Chapter V: Part 5

For a long time after, my mind was never without a lurking fear that the influence which had once taken possession of me might return again. Why should I have feared to be influenced—to be the messenger of a blessed creature, whose wishes could be nothing but heavenly? Who can say? Flesh and blood is not made for such encounters: they were more than I could bear. But nothing of the kind has ever occurred again.

Agnes had her peaceful domestic throne established under the picture. My father wished it to be so, and spent his evenings there in the warmth and light, instead of in the old library, in the narrow circle cleared by our lamp out of the darkness, as long as he lived. It is supposed by strangers that the picture on the wall is that of my wife; and I have always been glad that it should be so supposed. She who was my mother, who came back to me and became as my soul for three strange moments and no more, but with whom I can feel no credible relationship as she stands there, has retired for me into the tender regions of the unseen. She has passed once more into the secret company of those shadows, who can only become real in an atmosphere fitted to modify and harmonise all differences, and make all wonders possible—the light of the perfect day.—_Blackwood's Magazine._

DELLA CRUSCA AND ANNA MATILDA:

AN EPISODE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.

BY ARMINE T. KENT.

Most people are more or less vaguely aware that there existed in England, towards the end of the last century, a school of poets, or poetasters, called Della Cruscan; and Mrs. Oliphant not long ago suggested, in her _Literary History_, that a sketch of their eccentricities might not be unamusing. I propose, accordingly, for the edification of the curious, to recount a few particulars of the Della Cruscan writers, in the days of their prosperity and the days of their collapse. They were, let it at once be admitted, a feeble and a frivolous folk; yet I think that a moral may suggest itself when their story has been told.

In the year 1784 Mr. Robert Merry, a bachelor of thirty, had been for some years domiciled at Florence. That his position and prospects were not of a very definite order was owing to no defect of nurture or opportunity. He had been educated at Harrow, at the same time as Sheridan, and afterwards at Christ's College, Cambridge, and was originally intended for the Bar. To Lincoln's Inn he accordingly made a pretence of belonging till the death of his father, who was a Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company; the family connection with the North Seas being still perpetuated in the name of Merry's Island. Robert Merry at once took advantage of the independence which came to him on his father's death to abandon the Bar and buy himself a commission in the Guards. His liking for high play and high society kept him, for a short time, amused in his new position. He grew, however, once more restless; wandered on the Continent; and became, in the phraseology of the day, a man of letters and of leisure. His love of letters he gratified, at Florence, by becoming a member of the Italian Academy, the Accademia della Crusca, and his love of letters and leisure combined by joining himself to an English society who called themselves the “Oziosi,” and, no doubt, took good care to merit that designation.

The leading spirit of this coterie was no less a personage than Mrs. Piozzi, happily married at last, and safely escaped from the malice of her cold-blooded daughters, and from the virulence with which the English journals had inveighed against her choice of a second husband. Even now the memory of her domestic troubles tended to inspire her with a dejection which the master-pieces of Florentine sculpture were, oddly enough, powerless to remove. As she herself described it, in lines at which one cannot help smiling, sincere as they perhaps were,—

The slave and the wrestlers, what are they to me,
From plots and contention removed?
And Job with still less satisfaction I see,
When I think on the pains I have proved.

The homage of her countrymen, however, did much to enliven her despondency; and she complacently records in her journals some of the compliments paid her by her fellow-members of the “Oziosi.” They used to address her in this style:—

E'en so when Parsons pours his lay,
Correctly wild, or sweetly strong,
Or Greathead charms the listening day,
With English or Italian song,
Or when, with trembling wing I try,
Like some poor wounded bird, to fly,
Your fostering smiles you ne'er refuse,
But are the Pallas and the Muse!

The Parsons and Greathead of this all-round panegyric of Merry's were two members of the “Oziosi” clique: Parsons, a bachelor with a tendency to flirt, to “trifle with Italian dames,” as Mrs. Piozzi poetically put it; Greathead, the newly-married husband of a beautiful wife. Both Parsons and Greathead were voluminous contributors to the society's Album, which soon assumed formidable dimensions. The staple of the contents consisted of high-flown compliments in verse. Parsons, for instance, would write to Greathead's wife:—

O blest with taste, with Genius blest,
Sole mistress of thy Bertie's breast,
Who to his love-enraptured arms are given
The rich reward his virtues claim from Heaven.

And Bertie, as in duty bound, would reply in kind, bidding the sallow Arno pause and listen to the lays of Parsons. As an alternative to these panegyrics, they wrote _Dithyrambics to Bacchus_, _Odes to the Siroc_, or lines on that latest novelty, Montgolfier's air-balloon. Mrs. Greathead was, in fact, as Parsons informs us, the only member of the society who contributed nothing but the inspiration of her charms.

Some of these poems were printed in an _Arno Miscellany_, of which only a few copies were privately circulated. It was a subsequent and larger collection, published in 1785, under the name of _The Florence Miscellany_, which first made its way to England, and drew the attention of the English public to the rising school of versifiers. Horace Walpole characterized their productions as “mere imitations of our best poets,” that is to say, of Milton, Gray, and Collins. How justly, may be inferred from the opening stanza of Merry's _Ode on a distant prospect of Rome_:—

When Rome of old, terrific queen,
High-placed on Victory's sounding car,
With arm sublime and martial mien,
Brandished the flaming lance of war,
Low crouched in dust lay Afric's swarthy crowd,
And silken Asia sank, and barbarous Britain bowed.

The imitations of Milton and Collins are of a like description. Such as it was, the book was a success, and samples of its contents were reproduced, after the fashion of the day, in the newspapers and magazines—the _Gentleman's_, the _European_, the _Universal Magazine_, and so forth. Of the quality of the poems, critically considered, and of the Della Cruscan poetry generally, I shall have something to say farther on. In the meantime, it may, perhaps, be worth while to disinter a ludicrous passage in one of Merry's contributions to the _Florence Miscellany_. The “Oziosi” had one day agreed that each of them should produce by the evening a story or poem which should “excite horror by description.” Mrs. Piozzi's production will be found in her _Autobiography_, and is by no means devoid of merit. Merry brought a poem (“a very fine one,” says Mrs. Piozzi), in which he introduced the following remarkable ghost, which I commend to the attention of the new Psychical Society:—

While slow he trod this desolated coast,
From the cracked ground uprose a warning ghost;
Whose figure, all-confused, was dire to view,
And loose his mantle flowed, of shifting hue;
_He shed a lustre round; and sadly pressed
What seemed his hand upon what seemed his breast;
Then raised his doleful voice, like wolves that roar
In famished troops round Orcas' sleepy shore,_—
“Approach yon antiquated tower,” he cried,
“There bold Rinaldo, fierce Mambrino, died,” etc.

But I must not linger over the _Florence Miscellany_, which was but the prelude to those melodious bursts which filled the spacious times of George III. with the music of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda. A year or two after its publication the Florence coterie broke up, and returned to England.

The first note of the concert was struck by Robert Merry, who, in June 1787, sent to the _World_ a poem entitled _The Adieu and Recall to Love_, subscribing himself Della Crusca, a nickname which had been given to him at Florence, on account of his connection, already mentioned, with the Italian Academy. The _World_ was a daily morning paper, price threepence, which in more than one respect resembled its modern namesake. A contemporary satirist, writing under the modest pseudonym of “Horace Juvenal,” describes how the young lady of 1787—

Reluctant opes her eyes, 'twixt twelve and one,
To skim the _World_, or criticise the _Sun_,
And when she sees her darling friend abused
Is half enraged, yet more than half-amused.

And another poet portrays two unlucky baronets, Sir Gregory Turner and Sir John Miller—husband of Lady Miller of Bath Easton vase celebrity—lamenting the ridicule with which the same newspaper had overwhelmed them:—

Woe wait the week, Sir John, and cursed the hour,
When harmless gentlemen felt satire's power,
When, raised from insignificance and sloth,
The _World_ began to ridicule us both.

“In this paper,” says Gifford, “were given the earliest specimens of those audacious attacks on all private character, which the town first smiled at for their quaintness, then tolerated for their absurdity; and now that other papers, equally wicked and more intelligible, have ventured to imitate it, will have to lament to the last hour of British liberty.” That literary history is self-repeating, and that prophecies are mostly mistaken, are not new reflections; yet it is difficult to avoid making them when we compare those days with these.

But beyond its function as a purveyor of social gossip, no newspaper was then considered complete without a Poet's Corner, consecrated to sentimental effusions and labored impromptus—“Complimentary verses to the brilliancy of the Hon. Mrs. N——h's Eyes,” or “Lines on Lady T—e—l's Ring.” In publishing his poem in the _World_, Della Crusca did but select the natural and recognized arena of the eighteenth-century poet. It may be as well to quote the greater part of _The Adieu and Recall to Love_, in order to give some notion of the calibre of the verses which were to found a school:—

Go, idle Boy, I quit thy bower,
The couch of many a thorn and flower;
Thy twanging bow, thine arrow keen,
Deceitful Beauty's timid mien;
The feigned surprise, the roguish leer,
The tender smile, the thrilling tear,
Have now no pangs, no joys for me,
So fare thee well, for I am free!
Then flutter hence on wanton wing,
Or lave thee in yon lucid spring,
Or take thy beverage from the rose,
Or on Louisa's breast repose;
I wish thee well for pleasures past,
Yet, bless the hour, I'm free at last,
But sure, methinks, the altered day
Scatters around a mournful ray;
And chilling every zephyr blows,
And every stream untuneful flows.

* * * * *

Alas! is all this boasted ease
To lose each warm desire to please,
No sweet solicitude to know
For others' bliss, or others' woe,
A frozen apathy to find,
A sad vacuity of mind?
Oh, hasten back, then, heavenly Boy,
And with thine anguish bring thy joy!
Return with all thy torments here,
And let me hope, and doubt, and fear;
Oh, rend my heart with every pain,
But let me, let me love again.

I suppose what will strike most readers with regard to these lines is that they are decidedly fluent, and utterly commonplace. That, however, is not the light in which a critic of the last quarter of the eighteenth century would regard them. Amid the dead level of sing-song couplets, the milk-and-water decency of Hayley, the chill and prolix classicism of Pye, the ineffable mediocrity of a thousand Pratts and Polwheles—the fluency of Merry passed, according to the critic's leanings, for fire or for fustian; and the phraseology, which afterwards became hackneyed, was then startling. Take, for instance, Horace Walpole's criticism of the new poetic departure. “It is refreshing to read natural easy poetry, full of sense and humor, instead of that unmeaning, labored, painted style now in fashion of the Della Cruscas and Co., of which it is impossible ever to retain a couplet, no more than one could remember how a string of emeralds and rubies were placed in a necklace. Poetry has great merit if it is the vehicle and preservative of sense, but it is not to be taken in change for it.” Poetry the vehicle and preservative of sense—that is the critical canon which would have made Walpole as blind to Della Crusca's merits, had he happened to possess any, as it made him keen-sighted for his defects.

It may, nevertheless, be doubted whether Della Crusca would have caused so great a stir in literature, had it not been for several collateral circumstances, of which the first and most important was the appearance in the _World_, some ten days later, of “Anna Matilda,” with a poem entitled _To Della Crusca, the Pen_.

Oh, seize again thy golden quill,
And with its point my bosom thrill,
With magic touch explore my heart,
And bid the tear of passion start.
Thy golden quill Apollo gave,
Drenched first in bright Aonia's wave.
He snatched it fluttering through the sky,
Borne on the vapor of a sigh;
It fell from Cupid's burnished wing
As forcefully he drew the string,
Which sent his keenest, surest dart,
Through a rebellious, frozen heart,
That had, till then, defied his power,
And vacant beat through each dull hour.
Be worthy, then, the sacred loan!
Seated on Fancy's air-built throne;
Immerse it in her rainbow hues,
Nor, what the Godheads bid, refuse.
Apollo Cupid shall inspire,
And aid thee with their blended fire;
The one poetic language give,
The other bid thy passion live,
With soft ideas fill thy lays,
And crown with Love thy wintry days!

The shuttlecock of correspondence, thus fairly started, was diligently tossed to and fro in the _World_ by the two pseudonymous writers; Della Crusca “seized his quill” again and again, and his ideal passion for the invisible Anna Matilda gained in fervor of expression with every fortnight. It is obvious that here was just that element of mystery, of romance, which creates a _furore_ and sets a fashion.

The lady who signed herself “Anna Matilda” was Mrs. Hannah Cowley, the wife of an absent East India captain, then in her forty-fifth year, and known to-day as the authoress of the _Belle's Stratagem_, a play which still, and deservedly, keeps the stage. Her biographer records the beginning of her literary career as follows: “In the year 1776, some years after her marriage, a sense of power for dramatic writing suddenly struck her whilst sitting with her husband at the theatre. 'So delighted with this?' said she to him; 'why, I could write as well myself.' She then wrote _The Runaway_. Many will recollect the extraordinary success with which it was brought out.” Her habits of composition were not, perhaps, likely to result in poetry of much excellence. “Catching up her pen immediately as the thought struck her, she always proceeded with the utmost facility and celerity. Her pen and paper were so immediately out of sight again, that those around her could scarcely tell when it was she wrote. She was always much pleased with the description of Michael Angelo making the marble fly around him, as he was chiselling with the utmost swiftness, that he might shape, however roughly, his whole design in unity with one clear conception.” Her preparatory note to her collected “Anna Matilda” poems bears out this account. “The beautiful lines of _The Adieu and Recall to Love_ struck her so forcibly that, without rising from the table at which she read, she answered them. Della Crusca's elegant reply surprised her into another, and thus the correspondence most unexpectedly became settled. Anna Matilda's share in it had little to boast; but she has one claim of which she is proud, that of having been the first to point out the excellence of Della Crusca; if there can be merit in discerning what is so very obvious.” She further apologizes for one of her poems to Della Crusca, on the ground that it was written while sitting for her portrait, the painter interrupting her with “Smile a little,” or “More to the right.” Only that class of mind which grows incredulous when informed that orators prepare their speeches, will expect much from such methods of workmanship.

Nevertheless, to Mrs. Cowley appears to belong the credit, or discredit, of giving to the Della Cruscan poetry a certain turn or development which did much to make it popular. A hint of this development may be seen in the description of the pen, which was “borne on the vapor of a sigh.” It took final shape in such phrases as these:—

Hushed be each ruder note! Soft silence spread
With ermine hand thy cobweb robe around.

Was it the shuttle of the Morn,
That wove upon the cobweb'd thorn
Thy airy lay?

Or in the gaudy spheroids swell
Which the swart Indian's groves illume.

Gauzy zephyrs fluttering o'er the plain,
In Twilight's bosom drop their filmy rain.

Bid the streamy lightnings fly
In liquid peril from thine eye.

Summer tints begemmed the scene,
And silky ocean slept in glossy green.

A large and amusing assortment of this ambitious verbiage, which subsequently became in the eyes of the critics the sole “differentia” of Della Cruscan verse, may be seen in the notes to Gifford's _Baviad_. It was, however, an after-development, proceeding from a gradual consciousness of flagging powers; the feeling which induced Charles Reade's Triplet to “shove his pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction.”

The other members of the Florence coterie, who, as I have said, were now back in England, speedily began to swell the Della Cruscan chorus in the columns of the _World_ and the _Oracle_. Bertie Greathead as “Reuben” became Della Crusca's rival, on paper, in the affections of Anna Matilda; and Parsons, signing himself “Benedict,” in memory of a sojourn in the Benedictine convent of Vallombrosa, deluged with sonnets an imaginary Melissa. Whether Mrs. Piozzi contributed anything beyond tea-party patronage, appears to be doubtful; but, as was only to be expected, London already possessed a score of indigenous rhymesters, eager to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. One of the principal of these was Edward Jerningham, _alias_ “The Bard,” who is commemorated in Macaulay's neat sentence: “Lady Miller who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put verses, and Jerningham who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of Lady Miller.” His brother, Sir William, of Cossy Hall, in Norfolk, kept an album which rivalled in celebrity the vase of Bath Easton, and “The Bard” had been a determined poetaster for the last thirty years. He is described as “a mighty gentleman, who looks to be painted, and is all daintification in manner, speech, and dress, singing to his own accompaniment on the harp, whilst he looks the gentlest of all dying Corydons.” Fashionable poets seldom suffer from lack of appreciation. Burke wrote of Jerningham's poem _The Shakespeare Gallery_, “I have not for a long time seen anything so well finished. The author has caught new fire by approaching in his perihelion so near to the sun of our poetical system.” I think we may be certain, after reading _The Shakespeare Gallery_, that the patron of Crabbe did not read it.

Another Della Cruscan songstress was Mrs. Robinson, _alias_ “Laura Maria,” known to the public as a former mistress of the Prince of Wales, and authoress of various novels. In rapidity of composition she emulated Mrs. Cowley. “Conversing one evening with Mr. Richard Burke” (the Burke family appear to have been sometimes unfortunate in their poetical acquaintances) “respecting the facility with which modern poetry was composed, Mrs. Robinson repeated nearly the whole of those beautiful lines, 'To him who will understand them.' This improvisatore produced in her auditor not less surprise than admiration, when solemnly assured by its author that this was the first time of its being repeated. Mr. Burke entreated her to commit the poem to writing, a request which was readily complied with; and Mrs. Robinson had afterwards the gratification of finding this offspring of her genius inserted in the _Annual Register_, with a flattering encomium from the pen of the eloquent and ingenious editor.” She was one of Merry's most ardent admirers.

Winged Ages picture to the dazzled view
Each marked perfection of the sacred few,
Pope, Dryden, Spenser, all that Fame shall raise,
From Chaucer's gloom, till Merry's lucid days.

Her Della Cruscan poems were published under the signature of “Laura,” and she was followed by Cesario, Carlos, Adelaide, Orlando, Arno, and fifty more whose identity can no longer be determined.

A year after his first appearance in the _World_, Della Crusca printed his poems in a volume, and Anna Matilda speedily followed suit. But this was not enough for the reading public. They further greedily absorbed a collection of Della Cruscan verse, published as _The Poetry of the “World,”_ by Major Topham, the creator and editor of that paper, who, in a dedication to Sheridan, observes: “Of their merit, I am free to say I know no modern poems their superior. I am more happy that your opinion has confirmed mine.” It will be well to make allowance for changing literary fashions before we make too sure that Sheridan is here misrepresented. _The Poetry of the “World”_ afterwards ran through at least four editions as _The British Album_. As we read the publisher's advertisement of this work, which still abounds on second-hand bookstalls—_immorimur studiis lapsoque renascimur ævo_—we seem to be walking in the Bond Street of the Prince Regent. “Two beautiful volumes this day published, embellished with genuine portraits of the real Della Crusca and Anna Matilda, engraved in a very superior manner from faithful pictures, under the title of _The British Album_, being a new edition, revised and corrected by their respective authors, of the celebrated poems of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Arley, Laura, Benedict, and the elegant Cesario, “the African Boy;” and others, signed The Bard, by Mr. Jerningham; General Conway's elegy on Miss C. Campbell; Marquis of Townshend's verses on Miss Gardiner; Lord Derby's lines on Miss Farren's portrait.” It is unfortunate that the only pseudonym in the list which it is of much interest to decipher, should still remain a mystery. It is to “Arley” that we owe the admittedly excellent ballad of “Wapping old Stairs,” which first appeared in the _World_ for November 29th, 1787, and shines, a solitary pearl, in the pages of the _British Album_.

The Della Cruscan mania was at its height—“bedridden old women and girls at their samplers began to rave,”—when Gifford, in search of a quarry for a seasonable satire, came before the town with the _Baviad_. Of this poem I shall say but little, as it is better known than the writings which it satirised. It contains passages of a certain coarse and rank vigor not difficult of attainment by a student of Dryden and Juvenal. There is, in fact, a sort of Billingsgate raciness about the _Baviad_; and the notes, which are better written than the poem, contain much amusing matter. The imputation made against the Della Cruscan love-poetry of licentious warmth is, however, wholly absurd—as absurd as the charge made by Mathias, the author of _The Pursuits of Literature_, that Merry—

Proves a designer works without design,
And fathoms Nature with a Gallic line;

a notion which arose merely from the fact that he identified himself with the anarchists of France, and wrote odes for the Revolution Society, thereby acquiring the name, as Madame d'Arblay tells us, of “Liberty Merry,” and no doubt also the reputation for free-thinking then associated with everything French. As for detecting any breach of decorum in the mannered and falsetto gallantries of insincere Reubens addressing imaginary Annas, the idea was only possible to a satirist who started with the determination to fling all the mud he could find; and, it must be added, when he flung it at irreproachable characters such as Mrs. Piozzi, he did but excite a certain revulsion of sympathy for the victims. Nor was this Gifford's only misrepresentation. He asserted, in order to bring in an apt quotation from Martial, that the interview which finally took place between Merry and Mrs. Cowley, produced mutual disgust. This is not the testimony of Della Crusca himself in the poem of _The Interview_.

My song subsides, yet ere I close
The lingering lay that feeds my woes,
Ere yet forgotten Della Crusca runs
To torrid gales or petrifying suns,
Ere, bowed to earth, my latest feeling flies,
And the big passion settles on my eyes;
Oh, may this sacred sentiment be known,
That my adoring heart is Anna's own!

Such is the immortality of poetic attachments—

For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.

That the poet was shortly afterward “married to another,” is sufficient to explain the cessation of the correspondence, from which Gifford argues that the interview resulted in aversion. And he might further have reflected that when a poet is reduced to talk of “petrifying suns” his correspondence has been known to cease for lack of ideas.

The satirised poets did their best to retaliate on Gifford by abusive sonnets in the newspapers; and Mr. Jerningham wrote a feebly vituperative poem on Gifford and Mathias. The Della Cruscans had, undeniably, the worst of the battle. The efficacy of Gifford's satire in putting an end to the school is, however, more than doubtful. It is true that it afterwards came to be considered, naturally enough, that he had given the Della Cruscans their death-blow. Scott, for instance, writing in 1827, observes that the _Baviad_ “squabashed at one blow a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long enough”; but that is not the evidence of contemporary witnesses. Seven years after the publication of the _Baviad_, Mathias, in the preface to _The Pursuits of Literature_, remarks that “even the _Baviad_ drops from Mr. Gifford's pen have fallen off like oils from the plumage of the Florence and Cruscan geese. I am told that Mr. Greathead and Mr. Merry yet write and speak, and Mr. Jerningham (poor man!) still continues 'sillier than his sheep.”

This statement is in far better accordance both with the facts and the probabilities of the case. Satire, even first-rate satire, does not kill follies. They gradually die of inanition, or are crowded out by newer fashions. Laura Matilda's dirge in the _Rejected Addresses_ is a standing monument of the vitality of Della Cruscanism more than twenty years after its supposed death-blow.

The career as stage-writers of Merry, Greathead, and Jerningham, their bad tragedies and bad farces, do not belong to my present subject. Of the subsequent history of one or two of them a word may, however, be said. Jerningham lived to publish, as late as 1812, two editions of a flaccid poem, called _The Old Bard's Farewell_, after which he disappears from life and literature. Mrs. Cowley, perhaps the most interesting of the group, died in rural and religious retirement at Tiverton, in 1809. Mrs. Piozzi, as is well known, outlived all her contemporaries, and witnessed the popularity of a modern literature of which she had no very high opinion.

As for Della Crusca, he married, in 1791, Miss Brunton, an actress, whose sister became Countess of Craven, and who had played the heroine in his tragedy of _Lorenzo_. His reply to the remonstrances of his aunt on the _mésalliance_ shall be quoted, to show that he had his lucid intervals. “She ought,” he said, “to be proud that he had brought a woman of such virtue and talents into the family. Her virtue his marrying her proved; and her talents would all be thrown away by taking her off the stage.” Nevertheless, he afterwards weakly yielded to his relations, and withdrew her from the stage against her own inclination, thereby depriving himself of a source of income with which, as a gambler and _bon vivant_, he could ill afford to dispense. He accordingly quitted England, and must have betaken himself to France, an adventure which befell him in Paris, in September, 1792, being thus amusingly given by Horace Walpole:—

In the midst of the massacre of Monday last, Mr. Merry, immortalized, not by his verses, but by those of the _Baviad_, was mistaken for the Abbé Maury, and was going to be hoisted to the _lanterne_. He cried out that he was Merry, the poet: the ruffians, who probably had never read the scene in Shakespeare, yet replied, “Then we will hang you for your bad verses”; but he escaped better than Cinna, I don't know how, and his fright cost him but a few “gossamery tears,” and I suppose he will be happy to re-cross the “silky ocean,” and shed dolorous nonsense in rhyme over the woes of _this_ happy country.

But England was not to see much more of Merry. English society was probably not so kind to the Radical husband of an actress as it had been to the bachelor of fashion. He withdrew, with his wife, to America, in 1796, and died, three years afterwards, of apoplexy, in his garden at Baltimore.

Merry did not fail to find in his own day apologists of some pretensions to taste. I find in the notes to George Dyer's poem, _The Poet's Fate_, published in 1797—which contains early and interesting laudations not only of his school-fellows Lamb and Coleridge, but also of Wordsworth and Southey—the following reference to Merry:—“But, after all, though the hero of the _Baviad_ betrayed glitter and negligence—though he misled the taste of some, too much inclined to admire and imitate defects, yet Merry's writings possess poetical merits; and the spirit of liberty and benevolence which breathes through them is ardent and sincere.” The criticism may be incorrect, but it is worth noting, because it is the criticism of a contemporary. Had it not been for Coleridge's fervently expressed admiration for Bowles's sonnets, which so perplexes critics who do not judge literature from a historical point of view, the world would have continued to sneer at him, with Byron, as “simple Bowles,” and to know him only by Byron's line. The fact is, literary history will never be intelligently written, till it is studied in the spirit of the naturalist, to whom the tares are as interesting as the wheat. We may, perhaps, give the Della Cruscans, with their desperate strainings after poetic fire and poetic diction, the credit of having done something to shake the supremacy of versified prose; of having forwarded, however feebly, the poetic emancipation which Wordsworth and Coleridge were to consummate. The false extravagance of Della Crusca may have cleared the way for the truthful extravagance of Keats. It is, I am aware, customary to attribute the regeneration of English poetry to the French Revolution, which “shook up the sources of thought all over Europe,” but the critics who use these glib catch-words are in no hurry to point out a concrete chain of logical connection between Paris mobs and sequestered poets. Plain judges will ever consider it a far cry from _The Rights of Man_ to _Christabel_. At all events, Dyer was right in deprecating the savagery of Gifford's satire. The question

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

will apply to other schools and fashions besides that of the “elegant Cesario's,” whom Leigh Hunt designated _par excellence_ as “the plague of the Butterflies.” And here, I think, we touch upon the moral which I promised at the outset.

It is not very long since the country, to which Della Crusca ultimately betook himself, received to her shores the reputed prophet of Æstheticism, whose career, in other respects, presented remarkable parallels with that of Robert Merry. Each made his poetical appearance in the columns of a newspaper called the _World_; each professed Republican opinions; each wrote poems not remarkable for truth to nature or sobriety of diction; each represented a school; and the name of each became as a red rag to the Giffords who played the part of the bull in the china shop. But it is not with this clumsy rage that posterity will regard our follies; nor is it useful, or desirable, that we should now so regard them. It is with a smile of amused anticipation, it is with a bland and philosophic interest, that the antiquarian of the future will turn to the pages of _Punch_ or the libretto of _Patience_, to read of the Anna Matildas who lately delighted to apparel themselves in what Bramston called “shape-disguising sacks”—the Della Cruscas who took Postlethwaite for a great poet.—_National Review._

THE SAVAGE.

BY PROF. F. MAX MÜLLER.

There are people in the world who are very fond of asking what they call point-blank questions. They generally profess to hate all shilly-shallying, and they are at no pains to hide their suspicion that anyone who declines to say yes or no to any question which they choose to ask has either his intellect clouded by metaphysics or has not the courage of his opinions. The idea that it is often more difficult to ask a sensible question than to answer it, and that a question, however pointed it may sound, may for all that be so blunt and vague that no accurate and honest thinker would care or dare to answer it, never enters their mind; while the thought that there are realms of knowledge where indefinite language is more appropriate, and in reality more exact and more truthful than the most definite phraseology, is scouted as mere fencing and intellectual cowardice.

One of those point-blank questions which has been addressed to me by several reviewers of my books is this, “Tell us, do you hold that man began as a savage or not?” To say that man began as a savage, and that the most savage and degraded races now existing present us with the primeval type of man, seems to be the shibboleth of a certain school of thought, a school with which on many points I sympathize, so long as it keeps to an accurate and independent inquiry into facts, and to an outspoken statement of its discoveries, regardless of all consequences, but from which I totally dissent as soon as it tries to make facts subservient to theories. I am told that my own utterances on this subject have been ambiguous. Now even granting this, I could never understand why a certain hesitation in answering so difficult a question should rouse such angry feelings, till it began to dawn on me that those who do not unreservedly admit that man began as a savage are supposed to hold that man was created a perfect and almost angelic being. This would amount to denying the gospel of the day, that man was the offspring of a brute, and hence, I suppose, the Anathema.

Now I may say this, that though I have hesitated to affirm that man began as a savage, whatever that may mean, I have been even more careful not to commit myself to the opinion that man began as an angel, or as a child, or as a perfect rational being. I strongly object to such alternatives as that if man did not begin as a savage he must have begun as a child. It would be dreadful if, because there is no sufficient evidence to enable us to form a decided opinion on any given subject, we were to be driven into a corner by such alternatives, instead of preserving our freedom of judgment until we have the complete evidence before us.

But in our case the evidence is as yet extremely scanty, and, from the nature of the case, will probably always remain so. If we want to prove that man began as a child, what evidence can we produce? If we appealed to history, history is impossible before the invention of language; and what language could the primitive child have spoken, what life could it have lived, without a father and without a mother? If we give up history and appeal to our inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our very imagination, collapses when approaching the problem how such a child could have been born, how such a child could have been nourished, reared, and protected from wild animals and other dangers. We feel we have come to the end of our tether, and are running our head against a very old, but a very solid, wall.

Has Kant then written in vain; and is it still supposed that our senses or our reason can ever reach transcendent truths? Has the lesson to be taught again and again that both our senses and our reason have their limits; that we are indeed tethered, and that it is no proof of intellectual strength or suppleness to try to stand on our own shoulders? We are so made that neither can our senses perceive nor can our reason conceive the real beginning and end of anything, whether in space or in time. And yet we imagine we can form a definite conception of the true beginning of mankind.

Then what remains? There remains the humbler and yet far nobler task of studying the earliest records of man's life on earth: to go back as far as literature, language, and tools will allow us, and for a time to consider that as primitive which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we can reach, and seems at the same time so simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to require no further antecedents. That is the true work of the historian, and of the philosopher too; and there is plenty of work left for both of them before they dive into the whirlpool of their inner consciousness to find there the primordial savage.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven into a corner by such a question as “Did man begin as a savage or as a child?” we have a perfect right to ask the question, What is meant by these two words, _savage_ and _child_?

Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of savage, and to draw a sharp line between a savage and a non-savage? Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of child, if used in opposition to savage or brute? Have we been told whether by child is meant a suckling without a mother, or a boy who can speak, and count, and reason without a father? Lastly, are savage and child really terms that mutually exclude each other? May not a savage be a child, and may not a child be a savage?

How, then, is any one who has given serious thought to the problem of the origin of mankind to answer such a question as “Tell me, do you hold that man began as a savage or as a child?”

When we read some of the more recent works on anthropology, the primordial savage seems to be not unlike one of those hideous india-rubber dolls that can be squeezed into every possible shape, and made to utter every possible noise. There was a time when the savage was held up to the civilised man as the inhabitant of a lost paradise—a being of innocence, simplicity, purity, and nobility. Rousseau ascribed to his son of nature all the perfection which he looked for in vain in Paris and London. At present, when so many philosophers are on the lookout for the missing-link between man and beast, the savage, even if he has established his right to the name of man, cannot be painted black enough. He must be at least a man who maltreats his women, murders his children, kills and eats his fellow-creatures, and commits crimes from which even animals would shrink.

This devil-savage, however, of the present anthropologist is as much a wild creation of scientific fancy as the angel-savage of former philosophers. The true Science of Man has no room for such speculations.

Sometimes the history of a name can take the place of its definition, but this is hardly so in our case. The Greeks spoke of barbarians rather than of savages, and the Romans followed their example, though they might possibly have called the national heroes and sages of Germany and Britain not only _barbari_ but _feri_—that is, savages not very far removed from _feræ_, or wild beasts. Our own word _savage_, and the French _sauvage_, meant originally a man who lived in the woods, a _silvaticus_. It was at first applied to all who remained outside the cities, who were not _cives_, or civilised, and who in Christian times were also called _heathen_—that is, dwellers on the heath.

But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilisation than they established.[10] The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop; and some of the Maori poems and proverbs may rightly claim a place by the side of English popular poems and proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said that a savage is the opposite of a civilised man. Civilisation is the product of the uninterrupted work of many generations; and if savage meant no more than an uncivilised man, it is no great discovery to say that the first man must have been a savage. No doubt he could not have been acquainted even with what we consider the fundamental elements of civilisation, such as the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. His dress must have been very scanty, his food very primitive, his dwelling very uncomfortable, his family life very unrestrained. And yet, for all that, he might have been very far removed from the brute; nay, he might have been a perfect man, doing his duty in that state of life into which it pleased God to call him.

Civilisation, as it is well known, is as vague a term as savagery. When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek civilisation, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were ὑλόβιοι dwellers in the forest, can we hesitate to say which of the two was the true savage and which the sage? To the New Zealander who has been brought into contact with European civilisation, his former so-called savage life seems to have gained little by recent improvements. A grand Maori chief, reputed to have been one of the strongest men in his youth, thus speaks of the old days:[11]—

In former times we lived differently; each tribe had its territory; we lived in _pas_ placed high upon the mountains. The men looked to war as their only occupation, and the women and the young people cultivated the fields. We were a strong and a healthy people then. When the Pakeha came, everything began to die away, even the natural animals of the country. Formerly, when we went into a forest, and stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds—every tree was full of them. Then we had pigeons and everything in plenty; now many of the birds have died out.... In those times the fields were well tilled, there was always plenty of provisions, and we wore few clothes—only our own mats of feathers. Then the missionaries came and took our children from the fields, and taught them to sing hymns: they changed their minds, and the fields were untilled. The children came home and quoted Gospel on an empty stomach. Then came the war between the Pakeha and the Maori that split up our homes, and made one tribe fight against the other; and after the war came the Pakeha settlers, who took our lands, taught us to drink and to smoke, and made us wear clothes that brought on disease. What race could stand against them? The Maori is passing away like the _Kiwi_, the _Tui_, and many other things, and by-and-by they will disappear just like the leaves of the trees, and nothing will remain to tell of them but the names of their mountains and their rivers!

This is the view which a so-called savage takes of the benefits of European civilisation as contrasted with the contentment and happiness in which his forefathers had passed through this life. Let us now hear what a highly educated American, a scholar and a philosopher, Mr. Morgan, says of the character of the Iroquois, who are often quoted as specimens of extreme savagery:—

No test of friendship was too severe; no sacrifice to repay a favor too great; no fidelity to an engagement too inflexible for the red man. With an innate knowledge of the freedom and dignity of man, he has exhibited the noblest virtues of the heart, and the kindest deeds of humanity, in those sylvan retreats we are wont to look upon as vacant and frightful solitudes.

No one would suspect Morgan of exaggeration or sentimentality. And if it should be objected that these were private virtues only, and no proof of true civilisation or a well-organised society among the Iroquois, the same writer tells us:[12]—

They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation they stood for nearly two centuries with an unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and were capable of self-protection long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in its defence.

The words of another author also may be quoted, who tells us:[13]—

Their legislation was simple, and the penalties which gave law its sanctions well defined. Their league stood in the consent of the governed. It was a representative popular government, conceived in the wisdom of genuine statesmanship, and with the sagacity to provide against some of the dangers which beset popular institutions. It is said that the framers of our own (the American) government borrowed some of its features from the Iroquois league. Whether or not this be true, it is a matter of history that as early as 1755 a suggestion came from the Iroquois nation to the colonies that they should unite in a confederacy like their own for mutual protection.

It is the fashion to quote against these favorable statements cases of cruelty committed by the Red Indians or the New Zealanders in their wars among themselves and in their resistance to their white enemies. But let us not forget the bloody pages of our own history. We should probably say that the eighteenth century was one of the most brilliant in the history of Europe. We should probably assign to England at that time a foremost place among European countries, and we know how high a position Scotchmen took during the last century in general culture, in philosophy, in science, and statesmanship. Yet, in his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century,” Mr. Lecky describes the common people of Scotland as broken into fierce clans, ruled by wild chieftains; as thieves and cattle-lifters, kidnappers of men and children to be sold as slaves; as ferocious barbarians, besotted with the most brutal ignorance, and the grossest and gloomiest superstitions, possessed of the rudest modes of agriculture, scratching the earth with a crooked piece of wood for a plough, and for a harrow a brush attached to the tail of a horse, otherwise devoid of harness; their food, oatmeal and milk, mixed with blood drawn from the living cow; their cooking, revolting and filthy, boiling their beef in the hide, and roasting fowls in their feathers, with many like customs and demoralising habits unknown to aboriginal life among the Red Indians.

It will be clear after these few specimens, which might have been considerably increased, that we shall make no step in advance if we continue to use the word savage so vaguely as it has been hitherto used. To think is difficult, but it becomes utterly impossible if we use debased or false coin. I have been considered too inquisitive for venturing to ask anthropologists what they meant by a fetish, but I must expose myself once more to the same reproach by venturing to ask them to state plainly what they mean by a savage.

Whatever other benefits a study of the science of language may confer, there is one which cannot be valued too highly—namely, that it makes us not only look _at_ words, but _through_ words. If we are told that a savage means an uncivilised man, then, to say that the first man was a savage is saying either nothing or what is self-evident. Civilisation consists in the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of men, and to say that the first generation of men was uncivilised is therefore pure tautology. We are far too tolerant with respect to such tautologies. How many people, for instance, have been led to imagine that such a phrase as the survival of the fittest contains the solution of the problem of the survival of certain species and the extinction of others? To the student of language the survival of the fittest is a mere tautology, meaning the survival of the fittest to survive, which is the statement of a fact, but no solution of it.

It is easy to say that the meaning of savage has been explained and defined by almost every writer on anthropology. I know these explanations and definitions, but not one of them can be considered as answering the requirements of a scientific definition.

Some anthropologists say that savage means wild and cruel. But in that case no nation would be without its savages. Others say that savages are people who wear little or no clothing. But in that case the greatest philosophers, the gymnosophists of India, would have to be classed as savages. If it means people without a settled form of government, without laws and without a religion, then, go where you like, you will not find such a race. Again, if people who have no cities and no central government are to be called savages, then the Jews would have been savages, the Hindus, the Arabs, the ancient Germans, and other of the most important races in the history of the world. In fact, whatever characteristics are brought forward as distinctive of a savage, they can always be met by counter-instances, showing that each definition would either include races whom no one dares to call savage, or exclude races whom no one dares to call civilised. It used to be imagined that the use of letters was the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, to quote the words of Gibbon, “the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas committed to her charge, and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers, the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.” Such arguments might pass in the days of Gibbon, but after the new light that has been thrown on the ancient history of some of the principal nations of the world they are no longer tenable.

No one would call the ancient Brahmans savages, and yet writing was unknown to them before the third century B.C. Homer, quite apart from his blindness, was certainly unacquainted with writing for literary purposes. The ancient inhabitants of Germany, as described by Tacitus, were equally ignorant of the art of writing as a vehicle of literature; yet for all that we could not say, with Gibbon, that with them the nobler faculties of the mind had lost their powers, the judgment had become feeble, and the imagination languid.