Part 6 (1/2)

There is no respite for the emotions from Eliza's first page to her last. The implacable Douxmoure (for such was her singular name) ”continued for some time in a Condition little different from Madness; but when Reason had a little recovered its usual Sway, a deadly Melancholy succeeded Pa.s.sion.” When Bevillia tried to explain to her cousin that Emilius was no fit suitor for her hand, the young lady swooned twice before she seized Bevillia's ”cruel meaning;” and then--ah! then--”silent the stormy Pa.s.sions roll'd in her tortured Bosom, disdaining the mean Ease of raging or complaining. It was a considerable time before she utter'd the least Syllable; and when she did, she seem'd to start as from some dreadful Dream, and cry'd, 'It is enough--in knowing one I know the whole deceiving s.e.x'”; and she began to address an imaginary Women's Rights Meeting.

Plot was not a matter about which Eliza Haywood greatly troubled herself. A contemporary admirer remarked, with justice:

'_Tis Love Eliza's soft Affections fires; Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires; 'Tis Love that gives D'Elmont his manly Charms, And tears Amena from her Father's Arms_.

These last-named persons are the hero and heroine of _Love in Excess; or The Fatal Inquiry_, which seems to have been the most popular of the whole series. This novel might be called _Love Through a Window_; for it almost entirely consists of a relation of how the gentleman prowled by moonlight in a garden, while the lady, in an agitated disorder, peeped out of her lattice in ”a most charming Dishabillee.”

Alas! there was a lock to the door of a garden staircase, and while the lady ”was paying a Compliment to the Recluse, he was dextrous enough to slip the Key out of the Door unperceived.” Ann Lang!--”a sudden cry of Murder, and the noise of clas.h.i.+ng Swords,” come none too soon to save those blushes which, we hope, you had in readiness for the turning of the page! Eliza Haywood a.s.sures us, in _Idalia_, that her object in writing is that ”the Warmth and Vigour of Youth may be temper'd by a due Consideration”; yet the moralist must complain that she goes a strange way about it. Idalia herself was ”a lovely Inconsiderate” of Venice, who escaped in a ”Gondula” up ”the River Brent,” and set all Vicenza by the ears through her ”stock of Haughtiness, which nothing could surmount.” At last, after adventures which can scarcely have edified Ann Lang, Idalia abruptly ”remember'd to have heard of a Monastery at Verona,” and left Vicenza at break of day, taking her ”unguarded languishments” out of that city and out of the novel. It is true that Ann Lang, for 2s., bought a continuation of the career of Idalia; but we need not follow her.

The perusal of so many throbbing and melting romances must necessarily have awakened in the breast of female readers a desire to see the creator of these tender scenes. I am happy to inform my readers that there is every reason to believe that Ann Lang gratified this innocent wish. At all events, there exists among her volumes the little book of the play sold at the doors of Drury Lane Theatre, when, in the summer of 1724, Eliza Haywood's new comedy of _A Wife to be Lett_ was acted there, with the author performing in the part of Mrs. Graspall. The play itself is wretched, and tradition says that it owed what little success it enjoyed to the eager desire which the novelist's readers felt to gaze upon her features. She was about thirty years of age at the time; but no one says that she was handsome, and she was undoubtedly a bad actress, I think the disappointment that evening at the Theatre Royal opened the eyes of Ann Lang. Perhaps it was the appearance of Eliza in the flesh which prevented her old admirer from buying _The Secret History of Cleomina, suppos'd dead_, which I miss from the collection.

If Ann Lang lived on until the publication of _Pamela_--especially if during the interval she had bettered her social condition--with what ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all its shortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps she went to Vauxhall with it in her m.u.f.f, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of her acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novel after another break forth to lighten the darkness of life. She must have looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza Haywood, with their long-drawn palpitating intrigues, with positive disgust.

The English novel began in 1740, and after that date there was always something wholesome for Ann Lang and her sisters to read.

CATS

LES CHATS. _A Rotterdam, chez Jean Daniel Beman, MDCCXXVIII_.

An accomplished lady of my acquaintance tells me that she is preparing an anthology of the cat. This announcement has reminded me of one of the oddest and most entertaining volumes in my library. People who collect prints of the eighteenth century know an engraving which represents a tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of a gentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a volume. The volume is _Les Chats_, the book before us, and the portrait is that of the author, the amiable and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif. He was the son of English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so much in fas.h.i.+on in France. Somebody said of him, when he was famous as the laureate of the cats, that he had risen in life by never scratching, by always having velvet paws, and by never putting up his back, even when he was startled. Voltaire called him ”my very dear Sylph,” and he was the ideal of all that was noiseless, graceful, good-humoured, and well-bred. He slipped un.o.btrusively into the French Academy, and lived to be eighty-three, dying at last, like Anacreon, in the midst of music and dances and fair nymphs of the Opera, affecting to be a sad old rogue to the very last.

This book on Cats, the only one by which he is now remembered, was the sole production of his lifetime which cost him any annoyance. He was forty years of age when it appeared, and the subject was considered a little frivolous, even for such a _pet.i.t conteur_ as Moncrif. People continued to tease him about it, and the only rough thing he ever did was the result of one such twitting. The poet Roy made an epigram about ”cats” and ”rats,” in execrable taste, no doubt; this stung our Sylph to such an excess that he waited outside the Palais Royal and beat Roy with a stick when he came out. The poet was, perhaps, not much hurt; at all events, he had the presence of mind to retort, ”Patte de velours, patte de velours, Minon-minet!” It was six years after this that Moncrif was elected into the French Academy, and then the shower of epigrams broke out again. He wished to be made historiographer; ”Oh, nonsense,” the wits cried, ”he must mean historiogriffe” and they invited him, on nights when the Academy met, to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimneypots. He had the weakness to apologise for his charming book, and to withdraw it from circulation. His pastoral tales and heroic ballets, his _Zelindors_ and _Zelodes_ and _Erosines_, which to us seem utterly vapid and frivolous, never gave him a moment's uneasiness. His crumpled rose-leaf was the book by which his name lives in literature.

The book of cats is written in the form of eleven letters to Madame la Marquise de B----. The anonymous author represents himself as too much excited to sleep, after an evening spent in a fas.h.i.+onable house, where the company was abusing cats. He was unsupported; where was the Marquise, who would have brought a thousand arguments to his a.s.sistance, founded on her own experience of virtuous p.u.s.s.ies? Instead of going to bed he will sit up and indite the panegyric of the feline race. He is still sore at the prejudice and injustice of the people he has just left. It culminated in the conduct of a lady who declared that cats were poison, and who, ”when p.u.s.s.y appeared in the room, had the presence of mind to faint.” These people had rallied him on the absurdity of his enthusiasm; but, as he says, the Marquise well knows, ”how many women have a pa.s.sion for cats, and how many men are women in this respect.”

So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its elegant pedantry, its paradoxical wit, its genuine touches of observation and its constant sparkle of anecdote. He is troubled to account for the existence of the cat. An Ottoman legend relates that when the animals were in the Ark, Noah gave the lion a great box on the ear, which made him sneeze, and produce a cat out his nose. But the author questions this origin, and is more inclined to agree with a Turkish Minister of Religion, sometime Amba.s.sador to France, that the ape, ”weary of a sedentary life” in the Ark, paid his attentions to a very agreeable young lioness, whose infidelities resulted in the birth of a Tom-cat and a Puss-cat, and that these, combining the qualities of their parents, spread through the Ark _un esprit de coquetterie_--which lasted during the whole of the sojourn there. Moncrif has no difficulty in showing that the East has always been devoted to cats, and he tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted one day on a point of piety, preferred to cut off his sleeve, on which his favourite p.u.s.s.y was asleep, rather than wake her violently by rising.

From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good many curious tributes to the ”harmless, necessary cat.” I am seized with an ambition to put some fragments of these into English verse. Most of them are highly complimentary. It is true that Ronsard was one of those who could not appreciate a ”matou.” He sang or said:

_There is no man now living anywhere Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I; I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare, And when I see one come, I turn and fly_.

But among the _precieuses_ of the seventeenth century there was much more appreciation. Mme. Deshoulieres wrote a whole series of songs and couplets about her cat, Grisette. In a letter to her husband, referring to the attentions she herself receives from admirers, she adds:

_Deshoulieres cares not for the smart Her bright eyes cause, disdainful hussy, But, like a mouse, her idle heart Is captured by a p.u.s.s.y_.

Much better than these is the sonnet on the cat of the d.u.c.h.ess of Lesdiguieres, with its admirable line:

_Chatte pour tout le monde, et pour les chats tigresse_.

A fugitive epistle by Scarron, delightfully turned, is too long to be quoted here, nor can I pause to cite the rondeau which the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine addressed to her favourite. But she supplemented it as follows:

_My pretty puss, my solace and delight, To celebrate thy loveliness aright I ought to call to life the bard who sung Of Lesbia's sparrow with so sweet a tongue; But 'tis in vain to summon here to me So famous a dead personage as he, And you must take contentedly to-day This poor rondeau that Cupid wafts your way_.

When this cat died the d.u.c.h.ess was too much affected to write its epitaph herself, and accordingly it was done for her, in the following style, by La Mothe le Vayer, the author of the _Dialogues_:

_Puss pa.s.ser-by, within this simple tomb Lies one whose life fell Atropos hath shred; The happiest cat on earth hath heard her doom, And sleeps for ever in a marble bed.

Alas! what long delicious days I've seen!

O cats of Egypt, my ill.u.s.trious sires, You who on altars, bound with garlands green, Have melted hearts, and kindled fond desires,-- Hymns in your praise were paid, and offerings too, But I'm not jealous of those rights divine.

Since Ludovisa loved me, close and true, Your ancient glory was less proud than mine.