Chapter V: Part 5

The annual was as orthodox as it was aristocratic. “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” was not more edifying. “The Washerwoman of Finchley Common” was less conspicuously virtuous. Here in “The Winter’s Wreath” is a long poem in blank verse, by a nameless clergyman, on “The Efficacy of Religion.” Here in the “Amulet,” Mrs. Hemans, “leading the way as she deserves to do” (I quote from the “Monthly Review”), “clothes in her own pure and fascinating language the invitations which angels whisper into mortal ears.” And here in the “Forget-Me-Not,” Leontine hurls mild defiance at the spirit of doubt:--

Thou sceptic of the hardened brow,
Attend to Nature’s cry!
Her sacred essence breathes the glow
O’er that thou wouldst deny;

--an argument which would have carried conviction to Huxley’s soul, had he been more than eight years old when it was written. Poor Coleridge, always in need of a guinea or two, was bidden to write some descriptive lines for the “Keepsake,” on an engraving by Parris of the Garden of Boccaccio; a delightful picture of nine ladies and three gentlemen picnicking in a park, with arcades as tall as aqueducts, a fountain as vast as Niagara, and butterflies twice the size of the rabbits. Coleridge, exempt by nature from an unserviceable sense of humour, executed this commission in three pages of painstaking verse, and was severely censured for mentioning “in terms not sufficiently guarded, one of the most impure and mischievous books that could find its way into the hands of an innocent female.”

The system of first securing an illustration, and then ordering a poem to match it, seemed right and reasonable to the editor of the annual, who paid a great deal for his engravings, and little or nothing for his poetry. Sometimes the poet was not even granted a sight of the picture he was expected to describe. We find Lady Blessington writing to Dr. William Beattie,--the best-natured man of his day,--requesting “three or four stanzas” for an annual called “Buds and Blossoms,” which was to contain portraits of the children of noble families. The particular “buds” whose unfolding he was asked to immortalize were the three sons of the Duke of Buccleuch; and it was gently hinted that “an allusion to the family would add interest to the subject”;--in plain words, that a little well-timed flattery might be trusted to expand the sales. Another year the same unblushing petitioner was even more hardy in her demand.

“Will you write me a page of verse for the portrait of Miss Forester? The young lady is seated with a little dog on her lap, which she looks at rather pensively. She is fair, with light hair, and is in mourning.”

Here is an inspiration for a poet. A picture, which he has not seen, of a young lady in mourning looking pensively at a little dog! And poor Beattie was never paid a cent for these effusions. His sole rewards were a few words of thanks, and Lady Blessington’s cards for parties he was too ill to attend.

More business-like poets made a specialty of fitting pictures with verses, as a tailor fits customers with coats. A certain Mr. Harvey, otherwise lost to fame, was held to be unrivalled in this art. For many years his “chaste and classic pen” supplied the annuals with flowing stanzas, equally adapted to the timorous taste of editors, and to the limitations of the “innocent females” for whom the volumes were predestined. “Mr. Harvey embodies in two or three lines the expression of a whole picture,” says an enthusiastic reviewer, “and at the same time turns his inscription into a little gem of poetry.” As a specimen gem, I quote one of four verses accompanying an engraving called Morning Dreams,--a young woman reclining on a couch, and simpering vapidly at the curtains:--

She has been dreaming, and her thoughts are still
On their far journey in the land of dreams;
The forms we call--but may not chase--at will,
And sweet low voices, soft as distant streams.

This is a fair sample of the verse supplied for Christmas annuals, which, however “chaste and classic,” was surely never intended to be read. It is only right, however, to remember that Thackeray’s “Piscator and Piscatrix” was written at Lady Blessington’s behest, to accompany Wattier’s engraving of The Happy Anglers; and that Thackeray told Locker he was so much pleased with this picture, and so engrossed with his own poem, that he forgot to shave for the two whole days he was working at it. To write “good occasional verse,” by which he meant verse begged or ordered for some such desperate emergency as Lady Blessington’s, was, in his eyes, an intellectual feat. It represented difficulties overcome, like those wonderful old Italian frescoes fitted so harmoniously into unaccommodating spaces. Nothing can be more charming than “Piscator and Piscatrix,” and nothing can be more insipid than the engraving which inspired the lively rhymes:

As on this pictured page I look,
This pretty tale of line and hook,
As though it were a novel-book,
Amuses and engages:
I know them both, the boy and girl,
She is the daughter of an Earl,
The lad (that has his hair in curl)
My lord the County’s page is.

A pleasant place for such a pair!
The fields lie basking in the glare;
No breath of wind the heavy air
Of lazy summer quickens.
Hard by you see the castle tall,
The village nestles round the wall,
As round about the hen, its small
Young progeny of chickens.

The verses may be read in any edition of Thackeray’s ballads; but when we have hunted up the “pictured page” in a mouldy old “Keepsake,” and see an expressionless girl, a featureless boy, an indistinguishable castle, and no village, we are tempted to agree with Charles Lamb, who swore that he liked poems to explain pictures, and not pictures to illustrate poems. “Your woodcut is a rueful _lignum mortis_.”

There was a not unnatural ambition on the part of publishers and editors to secure for their annuals one or two names of repute, with which to leaven the mass of mediocrity. It mattered little if the distinguished writer conscientiously contributed the feeblest offspring of his pen; that was a reasonable reckoning,--distinguished writers do the same to-day; but it mattered a great deal if, as too often happened, he broke his word, and failed to contribute anything. Then the unhappy editor was compelled to publish some such apologetic note as this, from the “Amulet” of 1833. “The first sheet of the ‘Amulet’ was reserved for my friend Mr. Bulwer, who had kindly tendered me his assistance; but, in consequence of various unavoidable circumstances” (a pleasure trip on the Rhine), “he has been compelled to postpone his aid until next year.” On such occasions, the “reserved” pages were filled by some veteran annualist, like Mr. Alaric Attila Watts, editor of the “Literary Souvenir”; or perhaps Mr. Thomas Haynes Bailey, he who wrote “I’d be a Butterfly,” and “Gaily the Troubadour,” was persuaded to warble some such appropriate sentiment as this in the “Forget-Me-Not”:--

It is a book we christen thus,
Less fleeting than the flower;
And ’twill recall the past to us
With talismanic power;

which was a true word spoken in rhyme. Nothing recalls that faded past, with its simpering sentimentality, its reposeful ethics, its shut-in standards, and its differentiation of the masculine and feminine intellects, like the yellow pages of an annual.

Tom Moore, favourite of gods and men, was singled out by publishers as the lode-star of their destinies, as the poet who could be best trusted to impart to the “Amethyst” or the “Talisman” (how like Pullman cars they sound!) that “elegant lightness” which befitted its mission in life. His accounts of the repeated attacks made on his virtue, and the repeated repulses he administered, fill by no means the least amusing pages of his journal. The first attempt was made by Orne, who, in 1826, proposed that Moore should edit a new annual on the plan of the “Souvenir”; and who assured the poet--always as deep in difficulties as Micawber--that, if the enterprise proved successful, it would yield him from five hundred to a thousand pounds a year. Moore, dazzled but not duped, declined the task; and the following summer, the engraver Heath made him a similar proposition, but on more assured terms. Heath was then preparing to launch upon the world of fashion his gorgeous “Keepsake”--“the toy-shop of literature,” Lockhart called it; and he offered Moore, first five hundred, and then seven hundred pounds a year, if he would accept the editorship. Seven hundred pounds loomed large in the poet’s fancy, but pride forbade the bargain. The author of “Lalla Rookh” could not consent to bow his laurelled head, and pilot the feeble Fatimas and Zelicas, the noble infants in coral necklets, and the still nobler ladies with pearl pendants on their brows, into the safe harbour of boudoir and drawing-room. He made this clear to Heath, who, nothing daunted, set off at once for Abbotsford, and laid his proposals at the feet of Sir Walter Scott, adding to his bribe another hundred pounds.

Scott, the last man in Christendom to have undertaken such an office, or to have succeeded in it, softened his refusal with a good-natured promise to contribute to the “Keepsake” when it was launched. He was not nervous about his literary standing, and he had no sensitive fear of lowering it by journeyman’s work. “I have neither the right nor the wish,” he wrote once to Murray, “to be considered above a common labourer in the trenches.” Moore, however, was far from sharing this modest unconcern. When Reynolds, on whom the editorship of the “Keepsake” finally devolved, asked him for some verses, he peremptorily declined. Then began a system of pursuit and escape, of assault and repulse, which casts the temptations of St. Anthony into the shade. “By day and night,” so Moore declares, Reynolds was “after” him, always increasing the magnitude of his bribe. At last he forced a check for a hundred pounds into the poet’s empty pocket (for all the world like a scene in Caran d’Ache’s “Histoire d’un Chèque”), imploring in return a hundred lines of verse. But Moore’s virtue--or his vanity--was impregnable. “The task was but light, and the money would have been convenient,” he confesses; “but I forced it back on him again. The fact is, it is my _name_ brings these offers, and my name would suffer by accepting them.”

One might suppose that the baffled tempter would now have permanently withdrawn, save that the strength of tempters lies in their never knowing when they are beaten. Three years later, Heath renewed the attack, proposing that Moore should furnish _all_ the letter-press, prose and verse, of the “Keepsake” for 1832, receiving in payment the generous sum of one thousand pounds. Strange to say, Moore took rather kindly to this appalling suggestion, admitted he liked it better than its predecessors, and consented to think the matter over for a fortnight. In the end, however, he adhered to his original determination to hold himself virgin of annuals; and refused the thousand pounds, which would have paid all his debts, only to fall, as fall men must, a victim to female blandishments. He was cajoled into writing some lines for the “Casket,” edited by Mrs. Blencoe; and had afterwards the pleasure of discovering that the astute lady had added to her list of attractions another old poem of his, which, to avoid sameness, she obligingly credited to Lord Byron;--enough to make that ill-used poet turn uneasily in his grave.

Charles Lamb’s detestation of annuals dates naturally enough from the hour he was first seduced into becoming a contributor; and every time he lapsed from virtue, his rage blazed out afresh. When his ill-timed sympathy for a bereaved parent--and that parent an editor--landed him in the pages of the “Gem,” he wrote to Barton in an access of ill-humour which could find no phrases sharp enough to feed it.

“I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates, the names of contributors poked up into your eyes in the first page, and whistled through all the covers of magazines, the bare-faced sort of emulation, the immodest candidateship, brought into so little space; in short I detest to appear in an annual.... Don’t think I set up for being proud on this point; I like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity as well as any one. But these pompous masquerades without masks (naked names or faces) I hate. So there’s a bit of my mind.”

“Frippery,” “frumpery,” “show and emptiness,” are the mildest epithets at Lamb’s command, as often as he laments his repeated falls from grace; and a few years before his death, when that “dumb soporifical good-for-nothingness” (curse of the Enfield lanes) weighted his pen, and dulled the lively processes of his brain, he writes with poignant melancholy:--

“I cannot scribble a long letter. I am, when not on foot, very desolate, and take no interest in anything, scarce hate anything but annuals.” It is the last expression of a just antipathy, an instinctive clinging to something which can be reasonably hated to the end.

The most pretentious and the most aristocratic of the annuals was the ever famous “Book of Beauty,” edited for many years by the Countess of Blessington. Resting on a solid foundation of personal vanity (a superstructure never known to fail), it reached a heroic measure of success, and yielded an income which permitted the charming woman who conducted it to live as far beyond her means as any leader of the fashionable world in London. It was estimated that Lady Blessington earned by the “gorgeous inanities” she edited, and by the vapid tales she wrote, an income of from two thousand to three thousand pounds; but she would never have been paid so well for her work had she not supported her social position by an expenditure of twice that sum. Charles Greville, who spares no scorn he can heap upon her editorial methods, declares that she attained her ends “by puffing and stuffing, and untiring industry, by practising on the vanity of some and the good-nature of others. And though I never met with any one who had read her books, except the ‘Conversations with Byron,’ which are too good to be hers, they are unquestionably a source of considerable profit, and she takes her place confidently and complacently as one of the literary celebrities of her day.”

Greville’s instinctive unkindness leaves him often wide of the mark, but on this occasion we can only say that he might have spoken his truths more humanely. If Lady Blessington helped to create the demand which she supplied, if she turned her friendships to account, and made of hospitality a means to an end (a line of conduct not unknown to-day), she worked with unsparing diligence, and with a sort of desperate courage for over twenty years. Rival Books of Beauty were launched upon a surfeited market, but she maintained her precedence. For ten years she edited the “Keepsake,” and made it a source of revenue, until the unhappy bankruptcy and death of Heath. In her annuals we breathe the pure air of ducal households, and consort with the peeresses of England, turning condescendingly now and then to contemplate a rusticity so obviously artificial, it can be trusted never to offend. That her standard of art (she had no standard of letters) was acceptable to the British public is proved by the rapturous praise of critics and reviewers. Thackeray, indeed, professed to think the sumptuous ladies, who loll and languish in the pages of the year-book, underclad and indecorous; but this was in the spirit of hypercriticism. Hear rather how a writer in “Fraser’s Magazine” describes in a voice trembling with emotion the opulent charms of one of the Countess of Blessington’s “Beauties”:--

“There leans the tall and imperial form of the enchantress, with raven tresses surmounted by the cachemire of sparkling red; while her ringlets flow in exuberant waves over the full-formed neck; and barbaric pearls, each one worth a king’s ransom, rest in marvellous contrast with her dark and mysterious loveliness.”

“Here’s richness!” to quote our friend Mr. Squeers. Here’s something of which it is hard to think a public could ever tire. Yet sixteen years later, when the Countess of Blessington died in poverty and exile, but full of courage to the end, the “Examiner” tepidly observed that the probable extinction of the year-book “would be the least of the sad regrets attending her loss.”

For between 1823 and 1850 three hundred annuals had been published in England, and the end was very near. Exhausted nature was crying for release. It is terrible to find an able and honest writer like Miss Mitford editing a preposterous volume called the “Iris,” of inhuman bulk and superhuman inanity; a book which she well knew could never, under any press of circumstances, be read by mortal man or woman. There were annuals to meet every demand, and to please every class of purchaser. Comic annuals for those who hoped to laugh; a “Botanic Annual” for girls who took country walks with their governess; an “Oriental Annual” for readers of Byron and Moore; a “Landscape Annual” for lovers of nature; “The Christian Keepsake” for ladies of serious minds; and “The Protestant Annual” for those who feared that Christianity might possibly embrace the Romish Church. There were five annuals for English children; from one of which, “The Juvenile Keepsake,” I quote these lines, so admirably adapted to the childish mind. Newton is supposed to speak them in his study:--

Pure and ethereal essence, fairest light,
Come hither, and before my watchful eyes
Disclose thy hidden nature, and unbind
Thy mystic, fine-attenuated parts;
That so, intently marking, I the source
May learn of colours, Nature’s matchless gifts.

There are three pages of this poem, all in the same simple language, from which it is fair to infer that the child’s annual, like its grown-up neighbour, was made to be bought, not read.

OUR ACCOMPLISHED GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

Next to mere idleness, I think knotting is to be reckoned in the
scale of insignificance.--DR. JOHNSON.

Readers of Dickens (which ought to mean all men and women who have mastered the English alphabet) will remember how that estimable schoolmistress, Miss Monflathers, elucidated Dr. Watts’s masterpiece, which had been quoted somewhat rashly by a teacher. “‘The little busy bee,’” said Miss Monflathers, drawing herself up, “is applicable only to genteel children.

In books, or work, or healthful play,

is quite right as far as they are concerned; and the work means painting on velvet, fancy needlework, or embroidery.”

It also meant, in the good Miss Monflathers’s day, making filigree baskets that would not hold anything, Ionic temples of Bristol-board, shell flowers, and paper landscapes. It meant pricking pictures with pins, taking “impressions” of butterflies’ wings on sheets of gummed paper, and messing with strange, mysterious compounds called diaphanie and potichomanie, by means of which a harmless glass tumbler or a respectable window-pane could be turned into an object of desolation. Indeed, when the genteel young ladies of this period were not reading “Merit opposed to Fascination; exemplified in the story of Eugenio,” or “An Essay on the Refined Felicity which may arise from the Marriage Contract,” they were cultivating what were then called “ornamental arts,” but which later on became known as “accomplishments.” “It is amazing to me,” says that most amiable of sub-heroes, Mr. Bingley, “how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are. They paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this; and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished.”

We leave the unamiable Mr. Darcy snorting at his friend’s remark, to consider the paucity of Mr. Bingley’s list. Tables, screens, and purses represent but the first beginnings of that misdirected energy which for the best part of a century embellished English homes. The truly accomplished young lady in Miss More’s “Cœlebs” paints flowers and shells, draws ruins, gilds and varnishes wood, is an adept in Japan work, and stands ready to begin modelling, etching, and engraving. The great principle of ornamental art was the reproduction of an object--of any object--in an alien material. The less adapted this material was to its purpose, the greater the difficulties it presented to the artist, the more precious became the monstrous masterpiece. To take a plain sheet of paper and draw a design upon it was ignominious in its simplicity; but to construct the same design out of paper spirals, rolling up some five hundred slips with uniform tightness, setting them on end, side by side, and painting or gilding the tops,--that was a feat of which any young lady might be proud. It was so uncommonly hard to do, it ought to have been impossible. Cutting paper with fine sharp scissors and a knife was taught in schools (probably in Miss Monflathers’s school, though Dickens does not mention it) as a fashionable pastime. The “white design”--animals, landscape, or marine--was printed on a black background, which was cut away with great dexterity, the spaces being small and intricate. When all the black paper had been removed, the flimsy tracery was pasted on a piece of coloured paper, thus presenting--after hours of patient labour--much the same appearance that it had in the beginning. It was then glassed, framed, and presented to appreciative parents, as a proof of their daughter’s industry and taste.

The most famous work of art ever made out of paper was probably the celebrated “herbal” of Mrs. Delany,--Mrs. Delany whom Burke pronounced “the model of an accomplished gentlewoman.” She acquired her accomplishments at an age when most people seek to relinquish theirs,--having learned to draw when she was thirty, to paint when she was forty, and to write verse when she was eighty-two. She also “excelled in embroidery and shell-work”; and when Miss Burney made her first visit to St. James’s Place, she found Mrs. Delany’s walls covered with “ornaments of her own execution of striking elegance, in cuttings and variegated stained papers.” The herbal, however, was the crowning achievement of her life. It contained nearly a thousand plants, made of thin strips of coloured paper, pasted layer over layer with the utmost nicety upon a black background, and producing an effect “richer than painting.”

Cold Winter views amid his realms of snow
Delany’s vegetable statues blow;
Smoothes his stern brow, delays his hoary wing,
And eyes with wonder all the blooms of Spring.

The flowers were copied accurately from nature, and florists all over the kingdom vied with one another in sending Mrs. Delany rare and beautiful specimens. The Queen ardently admired this herbal, and the King, who regarded it with veneration not untinged by awe, expressed his feelings by giving its creator a house at Windsor, and settling upon her an annuity of three hundred pounds. Yet Miss Seward complained that although England “teemed with genius,” George III was “no Cæsar Augustus,” to encourage and patronize the arts. To the best of his ability, he did. His conception of genius and art may not have tallied with that of Augustus; but when an old lady made paper flowers to perfection, he gave her a royal reward.

Mrs. Delany’s example was followed in court circles, and in the humbler walks of life. Shell-work, which was one of her accomplishments, became the rage. Her illustrious friend, the Duchess of Portland, “made shell frames and feather designs, adorned grottoes, and collected endless objects in the animal and vegetable kingdom.” Young ladies of taste made flowers out of shells, dyeing the white ones with Brazil wood, and varnishing them with gum arabic. A rose of red shells, with a heart of knotted yellow silk, was almost as much admired as a picture of birds with their feathers pasted on the paper. This last triumph of realism presented a host of difficulties to the perpetrator. When the bill and legs of the bird had been painted in water colours on heavy Bristol-board, the space for its body was covered with a paste of gum arabic as thick as a shilling. This paste was kept “tacky or clammy” to hold the feathers, which were stripped off the poor little dead bird, and stuck on the prepared surface, the quills being cut down with a knife. Weights were used to keep the feathers in place, the result being that most of them adhered to the lead instead of to the Bristol-board, and came off discouragingly when the work was nearly done. As a combination of art and nature, the bird picture had no rival except the butterfly picture, where the clipped wings of butterflies were laid between two sheets of gummed paper, and the “impressions” thus taken, reinforced with a little gilding, were attached to a painted body. It may be observed that the quality of mercy was then a good deal strained. Mrs. Montagu’s famous “feather-room,” in her house on Portman Square, was ornamented with hangings made by herself from the plumage of hundreds of birds, every attainable variety being represented; yet no one of her friends, not even the sainted Hannah More, ever breathed a sigh of regret over the merry little lives that were wasted for its meretricious decorations.

Much time and ingenuity were devoted by industrious young people to the making of baskets, and no material, however unexpected, came amiss to their patient hands. Allspice berries, steeped in brandy to soften them and strung on wire, were very popular; and rice baskets had a chaste simplicity of their own. These last were made of pasteboard, lined with silk or paper, the grains of rice being gummed on in solid diamond-shaped designs. If the decoration appeared a trifle monotonous, as well it might, it was diversified with coloured glass beads. Indeed, we are assured that “baskets of this description may be very elegantly ornamented with groups of small shells, little artificial bouquets, crystals, and the fine feathers from the heads of birds of beautiful plumage”;--with anything, in short, that could be pasted on and persuaded to stick. When the supply of glue gave out, wafer baskets--wafers required only moistening--or alum baskets (made of wire wrapped round with worsted, and steeped in a solution of alum, which was coloured yellow with saffron or purple with logwood) were held in the highest estimation. The modern mind, with its puny resources, is bewildered by the multiplicity of materials which seem to have lain scattered around the domestic hearth a hundred years ago. There is a famous old receipt for “silvering paper without silver,” a process designed to be economical, but which requires so many messy and alien ingredients, like “Indian glue,” and “Muscovy talc,” and “Venice turpentine,” and “Japan size,” and “Chinese varnish,” that mere silver seems by comparison a cheap and common thing. Young ladies whose thrift equalled their ingenuity made their own varnish by boiling isinglass in a quart of brandy,--a lamentable waste of supplies.

Genteel parcels were always wrapped in silver paper. We remember how Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond tries in vain to make one sheet cover the famous “filigree basket,” which was her birthday present to her Cousin Bell, and which pointed its own moral by falling to pieces before it was presented. Rosamond’s father derides this basket because he is implored not to grasp it by its myrtle-wreathed handle. “But what is the use of the handle,” he asks, in the conclusive, irritating fashion of the Edgeworthian parent, “if we are not to take hold of it? And pray is this the thing you have been about all week? I have seen you dabbling with paste and rags, and could not conceive what you were doing.”

Rosamond’s half-guinea--her godmother’s gift--is spent buying filigree paper, and medallions, and a “frost ground” for this basket, and she is ruthlessly shamed by its unstable character; whereas Laura, who gives her money secretly to a little lace-maker, has her generosity revealed at exactly the proper moment, and is admired and praised by all the company. Apart from Miss Edgeworth’s conception of life, as made up of well-adjusted punishments and rewards, a half-guinea does seem a good deal to spend on filigree paper; but then a single sheet of gold paper cost six shillings, unless gilded at home, after the following process, which was highly commended for economy:--

“Take yellow ochre, grind it with rain-water, and lay a ground with it all over the paper, which should be fine wove. When dry, take the white of an egg and about a quarter of an ounce of sugar candy, and beat them together until the sugar candy is dissolved. Then strike it all over the ground with a varnish brush, and immediately lay on the gold leaf, pressing it down with a piece of fine cotton. When dry, polish it with a dog’s tooth or agate. A sheet of this paper may be prepared for eighteen pence.”

No wonder little Rosamond was unequal to such labour, and her half-guinea was squandered in extravagant purchases. Miss Edgeworth, trained in her father’s theory that children should be always occupied, was a good deal distressed by the fruits of their industry. The “chatting girls cutting up silk and gold paper,” whom Miss Austen watched with unconcern, would have fretted Miss Edgeworth’s soul, unless she knew that sensible needle-cases, pin-cushions, and work-bags were in process of construction. Yet the celebrated “rational toy-shop,” with its hand-looms instead of dolls, and its machines for drawing in perspective instead of tin soldiers and Noah’s arks, stood responsible for the inutilities she scorned. And what of the charitable lady in “Lazy Lawrence,” who is “making a grotto,” and buying shells and fossils for its decoration? Even a filigree basket, which had at least the grace of impermanence, seems desirable by comparison with a grotto. It will be remembered also that Madame de Rosier, the “Good French Governess,” traces her lost son, that “promising young man of fourteen,” by means of a box he has made out of refuse bits of shell thrown aside in a London restaurant; while the son in turn discovers a faithful family servant through the medium of a painted pasteboard dog, which the equally ingenious domestic has exposed for sale in a shop. It was a good thing in Miss Edgeworth’s day to cultivate the “ornamental arts,” were it only for the reunion of families.

Pasteboard, a most ungrateful and unyielding material, was the basis of so many household decorations that a little volume, published in the beginning of the last century, is devoted exclusively to its possibilities. This book, which went through repeated editions, is called “The Art of Working in Pasteboard upon Scientific Principles”; and it gives minute directions for making boxes, baskets, tea-trays, caddies,--even candlesticks, and “an inkstand in the shape of a castle with a tower,”--a baffling architectural design. What patience and ingenuity must have been expended upon this pasteboard castle, which had a wing for the ink well, a wing for the sand box, five circular steps leading up to the principal entrance, a terrace which was a drawer, a balcony surrounded by a “crenelled screen,” a tower to hold the quills, a vaulted cupola which lifted like a lid, and a lantern with a “quadrilateral pyramid” for its roof, surmounted by a real pea or a glass bead as the final bit of decoration. There is a drawing of this edifice, which is as imposing as its dimensions will permit; and there are four pages of mysterious instructions which make the reader feel as though he were studying architecture by correspondence.

Far more difficult of accomplishment, and far more useless when accomplished,--for they could not even hold pens and ink,--were the Grecian temples and Gothic towers, made of pasteboard covered with marbled paper, and designed as “elegant ornaments for the mantelpiece.” A small Ionic temple requires ten pages of directions. It is built of “the best Bristol-board, except the shafts of the pillars and some of the decorations, which are made of royal drawing-paper”; and its manufacturers are implored not to spare time, trouble, or material, if they would attain to anything so classic. “The art of working in pasteboard,” says the preface of this engaging little book, “may be carried to a high degree of usefulness and perfection, and may eventually be productive of substantial benefits to young persons of both sexes, who wisely devote their leisure hours to pleasing, quiet, and useful recreations, preferably to frivolous, noisy, and expensive amusements.”

A pleasing, quiet, and useful recreation which wasted nothing but eyesight,--and that nobody valued,--was pricking pictures with pins. The broad lines and heavy shadows were pricked with stout pins, the fine lines and high lights with little ones, while a toothed wheel, sharply pointed, was used for large spaces and simple decorative designs. This was an ambitious field of art, much of the work being of a microscopic delicacy. The folds of a lady’s dress could be pricked in such film-like waves that only close scrutiny revealed the thousand tiny holes of which its billowy softness was composed. The cleanness and dryness of pins commend them to our taste after a long contemplation of varnish and glue pots; of “poonah work,” which was a sticky sort of stencilling; of “Japan work,” in which embossed figures were made of “gum-water, thickened to a proper consistence with equal parts of bole ammoniac and whiting”; of “Chinese enamel,” which was a base imitation of ebony inlaid with ivory; and of “potichomanie,” which converted a piece of English glass into something that “not one in a hundred could tell from French china.” We sympathize with the refined editor of the “Monthly Museum,” who recommends knotting to his female readers, not only because it had the sanction of a queen,

Who, when she rode in coach abroad,
Was always knotting threads;

but because of its “pure nature” and “innocent simplicity.” “I cannot but think,” says this true friend of my sex, “that shirts and smocks are unfit for any lady of delicacy to handle; but the shuttle is an easy flowing object, to which the eye may remove with propriety and grace.”

Grace was never overlooked in our great-grandmother’s day, but took rank as an important factor in education. A London schoolmistress, offering in 1815 some advice as to the music “best fitted for ladies,” confesses that it is hard to decide between the “wide range” of the pianoforte and the harp-player’s “elegance of position,” which gives to her instrument “no small powers of rivalry.” Sentiment was interwoven with every accomplishment. Tender mottoes, like those which Miss Euphemia Dundas entreats Thaddeus of Warsaw to design for her, were painted upon boxes and hand-screens. Who can forget the white leather “souvenir,” adorned with the words “Toujours cher,” which Miss Euphemia presses upon Thaddeus, and which that attractive but virtuous exile is modestly reluctant to accept. A velvet bracelet embroidered with forget-me-nots symbolized friendship. A handkerchief, designed as a gift from a young girl to her betrothed, had a celestial sphere worked in one corner, to indicate the purity of their flame; a bouquet of buds and blossoms in another, to mark the pleasures and the brevity of life; and, in a third, Cupid playing with a spaniel, “as an emblem of the most passionate fidelity.” Even samplers, which represented the first step in the pursuit of accomplishments, had their emblematic designs no less than their moral axioms. The village schoolmistress, whom Miss Mitford knew and loved, complained that all her pupils wanted to work samplers instead of learning to sew; and that all their mothers valued these works of art more than they did the neatest of caps and aprons. The sampler stood for gentility as well as industry. It reflected credit on the family as well as on the child. At the bottom of a faded canvas, worked more than a hundred years ago, and now hanging in a great museum of art, is this inspiring verse:--

I have done this that you may see
What care my parents took of me.
And when I’m dead and in my grave,
This piece of work I trust you’ll save.

If the little girl who embodied her high hopes in the painful precision of cross-stitch could but know of their splendid fulfilment!

THE ALBUM AMICORUM

She kept an album too, at home,
Well stocked with all an album’s glories,
Paintings of butterflies and Rome,
Patterns for trimmings, Persian stories.

PRAED.

Modern authors who object to being asked for their autographs, and who complain piteously of the persecutions they endure in this regard, would do well to consider what they have gained by being born in an age when commercialism has supplanted compliment. Had they been their own great-grandfathers, they would have been expected to present to their female friends the verses they now sell to magazines. They would have written a few playful and affectionate lines every time they dined out, and have paid for a week’s hospitality with sentimental tributes to their hostess. And not their hostess only. Her budding daughters would have looked for some recognition of their charms, and her infant son would have presented a theme too obvious for disregard. It is recorded that when Campbell spent two days at the country seat of Mr. James Craig, the Misses Craig kept him busy most of that time composing verses for their albums,--a pleasant way of entertaining a poet guest. On another occasion he writes to Mrs. Arkwright, lamenting, though with much good-humour, the importunities of mothers. “Mrs. Grahame has a plot upon me that I should write a poem upon her boy, three years old. Oh, such a boy! But in the way of writing lines on lovely children, I am engaged three deep, and dare not promise.”

It seems that parents not only petitioned for these poetic windfalls, but pressed their claims hard. Campbell, one of the most amiable of men, yielded in time to this demand, as he had yielded to many others, and sent to little Master Grahame some verses of singular ineptitude.

Sweet bud of life! thy future doom
Is present to my eyes,
And joyously I see thee bloom
In Fortune’s fairest skies.

One day that breast, scarce conscious now,
Shall burn with patriot flame;
And, fraught with love, that little brow
Shall wear the wreath of fame.

There are many more stanzas, but these are enough to make us wonder why parents did not let the poet alone. Perhaps, if they had, he would have volunteered his services. We know that when young Fanny Kemble showed him her nosegay at a ball, and asked how she should keep the flowers from fading, he answered hardily: “Give them to me, and I will immortalize them,”--an enviable assurance of renown.

Album verses date from the old easy days, when rhyming was regarded as a gentlemanly accomplishment rather than as a means of livelihood. Titled authors, poets wealthy and well-born--for there were always such--naturally addressed themselves to the ladies of their acquaintance. They could say with Lord Chesterfield that they thanked Heaven they did not have to live by their brains. It was a theory, long and fondly cherished, that poetry was not common merchandise, to be bought and sold like meal and malt; that it was, as Burns admirably said, either above price or worth nothing at all. Later on, when poets became excellent men of business, when Byron had been seduced by Murray’s generosity, when Moore drove his wonderful bargains, and poetic narrative was the best-selling commodity in the market, we hear a rising murmur of protest against the uncommercial exactions of the album. Sonneteers who could sell their wares for hard cash no longer felt repaid by a word of flattery. Even the myrtle wreaths which crowned the victors of the Bath Easton contests appeared but slender compensation, save in Miss Seward’s eyes, or in Mrs. Hayley’s. When Mrs. Hayley went to Bath in 1781, and witnessed the solemn ceremonies inaugurated by Lady Miller; when she saw the laurels, and myrtles, and fluttering ribbons, her soul was fired with longing, and she set to work to persuade her husband that the Bath Easton prize was not wholly beneath his notice. The author of “The Triumphs of Temper” was naturally fearful of lowering his dignity by sporting with minor poets; and there was much wifely artifice in her assumption that such playfulness on his part would be recognized as true condescension. “If you should feel disposed to honour this slight amusement with a light composition, I am persuaded you will oblige very highly.” The responsive Hayley was not unwilling to oblige, provided no one would suspect him of being in earnest. He “scribbled” the desired lines “in the most rapid manner,” “literally in a morning and a half” (Byron did not take much longer to write “The Corsair”), and sent them off to Bath, where they were “admired beyond description,” and won the prize, so that the gratified Mrs. Hayley appeared that night with the myrtle wreath woven in her hair. The one famous contributor to the Bath Easton vase who did _not_ win a prize was Sheridan. He, being entreated to write for it some verses on “Charity,” complied in these heartless lines:--

THE VASE SPEAKS

For heaven’s sake bestow on me
A little wit, for that would be
Indeed an act of charity.

Complimentary addresses--those flowery tributes which seem so ardent and so facile--were beginning to drag a little, even in Walpole’s day. He himself was an adept in the art of polite adulation, and wrote without a blush the obliging comparison between the Princess Amelia and Venus (greatly to the disparagement of Venus), which the flattered lady found in the hand of the marble Apollo at Stowe. “All women like all or any praise,” said Lord Byron, who had reason to know the sex. The Princess Amelia, stout, sixty, and “strong as a Brunswick lion,” was pleased to be designated as a “Nymph,” and to be told she had routed Venus from the field. Walpole also presented to Madame de Boufflers a “petite gentillesse,” when she visited Strawberry Hill; and it became the painful duty of the Duc de Nivernois to translate these lines into French, on the occasion of Miss Pelham’s grand fête at Esher Place. The task kept him absorbed and preoccupied most of the day, “lagging behind” while the others made a cheerful tour of the farms, or listened to the French horns and hautboys on the lawn. Finally, when all the guests were drinking tea and coffee in the Belvidere, poor Nivernois was delivered of his verselets, which were received with a polite semblance of gratification, and for the remaining hours his spirit was at peace. But it does seem a hard return to exact for hospitality, and must often have suggested to men of letters the felicity of staying at home.

Miss Seward made it her happy boast that the number and the warmth of Mr. Hayley’s tributes--inserted duly in her album--raised her to a rivalry with Swift’s Stella, or Prior’s Chloe. “Our four years’ correspondence has been enriched with a galaxy of little poetic gems of the first water.” Nor was the lady backward in returning compliment for compliment. That barter of praise, that exchange of felicitation, which is both so polite and so profitable, was as well understood by our sentimental ancestors as it is in this hard-headed age. Indeed, I am not sure that the Muse did not sometimes calculate more closely then than she ventures to do to-day. We know that Canon Seward wrote an elegiac poem on a young nobleman who was held to be dying, but who--perversely enough--recovered; whereupon the reverend eulogist changed the name, and transferred his heartfelt lamentations to another youth whose death was fully assured. In the same business-like spirit Miss Seward paid back Mr. Hayley flattery for flattery, until even the slow-witted satirists of the period made merry over this commerce of applause.

_Miss Seward._ Pride of Sussex, England’s glory,
Mr. Hayley, is that you?

_Mr. Hayley._ Ma’am, you carry all before you,
Trust me, Lichfield swan, you do.

_Miss Seward._ Ode, dramatic, epic, sonnet,
Mr. Hayley, you’re divine!

_Mr. Hayley._ Ma’am, I’ll give my word upon it,
You yourself are all the Nine.

Moore, as became a poet of ardent temperament, wrote the most gallant album verses of his day; for which reason, and because his star of fame rode high, he endured sharp persecution at the hands of admiring but covetous friends. Young ladies asked him in the most offhand manner to “address a poem” to them; and women of rank smiled on him in ballrooms, and confided to him that they were keeping their albums virgin of verse until “an introduction to Mr. Moore” should enable them to request _him_ to write on the opening page. “I fight this off as well as I can,” he tells Lord Byron, who knew both the relentlessness of such demands and the compliant nature of his friend. On one occasion Lady Holland showed Moore some stanzas which Lord Holland had written in Latin and in English, on the subject of a snuff-box given her by Napoleon; bidding him imperiously “do something of the kind,” and adding that she greatly desired a corresponding tribute from Lord Byron. Moore wisely declined to make any promises for Byron (one doubts whether the four lines which that nobleman eventually contributed afforded her ladyship much pleasure), but wrote his own verses before he was out of bed the next morning, and carried them to Holland House, expecting to breakfast with its mistress. He found her, however, in such a captious mood, so out of temper with all her little world, that, although he sat down to the table, he did not venture to hint his hunger; and as no one asked him to eat or drink, he slipped off in half an hour, and sought (his poem still in his pocket) the more genial hospitality of Rosset’s restaurant. Had all this happened twenty years earlier, Moore’s self-esteem would have been deeply wounded; but the poet was by now a man of mark, and could afford to laugh at his own discomfiture.

Moore’s album verses may be said to make up in warmth what they lack in address. Minor poets--minims like William Robert Spencer--surpassed him easily in adroitness; and sometimes won for themselves slender but abiding reputations by expressing with consummate ease sentiments they did not feel. Spencer’s pretty lines beginning,--

Too late I stayed,--forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours:
How noiseless falls the foot of time
That only treads on flowers!

--lines which all our grandmothers had by heart--may still be found in compilations of English verse. Their dexterous allusions to the diamond sparks in Time’s hour-glass, and to the bird-of-paradise plumage in his grey wings, their veiled and graceful flattery, contrast pleasantly with Moore’s Hibernian boldness, with his offhand demand to be paid in kisses for his songs--

That rosy mouth alone can bring
What makes the bard divine;
Oh, Lady! how my lip would sing,
If once ’twere prest to thine.

A discreet young woman might have hesitated to show _this_ album page to friends.

Byron’s “tributes,” when he paid them, were singularly chill. He may have buried his heart at Mrs. Spencer Smith’s feet; but the lines in her album which record this interment are eloquent of a speedy resurrection. When Lady Blessington demanded some verses, he wrote them; but he explained with almost insulting lucidity that his heart was as grey as his head (he was thirty-one), and that he had nothing warmer than friendship to offer in place of extinguished affections. Moore must have wearied painfully of albums and of their rapacious demands; yet to the end of his life he could be harassed into feigning a poetic passion; but Byron stood at bay. He was a hunted creature, and the instinct of self-preservation taught him savage methods of escape.

There are people who, from some delicacy of mental fibre, find it exceedingly difficult to be rude; and there are people who--like Charles Lamb--have a curious habit of doing what they do not want to do, and what they know is not worth doing, for the sake of giving pleasure to some utterly insignificant acquaintance. The first class lacks a valuable weapon in life’s warfare. The second class is so small, and the motives which govern it are so inscrutable, that we are apt to be exasperated by its amiability. It is easy to sympathize with Thackeray, who, being badgered to write in an album already graced by the signatures of several distinguished musicians, said curtly: “What! among all those fiddlers!” This hardy British superciliousness commends itself to our sense of humour, no less than to our sense of self-protection. A great deal has been said, especially by Frenchmen, about the wisdom of polite denials; but a rough word, spoken in time, is seldom without weight in England.

Yet, for a friend, Thackeray found no labour hard. The genial tolerance of “The Pen and the Album” suggests something akin to affection for these pillaging little books when the right people owned them,--when they belonged to “Chesham Place.” Locker tells a pleasant story of meeting Thackeray in Pall Mall, on his way to Kensington, and offering to join him in his walk. This offer was declined, Thackeray explaining that he had some rhymes trotting through his head, and that he was trying to polish them off in the course of a solitary stroll. A few days later they met again, and Thackeray said, “I finished those verses, and they are very nearly being very good. I call them ‘Mrs. Katherine’s Lantern.’ I did them for Dickens’s daughter.”

“Very nearly being very good!” This is an author’s modest estimate. Readers there are who have found them so absolutely good that they leaven the whole heavy mass of album verse. Shall not a century of extortion on the one side and debility on the other be forgiven, because upon one blank page, the property of one thrice fortunate young woman, were written these lines, fragrant with imperishable sentiment:--

When he was young as you are young,
When he was young, and lutes were strung,
And love-lamps in the casement hung.

But when we turn to Lamb, and find him driving his pen along its unwilling way, and admitting ruefully that the road was hard, we see the reverse of the medal, and we resent that inexplicable sweetness of temper which left him defenceless before marauders.

My feeble Muse, that fain her best would
Write at command of Frances Westwood,
But feels her wits not in their best mood.

Why should Frances Westwood have commanded his services? Why should Frances Brown, “engaged to a Mr. White,” have wrung from him a dozen lines of what we should now call “copy”? She had no recognizable right to that copy; but Lamb confided to Mrs. Moxon that he had sent it to her at twenty-four hours’ notice, because she was going to be married and start with her husband for India. Also that he had forgotten what he had written, save only two lines:--

May your fame
And fortune, Frances, Whiten with your name!

of which conceit he was innocently proud.

Mrs. Moxon (Emma Isola) was herself an old and hardened offender. Her album, enriched with the spoils of a predatory warfare, travelled far afield, extorting its tribute of verse. We find Lamb first paying, as was natural, his own tithes, and then actually aiding and abetting injustice by sending the book to Mr. Procter (Barry Cornwall), with an irresistible appeal for support.

“I have another favour to beg, which is the beggarliest of beggings; a few lines of verse for a young friend’s album (six will be enough). M. Burney will tell you who I want ’em for. A girl of gold. Six lines--make ’em eight--signed Barry C----. They need not be very good, as I chiefly want ’em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously obliged by any refuse scraps. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be ‘headstrong lovers of their own wills, having albums.’ I fled hither to escape the albumean persecution, and had not been in my new house twenty-four hours when a daughter of the next house came in with a friend’s album, to beg a contribution, and, the following day, intimated she had one of her own. Two more have sprung up since. ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be.’ New Holland has albums. The age is to be complied with.”

* * * * *

“Ask for this little book a token of remembrance from friends, and from fellow students, and from wayfarers whom you may never see again. He who gives you his name and a few kind words, gives you a treasure which shall keep his memory green.”

So wrote Goethe--out of the abyss of German sentimentality--in his son’s album; and the words have a pleasant ring of good fellowship and unforced fraternity. They are akin to those gracious phrases with which the French monarchy--“despotism tempered by epigram”--was wont to designate the taxes that devoured the land. There was a charming politeness in the assumption that taxes were free gifts, gladly given; but those who gave them knew.

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

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