Part 8

In the month of leafy June, beneath celestial azure Of skies all cloudless, sate the aged Rector of Esthwaite Dining amidst his household; but not the meridian ardour Of sunbeams fierce he felt; him the shady veranda With vine-clad trellis defends: beyond a pendulous awning Of boughs self-wreath'd from limes (whose mighty limbs overarching Spanned the low roof of the house) spreads far effectual umbrage For young and old alike; noontide awfully breathless Settled in deepest silence on the woods and valley of Esthwaite. Yet not the less there would rise, after stillest interval often, 10 Low whispering gales that stole, like sobbing murmur of infant Dreaming in arms maternal, into the heart o' the youngest: Gales that at most could raise a single ringlet of auburn As it pencill'd the noble brow of the youthful Anna Louisa-- Sole child that survived to thee, oh, aged pastor of Esthwaite. Clad in his morning gown, the reverend priest at a table Of sculptur'd stone was seated; and his seat was a massy but easy Settle of oak, which in youth his ancient servitor, Isaac, Footman, sexton, and steward, butler and gardener also, Carved by the winter fire in nights of gloomy November, And through many a long, long night of many a dark December. 21 The good man's heart was glad, and his eyes were suffus'd with a rapture Of perfect love as they settled on her--that pulse of his heart's blood, The one sole prop of his house, the beautiful Anna Louisa. By the side of himself sate his wife, that ancient tamer of housemaids,[12] Yet kind of heart as a dove, and with matron graces adorning Her place as she sate dispensing hospitality boundless To the strangers within her gates; for, lo! two strangers on one side Sate of the long stone table; yet strangers by manner or action One would not suppose them; nor were they, but guests ever honour'd, 30 And dear to each heart in the house of th' ancient Rector of Esthwaite. The elder of them was called Augustus Harry Delancey, And he rode as a cornet of horse in the mighty imperial army. Him had the parents approved (and those were melodious accents, The sweetest he ever had heard) as suitor of Anna Louisa. But from lips more ruby far--far more melodious accents Had reach'd his ears since then; for she, the daughter, her own self, Had condescended at last to utter sweet ratification Of all his hopes; low whisp'ring the 'yes'--celestial answer That raised him to paradise gates on pinion[13] of expectation. 40 Over against his beloved he sate--the suitor enamour'd: And God He knows that indeed should it prove an idolatrous error To look in the eyes of a lady till you feel a dreamy devotion, I fear for the health of your soul that day, oh, Harry Delancey! Next to Delancey there sate his pupil, Magnus Adolphus, A fair-haired boy of ten, half an orphan, a count of the empire-- Magnus Adolphus of Arnstein, that great Bavarian earldom. Him had his widowed mother, the noble Countess of Arnstein, Placed with Delancey betimes, as one in knightly requirements Skilful and all-accomplished, that he the 'youthful idea'[14] 50 Might 'teach how to shoot' (with a pistol, videlicet),--horses To mount and to manage with boldness, hounds to follow in hunting The fox, the tusky boar, the stag with his beautiful antlers: Arts, whether graceful or useful, in arms or equestrian usage, Did Augustus impart to his pupil, the youthful earl of the empire. To ride with stirrups or none, to mount from the near-side or off-side (Which still is required in the trooper who rides in the Austrian army), To ride with bridle or none, on a saddle Turkish or English, To force your horse to curvet, pirouette, dance on his haunches, And whilst dancing to lash with his feet, and suggest an effectual hinting 60 To the enemy's musqueteers to clear the road for the hinter: Or again, if you want a guide by night, in a dangerous highway Beset with the enemies' marksmen and swarming with murderous ambush, To train your horse in the art of delicate insinuation, Gently raising a hoof to tap at the door o' the woodsman. But, if he persists in snoring, or pretending to snore, or is angry At your summons to leave his lair in the arms of his wife or his infants, To practise your horse in the duty of stormy recalcitration, Wheeling round to present his heels, and in mid caracoling To send the emperor's greeting smack through the panel of oakwood[15] 70 That makes the poor man so hard of hearing imperial orders. Arts such as these and others, the use of the sabre on horseback, All modes of skill gymnastic, modes whether forceful or artful, Of death-grapple if by chance a cannon-shot should un-horse you, All modes of using the limbs with address, with speed, or enormous Effort of brutal strength, all this did Harry Delancey Teach to his docile pupil: and arts more nobly delightful, Arts of the head or the heart, arts intellectual; empire Over dead men's books, over regions of high meditation, Comparative tactics, warfare as then conducted in ages When powder was none, nor cannon, but brute catapultæ, 81 Blind rams, brainless wild asses, the stony slinger of huge stones.[16] Iron was lord of the world; iron reigned, man was his engine; But now the rule is reversed, man binds and insults over iron. Together did they, young tutor, young pupil, Augustus, Adolphus, Range over history martial, or read strategical authors, Xenophon, Arrian, old Polybius, old Polyænus (Think not these Polys, my boy, were blooming Pollies of our days!), And above all others, they read the laurel'd hero of heroes, Thrice kingly Roman Julius, sun-bright leader of armies, Who planted his god-like foot on the necks of a whole generation. 91 Such studies, such arts were those by which young Harry Delancey Sought to discharge the trust which to him the Lady of Arnstein Confided with hopes maternal; thus trained, he hoped that Adolphus Would shine in his native land, for high was his place in the empire.

EDITOR'S NOTE.--This was, of course, written for _Blackwood's Magazine_; but it never appeared there.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] 'That tamer of housemaids': [Greek: Hektoros ippodamoio]--of Hector, the tamer of horses ('Iliad').

[13] 'On pinion of expectation.' Here I would request the reader to notice that it would have been easy for me to preserve the regular dactylic close by writing '_pinion of anticipation_;' as also in the former instance of '_many a dark December_' to have written '_many a rainy December_.' But in both cases I preferred to lock up by the massy spondaic variety; yet never forgetting to premise a dancing dactyle--'many a'--and 'pinion of.' Not merely for variety, but for a separate effect of peculiar majesty.

[14] Alluding to a ridiculous passage in Thomson's 'Seasons':

'Delightful task! to teach the young idea how to shoot.'

[15] All these arts, viz., teaching the horse to fight with his forelegs or lash out with his hind-legs at various angles in a general melée of horse and foot, but especially teaching him the secret of 'inviting' an obstinate German boor to come out and take the air strapped in front of a trooper, and do his duty as guide to the imperial cavalry, were imported into the Austrian service by an English riding-master about the year 1775-80. And no doubt it must have been horses trained on this learned system of education from which the Highlanders of Scotland derived their terror of cavalry.

[16] 'Blind rams, brainless wild asses,' etc. The 'arietes,' or battering-rams with iron-bound foreheads, the 'onagri,' or wild asses, etc., were amongst the poliorcetic engines of the ancients, which do not appear to have received any essential improvement after the time of the brilliant Prince Demetrius, the son of Alexander's great captain, Antigonus.

_XIII. SOME THOUGHTS ON BIOGRAPHY._

We have heard from a man who witnessed the failure of Miss Baillie's 'De Montford,' notwithstanding the scenic advantages of a vast London theatre, fine dresses, fine music at intervals, and, above all, the superb acting of John Kemble, supported on that occasion by his incomparable sister, that this unexpected disappointment began with the gallery, who could not comprehend or enter into a hatred so fiendish growing out of causes so slight as any by possibility supposable in the trivial Rezenvelt. To feel teased by such a man, to dislike him, occasionally to present him with your compliments in the shape of a duodecimo kick--well and good, nothing but right. And the plot manifestly tended to a comic issue. But murder!--a Macbeth murder!--not the injury so much as the man himself was incommensurate, was too slight by a thousand degrees for so appalling a catastrophe. It reacts upon De Montford, making _him_ ignoble that could be moved so profoundly by an agency so contemptible.

Something of the same disproportion there is, though in a different way, between any quarrel that may have divided us from a man in his life-time and the savage revenge of pursuing the quarrel after his death through a malicious biography. Yet, if you hated him through no quarrel, but simply (as we all hate many men that died a thousand years ago) for something vicious, or which you think vicious, in his modes of thinking, why must you, of all men, be the one to undertake an edition of his works, 'with a life of the author'? Leave that to some neutral writer, who neither loves nor hates. And whilst crowds of men need better biographical records whom it is easy to love and not difficult to honour, do not you degrade your own heart or disgust your readers by selecting for your exemplification not a model to be imitated, but a wild beast to be baited or a criminal to be tortured? We privately hate Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own bias. For it is too odious a spectacle to imprison a fellow-creature in a book, like a stag in a cart, and turn him out to be hunted through all his doubles for a day's amusement. It too much resembles that case of undoubted occurrence both in France and Germany, where 'respectable' individuals, simply as amateurs, and not at all with any view to the salary or fees of operating, have come forward as candidates for the post of public executioner. What is every man's duty is no man's duty by preference. And unless where a writer is thrust upon such a duty by an official necessity (as, if he contracts for a 'Biographia Britannica,' in that case he is bound by his contract to go through with the whole series--rogues and all), it is too painful to see a human being courting and wooing the task of doing execution upon his brother in his grave. Nay, even in the case where this executioner's task arises spontaneously out of some duty previously undertaken without a thought of its severer functions, we are still shocked by any exterminating vengeance too rancorously pursued. Every reader must have been disgusted by the unrelenting persecution with which Gifford, a deformed man, with the spiteful nature sometimes too developed in the deformed, had undertaken 'for our fathers in the Row' an edition of Massinger. Probably he had not thought at the time of the criminals who would come before him for judgment. But afterwards it did not embitter the job that these perquisites of office accrued, _lucro ponatur_, that such offenders as Coxeter, Mr. Monck Mason, and others were to be 'justified' by course of law. Could he not have stated their errors, and displaced their rubbish, without further personalities? However, he does _not_, but makes the air resound with his knout, until the reader wishes Coxeter in his throat, and Monck Mason, like 'the cursed old fellow' in Sinbad, mounted with patent spurs upon his back.

We shall be interrupted, however, and _that_ we certainly foresee, by the objection--that we are fighting with shadows, that neither the _éloge_ in one extreme, nor the libel in the other extreme, finds a place in _our_ literature. Does it not? Yes, reader, each of these biographical forms exists in favour among us, and of one it is very doubtful indeed whether it ought not to exist. The _éloge_ is found abundantly diffused through our monumental epitaphs in the first place, and _there_ every man will countersign Wordsworth's judgment (see 'The Excursion' and also Wordsworth's prose Essay on Epitaphs), that it is a blessing for human nature to find one place in this world sacred to charitable thoughts, one place at least offering a sanctuary from evil speaking. So far there is no doubt. But the main literary form, in which the English _éloge_ presents itself, is the Funeral Sermon. And in this also, not less than in the churchyard epitaph, kind feeling ought to preside; and for the same reasons, the sanctity of the place where it is delivered or originally published, and the solemnity of the occasion which has prompted it; since, if you cannot find matter in the departed person's character fertile in praise even whilst standing by the new-made grave, what folly has tempted you into writing an epitaph or a funeral sermon? The good ought certainly to predominate in both, and in the epitaph nothing _but_ the good, because were it only for a reason suggested by Wordsworth, viz., the elaborate and everlasting character of a record chiselled out painfully in each separate letter, it would be scandalous to confer so durable an existence in stone or marble upon trivial human infirmities, such as do not enter into the last solemn reckoning with the world beyond the grave; whilst, on the other hand, all graver offences are hushed into 'dread repose,' and, where they happen to be too atrocious or too memorable, are at once a sufficient argument for never having undertaken any such memorial. These considerations privilege the epitaph as sacred to charity, and tabooed against the revelations of candour. The epitaph cannot open its scanty records to any breathing or insinuation of infirmity. But the Funeral Sermon, though sharing in the same general temper of indulgence towards the errors of the deceased person, might advantageously be laid open to a far more liberal discussion of those personal or intellectual weaknesses which may have thwarted the influence of character otherwise eminently Christian. The _Oraison Funèbre_ of the French proposes to itself by its original model, which must be sought in the _Epideictic_ or panegyrical oratory of the Greeks, a purpose purely and exclusively eulogistic: the problem supposed is to abstract from everything _not_ meritorious, to expand and develop the total splendour of the individual out of that one centre, that main beneficial relation to his own age, from which this splendour radiated. The incidents of the life, the successions of the biographical detail, are but slightly traced, no farther, in fact, than is requisite to the intelligibility of the praises. Whereas, in the English Funeral Sermon, there is no principle of absolute exclusion operating against the minutest circumstantiations of fact which can tend to any useful purpose of illustrating the character. And what is too much for the scale of a sermon literally preached before a congregation, or modelled to counterfeit such a mode of address, may easily find its place in the explanatory notes. This is no romance, or ideal sketch of what might be. It is, and it has been. There are persons of memorable interest in past times, of whom all that we know is embodied in a funeral sermon. For instance, Jeremy Taylor in that way, or by his Epistles Dedicatory, has brought out the characteristic features in some of his own patrons, whom else we should have known only as _nominis umbras_. But a more impressive illustration is found in the case of John Henderson, that man of whom expectations so great were formed, and of whom Dr. Johnson and Burke, after meeting and conversing with him, pronounced (in the Scriptural words of the Ethiopian queen applied to the Jewish king, Solomon) 'that the half had not been told them.' For this man's memory almost the sole original record exists in Aguttar's funeral sermon; for though other records exist, and one from the pen of a personal friend, Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, yet the main substance of the biography is derived from the _fundus_ of this one sermon.[17] And it is of some importance to cases of fugitive or unobtrusive merit that this more quiet and sequestered current of biography should be kept open. For the local motives to an honorary biographical notice, in the shape of a Funeral Sermon, will often exist, when neither the materials are sufficient, nor a writer happens to be disposable, for a labour so serious as a regular biography.

Here then, on the one side, are our English _éloges_. And we may add that amongst the Methodists, the Baptists, and other religious sectaries, but especially among the missionaries of all nations and churches, this class of _éloges_ is continually increasing. Not unfrequently men of fervent natures and of sublime aspirations are thus rescued from oblivion, whilst the great power of such bodies as the Methodists, their growing wealth, and consequent responsibility to public opinion, are pledges that they will soon command all the advantages of colleges and academic refinement; so that if, in the manner of these funeral _éloges_, there has sometimes been missed that elegance which should have corresponded to the weight of the matter, henceforwards we may look to see this disadvantage giving way before institutions more thoroughly matured. But if these are our _éloges_, on the other hand, where are our libels?

This is likely to be a topic of offence, for many readers will start at hearing the upright Samuel Johnson and the good-humoured, garrulous Plutarch denounced as traffickers in libel. But a truth is a truth. And the temper is so essentially different in which men lend themselves to the propagation of defamatory anecdotes, the impulses are so various to an offence which is not always consciously perceived by those who are parties to it, that we cannot be too cautious of suffering our hatred of libel to involve every casual libeller, or of suffering our general respect for the person of the libeller to exonerate him from the charge of libelling. Many libels are written in this little world of ours unconsciously, and under many motives. Perhaps we said that before, but no matter. Sometimes a gloomy fellow, with a murderous cast of countenance, sits down doggedly to the task of blackening one whom he hates worse 'than toad or asp.' For instance, Procopius performs that 'labour of hate' for the Emperor Justinian, pouring oil into his wounds, but, then (as Coleridge expresses it in a 'neat' sarcasm), oil of vitriol. Nature must have meant the man for a Spanish Inquisitor, sent into the world before St. Dominic had provided a trade for him, or any vent for his malice--so rancorous in his malignity, so horrid and unrelenting the torture to which he subjects his sovereign and the beautiful Theodora. In this case, from the withering scowl which accompanies the libels, we may be assured that they _are_ such in the most aggravated form--not malicious only, but false. It is commonly said, indeed, in our courts, that truth it is which aggravates the libel. And so it is as regards the feelings or the interests of the man libelled. For is it not insufferable that, if a poor man under common human infirmity shall have committed some crime and have paid its penalty, but afterwards reforming or out-growing his own follies, seeks to gain an honest livelihood for his children in a place which the knowledge of his past transgression has not reached, then all at once he is to be ruined by some creature purely malignant who discovers and publishes the secret tale? In such a case most undoubtedly it is the truth of the libel which constitutes its sting, since, if it were not true or could be made questionable, it would do the poor man no mischief. But, on the other hand, it is the falsehood of the libel which forms its aggravation as regards the publisher. And certain we are, had we no other voucher than the instinct of our hatred to Procopius, that his disloyal tales about his great lord and lady are odiously overcharged, if not uniformly false. Gibbon, however, chooses to gratify his taste for the luxury of scandal by believing at once in the perfect malice of the slanderer, and the perfect truth of his slanders.