Part 4 (1/2)
The Academy was not pacified, and began to take counsel how they could turn Furetiere out of their body. There was no precedent for such a degradation, but a parallel was sought for in the fact that the Sorbonne had successfully ejected one of its most famous doctors, Arnauld. Meanwhile the suit went on, the Thirty-nine versus the One.
Furetiere is said to have bowed for a moment beneath the storm, offering to blend his work in the general Dictionary of the Academy, or to remove from it all words not admitted to deal technically with art and science. But pa.s.sion had gone too far, and on the 22nd of January, 1685, at a general meeting, twenty Academicians being present, Furetiere was expelled from the body by a majority of nineteen to one. It is believed that the one who voted for mercy was the most ill.u.s.trious of all, Racine. Boileau and Bossuet also defended the Abbe, and when the matter became at last so serious that the King himself was obliged to take cognisance of it, it was understood that his sympathies also were with Furetiere.
My little volume (written, I think, in 1687) does not know anything about the expulsion, which was therefore probably secret. It says: ”As to Monsieur Furetiere, he no longer puts in an appearance at the meetings of the Academy, but it is not known whether any other Academician is to be elected in his place.” As a matter of fact, the society hesitated to go so far as this, and the seat was left vacant.
Not for long, however; the unanimous rancour of so many men of influence and rank had successfully ruined the fortune and broken the spirit of the old piratical lexicographer. Before retiring into private life, however, he poured out in his _Couches de l'Academie_ a torrent of poison, which was distilled through the presses of Amsterdam in 1687. One of his earlier colleagues at the Academy supplied the bankrupt man with the necessaries of life, until, on the 14th of May, 1688, probably just as the ”dumpy twelve” was pa.s.sing through the press, he died in Paris like a rat in a hole. His Dictionary, being suppressed in France, was edited, after his death, in 1690, at The Hague and Rotterdam, and enjoyed a great success. We learn from a letter of Racine to Boileau that in 1694 the publisher ventured to offer a copy of a new edition of it to the King of France, and that it was graciously received. If the poor old man could have struggled on a little longer he might have lived to see himself become fas.h.i.+onable and successful again.
With all his misfortunes he managed to beat the Academy, for that body, in spite of its superhuman efforts, did not contrive to publish its Dictionary till four years after the appearance of Furetiere's.
The latter is a great curiosity of lexicography, a vast storehouse of peculiar and rare information. It is always consulted by scholars, but never without a recollection of the extraordinary struggle which its author sustained, singlehanded, against the world, and in which he fell, overpowered by numbers, only to triumph after all in the ashes of his fame.
LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS
MISCELLANY POEMS. _With Two Plays. By Ardelia.
I never list presume to Parna.s.s hill, But piping low, in shade of lowly grove, I play to please myself, albeit ill.
Spencer Shep. Cal. June.
Ma.n.u.script in folio. Circa_ 1696.
There is no other book in my library to which I feel that I possess so clear a presumptive right as to this ma.n.u.script. Other rare volumes would more fitly adorn the collections of bibliophiles more learned, more ingenious, more elegant, than I. But if there is any person in the two hemispheres who has so fair a claim upon the ghost of Ardelia, let that man stand forth. Ardelia was uncultivated and unsung when I const.i.tuted myself, years ago, her champion. With the exception of a n.o.ble fragment of laudation from Wordsworth, no discriminating praise from any modern critic had stirred the ashes of her name. I made it my business to insist in many places on the talent of Ardelia. I gave her, for the first time, a chance of challenging public taste, by presenting to readers of Mr. Ward's _English Poets_ many pages of extracts from her writings; and I hope it is not indiscreet to say that, when the third volume of that compilation appeared, Mr. Matthew Arnold told me that its greatest revelation to himself had been the singular merit of this lady. Such being my claim on the consideration of Ardelia, no one will, I think, grudge me the possession of this unknown volume of her works in ma.n.u.script. It came into my hands by a strange coincidence. In his brief life of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea--for that was Ardelia's real name--Theophilus Gibber says, ”A great number of our auth.o.r.ess' poems still continue unpublished, in the hands of the Rev. Mr. Creake.” In 1884 I saw advertised, in an obscure book-list, a folio volume of old ma.n.u.script poetry. Something excited my curiosity, and I sent for it. It proved to be a vast collection of the poems of my beloved Anne Finch. I immediately communicated with the bookseller, and asked him whence it came. He replied that it had been sold, with furniture, pictures and books, at the dispersing of the effects of a family of the name of Creake. Thank you, divine Ardelia! It was well done; it was worthy of you.
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, is not a commanding figure in history, but she is an isolated and a well-defined one. She is what one of the precursors of Shakespeare calls ”a diminutive excelsitude.”
She was entirely out of sympathy with her age, and her talent was hampered and suppressed by her conditions. She was the solitary writer of actively developed romantic tastes between Marvell and Gray, and she was not strong enough to create an atmosphere for herself within the vacuum in which she languished. The facts of her life are extremely scanty, although they may now be considerably augmented by the help of my folio. She was born about 1660, the daughter of a Hamps.h.i.+re baronet. She was maid of honour to Mary of Modena, d.u.c.h.ess of York, and at Court she met Heneage Finch, who was gentleman of the bed-chamber to the Duke. They married in 1685, probably on the occasion of the enthronement of their master and mistress, and when the crash came in 1688, they fled together to the retirement of Eastwell Park. They inhabited this mansion for the rest of their lives, although it was not until the death of his nephew, in 1712, that Heneage Finch became fourth Earl of Winchilsea. In 1713 Anne was at last persuaded to publish a selection of her poems, and in 1720 she died. The Earl survived her until 1726.
My ma.n.u.script was written, I think, in or about the year 1696--that is to say, when Mrs. Finch was in retirement from the Court. She has adopted the habit of writing,
_Betrayed by solitude to try Amus.e.m.e.nts, which the prosperous fly_.
But her exile from the world gives her no disquietude. It seems almost an answer to her prayer. Years before, when she was at the centre of fas.h.i.+on in the Court of James II., she had written in an epistle to the Countess of Thanet:
_Give me, O indulgent Fate, Give me yet, before I die, A sweet, but absolute retreat, 'Mongst paths so lost, and trees so high, That the world may ne'er invade, Through such windings and such shade, My unshaken liberty_.
This was a sentiment rarely expressed and still more rarely felt by English ladies at the close of the seventeenth century. What their real opinion usually was is clothed in crude and ready language by the heroines of Wycherley and Shadwell. Like Lucia, in the comedy of _Epsom Wells_, to live out of London was to live in a wilderness, with bears and wolves as one's companions. Alone in that age Anne Finch truly loved the country, for its own sake, and had an eye to observe its features.
She had one trouble, const.i.tutional low spirits: she was a terrible sufferer from what was then known as ”The Spleen.” She wrote a long pindaric Ode on the Spleen, which was printed in a miscellany in 1701, and was her first introduction to the public. She talks much about her melancholy in her verses, but, with singular good sense, she recognised that it was physical, and she tried various nostrums.
Neither tea, nor coffee, nor ratafia did her the least service:
_In vain to chase thee every art I try, In vain all remedies apply, In vain the Indian leaf infuse, Or the parched eastern berry bruise, Or pa.s.s, in vain, those bounds, and n.o.bler liquors use_.
Her neurasthenia threw a cloud over her waking hours, and took sleep from her eyelids at night:
_How shall I woo thee, gentle Rest, To a sad mind, with cares oppress'd?
By what soft means shall I invite Thy powers into my soul to-night?
Yet, gentle Sleep, if thou wilt come, Such darkness shall prepare the room As thy own palace overspreads,-- Thy palace stored with peaceful beds,-- And Silence, too, shall on thee wait Deep, as in the Turkish State; Whilst, still as death, I will be found, My arms by one another bound, And my dull limbs so clos'd shall be As if already seal'd by thee_.
She tried a course of the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but without avail. When the abhorred fit came on, the world was darkened to her.