Chapter XXII: Home Again (2)

Milton’s preference of _Paradise Regained_ to _Paradise Lost_ has often been instanced as an example of the false judgments writers form of their works. As a matter of fact, however, this opinion attributed to Milton is overstated. As has recently been pointed out by Mr Mark Pattison, all we know about the matter is, that Milton ‘could not bear to hear with patience’ that it was inferior to _Paradise Lost_. Of a writer who formed the most exaggerated and erroneous notions about the merits of his works, no better example could be given than Southey. He was indeed, as Macaulay remarked in his Diary, arrogant beyond any man in literary history; for his self-conceit was proof against the severest admonitions, and the utter failure of one of his books only confirmed him in his belief of its excellence. When William Taylor asked him who was to read his massive quartos on Brazil, he replied: ‘That one day he should by other means have made such a reputation that it would be thought a matter of course to read them.’ About _Kehama_, he wrote: ‘I was perfectly aware that I was planting acorns while my contemporaries were planting Turkey beans. The oak will grow; and though I may never sit under its shade, my children will.’ To one of his contemporaries, he writes in 1805: ‘No further news of the sale of _Madoc_. The reviews will probably hurt it for a while; that is all they can do. Unquestionably the poem will stand and flourish. I am perfectly satisfied with the execution—now, eight months after its publication, in my cool judgment. William Taylor has said it is the best English poem that has left the press since _Paradise Lost_. Indeed, this is not exaggerated praise, for there is no competition.’ On another occasion Southey writes: ‘_Thalaba_ is finished. You will, I trust, find the Paradise a rich poetical picture, a proof that I can employ magnificence and luxury of language when I think them in place. One overwhelming propensity has formed my destiny, and marred all prospects of rank or wealth; but it has made me happy, and it will make me immortal.’ In a letter written in 1815, he modestly remarks that nothing could be more absurd than thinking of comparing any of his pieces with _Paradise Lost_; but that with Tasso, with Virgil, with Homer, there might be fair grounds of comparison! Nor did he think more meanly of himself as an historian, for he predicted that he would stand above Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon; nay, he went even further, and challenged comparison with the Father of History. ‘I have flattered myself,’ he says, ‘that my _History of Brazil_ might in more points than one be compared to Herodotus, and will hereafter stand in the same relation to the history of that large portion of the new world as his History does to that of the old.’

Southey’s friend and admirer, Walter Savage Landor, resembled him in the exalted notions he entertained of the value of his own productions. ‘I have published,’ he says in the conversation with Hare, ‘five volumes of _Imaginary Conversations_; cut the most of them through the middle, and there will remain in the decimal fraction enough to satisfy my appetite for fame. I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select.’ ‘Be patient!’ he says in another place. ‘From the higher heavens of poetry it is long before the radiance of the brightest star can reach the world below. We hear that one man finds out one beauty, another man finds out another, placing his observatory and instruments on the poet’s grave. The worms must have eaten us before we rightly know what we are. It is only when we are skeletons that we are boxed, and ticketed, and shown. Be it so! I shall not be tired of waiting.’ Knowing, he again writes, that in two thousand years there have not been five volumes of prose (the work of one man) equal to his _Conversations_, he could indeed afford to wait. If conscious of earthly things, we fear he may be waiting still.

With better reason than Southey and Landor, Wordsworth nourished in his breast a sublime self-complacency, and, in spite of adverse criticisms, wrote calmly on, ‘in the full assurance that his poems would be unpopular, and in the full assurance that they would be immortal.’ To a friend who wrote condoling with him about the severity with which his poems were criticised in the _Edinburgh Review_, he replied: ‘Trouble not yourself about their present reception; of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny? To console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young and gracious of every age to see, to think, and to feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous—this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we—that is, all that is mortal of us—are mouldering in our graves.’ Again: ‘I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings, and among them these little poems, will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society, wherever found, and that they will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men happier and wiser.’

Byron, to whom Macaulay denied the possession of any high critical faculty, was no better judge of his own poetry than he was of other people’s. His _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ he thought inferior to his _Hints from Horace_, a feeble imitation of Pope and Johnson, which he repeatedly designed to publish, and was withheld from doing only by the solicitations of his friends, whom, to his astonishment, he could never bring to think of the matter as he did. Scott, who had few of the weaknesses common to literary men, was free from any tendency to unduly estimate his own writings. He always said that his poetry would never live, and was not to be compared with that of many of his contemporaries. He felt that though Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley were then comparatively neglected, the time would come when they would be recognised as having possessed more of the sacred fire of inspiration than he. ‘I promise you,’ he says in an epistle to an old friend, ‘my oaks will outlast my laurels; and I pique myself more on my compositions for manure, than on any other compositions to which I was ever accessory.’ This was, of course, in great part badinage. But he repeatedly, both in writing and conversation, placed literature below some other professions, and especially the military, of whose greatest representative then living, the Duke of Wellington, his admiration knew no bounds.

‘There are two things,’ said Dr Johnson to Reynolds, ‘which I am confident I can do very well: one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner; the other is a conclusion proving from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author promised to himself and the public.’ The Doctor was, on the whole, a very honest critic of his own productions. ‘I showed him,’ writes Boswell, ‘as a curiosity that I had discovered, his translation of Lobo’s Account of Abyssinia, which Sir John Pringle had lent me, it being then little known as one of his works. He said: “Take no notice of it,” or, “Don’t talk of it.” He seemed to think it beneath him, though done at six-and-twenty. I said to him: “Your style, sir, is much improved since you translated this.” He answered with a sort of triumphant smile: “Sir, I hope it is.”’ On one occasion, when some person read his _Irene_ aloud, he left the room, saying he did not think it had been so bad. Reviewing the _Rambler_ late in life, he shook his head, and said it was ‘too wordy.’

A good specimen of honest, manly self-criticism is afforded by a letter of Sydney Smith’s to Jeffrey, who had written to him complaining that he treated grave subjects in too jocular a vein. ‘You must consider,’ he writes, ‘that Edinburgh is a very grave place, and that you live with philosophers who are very intolerant of nonsense. I write for the London, not for the Scotch market, and perhaps more people read my nonsense than your sense. The complaint was loud and universal about the extreme dullness and lengthiness of the _Edinburgh Review_. Too much, I admit, would not do of my style; but the proportion in which it exists enlivens the _Review_, if you appeal to the whole public, and not to the eight or ten grave Scotchmen with whom you live.... Almost any one of the sensible men who write for the _Review_ could have done a much wiser and more profound article than I have done upon the Game Laws. I am quite certain nobody would obtain more readers for his essay on such a subject, and I am equally certain that the principles are right, and that there is no lack of sense in it.’

Macaulay also may be ranked among the writers who have formed correct judgments of their own works. ‘I have written,’ he wrote with great candour, to Macvey Napier, ‘several things on historical, political, and moral questions, of which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated. But I have never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts which I would not burn if I had the power. I leave it to yourself to make the comparison. I am sure that on reflection you will agree with me. Hazlitt used to say of himself, “I am nothing if not critical.” The case with me is directly the reverse. I have a strong and acute enjoyment of great works of the imagination; but I have never habituated myself to dissect them.’ Not less sound was his estimate of his great History. A fortnight before its publication, he wrote in his Diary: ‘The state of my own mind is this: when I compare my own work with what I imagine history ought to be, I feel dejected and ashamed; but when I compare it with some Histories which have a high repute, I feel re-assured.’ At a subsequent stage of the publication, he writes: ‘I dawdled over my book most of the day, sometimes in good, sometimes in bad spirits about it. On the whole, I think that it must do. The only competition, so far as I perceive, it has to dread is that of the two former volumes. Certainly no other History of William’s reign is either so trustworthy or so agreeable.’ The following entry is interesting: ‘I looked through ——’s two volumes. He is, I see, an imitator of me. But I am a very unsafe model. My manner is, I think, and the world thinks, on the whole a good one; but it is very near to a bad manner indeed, and those characteristics of my style which are most easily copied are the most questionable.’

Of all classes of writers, perhaps the most vain are amateur poets and great classical scholars. An amusing instance of conceit in one of the former class is given in Cyrus Redding’s _Recollections_. Once meeting with Colton, the author of _Lacon_, they entered into conversation, and Colton invited him to his house, and quoted many lines from a poem he was composing called _Hypocrisy_. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘do you think any lines of Pope more euphonical than these?’

His conceit at first surprised Redding; but seeing his weak side, he flattered him. ‘Really, they are very good, and very like’——

‘There, sir; I think these will convince you I write verses of some merit.’

This anecdote reminds one of a certain amateur versifier whom Thomas Davidson, the ‘Scottish Probationer,’ once met with in his peregrinations, who used to read to his suffering auditor long poems of his own composition. When Davidson did violence to his conscience by praising any of them, the poetaster complacently remarked: ‘Yes, it’s capital.’ How differently puerile vanity like this affects one, from the lofty words some great writers have used of their own works. How fine, for example, is the address of Bacon: ‘Those are the Meditations of Francis of Verulam, which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed _their_ interest.’ Horace, in one of his finest odes, says of himself: ‘I have erected a monument more durable than brass, and more lofty than the regal height of the pyramids.’ In a similar strain, Shakspeare writes in one of his sonnets:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this lofty rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

It would fail us to repeat all the anecdotes that might be told of the vanity of scholars. Richard Bentley, whom Macaulay calls the greatest scholar that has appeared in Europe since the revival of learning, always spoke, wrote, and acted as if he considered a great scholar the greatest of men. In the preface to his edition of Horace, he describes at some length the characteristics of the ideal critic, and pretty plainly indicates that he regarded himself as that model individual. If, in scholarship, Samuel Parr was inferior to Bentley, his vanity was at least equally colossal. ‘Shepherd,’ he once said to one of his friends, ‘the age of great scholars is past. I am the only one now remaining of that race of men.’ ‘No man’s horse carries more Latin than mine,’ he one day observed to an acquaintance with whom he was out riding. In signal contrast to the opinions these two worthies entertained of themselves was the verdict which Porson, the greatest Greek scholar England has seen, passed on himself. Being once asked why he had produced so little original matter, he replied: ‘I doubt if I could produce any original work which could command the attention of posterity. I can only be known by my notes; and I am quite satisfied if, three hundred years hence, it shall be said that one Porson lived towards the close of the eighteenth century who did a good deal for the text of Euripides.’

BURIED ALIVE.

Of all the horrible and appalling calamities that can befall mortal man, we can imagine none more ghastly than that of being buried alive, and well authenticated records have placed beyond a doubt that it has occasionally happened. The case of the lady whose ring, cut from her finger by midnight violators of her tomb, was the means of saving her from a dreadful fate, has been often told. Her son, the eminent Dr L——, born many years after his mother had been buried, was the physician and friend of the family of the writer, one of whose earliest recollections is the hearing the story from the lips of an aged relative, while forming one of a group of small listeners gathered round and hanging with ’bated breath on the narration. Children love to have the same stories told over and over again in the same words. They like to know what is coming—to watch with thrills of expectation for each detail. And these details, graphically given by one who had them from the very actors in the scene, were weird and vivid. The vault at midnight—the cutting off of the finger—the ghastly terror of the ruffians, when the dead woman sat up in her coffin and blood began to flow—the familiar knock coming to the house-door in the dead of night, heard by terrified maids, who, thinking their mistress’s ghost was there, buried their faces, trembling, in their pillows. The bereaved husband lying sleepless in his grief, heard it too, and started at the sound. ‘If my dear wife were not gone,’ he thought, ‘I should say that was her knock;’ and when, more faintly, it again smote his ear, rising at last and going to the door, he was confronted by the resuscitated woman. All this was listened to with an interest intensified by the fact of its being true.

A curious coincidence respecting this event is that an exactly similar story is recorded in the annals of the family of the Earls of Mount-Edgcumbe. In them we read that the mother of Richard Edgcumbe, created first Baron in 1742, being at the time young and childless, died, apparently, at their seat, Cothele, near Plymouth. She was buried with a valuable ring on her finger; and the cutting this off by violators of the tomb, as in the case of Mrs L——, restored her to consciousness. Five years afterwards, she gave birth to a son.

In the year 1838, a remarkable instance of burying alive occurred at Cambray, in France. M. Marbois, a farmer residing at Sisoy, in that neighbourhood, had reared a large family, and acquired by his industry and good conduct, wealth and consideration, so that he was chosen principal churchwarden of his parish, and appointed deputy-mayor. He had lived in harmony with his family, until the subject of a marriage his eldest son wished to contract, became the cause of a quarrel, and brought on fierce disputes between him and his children. Marbois was a man of violent passions; opposition made him frantic; and on one occasion, when the dispute ran higher than usual, he became so infuriated that he rose up and pronounced a fearful malediction upon his family. No sooner had the words passed his lips, than his whole frame suddenly collapsed; his face grew livid, his eyes fixed, his limbs stiffened, and he fell to the ground. Medical aid was called in; but all pulsation had ceased. Soon the body became cold, and his death was decidedly pronounced—the cause, a stoppage of the heart’s action produced by violent excitement. This occurred on the 13th of January; and on the 16th the interment took place. There had been a severe frost, and the extreme hardness of the ground prevented the grave from being properly dug. It was therefore left shallow, with the intention of deepening it when the thaw should come. By the 23d the ground became sufficiently softened, and men were set to work to raise the body and finish the grave. On lifting the coffin, they fancied that they heard a sigh, and on listening attentively, they found the sounds of life repeated. Breaking open the coffin, and perceiving that faint actions of pulsation and respiration were going on to a certain extent, the men hurried off with the body to the house of the parish doctor, by whose efforts Marbois was at last restored to consciousness.

When the resuscitated man was able to recall what had taken place, he became overwhelmed with contrition, regarding the fate from which he so narrowly escaped as the deserved punishment of his sin. He sent for the clergyman of Sisoy, whom he entreated to mediate with his children, expressing his anxiety to make his peace with them and to recall his malediction. The result was a return to mutual understanding and the re-establishment of harmony in the household.

The distinguished physician Sir Henry Marsh, used to describe an event which occurred at the beginning of his medical career, many years before he had reached the eminence to which he afterwards attained. He was called in by the family doctor—a country practitioner—to attend upon Colonel H——, struck down suddenly by apoplexy. The fit was a severe one. All efforts to save the sick man proved unavailing; he never rallied, and at the end of a few days, to all appearance breathed his last. On the morning of the funeral, the two medical attendants deemed it right, as a last attention, to go and take leave of the remains of their patient before the coffin was screwed down. The family doctor, a jovial florid personage, on whom professional cares sat lightly, had been a friend, and ofttimes boon-companion, of the deceased. A bottle of port and glasses stood on a table near the coffin.

‘Ah, my poor friend!’ he said, pouring out a bumper and tossing it off; ‘this was his favourite drink. Rare wine, too. He knew what was good, and never spared it. Many a generous glass we have had together. I’ll drink another to his memory,’ he cried; and another, and another followed, until the wine rapidly gulped down, and at so unwonted an hour, began to tell upon the man, and make his eyes glisten and his speech grow thick.

‘Why should you not pledge me now for the last time?’ exclaimed the excited doctor, while he approached the corpse, and, to Sir Henry’s inexpressible disgust at such revolting levity, pressed the glass to the pale lips. The contents went down the colonel’s throat!

Sir Henry stood amazed; his eyes, which he was turning away from the unbecoming spectacle, were riveted on the corpse.

The jovial doctor, sobered in a moment, staggered back. ‘Can a dead man drink?’ he cried.

‘Give him more—more!’ exclaimed Sir Henry, recovering his presence of mind and seizing the bottle.

A tinge so slight that only a medical eye could have detected it, began faintly to suffuse the white face. The doctor tore away the shroud and placed his hand upon the heart. There was no movement; but they lifted the body out of the coffin and proceeded to adopt the measures proper for resuscitation.

Meanwhile, the hearse stood at the door; the funeral guests were assembling outside—carriages arriving; while within, all was commotion and suspense—servants hurrying to and fro fetching hot bricks, stimulants, restoratives, in obedience to the doctors’ commands; the latter plying every means skill could devise to keep the flickering spark of life from dying out; and the startled family, half paralysed by the sudden revulsion, standing around, gathered in anxious, silent groups.

Breathlessly they watched for tidings. For a long time the result seemed doubtful—doubtful whether the hearse before the door, the gaping coffin, the graveclothes lying scattered about and trampled under foot, all the grim paraphernalia of death, hastily discarded in the first wild moment of hope—might not yet be needed to fulfil their mournful office. But no! Breath, pulsation, consciousness, were slowly returning.

Colonel H—— was given back to his family and home, filling again the place that it was thought would know him no more. And not until five-and-twenty years had passed away after that memorable morning, were his friends summoned—this time to pay him the last tribute.

A young officer returned from China related, apropos of burying alive, the following experience.

‘On our passage home,’ he said, ‘we had in the transport, besides our own troops, a large draft of French soldiers. Disease soon broke out among the closely packed men, and deaths were of daily occurrence. The French dealt summarily with their dead. As soon as a poor fellow had breathed his last, he was stripped, a twenty-pound shot tied to his heels, and his body thrust through a porthole into the sea. John Bull’s prejudices rebelled against such rapid proceedings. When we lost any of our comrades, they were allowed to lie for twelve hours covered with the Union-jack, and the burial service was read over them before they were committed to the deep. One day, a French sergeant, who had just fallen a victim to the pestilence, was brought up on deck in the sheet in which he had died, to be thrown overboard. The twenty-pound shot had been fastened to his feet and the sheet removed, when, in pushing him through the porthole, he was caught by a protruding hook or nail at the side, and stuck fast. A few more vigorous thrusts sent the body further through; and in so doing, the flesh was torn by the hook, and blood began to flow. The attention of the bystanders was attracted to this; and, moreover, they fancied that they saw about the corpse other startling symptoms. “The man’s alive!” flew from mouth to mouth. In an instant, willing hands were pressing eagerly to the rescue, and before the body could touch the water, it was caught and brought up on deck.

‘The French sergeant was one of the soundest men on board the transport-ship when we landed.’

CAMEO-CUTTING.

The best American artist in cameo-cutting has recently, says a contemporary, been interviewed upon his costly art. He was found pounding up diamonds with a pestle and mortar. This, he explained, was not the only costly part of cameo-making, which takes eyesight, a great deal of time and patience, and years of experience. Then the onyx stones, from which the cameos are made, are expensive, costing sometimes as much as fifty dollars. The choicest have a layer of cream-coloured stone on a dark chocolate-coloured base. But many persons like the red, orange, black, or shell pink stones just as well. They are found in the Uruguay Mountains and in Brazil. The onyx is a half-precious stone of the quartz family. It is taken to Europe, and cut into oval or oblong shapes, and Americans have to pay ten per cent. duty to get it through the custom-house. The cameo-cutter turned to his lathe by the window, and, rubbing some of the diamond dust, which he had mixed with sperm oil, on the end of a small drill, began his work. He was making for a cabinet piece a large cameo, two by two and a half inches, one of the largest ever cut, of an old gentleman in Germany, whose portrait was placed before him. ‘I have one hundred and twenty-five of these soft iron drills,’ he remarked; ‘they are made soft so as to catch the diamond dust, which is the only thing that will cut a cameo. A cameo is indestructible, except you take a hammer and smash it. It is an old art, and was practised by the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. Dr Schliemann found some cameos in good preservation that were probably three thousand years old. It takes several weeks to cut a large piece like this. Afterwards, it has to be polished with tripoli, first being smoothed with emery and oil, using the lead instruments similar to those for cutting. It is easier to cut a profile than a full-face portrait. Some people prefer intaglios, in which the portrait is depressed instead of raised. They are made on sards and cornelians, the former being a dark-reddish brown, and the latter a clear red. They are harder to make than cameos. I have to take impressions of the work in wax as I go on. I usually cut portraits from photographs, but sometimes have done them from life, and also from casts of dead persons.’ Among portraits which the artist had cut are those of ex-President Hayes, Mrs Hayes, William Cullen Bryant, Bayard Taylor, Peter Cooper, and others. A large cameo copy of Gerôme’s ‘Cleopatra before Cæsar’ was valued at fifteen hundred dollars.

ANGEL VISITORS.

In the graveyard gray and chill,
Veiled in shadow, hushed and still,
’Neath one drooping cypress tree,
They are laid, my darlings three—
Merry Robin, brave and bold;
Baby May, with locks of gold;
Darling Dolly, shy and fair,
With the grave-dust on her hair.
Now their joyous feet no more
Patter o’er the cottage floor;
Still they hover near, I know—
Lovely spirits, white as snow!

Ringing sounds of boyish mirth
Never round my childless hearth
In the morning light are heard,
Welcoming the early bird;
In the evening, drear and long,
Never maiden’s vesper song
Bids discordant voices cease,
Fills the slumberous hush with peace;
Yet when bowed in tearful prayer,
Lo! they mount the silent stair!
Whispering, fluttering, to and fro—
Lovely spirits, white as snow!

Heavenly wisdom in their eyes,
Downward from the starlit skies,
On the moonbeams pale they glide,
Smiling angels side by side!
Folded in their loving arms,
Swiftly fade life’s vague alarms.
When I feel their flowery breath
Fan my cheek, I long for death.
How my heart in rapture sings,
Listening to their rustling wings,
Making music sweet and low—
Lovely spirits, white as snow!

When the faint, uncertain glow
Of my taper burning low,
Dimly shows each vacant place,
Treasured curl and pictured face,
With a world of longing pain,
Empty hands are clasped in vain!
Then lie patient on my knee,
Till they come, my darlings three!
Bidding earthly sounds grow dumb,
In their shimmering robes they come,
Wondering at their mother’s woe—
Lovely spirits, white as snow!

When I slumber, they are near,
Whispering in my dreaming ear,
Shedding beams of heavenly light
From their pinions silvery bright!
Ah! such holy truths they speak,
Kissing lip, and brow, and cheek!
‘Peace!’ they murmur o’er and o’er;
‘We are with you evermore!
Angels count the mourner’s hours;
Every cross is crowned with flowers.’
God has taught them this, I know—
Lovely spirits, white as snow!

FANNY FORRESTER.

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