Contributions to All The Year Round
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Charles Dickens >> Contributions to All The Year Round
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Nothing is without its use, and even this odious book may do some
service. Not because it coolly claims for the writer and his
disciples such powers as were wielded by the Saviour and the
Apostles; not because it sees no difference between twelve table
rappers in these days, and "twelve fishermen" in those; not because
it appeals for precedents to statements extracted from the most
ignorant and wretched of mankind, by cruel torture, and constantly
withdrawn when the torture was withdrawn; not because it sets forth
such a strange confusion of ideas as is presented by one of the
faithful when, writing of a certain sprig of geranium handed by an
invisible hand, he adds in ecstasies, "WHICH WE HAVE PLANTED AND IT
IS GROWING, SO THAT IT IS NO DELUSION, NO FAIRY MONEY TURNED INTO
DROSS OR LEAVES"--as if it followed that the conjuror's half-crowns
really did become invisible and in that state fly, because he
afterwards cuts them out of a real orange; or as if the conjuror's
pigeon, being after the discharge of his gun, a real live pigeon
fluttering on the target, must therefore conclusively be a pigeon,
fired, whole, living and unshattered, out of the gun!--not because
of the exposure of any of these weaknesses, or a thousand such, are
these moving incidents in the life of the Martyr Medium, and similar
productions, likely to prove useful, but because of their uniform
abuse of those who go to test the reality of these alleged
phenomena, and who come away incredulous. There is an old homely
proverb concerning pitch and its adhesive character, which we hope
this significant circumstance may impress on many minds. The writer
of these lines has lately heard overmuch touching young men of
promise in the imaginative arts, "towards whom" Martyr Mediums
assisting at evening parties feel themselves "drawn". It may be a
hint to such young men to stick to their own drawing, as being of a
much better kind, and to leave Martyr Mediums alone in their glory.
As there is a good deal in these books about "lying spirits", we
will conclude by putting a hypothetical case. Supposing that a
Medium (Martyr or otherwise) were established for a time in the
house of an English gentleman abroad; say, somewhere in Italy.
Supposing that the more marvellous the Medium became, the more
suspicious of him the lady of the house became. Supposing that the
lady, her distrust once aroused, were particularly struck by the
Medium's exhibiting a persistent desire to commit her, somehow or
other, to the disclosure of the manner of the death, to him unknown,
of a certain person. Supposing that she at length resolved to test
the Medium on this head, and, therefore, on a certain evening
mentioned a wholly supposititious manner of death (which was not the
real manner of death, nor anything at all like it) within the range
of his listening ears. And supposing that a spirit presently
afterwards rapped out its presence, claiming to be the spirit of
that deceased person, and claiming to have departed this life in
that supposititious way. Would that be a lying spirit? Or would it
he a something else, tainting all that Medium's statements and
suppressions, even if they were not in themselves of a manifestly
outrageous character?
THE LATE MR. STANFIELD
Every Artist, be he writer, painter, musician, or actor, must bear
his private sorrows as he best can, and must separate them from the
exercise of his public pursuit. But it sometimes happens, in
compensation, that his private loss of a dear friend represents a
loss on the part of the whole community. Then he may, without
obtrusion of his individuality, step forth to lay his little wreath
upon that dear friend's grave.
On Saturday, the eighteenth of this present month, Clarkson
Stanfield died. On the afternoon of that day, England lost the
great marine painter of whom she will be boastful ages hence; the
National Historian of her speciality, the Sea; the man famous in all
countries for his marvellous rendering of the waves that break upon
her shores, of her ships and seamen, of her coasts and skies, of her
storms and sunshine, of the many marvels of the deep. He who holds
the oceans in the hollow of His hand had given, associated with
them, wonderful gifts into his keeping; he had used them well
through threescore and fourteen years; and, on the afternoon of that
spring day, relinquished them for ever.
It is superfluous to record that the painter of "The Battle of
Trafalgar", of the "Victory being towed into Gibraltar with the body
of Nelson on Board", of "The Morning after the Wreck", of "The
Abandoned", of fifty more such works, died in his seventy-fourth
year, "Mr." Stanfield.--He was an Englishman.
Those grand pictures will proclaim his powers while paint and canvas
last. But the writer of these words had been his friend for thirty
years; and when, a short week or two before his death, he laid that
once so skilful hand upon the writer's breast and told him they
would meet again, "but not here", the thoughts of the latter turned,
for the time, so little to his noble genius, and so much to his
noble nature!
He was the soul of frankness, generosity, and simplicity. The most
genial, the most affectionate, the most loving, and the most lovable
of men. Success had never for an instant spoiled him. His interest
in the Theatre as an Institution--the best picturesqueness of which
may be said to be wholly due to him--was faithful to the last. His
belief in a Play, his delight in one, the ease with which it moved
him to tears or to laughter, were most remarkable evidences of the
heart he must have put into his old theatrical work, and of the
thorough purpose and sincerity with which it must have been done.
The writer was very intimately associated with him in some amateur
plays; and day after day, and night after night, there were the same
unquenchable freshness, enthusiasm, and impressibility in him,
though broken in health, even then.
No Artist can ever have stood by his art with a quieter dignity than
he always did. Nothing would have induced him to lay it at the feet
of any human creature. To fawn, or to toady, or to do undeserved
homage to any one, was an absolute impossibility with him. And yet
his character was so nicely balanced that he was the last man in the
world to be suspected of self-assertion, and his modesty was one of
his most special qualities.
He was a charitable, religious, gentle, truly good man. A genuine
man, incapable of pretence or of concealment. He had been a sailor
once; and all the best characteristics that are popularly attributed
to sailors, being his, and being in him refined by the influences of
his Art, formed a whole not likely to be often seen. There is no
smile that the writer can recall, like his; no manner so naturally
confiding and so cheerfully engaging. When the writer saw him for
the last time on earth, the smile and the manner shone out once
through the weakness, still: the bright unchanging Soul within the
altered face and form.
No man was ever held in higher respect by his friends, and yet his
intimate friends invariably addressed him and spoke of him by a pet
name. It may need, perhaps, the writer's memory and associations to
find in this a touching expression of his winning character, his
playful smile, and pleasant ways. "You know Mrs. Inchbald's story,
Nature and Art?" wrote Thomas Hood, once, in a letter: "What a fine
Edition of Nature and Art is Stanfield!"
Gone! And many and many a dear old day gone with him! But their
memories remain. And his memory will not soon fade out, for he has
set his mark upon the restless waters, and his fame will long be
sounded in the roar of the sea.
A SLIGHT QUESTION OF FACT
It is never well for the public interest that the originator of any
social reform should be soon forgotten. Further, it is neither
wholesome nor right (being neither generous nor just) that the merit
of his work should be gradually transferred elsewhere.
Some few weeks ago, our contemporary, the Pall Mall Gazette, in
certain strictures on our Theatres which we are very far indeed from
challenging, remarked on the first effectual discouragement of an
outrage upon decency which the lobbies and upper-boxes of even our
best Theatres habitually paraded within the last twenty or thirty
years. From those remarks it might appear as though no such Manager
of Covent Garden or Drury Lane as Mr. Macready had ever existed.
It is a fact beyond all possibility of question, that Mr. Macready,
on assuming the management of Covent Garden Theatre in 1837, did
instantly set himself, regardless of precedent and custom down to
that hour obtaining, rigidly to suppress this shameful thing, and
did rigidly suppress and crush it during his whole management of
that theatre, and during his whole subsequent management of Drury
Lane. That he did so, as certainly without favour as without fear;
that he did so, against his own immediate interests; that he did so,
against vexations and oppositions which might have cooled the ardour
of a less earnest man, or a less devoted artist; can be better known
to no one than the writer of the present words, whose name stands at
the head of these pages.
LANDOR'S LIFE
Prefixed to the second volume of Mr. Forster's admirable biography
of Walter Savage Landor, {1} is an engraving from a portrait of that
remarkable man when seventy-seven years of age, by Boxall. The
writer of these lines can testify that the original picture is a
singularly good likeness, the result of close and subtle observation
on the part of the painter; but, for this very reason, the engraving
gives a most inadequate idea of the merit of the picture and the
character of the man.
From the engraving, the arms and hands are omitted. In the picture,
they are, as they were in nature, indispensable to a correct reading
of the vigorous face. The arms were very peculiar. They were
rather short, and were curiously restrained and checked in their
action at the elbows; in the action of the hands, even when
separately clenched, there was the same kind of pause, and a
noticeable tendency to relaxation on the part of the thumb. Let the
face be never so intense or fierce, there was a commentary of
gentleness in the hands, essential to be taken along with it. Like
Hamlet, Landor would speak daggers, but use none. In the expression
of his hands, though angrily closed, there was always gentleness and
tenderness; just as when they were open, and the handsome old
gentleman would wave them with a little courtly flourish that sat
well upon him, as he recalled some classic compliment that he had
rendered to some reigning Beauty, there was a chivalrous grace about
them such as pervades his softer verses. Thus the fictitious Mr.
Boythorn (to whom we may refer without impropriety in this
connexion, as Mr. Forster does) declaims "with unimaginable energy"
the while his bird is "perched upon his thumb", and he "softly
smooths its feathers with his forefinger".
From the spirit of Mr. Forster's Biography these characteristic
hands are never omitted, and hence (apart from its literary merits)
its great value. As the same masterly writer's Life and Times of
Oliver Goldsmith is a generous and yet conscientious picture of a
period, so this is a not less generous and yet conscientious picture
of one life; of a life, with all its aspirations, achievements, and
disappointments; all its capabilities, opportunities, and
irretrievable mistakes. It is essentially a sad book, and herein
lies proof of its truth and worth. The life of almost any man
possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself; and this
book enables us not only to see its subject, but to be its subject,
if we will.
Mr. Forster is of opinion that "Landor's fame very surely awaits
him". This point admitted or doubted, the value of the book remains
the same. It needs not to know his works (otherwise than through
his biographer's exposition), it needs not to have known himself, to
find a deep interest in these pages. More or less of their warning
is in every conscience; and some admiration of a fine genius, and of
a great, wild, generous nature, incapable of mean self-extenuation
or dissimulation--if unhappily incapable of self-repression too--
should be in every breast. "There may be still living many
persons", Walter Landor's brother, Robert, writes to Mr. Forster of
this book, "who would contradict any narrative of yours in which the
best qualities were remembered, the worst forgotten." Mr. Forster's
comment is: "I had not waited for this appeal to resolve, that, if
this memoir were written at all, it should contain, as far as might
lie within my power, a fair statement of the truth". And this
eloquent passage of truth immediately follows: "Few of his
infirmities are without something kindly or generous about them; and
we are not long in discovering there is nothing so wildly incredible
that he will not himself in perfect good faith believe. When he
published his first book of poems on quitting Oxford, the profits
were to be reserved for a distressed clergyman. When he published
his Latin poems, the poor of Leipzig were to have the sum they
realised. When his comedy was ready to be acted, a Spaniard who had
sheltered him at Castro was to be made richer by it. When he
competed for the prize of the Academy of Stockholm, it was to go to
the poor of Sweden. If nobody got anything from any one of these
enterprises, the fault at all events was not his. With his
extraordinary power of forgetting disappointments, he was prepared
at each successive failure to start afresh, as if each had been a
triumph. I shall have to delineate this peculiarity as strongly in
the last half as in the first half of his life, and it was certainly
an amiable one. He was ready at all times to set aside, out of his
own possessions, something for somebody who might please him for the
time; and when frailties of temper and tongue are noted, this other
eccentricity should not be omitted. He desired eagerly the love as
well as the good opinion of those whom for the time he esteemed, and
no one was more affectionate while under such influences. It is not
a small virtue to feel such genuine pleasure, as he always did in
giving and receiving pleasure. His generosity, too, was bestowed
chiefly on those who could make small acknowledgment in thanks and
no return in kind."
Some of his earlier contemporaries may have thought him a vain man.
Most assuredly he was not, in the common acceptation of the term. A
vain man has little or no admiration to bestow upon competitors.
Landor had an inexhaustible fund. He thought well of his writings,
or he would not have preserved them. He said and wrote that he
thought well of them, because that was his mind about them, and he
said and wrote his mind. He was one of the few men of whom you
might always know the whole: of whom you might always know the
worst, as well as the best. He had no reservations or duplicities.
"No, by Heaven!" he would say ("with unimaginable energy"), if any
good adjective were coupled with him which he did not deserve: "I
am nothing of the kind. I wish I were; but I don't deserve the
attribute, and I never did, and I never shall!" His intense
consciousness of himself never led to his poorly excusing himself,
and seldom to his violently asserting himself. When he told some
little story of his bygone social experiences, in Florence, or where
not, as he was fond of doing, it took the innocent form of making
all the interlocutors, Landors. It was observable, too, that they
always called him "Mr. Landor"--rather ceremoniously and
submissively. There was a certain "Caro Pedre Abete Marina"--
invariably so addressed in these anecdotes--who figured through a
great many of them, and who always expressed himself in this
deferential tone.
Mr. Forster writes of Landor's character thus:
"A man must be judged, at first, by what he says and does. But with
him such extravagance as I have referred to was little more than the
habitual indulgence (on such themes) of passionate feelings and
language, indecent indeed but utterly purposeless; the mere
explosion of wrath provoked by tyranny or cruelty; the
irregularities of an overheated steam-engine too weak for its own
vapour. It is very certain that no one could detest oppression more
truly than Landor did in all seasons and times; and if no one
expressed that scorn, that abhorrence of tyranny and fraud, more
hastily or more intemperately, all his fire and fury signified
really little else than ill-temper too easily provoked. Not to
justify or excuse such language, but to explain it, this
consideration is urged. If not uniformly placable, Landor was
always compassionate. He was tender-hearted rather than bloody-
minded at all times, and upon only the most partial acquaintance
with his writings could other opinion be formed. A completer
knowledge of them would satisfy any one that he had as little real
disposition to kill a king as to kill a mouse. In fact there is not
a more marked peculiarity in his genius than the union with its
strength of a most uncommon gentleness, and in the personal ways of
the man this was equally manifest."--Vol. i. p. 496.
Of his works, thus:
"Though his mind was cast in the antique mould, it had opened itself
to every kind of impression through a long and varied life; he has
written with equal excellence in both poetry and prose, which can
hardly be said of any of his contemporaries; and perhaps the single
epithet by which his books would be best described is that reserved
exclusively for books not characterised only by genius, but also by
special individuality. They are unique. Having possessed them, we
should miss them. Their place would be supplied by no others. They
have that about them, moreover, which renders it almost certain that
they will frequently be resorted to in future time. There are none
in the language more quotable. Even where impulsiveness and want of
patience have left them most fragmentary, this rich compensation is
offered to the reader. There is hardly a conceivable subject, in
life or literature, which they do not illustrate by striking
aphorisms, by concise and profound observations, by wisdom ever
applicable to the deeds of men, and by wit as available for their
enjoyment. Nor, above all, will there anywhere be found a more
pervading passion for liberty, a fiercer hatred of the base, a wider
sympathy with the wronged and the oppressed, or help more ready at
all times for those who fight at odds and disadvantage against the
powerful and the fortunate, than in the writings of Walter Savage
Landor."--Last page of second volume.
The impression was strong upon the present writer's mind, as on Mr.
Forster's, during years of close friendship with the subject of this
biography, that his animosities were chiefly referable to the
singular inability in him to dissociate other people's ways of
thinking from his own. He had, to the last, a ludicrous grievance
(both Mr. Forster and the writer have often amused themselves with
it) against a good-natured nobleman, doubtless perfectly unconscious
of having ever given him offence. The offence was, that on the
occasion of some dinner party in another nobleman's house, many
years before, this innocent lord (then a commoner) had passed in to
dinner, through some door, before him, as he himself was about to
pass in through that same door with a lady on his arm. Now, Landor
was a gentleman of most scrupulous politeness, and in his carriage
of himself towards ladies there was a certain mixture of stateliness
and deference, belonging to quite another time, and, as Mr. Pepys
would observe, "mighty pretty to see". If he could by any effort
imagine himself committing such a high crime and misdemeanour as
that in question, he could only imagine himself as doing it of a set
purpose, under the sting of some vast injury, to inflict a great
affront. A deliberately designed affront on the part of another
man, it therefore remained to the end of his days. The manner in
which, as time went on, he permeated the unfortunate lord's ancestry
with this offence, was whimsically characteristic of Landor. The
writer remembers very well when only the individual himself was held
responsible in the story for the breach of good breeding; but in
another ten years or so, it began to appear that his father had
always been remarkable for ill manners; and in yet another ten years
or so, his grandfather developed into quite a prodigy of coarse
behaviour.
Mr. Boythorn--if he may again be quoted--said of his adversary, Sir
Leicester Dedlock: "That fellow is, AND HIS FATHER WAS, AND HIS
GRANDFATHER WAS, the most stiff-necked, arrogant, imbecile, pig-
headed numskull, ever, by some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born
in any station of life but a walking-stick's!"
The strength of some of Mr. Landor's most captivating kind qualities
was traceable to the same source. Knowing how keenly he himself
would feel the being at any small social disadvantage, or the being
unconsciously placed in any ridiculous light, he was wonderfully
considerate of shy people, or of such as might be below the level of
his usual conversation, or otherwise out of their element. The
writer once observed him in the keenest distress of mind in behalf
of a modest young stranger who came into a drawing-room with a glove
on his head. An expressive commentary on this sympathetic
condition, and on the delicacy with which he advanced to the young
stranger's rescue, was afterwards furnished by himself at a friendly
dinner at Gore House, when it was the most delightful of houses.
His dress--say, his cravat or shirt-collar--had become slightly
disarranged on a hot evening, and Count D'Orsay laughingly called
his attention to the circumstance as we rose from table. Landor
became flushed, and greatly agitated: "My dear Count D'Orsay, I
thank you! My dear Count D'Orsay, I thank you from my soul for
pointing out to me the abominable condition to which I am reduced!
If I had entered the Drawing-room, and presented myself before Lady
Blessington in so absurd a light, I would have instantly gone home,
put a pistol to my head, and blown my brains out!"
Mr. Forster tells a similar story of his keeping a company waiting
dinner, through losing his way; and of his seeing no remedy for that
breach of politeness but cutting his throat, or drowning himself,
unless a countryman whom he met could direct him by a short road to
the house where the party were assembled. Surely these are
expressive notes on the gravity and reality of his explosive
inclinations to kill kings!
His manner towards boys was charming, and the earnestness of his
wish to be on equal terms with them and to win their confidence was
quite touching. Few, reading Mr. Forster's book, can fall to see in
this, his pensive remembrance of that "studious wilful boy at once
shy and impetuous", who had not many intimacies at Rugby, but who
was "generally popular and respected, and used his influence often
to save the younger boys from undue harshness or violence". The
impulsive yearnings of his passionate heart towards his own boy, on
their meeting at Bath, after years of separation, likewise burn
through this phase of his character.
But a more spiritual, softened, and unselfish aspect of it, was to
derived from his respectful belief in happiness which he himself had
missed. His marriage had not been a felicitous one--it may be
fairly assumed for either side--but no trace of bitterness or
distrust concerning other marriages was in his mind. He was never
more serene than in the midst of a domestic circle, and was
invariably remarkable for a perfectly benignant interest in young
couples and young lovers. That, in his ever-fresh fancy, he
conceived in this association innumerable histories of himself
involving far more unlikely events that never happened than Isaac
D'Israeli ever imagined, is hardly to be doubted; but as to this
part of his real history he was mute, or revealed his nobleness in
an impulse to be generously just. We verge on delicate ground, but
a slight remembrance rises in the writer which can grate nowhere.
Mr. Forster relates how a certain friend, being in Florence, sent
him home a leaf from the garden of his old house at Fiesole. That
friend had first asked him what he should send him home, and he had
stipulated for this gift--found by Mr. Forster among his papers
after his death. The friend, on coming back to England, related to
Landor that he had been much embarrassed, on going in search of the
leaf, by his driver's suddenly stopping his horses in a narrow lane,
and presenting him (the friend) to "La Signora Landora". The lady
was walking alone on a bright Italian-winter-day; and the man,
having been told to drive to the Villa Landora, inferred that he
must be conveying a guest or visitor. "I pulled off my hat," said
the friend, "apologised for the coachman's mistake, and drove on.
The lady was walking with a rapid and firm step, had bright eyes, a
fine fresh colour, and looked animated and agreeable." Landor
checked off each clause of the description, with a stately nod of
more than ready assent, and replied, with all his tremendous energy
concentrated into the sentence: "And the Lord forbid that I should
do otherwise than declare that she always WAS agreeable--to every
one but ME!"
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