A GEORGIAN PAGEANT
By Frank Frankfort Moore
With Illustrations
London: Hutchinson & Co. Paternoster Row
1908
CONTENTS
[ THE MONARCH OF THE PAGEANT ]
[ A COMEDY IN ST. MARTIN'S STREET ]
[ A TRAGEDY IN THE HAYMARKET ]
[ THE PLOT OF A LADY NOVELIST ]
[ THE BEST COMEDY OF THE CENTURY ]
[ A MELODRAMA AT COVENT GARDEN ]
[ THE COMEDY AT DOWNING STREET ]
THE WRITER'S APOLOGY
THE greater number of the papers in this series, dealing with some well-known persons and incidents of the latter half of the Eighteenth Century, are the practical result of a long conversation which the writer had with the late Professor J. Churton Collins upon a very memorable occasion. The writer ventured to contend that the existing views respecting the personality of Oliver Goldsmith, of Henry Thrale, of James Boswell, of Samuel Johnson, and of some others whom he named, were grossly erroneous; as were also the prevalent notions respecting such matters as Fanny Burney's attendance upon the Queen, the “romance” of the Gunnings, and the “elopement” of Richard Brinsley Sheridan with Elizabeth Linley. If Professor Churton Collins had not urged upon the writer the possible interest attaching to the expression of some opinions unbiassed by those conservators of the conventional who have dealt with the same period, every one of them being as careful as Indians on the warpath to tread in the footsteps of the man preceding him, he would not have the courage to set forth his views in the form they now assume.
The non-controversial papers in the series may increase the light and shade in the sketches of this very humble Georgian Pageant. The romance of Lady Susan Fox-Strangways naturally took the shape of a “regulation” story. The details are absolutely correct.
On the very day the writer meant to keep the promise he made to Professor Churton Collins, by sending him the completed proofs of this book, the melancholy news of his death was published—an irreparable loss to the Literature of English Criticism.
THE MONARCH OF THE PAGEANT
On the morning of February 2nd, 1789, a lady was taking a solitary stroll in Kew Gardens. She was a small person, of dainty features, with a dimple on each side of her mouth that suggested a smile, varying, perhaps out of compliment to the variations of the people with whom she came in contact in her daily life, and shifting doubtless with the movements of the folk of her fancy through her quick brain, but remaining a smile all the time. There was about her a good deal of that doll-like primness which is so pretty an accompaniment of a person of small stature; but with this particular person it had—not quite, but almost—the additional charm of dignity. One could at all times see that she was making a highly intellectual attempt to be dignified; but that she was not really dignified at heart. One could see that she had too fine a sense of humour to be thoroughly dignified; and it may be that some of her closest observers—her closest observers were her greatest admirers—perceived now and again that she had a full sense of the humour of her efforts in the direction of dignity. She had large eyes, but being very short-sighted, she had a habit of half closing them when looking at anything or any one further away from her than ten feet. But somehow it was never suggested that the falling of her lids brought a frown to her face.
She was a quick walker at all times; but on this winter day the slowest would have had little temptation to dawdle. The usual river mist was thrusting up a quivering cold hand among the gaunt trees of the water boundary of the Gardens, and here and there it flitted like a lean spectre among the clipped evergreens of the shrubberies. There was a maze of yew hedges, in the intricacies of which one mist-spectre had clearly got lost; and the lady, who had some imagination, could see, as she hurried past, the poor thing's wispy head and shoulders flitting about among the baffling central walks. (A defective eyesight is sometimes a good friend to the imagination.) And all the while she was hurrying along the broad track she was looking with some measure of uneasiness through her half-closed eyes down every tributary walk that ran into the main one, and peering uneasily down every long artificial vista that Sir Thomas Chambers, the Swedish knight and landscape gardener, had planned, through the well-regulated boskage, with an imitation Greek temple or Roman villa at the end. Approaching the widening entrance to each of these, she went cautiously for a few moments until she had assured herself on some point. Once she started and took a step backward, but raising the lorgnette which she carried, and satisfying herself that the group of men a hundred yards down one of the vistas was composed wholly of gardeners, she resumed her stroll.
Whatever slight apprehension may have been on her mind had vanished by the time she had half completed the circuit made by the main walk. She had reached one of the mounds which at that time were covered with rhododendrons, and paused for a moment to see if there was sign of a bud. A blackbird flew out from among the dense leafage, and she followed it with her eyes as well as she could while she walked on, crossing the narrow path that led to the seats on the mound. But at the moment of crossing she was startled out of her senses by the sound of a shout from some distance down this path—a loud shout followed by several others rather less imperative. She gave a little exclamation of terror, raising her muff to her face. Glancing in the direction whence the commotion was coming, she gave another cry, seeing a tall man rush toward her with outstretched arms—waving arms, frantically beckoning to her while he shouted:
“Miss Burney! Miss Burney!”
She waited no longer. She turned and fled along the broad walk, making for one of the many labyrinths not so very far away, and after her ran the man, still shouting and gesticulating. She could hear the sound of his feet and his voice behind her, as well as the cries of the other men who were endeavouring to keep pace with him. On they came, and there flashed through her active brain, in spite of the horrible apprehension which thrilled through every nerve in her body, as she doubled back upon the path which she had just traversed, the lines written by Dr. Goldsmith and often quoted by her friend Dr. Johnson:
A hare whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first he flew.
She realised, all too painfully, the feelings of the poor hare at that moment. She longed for a friendly earth to open up before her. They were behind her—those wild huntsmen, one hoarsely yelling to her she knew not what, the others, more shrill, shouting to her to stop.
She was too frightened to think of obeying any of them. On she ran, and it seemed that she was increasing the distance between her and her panting pursuers, until one of them, having better wind, managed to shoot ahead of the others, and to get close enough to say in a voice that was not all gasps:
“Madam, madam, the doctor begs you to stop!” She glanced over her shoulder, still flying.
“No, no, I cannot—I dare not!” she gasped.
“Madam, you must—you must: it hurts the King to run!” cried the man.
Then she stopped. The man, an ordinary attendant, stood in front of her. He was more breathless than Miss Burney.
“The doctor, madam,” he faltered, “'twas the doctor—he thought at first that His Majesty was—was—but that was at first—now he says you must please not lead His Majesty on—'tis all too much for him. Save us! How you did go, madam! Who would ha' thought it?”
She was paying no attention to him. Her eyes were fixed upon the group of men who were recovering their breath while they walked slowly toward her. The King was between his two physicians—not Physicians in Ordinary; just the contrary—the two physicians who had been summoned from Lincolnshire by some person in authority who possessed intelligence—it should surely be easy to identify such a man at the Court of George III—when, some months earlier, His Majesty gave signs of losing his mental balance. They were the Willises, father and son, the former a clergyman, who was therefore all the more fully qualified to deal with a mind diseased—such a case as was defined as needing more the divine than the physician. The King was between the father and his son, but neither of them was exercising any ostentatious or officious restraint upon him. One of them was smiling while he said some reassuring words to the Royal patient; the other was endeavouring to reassure little Miss Burney from a distance.
And it seemed that the intentions of both were realised, for His Majesty was smiling as benignly as was ever his wont, and little Miss Burney took her courage in both hands and boldly advanced to meet her Sovereign. (She had been for three years the Queen's “Dresser.”) But when they met, after the King had cried, “Why did you run away from me, Miss Burney?” it appeared that the process of reassuring the King had been but too effectually accomplished, for before the lady could frame a diplomatic reply to his inquiry, he had enwound her in his paternal arms and kissed her heartily on the cheek, greatly to her confusion and (she pretends) to her horror. The two doctors stood placidly by. They, poor things, being quite unaccustomed to the ways of the immediate entourage of the Court of George III—though they had doubtless heard something of the practices that prevailed at the Courts of His Majesty's lamented grandfather and great-grandfather—seemed under the impression that there was nothing unusual in this form of salutation. For all they knew it might be regarded as de rigueur between a monarch and the ladies of his consort's retinue. Even Dr. Willis, the divine, took a tolerant view of the transaction. He, as Miss Burney afterwards recorded, actually looked pleased!
But, of course, the prim little lady herself was overwhelmed—yes, at first; but soon her good sense came to her rescue. She seems to have come with extraordinary rapidity to the conclusion that the King was not so mad as she had believed him to be. Her train of reasoning was instinctive, and therefore correct: the King had put his arms about her and kissed her when he had the chance, therefore he could not be so mad after all.
In truth, however, Fanny Burney took the view of her treatment that any sensible modest young woman would take of it. She knew that the King, who had been separated for several months from the people whom he had been daily in the habit of meeting, had shown in the most natural way possible his delight at coming once more in contact with one of them.
And undoubtedly the homely old gentleman was delighted beyond measure to meet with some one belonging to his happy years—a pleasanter face than that of Mrs. Schwellenberg, the dreadful creature who had made Fanny Burney's life miserable. It is not conceivable that the King would have kissed Mrs. Schwellenberg if he had come upon her suddenly as he had upon Miss Burney. People prefer silver rather than iron links with a happy past. He was so overjoyed, that the divine and the physician in attendance soon became anxious. They could not know much of all that he talked about to Miss Burney. They were in the position of strangers suddenly introduced to a family circle, and understanding nothing of the little homely secrets—homely topics upon which all the members of the circle have laughed together for years.
They possibly could not see much sense in his long and rambling chat—it must have been largely in monologue—but they must have observed the face of the lady who was listening to him, and known from the expression which it wore that their patient was making himself intelligible. Only now and again they thought it prudent to check his exuberance. They must have been the most intelligent of men; and their names deserve to stand high in the annals of their country. At a time when the scientific treatment of the insane had not even begun to be formulated—when to be mentally afflicted meant to be on a level with felons and to be subjected to such repressive treatment as was afforded by the iron of the fetters and the hiss of the whipcord—at a time when a lust for office could make a statesman like Burke (a statesman who caused multitudes to weep in sympathy with his harangue on the sufferings of Marie Antoinette) refer to the King as having been “hurled by the Almighty from his throne” (in order to give the Opposition a chance of jumping into place and power over his prostrate body)—at such a time as this Dr. Willis and his two sons undertook the treatment of the King, and in the face of much opposition from the place-hunters in the Prince of Wales's pack, succeeded in restoring their patient to the palace which his happy nature had transformed into a home for every one dwelling under its roof.
They stood by for some time after the King had greeted Miss Burney; and when he began to speak to her of topics that had a purely domestic ring they showed their good taste, as well as their knowledge of the peculiarities of their “case,” by moving away to a little distance, signalling to their attendants to do the same. Their discrimination must have been highly appreciated by the King. The poor restless mind had long wanted such a good long talk with a sympathetic listener, who, he knew, could understand every allusion that he might make to the past. He yearned to talk and to hear of such things as some one living in a distant land looks forward to finding in a letter from home. The res angusta domi—that was what he was hungering for—the trivial things in which he delighted—the confidences on simple matters—the sly everyday jests, never acutely pointed even to the family circle, but absolutely pointless to every one outside, yet sounding so delightfully witty when repeated as a sign of a happy intimacy of the past!
Little Miss Burney had never imagined a scene like that in which she played an insignificant part at the moment, but one of enormous importance for posterity. She had, a few years before, been placed upon the porphyry pedestal which is reserved in England for the greatest woman writer of the generation. Seated there quite complacently, without reflecting upon the possibility of her pedestal becoming a trifle rickety, she had clasped her novel Evelina to her bosom, and received, without her head being in the least turned, the adulation—respectful in some cases, almost passionate in others—of the most notable men and women in the most intellectual and artistic society in England. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was not disposed to overrate the merits of any writer whom the world had praised, was kissing her hands, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan was kissing her feet; Sir Joshua Reynolds was kissing the hem of her garments; while Edmund Burke was weaving a tinsel crown of rhetoric for her shapely head; but there were others equally great at that time who seemed to think that only a nimbus could give the appropriate finish to the little personage on the pedestal. The marvellous story of her success has been often told. It is more easily told than understood in the present day, the fact being that fashion in fiction is the most ephemeral of all human caprices, and Fanny Burney was essentially a fashion. She followed up the marvellous success of Evelina, after an interval of four years, with the natural success of Cecilia, and, after another four years, she retired from the brilliant world into the obscurity of the palace—the palace wardrobe. She had visited Mrs. Delany, and had been introduced (not presented) to the King and Queen, and the office of Queen's Dresser—Keeper of the Robes was the stately designation of a very humble service—becoming vacant, it was offered to Fanny Burney and accepted by her, acting on the advice of her father, who most certainly hoped that his own interests as a musician, fully qualified to become leader of the Royal Band, would be materially advanced when his daughter should become one of the Household.
Reams of indignation have been published from time to time in respect of Dr. Burney's conduct in urging on his one brilliant daughter—the others were not brilliant, only mothers—to accept a post the duties of which could be discharged by any lady's maid with far more advantage to the Royal Consort than could possibly result from the ministrations of Fanny Burney. The world has been called on to bemoan the prudent indiscretion of the father, who did not hesitate to fling his gifted daughter's pen out of the window, so to speak, and thereby deprive the waiting world of some such masterpiece as Camilla—the novel which she published five years after her release from the burden of the Robes. There can be no doubt that the feeling which prevailed among the circle of the elect—the Reynoldses, the Burkes, and even the frigid Walpole—when it became known that Miss Burney's health was breaking down under the strain of her duties at the Court—she had about two hours' daily attendance of the most ordinary nature upon the Queen—was on the border of indignation. Every one affirmed that it was a disgrace for so lively a genius to be kept at the duties of a lady's maid. It was like turning the winner of the Oaks out to the plough. Edmund Burke, recalling his early approbation of the intentions of Dr. Burney in regard to his daughter, declared that he had never made so great a mistake in all his life; and we know that he made a few. These excellent people had no reason to speak otherwise than they did on this matter. All they knew was that the pen of the novelist who had given them so much pleasure had been (as they believed) idle for nearly nine years, five of which had been passed at the Court. That reflection was quite enough to rouse their indignation. But what can one say of the indignation on this point of a writer who actually made the fact of his being engaged on a review of the Diary of Fanny Burney—the incomparable Diary which she kept during her five years at Court—an excuse for turning the vials of his wrath upon her father, whose obstinacy gave her a chance of writing the most interesting chapter—the most accurate chapter—of History that was ever penned by man or woman?
Macaulay wrote in all the fullness of his knowledge of what Fanny Burney had written. He knew that for four years after she had published Cecilia her pen had been idle so far as fiction was concerned. He knew that for five years after her release from the thraldom of the Queen's closet she had published nothing; he himself felt it to be his duty to point out the comparative worthlessness of Camilla, the novel which she then gave to the world, not because she felt upon her the impulse of a woman of genius, but simply because she found herself in great need of some ready money. Macaulay does not disdain to go into the money question, showing (he fancies) how Dr. Burney had by his obstinacy deprived his gifted daughter of earning the large sum which she would assuredly have obtained by the writing of a novel in the time that she was compelled to devote to the Queen's toilette. He found it convenient to ignore the fact that of the fourteen years that elapsed between the publication of Cecilia and that of Camilla only five were spent at Court. Surely any born novelist could, without running a chance of imperilling a well-earned reputation by undue haste in the dialogue or by scamping the descriptive passages, contrive by dint of hard, but not over-hard, work to produce more than one complete romance within a space of nine years. Many ladies who are not born novelists have succeeded in surpassing this task without physical suffering.
But even assuming that the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla lost not only time but money while she was at Court, how much money did she lose? She received at least the equivalent of £2000 for her five years' service, and she was granted a pension of £100 a year, which she drew for forty-nine years; so that for her enforced seclusion she was remunerated to the extent of close upon £7000! This sum represents more than all Fanny Burney's literary works yielded to her from the joyous youthful days of Evelina down to the somewhat sordid middle age of Camilla.
But what has the world gained by the lamentable short-sightedness attributed to Dr. Burney? How is one to estimate the value of that incomparable Diary so admirably “written up” during her tedious five years at Court? How many Cecilias, how many Camillas would one not give in exchange for a single year of that part of the Diary which deals with the approach of the King's malady? In no work of fiction that ever came from her pen did she ever show such power of observation, not only of incident, but of character as well; nor is there apparent on any page produced by her imagination such perfect artistic effects as appeal to a reader on every page of this Diary of a disease.
At the outset of her account of these dreadful days we are conscious of the vague approach of a shadow—we feel as if we were led into the darkened chamber of a haunted house. Our attendant pauses by our side, listening for strange noises; she lays a hand upon our arm, as it were, and speaks to us in a whisper. We feel that the dread Thing is coming. The King is indisposed—he has not been quite in his usual health for some time past; but of course nothing very alarming has been announced by Sir George Barker, the Physician in Ordinary, although there is an uncertainty as to His Majesty's complaint. But Miss Burney has seen the faces of the people about her who have come more closely in contact with the Sovereign; she has doubtless noticed the solemnity of some—the airs of mystery, the head-shakings, and she is capable of drawing her own conclusions. “Heaven preserve him!” she whispers in her Diary for October 19th, 1788. She is very much with the Queen, and she perceives that Her Majesty is extremely uneasy, though saying nothing. There is great alarm during the night. Possibly some one has heard the delirious voice of the King coming from his apartments in that tumbledown palace of his at Kew. The fright is general, and every one is wondering what the morning will bring forth. Hope comes with the light. The bulletin is that the King was ill, but is now so very much better that his physician believes the move to Windsor, to which the Court was looking forward, may be taken. The move is made on the 25th, and then Miss Burney has a chance meeting with the King that causes her to suspect the truth. He talks to her with unnatural vehemence—unnatural volubility—and without cessation for a long time; all is exaggerated, and his graciousness most of all. She has never met with anything like this before, but having heard of the delirium accompanying a high fever, she believes that His Majesty is in the throes of a fever.
The next day is Sunday, and she meets him again in one of the passages, and she finds him rather more coherent in his talk, but still it is the talk of a man in the delirium of a fever. It is all about himself—his health—his dreadful sleeplessness. He keeps at it for half an hour without making the slightest pause; and yet he manages to convey to her an impression of his benevolence—his consideration for the people around him—his hopes that he may not cause them any uneasiness. When he leaves her she doubtless tells of the meeting to some of her friends in the apartments where the equerries are accustomed to meet, and doubtless there are more head-shakings and airs of mystery; but she records: “Nobody speaks of his illness, nor what they think of it.”
Apparently, too, no one felt it to be necessary to subject His Majesty to any course of treatment, although, a few days later, he became so weak that he, who at the beginning of the year thought nothing of walking twelve miles at a stretch—more than his sons could do—hobbled along like a gouty man. Gradually, very gradually, the horror approaches; and nothing that has ever been done in fiction equals in effect the simple record of all that Fanny Burney noticed from day to day. Most touching of all her entries are those relating to the Queen. “The Queen,” she writes, “is almost overpowered with some secret terror. I am affected beyond all expression in her presence to see what struggles she makes to support her serenity. To-day she gave up the conflict when I was alone with her; and burst into a violent fit of tears. It was very, very terrible to see!... something horrible seemed impending... I was still wholly unsuspicious of the greatness of the cause she had for dread. Illness, a breaking up of the constitution, the payment of sudden infirmity and premature old age for the waste of unguarded health and strength—these seemed to me the threats awaiting her; and great and grievous enough, yet how short of the fact!”...
At last the terrible truth was revealed. Miss Burney was dining with one of the Queen's ladies; but there was little conversation between them. It was clear that both had their suspicions of the nature of the dread shadow that was hovering over the castle. They remained together, waiting for the worst. “A stillness the most uncommon reigned over the whole house. Nobody stirred; not a voice was heard; not a motion. I could do nothing but watch, without knowing for what; there seemed a strangeness in the house most extraordinary.”
To talk of such passages as these as examples of literary art would be ridiculous. They are transcripts from life itself made by some one with a genius for observation, not merely for recording. Boswell had a genius for recording; but his powers of observation were on a level with those of a sheep. We know perfectly well what his treatment of the scenes leading up to the tragedy of the King would have been. But Fanny Burney had the artist's instinct for collecting only such incidents as heighten the effect.
When she is still sitting in the dim silence of that November evening with her friend some one enters to whisper that there was to be no playing of the after-dinner music in which the King usually took so much pleasure. Later on the equerries come slowly into the room. There is more whispering—more head-shaking. What was it all about? Had anything happened? What had happened? No one wishes to be the first to speak. But the suspense! The strain upon the nerves of the two ladies! At last it can be borne no longer. The dreadful revelation is made. The King is a madman!
At dinner, the Prince of Wales being present, His Majesty had “broken forth into positive delirium, which long had been menacing all who saw him most closely; and the Queen was so overpowered as to fall into violent hysterics. All the princesses were in misery, and the Prince of Wales had burst into tears. No one knew what was to follow—no one could conjecture the event.” Nothing could be more pathetic than the concern of the King for his wife. His delusion is that she is the sufferer. When Fanny Burney went to her room, where she was accustomed to await her nightly summons to attend Her Majesty, she remained there alone for two hours. At midnight she can stand the suspense no longer. She opens the door and listens in the passage. Not a sound is to be heard. Not even a servant crossed the stairs on the corridor off which her apartment opened. After another hour's suspense a page knocks at her door with the message that she is to go at once to her Royal mistress.
“My poor Royal Mistress!” she writes. “Never can I forget her countenance—pale, ghastly pale she looked... her whole frame was disordered, yet she was still and quiet. And the poor King is dreadfully uneasy about her. Nothing was the matter with himself, he affirmed, except nervousness on her account. He insisted on having a bed made up for himself in her dressing-room in order that he might be at hand should she become worse through the night. He had given orders that Miss Goldsworthy was to remain with her; but it seemed that he had no great confidence in the vigilance of any one but himself, for some hours after the Queen had retired he appeared before the eyes of the horrified lady-in-waiting, at the door, bearing a lighted candle. He opened the bed curtains and satisfied himself that his dread of her being carried out of the palace was unfounded; but he did not leave the room for another half-hour, and the terror of the scene completely overwhelmed the unhappy lady.”
Truly when this terror was walking by night Fanny Burney's stipend was well earned. But worse was in store for her when it was decided that the King should be removed to Kew Palace, which he detested and which was certainly the most miserable of all the miserable dwelling-places of the Royal Family. It seemed to be nobody's business to make any preparation for the reception of the Queen and her entourage. The rooms were dirty and unwarmed, and the corridors were freezing. And to the horrors of this damp, unsavoury barrack was added Mrs. Schwellenberg, the German she-dragon who had done her best to make Fanny Burney's life unendurable during the previous three years. Formerly Fanny had dwelt upon the ill-treatment she had received at the hands of this old harridan; but now she only refers to her as an additional element of casual discomfort. The odious creature is “so oppressed between her spasms and the house's horrors, that the oppression she inflicted ought perhaps to be pardoned. It was, however, difficult enough to bear,” she adds. “Harshness, tyranny, dissension, and even insult seemed personified. I cut short details upon this subject—they would but make you sick.”
Truly little Miss Burney earned her wages at this time. The dilapidated palace was only rendered habitable by the importation of a cartload of sandbags, which were as strategically distributed for the exclusion of the draughts as if they were the usual defensive supply of a siege. But even this ingenious device failed to neutralise the Arctic rigours of the place. The providing of carpets for some of the bare floors of the bedrooms and passages was a startling innovation; but eventually it was carried out. An occasional set of curtains also was smuggled into this frozen fairy palace, and a sofa came now and again.
But in spite of all these auxiliaries to luxury—in spite, too, of Mrs. Schwellenberg's having locked herself into her room, forbidding any one to disturb her—the dreariness and desolation of the December at Kew must have caused Miss Burney to think with longing of the comforts of her father's home in St. Martin's Street and of the congenial atmosphere which she breathed during her numerous visits to the Thrales' solid mansion at Streatham.
The condition of the King was becoming worse, and early whispers of the necessity for a Regency grew louder. It was understood that Mrs. Fitzherbert would be made a duchess! Everybody outside the palace sought to stand well in the estimation of the Prince of Wales, and Pitt was pointed out as a traitor to his country because he did his best to postpone the Comus orgy which every one knew would follow the establishing of a Regency. The appointment of the Doctors Willis was actually referred to as a shocking impiety, suggesting as it did a wicked rebellion against the decree of the Almighty, Who, according to Burke, had hurled the monarch from his throne. There were, however, some who did not regard Mr. Burke as an infallible judge on such a point, and no one was more indignant at the mouthings of the rhetorician than Miss Burney. But it seemed as if the approach of the Regency could no longer be retarded. The Willises were unable to certify to any improvement in the condition of the King during the month of January, 1789. It was really not until he had that chase after Fanny Burney in Kew Gardens that a change for the better came about.
Though she was greatly terrified by his affectionate salutation, she could not but have been surprised at the sanity displayed in the monologue that followed; for one of the first of his innumerable questions revealed to her the fact that he was perfectly well aware of what a trial to her patience was the odious Mrs. Schwellenberg. He asked how she was getting on with Mrs. Schwellenberg, and he did so with a laugh that showed her how well he appreciated her difficulties in this direction in the past. Before she could say a word he was making light of the Schwellenberg—adopting exactly the strain that he knew would be most effective with Miss Burney.
“Never mind her—never mind her! Don't be oppressed! I am your friend! Don't let her cast you down—I know that you have a hard time of it—but don't mind her!”
The advice and the tone in which it was given—with a pleasant laugh—did not seem very consistent with what she expected from a madman. Fanny Burney appears up to that moment to have been under the impression that the King and Queen had known nothing of the tyranny and the insults to which she had been subjected by Mrs. Schwellenberg. But now it was made plain to her that the eyes of the Royal couple had been open all the time. If Macaulay had noticed the passage touching upon this point he would have had still stronger grounds for his attack upon their Majesties for their want of consideration for the tire-woman who was supposed never to be tired.
But how much more surprised must Fanny Burney have been when the King went on to talk to her in the most cordially confidential way about her father! It must have been another revelation to her when he showed how fully he realised the ambitions of Dr. Burney. He asked her regarding the progress of the History of Music, at which Dr. Burney had been engaged for several years, and this gave him a chance of getting upon his favourite topic, the music of Handel. But when he began to illustrate some of his impressions on this fruitful theme by singing over the choruses of an oratorio or two—perhaps such trifles as “All we like Sheep,” or “Lift up your Heads,” or the “Hallelujah”—he must have gone far toward neutralising the good opinion she had formed as to his sanity. Fortunately the attendant doctors interposed at this point; but the fact that the distinguished amateur suffered their adverse criticism proves to posterity that the King was even more good-natured than he had been painted by Miss Burney.
On then he went to talk of the subject which must never have been far from Dr. Burney's heart—the Mastership of the King's Band: “Your father ought to have had the post, and not that little poor musician Parsons, who was not fit for it,” he cried. “But Lord Salisbury used your father very ill in that business, and so he did me! However, I have dashed out his name, and I shall put your father's in—as soon as I get loose again. What has your father got at last? Nothing but that poor thing at Chelsea! Oh, fie! fie! But never mind! I will take care of him—I will do it myself!”
Could he have given the devoted daughter of Dr. Burney a more emphatic proof of his complete recovery to sanity than this? Why, it would have convinced Dr. Burney himself!
Alas! although the King may have been very resolute at the moment—he had just been making out a list of new officers of State, and was ready to show her that the name of her father's enemy, Lord Salisbury, was not to be found in it, and he assured her that in future he would rule with a rod of iron—yet before he returned to his ordinary way of life he must have mislaid his list, for poor Dr. Burney remained at his post of organist of Chelsea Hospital. He never attained to the place which he coveted and for which his daughter was sent to five years' Royal servitude, and (incidentally) to achieve for herself that immortality as a chronicler which would certainly never have been won by her as a novelist.
But the King did not confine his conversation to the one topic which he knew was of greatest interest to her. He spoke of Mrs. Delany, who had been the means of introducing Fanny to the Royal circle; and he referred to the ill-treatment which he had received at the hands of one of his pages; but this was the only passage that savoured of unkindness, and the chronicler is unable to do more than hope that the conduct of the pages was one of His Majesty's delusions. Then, with what seems to us to be consummate adroitness, he put some questions to her which she could not but answer. “They referred to information given to him in his illness from various motives, but which he suspected to be false, and which I knew he had reason to suspect,” Miss Burney writes. “Yet was it most dangerous to set anything right, as I was not aware what might be the views of their having been stated wrong. I was as discreet as I knew how to be, and I hope I did no mischief: but this was the worst part of the dialogue.”
We can quite believe that it was, and considering that it was the part of the dialogue which was most interesting to the King, we think that Miss Burney was to be congratulated upon the tact she displayed in her answers. She did not cause the King to be more perturbed than he was when waxing indignant over the conduct of his pages; and there was no need for Dr. Willis to interfere at this point, though he did a little later on. Then submitting with the utmost docility to the control of his excellent attendant, and with another exhortation not to pay any attention to the whims of the Schwellenberg, the gracious gentleman kissed her once more on the cheek and allowed her to take her departure.
So ended this remarkable adventure in Kew Gardens. One can picture Fanny Burney flying to tell the Queen all that had occurred—to repeat everything that her discretion permitted her of the conversation; and one has no difficulty in imagining the effect upon Queen Charlotte of all that she narrated; but it seems rather hard that from Mrs. Schwellenberg should have been withheld the excellent advice given by the King to Miss Burney respecting the German virago.
It would have been impossible either for Fanny Burney or the Queen to come to any conclusion from all that happened except one that was entirely satisfactory to both. King George III was undoubtedly on the high road to recovery, and subsequent events confirmed this opinion. It really seemed that the interview with the author of Evelina marked the turning-point in his malady at this time. Every day brought its record of improvement, and within a fortnight the dreaded Regency Bill, which had been sent up to the Lords, was abandoned. On March 1st there were public thanksgivings in all the churches, followed by such an illumination of London as had not been seen since the great fire. The scene at Kew is admirably described by Miss Burney, who had written some congratulatory lines to be offered by the Princess Amelia to the King. A great “transparency” had been painted by the Queen's order, representing the King, Providence, Health, and Britannia—a truly British tableau—and when this was hung out and illuminated the little Princess “went to lead her papa to the front window.” Then she dropped on her knees and gave him the “copy of verses,” with the postscript:
The little bearer begs a kiss
From dear papa for bringing this.
The “dear papa” took his dear child in his arms, and held her close to him for some time. Nothing could have been more charmingly natural and affecting. For such a picture of Royalty at home we are indebted to Fanny Burney, and, face to face with it, we are selfish enough to feel grateful to Dr. Burney for having given his daughter for five years to discharge a humble duty to her Sovereign and an immortal one to her fellow-countrymen, who have read her Diary and placed it on a shelf between Pepys and de Gramont.
A COMEDY IN ST. MARTIN'S STREET
DR BURNEY was giving a “command” party at his house in St. Martin's Street, Leicester Fields—the house which Sir Isaac Newton did once inhabit, and which was still crowned with the most celebrated observatory in Europe. In the early years of his musical career he had had a patron, Mr. Fulk Greville, who had done a great deal for him, and in later days he had never quite forgotten this fact, although Dr. Burney had climbed high on the professional as well as the social ladder, and was better known in the world than Mr. Greville himself. He had become quite intimate with many great persons and several curious ones. It is uncertain whether Mr. Greville regarded Dr. Johnson as belonging to the former or the latter class, but at any rate he had heard a great deal about Dr. Johnson, and did not think that, provided he took every reasonable precaution, any harm could come to himself from meeting such a notability. He accordingly instructed Dr. Burney to bring him and Johnson together, and Burney promised to do so. Before the day for this meeting was fixed Mrs. Greville—who, by the way, was Fanny Burney's godmother—had signified her intention of viewing the huge person also, and of bringing her daughter, the exquisite Mrs. Crewe, to attend the promised exhibition of genius in bulk.
Of course Dr. Johnson was ready to lend himself to any plan that might be devised to increase the circumference of his circle of admirers, and besides, this Mr. Fulk Greville was a descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and had large possessions, as well as a magnificent country seat, and altogether he would make a most desirable listener; so he agreed to come to the party to be inspected by the Greville family. Burney, however, wishing, as every responsible proprietor of a menagerie should wish, to be on the safe side and exhibit his bear under the eye and the controlling influence of his favourite keeper, invited Mr. and Mrs. Thrale to the party.
These were to be the “principals” in the comedy of this entertainment; and for the subordinates he selected his married daughter and her husband—both admirable musicians—Mr. Davenant, Mr. Seward, and a certain Italian musician, a vocalist as well as a performer on the violin and that new instrument which was at first called the fortepiano, then the pianoforte, and later on simply the piano. This person's name was Gabrielli Piozzi.
Such were the harmonious elements which Dr. Burney proposed to bring together for the gratification of Mr. Fulk Greville and his wife. Mr. Greville was an amateur of some little capacity, and he had certainly at one time been greatly interested in music. He had paid £300 to Burney's master, the celebrated Dr. Arne, who composed in the masque of “Alfred” the rousing anthem known as “Rule Britannia,” for the cancelling of Burney's indentures as an apprentice to the “art of musick,” and had taken the young man into his own house in a capacity which may best be described as that of entertaining secretary. Dr. Burney may therefore have thought in his wisdom that, should Johnson be in one of his bearish moods and feel disinclined to exhibit his parts of speech to Mr. Greville, the latter would be certain of entertainment from the musicians. This showed forethought and a good working knowledge of Dr. Johnson. But in spite of the second string to the musician's bow the party was a fiasco—that is, from the standpoint of a social entertainment; it included one incident, however, which made it the most notable of the many of the Burney parties of which a record remains.
And what records there are available to any one interested in the entertainments given by Dr. Burney and his charming family at that modest house of theirs, just round the corner from Sir Joshua Reynolds' larger establishment in Leicester Fields! Hundreds of people who contributed to make the second half of the eighteenth century the most notable of any period so far as literature and the arts were concerned, since the spacious days of Elizabeth, were accustomed to meet together informally at this house, and to have their visits recorded for all ages to muse upon. To that house came Garrick, not to exhibit his brilliance as a talker before a crowd of admirers, but to entertain the children of the household with the buffooning that never flagged, and that never fell short of genius in any exhibition. He was the delight of the schoolroom. Edmund Burke and his brother, both fond of conversation when oratory was not available, were frequently here; Reynolds came with many of his sitters, and found fresh faces for his canvas among his fellow-guests; and with him came his maiden sister, feeling herself more at home with the simple Burney circle than she ever did with the company who assembled almost daily under her brother's roof. Nollekens, the sculptor; Colman, the dramatist and theatre manager, who was obliged to run away from London to escape the gibes which were flung at him from every quarter when Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, which he had done his best to make a failure, became the greatest success of the year; Cumberland, the embittered rival of Goldsmith, who was the person who gave the solitary hiss during the first performance of the same play, causing the timid author to say to the manager on entering the playhouse, “What is that, sir—pray, what is that? Is it a hiss?” To which Colman replied, “Psha! sir, what signifies a squib when we have been sitting on a barrel of gunpowder all night?”
These were among the notabilities; and the “curiosities” were quite as numerous. The earliest of Arctic voyagers, Sir Constantine Phipps, who later became Lord Mulgrave, put in an appearance at more than one of the parties; and so did Omai, the “gentle savage” of the poet Cowper, who was brought by Captain Cook from the South Seas in the ship on which young Burney was an officer. The sisters, who, of course, idolised the sailor, sat open-mouthed with wonder to hear their brother chatting away to Omai in his native language. Upon another occasion came Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, who told the story of how steaks were cut from the live ox when needed by the inhabitants of one region. He was immensely tall, as were some of his stories; but though extremely dignified, he did not object to a practical joke. Another person of great stature who visited the Burneys was the notorious Count Orloff, the favourite of the Empress Catherine of Russia; and from the letters of one of the young people of the household one has no difficulty in perceiving with what interest he was regarded by the girls, especially since the report reached them that he had personally strangled his imperial master at the instigation of his imperial mistress.
These are but, a few names out of the many on the Burneys' visiting list. Of course, as regards musical artists, the house was the rendezvous of the greatest in London. While the opera-house in the Haymarket was open there was a constant flow of brilliant vocalists to these shores, and the young people had many opportunities of becoming acquainted with the ignorance, the capriciousness, the affectations, and the abilities which were to be found associated with the lyric stage in the eighteenth century, as they are in the twentieth. Among the prime donne who sang for the Burneys were the Agujari—a marvellous performer, who got fifty pounds for every song she sang at the Pantheon—and her great but uncertain rival, Gabrielli. The former, according to Mozart, who may possibly be allowed to be something of a judge, had a vocal range which was certainly never equalled by any singer before or after his time. She won all hearts and a great deal of money during her visit to London, and she left with the reputation of being the most marvellous and most rapacious of Italians. Gabrielli seems to have tried to make up by capriciousness what she lacked in expression. Her voice was, so far as can be gathered from contemporary accounts, small and thin. But by judiciously disappointing the public she became the most widely talked of vocalist in the country. Then among the men were the simple and gracious Pacchierotti—who undoubtedly became attached to Fanny Burney—Rauzzini, and Piozzi.
The Burneys' house was for years the centre of the highest intellectual entertainment to be found in London, and the tact of the head of the household, and the simple, natural manners of his daughters, usually succeeded in preventing the intrusion of a single inharmonious note, in spite of the fact that a Welsh harpist named Jones had once been among the visitors.
But upon the occasion of this “command” party, when Greville was to meet Johnson, and the latter had dressed himself with that extreme care which we suspect meant that he tied up his hose, and put on a wig the front of which had not yet been burnt away by coming in contact with his lighted candle, Burney's tact overreached itself. Mr. Greville may have felt that the Thrales had no business to be of the party, or Johnson may have gained the impression that Burney's old patron was anxious to play the same part, in an honorary sort of way, in regard to himself. At any rate, he refused to be drawn out to exhibit his conversational powers to a supercilious visitor; and after a brief space of time he turned his back upon every one and his face to the fire, and there he sat, greatly to the discomfiture, no doubt, of his host. In a very short time a gloom settled down upon the whole party. Mr. Thrale, stiff and reserved, was not the man to pull things together. He sat mute on his chair, making no advance toward Mr. Greville, and Mr. Greville had probably his chin in the air, having come to the conclusion that Dr. Johnson's powers as a conversationalist had been greatly overrated by rumour.
It was when all hope of sociability had vanished that Dr. Burney, who, when a church organist, may have had occasion to cover up the shortcomings of the clergyman by a timely voluntary, begged Signor Piozzi to oblige the company with a song. But Piozzi was a forlorn hope. He was the last man in the world to save the situation. Had he been a vocalist of the calibre of Pacchierotti he could have made no headway against the funereal gloom that had settled down upon the party.
Piozzi had a sweet and highly trained voice, though some years earlier he had lost its best notes, and he sang with exquisite expression; but when playing his own accompaniment, with his back turned to his audience, he was prone to exaggerate the sentiment of the music until sentiment became lost in an exuberance of sentimentality.
This style of singing is not that to which any one would resort in order to dissipate a sudden social gloom. As the singer went on the gloom deepened.
It was just at this moment that one of those ironic little imps that lurk in wainscot nooks looking out for an opportunity to influence an unconscious human being to an act which the little demon, seeing the end of a scene of which mortals only see the beginning, regards with sardonic glee, whispered something in the ear of Mrs. Thrale, and in an instant, in obedience to its prompting, she had left her chair and stolen behind the singer at the piano. Raising her hands and turning up her eyes in imitation of Piozzi, she indulged in a piece of mimicry which must have shocked every one in the room except the singer, who had his back to her, and Dr. Johnson, who, besides being too short-sighted to be able to see her, was gazing into the grate.
No doubt the flippant little lady felt that a touch of farcical fun was the very thing needed to make the party go with a snap; but such flagrant bad taste as was involved in the transaction was more than Dr. Burney could stand. Keeping his temper marvellously well in hand, considering his provocation, he went gently behind the gesticulating woman and put a stop to her fooling. Shaking his head, he whispered in a “half joke whole earnest” way:
“Because, madam, you have no ear yourself for music, will you destroy the attention of all who, in that one point, are otherwise gifted?”
Or words to that effect, it might be safe to add, for the phrases as recorded in the diary of one of his daughters are a trifle too academic for even Dr. Burney to have whispered on the spur of the moment. But he certainly reproved the lady, and she took his remonstrance in good part, and showed herself to be admirably appreciative of the exact pose to assume in order to save the situation. She went demurely to her chair and sat there stiffly, and with the affectation of a schoolgirl who has been admonished for a fault and commanded to take a seat in silence and apart from the rest of the class. It must be apparent to every one that this was the precise attitude for her to strike in the circumstances, and that she was able to perceive this in a rather embarrassing moment shows that Mrs. Thrale was quite as clever as her friends made her out to be.
But regarding the incident itself, surely the phrase, “the irony of fate,” was invented to describe it. A better illustration of the sport of circumstance could not be devised, for in the course of time the lively little lady, who had gone as far as any one could go in making a mock of another, had fallen as deep in love with the man whom she mocked as ever Juliet did with her Romeo. She found that she could not live without him, and, sacrificing friends, position, and fortune, she threw herself into his arms, and lived happy ever after.
The conclusion of the first scene in this saturnine comedy which was being enacted in the drawing-room in that house in St. Martin's Street, was in perfect keeping with the mise-en-scène constructed by Fate, taking the rôle of Puck. It is admirably described in the diary of Charlotte Burney. She wrote that Mr. Greville—whom she nicknamed “Mr. Gruel”—assumed “his most supercilious air of distant superiority” and “planted himself immovable as a noble statue upon the hearth, as if a stranger to the whole set.”
By this time Dr. Johnson must have had enough of the fire at which he had been sitting, and we at once see how utterly hopeless were the social relations at this miserable party when we hear that the men “were so kind and considerate as to divert themselves by making a fire-screen to the whole room.” But Dr. Johnson, having thoroughly warmed himself, was now in a position to administer a rebuke to the less fortunate ones, and, when nobody would have imagined that he had known the gentlemen were in the room, he said that “if he was not ashamed he would keep the fire from the ladies too.”
“This reproof (for a reproof it certainly was, although given in a very comical, dry way) was productive,” Charlotte adds, “of a scene as good as a comedy, for Mr. Suard tumbled on to a sopha directly, Mr. Thrale on to a chair, Mr. Davenant sneaked off the premises, seemingly in as great a fright and as much confounded as if he had done any bad action, and Mr. Gruel being left solus, was obliged to stalk off.”
A more perfect description of the “curtain” to the first act of this, “as good as a comedy,” could not be imagined. In every scene of this memorable evening the mocking figure of an impish Fate can be discerned. There was the tactful and urbane Dr. Burney anxious to gratify his old patron by presenting to him the great Dr. Johnson, and at the same time to show on what excellent terms he himself was with the family of the wealthy brewer, Mr. Thrale. Incidentally he has caused Johnson to put himself to the inconvenience of a clean shirt and a respectable wig; and, like a thoughtful general, lest any of his plans should fall short of fulfilment, he has invited an interesting vocalist to cover up the retreat and make failure almost impossible!
Dr. Burney could do wonders by the aid of his tact and urbanity, but he is no match for Fate playing the part of Puck. Within an hour Johnson has disappointed him and become grumpy—the old bear has found the buns to be stale; Mr. Greville, the patron, is in a patronising mood, and becomes stiff and aloof because Johnson, secure with his pension, resents it; Mrs. Thrale, anxious to do her best for Burney, and at the same time to show Mrs. Greville and her fine daughter how thoroughly at home she is in the house and how delicate is her sense of humour, strikes an appallingly false note, and only saves herself by a touch of cleverness from appearing wholly ridiculous. This is pretty well for the opening scenes, but the closing catastrophe is not long delayed. The men huddle themselves together in stony silence; and they are reproved for impoliteness by—whom? Dr. Johnson, the man who has studied boorishness and advanced it to a place among the arts—the man who calls those who differ from him dolts and fools and rascals—the man whose manners at the dinner table are those of the sty and trough—the man who walks about the streets ungartered and unclean—this is the man who has the effrontery to rebuke for their rudeness such gentlemen as Mr. Fulk Greville, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Thrale! Puck can go no further. Down comes the curtain when one gentleman collapses upon a “sopha,” another into a chair, a third sneaks off like a culprit, and the fourth stalks off with an air of offended dignity!
It might be thought that the imp of mischief who had assumed the control of this evening's entertainment would be satisfied at the result of his pranks so far. Nothing of the sort. He was only satisfied when he had made a match between the insignificant figure who was playing the musical accompaniment to his pranks and the lady who thought that his presence in the room was only justifiable on the ground that he made an excellent butt for her mockery!
And the funniest part of the whole comedy is to be found in the fact that the pair lived happy ever after!
The extraordinary influence which Boswell has had upon almost every student of the life of the latter half of the eighteenth century is shown in a marked way by the general acceptance of his view—which it is scarcely necessary to say was Johnson's view—of the second marriage of Mrs. Thrale. We are treating Boswell much more fairly than he treated Mrs. Thrale when we acknowledge at once that his opinion was shared by a considerable number of the lady's friends, including Dr. Burney and his family. They were all shocked when they heard that the widow of the Southwark brewer had married the Italian musician, Signor Gabrielli Piozzi. Even in the present day, when one might reasonably expect that, the miserable pettiness of Boswell's character having been made apparent, his judgment on most points would be received with a smile, he is taken very seriously by a good many people. It has long ago been made plain that Boswell was quite unscrupulous in his treatment of every one that crossed his path or made an attempt to interfere with the aim of his life, which was to become the biographer of Johnson. The instances of his petty malevolence which have come to light within recent years are innumerable. They show that the opinion which his contemporaries formed of him was absolutely correct. We know that he was regarded as a cur who was ever at Johnson's heels, and took the insults of the great man with a fawning complacency that was pathetically canine. He was daily called a cur. “Oh, no,” said Goldsmith, “he is not a cur, only a burr; Tom Davies flung him at Johnson one day as a joke, and he stuck to him ever since”—a cur, and an ape and a spy and a Branghton—the last by Dr. Johnson himself in the presence of a large company, that included the creator of the contemptible Mr. Branghton. (The incident was not, however, recorded by Mr. Boswell himself.) But as the extraordinary interest in his Life of Johnson began to be acknowledged, the force of contemporary opinion gradually dwindled away, until Boswell's verdicts and Boswell's inferences found general acceptance; and even now Goldsmith is regarded as an Irish omadhaum, because Boswell did his best to make him out to be one, and Mrs. Thrale is thought to have forfeited her claims to respect because she married Signor Piozzi.
People forget the origin of Boswell's malevolence in both cases. He detested Goldsmith because Goldsmith was a great writer, who was capable of writing a great biography of Johnson, with whom he had been on the most intimate terms long before Tom Davies flung his burr at Johnson; he hated Baretti and recorded—at the sacrifice of Johnson's reputation for humanity—Johnson's cynical belittling of him, because he feared that Baretti would write the biography; he was spiteful in regard to Mrs. Thrale because she actually did write something biographical about Johnson.
The impudence of such a man as Boswell writing about “honest Dr. Goldsmith” is only surpassed by his allusions to the second marriage of Mrs. Thrale. He was a fellow-guest with Johnson at the Thrales' house in 1775, and he records something of a conversation which he says occurred on the subject of a woman's marrying some one greatly beneath her socially. “When I recapitulate the debate,” he says, “and recollect what has since happened, I cannot but be struck in a manner that delicacy forbids me to express! While I contended that she ought to be treated with inflexible steadiness of displeasure, Mrs. Thrale was all for mildness and forgiveness and, according to the vulgar phrase, making the best of a bad bargain.” This was published after the second marriage. What would be thought of a modern biographer who should borrow a little of Boswell's “delicacy,” and refer to a similar incident in the same style?
In his own inimitable small way Boswell was for ever sneering at Mrs. Thrale. Sometimes he did it with that scrupulous delicacy of which an example has just been given; but he called her a liar more than once with considerable indelicacy, and his readers will without much trouble come to the conclusion that his indelicacy was preferable to his delicacy—it certainly came more natural to him. He was small and mean in all his ways, and never smaller or meaner than in his references to Mrs. Thrale's second marriage.
But, it must be repeated, he did not stand alone in regarding her union with Piozzi as a mésalliance. Dr. Burney was shocked at the thought that any respectable woman would so far forget herself as to marry a musician, and his daughter Fanny wept remorseful tears when she reflected that she had once been the friend of a lady who did not shrink from marrying a foreigner and a Roman Catholic—more of the irony of Fate, for Fanny Burney was herself guilty of the same indiscretion later on: she made a happy marriage with a Roman Catholic foreigner, who lived on her pension and her earnings. Dr. Johnson was brutal when the conviction was forced upon him that he would no longer have an opportunity of insulting a lady who had treated him with incredible kindness, or the guests whom he met at her table. Upon one of the last occasions of his dining at Mrs. Thrale's house at Streatham, a gentleman present—an inoffensive Quaker—ventured to make a remark respecting the accuracy with which the red-hot cannon-balls were fired at the Siege of Gibraltar. Johnson listened for some time, and then with a cold sneer said, “I would advise you, sir, never to relate this story again. You really can scarce imagine how very poor a figure you make in the telling of it.” Later on he took credit to himself for not quarrelling with his victim when the latter chose to talk to his brother rather than to the man who had insulted him. Yes, it can quite easily be understood that Johnson should look on the marriage as a sad mésalliance, and possibly it is fair to assume from the letter which he wrote to the lady that he felt hurt when he heard that it was to take place.
Mrs. Thrale wrote to tell him that she meant to marry Piozzi, and received the following reply:
“Madam,—If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do no further mischief!”
Possibly the lady may have gathered from the hint or two conveyed to her, with Boswellian delicacy, in this letter, that Johnson was displeased with her. At any rate, she replied, declining to continue the correspondence.
In her letter she summed up the situation exactly as a reasonable person, acquainted with all the facts, and knowing something of the first husband, would do.
“The birth of my second husband is not meaner than that of my first,” she wrote; “his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner; and his superiority in what he professes acknowledged by all mankind. It is want of fortune, then, that is ignominious; the character of the man I have chosen has no other claim to such an epithet. The religion to which he has always been a zealous adherent, will, I hope, teach him to forgive insults he has not deserved; mine will, I hope, enable [me] to bear them at once with dignity and patience. To hear that I have forfeited my fame is indeed the greatest insult I ever yet received. My fame is as unsullied as snow, or I should think it unworthy of him who must henceforth protect it.”
This brought the surly burly mass of offended dignity to his proper level; but still he would not offer the lady who had been his benefactress for twenty years an apology for his brutality. He had the presumption to offer his advice instead—advice and the story (highly appropriate from his point of view) of Mary Queen of Scots and the Archbishop of St. Andrews. He advised her to remain in England—he would not relinquish his room in her house and his place at her table without a struggle—as her rank would be higher in England than in Italy, and her fortune would be under her own eye. The latter suggestion was a delicate insult to Piozzi.
Mrs. Piozzi, as she then became, showed that she esteemed this piece of presumption, under the guise of advice, at its true value. Immediately after her marriage she went abroad with her husband, though eventually she settled with him in England.
Now, most modern readers will, we think, when they have become acquainted with the whole story of Mrs. Thrale's life, arrive at the conclusion that it was her first marriage that was the mésalliance, not her second.
Henry Thrale was a man of humble origin—a fact that revealed itself almost daily in his life—and he was incapable of loving any one except himself. He certainly never made a pretence of devotion to his wife, and it is equally certain that, although she did more for him than any other woman would have done, she never loved him. It might be going too far, considering the diversity of temperament existing among womankind, to assert that he was incapable of being loved by any woman; but beyond a doubt he was not a lovable man. He was a stiff, dignified, morose, uncongenial man, and he was a Member of Parliament into the bargain. What could a pretty, lively, brilliant girl of good family see in such a man as Thrale to make her love him? She never did love him—at times she must have detested him. But she married him, and it was a lucky day for him that she did so. Twice she saved him from bankruptcy, and three times she induced his constituents, who thoroughly hated him, to return him to Parliament as their representative. He never did anything in Parliament, and he did little out of it that was worth remembering. It is customary to make large allowances for a man of business who finds that his wealth and a charming wife serve as a passport into what is called society, though latterly such men do not stand in need of such a favour being shown to them. But if a man betrays his ignorance of certain social usages—not necessarily refinements—his friends excuse him on the ground that he is a first-rate business man. Thrale, however, was unworthy of such a title. He inherited a great scientific business, but he showed himself so incapable of appreciating the methods by which it had been built up, that he brought himself within a week or two of absolute ruin by listening to a clumsy adventurer who advocated the adoption of a system of adulteration of his beer that even a hundred and fifty years ago would have brought him within sight of a criminal prosecution.
His literary wife, by her clever management, aided by the money of her mother and of sundry of her own, not her husband's, friends, succeeded in staving off the threatened disaster. But the pig-headed man did not accept the lesson which one might imagine he would have learned. Seeing the success that crowned other enterprises of the same character as his own, he endeavoured to emulate this success, not by the legitimate way of increasing his customers, but by the idiotic plan of over-production. He had an idea that in the multiplying of the article which he had to sell he was increasing his business. Once again he was helped from the verge of ruin by his literary wife.
He must have been a dreadful trial to her, and to a far-seeing manager whom he had—a man named Perkins. Of course it was inevitable that the force of character possessed by this Mr. Perkins must eventually prevail against the dignified incompetence of the proprietor. The inevitable happened, and the name of Perkins has for more than a hundred years been bracketed with Barclay as a going concern, while the name of Thrale has vanished for ever from “the Borough.”
It was this Mr. Perkins who, when the brewery was within five minutes of absolute disaster, displayed the tactics of a great general in the face of an implacable enemy, and saved the property. As a reward for his services his master authorised the presentation to him of the sum of a hundred pounds. His master's wife, however, being a more generous assessor of the value of the man's ability, ventured to present double the sum, together with a silver tea-service for Mrs. Perkins; but she did so in fear and trembling, failing to summon up sufficient courage to acquaint her husband with her extravagance until further concealment was impossible. She was so overjoyed at his sanctioning the increase that she at once wrote to her friends acquainting them with this evidence of his generosity.
This episode was certainly the most stirring in the history of Thrale's brewery. The Gordon rioters had been terrorising London for several days, burning houses in every direction, as well as Newgate and another prison, and looting street after street. They had already overthrown one brewery, and they found the incident so fascinating that they marched across the bridge to the Southwark concern, raising the cry that Thrale was a Papist. The Thrales were at this time sojourning at Bath, and were in an agony of suspense regarding their property. They had left Dr. Johnson comfortably ensconced at their Streatham house in order that they might learn in dignified language how things were going on.
This is Johnson's thrilling account of the incident:
“What has happened to your house you all know. The harm is only a few butts of beer, and I think you may be sure that the danger is over. Pray tell Mr. Thrale that I live here, and have no fruit, and if he does not interpose am not likely to have much; but I think he might as well give me a little as give all to the gardener.”
There was a double catastrophe threatening, it would appear: the burning of the brewery and the shortage in the supply of Dr. Johnson's peaches.
This is how Mrs. Thrale describes the situation:
“Nothing but the astonishing presence of mind shewed by Perkins in amusing the mob, with meat and drink and huzzas, till Sir Philip Jennings Clerke could get the troops, and pack up the counting-house, bills, bonds etc. and carry them, which he did, to Chelsea College for safety, could have saved us from actual undoing. The villains had broke in, and our brew-house would have blazed in ten minutes, when a property of £150,000 would have been utterly lost, and its once flourishing possessors quite undone.”
It seems almost incredible that Johnson, living at Streatham as the guardian of Mr. Thrale's interests, should require the lady to write to him, begging him to thank Perkins for his heroism. But so it was.
“Perkins has behaved like an Emperor,” she wrote, “and it is my earnest wish and desire—command, if you please to call it so—that you will go over to the brew-house and express your sense of his good behaviour.”
Mrs. Thrale was unreasonable. How could Johnson be expected to take any action when he was deprived of his peaches?
It will strike a good many modern readers of the account of this and other transactions that if it was Perkins who saved the brewery for Mr. Thrale, it was Mrs. Thrale who saved Perkins for the brewery. Possibly it was her prompt gift of the silver plate to Mrs. Perkins that induced this splendid manager to pocket the insult of the beggarly two hundred guineas given to him by Mrs. Thrale—though this was double the amount authorised by the “master.” Thrale never sufficiently valued the services of Perkins. If he had had any gratitude in his composition he would never have made Johnson one of his executors. What a trial it must have been to the competent man of business to see Johnson lumbering about the place with a pen behind his ear and an ink-pot suspended from a button of his coat, getting in the way of everybody, and yet feeling himself quite equal to any business emergency that might crop up. He felt himself equal to anything—even to improve upon the auctioneer's style in appraising the value of the whole concern. “Beyond the dreams of avarice” remains as the sole classic phrase born beneath the shadow of a brew-house.
In the matter of the premium to Perkins, Thrale should have felt that he had a treasure in his wife, to say nothing of all that she had done for him upon another occasion, involving a terrible sacrifice. A quarrel had broken out among the clerks at the brewery, which even the generalship of Perkins was unable to mollify. Had Mrs. Thrale been an ordinary woman she would not have jeopardised her own life and the life of her child—her thirteenth—in her husband's interests. As it was, however, she felt that the duty was imposed on her to settle the difficulties in the counting-house, and she did so; but only after many sleepless nights and the sacrifice of her child. “The men were reconciled,” she wrote, “and my danger accelerated their reconcilement.”
If Henry Thrale was deficient in the best characteristics of a business man, his qualifications to shine socially can scarcely be regarded as abundant. There were stories of his having been a gay dog in his youth, but assuredly he and gaiety had long been strangers when he married his wife, and upon no occasion afterwards could he be so described even by the most indulgent of his friends; so that one rather inclines to the belief that the dull dog must have been a dull puppy. We know what his eldest daughter was, and we are convinced that the nature of that priggish, dignified, and eminently disagreeable young lady was inherited from her father. In Miss Thrale as a girl one feels that one is looking at Henry Thrale as a boy. The only story that survives of those mythical gay days with which he was accredited is that relating to the arrival of the Gunnings to take London by storm. It was said that he and Murphy thought to make these exquisite creatures the laughing-stock of the town by introducing them to a vulgar hanger-on of Murphy, in the character of a wealthy man of title and distinction. Possibly the two young men were put up to play this disgraceful prank upon the Gunnings by some jealous female associate; but however this may be, it not only failed most ignominiously, it recoiled upon the jesters themselves, for Mrs. Gunning, herself the sister of a nobleman, and destined to become the mother-in-law of two dukes and the grandmother of two more—the parent of a peeress in her own right, and an uncommonly shrewd Irishwoman into the bargain—“smoaked,” as the slang of the period had it, the trick, and her footman bundled the trio into the street.
The story may be true; but as both the Gunning girls were married in 1752, and Thrale did not meet Hester Lynch Salusbury till 1763, it was an old story then, and it was not remembered against him except by the Duchess of Hamilton. If it represents the standard of his adolescent wildness, we cannot but think that his youth was less meteoric than his wife believed it to be. At any rate, we do not know much about his early life, but we do know a great deal about his latter years, and it is impossible to believe that his nature underwent a radical change within a year or two of his marriage.
He became the host of a large number of the most notable people of that brilliant period at which he lived, and we perceive from the copious accounts that survive of the Streatham gatherings that he was greatly respected by all his visitors. He never said anything that was worth recording, and he never did anything memorable beyond stopping Johnson when the latter was becoming more than usually offensive to his fellow-guests. He had no ear for music any more than Johnson had, and it does not appear that he cared any more for painting, although he became a splendid patron of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he commissioned to paint several portraits of his distinguished friends for the decoration of the library at Streatham. To his munificence in this respect the world owes its finest portraits of Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick, the painter himself, and Mrs. Thrale.
The debt which we feel we owe to Thrale on this account is, however, somewhat discounted when we learn that this enthusiastic patron of art never paid the painter for his work. He left the pictures and the obligation to pay for them as a legacy to his widow—and to pay for them at more than the current rate for each into the bargain. Sir Joshua Reynolds was as good a man of business as Thrale was an indifferent one. At the time of his painting the portraits his price for a three-quarter-length picture was £35, but in the course of a year or two he felt it necessary to charge £50 for the same size, and this was the price which the unfortunate widow had to pay for her husband's pose as the munificent patron of the Arts.
Men of the stamp of Thrale usually have no vices.
They are highly respected. If they had a vice or two they would be beloved. He had a solitary failing, but it did not win for him the affection of any one: it was gluttony. For years of his life he gave himself up to the coarsest form of indulgence. He was not a gourmet: he did not aim at the refinements of the table or at those daintinesses of cuisine which in the days of intemperate eaters and drinkers proved so fatally fascinating to men of many virtues; no, his was the vice of the trough. He ate for the sake of eating, unmindful of the nature of the dish so long as it was plentiful enough to keep him employed for an hour or two.
The dinner-table of the famous Streatham Park must have been a spectacle for some of the philosophers who sat round it. We know what was the food that Johnson's soul loved, and we know how he was accustomed to partake of it. He rioted in pork, and in veal baked with raisins, and when he sat down to some such dainty he fed like a wild animal. He used his fingers as though they were claws, tearing the flesh from the bone in his teeth, and swallowing it not wholly without sound. It is not surprising to learn that his exertions caused the veins in his forehead to swell and the beads of perspiration to drop from his scholarly brow, nor can any one who has survived this account of his muscular feat at the dinner-table reasonably be amazed to hear that when so engaged, he devoted himself to the work before him to the exclusion of every other interest in life. He was oblivious of anything that was going on around him. He was deaf to any remark made by a neighbour, and for himself articulation was suspended. Doubtless the feeble folk on whom he had been trampling in the drawing-room felt that his peculiarities of feeding, though revolting to the squeamish, were not without a bright side. They had a chance of making a remark at such intervals without being gored—“gored,” it will be remembered, was the word employed by Boswell in playful allusion to the effect of his argumentative powers.
Thanks to the careful habits of some of the guests at this famous house we know what fare was placed before the Gargantuan geniuses at one of these dinners. Here is the carte du jour, “sufficient for twelve,” as the cookery book says:
“First course, soups at head and foot, removed by fish and a saddle of mutton; second course, a fowl they call galena at head and a capon larger than some of our Irish turkeys at foot; third course, four different sorts of ices, pine-apple, grape, raspberry and a fourth; in each remove there were fourteen dishes.” The world is indebted to an Irish clergyman for these details. It will be seen that they did not include much that could be sneered at as bordering on the kickshaw. All was good solid English fare—just the sort to make the veins in a gormandiser's forehead to swell and to induce the lethargy from which Thrale suffered. He usually fell asleep after dinner; one day he failed to awake, and he has not awakened since.
Of course Johnson, being invariably in delicate health, was compelled to put himself on an invalid's diet when at home. He gives us a sample of a diner maigre at Bolt Court. Feeling extremely ill, he wrote to Mrs. Thrale that he could only take for dinner “skate, pudding, goose, and green asparagus, and could have eaten more but was prudent.” He adds, “Pray for me, dear Madam,”—by no means an unnecessary injunction, some people will think, when they become aware of the details of the meal of an invalid within a year or two of seventy.
It was after one of the Streatham dinners that Mrs. Thrale ventured to say a word or two in favour of Garrick's talent for light gay poetry, and as a specimen repeated his song in Florizel and Perdita, and dwelt with peculiar pleasure on this line:
I'd smile with the simple and dine with the poor.
This is Boswell's account of the matter, and he adds that Johnson cried, “Nay, my dear lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with the simple! What folly is that? And who would feed with the poor that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise and feed with the rich!”
Quite so; beyond a doubt Johnson spoke from the bottom of his heart—nay, from a deeper depth still.
Boswell was amazed to find that Garrick's “sensibility” as a writer was irritated when he related the story to him, and in Mrs. Thrale's copy of Johnson she made a note—“How odd to go and tell the man!”
It was not at all odd that Boswell, being a professional tale-bearer and mischief-maker, should tell the man; but it is odd that Garrick should be irritated, the fact being that the sally was directed against a line which he did not write. What Garrick did write was something very different. The verse, which was misquoted, runs thus:
That giant Ambition we never can dread;
Our roofs are too low for so lofty a head;
Content and sweet Cheerfulness open our door,
They smile with the simple and feed with the poor.
Such a muddle as was made of the whole thing can only be attributed to the solidity of the Streatham fare.
It was inevitable that Thrale could not continue over-eating himself with impunity. He was warned more than once by his doctors that he was killing himself, and yet when he had his first attack every one was shocked. He recovered temporarily, and all his friends implored him to cultivate moderation at the dinner-table. A touch of humour is to be found among the details of the sordid story, in his wife's begging Johnson—Johnson of the swollen forehead and the tokens of his submission to the primeval curse in the eating of his bread—to try to reason the unhappy man out of his dreadful vice. After wiping from the front of his coat the remains of the eighth peach which he had eaten before breakfast, or the dregs of his nineteenth cup of tea from his waistcoat, Johnson may have felt equal to the duty. He certainly remonstrated with Thrale. It was all to no purpose, however; he had a second attack of apoplexy in the spring of 1780, and we hear that he was copiously “blooded.” He recovered and went to Bath to recruit. It was during this visit to Bath that the brewery was attacked by the Gordon rioters. On returning to London he failed to induce his constituents to remain faithful to him, and he continued eating voraciously for another year. He began a week of gorging on April 1st, 1781. His wife implored him to be more moderate, and Johnson said very wisely, “Sir, after the denunciation of your physicians this morning, such eating is little better than suicide.” It was all to no purpose. He survived the gorge of Sunday and Monday, but that of Tuesday was too much for him. He was found by his daughter on the floor in a fit of apoplexy, and died the next morning.
Such was the man whose memory was outraged by the marriage of his widow with Piozzi, an Italian musician, whose ability was so highly appreciated that his earnings, even when he had lost his voice, amounted to £1200 a year, a sum equal to close upon £2500 of our money. And yet Johnson had the effrontery to suggest in that letter of his to Mrs. Thrale, which we have quoted, that she would do well to live in England, so that her money might be under her own eye!
The truth is that Mrs. Thrale was in embarrassed circumstances when she married Signor Piozzi. Her worthy husband left her an annuity of £2000, which was to be reduced by £800 in the event of her marrying again; and also £500 for her immediate expenses. Johnson wrote to her, making her acquainted with this fact, in order, it would seem, to allay any unworthy suspicion which she might entertain as to the extent of her husband's generosity. But his last will and testament cannot have wholly dispersed the doubt into which her experience of Mr. Thrale may have led her. For a man who had been making from £16,000 to £20,000 a year to leave his wife only £2000 a year, with a possibility of its being reduced to £1200, would not strike any one as being generous to a point of recklessness. When, however, it is remembered that Thrale's wife plucked him and his business from the verge of bankruptcy more than once, that she bore him fourteen children, and that she lived with him for eighteen years, all question as to the generosity of his bequest to her vanishes. But when, in addition, it is remembered that the lady's fortune at her marriage to Thrale amounted to £10,000, all of which he pocketed, and that later on she brought him another £500 a year, that it was her mother's money, added to the sum which she herself collected personally, which saved the brewery from collapse—once again at the sacrifice of her infant—all question even of common fairness disappears, and the meanness of the man stands revealed.
It was through the exertions and by the business capacity of his widow that the brewery was sold for £135,000. She was the only one of the trustees who knew anything definite about the value of the property, and had she not been on the spot, that astute Mr. Perkins could have so worked the concern that he might have been able to buy it in a year or two for the value of the building materials. And yet when she became involved in a lawsuit that involved the paying of £7000, she had difficulty in persuading her daughters' trustees to advance her the money, although the security of the mortgage which she offered for the accommodation would have satisfied any bankers. A wretch named Crutchley, who was one of this precious band of incompetents, on the completion of the deed bade her thank her daughters for keeping her out of gaol. It is not recorded that the lady replied, though she certainly might have done so, and with truth on her side, that if her daughters had kept her out of a gaol she had kept her daughters out of a workhouse. She would have done much better to have gone to her friends the Barclays, whose bank had a hundred and fifty years ago as high a reputation for probity combined with liberality as the same concern enjoys to-day.
Enough of the business side of Mrs. Thrale's second marriage has been revealed to make it plain that Piozzi was not influenced by any mercenary motives in the transaction. On the contrary, it was he who came to her assistance when she was in an extremity, and by the prompt loan of £1000 extricated her from her embarrassment, and left the next day for Italy, without having any hope of marrying her.
Johnson's verdict on Piozzi, communicated to Miss Seward, was that he was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession. Unfortunately for this musical enthusiast and devotee to beauty, Miss Seward met Piozzi on his return from Italy with his wife. (His excellent control of her money had resulted in every penny of the mortgage being paid, and of the lodgment of £1500 to their credit in the bank). And Miss Seward, writing from Lichfield—more of the irony of Fate—in 1787, affirmed that the great Lichfield man “did not tell me the truth when he asserted that Piozzi was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession. M. Piozzi is a handsome man in middle life, with gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his profession. Though he has not a powerful or fine-toned voice, he sings with transcending grace and expression. I was charmed with his perfect expression on his instrument. Surely the finest sensibilities must vibrate through his frame, since they breathe so sweetly through his song.” From this verdict no person who was acquainted with Signor Piozzi differed. Mrs. Thrale's marriage with Piozzi was as fortunate for her as her first marriage was for Thrale.
A TRAGEDY IN THE HAYMARKET
ABOUT half-past nine o'clock on the night of October 6th, 1769, a tall, middle-aged gentleman named Joseph Baretti was walking up the Hay-market. The street was probably as well lighted as any other in London, and this is equivalent to saying that a foot passenger, by keeping close to the windows of the shops and taking cross bearings of the economically distributed oil lamps hung out at the corners of the many lanes, might be able to avoid the deep channel of filth that slunk along the margin of cobble stones. But just at this time the Haymarket must have been especially well illuminated, for the Opera House was in the act of discharging its audience, and quite a number of these fashionable folk went home in their chairs, with link boys walking by the side of the burly Irish chairmen, showing a flaring flame which left behind it a long trail of suffocating smoke, and spluttered resin and bitumen into the faces and upon the garments of all who were walking within range of the illuminant. Then there was the little theatre higher up the street, and its lamps were not yet extinguished; so that Mr. Baretti may have felt that on the whole he was fortunate in the hour he had chosen for his stroll to the coffee-house where he meant to sup. He may have thought that he had a chance of coming across his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds leaving one of the playhouses, and of being invited by that hospitable gentleman to his house in Leicester Fields; or his still more intimate friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, who would certainly insist on carrying him off to the “Mitre,” unless the great man were accompanied by that little Scotch person, James Boswell, who usually wanted him all to himself, after he had given people a chance of seeing him in the company of his distinguished friend, and envying him his position of intimacy—the same position of intimacy that exists between a Duke and his doormat. Mr. Baretti was too short-sighted to have any chance of recognising Sir Joshua Reynolds unless he chanced to be standing under the lamp in the portico of the playhouse, but he felt that he would have no trouble in recognising Dr. Johnson. The latter had characteristics that appealed to other senses than the sense of seeing, and made the act of recognition easy enough to his intimates.
Mr. Baretti, however, passed along the dispersing crowd, and was soon in the dim regions of Panton Street, where pedestrians were few. But before he had turned down this street he found his way barred by a couple of half-drunken women. His infirmity of sight prevented his being aware of their presence until he was almost in the arms of one of them, and the very second that he made his sudden stop she made a change in the details of the accident that seemed imminent and threw herself into his arms with a yell.
The good man was staggered for a moment, but, recovering himself, he flung her off with an expressive word or two in the Italian tongue. She went limply back and, being adroitly avoided by her companion, gave a circular stagger or two and fell into the gutter with a screech.
Baretti was hurrying on when out of the darkness of Panton Street a big man sprang, followed quickly by two others. The first seized him by the right arm with the oath of a bully, the others tried to trip him up, shouting that he had killed a lady. Baretti was a powerful man and decidedly tough. He struck at the fellow who had closed with him, and used his feet against the attack of the others with considerable effect. He managed to free his arm, but before he could draw his sword he was pulled backward and would have fallen upon his head if he had not clutched the coat of the man from whom he had freed himself. There was a pause of a few seconds, filled up by the wild street yell of the women. The most aggressive of the three men leapt upon the unfortunate Baretti, but before their bodies met, gave a guttural shriek, then a groan. He staggered past, his fingers tearing like talons at his ribs; he whirled twice round and, gasping, fell on his knees, motionless only for a few seconds; his hands dropped limply from his side, and he pitched forward on his head into the gutter.
Baretti was standing, awaiting a further attack, with a knife in his hand, when he was seized by some of the crowd. He offered no resistance. He seemed to be so amazed at finding himself alive as to be incapable of taking any further action.
“He has killed the man—stabbed him with a dagger to the very heart!” was the cry that came from those of the crowd who were kneeling beside the wretch in the gutter.
“And a woman—he had slain a woman at the outset. Hold him fast. None of us are safe this night. Have a care for the dagger, friends!”
A sufficiency of advice was given by the excited onlookers to the men who had encircled Baretti—one of them was clinging to him with his arms clasped around his body—until two of the Haymarket watch hurried up, striking right and left with their staves after the wholesome manner of the period, and so making a way for their approach through the crowd.
“'Tis more than a street brawl—a man has been slain—some say a woman also,” a shopkeeper explained to them, having run bareheaded out of his shop; his apprentice had just put up the last of the shutters.
They had Baretti by the collar in a second, cautiously disarming him, holding the weapon up to the nearest lamp. The blade was still wet with blood.
“A swinging matter this,” one of them remarked. “I can swear to the blood. No dagger, but a knife. What man walks the streets at night with a naked knife unless slaughter is his intent?”
“Friends, I was attacked by three bullies, and I defended myself—that is all,” said Baretti. He spoke English perfectly.
“You will need to tell that to Sir John in the morning,” said one of the watchmen. “You are apprehended in the King's name. Where is the poor victim?”
“There must be some of the crowd who saw how I was attacked,” said Baretti. “They will testify that I acted in self-defence. Sirs, hear me make an appeal to you. Out of your sense of justice—you will not see an innocent man apprehended.”
“The knife—who carries a bare knife in the streets unless with intent?” said a man.
“'Twas my fruit-knife. I never go abroad without it. I eat my fruit like a Christian, not like a pig or an Englishman,” was the defence offered by Baretti, who had now quite lost his temper and was speaking with his accustomed bitterness. He usually sought to pass as an Englishman, but he was now being arrested by the minions of the law as it was in England.
“Hear him! A pig of an Englishman. Those were his words! A foreign hound. Frenchie, I'll be bound.”
“A spy—most like a Papist. He has the hanging brow of a born Papist.”
“He'll hang like a dog at Tyburn—he may be sure o' that.”
“'Tis the mercy o' Heaven that the rascal was caught red-handed! Sirs, this may be the beginning of a dreadful massacring plot against the lives of honest and peaceful people.”
The comments of a crowd of the period upon such an incident as the stabbing of an Englishman by a foreigner in the streets of London can easily be imagined.
Even when Baretti was put into a hackney coach and driven off to Bow Street the crowd doubtless remained talking in groups of the menace to English freedom and true religion by the arrival of pestilent foreigners, every man of them carrying a knife. It would be a sad day for England when Jesuitical fruit-knives took the place of good wholesome British bludgeons in the settlement of the ordinary differences incidental to a Protestant people.
It is certain that this was one of the comments of the disintegrating crowd, and it is equally certain that Baretti commented pretty freely to his custodians in the hackney coach upon the place occupied in the comity of nations of that State, the social conditions of whose metropolis made possible so gross a scandal as the arrest of a gentleman and a scholar, solely by reason of his success in snatching his life out of the talons of a ruffian and a bully.
Mr. Baretti was a gentleman and a scholar whose name appears pretty frequently in the annals of the eighteenth century, but seldom with any great credit to himself. As a matter of fact, this dramatic episode of the stabbing of the man in the Haymarket is the happiest with which his name is associated. He made his most creditable appearance in the chronicles of the period as the chief actor in this sordid drama. He cuts a very poor figure indeed upon every other occasion when he appears in the pages of his contemporaries, though they all meant to be kind to him.
He never could bear people to be kind to him, and certainly, so far as he himself was concerned, it cannot be said that any blame attaches to him for the persistence of his friends in this direction. He did all that mortal man could do to discourage them, and if after the lapse of a year or two he was still treated by some with cordiality or respect, assuredly it was not owing to his display of any qualities that justified their maintenance of such an attitude.
Mr. Baretti was an eminently detestable scholar of many parts. He was as detestable as he was learned—perhaps even more so. Learned men are not invariably horrid, unless they are men of genius as well, and this rarely happens.
Baretti had no such excuse, though it must be acknowledged that his capacity for being disagreeable almost amounted to genius. Such a character as his is now and again met with in daily life. A man who feels himself to be, in point of scholarly attainment, far above the majority of men, and who sees inferiority occupying a place of distinction while he remains neglected and, to his thinking, unappreciated, is not an uncommon figure in learned or artistic circles. Baretti was a disappointed man, and he showed himself to be such. He had a grievance against the world for being constituted as it is. He had a grievance against society. He had a grievance against his friends who got on in the world. But the only people against whom he was really malevolent were those who were signally and unaccountably kind to him. He accepted their kindness, and then turned and rent them.
Dr. Johnson met him when they were both working for the booksellers, and when the great dictionary scheme was floated his co-operation was welcomed. Johnson's success in life was largely due to his faculty for discovering people who could be useful to him. It can easily be believed that, knowing something of the scholarship of Baretti, he should be delighted to avail himself of his help. Baretti had an intimate knowledge of several languages and their literature; as a philologist he was probably far superior to Johnson; and possibly Johnson knew this, though he was doubtless too wise ever to acknowledge so much openly. We do not hear that the relations between the two ever became strained while the great work was in course of progress. Shortly after it was completed Baretti returned to his native Italy, and began to reproach Johnson for not writing to him more frequently. We have several examples of the cheerfulness with which Johnson set about exculpating himself from such reproaches. The letters which he wrote to him at Italy are among the most natural that ever came from his pen. They are models of the gossipy style which Johnson could assume without once deviating from that dignity which so frequently became ponderous, suggesting the dignity of the elephant rather than that of the lion. Walpole was a master of the art of being gossipy without being dignified. But Johnson's style was not flexible. We have not Baretti's letters to Johnson, but the references made by the latter to some matters communicated to him by his correspondent let us know something of how Baretti was getting on in the land of his birth. He seems to have set his heart upon obtaining some appointment in Italy, and his aspirations included marriage. He was disappointed in both directions; and it would be too much to expect that his temper was improved by these rebuffs.
It may well be believed that he quarrelled his way through Italy. “I have lately seen Mr. Stratico, Professor of Padua, who has told me of your quarrel with an abbot of the Celestine Order, but had not the particulars very ready in his memory,” Johnson wrote to him at Milan. Any one who could quarrel with an abbot of the Celestine Order would, we fancy, be capable de tout, like the prophet Habakkuk, according to the witty Frenchman. One is not disposed to be hard upon Professor Stratico for his shortness of memory in regard to this particular quarrel; the strain of remembering the details of all the quarrels of Mr. Baretti would be too great for any man.
Of course, Dr. Johnson gave him some excellent advice. It seems that poor Baretti had been at first so well received on his return to Italy that he became sanguine of success in all his enterprises, and when they miscarried he wrote very bitterly to Johnson, who replied as follows:
“I am sorry for your disappointment, with which you seem more touched than I should expect a man of your resolution and experience to have been, did I not know that general truths are seldom applied to particular occasions; and that the fallacy of our selflove extends itself as wide as our interests or affections. Every man believes that mistresses are unfaithful and patrons capricious; but he excepts his own mistress and his own patron. We have all learned that greatness is negligent and contemptuous, and that in Courts life is often languished away in ungratified expectation; but he that approaches greatness or glitters in a Court, imagines that destiny has at last exempted him from the common lot.”
It is doubtful if this excellent philosophy made the person to whom it was addressed more amiable to his immediate entourage; nor is it likely that he was soothed by the assurance that his “patron's weakness or insensibility will finally do you little hurt, if he is not assisted by your own passions.”
“Of your love,” continued Johnson, “I know not the propriety; we can estimate the power, but in love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events.” He then hastens to add that “love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look, and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and success in amusement.”
The pleasant little cynical bark in the phrase “those that are to suffer the evils together,” as if it referred to love and marriage, is, Malone thinks, not Johnson's, but Baretti's. It is suggested that Johnson really wrote “those that are to suffer the evils of life together,” and that Baretti in transcribing the letter for Boswell, purposely omitted the words “of life.” It would be quite like Baretti to do this; for he would thereby work off part of his spite against Johnson for having given him the advice, and he would have had his own sneer against “love and marriage,” the fons et origo of his disappointment.
But of Dr. Johnson's esteem for the attainments of Baretti there can be no doubt. He thought that the book on Italy which he published on his return to England was very entertaining, adding: “Sir, I know no man who carries his head higher in conversation than Baretti. There are strong powers in his mind. He has not, indeed, many hooks; but with what hooks he has he grapples very forcibly.”
It may seem rather strange after this that Baretti was never admitted to the membership of the celebrated club. He was intimate with nearly all the original members, but the truth remained that he was not what Johnson called a clubbable man: he had too many hooks, not too few.
Such was the man who was brought before Sir John Fielding, the magistrate at Bow Street, on the morning after the tragedy, charged with murder; and then it was that he found the value of the friendships which he had formed in England. The first person to hasten to his side in his extremity was Oliver Goldsmith, the man whom he had so frequently made the object of his sarcasm, whose peculiarities he had mimicked, not in the playful manner of Garrick or Foote, but in his own spiteful style, with the grim humour of the disappointed man. Goldsmith it was who opened his purse for him and got a coach for him when he was remanded until the next day, riding by his side to the place of his incarceration. Goldsmith was by his side when the question of bail was discussed before Lord Mansfield. For some reason which does not require any particular explanation, it was not thought that Goldsmith as a bailsman would appeal irresistibly to the authorities, but the names of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Edmund Burke, Mr. David Garrick, and Mr. H. Fitzherbert were submitted to Lord Mansfield, and immediately accepted. An amusing anecdote was current regarding the few days of Baretti's incarceration. One morning he was visited by a teacher of languages, who begged a trifling favour of him. This was merely a letter of recommendation to Baretti's pupils, so that the applicant might have a chance of taking them over “when you are hanged, sir.” The fact that this sympathetic visitor was allowed to depart without molestation makes people doubt whether Baretti was so bad-tempered after all. He did not assault the man. “You rascal!” he cried. “If I were not in my own room, I would kick you downstairs directly.”
The trial was fixed for October 20th at the Old Bailey, and a few days before this date a number of the prisoner's friends met together to consult as to the line which should be taken for his defence. It seems that they were not all agreed on some points; this was only to be expected, considering what an array of wisdom was brought together upon the occasion of these consultations, and considering also the course which was adopted by Dr. Johnson, who thought that the interests of the prisoner would be advanced by getting up an academical discussion with Burke. Johnson and Burke were notorious rivals in conversation in those days when conversation was regarded as an art, and men and women seemed to have plenty of leisure to talk together for the sake of talking, and to argue together for the sake of argument, and to be rude to one another for the sake of wit. Boswell was for ever extolling Johnson at the expense of Burke; and indeed, so far as one can gather from his pages, Johnson was the ruder man.
The example that Boswell gives of his own readiness in making Goldsmith “shut up” when he questioned Johnson's superiority to Burke in discussion is one of the best instances of the little Scotsman's incapacity to perceive the drift of an argument. “Is he like Burke who winds into a subject like a serpent?” asked Goldsmith.
“But” (said I) “Dr. Johnson is the Hercules that strangled serpents in his cradle.”
This repartee which Boswell gleefully records is about equal to the reply made by one of the poets who was appealed to in the “Bab Ballads” to say if he wrote “the lovely cracker mottoes my Elvira pulls at supper.” It will be remembered that the poet whose name rhymes with “supper” replied:
“'A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit,'
Which” (the earnest inquirer said) “I felt was very wise,
but I didn't understand it.”
It was in regard to this consultation as to the best defence to be made out for Baretti that Johnson admitted to have opposed Burke simply for the sake of showing the rest of the company that he could get the better of Burke in an argument. “Burke and I,” he said, “should have been of one opinion if we had had no audience.” Such a confession! There was the life of his friend Baretti trembling in the balance, and yet Johnson, solely for the sake of “showing off,” opposed the wisdom and ingenuity Burke exercised to save from the gallows a man whom Johnson professed to admire!
But if we are to believe Boswell, Johnson cared very little whether his friend was hanged or not. As for Boswell himself, he always detested Baretti, and is reported to have expressed the earnest hope that the man would be hanged. However, the “consultations” went merrily on, and doubtless contributed in some measure to a satisfactory solution of the vexed question as to whether Johnson or Burke was the more brilliant talker. They formed a tolerably valid excuse for the uncorking of several bottles, and perhaps these friends of Baretti felt that even though he should die, yet the exchange of wit in the course of these happy evenings would live for ever in the memory of those present, so that after all, let the worst come to the worst, Baretti should have little cause for complaint.
It is reported that the prisoner, upon the occasion of his receiving a visit from Johnson and Burke, cried: “What need a man fear who holds two such hands?” It may here be mentioned, however, that although it was asserted that Johnson and Murphy were responsible for the line of defence adopted at the trial, yet in after years Baretti was most indignant that it should be suggested that credit should be given to any one but himself for his defence; and he ridiculed the notion that Johnson or Burke or Murphy or even Boswell—himself an aspirant to the profession of law in which he subsequently displayed a conspicuous lack of distinction—had anything to do with the instruction either of solicitors or barristers on his behalf.
At any rate, the “consultations” came to an end, and the friends of the accused awaited the trial with exemplary patience. Mr. Boswell seems suddenly to have become the most sympathetic of the friends; for three days before the event he took a journey to Tyburn to witness the hanging of several men at that place, and though it is known that the spectacle of a hanging never lost its charm for him, yet it is generous to assume that upon this occasion he went to Tyburn in order to qualify himself more fully for sympathising with Baretti, should the defence assigned to him break down.
Another ardent sympathiser was Mr. Thomas Davies the bookseller, a gentleman whose chief distinction in the eyes of his contemporaries consisted—if we are to believe one of the wittiest of his associates—in the fact that he had an exceedingly pretty wife; but whose claim to the gratitude of coming generations lies in the circumstance of his having introduced Boswell to Johnson. Tom Davies was terribly cut up at the thought of the possibility of Baretti's being sentenced to be hanged. Boswell, on the day before the trial, after telling Johnson how he had witnessed the executions at Tyburn, and expressing his surprise that none of the wretches seemed to think anything of the matter, mentioned that Foote, the actor, had shown him a letter which he had received from Tom Davies, and in which the writer affirmed that he had not had a wink of sleep owing to his anxiety in respect of “this sad affair of Baretti,” and begging Foote to suggest some way by which he could be of service to the accused, adding that should Mr. Foote be in need of anything in the pickle line, he could strongly recommend him to an industrious young man who had lately set up in that business.
Strange to say, Johnson was not impressed with this marked evidence of Mr. Davies' kind heart.
“Ay, sir, here you have a specimen of human sympathy,” he cried. “A friend hanged and a cucumber pickled! We know not whether Baretti or the pickle man has kept Davies from sleep; nor does he know himself.”
This was rather sweeping, but his dictum showed that he was rather a poor analyser of human emotion. In the minds of the people of to-day who read of Tom Davies' bad nights there is no manner of doubt whatever that the sequence of his emotions was to be attributed to his intimacy with the industrious young pickle maker. Tom had indulged rather too freely in some of the specimens of his art presented to him by the pickler, and the result was a melancholy night; and, being melancholy, he was led to think of the most melancholy incident that had recently come under his notice. When a man is full of mixed pickles he is liable to get a little mixed, and so in the morning he attributed his miserable night to his thoughts about Baretti, instead of knowing that his thoughts about Baretti were the natural result of his miserable night. If he had been acquainted with an industrious young onion merchant he might have passed the night in tears.
“As for his not sleeping,” said Dr. Johnson, “sir, Tom Davies is a very great man—Tom has been on the stage, and knows how to do those things.”
Boswell: “I have often blamed myself, sir, for not feeling for others as sensibly as many say they do.” Johnson: “Sir, don't be duped by them any more. You will find those very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling.” Mr. Boswell thought that he would do well to turn his friend from the subject under discussion, so he made the apparently harmless remark that Foote had a great deal of humour and that he had a singular talent of exhibiting character. But Johnson had on him the mood not only of “the rugged Russian bear,” but also of “the armed rhinoceros and the Hyrcan tiger.”
“Sir, it is not a talent: it is a vice; it is what others abstain from,” he growled.
“Did not he think of exhibiting you, sir?” inquired the tactful Mr. Boswell, though he knew all about Foote and Johnson long before.
“Sir, fear restrained him,” said Johnson. “He knew I would have broken his bones. I would have saved him the trouble of cutting off a leg: I would not have left him a leg to cut off.”
This brutal reference to the fact that Foote's recent accident had compelled him to have a leg amputated should surely have suggested to his inquisitor that he had probably been paying a visit to an industrious young pickle maker without Tom Davies' recommendation, or that he had partaken of too generous a helping of his favourite veal, baked with plums, and so that he would do well to leave him alone for a while. But no, Mr. Boswell was not to be denied.
“Pray, sir, is not Foote an infidel?” he inquired. But as he himself had been dining with Foote the previous day, and as he possessed no more delicacy than a polecat, he could easily have put the question to Foote himself.
But Johnson would not even give the man credit for his infidelity.
“I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel,” he said; “but if he is an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel, that is to say, he has never thought on the subject.”
In another second he was talking of Buchanan, a poet, whom he praised, and of Shakespeare, another poet, whom he condemned, winding up by saying that there were some very fine things in Dr. Young's Night Thoughts. But the most remarkable of his deliverances on this rather memorable evening had reference to Baretti's fate. After declaring that if one of his friends had just been hanged he would eat his dinner every bit as heartily as if his friend were still alive.—“Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow,” he added; “friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plum pudding the less.” Happily the accuracy of this tender-hearted scholar's prediction had no chance of being put to the test. Baretti was tried and acquitted.
Boswell gives only a few lines to an account of the trial, and fails to mention that the prisoner declined the privilege of being tried by a jury one half of whom should be foreigners. “It took place,” he said, “at the awful Sessions House, emphatically called Justice Hall,” and he affirms that “never did such a constellation of genius enlighten the Old Bailey.”
He mentions that Mr. Burke, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Beauclerk, and Dr. Johnson gave evidence, the last-named being especially impressive, speaking in a slow, deliberate, and distinct tone of voice. It seems strange that Boswell, who was (nominally) a lawyer, when he wrote his life of Johnson, should say nothing whatever respecting the line of defence adopted by the friends of the prisoner upon this interesting occasion. It might have been expected that he would dwell lovingly, as a lawyer would certainly be pardoned for doing, upon the technical points involved in the trial, even though he hated Baretti. For instance, it would be interesting to learn why it was thought that the result of the trial might mean the hanging of Baretti, when from the first it was perfectly plain that he had acted in self-defence: not merely was he protecting his purse, he had actually to fight for his life against an acknowledged ruffian of the most contemptible type. In the present day if a short-sighted man of letters—say Mr. Augustine Birrell—were to be attacked in a dark street by three notorious scoundrels and to manage to kill one of them by poking the ferrule end of an umbrella into his eye, no one—not even a Conservative Attorney-General—would fancy that a grand jury at the New Old Bailey would return a true bill against him for the act, putting aside all question of his being found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. And yet in Baretti's time swords were commonly worn, and they were by no means toy weapons. Why should poor Tom Davies have a sleepless night, owing (as he believed) to his apprehension that his friend would be hanged in a day or two? Why was it necessary to dazzle the “awful Sessions House” by such “a constellation of genius” as had never before assembled in that “Hall of Justice”?
Mr. Boswell might certainly have told us something of the actual scene in the court, when he has devoted so much space to the ridiculous dialogues between himself and Johnson, having more or less bearing upon the case. The course he adopted is like laying a dinner-table with four knives and forks and five wineglasses for every guest—in having a constellation of genii in plush behind every chair, and then serving a dinner of hashed mutton only. A great number of people believe that whatever Boswell may have been, he was invariably accurate. But in this case he does not even give a true account of the constellation of genius to which he refers. He only says that Burke, Garrick, Beauclerk, and Johnson were called as witnesses. He omits to say a word about Goldsmith, who was something of a genius; or Reynolds, who was quite a tolerable painter; or Fitzherbert, who had a wide reputation as a politician; or Dr. Halifax, whose evidence carried certainly as much weight as Johnson's. He does not even say a word respecting the evidence which Johnson and the others were called on to give on behalf of the prisoner at the bar. What is the good of telling us that the constellation of genius had never been paralleled within the precincts of the “emphatically called Justice Hall” if we are not made aware of some of the flashes of their genius when they were put into the witness-box?
The truth is that Boswell had no sense of proportion any more than a sense of the sublime and beautiful—or, for that matter, a sense of the ridiculous. He was the Needy Knife Grinder—with an occasional axe of his own—of the brilliant circle into which he crawled, holding on to Johnson's skirts and half concealing himself beneath their capacious flaps. He had constant stories suggested to him, but he failed to see their possibilities. He was a knife grinder and nothing more; but at his own trade he was admirable; he ground away patiently at his trivialities respecting the man whom he never was within leagues of understanding, and it is scarcely fair to reproach him for not throwing away his grindstone, which he knew how to use, and taking to that of a diamond cutter, which he was incapable of manipulating. But surely he might have told us something more of the actual trial of Baretti instead of giving us page after page leading up to the trial.
From other sources we learn that what all the geniuses were called on to testify to was the pacific character of Baretti, and this they were all able to do in an emphatic manner. It would seem that it was assumed that the prisoner, a short-sighted, middle-aged man of letters, was possessed of all the dangerous qualities of a bloodthirsty brigand of his own country—that he was a fierce and ungovernable desperado, who was in the habit of prowling about the purlieus of the Haymarket to do to death with a fruit-knife the peaceful citizens whom he might encounter. He was a foreigner, and he had killed an Englishman with an outlandish weapon. That seems to have been the reason there was for the apprehension, which was very general in respect of the fate of Baretti, for it was upon these points that his witnesses were most carefully examined.
Goldsmith, Reynolds, and Garrick were very useful witnesses regarding the knife. They affirmed that in carrying a fruit-knife the prisoner was in no way departing from the recognised custom of his fellow-countrymen. He, in common with them, was in the habit of eating a great deal of fruit, so that the knife was a necessity with him.
Johnson's evidence was as follows:
“I have known Mr. Baretti a long time. He is a man of literature—a very studious man—a man of great intelligence. He gets his living by study. I have no reason to think he was ever disordered with liquor in his life. A man that I have never known to be otherwise than peaceable and a man that I take to be rather timorous. As to his eyesight, he does not see me now, nor do I see him. I do not believe he would be capable of assaulting anybody in the street without great provocation.”
It cannot be denied that the reference to Baretti's imperfect sight told upon the jury, and uttered as the words were by Johnson in his dignified way, they could scarcely fail to produce a profound effect upon the court.
Baretti was acquitted, and no one could presume to refer to him for the rest of his life except as a quiet, inoffensive, frugivorous gentleman, since these were the qualities with which he was endowed by a constellation of geniuses on their oath. He was acquitted by the jury; but the judge thought it well to say a few words to him before allowing him to leave the dock, and the drift of his discourse amounted to a severe censure upon his impetuosity, and the expression of a hope that the inconvenience to which he was put upon this occasion would act as a warning to him in future.
Really one could hardly imagine that in those days, when every week Mr. Boswell had a chance of going to such an entertainment at Tyburn as he had attended forty-eight hours before the opening of the Sessions, the taking of the life of a human being was regarded with such horror. One cannot help recalling the remark made by Walpole a few years later, that, owing to the severity of the laws, England had been turned into one vast shambles; nor can one quite forget the particulars of the case which was quoted as having an intimate bearing upon this contention—the case in which a young wife whose husband had been impressed to serve in His Majesty's Fleet, and who had consequently been left without any means of support, had stolen a piece of bread to feed her starving children, and had been hanged at Tyburn for the crime.
Reading the judge's censure of Baretti, who had, in preventing a contemptible ruffian from killing him, decreased by a unit the criminality of London, the only conclusion that one can come to is that the courts of law were very jealous of their precious prerogative to kill. Looking at the matter in this light, the bombastic phrase of Boswell does not seem so ridiculous after all; the Old Bailey had certainly good reason to be regarded as the “awful Sessions House.” But we are not so fully convinced that it had any right to be referred to as emphatically the Hall of Justice. In the Georgian Pageant the common hangman played too conspicuous a part.
But the unfortunate, if impetuous, Baretti left the court a free man, and we cannot doubt that in the company of his friends who had stood by him in his hour of trial he was a good deal harder upon the judge than the judge had been upon him; and probably he was reproved in a grave and dignified manner by Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds standing by with his ear trumpet, fearful lest a single word of Johnson's wisdom should escape him. Doubtless Mr. Garrick, the moment Johnson's back was turned, gave an inimitable imitation of both Johnson and Baretti—perhaps of the judge as well, and most likely the usher of the court.
Later on, when the avaricious Reynolds had hastened back to his studio in Leicester Fields to daub on canvas the figures of some of his sitters at the extortionate price of thirty-five guineas for a three-quarter length, he and Johnson put their heads together to devise what could be done for Baretti.
For about a year Baretti resumed his old way of living, working for the booksellers and completing his volume of travel through Europe, by which it is said he made £500. It would appear, however, that all his pupils had transferred themselves to the enterprising gentleman who had appealed to him at an inopportune moment for his recommendation, or to some of his other brethren, for by the end of the year he was in needy circumstances. Meantime he had been made by Sir Joshua Reynolds Honorary Secretary for Foreign Correspondence to the Royal Academy, and then Johnson recommended him to the husband of Mrs. Thrale as tutor to her girls at Streatham. This was very kind to Baretti, but it was rather hard on the Thrales. Apparently from the first day he went to Streatham his attitude in regard to the Thrale family was one of spite and malevolence; and there can be no doubt that Johnson bitterly regretted his patronage of a man who seemed never to forgive any one who had done him a good turn.
The agreement made by him with the Thrales was that he should practically be his own master, only residing at Streatham as a member of the family with no fixed salary. He was as artful as an Irish cabman in suggesting this “leave it to your honour” contract. He had heard on all hands of the liberality of Mr. Thrale, and he knew that, in addition to being provided with a luxurious home, he would receive presents from him far in excess of what he could earn. He was extremely well treated for the next three years, though he was for ever grumbling when he had a moment's leisure from insulting the Thrales and their guests. Mrs. Thrale said more in his favour than any one with whom he came in contact. She wrote: “His lofty consciousness of his own superiority which made him tenacious of every position, and drew him into a thousand distresses, did not, I must own, ever disgust me, till he began to exercise it against myself, and resolve to reign in our house by fairly defying the mistress of it. Pride, however, though shocking enough, is never despicable; but vanity, which he possessed too, in an eminent degree, will sometimes make a man near sixty ridiculous.”
Assuredly Mrs. Thrale “let him down” very gently. Dr. Thomas Campbell, a clergyman from Ireland, gives us a glimpse of Baretti's bearing at Streatham. It is clear that Baretti was anxious to impress him with the nature of his position in the house. “He told me he had several families both in town and country with whom he could go at any time and spend a month; he is at this time on these terms at Mr. Thrale's, and he knows how to keep his ground. Talking, as we were at tea, of the magnitude of the beer vessels, he said there was one thing at Mr. Thrale's house still more extraordinary—his wife. She gulped the pill very prettily. So much for Baretti!” wrote the clergyman in a very illuminating account of his visit to Streatham.
But not only did Mrs. Thrale bear with this detestable person for nearly two more years, but she and her husband took him with them and Johnson to Paris, where they lived in a magnificent way, the Thrales paying for everything. It was in a letter to Frank Levet, his domestic apothecary, that Johnson, writing from Paris, said: “I ran a race in the rain this day, and beat Baretti. Baretti is a fine fellow.” This is Johnson on Baretti. Here is Baretti on Johnson; on a copy of the Piozzi Letters he wrote: “Johnson was often fond of saying silly things in strong terms, and the silly madam”—meaning Mrs. Thrale—“never failed to echo that beastly kind of wit.”
It was not, however, until an Italian tour, projected by Mr. Thrale, was postponed, that Baretti became quite unendurable. He had been presented by Mr. Thrale with £100 within a few months, and on the abandonment of the longer tour he received another £100 by way of compensation for the satisfaction he had been compelled to forgo in showing his countrymen the position to which he had attained in England. This was another act of generosity which he could not forgive. He became sullen and more cantankerous than ever, and neglected his duties in an intolerable way. In fact, he treated Streatham as if it were an hotel, turning up to give Miss Thrale a lesson at the most inconvenient hours, and then devoting the most of his time to poisoning the girl's mind against her mother. Upon one occasion he expressed the hope to her that if her mother died Mr. Thrale would marry Miss Whitbred, who would, he said, be a pretty companion for her, not tyrannical and overbearing as he affirmed her own mother was! Truly a nice remark for a young lady's tutor to make to her under her mother's roof.
The fact was, however—we have Baretti's own confession for it—that he had been led to believe that after being with the Thrales for a year or two, an annuity would be settled on him by the wealthy brewer, and he grew impatient at his services to the family not obtaining recognition in this way. It is extremely unlikely that Johnson ever even so much as hinted at this annuity, though Baretti says his expectations were due to what Johnson had told him; but it is certain that he had so exalted an opinion of himself, he believed that after a year or two of desultory teaching he should receive a handsome pension. And there the old story of the car-driver who left the nomination of the fare to “his honour's honour” was repeated. Baretti one morning packed up his bag and left Streatham without a word of farewell.
Johnson's account of his departure and his comments thereupon are worth notice. He wrote to Boswell:
“Baretti went away from Thrales in some whimsical fit of disgust or ill-nature without taking any leave. It is well if he finds in any other place as good an habitation and as many conveniences.”
On the whole it is likely that a good many of Baretti's friends felt rather sorry than otherwise that the jury at the Old Bailey had taken so merciful a view of his accident. If Johnson and Murphy were really responsible for the line of defence which prevailed at the trial, one can quite believe that the Thrales and a good many of their associates bore them a secret grudge for their pains.
In the year 1782 he was granted by the Government the pension which he had failed to extort from the Thrales. It amounted to £80 per annum, and we may take it for granted that he had nothing but the most copious abuse for the Prime Minister who had only given him £80 when Sheridan was receiving £200 and Johnson £300. He drew his pension for seven years.
Baretti's portrait, painted by Reynolds for the Streatham gallery, fetched £31 10s., the smallest price of any in the whole collection, on its dispersal, years after the principal actors in the scene in the “awful Sessions House” had gone to another world.
THE FATAL GIFT
WHEN Mr. Boswell had been snubbed, and very soundly snubbed too, by a Duchess, one might fancy that his ambition was fully satisfied. But he was possibly the most persevering of the order of Pachydermata at that time extant; and in the matter of snubs he had the appetite of a leviathan. He was fired with the desire to be snubbed once more by Her Grace—and he was. Without waiting to catch her eye, he raised his glass and, bowing in her direction, said:
“My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink Your Grace's good health.”
The Duchess did not allow her conversation with Dr. Johnson to be interrupted by so flagrant a piece of politeness; she continued chatting quite pleasantly to the great man, ignoring the little one. That was how she had got on in life; and, indeed, a better epitome of the whole art of getting on in life could scarcely be compiled even by the cynical nobleman who wrote letters to his son instructing him in this and other forms of progress—including the Rake's.
Mr. Boswell, who, as usual, is the pitiless narrator of the incident, records his satisfaction at having attained to the distinction of a snub from the beautiful creature at whose table he was sitting, and we are, as usual, deeply indebted to him for giving us an illuminating glimpse of the Duchess of whom at one time all England and the greater part of Ireland were talking. He also mentions that Her Grace made use of an idiom by which her Irish upbringing revealed itself. If we had not Mr. Boswell's account of his visit to Inveraray to refer to we might be tempted to believe that Horace Walpole deviated into accuracy when he attributed to the Duchess of Argyll, as well as her sister, the Countess of Coventry, the brogue of a bog-trotter. It was only by her employment of an idiom common to the south and west of Ireland and a few other parts of the kingdom, that Her Grace made him know that she had not been educated in England, or for that matter in Scotland, where doubtless Mr. Boswell fondly believed the purest English in the world was spoken.
Mr. Boswell faithfully records—sometimes with glee and occasionally with pride—many snubs which he received in the course of a lifetime of great pertinacity, and some that he omitted to note, his contemporaries were obliging enough to record; but on none did he reflect with more satisfaction than that, or those, which he suffered in the presence of the Duchess of Argyll.
It happened during that memorable tour to the Hebrides to which he lured Johnson in order to show his countrymen how great was his intimacy with the man who traduced them once in his Dictionary and daily in his life. It was like Boswell to expect that he would impress the Scottish nation by leading Johnson to view their fine prospects—he certainly was never foolish enough to hope to impress Johnson by introducing the Scottish nation to him. In due time, however, the exploiter and the exploited found themselves in the neighbourhood of Inveraray, the Duke of Argyll's Castle, and the stronghold of the Clan Campbell.
It chanced that the head of the great family was in residence at this time, and Mr. Boswell hastened to apprise him of the fact that the great Dr. Johnson was at hand. He called at the Castle very artfully shortly after the dinner hour, when he believed the Duchess and her daughter would have retired to a drawing-room. He was successful in finding the Duke still at the dinner-table, the ladies having retired. In the course of the interview the Duke said: “Mr. Boswell, won't you have some tea?” and Mr. Boswell, feeling sure that the Duchess could not go very far in insulting him when other people were present, followed his host into the drawing-room. “The Duke,” he records, “announced my name, but the Duchess, who was sitting with her daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, and some other ladies, took not the least notice of me. I should,” he continues, “have been mortified at being thus coldly received by a lady of whom I, with the rest of the world, have always entertained a very high admiration, had I not been consoled by the obliging attention of the Duke.”
The Duke was, indeed, obliging enough to invite Johnson to dinner the next day, and Mr. Boswell was included in the invitation. (So it is that the nursery governess gets invited to the table in the great house to which she is asked to bring the pretty children in her charge.) Of course, Boswell belonged to a good family, and his father was a judge. It was to a Duke of Argyll—not the one who was now so obliging—that the Laird of Auchinleck brought his son, James Boswell, to be examined in order to find out whether he should be put into the army or some other profession. Still, he would never have been invited to Inveraray at this time or any other unless he had had charge of Johnson. No one was better aware of this fact than Boswell; but did he therefore decline the invitation? Not he. Mr. Boswell saw an opportunity ahead of him. He had more than once heard Johnson give an account of how he had behaved when the King came upon him in the Royal Library; and probably he had felt melancholy at the reflection that he himself had had no part or lot in the incident. It was all Dr. Johnson and the King. But now he was quick to perceive that when, in after years, people should speak with bated breath of Dr. Johnson's visit to Inveraray they would be compelled to say: “And Mr. Boswell, the son of auld Auchinleck, was there too.”
He knew very well that there were good reasons why Mr. Boswell could not hope to be a persona grata to the Duchess of Argyll. In the great Douglas lawsuit the issue of which was of considerable importance to the Duke of Hamilton, the son of Her Grace, the Boswells were on the side of the opposition, and had been very active on this side into the bargain. James Boswell himself narrowly escaped being committed for contempt of court for publishing a novel founded on the Douglas cause and anticipating in an impudent way the finding of the judges. Had the difference been directly with the Duke of Argyll some years earlier, no doubt every man in the Clan Campbell would have sharpened his skene when it became known that a friend of an opponent of the MacCallein More was coming, and have awaited his approach with complacency; but now the great chief tossed Boswell his invitation when he was asking Johnson, and Boswell jumped at it as a terrier jumps for a biscuit, and he accompanied his friend to the Castle.
The picture which he paints of his second snubbing is done in his best manner. “I was in fine spirits,” he wrote, “and though sensible that I had the misfortune of not being in favour with the Duchess, I was not in the least disconcerted, and offered Her Grace some of the dish which was before me.” Later on he drank Her Grace's health, although, he adds, “I knew it was the rule of modern high life not to drink to anybody.” Thus he achieved the snub he sought; but he acknowledges that he thought the Duchess rather too severe when she said: “I know nothing of Mr. Boswell.” On reflection, however, he received “that kind of consolation which a man would feel who is strangled by a silken cord.”
It seems strange that no great painter has been inspired by the theme and the scene. The days of “subject pictures” are, we are frequently told, gone by. This may be so, generally speaking, but every one knows that a “subject picture,” if its “subject” lends itself in any measure to the advertising of an article of commerce, will find a ready purchaser, so fine a perception of the aspirations of art—practical art—exists in England, and even in Scotland, in the present day.
Now, are not the elements of success apparent to any one of imagination in this picture of the party sitting round the table in the great hall of Inveraray—Dr. Johnson chatting to the beautiful Duchess and her daughter at one side, the Duke looking uncomfortable at the other, when he sees Mr. Boswell on his feet with his glass in his hand bowing toward Her Grace? No doubt Her Grace had acquainted His Grace with the attitude she meant to assume in regard to Mi. Boswell, so that he was not astonished—only uncomfortable—when Mr. Boswell fished for his snub. Surely arrangements could be made between the art patron and the artist to paint a name and a certain brand upon the bottle—a bottle must, of course, be on the table; but if this is thought too realistic the name could easily be put on the decanter—from which Mr. Boswell has just replenished his glass! Why, the figure of Dr. Johnson alone should make the picture a success—i.e. susceptible of being reproduced as an effective poster in four printings. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “claret for boys, port for men, but brandy for heroes.” Yes, but whose brandy? There is a hint for a great modern art patron—a twentieth-century art patron is a man who loves art for what he can make out of it.
Dr. Johnson was unmistakably the honoured guest this day at Inveraray; and perhaps, while the lovely Duchess hung upon his words of wisdom, his memory may have gone back to a day when he was not so well known, and yet by some accident found himself in a room with the then Duchess of Argyll. Upon that occasion he had thought it due to himself to be rude to the great lady, in response to some fancied remissness on her part. He had nothing to complain of now. The Duchess with whom he was conversing on terms of perfect equality—if Her Grace made any distinction between them it was, we may rest assured, only in a way that would be flattering to his learning—was at the head of the peerage for beauty, and there was no woman in the kingdom more honoured than she had been. He may have been among the crowds who hung about the Mall in St. James's Park twenty-two years before, waiting patiently until the two lovely Miss Gunnings should come forth from their house in Westminster to take the air. The Duchess of Argyll was the younger of the two sisters.
The story of the capture of the town by the pair of young Irish girls has been frequently told, and never without the word romantic being applied to it. But really there was very little that can be called romantic in the story of their success. There is far more of this element in many of the marriages affecting the peerage in these unromantic days. There is real romance in the story of a young duke's crossing the Atlantic with a single introduction, but that to the daughter of a millionaire with whom he falls madly in love and whom he marries as soon as the lawyers can make out the settlements. There is real romance in the idyll of the young marquis who is fortunate enough to win the affection of an ordinary chorus girl; and every year witnesses such-like alliances—they used to be called mésalliances long ago. There have also been instances of the daughters of English tradesmen marrying foreign nobles, whom they sometimes divorce as satisfactorily as if they were the daughters of wealthy swindlers on the other side of the Atlantic. In such cases there are portraits and paragraphs in some of the newspapers, and then people forget that anything unusual has happened. As a matter of fact, nothing unusual has happened.
In the romantic story of the Gunnings we have no elements of that romance which takes the form of a mésalliance. Two girls, the granddaughters of one viscount and the nieces of another, came to London with their parents one year, and early the next married peers—the elder an earl, the younger a duke. Like thousands of other girls, they had no money; but, unlike hundreds of other girls who marry into the peerage, they were exceptionally good-looking.
Where is there an element of romance in all this? The girls wedded men in their own station in life, and, considering their good looks, they should have done very much better for themselves. The duke was a wretched roué, notable for his excesses even in the days when excess was not usually regarded as noteworthy. He had ruined his constitution before he was twenty, and he remained enfeebled until, in a year or two, he made her a widow. The earl was a conceited, ill-mannered prig—a solemn, contentious, and self-opinionated person who was deservedly disliked in the town as well as the country.
Not a very brilliant marriage either of these. With the modern chorus girl the earl is on his knees at one side, and the gas man on the other. But with the Miss Gunnings it was either one peer or another. They were connected on their mother's side with at least two families of nobility, and on their father's side with the spiritual aristocracy of some generations back: they were collateral descendants of the great Peter Gunning, Chancellor of Oxford and Bishop of Ely, and he was able to trace his lineage back to the time of Henry VIII. From a brother of this great man was directly descended the father of the two girls and also Sir Robert Gunning, Baronet, who held such a high post in the diplomatic service as Minister Plenipotentiary to Berlin, and afterwards to St. Petersburg. Members of such families might marry into the highest order of the peerage without the alliance being criticised as “romantic.” The girls did not do particularly well for themselves. They were by birth entitled to the best, and by beauty to the best of the best. As it was, the one only became the wife of a contemptible duke, the other of a ridiculous earl. It may really be said that they threw themselves away.
Of course, it was Walpole's gossip that is accountable for much of the false impression which prevailed in respect of the Gunnings. From the first he did his best to disparage them. He wrote to Mann that they were penniless, and “scarce gentlewomen.” He could not ignore the fact that their mother was the Honourable Bridget Gunning; but, without knowing anything of the matter, he undertook to write about the “inferior tap” on their father's side. In every letter that he wrote at this time he tried to throw ridicule upon them, alluding to them as if they were nothing better than the barefooted colleens of an Irish mountain-side who had come to London to seek their fortunes. As usual, he made all his letters interesting to his correspondents by introducing the latest stories respecting them; he may not have invented all of these, but some undoubtedly bear the Strawberry Hill mark, and we know that Walpole never suppressed a good tale simply because it possessed no grain of truth.
Now, the true story of the Gunnings can be ascertained without any reference to Walpole's correspondence. Both girls were born in England—the elder, Maria, in 1731, the younger in 1732. When they were still young their father, a member of the English Bar, inherited his brother's Irish property. It had once been described as a “tidy estate,” but it was now in a condition of great untidiness. In this respect it did not differ materially from the great majority of estates in Ireland. Ever since the last “settlement” the country had been in a most unsettled condition, and no part of it was worse than the County Roscommon, where Castle Coote, the residence of the Gunning family, was situated. It might perhaps be going too far to say that the wilds of Connaught were as bad as the wilds of Yorkshire at the same date, but from all the information that can be gathered on the subject there does not seem to have been very much to choose between Roscommon and the wilder parts of Yorkshire. The peasantry were little better than savages; the gentry were little worse. Few of the elements of civilized life were to be found among the inhabitants. The nominal owners of the land were content to receive tribute from their tenantry in the form of the necessaries of life, for money as a standard of exchange was rarely available. Even in the present day in many districts in the west of Ireland cattle occupy the same place in the imagination of the inhabitants as they do in Zululand. The Irish bride is bargained away with so many cows; and for a man to say—as one did in the very county of Roscommon the other day—that he never could see the difference of two cows between one girl and another, may be reckoned somewhat cynical, but it certainly is intelligible.