of fiction. Fiction has much to be said for it, but as a rule it reaps its reward very promptly, both in finance and in fame. No such rewards come to the writer of biography, to the writer of history, to the literary editor. Dr. Hill’s beautiful edition of Boswell’s Life, with all its fascinating annotation, did not reach a second edition in his lifetime. I am afraid that the sum that he made out of it, or that his publishers made out of it, would seem a very poor reward indeed when gauged by the results in other fields of labour.
Within the past few weeks I have had the privilege of reading a book that continues these researches. Mr. Aleyn Lyell Reade has published a handsome tome, which he has privately printed, entitled Dr. Johnson’s Ancestry: His Kinsfolk and Family Connexions. I am glad to hear that the Johnson Museum has purchased a copy, for such a work deserves every encouragement. The author must have spent hundreds of pounds, without the faintest possibility of obtaining either fame or money from the transaction. He seems to have employed copyists in every town in Staffordshire, to copy wills, registers of births and deaths, and kindred records from the past. Now Dr. Birkbeck Hill could not have afforded to do this; he was by no means a rich man. Mr. Reade has clearly been able to spare no expense, with the result that here are many interesting facts corrective of earlier students. The whole is a valuable record of the ancestry of Dr. Johnson. It shows clearly that whereas Dr. Johnson thought very little of his ancestry, and scarcely knew anything of his grandfather on the paternal or the maternal side, he really sprang from a very remarkable
stock, notably on the maternal side; and that his mother’s family, the Fords, had among their connexions all kinds of fairly prosperous people, clergymen, officials, professional men as well as sturdy yeomen. These ancestors of Dr. Johnson did not help him much to push his way in the world. Of some of them he had scarcely heard. All the same it is of great interest to us to know this; it in a manner explains him. That before Samuel Johnson was born, one of his family had been Lord Mayor of London, another a Sheriff, that they had been associated in various ways, not only with the city of his birth, but also with the great city which Johnson came to love so much, is to let in a flood of fresh light upon our hero. My time does not permit me to do more than make a passing reference to this book, but I should like to offer here a word of thanks to its author for his marvellous industry, and a word of congratulation to him for the extraordinary success that has accrued to his researches.
I mention Mr. Reade’s book because it is full of Lichfield names and Lichfield associations, and it is with Dr. Johnson’s life-long connexion with
Lichfield that all of us are thinking to-night. Now here I may say, without any danger of being challenged by some visitor who has the misfortune not to be a citizen of Lichfield—you who are will not wish to challenge me—that this city has distinguished itself in quite an unique way. I do not believe that it can be found that any other town or city of England—I will not say of Scotland or of Ireland—has done honour to a literary son in the same substantial measure that Lichfield has done honour to Samuel Johnson. The peculiar glory of the deed is that it was done to the living Johnson, not coming, as so many honours do, too late for a man to find pleasure in the recognition. We know that—
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
But I doubt whether in the whole history of literature in England it can be found that any other purely literary man has received in his lifetime so substantial a mark of esteem from the city which gave him birth, as Johnson did when your Corporation, in 1767, “at a common-hall of the bailiffs and citizens, without any
solicitation,” presented him with the ninety-nine years’ lease of the house in which he was born. Your citizens not only did that for Johnson, but they gave him other marks of their esteem. He writes from Lichfield to Sir Joshua Reynolds to express his pleasure that his portrait has been “much visited and much admired.” “Every man,” he adds, “has a lurking desire to appear considerable in his native place.” Then we all remember Boswell’s naïve confession that his pleasure at finding his hero so much beloved led him, when the pair arrived at this very hostelry, to imbibe too much of the famous Lichfield ale. If Boswell wished, as he says, to offer incense to the spirit of the place, how much more may we desire to do so to-night, when exactly 125 years have passed, and his hero is now more than ever recognized as a king of men.
I do not suggest that we should honour Johnson in quite the same way that Boswell did. This is a more abstemious age. But we must drink to his memory all the same. Think of it. A century and a quarter have passed since that memorable evening at the Three Crowns, when Johnson and Boswell thus
foregathered in this very room. You recall the journey from Birmingham of the two companions. “We are getting out of a state of death,” the Doctor said with relief, as he approached his native city, feeling all the magic and invigoration that is said to come to those who in later years return to “calf-land.” Then how good he was to an old schoolfellow who called upon him here. The fact that this man had failed in the battle of life while Johnson had succeeded, only made the Doctor the kinder. I know of no more human picture than that—“A Mr. Jackson,” as he is called by Boswell, “in his coarse grey coat,” obviously very poor, and as Boswell suggests, “dull and untaught.” The “great Cham of Literature” listens patiently as the worthy Jackson tells his troubles, so much more patiently than he would have listened to one of the famous men of his Club in London, and the hero-worshipping Boswell drinks his deep potations, but never neglects to take notes the while. Of Boswell one remembers further that Johnson had told Wilkes that he had brought him to Lichfield, “my native city,” “that he might see for once real Civility—for
you know he lives among savages in Scotland, and among rakes in London.” All good stories are worth hearing again and again, and so I offer an apology for recalling the picture to your mind at this time and in this place.
Alas! I have not the gift of the worldfamed Lord Verulam, who, as Francis Bacon, sat in the House of Commons. The members, we are told, so delighted in his oratory that when he rose to speak they “were fearful lest he should make an end.” I am making an end. Johnson then was not only a great writer, a conversationalist so unique that his sayings have passed more into current speech than those of any other Englishman, but he was also a great moralist—a superb inspiration to a better life. We should not love Johnson so much were he not presented to us as a man of many weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, and therefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters of whom we may read. Johnson striving to methodize his life, to fight against sloth and all the minor vices to which he was prone, is the Johnson whom some of us prefer to keep ever in mind. “Here was,” I quote
Carlyle, “a strong and noble man, one of our great English souls.” I love him best in his book called Prayers and Meditations, where we know him as we know scarcely any other Englishman, for the good, upright fighter in this by no means easy battle of life. It is as such a fighter that we think of him to-night. Reading the account of his battles may help us to fight ours.
Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening. Let us drink in solemn silence, upstanding, “The Immortal Memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson.”
II. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM COWPER
An address entitled ‘The Sanity of Cowper,’ delivered at the Centenary Celebration at Olney, Bucks, on the occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of the poet William Cowper, April 25, 1900.
I owe some apology for coming down to Olney to take part in what I believe is a purely local celebration, in which no other Londoner, as far as I know, has been asked to take part. I am here not because I profess any special qualification to speak about Cowper, in the town with which his name is so pleasantly associated, but because Mr. Mackay, [31] the son-in-law of your Vicar, has written a book about the Brontës, and I have done likewise, and he asked me to come.
This common interest has little, you will say, to do with the Poet of Olney. Between Cowper and Charlotte Brontë there were, however, not a few points of likeness or at least of contrast. Both were the children of country clergymen; both lived lives of singular and, indeed, unusual strenuousness; both were the very epitome of a strong Protestantism; and yet both—such is the inevitable toleration of genius—were drawn in an unusual manner to attachment to friends of the Roman Catholic Church—Cowper to Lady Throckmorton, who copied out some of his translations from Homer for him, assisted by her father-confessor, Dr. Gregson, and Miss Brontë to her Professor, M. Héger, the man in the whole world whom she most revered. Under circumstances of peculiar depression both these great Protestant writers went further on occasion than their Protestant friends would have approved, Cowper to contemplate—so he assures us in one of his letters—the entering a French monastery, and Miss Brontë actually to kneel in the Confessional in a Brussels church. Further, let me remind you that there were moments in the lives of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, when Cowper’s
poem, The Castaway, was their most soul-stirring reading. Then, again, Mary Unwin’s only daughter became the wife of a Vicar of Dewsbury, and it was at Dewsbury and to the very next vicar, that Mr. Brontë, the father of Charlotte, was curate when he first went into Yorkshire. Finally, let it be recalled that Cowper and Charlotte Brontë have attracted as much attention by the pathos of their lives as by anything that they wrote. Thus far, and no further, can a strained analogy carry us. The most enthusiastic admirers of the Brontës can only claim for them that they permanently added certain artistic treasures to our literature. Cowper did incomparably more than this. His work marked an epoch.
But first let me say how interested we who are strangers naturally feel in being in Olney. To every lover of literature Olney is made classic ground by the fact that Cowper spent some twenty years of his life in it—not always with too genial a contemplation of the place and its inhabitants. “The genius of Cowper throws a halo of glory over all the surroundings of Olney and Weston,” says Dean Burgon. But Olney
has claims apart from Cowper. John Newton [34] presents himself to me as an impressive personality. There was a time, indeed, of youthful impetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography I read very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view that Newton was largely responsible for the poet’s periodical attacks of insanity.
But a careful survey of the facts modifies any such impression. Newton was narrow at times, he was over-concerned as to the letter, often ignoring the spirit of true piety, but the student of the two volumes of his Life and Correspondence that we owe to Josiah Bull, will be compelled to look at “the old African blasphemer” as he called himself, with much of sympathy. That he had a note of tolerance, with which he is not usually credited, we learn from one of his letters, where he says:
I am willing to be a debtor to the wise and to the unwise, to doctors and shoemakers, if I can get a hint from any one without respect of parties. When a house is on fire Churchmen and Dissenters, Methodists and Papists, Moravians and Mystics are all welcome to bring water. At such times nobody asks, “Pray, friend, whom do you hear?” or “What do you think of the five points?”
Even my good friend Canon Benham, who has done so much to sustain the honourable fame of Cowper, and who would have been here to-day but for a long-standing engagement, is scarcely fair to Newton. [35] It is not true, as has been suggested, that Cowper always changed his manner into one of painful sobriety when he wrote to Newton. One of his most humorous letters—a rhyming epistle—was addressed to that divine.
I have writ (he says) in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penned; which you may do ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your humble me, W. C.
Now, I quote this very familiar passage from the correspondence to remind you that Cowper could only have written it to a man possessed of considerable healthy geniality.
At any rate, alike as a divine and as the author of the Olney Hymns, Newton holds an important place in the history of theology, and Olney has a right to be proud of him. An even more important place is held by Thomas Scott, [36] and it seems to me quite a wonderful thing that Olney should sometimes have held at one and the same moment three such remarkable men as Cowper, Newton, and Scott.
In my boyhood Scott’s name was a household word, and many a time have I thumbed the volumes of his Commentaries, those Commentaries which Sir James Stephen declared to be “the greatest theological performance of our age and country.” Of Scott Cardinal Newman in his Apologia said, it will be remembered, that “to
him, humanly speaking, I almost owe my soul.” Even here our literary associations with Olney and its neighbourhood are not ended, for, it was within five miles of this town—at Easton Maudit—that Bishop Percy [37] lived and prepared those Reliques which have inspired a century of ballad literature. Here the future Bishop of Dromore was visited by Dr. Johnson and others. What a pity that with only five miles separating them Cowper and Johnson should never have met! Would Cowper have reconsidered the wish made when he read Johnson’s biography of Milton in the Lives of the Poets: “Oh! I could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket!”?
But it is with Cowper only that we have here to do, and when we are talking of Cowper the difficulty is solely one of compression. So much has been written about him and his work. The Lives of him form of themselves a most substantial library. He has been made the subject of what is surely the very worst biography in the
language and of one that is among the very best. The well-meaning Hayley [38a] wrote the one, in which the word “tenderness” appears at least twice on every page, and Southey [38b] the other. Not less fortunate has the poet been in his critics. Walter Bagehot, James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Oliphant, George Eliot [38c]—these are but a few of
the names that occur to me as having said something wise and to the point concerning the Poet of Olney.
I somehow feel that it is safer for me to refer to the Poet of Olney than to speak of William Cowper, because I am not quite sure how you would wish me to pronounce his name. Cooper, he himself pronounced it, as his family are in the habit of doing. The present Lord Cowper is known to all the world as Lord Cooper. The derivation of the name and the family coat-of-arms justify that pronunciation, and it might be said that a man was, and is, entitled to settle the question of the pronunciation of his own name. And yet I plead for what I am quite willing to allow is the incorrect pronunciation. All pronunciation, even of the simplest words, is settled finally by a consensus of custom. Throughout the English-speaking world the name is now constantly pronounced Cowper, as if that most useful and ornamental animal the cow had given it its origin. Well-read Scotland is peculiarly unanimous in the custom, and well-read America follows suit. William Shakspere, I doubt not, called himself Shaxspere, and we
decline to imitate him, and so probably many of us will with a light heart go on speaking of William Cowper to the end of the chapter. At any rate Shakspere and Cowper, divergent as were their lives and their work—and one readily recognizes the incomparably greater position of the former—had alike a keen sense of humour, rare among poets it would seem, and hugely would they both have enjoyed such a controversy as this.
This suggestion of the humour of Cowper brings me to my main point. Humour is so essentially a note of sanity, and it is the sanity of Cowper that I desire to emphasize here. We have heard too much of the insanity of Cowper, of the “maniac’s tongue” to which Mrs. Browning referred, of the “maniacal Calvinist” of whom Byron wrote somewhat scornfully. Only a day or two ago I read in a high-class journal that “one fears that Cowper’s despondency and madness are better known to-day than his poetry.” That is not to know the secret of Cowper. It is true that there were periods of maniacal depression, and these were not always religious ones. Now, it was from sheer nervousness at
the prospect of meeting his fellows, now it was from a too logical acceptance of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Had it not been these, it would have been something else. It might have been politics, or a hundred things that now and again give a twist to the mind of the wisest. With Cowper it was generally religion. I am not here to promote a paradox. I accept the only too well-known story of Cowper’s many visitations, but, looking back a century, for the purpose of asking what was Cowper’s contribution to the world’s happiness and why we meet to speak of our love for him to-day, I insist that these visitations are not essential to our memory of him as a great figure in our literature—the maker of an epoch.
Cowper lived for some seventy years—sixty-nine, to be exact. Of these years there was a period longer than the full term of Byron’s life, of Shelley’s or of Keats’s, of perfect sanity, and it was in this period that he gave us what is one of the sanest achievements in our literature, view it as we may.
Let us look backwards over the century—a century which has seen many changes of which Cowper had scarcely any vision—the
wonders of machinery and of electricity, of commercial enterprise, of the newspaper press, of book production. The galloping postboy is the most persistent figure in Cowper’s landscape. He has been replaced by the motor car. Nations have arisen and fallen; a thousand writers have become popular and have ceased to be remembered. Other writers have sprung up who have made themselves immortal. Burns and Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Scott and Shelley among the poets.
We ask ourselves, then, what distinctly differentiates Cowper’s life from that of his brothers in poetry, and I reply—his sanity. He did not indulge in vulgar amours, as did Burns and Byron; he did not ruin his moral fibre by opium, as did Coleridge; he did not shock his best friends by an over-weening egotism, as did Wordsworth; he did not spoil his life by reckless financial complications, as did Scott; or by too great an enthusiasm to beat down the world’s conventions, as did Shelley. I do not here condemn any one or other of these later poets. Their lives cannot be summed up in the mistakes they made. I only urge that, as it is not good to be at warfare
with your fellows, to be burdened with debts that you have to kill yourself to pay, to alienate your friends by distressing mannerisms, to cease to be on speaking terms with your family—therefore Cowper, who avoided these things, and, out of threescore years and more allotted to him, lived for some forty or fifty years at least a quiet, idyllic life, surrounded by loyal and loving friends, had chosen the saner and safer path. That, it may be granted, was very much a matter of temperament, and for it one does not need to praise him. The appeal to us of Robert Burns to gently scan our brother man will necessarily find a ready acceptance to-day, and a plea on behalf of kindly toleration for any great writer who has inspired his fellows is natural and honourable. But Cowper does not require any such kindly toleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there were few temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasional drives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as our English ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialism in our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as a haven on this side of the grave.
But I have undertaken to plead for Cowper’s sanity. I desire, therefore, to beg you to look not at this or that episode in his life, when, as we know, Cowper was in the clutches of evil spirits, but at his life as a whole—a life of serene contentment in the company of his friends, his hares Puss, Tiny and Bess, his “eight pair of tame pigeons,” his correspondents; and then I ask you to turn to his work, and to note the essential sanity of that work also.
First there is his poetry. When after the Bastille had fallen Charles James Fox quoted in one of his speeches Cowper’s lines—written long years before—praying that that event might occur, he paid an unconscious tribute to the sanity of Cowper’s genius. [44] Few poets who have let their convictions and aspirations find expression in verse have come so near the mark.
Wordsworth’s verse—that which was written at the same age—is studded with prophecy of evils that never occurred. It was not because of any supermundane intelligence, such as latter-day poets have been pleased to affect and latter-day
critics to assume for them, that Cowper wrote in anticipation of the fall of the Bastille in those thrilling lines, but because his exceedingly sane outlook upon the world showed him that France was riding fast towards revolution.
We have been told that Cowper’s poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the “lyric cry.” I protest that I find the note of passion in the “Lines on the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture,” in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper’s works a note of enthusiasm for human brotherhood, for man’s responsibility for man, for universal kinship, that had scarcely any place in literature before he wrote quietly here at Olney thoughts wiser and saner than he knew. To-day we call ourselves by many names, Conservatives or Liberals, Radicals, or Socialists; we differ widely as to ways and means; but we are all practically agreed about one thing—that the art of politics is the art of making the world happier. Each politician who has any aspirations beyond mere ambition desires to leave the world a little better
than he found it. This is a commonplace of to-day. It was not a commonplace of Cowper’s day. Even the great-hearted, lovable Dr. Johnson was only concerned with the passing act of kindliness to his fellows; patriotism he declared to be the last refuge of a scoundrel; collective aspiration was mere charlatanry in his eyes, and when some one said that he had lost his appetite because of a British defeat, Johnson thought him an impostor, in which Johnson was probably right. There have been plenty of so-called patriots who were scoundrels, there has been plenty of affectation of sentiment which is little better than charlatanry, but we do not consider when we weigh the influence of men whether Rousseau was morally far inferior to Johnson. We know that he was. But Rousseau, poor an instrument as he may have been, helped to break many a chain, to relieve many a weary heart, to bring to whole peoples a new era in which the horrors of the past became as a nightmare, and in which ideals were destined to reign for ever. Cowper, an incomparably better man than Rousseau, helped to permeate England with that collective sentiment, which, while it does not excuse us
for neglecting our neighbour, is a good thing for preserving for nations a healthy natural life, a more and more difficult task with the growing complications of commercialism. Cowper here, as I say, unconsciously performed his greatest service to humanity; and it was performed, be it remembered, at Olney. It has been truly said that in Cowper:—
The poetry of human wrong begins, that long, long cry against oppression and evil done by man to man, against the political, moral, or priestly tyrant, which rings louder and louder through Burns, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, ever impassioned, ever longing, ever prophetic—never, in the darkest time, quite despairing. [47]
And Cowper achieved this without losing sight for one moment of the essential necessity for personal worth:
Spend all thy powers
Of rant and rhapsody in Virtue’s praise,
Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand,
and it profiteth nothing, he said in effect.
That was not his only service as a citizen. He struck the note of honest patriotism as it had not
been struck before since Milton, by the familiar lines commencing:
England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,
My country!
As also in that stirring ballad “On the Loss of the Royal George:”
Her timbers yet are sound,
And she may float again,
Full charged with England’s thunder,
And plough the distant main.
There are two other great claims that might here be made for Cowper did time allow, that he anticipated Wordsworth alike as a lover of nature, as one who had more than a superficial affection for it—the superficial affection of Thomson and Gray—and that he anticipated Wordsworth also as a lover of animal life. Cowper’s love of nature was the less effective than Wordsworth’s only, surely, in that he had not had Wordsworth’s advantage of living amid impressive scenery. His love of animal life was far less platonic than Wordsworth’s. To his hares and his pigeons and all dumb creatures he was genuinely devoted. Perhaps it was because he had in him the blood
of kings—for, curiously enough, it is no more difficult to trace the genealogical tree of both Cowper and Byron down to William the Conqueror than it is to trace the genealogical tree of Queen Victoria—it was perhaps, I say, this descent from kings which led him to be more tolerant of “sport” than was Wordsworth. At any rate, Cowper’s vigorous description of being in at the death of a fox may be contrasted with Wordsworth’s “Heart Leap Well,” and you will prefer Cowper or Wordsworth, as your tastes are for or against our old-fashioned English sports. But even then, as often, Cowper in his poetry was less tolerant than in his prose, for he writes in The Task of:
detested sport
That owes its pleasures to another’s pain,
We may note in all this the almost entire lack of indebtedness in Cowper to his predecessors. One of his most famous phrases, indeed, that on “the cup that cheers, but not inebriates,” he borrowed from Berkeley; but his borrowings were few, far fewer than those of any other great poet, whereas mine would be a long essay were I to produce by the medium of
parallel columns all that other poets have borrowed from him.
Lastly, among Cowper’s many excellencies as a poet let me note his humour. His pathos, his humanity—many fine qualities he has in common with others; but what shall we say of his humour? If the ubiquitous Scot were present, so far from his native heath—and I daresay we have one or two with us—he might claim that humour was also the prerogative of Robert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other great characteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously in Burns. There is virtue in the almost. Cowper was born in 1731, Burns in 1759. At any rate humour has been a rare product among the greater English poets. It was entirely absent in Wordsworth, in Shelley, in Keats. Byron possessed a gift of satire and wit, but no humour, Tennyson only a suspicion of it in “The Northern Farmer.” From Cowper to Browning, who also had it at times, there has been little humour in the greatest English poetry, although plenty of it in the lesser poets—Hood and the rest. But there was in Cowper a great sense of humour, as there was also plenty of what
Hazlitt, almost censoriously, calls “elegant trifling.” Not only in the imperishable “John Gilpin,” but in the “Case Between Nose and Eyes,” “The Nightingale and Glow-worm,” and other pieces you have examples of humorous verse which will live as long as our language endures.
Cowper’s claims as a poet, then, may be emphasized under four heads:—
I. His enthusiasm for humanity.
II. His love of nature.
III. His love of animal life.
IV. His humour.
And in three of these, let it be said emphatically, he stands out as the creator of a new era.
There is another claim I make for him, and with this I close—his position as a master of prose, as well as of poetry. Cowper was the greatest letter-writer in a language which has produced many great letter-writers—Walpole, Gray, Byron, Scott, FitzGerald, and a long list. But nearly all these men were men of affairs, of action. Given a good literary style they could hardly have been other than interesting, they had so much to say that they gained from external sources. Even FitzGerald—the one
recluse—had all the treasures of literature constantly passing into his study. Cowper had but eighteen books altogether during many of his years in Olney, and some of us who have lent our volumes in the past and are still sighing over gaps in our shelves find consolation in the fact that six of Cowper’s books had been returned to him after a friend had borrowed for twenty years or so. Now, it is comparatively easy to write good letters with a library around you; it is marvellous that Cowper could have done this with so little material, and his letters are, from this point of view, the best of all—“divine chit-chat” Coleridge called them. His simple style captivates us. And here let me say—keeping to my text—that it is the sanest of styles, a style with no redundancies, no rhetoric, no straining after effect. The outlook on life is sane—what could be finer than the chase for the lost hare, or the call of the Parliamentary candidate, or the flogging of the thief?—and the outlook on literature is particularly sane.
Cowper was well-nigh the only true poet in the first rank in English literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent
judgments of their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though good, is small in quantity, and the same may be said of Matthew Arnold. Tennyson discreetly kept away from prose, and his letters, be it remembered, lack distinction as do most letters of the nineteenth century. If, however, as we are really to believe, he it was who really made the first edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Lyric Poetry, he came near to Cowper in his sanity of judgment, and one delights to think that in that precious volume Cowper ranks third—that is, after Shakspere and Wordsworth—in the number of selections that are there given, and rightly given, as imperishable masterpieces of English poetry. Tennyson, also, was at one with Cowper in declaring that an appreciation of Lycidas was a touchstone of taste for poetry. To Tennyson, as to Cowper, Milton was the one great English poet after Shakspere; and here, also, we revere the saneness of view. More sane too, was Cowper than any of the
modern critics, in that he did not believe that mere technique was the standpoint from which all poetry must ultimately be judged.
“Give me,” he says, “a manly rough line with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing in them, only smoothness to recommend them!”
And thus he justified Robert Browning and many another singer.
Let us then dismiss from our minds the one-sided picture of Cowper as a gloomy fanatic, who was always asking himself in Carlylian phrase, “Am I saved? Am I damned?” Let us remember him as staunch to the friends of his youth, sympathetic to his old schoolfellow, Warren Hastings, when the world would make him out too black. Opposed in theory to tobacco, how he delighted to welcome his good friend Mr. Bull. “My greenhouse,” he says, “wants only the flavour of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful!” Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink to the success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present of bottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods of aberration, there is no more
resemblance to Cowper in the picture that certain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is in these same people’s conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, who loved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of the men he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception of him once current in this country than was the real Cowper—the frank, genial humorist, who wrote “John Gilpin,” who in his youth “giggled and made giggle” with his girl-cousins, and in his maturer years “laughed and made laugh” with Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh.
To all men there are periods of weariness and depression, side by side with periods of happiness and hopefulness. Cowper, alas! had more than his share of the tragedy of life, but let us not forget that he had some of its joy, and that joy is reflected for us in a substantial literary achievement, which has lived, and influenced the world, while his more tragic experiences may well be buried in oblivion. This, you may have noted, is not a criticism of Cowper, but an eulogy. I would wish to say, however, that the criticism of Cowper by living writers has been of surpassing
excellence. For the first fifty or sixty years of the century that we are recalling Cowper was the most popular poet of our country, with Burns and Byron for rivals. He has been largely dethroned by Wordsworth and Shelley, and Tennyson, not one of whom has been praised too much. But if Cowper has sunk somewhat out of sight of late years, owing to inevitable circumstances, it is during these late years that he has secured the goodwill of the best living critics. Would that Mr. Leslie Stephen [56]—who wrote his life in the Dictionary of National Biography—would that Mr. Edmund Gosse—who has so recently published a great biography of Cowper’s memorable ancestor, Dr. Donne—were, one or other of them, here to-day; or Mr. Austin Dobson, who has visited Olney, and described his impressions; or Dr. Jessopp, who lives near Cowper’s tomb in East Dereham Church. These writers are, alas! not with us, and some presentment of a poet they love has fallen to less capable hands.
But not the most brilliant of speeches, not all the enthusiasm of all the critics, can ever restore Cowper to his former immense popularity. We do well, however, to celebrate his centenary, because it is good at certain periods to remember our indebtedness to the great men who have helped us in literature or in life. But that is not to say that we work for the dethronement of later favourites. “Each age must write its own books,” says Emerson, and this is particularly the case with the great body of poetry. Cowper, however, will live to all time among students of literature by his longer poems; he will live to all time among the multitude by his ballads and certain of his lyrics. He will, assuredly, live by his letters, to study which will be a thousand times more helpful to the young writer than many volumes of Addison, to whom we were once advised to devote our days and our nights. Cowper will live, above all, as a profoundly interesting and beautiful personality, as a great and good Englishman—the greatest of all the sons of this his adopted town.
III. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE BORROW
An Address delivered in Norwich on the Occasion of the Borrow Centenary, 1903.
One hundred years ago there was born some two miles from the pleasant little town of East Dereham, in this county, a child who was christened George Henry Borrow. That is why we are assembled here this evening. I count it one of the most interesting coincidences in literary history that only three years earlier there should have left the world in the same little town—a town only known perhaps to those of us who are Norfolk men—a poet who has always seemed to me to be one of the greatest glories of our literature: I mean William Cowper. Cowper died in April, 1800, and Borrow was born in July, 1803, in this same town of East Dereham: and there very much it might be thought, any point of likeness or of contrast must surely end.
Cowper and Borrow do, indeed, come into some trivial kind of kinship at one or two points. In reading Cowper’s beautiful letters I have come across two addressed by him to one Richard Phillips, a bookseller of that day, who had been in prison for publishing some of Thomas Paine’s works. Cowper had been asked by Phillips to write a sympathetic poem denunciatory of the political and religious tyranny that had sent Phillips to jail. Cowper had at first agreed, but was afterwards advised not to have anything more to do with Phillips. Judging by the after career of Phillips, Cowper did wisely; for Phillips was not a good man, although twenty years later he had become a sheriff of London and was knighted. As Sir Richard Phillips he was visited by George Borrow, then a youth at the beginning of his career. Borrow came to Phillips armed with an introduction from William Taylor of Norwich, and his reception is most dramatically recorded in the pages of Lavengro. This is, however, to anticipate. Then there is a poem by Cowper to Sir John Fenn [62] the antiquary, the
first editor of the famous Paston Letters. In it there is a reference to Fenn’s spouse, who, under the pseudonym of “Mrs. Teachwell,” wrote many books for children in her day. Now Borrow could remember this lady—Dame Eleanor Fenn—when he was a boy. He recalled the “Lady Bountiful leaning on her gold-headed cane, while the sleek old footman followed at a respectful distance behind.” Lady Fenn was forty-six years old when Cowper referred to her. She was sixty-six when the boy Borrow saw her in Dereham streets. At no other points do these great East Dereham writers come upon common ground: Cowper during the greater part of his life was a recluse. He practically fled from the world. In reading the many letters
he wrote—and they are among the best letters in the English language—one is struck by the small number of his correspondents. He had few acquaintances and still fewer friends. He had never seen a hill until he was sixty, and then it was only the modest hills of Sussex that seemed to him so supremely glorious. He was never on the Continent. For half a lifetime he did not move out of one county, the least picturesque part of Buckinghamshire, the neighbourhood of Olney and of Weston. There he wrote the poems that have been a delight to several generations, poems which although they may have gone out of fashion with many are still very dear to some among us; and there, as I have said, he wrote the incomparable letters that have an equally permanent place in literature.
You could not conceive a more extraordinary contrast than the life of this other writer associated with East Dereham, whom we have met to celebrate this evening. George Borrow was the son of a soldier, who had risen from the ranks, and of a mother who had been an actress. Soldier and actress both imply to all of us a restless, wandering life. The soldier was a Cornishman
by birth, the actress was of French origin, and so you have blended in this little Norfolk boy—who is a Norfolk boy in spite of it all—every kind of nomadic habit, every kind of fiery, imaginative enthusiasm, a temperament not usually characteristic of those of us who claim East Anglia as the land of our birth or of our progenitors. I wish it were possible for me to reconstruct that Norwich world into which young George Borrow entered at thirteen years of age. That it was a Norwich of great intellectual activity is indisputable. In the year of Borrow’s birth John Gurney, who died six years later, first became a partner in the Norwich bank. His more famous son, Joseph John Gurney—aged fifteen—left the Earlham home in order to study at Oxford. His sister, the still more famous Elizabeth Fry, was now twenty-three. So that when Borrow, the thirteen year old son of the veteran soldier—who had already been in Ireland picking up scraps of Irish, and in Scotland adding to his knowledge of Gaelic—settled down for some of his most impressionable years in Norwich, Joseph John Gurney was a young man of twenty-eight and Elizabeth Fry was thirty-six.
Dr. James Martineau was eleven years of age and his sister Harriet was fourteen. Another equally clever woman, not then married to Austin, the famous jurist, was Sarah Taylor, aged twenty-three. This is but to name a few of the crowd of Norwich worthies of that day. Would that some one could produce a picture of the literary life of Norwich of this time and of a quarter of a century onward—a period that includes the famous Bishop Stanley’s [66] occupancy of the See of Norwich and the visits to this city from all parts of England of a great number of famous literary men. It is my pleasant occupation to-night to endeavour to show that Borrow, the very least of these men and women in public estimation for a good portion of his life, and perhaps the least in popular judgment even since his death, was really the greatest, was really the man of all others to whom this beautiful city should do honour if it asks for a name out of its nineteenth century history to crown with local recognition.
For whatever homage may have fallen to Borrow during the half-century or more since his name first came upon many tongues Norwich, it must be admitted, has given very little of it. No one associated with your city, I repeat, but has heard of the Gurneys and the Martineaus, of the Stanleys and the Austins, whose life stories have made so large a part of your literary and intellectual history during this very period. But I turn in vain to a number of books that I have in my library for any information concerning one who is indisputably the greatest among the intellectual children of Norwich. I turn to Mr. Prothero’s Life of Dean Stanley—not one word about Borrow; to that pleasant Memoir of Sarah Austin and her mother, Mrs. Taylor, called Three Generations of a Norfolk Family—again not one word. I turn to Mr. Braithwaite’s biography of Joseph John Gurney, and to Mr. Augustus Hare’s book The Gurneys of Earlham—upon these worthy biographers Borrow made no impression whatever, although Joseph John Gurney was personally helpful to him and we read in Lavengro of that pleasant meeting between the pair on the river bank when Mr. Gurney chided
the boy Borrow or Lavengro for angling. “From that day,” he says, “I became less and less a practitioner of that cruel fishing.” In Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, which enjoyed its hour of fame when it was published twenty-six years ago, there is a contemptuous reference to the disciple of William Taylor, “this polyglot gentleman, who went through Spain disseminating Bibles.” If Miss Martineau were alive now she would hear the works of “this polyglot gentleman” praised on every hand, and would find that a cult had arisen which to her would certainly be quite incomprehensible. In that large, dismal book—the Life of James Martineau, again, there is but one mention of Dr. Martineau’s famous schoolfellow whose name has been linked with him only by a silly story. Do not let it be thought that I am complaining of this neglect; the world will always treat its greatest writers in precisely this fashion. Borrow did not lack for fame of a kind, but he was, as I desire to show, praised in his lifetime for the wrong thing, where he was praised at all. Everyone in the fifties and sixties read The Bible in Spain, as they read a hundred other books of
that period, now forgotten. Many read it who were deceived by its title. They expected a tract. Many read it as we to-day read the latest novel or biography of the hour. Then a new book arises and the momentary favourite is forgotten. We think for a whole week that we are in contact with a well-nigh immortal work. A little later we concern ourselves not at all whether the book is immortal or not. We go on to something else. The critic is as much to blame as the reader. Not one man in a hundred whose profession it is to come between the author and the public, and to guide the reader to the best in literature, has the least perception of what is good literature. It is easy when a writer has captured the suffrages of the crowd for the critic to tell the world that he is great. That happened to Carlyle, to Tennyson, to many a popular author whose earliest books commanded little attention: but, happily, these writers did not lose heart. They kept on writing. Borrow was otherwise made. He wrote The Bible in Spain—a book of travel of surprising merit. It sold largely on its title. Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us that he knew a boy in a very
strict household who devoured the narrative on Sunday afternoons, the title being thought to cover a conventional missionary journey. Well, when I was a boy The Bible in Spain had gone out of fashion and the public had not taken up with the author’s greater work, Lavengro. Borrow was naturally disappointed. He abused the critics and the public. Perhaps he grew somewhat soured. He did not hesitate in The Romany Rye to talk candidly about those “ill-favoured dogs . . . the newspaper editors,” and he made the gentleman’s gentleman of Lavengro describe how he was excluded from the Servants’ Club in Park Lane because his master followed a profession “so mean as literature.” In fact as a reaction from the unfriendly reception accorded to the Romany Rye—now one of the most costly of his books in a first edition—he lost heart, and he grew to despise the whole literary and writing class. Hence the various stories presenting him in not very sympathetic guise, the story of Thackeray being snubbed on asking Borrow if he had read the Snob Papers, of Miss Agnes Strickland receiving an even more forcible rebuff when she offered to send him her Queens of England.
“For God’s sake don’t Madame; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.” These stories are in Gordon Hake’s Memoirs of Eighty Years, but Mr. Francis Hindes Groome has shown us the other side of the picture, and others also to whom I shall refer a little later have done the same. Perhaps the literary class is never the worse for a little plain speaking. The real secret of Borrow is this—that he was a man of action turned into a writer by force of circumstances.
The life of Borrow, unlike that of most famous men of letters, has not been overwritten. His death in 1881 caused little emotion and attracted but small attention in the newspapers. The Times, then as now so excellent in its biographies as a rule, devoted but twenty lines to him. Here I may be pardoned for being autobiographical. I was last in Norwich in the early eighties. I had a wild enthusiasm for literature so far as my taste had been directed—that is to say I read every book I came across and had been doing so from my earliest boyhood. But I had never heard of George Borrow or of his works. In my then not infrequent
visits to Norwich I cannot recall that his name was ever mentioned, and in my life in London, among men who were, many of them, great readers, I never heard of Borrow or of his achievement. He died in 1881, and as I do not recall hearing his name at the time of his death or until long afterwards, I must have missed certain articles in the Athenaeum—two of them admirable “appreciations” by Mr. Watts-Dunton—and so my state of benightedness was as I have described. It may be that those who are a year or two older than I am and those who are younger may find this extraordinary. You have always heard of Borrow and of his works, but I think I am entitled to insist that when Borrow sank into his grave, an old, and to many an eccentric and bitter man, he had fallen into the most curious oblivion with the public that has ever come to a man, I will not say of equal distinction, but of any distinction whatever. Mr. Egmont Hake told the readers of the Athenaeum in a biography that appeared at the time of Borrow’s death that Borrow’s works were “forgotten in England” and I find in turning to the biography of Borrow in The
Norvicensian, for 1882—the organ of the Norwich Grammar School—that the writer of this obituary notice confessed that there were none of Borrow’s works in the library of the school of which Borrow had been the most distinguished pupil.
From that time—in 1881—until 1899, a period of eighteen years, Borrow had but little biographical recognition. A few introductions to his books, sundry encyclopaedia articles, and one or two magazine essays made up the sum total of information concerning the author of Lavengro until Dr. Knapp’s Life appeared in 1899. That Life has been severely handled by some lovers of Borrow, and lovers of Borrow are now plentiful enough. Dr. Knapp had not the cunning of the really successful biographer. His book still remains in the huge two-volumed form in which it was first issued four years ago, and I do not anticipate that it will ever be a popular book. There is no literary art in it. There is a capacity for amassing facts, but no power of co-ordinating these facts. Moreover Dr. Knapp did a great deal of mischief by very over-zeal. He made too great a research into all the current gossip in Norfolk and Suffolk concerning Borrow.
If you were to make special research into the life of any friend or acquaintance of the past you would hear much foolish gossip and a great many wrong motives imputed, and possibly you would not have an opportunity of checking the various statements. The whole of Dr. Knapp’s book seems to be written upon the principle of “I would if I could” say a good many things, and, indeed, every few months there appears in the Eastern Daily Press, a journal of your city that I have read every day regularly since boyhood, a letter from some one explaining that the less inquiry about this or that point in Borrow’s career the better for Borrow. Take, for example, last Saturday’s issue of the journal I have named, where I find the following from a correspondent:—
Dr. Knapp, from dictates of courtesy, left it unrevealed, and as he could say nothing to Borrow’s credit, passed the affair over in silence, and on this point all well-wishers of Borrow’s reputation would be wise to take their cue from this biographer’s example.
Now there is nothing more damnatory than a sentence of this kind. What does it amount to? What is the ‘it’ that is unrevealed by the
courteous Dr. Knapp? It seems to amount to the charge that Borrow is accused of gibbeting in his books the people he dislikes; this is what every great imaginative writer has been charged with to the perplexing of dull people. There are many characters in Dickens’s novels which are supposed to be a presentation of near relatives or friends. These he ought to have treated with more kindliness. That heroic little woman, Miss Brontë, gave a picture of Madame Héger, who kept a school at Brussels, that conveyed, I doubt not, a very mistaken presentation of the subject of her satire. Imaginative writers have always taken these liberties. When the worst is said it simply amounts to this, that Borrow was a good hater. Dr. Johnson said that he loved a good hater, and he might very well have loved Borrow. Dante, whom we all now agree to idolize, treated people even more roughly; he placed some of his acquaintances who had ill-used him in the very lowest circles of hell. May I express a hope, therefore, that this type of letter to the Norwich newspapers about Dr. Knapp’s “kindness” to Borrow’s reputation may cease. If Dr. Knapp
had printed the whole of the facts we should know how to deal with them; but this is one of his limitations as a biographer. He has not in the least helped to a determination of Borrow’s real character.
Had Borrow possessed a biographer so skilful with her pen as Mrs. Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, so keen-eyed for the dramatic note as Sir George Trevelyan in his Life of Macaulay, he would have multiplied readers for Lavengro. There are many people who have read the Brontë novels from sheer sympathy with the writers that their biographer, Mrs. Gaskell, had kindled. Let us not, however, be ungrateful to Dr. Knapp. He has furnished those of us who are sufficiently interested in the subject with a fine collection of documents. Here is all the material of biography in its crude state, but presenting vividly enough the live Borrow to those who have the perception to read it with care and judgment. Still more grateful may we be to Dr. Knapp for his edition of Borrow’s works, particularly for those wonderful episodes in Lavengro which he has reproduced from the original manuscript, episodes as dramatic as any other portion of the
text, and making Dr. Knapp’s edition of Lavengro the only possible one to possess.
But to return to the main facts of Borrow’s career, which every one here at least is familiar with. You know of his birth at East Dereham, of his life in Ireland and in Scotland, of his school days at Norwich, of his departure from Norwich to London on his father’s death, of his dire struggles in the literary whirlpool, and of his wanderings in gipsy land. You know, thanks to Dr. Knapp, more than you could otherwise have learned of his life at St. Petersburg, whither he had been sent by the Bible Society, on the recommendation of Mr. Joseph John Gurney and another patron. Then he has himself told us in picturesque fashion of his life in Portugal and Spain. After this we hear of his marriage to Mary Clarke, his residence from 1840 to 1853 at Oulton, in Suffolk, from 1853 to 1860 at Yarmouth, from 1860 to 1874 in Hereford Square, London, and finally from 1874 to 1881 at Oulton, where he died. That is the bare skeleton of Borrow’s life, and for half his life, I think, we should be content with a skeleton. For the other half of it we have the best autobiography
in the English language. An autobiography that ranks with Goethe’s Truth and Poetry from my Life and Rousseau’s Confessions. In four books—in Lavengro, Romany Rye, The Bible in Spain, and Wild Wales we have some delightful glimpses of an interesting personality, and here we may leave the personal side of Borrow. Beyond this we know that he was unquestionably a devoted son, a good husband, a kind father. The literary life has its perils, so far as domesticity is concerned. Sir Walter Scott in his life of Dryden speaks of:—
Her who had to endure the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incidental to one compelled to dwell for long periods of time in the fitful realms of the imagination,
and it is certain that those who dwell in the realms of the imagination are usually very irritable, very difficult to live with. Literary history in its personal side is largely a dismal narrative of the uncomfortable relations of men of genius with their wives and with their families. Your man of genius thinks himself bound to hang up his fiddle in his own house, however merry a fellow he may prove himself to a hundred boon companions outside. George Borrow was perhaps
the opposite of all this. As a companion and a neighbour he did not always shine, if the impression of many a witness is to be trusted. They tell anecdotes of his lack of cordiality, of his unsociability, and so on. They have told those anecdotes more industriously in Norwich than anywhere else. He himself in an incomparable account of going to church with the gypsies in The Romany Rye has the following:
It appeared as if I had fallen asleep in the pew of the old church of pretty Dereham. I had occasionally done so when a child, and had suddenly woke up. Yes, surely, I had been asleep and had woke up; but no! if I had been asleep I had been waking in my sleep, struggling, striving, learning and unlearning in my sleep. Years had rolled away whilst I had been asleep—ripe fruit had fallen, green fruit had come on whilst I had been asleep—how circumstances had altered, and above all myself whilst I had been asleep. No, I had not been asleep in the old church! I was in a pew, it is true, but not the pew of black leather, in which I sometimes fell asleep in days of yore, but in a strange pew; and then my companions, they were no longer those of days of yore. I was no longer with my respectable father and mother, and my dear brother, but with the gypsy cral and his wife, and the gigantic Tawno, the Antinous of the dusky people. And what was I myself? No longer an innocent child but a moody man, bearing in my face, as I knew well, the marks of my strivings and strugglings; of what I had learnt and unlearnt.
But this “moody man,” let it be always remembered, was a good husband and father. His wife was devoted to him, his step-daughter carries now to an old age a profound reverence and affection for his memory. Grieved beyond all words was she—the Henrietta or “Hen” of all his books—at what is maintained to be the utterly fictitious narrative of Borrow’s described deathbed that Professor Knapp presented from the ill-considered gossip that he picked up while staying in the neighbourhood. [80] Borrow has himself something to say concerning his family in Wild Wales:—
Of my wife I will merely say that she is a perfect paragon of wives—can make puddings and sweets and treacle posset, and is the best woman of business in East Anglia: of my step-daughter, for such she is though I generally call her daughter, and with good reason seeing that she has always shown herself a daughter to me, that she has all kinds of good qualities and several accomplishments, knowing something of conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar.
Yes, I am not quite sure but that Borrow was really a good fellow all round, as well as being a good husband and father. He hated the literary class, it is true. He considered that the “contemptible trade of author,” as he called it, was less creditable than that of a jockey. He avoided as much as possible the writers of books, and particularly the blue-stocking, and when they came in his way he was not always very polite, sometimes much the reverse. Only the other day a letter was published from the late Professor Cowell describing a visit to Borrow and his not very friendly reception. Well, Borrow was here as elsewhere a man of insight. The literary class is usually a very narrow class. It can talk about no trade but its own. Things have grown worse since Borrow’s day, I am sure, but they were bad enough then. Borrow was a man of very varied tastes. He took interest in gypsies and horses and prize fighters and a hundred other entertaining
matters, and so he despised the literary class, which cared for none of these things. But unhappily for his fame the literary class has had the final word; it has revealed all the gossip of a gossiping peasantry, and it has done its best to present the recluse of Oulton in a disagreeable light. Fortunately for Borrow, who kept the bores at bay and contented himself with but few friends, there were at least two who survived him to bear testimony to the effect that he was “a singularly steadfast and loyal friend.” One of these was Mr. Watts-Dunton, who tells us in one of his essays that:
George Borrow was a good man, a most winsome and a most charming companion, an English gentleman, straightforward, honest, and brave as the very best examplars of that fine old type.
I have dwelt longer on this aspect of my subject than I should have done had I been addressing any other audience than a Norwich one. But the fact is that all the gossip and backbiting and censoriousness that has gathered round Borrow for a hundred years has come out of this very city, commencing with the “bursts of laughter” that, according to Miss Martineau, greeted Borrow’s
travels in Spain for the Bible Society. Borrow was twenty-one years of age when he left Norwich to make his way in the world. During the next twenty years he may have undergone many changes of intellectual view, as most of us do, as Miss Martineau notably did, and Miss Martineau and her laughing friends were diabolically uncharitable. That lack of charity followed Borrow throughout his life. He was libelled by many, by Miss Frances Power Cobbe most of all. However, the great city of Norwich will make up for it in the future, and she will love Borrow as Borrow indisputably loved her. How he praised her fine cathedral, her lordly castle, her Mousehold Heath, her meadows in which he once saw a prize fight, her pleasant scenery—no city, not even glorious Oxford, has been so well and adequately praised, and I desire to show that that praise is not for an age but for all time.
If George Borrow has not been happy in his biographer, and if, as is true, he has received but inadequate treatment on this account—such series of little books as The English Men of Letters and the Great Writers quite ignoring
him—he has been equally unfortunate in his critics. There are hardly any good and distinctive appreciations in print of Borrow’s works. While other great names in the great literature of the Victorian Period have been praised by a hundred pens, there has scarcely been any notable and worthy praise of Borrow, and if I were in an audience that was at all sceptical as to Borrow’s supreme merits, which happily I am not; if I were among those who declared that they could see but small merit in Borrow themselves, but were prepared to accept him if only I could bring good authority that he was a very great writer, I should be hardly put to to comply with the demand. I can only name Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton and Mr. Augustine Birrell as critics of considerable status who have praised Borrow well. “The delightful, the bewitching, the never sufficiently-to-be-praised George Borrow,” says Mr. Birrell in one of the essays he has written on the subject; [84] while Mr. Theodore
Watts-Dunton, has written no less than four papers on one whom he knew and admires personally, and of whom he insists that “his idealizing powers, his romantic cast of mind, his force, his originality, give him a title to a permanent place high in the ranks of English prose writers.”
All this is very interesting, but in literature as in life we have got to work out our own destinies.
We have not got to accept Borrow because this or that critic tells us he is good. I have therefore no quarrel with any one present who does not share my view that Borrow was one of the greater glories of English literature. I only desire to state my case for him.
To be a lover of Borrow, a Borrovian, in fact, it is not necessary to know all his books. You may never have seen copies of the Romantic Ballads or of Faustus, of Targum or of The Turkish Jester, of Borrow’s translation of The Talisman of Pushkin. Your state may be none the less gracious. To possess these books is largely a collector’s hobby. They are interesting, but they would not have made for the author an undying reputation. Further, you may not care for The Bible in Spain, you may be untouched by the Gypsies in Spain and Wild Wales, and even then I will not deny to you the title of a good Borrovian, if only you pronounce Lavengro and The Romany Rye to be among the greatest books you know. I can admire the Gypsies in Spain and Wild Wales. I can read The Bible in Spain with something of the enthusiasm with which our fathers read it. It is a stirring narrative of
travel and much more. Robert Louis Stevenson did, indeed, rank it among his “dear acquaintances” in bookland, “the Pilgrim’s Progress in the first rank, The Bible in Spain not far behind,” he says. All the same, it has not, none of these three books has, the distinctive mark of first class genius that belongs to the other two in the five-volumed edition of Borrow’s Collected Works that many of us have read through more than once. Not all clever people have thought Lavengro and The Romany Rye to be thus great. A critic in the Athenaeum declared Lavengro when it was published in 1851 to be “balderdash,” while a critic writing just fifty years afterwards and writing from Norfolk, alas! insisted that the author of this book “was absolutely wanting in the power of invention” that he (Borrow) could “only have drawn upon his memory,” that he had “no sense of humour.” If all this were true, if half of it were true, Borrow was not the great man, the great writer that I take him to be. But it is not true. Lavengro with its continuation The Romany Rye, is a great work of imagination, of invention; it is in no sense a photograph, a memory picture, and it abounds
in humour as it abounds in many other great characteristics. What makes an author supremely great? Surely a certain quality which we call genius, as distinct from the mere intellectual power of some less brilliant writer:—
True genius is the ray that flings
A novel light o’er common things
and here it is that Borrow shines supreme. He has invested with quite novel light a hundred commonplace aspects of life. Not an inventor! not imaginative! Why, one of the indictments against him is that philologists decry his philology and gyptologists his gypsy learning. If, then, his philology and his gypsy lore were imperfect, as I believe they were, how much the greater an imaginative writer he was. To say that Lavengro merely indicates keen observation is absurd. Not the keenest observation will crowd so many adventures, adventures as fresh and as novel as those of Gil Blas or Robinson Crusoe, into a few months’ experience. “I felt some desire,” says Lavengro, “to meet with one of those adventures which upon the roads of England are generally as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.” I
think that most of us will wander along the roads of England for a very long time before we meet an Isopel Berners, before we have such an adventure as that of the blacksmith and his horse, or of the apple woman whose favourite reading was Moll Flanders. These and a hundred other adventures, the fight with the Flaming Tinman, the poisoning of Lavengro by the gypsy woman, the discourse with Ursula under the hedge, when once read are fixed upon the memory for ever. And yet you may turn to them again and again, and with ever increasing zest. The story of Isopel Berners is a piece of imaginative writing that certainly has no superior in the literature of the last century. It was assuredly no photographic experience. Isopel Berners is herself a creation ranking among the fine creations of womanhood of the finest writers. I doubt not but that it was inspired by some actual memory of Borrow—the memory of some early love affair in which the distractions of his mania for word-learning—the Armenian and other languages—led him to pass by some opportunity of his life, losing the substance for the shadow. But whether there were ever a real Isopel we shall
never know. We do know that Borrow has presented his fictitious one with infinite poetry and fine imaginative power. We do know, moreover, that it is not right to describe Isopel Berners as a marvellous episode in a narrative of other texture. Lavengro is full of marvellous episodes. Some one has ventured to comment upon Borrow’s style—to imply that it is not always on a high plane. What does that matter? Style is not the quality that makes a book live, but the novelty of the ideas. Stevenson was a splendid stylist, and his admirers have deluded themselves into believing that he was, therefore, among the immortals. But Stevenson had nothing new to tell the world, and he was not, he is not, therefore of the immortals. Borrow is of the immortals, not by virtue of a style, but by virtue of having something new to say. He is with Dickens and with Carlyle as one of the three great British prose writers of the age we call Victorian, who in quite different ways have presented a new note for their own time and for long after. It is the distinction of Borrow that he has invested the common life of the road, of the highway, the path through the meadow, the gypsy encampment,
the country fair, the very apple stall and wayside inn with an air of romance that can never leave those of us who have once come under the magnificent spell of Lavengro and the Romany Rye. Perhaps Borrow is pre-eminently the writer for those who sit in armchairs and dream of adventures they will never undertake. Perhaps he will never be the favourite author of the really adventurous spirit, who wants the real thing, the latest book of actual travel. But to be the favourite author of those who sit in arm-chairs is no small thing, and, as I have said already, Borrow stands with Carlyle and Dickens in our century, by which I mean the nineteenth century; with Defoe and Goldsmith in the eighteenth century, as one of the really great and imperishable masters of our tongue.
What then will Norwich do for George Borrow? I ask this question, although it would, perhaps, be an impertinence to ask it were I not a Norwich man. If you have read Dr. Knapp’s Life of Borrow, you will have seen more than one reference to Mrs. Borrow’s landlord, “old King,” “Tom King the carpenter,” and so on, who owned the house in Willow Lane in which Borrow
spent his boyhood. That ‘old King the carpenter’—I believe he called himself a builder, but perhaps this was when he grew more prosperous—was my great-great-uncle. One of his sons became physician to Prince Talleyrand and married a sister of John Stuart Mill. One of his great-nieces was my grandmother, and her mother’s family, the Parkers, had lived in Norwich for many generations. So on the strength of this little piece of genealogy let me claim, not only to be a good Borrovian, but also a good Norvicensian. Grant me then a right to plead for a practical recognition of Borrow in the city that he loved most, although he sometimes scolded it as it often scolded him. I should like to see a statue, or some similar memorial. If you pass through the cities of the Continent—French, German, or Belgian—you will find in well-nigh every town a memorial to this or that worthy connected with its literary or artistic fame. How many memorials has Norwich to the people connected with its literary or artistic fame? Nay, I am not rash and impetuous. I would beg any one of my hearers who thinks that Borrow might well have
a memorial in marble or bronze in your city to wait a while. You are busy with a statue to Sir Thomas Browne—a most commendable scheme. To attempt to raise one to Borrow at this moment would probably be to court disaster. Nor do I advocate a memorial by private subscription. Observation has shown me what that means: failure or half failure in nearly every case. The memorial when it comes must be initiated by the City Fathers in council assembled. That time is perhaps far distant. But let us all do everything we can to make secure the high and honourable achievement of George Borrow, to kindle an interest in him and his writings, to extend a taste for the undoubted beauties of his works among all classes of his fellow-citizens—that is to secure Borrow the best of all monuments. More durable than brass will be the memorial that is contained in the assurance that he possesses the reverence and the homage of all true Norfolk hearts.
IV. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE CRABBE
An Address delivered at the Crabbe Celebration at Aldeburgh in Suffolk on the 16th of September, 1905.
I have been asked to say something in praise of George Crabbe. The task would be an easier one were it not for the presence of the distinguished critic from the University of Nancy who is with us to-day. M. Huchon [97] has devoted to the subject a singleminded zeal to which one whose profession is primarily that of a journalist can make no claim. Moreover it has been well said that the judgment of foreigners is the judgment of posterity, and I fully believe that where a writer has secured the suffrages of men of another nation than his own, he has done more for his ultimate fame than the
passing and fickle favour of his countrymen can secure for him. In any case Crabbe has been praised more eloquently than almost any other modern, and this in spite of the fact that he was not read by the generation succeeding his death, nor is he read much in our own time.
If you want to read Crabbe to-day in his entirety, you must become possessed of a huge and clumsy volume of sombre appearance, small type and repellant double columns. For fully seventy years it has not paid a publisher to reprint Crabbe’s poems properly. [98] When this was achieved in 1834, the edition in eight volumes was comparatively a failure, and the promised two volumes of essays and sermons were not forthcoming in consequence. Selections from Crabbe have been many, but when all is said he has been the least read for the past sixty or seventy years of all the authors who have claims to be considered classics. The least read but perhaps the best praised—that is one point of certainty. The praise began
with the politicians—with the two greatest political leaders of their age. The eloquent and noble Edmund Burke, the great-hearted Charles James Fox. Burke “made” George Crabbe as no poet was ever made before or since. To me there is no picture in all literature more unflaggingly interesting than that of the great man, whose life was so full of affairs, taking the poor young stranger by the hand, reading through his abundant manuscripts, and therefrom selecting—as the poet was quite unable to select—The Library and The Village as the most suitable for publication, helping him to a publisher, introducing him to friends, and proving himself quite untiring on his behalf. There is a letter of Burke’s printed in a little known book—The Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer, Speaker of the House of Commons—in which Burke takes the trouble to defend Crabbe’s moral character and to press his claims for being admitted to holy orders. “Dudley North tells me,” he continues, “that he has the best character possible among those with whom he has always lived, that he is now working hard to qualify, and has not only Latin, but some smattering of Greek.” It had
its gracious amenities, that eighteenth century, for I do not believe that there is a man in the ranks of the present Government, or of the present Opposition, who would take all this trouble for a poor unknown who had appealed to him merely by two or three long letters recounting his career. Nay, Cabinet Ministers are less punctilious than formerly, and the newest type, I understand, leaves letters unanswered. I can imagine the attitude of one of our modern statesmen in the face of two quite bulky packages of many sheets from a young author. He would request his secretary to see what they were all about, and then would follow the curt answer—“I am directed by Dash to say that he cannot comply with your request.” Burke not only wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons, but enclosed Crabbe’s letter to him, a quite wonderful piece of autobiography. [100] All Crabbe’s admirers should read that letter. Crabbe apologizes for writing again, and refers to “these repeated attacks on your patience.” “My
father,” he said, “had a place in the Custom House at Aldeburgh. He had a large family, a little income and no economy,” and then the story of his life up to that time is told to Burke in fullest detail.
Again, there is that other statesman-admirer of Crabbe, Charles James Fox. Fox gave to Crabbe’s work an admiration which never faltered, and on his death-bed requested that the pathetic story of Phœbe Dawson in The Parish Register should be read to him—it was, we are told, “the last piece of poetry that soothed his dying ear.”
In Lord Holland’s Memoirs of the Whig Party there is a statement by his nephew which no biographer so far has quoted:—
I read over to him the whole of Crabbe’s Parish Register in manuscript. Some parts he made me read twice; he remarked several passages as exquisitely beautiful, and objected to some few which I mentioned to the author and which he, in almost every instance, altered before publication. Mr. Fox repeated once or twice that it was a very pretty poem, that Crabbe’s condition in the world had improved since he wrote The Village, and his view of life, likewise The Parish Register, bore marks of considerably more indulgence to our species; though not so many as he could have wished, especially as the few touches of that nature were beautiful in the extreme. He was particularly struck with the description of the substantial happiness of a farmer’s wife.
From great novelists the tributes are not less noteworthy than from great statesmen. Jane Austen, whose personality perhaps has more real womanly attractiveness than that of any sister novelist of the first rank, declared playfully that if she could have been persuaded to change her state it would have been to become Mrs. Crabbe; and who can forget Sir Walter Scott’s request in his last illness: “Read me some amusing thing—read me a bit of Crabbe.” They read to him from The Borough, and we all remember his comment, “Capital—excellent—very good.” Yet at this time—in 1832—any popularity that Crabbe had once enjoyed was already on the wane. Other idols had caught the popular taste, and from that day to this there was to be no real revival of appreciation for these poems. There were to be no lack of admirers, however, of the audience “fit though few.” Byron’s praise has been too often quoted for repetition. Wordsworth, who rarely praised his contemporaries in poetry, declared of Crabbe that his works
“would last from their combined merit as poetry and truth.” Macaulay writes of “that incomparable passage in Crabbe’s Borough which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child”—the passage in which the condemned felon
Takes his tasteless food, and when ’tis done,
Counts up his meals, now lessen’d by that one,—
a story which Macaulay bluntly charges Robert Montgomery with stealing. Lord Tennyson, again, at a much later date, admitted that “Crabbe has a world of his own.”
Not less impressive surely is the attitude of the two writers as far as the poles asunder in their outlook upon life and its mysteries—Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald. The famous theologian, we learn from the Letters and Correspondence collected by Anne Mozley, writes in 1820 of his “excessive fondness” for The Tales of the Hall, and thirty years later in one of his Discourses he says of Crabbe’s poems that they are among “the most touching in our language.” Still another twenty years, and the aged cardinal reread Crabbe to find that he
was more delighted than ever with our poet. That great nineteenth century pagan, on the other hand, that prince of letter-writers and wonderful poet of whom Suffolk has also reason to be proud, Edward FitzGerald, was even more ardent. Praise of Crabbe is scattered freely throughout the many volumes of his correspondence, and he edited, as we all know, a book of Selections, which I want to see reprinted. It contains a preface that, it may be admitted, is not really worthy of FitzGerald, so lacking is it in the force and vigour of his correspondence. But this also was in fact yet another death-bed tribute, for it was, I think, one of the last things FitzGerald wrote. FitzGerald, however, has done more for Crabbe among the moderns than any other man. His keen literary judgment must have brought new converts to that limited brotherhood of the elect, of which this gathering forms no inconsiderable portion.
We have one advantage in speaking about George Crabbe that does not obtain with any other poet of great eminence; that is to say, that his life story has not been hackneyed by repetition.
With almost any other writer there is some standing biography which is widely familiar. The Life of George Crabbe, written by his son, although it is one of the very best biographies that I have ever read, is little known. It was quite out of print for years, and it has never been reprinted separately from the poems. It is an admirable biography, and it offers a contradiction of the view occasionally urged that a man’s life should not be written by a member of his own family; for George Crabbe the second would seem not only to have been an exceedingly able man, but possessed of a frankness of disposition in criticizing his father which sons are often prone to show in real life, but which, I imagine, they rarely show in print. His book is a model of candid statement, treating of Crabbe’s little weaknesses—and who of us has not his little weaknesses—in the most cheery possible manner. It is perhaps a small matter to tell us in one place of his father’s want of “taste,” his insensibility to the beauty of order in his composition—that had been done by the critics before him; but he even has something to say about the philandering which characterized the old gentleman in the
last years of his life, his apparent anxiety to get married again. [106] The only thing that he all but ignores is Crabbe’s opium habit—a habit that came to him as a sedative from a painful complaint and inspired, as was the case with Coleridge, his more melodious utterances. Taken altogether the picture is as pleasant as it is capable and exhaustive. We see his early boyhood at Aldeburgh, his schooldays: his first period of unhappiness at Slaughden Quay, his apprenticeship near Bury St. Edmunds, where we seem to hear his master’s daughters, when he reached the door, exclaim with laughter, “La! Here’s our new ’prentice.” We follow him a little higher, to the house of the Woodbridge surgeon, then through his prolonged courtship of Sarah Elmy, then to those dreary, uncongenial duties of piling up butter casks on Slaughden Quay. A brief period of starvation in London, and we find him again in a chemist’s shop in Aldeburgh. Lastly comes his most important journey to London upon the borrowed sum of £5, only three of which he
carried in hard cash. His hand to mouth existence in London for some months is among the most interesting things in literature. Chatterton’s tragic fate might have been his, but, more fortunate than Chatterton, he had friends at Beccles who helped him, and he was even able to publish a poem, The Candidate. Although this poem contained only thirty-four pages, one is not quite sure but that it helped to ruin its publisher. In any case that publisher went bankrupt soon after.
Crabbe has been reproached for having continually attempted to secure a “patron” at this time, and it has been hinted by Sir Leslie Stephen that he ought to have recognized that the patron was out of date, killed by Dr. Johnson’s sturdy defiance. I do not agree with this view. Dr. Johnson, in spite of his famous epigram, was always more or less assisted by the patron, although his personality was strong enough to enable him to turn the tables at the end. When one comes to think of it, Thrale the brewer was a patron of Johnson, so was Strahan the printer. And does he not say in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield that “Seven years, my
lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door,” clearly implying that if Chesterfield was not Johnson’s patron it was not the great Doctor’s fault? In any case the patron must always exist for the poor man of letters in every age. Now, he is frequently a collective personality rather than an individual. He is represented for the author who has tried and failed by the Royal Literary Fund, by such bounty as is awarded by the Society of Authors, or by the Civil List Grant. For the author in embryo he is assisted above all by the literary log-roller who flourishes so much in our day. If he is not this “collective personality,” or one of the others I have named, then he is something much worse—that is, a capitalist publisher. We can none of us who have to earn a living run away from the patronage of capital, and when Sir Leslie Stephen was being paid a salary by the late Mr. George Smith for editing the Dictionary of National Biography, and was told, as we remember that he frequently was, that it was not a remunerative venture and that, as Mr. Smith was fond of saying, his publishing business did not pay for his vineries, Sir
Leslie Stephen was experiencing a patronage, if he had known it, not less melancholy than anything Crabbe suffered from Edmund Burke or the Duke of Rutland.
When one meets a writer who desires to walk on high stilts and to talk of the independence of literature, one is entitled to ask him if it was a greater indignity for Lord Tennyson in his younger days to have received £200 a year from the Civil List than for Crabbe to have received the same sum as the Duke of Rutland’s chaplain; in fact, Crabbe earned the money, and Tennyson did not. There are, as I have said, some most wonderful and pathetic touches in the account of Crabbe’s attempt to conquer London. There are his letters to his sweetheart, for example, his “dearest Mira,” in one of which he says that he is possessed of 6¼d. in the world. In another he relates that he has sold his surgical instruments in order to pay his bills. Nevertheless, we find him standing at a bookstall where he sees Dryden’s works in three volumes, octavo, for five shillings, and of his few shillings he ventures to offer 3s. 6d.—and carries home the Dryden. What bibliophile but
must love such a story as that, even though a day or two afterwards its hero writes, “My last shilling became 8d. yesterday.” But what a good investment withal. Dryden made him a much better poet. Then comes the famous letter to Burke, and the less known second letter to which I have referred, and Burke’s splendid reception of the writer. Nothing, I repeat, in the life of any great man is more beautiful than that. As Crabbe’s son finely says: “He went in Burke’s room a poor young adventurer, spurned by the opulent and rejected by the publishers, his last shilling gone, and his last hope with it. He came out virtually secure of almost all the good fortune that by successive stages afterwards fell to his lot.” The success that comes to most men is built up on such chances, on the kind help of some one or other individual.
Finally there came—for I am hastily recapitulating Crabbe’s story—the years of prosperity, curacies, rectories, the praise of great contemporaries, but nothing surely more edifying than the burning of piles of manuscripts so extensive that no fireplace would hold them. The son’s account of his assisting at these conflagrations is
not the least interesting part of his biography, the merits of which I desire to emphasize.
People who make jokes about that most succulent edible, the crab, when the poet Crabbe is mentioned in their presence—and who can resist an obvious pun—are not really far astray. There can be little doubt but that a remote ancestor of George Crabbe took his name from the “shellfish,” as we all persist, in spite of the naturalist, in calling it; and the poet did not hesitate to attribute it to the vanity of an ancestor that his name had had two letters added. Nor when we hear of Cromer crabs, or crabs from some other part of Norfolk as distinct from what I am sure is equally palatable, the crustacean as it may be found in Aldeburgh, are we remote from the story of our poet’s life. For there cannot be a doubt but that Norfolk shares with Suffolk the glory of his origin. His family, it is clear, came first from Norfolk. The Crabbes of Norfolk were farmers, the Crabbes of Suffolk always favoured the seacoast, and all the glory that surrounds the name of the poet to whom we do honour to-day is reflected in the town in which he was born and bred. Aldeburgh is Crabbe’s
own town, and it is an interesting fact that no other poet can be identified with one particular spot in the way in which Crabbe can be identified with this beautiful watering-place in which we are now assembled. Shakspere was more of a Londoner than a Stratfordian; nearly all his best work was written in London, and many of the most receptive years of his life were spent in that city. Milton’s honoured name is identified with many places, apart from London, the city of his birth. Shelley, Byron and Keats were essentially cosmopolitans in their writings as in their lives. Wordsworth was closely identified with Grasmere, although born in a neighbouring county; but he went to many and varied scenes, and to more than one country, for some of his most inspired verses. Then Cowper, the poet of whom one most often thinks when one is recalling the achievement of Crabbe, is a poet of some half-dozen places other than Olney, and perhaps his best verses were written at Weston-Underwood. Now George Crabbe in the years of his success was identified with many places other than Aldeburgh: with Belvoir Castle, with Muston, and with Trowbridge, where he died,
and some of his admirers have even identified him with Bath. When all this is allowed, it is upon Aldeburgh that the whole of his writings turned, the place where he was born, where he spent his boyhood, and the earlier years of a perhaps too sordid manhood, whither he returned twice, as a chemist’s assistant and as curate. It is the place that primarily inspired all his verses. Aldeburgh stands out vividly before us in each succeeding poem—in The Village, The Borough, The Parish Register, The Tales, and even in those Tales of the Hall, composed in later life in faraway Trowbridge. Crabbe’s vivid observations indeed come home to every one who has studied his works when they have visited not only Aldeburgh but its vicinity. Every reach of the river Ald recalls some striking line by him: the scenery in The Lover’s Journey we know is a description of the road between Aldeburgh and Beccles, and all who have sailed along the river to Orford have recognized that no stream has been so perfectly portrayed by a poet’s pen. Here in his writings you may have a suggestion of Muston, here of Allington, and here again of Trowbridge; but in the main it is the Suffolk scenery that most
of us here know so well that was ever in his mind.
When an attempt was once made to stir up the Great Eastern Railway to identify this district with the name of Crabbe as the English Lakes were identified with the name of Wordsworth, and the Scots Lakes with that of Sir Walter Scott, a high official of the railway made the statement that up to that moment he had never even heard the name of Crabbe. Well, all that is going to be changed. I do not at all approve of the phrase beloved of certain book-makers and of railway companies that implies that any county or district is the monopoly of one man, be he ever so great a writer. Yet I venture to say that within the next ten years the “Crabbe Country” will sound as familiar to the officials of the Great Eastern as the “Wordsworth Country” does to those of the Midland or the North Western. It is true that once in the bitterness of his heart the poet referred to Aldeburgh as “a little venal borough in Suffolk” and that he more than once alluded to his unkind reception upon his reappearance as a curate, when he had
previously failed at other callings. “In my own village they think nothing of me,” he once said. But who does not know how the heart turns with the years to the places associated with childhood and youth, and Crabbe was a remarkable exemplification of this. A well-known literary journal stated only last week that “Crabbe’s connexion with Aldeburgh was not very protracted.” So far from this being true it would be no exaggeration to say that it extended over the whole of his seventy-eight years of life. It included the first five-and-twenty years almost entirely. It included also the brief curacy, the prolonged residence at Parham and Glenham, frequent visits for holidays in after years, and who but a lover of his native place would have done as his son pictures him doing when at Stathern—riding alone to the coast of Lincolnshire, sixty miles from where he was living, only to dip in the waves that also washed the beach of Aldeburgh and returned immediately to his home. “There is no sea like the Aldeburgh sea,” said Edward FitzGerald, and we may be sure that was Crabbe’s opinion also, for revisiting it in later life he wrote:—
There once again, my native place I come
Thee to salute, my earliest, latest home.
One picture in Crabbe’s life stands out vividly to us all—the long years of devotion given by him to Sarah Elmy, and the reciprocal devotion of the very capable woman who finally became his wife. Crabbe’s courtship and marriage affords a pleasant contrast to the usual unhappy relations of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe’s powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a different state of things.
I have given thus much time to Crabbe’s life story because it interests me, and I do not believe that it is possible nowadays to kindle a very profound interest in any writer without a definite presentation of his personality. Apart from his biography—his three biographies by George Crabbe the second, Mr. T. E. Kebbel, and Canon Ainger, there are the seven volumes of his works. Now I do not imagine that any great accession will
be made to the ranks of Crabbe’s admirers by asking people to take down these seven volumes and read them right through—a thing I have myself done twice, and many here also I doubt not. Rather would I plead for a reprint of Edmund FitzGerald’s Selections, or failing that I would ask you to look at the volume of Selections made by Mr. Bernard Holland, or that other admirable selection by the Rev. Anthony Deane. “I must think my old Crabbe will come up again, though never to be popular,” wrote FitzGerald to Archbishop Trench. Well, perhaps the “large still books” of the older writers are never destined to be popular again, but they will always maintain with genuine book lovers their place in English Literature, and if the adequate praise they have received from many good judges is well kept to the front there will be constant accessions to the ranks, and readers will want the whole of Crabbe’s works in which to dig for themselves. Crabbe’s place in English Literature needed not such a gathering as this to make it secure, but we want celebrations of our literary heroes to keep alive enthusiasm, and to encourage the faint-hearted.
In the glorious tradition of English Literature, then, Crabbe comes after Cowper and before Wordsworth. There is a lineal descent as clear and well-defined as any set forth in the peerages of “Burke” or “Debrett.” We read in vain if we do not fully grasp the continuity of creative work. Cowper was born in 1731, Crabbe in 1754, and Cowper was called to the Bar in the year that Crabbe was born. In spite of this disparity of years they started upon their literary careers almost at the same time. The Village was published in 1783, and The Task in 1785, yet Cowper is in every sense the elder poet, inheriting more closely the traditions of Pope and Dryden, coming less near to humanity than Crabbe, and being more emphatically a child of the eighteenth century in its artificial aspects. It is impossible to indict a whole century with all its varied accomplishments, and the century that produced Swift and Cowper and Crabbe had no lack of the finer instincts of brotherhood. Yet the century was essentially a cruel one. Take as an example the attitude of naturally kindly men to the hanging of Dr. Dodd for forgery. Even Samuel Johnson, who did
what he could for Dodd, did not find, as he should have done, his whole soul revolted by such a punishment for a crime against property. Cowper has immense claim upon our regard. He is one of the truest of poets, and one of the most interesting figures in all English literature, although no small share of his one-time popularity was due to his identification with Evangelicalism in religion. Cowper had humour and other qualities which enabled him to make the universal appeal to all hearts which is the test of the greatest literature—the appeal of “John Gilpin,” the “Lines” to his Mother’s Portrait, and his verses on “The loss of the Royal George.” Crabbe made no such appeal, and he has not the adventitious assistance that association with a religious sect affords. Hence the popularity he once enjoyed was more entirely on his merits than was that of Cowper. He was the first of the eighteenth century poets who was able to see things as they really are. Therein lies his strength. Were they poets at all—those earlier eighteenth century writers? It sounds like rank blasphemy to question it, but what is poetry? Surely it is the expression artistically in rhythmic form—
or even without it—of the sincerest emotions concerning nature and life. The greatest poet is not the one who is most sincere—a very bad poet can be that—but the poet who expresses that sincerity with the most perfect art. From this point of view the poets before Cowper and Crabbe, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. Masters of language every one of them, able to command a fine rhetoric, but not poets. Gray in two or three pieces was a poet, but for Johnson that claim can scarcely be made. Cowper was the first to emancipate himself from the conventionality of his age, and Crabbe emancipated himself still further. He had boundless sincerity, and he is really a very great poet even if he has not the perfection of art of some later poets. Many know Crabbe only by the parody of his manner in Rejected Addresses:
John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs Esquire;
But when John Dwyer listed in the blues,
Emanuel Jennings polished Stubbs’s shoes.
and it must be admitted that there are plenty of lines like these in Crabbe, as for example:—
Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred’s sire
Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher.
or this:—
The church he view’d as liberal minds will view
And there he fixed his principles and pew.
Banalities of this kind are scattered through his pages as they are scattered through those of Wordsworth. Nevertheless he was a great poet, bringing us before Wordsworth out of the ruck of artificiality and insincerity. Does any one suppose that Pope in his Essay on Man, that Johnson in his London or that Goldsmith in his Deserted Village had any idea other than the production of splendid phrases. Each and all of them were brilliant men of letters. Crabbe was not a brilliant man of letters, but he was a fine and a genuine poet. You will look in vain in his truest work for the lyrical and musical gift that we associate with poets who came after:—Shelley, Keats, Tennyson—poets who made Crabbe’s work quite distasteful for some three generations. Crabbe it has been claimed had that gift also, to be found in “Sir Eustace Grey” and other verses written under the inspiration of opium, as much
of Coleridge’s best work was written—but it is not in these that his admirers will seek to emphasize his achievement—it is in his work which treats of
The simple annals of my parish poor.
The Village, The Parish Register, The Borough, and many of the Tales bear witness to a clear vision of life as it is lived by the majority of people born into this world. I have seen criticism of Crabbe which calls him the poet who took the middle classes for his subjects, criticism which compared him with George Eliot. All this is quite beside the mark. Crabbe is pre-eminently the poet of the poor, with a lesson for to-day as much as for a century ago. Villages are not now what they were then, we are told. But I fully believe that there are all the conditions of life to-day hidden beneath the surface as Crabbe’s close observations pictured them. “The altered position of the poor,” says Mr. Courthope, “has fortunately deprived his poems of much of the reality they once possessed.” I do not believe it. The closely packed towns, the herding together of families, the squalor are still to be found
in our midst. Crabbe has his message for our time as well as for his own. How he tore the veil from the conventional language of his day, the picture of the ideal village where the happy peasantry passed through life so joyously. Contrast such pictures with his sad declaration—
I’ve seldom known, though I have often read
Of happy peasants on their dying-bed.
Solution Crabbe offers none for the tragedy of poverty. He was no politician. He signed the nomination paper for John Wilson Croker the Tory in his native Aldeburgh, and he supported a Whig at the same election at Trowbridge. His politics were summed up in backing his friends of both parties. But he did see, as politicians are only beginning to see to-day, that the ultimate solution was a social one and not a mere question of political parties. Generations have passed away since he lived, and men are still shouting themselves hoarse to prove that in this Shibboleth or in that may be found the salvation of the country, yet we have still our thousands on the verge of starvation, we have still the very poor in our midst, and the problem seems as far from solution
as ever. But it would be all the better for the State if we could keep the questions raised by Crabbe in his wonderful pictures more continually in view,—lacking in taste as they may sometimes seem to weak stomachs, coarse, unvarnished narratives though they be of a life which is really almost entirely sordid.
Then let us turn to Crabbe’s gallery of pictures. Phœbe Dawson, and the equally pathetic Ruth, Blaney and Clelia, Peter Grimes and many another. They are as clearly defined a set of entirely human beings as any Master has given us. It is not assuredly in George Eliot, as Canon Ainger suggests, that I find an affinity to Crabbe among the moderns, but in two much greater writers of quite different texture, Balzac and Dickens. Had Crabbe not been bounded and restrained by the conventions of his cloth, he might have become one of the most popular story-tellers in our literature—the English Balzac. At a hundred points Charles Dickens is an entire contrast to Crabbe—in his buoyant humour, his gaiety of heart, in the glamour that he throws over the life of the poor, a glamour that was more present in the early Victorian
era than in our own, but Crabbe is with Balzac and with Dickens in that he presents as no other moderns have done living pictures of suffering human lives.
There is yet one other literary force, powerful in our day, that has been largely influenced by Crabbe. Those who love the novels of Mr. Thomas Hardy, whom we rejoice to see with us at this Celebration,—his Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, and many another book that touches the very heart of things in nature and human life, will rejoice to hear that this great writer has admitted George Crabbe to be the most potent influence that has affected his work. I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe, whereas the later French realists had no influence upon him whatever. “Crabbe was our first great English realist” Mr. Hardy would tell you if only we could persuade him to speak from this platform, as unfortunately he will not.
Lastly let us take Crabbe as a great story-teller. He has many more ideas than most of the novelists. That is why we do well to recall the hint
of the writer who said that when a new work came out we should take down an old one from our shelves. Instead of the “un-idead” novels, that come out by the dozen and are so popular. I wish we could agree to read Crabbe’s novels in verse. Unhappily their form is against them in the present age. But it would not be at all a misfortune if we could make Crabbe’s Tales once more the vogue. They are good stories, absorbingly interesting. They leave a very vivid impression on the mind. Once read they are unforgettable.
I have seen it stated that these stories are old-fashioned both in manner and in substance. In manner they may be, but in substance I maintain they are intensely modern, alive with the spirit of our time. Any latter-day novelist might envy Crabbe his power of developing a story. It is this essential modernity that is to make Crabbe’s place in English literature secure for generations yet to come.
Finally, Crabbe’s place in English literature is as the bridge between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. With him begins that “enthusiasm of humanity” which the eighteenth
century so imperfectly understood. Byron and Wordsworth, disliking each other cordially, did well to praise him, for he was their forerunner. A master of pathos, you may find in his work incentive to tears and laughter, although sometimes the humour, as in The Learned Boy, is sadly unconscious.
But I must bring these rambling remarks to a close, and in doing so I must once again quote that other Suffolk worthy to whom many of us are very much attached, I mean Edward FitzGerald. When Sir Leslie Stephen wrote what is to my mind a singularly infelicitous essay on Crabbe in the Cornhill, he quoted the remark, which seemed to be new to FitzGerald, as to Crabbe being a “pope in worsted stockings”—a remark made by Horace Smith of Rejected Addresses, although I have seen it ascribed to Byron and others. “Pope in worsted stockings,” exclaimed FitzGerald, “why I could cite whole paragraphs of as fine a texture as Molière; ‘incapable of epigram,’ the jackanapes says—why, I could find fifty of the very best epigrams in five minutes,” and later, in another letter he writes—
I am positively looking over my everlasting Crabbe again; he naturally comes in about the fall of the year.
Here surely is an appropriate quotation, a little prophetic perhaps, for our gathering—the “everlasting Crabbe.” We cannot all love Crabbe as much as FitzGerald loved him, but this gathering will not be vain if after this we handle his volumes more lovingly, read his poems more sympathetically, and continue with more zeal than ever before to be proud of the man who, born in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago, is closely identified with this county of Suffolk as I believe no other great writer is closely identified with any county in England. An Aldeburgh man—a Suffolk man he was—yet even more in the future than in the past, he is destined to gain the whole world for his parish. He is the everlasting Crabbe!
V. THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF EAST ANGLIA
An address to the East Anglian Society on the occasion of a dinner to Mr. William Dutt, author of “Highways and Byways in East Anglia.” March 25, 1901.
I appreciate the privilege of being allowed to speak this evening for a few minutes upon the literary associations of East Anglia, of being permitted to ask you, while doing honour to a well-known East Anglian writer of to-day, to cast a glance back upon the literature of the past so far as it affects that portion of the British Empire with which we nearly all of us here are proud to be associated. There is necessarily some difference of opinion as to what constitutes East Anglia. I find that our guest of to-night tells us that it is “Norfolk, Suffolk and portions of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.” Dr. Knapp, the biographer of Borrow, says that it is Norfolk,
Suffolk and Cambridgeshire; personally I am content with that classification, because, although I was born in London, I claim, apart from schoolboy days at Downham Market, a pretty lengthy ancestry from Norwich on one side—which is indisputably East Anglia—and from Welney, near Wisbeach, on another side, and Welney and Wisbeach are, I affirm, just as much East Anglia as Norwich and Ipswich. With reference to those other counties and portions of counties, I think that the inhabitants must be allowed to decide for themselves. I imagine that they will give every possible stretch to the imagination in order to allow themselves the honour of being incorporated in East Anglia, a name that one never pronounces without recalling that fine old-world compliment of St. Augustine of Canterbury to our ancestors, that they ought to be called not “Angles” but “Angels.”
Every one in particular who loves books must be proud to partake of our great literary tradition. If it is difficult to decide precisely what East Anglia is, it is perhaps equally difficult to speak for a few minutes on so colossal a theme as the literature of East Anglia. It would be
easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary will provide, a long list of famous names associated with our counties; to remind you that we have produced two poet-laureates—John Skelton, of Diss, the author of Colyn Cloute, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill, the playwright—the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; two very rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born at Thetford, and William Godwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelist in Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. Samuel Clarke; as also the famous brother and sister whose works appealed to totally different minds, James and Harriet Martineau. Then there was that pathetic creature and indifferent poet, Robert Bloomfield, whose Farmer’s Boy once appeared in the luxurious glories of an expensive quarto. Finally, one recalls that two of the most popular women writers of an earlier generation, Clara Reeve, the novelist, and Agnes Strickland, the historian, were Suffolk women.
But I am not concerned to give you a recapitulation of all the East Anglian writers, whose names, as I have said, can be found in any biographical
dictionary, and the quality of whose work would rather suggest that East Anglia, from a literary point of view, is a land of extinct volcanoes. I am naturally rather anxious to make use of the golden opportunity that has been afforded me to emphasize my own literary sympathies, and to say in what I think lies the glory of East Anglia, at least so far as the creation of books is concerned. Here I make an interesting claim for East Anglia, that it has given us in Captain Marryat perhaps the very greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century who has been a delight to youth, and two of the very greatest prose writers of all times for the inspiration of middle-age, Sir Thomas Browne and George Borrow. It has given us in Sarah Austin an example of a learned woman who was also a fascinating woman; it has given us again the most remarkable letter-writers in the English language—Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. To these there were only three serious rivals as letter-writers—William Cowper, Thomas Grey and Charles Lamb; and the first found a final home and a last resting-place in our midst. It has given us that remarkable novelist and entertaining diarist,
Fanny Burney. Finally, it has given us in that same William Cowper—who rests in East Dereham Church, and for whom we claim on that and for other reasons some share and participation in his genius—a great and much loved poet. It has given us indeed in William Cowper and George Crabbe the two most natural and the two most human poets in the English literature of two centuries, only excepting the favourite poet of Scotland—Robert Burns. It is to these of all writers that I would pin my faith in talking of East Anglia and its literature; it is their names that I would have you keep in your mind when you call up memories of the literature which has most inspired our East Anglian life.
In connexion with many writers a point of importance will occur to us. Only occasionally has a great English author a special claim on one particular portion of England. He has not been the lesser or the greater for that, it has merely been an accident of his birth and of his career. The greatest of all writers, the one of whom all Englishmen are naturally the most proud, Shakspere, has, it is true, an abundant association with Warwickshire, but Shakspere stands almost alone
in this, as in many things. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron and Keats were born in London; they travelled widely, they lived in many different counties or countries, and cannot be said to have adorned any distinctively local tradition. Shelley was born in Sussex, but a hundred cities, including Rome, where his ashes rest, may claim some participation in his fine spirit. Wordsworth, on the other hand, who was born in Cumberland, certainly obtained the greater part of his inspiration from the neighbouring county of Westmorland, where his life was passed. But when we come to East Anglia we are face to face with a body of writers who belong to the very soil, upon whom the particular character of the landscape has had a permanent effect, who are not only very great Englishmen and Englishwomen, but are great East Anglians as well.
I have said that Captain Marryat was an East Anglian, and have we not a right to be proud of Marryat’s breezy stories of the sea? Our youth has found such plentiful stimulus in Peter Simple, Frank Mildmay, and Mr. Midshipman Easy; generations of boys have read them with delight, generations of boys will read them. And not
only boys, but men. One recalls that Carlyle, in one of his deepest fits of depression, took refuge in Marryat’s novels with infinite advantage to his peace of mind. Speaking of Captain Marryat and books for boys, a quite minor kind of literature perhaps some of you may think, I must recall that an earlier and still more famous story for children had an East Anglian origin. Did not The Babes in the Wood come out of Norfolk? Was it not their estate in that county that, as we learn from Percy’s Reliques, their wicked uncle coveted, and were not the last hours of those unfortunate children, in this most picturesque and pathetic of stories, solaced by East Anglian robins and their poor bodies covered by East Anglian vegetation?
Let me pass, however, to what may be counted more serious literature. What can one say of Sir Thomas Browne unless indeed one has an hour in which to say it. Every page of that great writer’s Religio Medici and Urn Burial is quotable—full of worldly wisdom and of an inspiration that is not of the world. Browne was born in London, and not until he was thirty-two years of age did he settle in Norwich, where he was
“much resorted to for his skill in physic,” and where he lived for forty-five years, when the fine church of St. Peter Mancroft, received his ashes—a church in which, let me add, with pardonable pride, my own grandfather and grandmother were married. I am glad that Norwich is shortly to commemorate by a fitting monument not the least great of her sons, one who has been aptly called “the English Montaigne.” [138]
Perhaps there are those who would dispute my claim for Marryat and for Sir Thomas Browne that they were East Anglians—both were only East Anglians by adoption. There are even those who dispute the claim for one whom I must count well-nigh the greatest of East Anglian men of letters—George Borrow. Borrow, I maintain, was an East Anglian if ever there was one, although this has been questioned by Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton. Now I have the greatest possible regard for Mr. Watts-Dunton. He is distinguished alike as a critic, a poet, and a romancer. But I must join issue
with him here, and you, I know, will forgive me for taking up your time with the matter; for if Mr. Watts-Dunton were right, one of the chief glories would be shorn from our East Anglian traditions. He denies in the Introduction to a new edition of The Romany Rye, just published, the claim of Borrow to be an East Anglian, although Borrow himself insisted that he was one.
One might as well call Charlotte Brontë a Yorkshire woman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. His father was a Cornishman and his mother of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the egotism of Borrow that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.
Well, I am not prepared to question the suggestion that East Anglia is the hub of the universe, only to question Mr. Watts-Dunton’s position. There is virtue in that qualification of his that there was “very little” East Anglian blood in the veins of Borrow’s mother, and that
she was “mainly” French. As a matter of fact she was, of course, partly East Anglian; that is to say, she must have had two or three generations of East Anglian blood in her, seeing that it was her great-grandfather who settled in Norfolk from France, and he and his children and grandchildren intermarried with the race. But I do not pin my claim for Borrow upon that fact—the fact of three generations of his mother’s family at Dumpling Green—or even on the fact that he was born near East Dereham. There is nothing more certain than that we are all of us influenced greatly by our environment, and that it is this, quite as much as birth or ancestry, that gives us what characteristics we possess. It is the custom, for example, to call Swift an Irishman, whereas Swift came of English parentage and lived for many of his most impressionable years in England. Nevertheless, he may be justly claimed by the sister-island, for during a long sojourn in that country he became permeated with the subtle influence of the Irish race, and in many things he thought and felt as an Irishman. It is the custom to speak of Maria Edgeworth as an Irish novelist, yet Miss Edgeworth was born in
England of English parentage. Nevertheless, she was quite as much an Irish novelist as Charles Lever and Samuel Lover, for all her life was spent in direct communion with the Irish race, and her books were Irish books. It is, on the other hand, quite unreasonable to deny that Charlotte Brontë was a Yorkshire woman. Only once at the end of her life did she visit Ireland for a few weeks. Her Irish father and her Cornish mother doubtless influenced her nature in many ways, but not less certain was the influence of those wonderful moors around Haworth, and the people among whom she lived. Neither Ireland nor Cornwall has as much right to claim her as Yorkshire. I am the last to disclaim the influence of what is sometimes called “Celticism” upon English literature; upon this point I am certain that Matthew Arnold has said almost the last word. The Celts—not necessarily the Irish, as there are three or four races of Celts in addition to the Irish—have in the main given English literature its fine imaginative quality, and even where he cannot trace a Celtic origin to an English writer we may fairly assume that there is Celtic blood somewhere in an earlier generation.
Nevertheless, the impressions, as I have said, derived from environment are of the utmost vitality, and assuredly Borrow was an East Anglian, as Sir Thomas Browne was an East Anglian. In each writer you can trace the influence of our soil in a peculiar degree, and particularly in Borrow. Borrow was proud of being an East Anglian, and we are proud of him. In Lavengro, I venture to assert, we have the greatest example of prose style in our modern literature, and I rejoice to see a growing Borrow cult, a cult that is based not on an acceptance of the narrower side of Borrow—his furious ultra-Protestantism, for example—as was the popularity that he once enjoyed, but upon the fact that he was a magnificent artist in words. No artist in words but is influenced by environment. Charles Kingsley, for example, who came from quite different surroundings, was profoundly influenced by the East Anglian fen-country:—
“They have a beauty of their own, those great fens,” he said, “a beauty of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Overhead the arch of heaven spreads more ample than elsewhere, and that vastness gives such cloud-lands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles.”
But I must hasten on, although I would fain tarry long over George Borrow and his works. I have said that East Anglia is the country of great letter writers. First, there was Margaret Paston. There is no such contribution to a remote period of English history as that contained in the Paston Letters, and I think we must associate them with the name of a woman—Margaret Paston. Margaret’s husband, John Paston; her son, Sir John Paston; and her second son, who, strangely enough, was also a John, and called himself “John Paston the Youngest,” come frequently before us in the correspondence, but Margaret Paston is the central figure.
It may not be without interest to some of my hearers who are married to recall that Margaret Paston addresses her husband not as “Dear John,” or “My dear John,” as I imagine a wife of to-day would do, but as “Right Reverend and Worshipful Husband.” Nowhere is there such a vivid picture of a bygone age as that contained in these Paston Letters. We who sit quietly by the hearth in the reign of King Edward VII may read what it meant to live by the hearth in the reign of King Edward IV. It is
curious that the most humane documents of far-off times in our history should all come from East Anglia, not only those Paston Letters, brimful of the most vital interest concerning the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV, but also an even earlier period—the life, or at least the monastic life in the time of the first Richard and of King John is in a most extraordinarily human fashion mirrored for us in that Chronicle of St. Edmund’s Bury Monastery known as the Jocelyn Chronicle, published by the Camden Society, which Carlyle has vitalized so superbly for us in Past and Present.
But I was speaking of the great letter writers, commencing with Margaret Paston. Who are our greatest letter writers? Undoubtedly they are Horace Walpole, William Cowper and Edward FitzGerald. You know what a superb picture of eighteenth century life has been presented to us in the nine volumes of correspondence we have by Horace Walpole. [144] Walpole was to all practical purposes an East Anglian, although he
happened to be born in London. His father, the great Sir Robert Walpole, was a notable East Anglian, and he had the closest ties of birth and association with East Anglia. Many of his letters were written from the family mansion of Houghton. [145]
Next in order comes William Cowper. I believe that more than one literary historian has claimed Cowper as a Norfolk man. Cowper was born in Hertfordshire; he lived for a very great deal of his life in Olney, in Buckinghamshire, in London and in Huntingdon, but if ever there was a man who took on the texture of East Anglian scenery and East Anglian life it was Cowper. That beautiful river, the Ouse, which empties itself into the Wash, was a peculiar inspiration to Cowper, and those who know the scenery of Olney know that it has conditions exactly
analogous in every way to those of East Anglia. One of Cowper’s most beautiful poems is entitled “On Receipt of my Mother’s Portrait out of Norfolk,” and he himself, as I have said, found his last resting-place on East Anglian soil—at East Dereham.
If there may be some doubt about Cowper, there can be none whatever about Edward FitzGerald, the greatest letter-writer of recent times. In mentioning the name of FitzGerald I am a little diffident. It is like introducing “King Charles’s head” into this gathering; for was he not the author of the poem known to all of us as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, and there is no small tendency to smile to-day whenever the name of Omar Khayyám is mentioned and to call the cult a “lunacy.” It is perhaps unfortunate that FitzGerald gave that somewhat formidable title to his paraphrase, or translation, of the old Persian poet. It is not the fault of those who admire that poem exceedingly that it gives them a suspicion of affecting a scholarship that they do not in most cases possess. What many of us admire is not Omar Khayyám the Persian, nor have we any desire to see or to know
any other translation of that poet. We simply admit to an honest appreciation of the poem by Edward FitzGerald, the Suffolk squire, the poem that Tennyson describes as “the one thing done divinely well.” That poem by FitzGerald will live as long as the English language, and let it never be forgotten that it is the work of an East Anglian, an East Anglian who, like Borrow, possessed a marked Celtic quality, the outcome of a famous Irish ancestry, nevertheless of an East Anglian who loved its soil, its rivers and its sea.
Then I come to another phase of East Anglian literary traditions. It is astonishing what a zest for learning its women have displayed; I might give you quite a long list of distinguished women who have come out of East Anglia. Crabbe must have had one in mind when he wrote of Arabella in one of his Tales:—
This reasoning maid, above her sex’s dread
Had dared to read, and dared to say she read,
Not the last novel, not the new born play,
Not the mere trash and scandal of the day;
But (though her young companions felt the shock)
She studied Berkeley, Bacon, Hobbes and Locke.
The one who perhaps made herself most
notorious was Harriet Martineau, and in spite of her disagreeable egotism it is still a pleasure to read some of her less controversial writings. Her Feats on the Fiord, for example, is really a classic. But I can never quite forgive Harriet Martineau in that she spoke contemptuously of East Anglian scenery, scenery which in its way has charms as great as any part of Europe can offer. No, in this roll of famous women, the two I am most inclined to praise are Sarah Austin and Fanny Burney. Mrs. Austin was, you will remember, one of the Taylors of Norwich, married to John Austin, the famous jurist. She was one of the first to demonstrate that her sex might have other gifts than a gift for writing fiction, and that it was possible to be a good, quiet, domestic woman, and at the same time an exceedingly learned one. Even before Carlyle she gave a vogue to the study of German literature in this country; she wrote many books, many articles, and made some translations, notably what is still the best translation of von Ranke’s History of the Popes. In the muster-roll of East Anglian worthies let us never forget this singularly good woman, this correspondent of all the
most famous men of her day, of Guizot, of Grote, of Gladstone, and one who also, as a letter-writer, showed that she possessed the faculty that seems, as I have said, to be peculiar to the soil of East Anglia. Still less must we forget Fanny Burney, who, born in King’s Lynn, lived to delight her own generation by Evelina and by the fascinating Diary that gives so pleasant a picture of Dr. Johnson and many another of her contemporaries. Evelina and the Diary are two of my favourite books, but I practise self-restraint and will say no more of them here.
I now come to my ninth, and last, name among those East Anglian worthies whom I feel that we have a particular right to canonize—George Crabbe—“though Nature’s sternest painter yet the best,” as Byron described him. Now it may be frankly admitted that few of us read Crabbe to-day. He has an acknowledged place in the history of literature, but there pretty well even well-read people are content to leave him. “What have our literary critics been about that they have suffered such a writer to drop into neglect and oblivion?” asks a recent Quarterly Reviewer. He does not live as Cowper
does by a few lyrics and ballads and by incomparable letters. Scarcely a line of Crabbe survives in current conversation. If you turn to one of those handy volumes of reference—Dictionaries of Quotation, as they are called—from which we who are journalists are supposed to obtain most of the literary knowledge that we are able to display on occasion, you will scarcely find a dozen lines of Crabbe. And yet I venture to affirm that Crabbe has a great and permanent place in literature, and that as he has been a favourite in the past, he will become a favourite in the future. Crabbe can never lose his place in the history of literature, a place as the forerunner of Wordsworth and even of Cowper, but it would be a tragedy were he to drop out of the category of poets that are read. A dainty little edition in eight volumes is among my most treasured possessions. I have read it not as we read some so-called literature, from a sense of duty, but with unqualified interest. We have had much pure realism in these latter days; why not let us return to the most realistic of the poets. He was beloved by all the greatest among his contemporaries. Scott and Wordsworth
were devoted to his work, and so also was Jane Austen. At a later date Tennyson praised him. We have heard quite recently the story of Mr. James Russell Lowell in his last illness finding comfort in reading Scott’s Rob Roy. Let us turn to Scott’s own last illness and see what was the book he most enjoyed, almost on his deathbed:—
“Read me some amusing thing,” said Sir Walter, “read me a bit of Crabbe.” “I brought out the first volumes of his old favourite that I could lay hand on,” says Lockhart, “and turned to what I remembered was one of his favourite passages in it. He listened with great interest. Every now and then he exclaimed, “Capital, excellent, excellent, very good.”
Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald at the opposite poles, as it were, of religious impressions, agree in a devotion to Crabbe’s poetry. Cardinal Newman speaks of Tales of the Hall as “a poem whether in conception or in execution one of the most touching in our language,” and in a footnote to his Idea of a University he tells us that he had read the poem thirty years earlier with extreme delight, “and have never lost my
love of it,” and he goes on to plead that it is an absolute classic.
Not to have read Crabbe, therefore, is not to know one of the most individual in the glorious muster-roll of English poets, and Crabbe was pre-eminently an East Anglian, born and bred in East Anglia, and taking in a peculiar degree the whole character of his environment, as only Shakspere, Cowper and Wordsworth among our great poets, have done.
In conclusion, let me recapitulate that the names of Marryat, Sir Thomas Browne, George Borrow, Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole, Sarah Austin, Fanny Burney, Edward FitzGerald, and George Crabbe are those that I prefer to associate with East Anglian Literature. We are well aware that literature is but an aspect of our many claims on the gratitude of those Englishmen who have not the good fortune to be East Anglians. We have given to the Empire a great scholar in Porson, a great statesman in Sir Robert Walpole, a great lawyer in Sir Edward Coke, great ecclesiastics in Cardinal Wolsey and Archbishop Parker, great artists in Gainsborough, Constable and Crome, and perhaps above all great sailors in Sir Cloudesley
Shovel and the ever memorable Lord Nelson. Personally I admire a certain rebel, Kett the Tanner, as much as any of those I have named.
Of all these East Anglian worthies the praise has often been sung, but let me be pardoned if, on an occasion like this, I have dwelt rather at length on the less familiar association of East Anglia with letters. That I have but touched the fringe of the subject is obvious. What might not be said, for example, concerning Norwich as a literary centre under Bishop Stanley—the Norwich of the Taylors and the Gurneys, possessed of as much real intellectual life as London can boast of to-day. What, again, might not be said of the influence upon writers from afar. Read Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, Mr. Swinburne’s Midsummer Holiday, Charles Dickens’ description of Yarmouth and Goldsmith’s poetical description in his Deserted Village, where clearly Houghton was intended. [153]
These, and a host of other memories touch the heart of all good East Anglians, but that East Anglians do not forget the living in doing honour to the dead is indicated by this gathering to-night. We are grateful to Dr. Augustus Jessopp, to Mr. Walter Rye, to Mr. Edward Clodd, and to our guest of this evening, Mr. William Dutt, for keeping alive the folk-lore, the literary history, the historical tradition of that portion of the British Isles to which we feel the most profound attachment by ties of residence or of kinship.
VI. DR. JOHNSON’S ANCESTRY
A paper read before the members of the Johnson Club of London at Simpson’s Restaurant in the Strand.
There is, I believe, a definite understanding among our members that we, the Brethren of the Johnson Club, have each and all of us read every line about Dr. Johnson that is in print, to say nothing of his works. It is particularly accepted that the thirteen volumes in which our late brother, Dr. Birkbeck Hill, enshrined his own appreciation of our Great Man, are as familiar to us all as are the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. For my part, with a deep sense of the responsibility that must belong to any one who has rashly undertaken to read a paper before the Club, I admit to having supplemented these thirteen volumes by a reperusal of the little book entitled Johnson Club Papers, by Various Hands, issued in 1899 by Brother Fisher Unwin. I feel as I reread these addresses that there were indeed giants in those days,