Part 31 (1/2)
One of the first persons who came was Lord Byron's sister, a thin, plain, middle-aged woman, of a very serious countenance, and with very cordial and pleasing manners. The rooms soon filled, and two professed singers went industriously to work in their vocation at the piano; but, except one pale man, with staring hair, whom I took to be a poet, n.o.body pretended to listen.
Every second woman has some strong claim to beauty in England, and the proportion of those who just miss it, by a hair's breadth as it were--who seem really to have been meant for beauties by nature, but by a slip in the moulding or pencilling are imperfect copies of the design--is really extraordinary. One after another entered, as I stood near the door with my old friend Dr. Bowring for a nomenclator, and the word ”lovely” or ”charming,” had not pa.s.sed my lips before some change in the att.i.tude, or unguarded animation had exposed the flaw, and the hasty homage (for homage it is, and an idolatrous one, that we pay to the beauty of woman), was coldly and unsparingly retracted.
From a G.o.ddess upon earth to a slighted and unattractive trap for matrimony is a long step, but taken on so slight a defect sometimes, as, were they marble, a sculptor would etch away with his nail.
I was surprised (and I have been struck with the same thing at several parties I have attended in London), at the neglect with which the female part of the a.s.semblage is treated. No young man ever seems to dream of speaking to a lady, except to ask her to dance. There they sit with their mamas, their hands hung over each other before them in the received att.i.tude; and if there happens to be no dancing (as at Bulwer's), looking at a print, or eating an ice, is for them the most enlivening circ.u.mstance of the evening. As well as I recollect, it is better managed in America, and certainly society is quite another thing in France and Italy. Late in the evening a charming girl, who is the reigning belle of Naples, came in with her mother from the opera, and I made the remark to her. ”I detest England for that very reason,”
she said frankly. ”It is the fas.h.i.+on in London for the young men to prefer everything to the society of women. They have their clubs, their horses, their rowing matches, their hunting and betting, and everything else is a _bore_! How different are the same men at Naples!
They can never get enough of one there! We are surrounded and run after,
”'Our poodle dog is quite adored, Our sayings are extremely quoted,'
”and really, one feels that one _is_ a belle.” She mentioned several of the beaux of last winter who had returned to England. ”Here I have been in London a month, and these very men that were dying for me, at my side every day on the _Strada Nuova_, and all but fighting to dance three times with me of an evening, have only left their cards! Not because they care less about me, but because it is 'not the fas.h.i.+on'--it would be talked of at the club, it is 'knowing' to let us alone.”
There were only three men in the party, which was a very crowded one, who could come under the head of _beaux_. Of the remaining part, there was much that was distinguished, both for rank and talent. Sheil, the Irish orator, a small, dark, deceitful, but talented-looking man, with a very disagreeable squeaking voice, stood in a corner, very earnestly engaged in conversation with the aristocratic old Earl of Clarendon.
The contrast between the styles of the two men, the courtly and mild elegance of one, and the uneasy and half-bred, but shrewd earnestness of the other, was quite a study. Fonblanc of the Examiner, with his pale and dislocated-looking face, stood in the door-way between the two rooms, making the amiable with a ghastly smile to Lady Stepney.
The 'bilious Lord Durham,' as the papers call him, with his Brutus head, and grave, severe countenance, high-bred in his appearance, despite the worst possible coat and trowsers, stood at the pedestal of a beautiful statue, talking politics with Bowring; and near them, leaned over a chair the Prince Moscowa, the son of Marshal Ney, a plain, but determined-looking young man, with his coat b.u.t.toned up to his throat, unconscious of everything but the presence of the Honorable Mrs. Leicester Stanhope, a very lovely woman, who was enlightening him in the prettiest English French, upon some point of national differences. Her husband, famous as Lord Byron's companion in Greece, and a great liberal in England, was introduced to me soon after by Bulwer; and we discussed the Bank and the President, with a little a.s.sistance from Bowring, who joined us with a paean for the old general and his measures, till it was far into the morning.
LETTER LXXIII.
BREAKFAST WITH BARRY CORNWALL--LUXURY OF THE FOLLOWERS OF THE MODERN MUSE--BEAUTY OF THE DRAMATIC SKETCHES GAINS PROCTOR A WIFE--HAZLITT'S EXTRAORDINARY TASTE FOR THE PICTURESQUE IN WOMEN--COLERIDGE'S OPINION OF CORNWALL.
Breakfasted with Mr. Procter (known better as Barry Cornwall). I gave a partial description of this most delightful of poets in a former letter. In the dazzling circle of rank and talent with which he was surrounded at Lady Blessington's, however, it was difficult to see so shrinkingly modest a man to advantage, and with the exception of the keen gray eye, living with thought and feeling, I should hardly have recognised him, at home, for the same person.
Mr. Procter is a barrister; and his ”whereabout” is more like that of a lord chancellor than a poet proper. With the address he had given me at parting, I drove to a large house in Bedford square; and, not accustomed to find the children of the Muses waited on by servants in livery, I made up my mind as I walked up the broad staircase, that I was blundering upon some Mr. Procter of the exchange, whose respect for his poetical namesake, I hoped would smooth my apology for the intrusion. Buried in a deep morocco chair, in a large library, notwithstanding, I found the poet himself--choice old pictures, filling every nook between the book-shelves, tables covered with novels and annuals, rolls of prints, busts and drawings in all corners; and, more important for the nonce, a breakfast table at the poet's elbow, spicily set forth, not with flowers or ambrosia, the canonical food of rhymers, but with cold ham and ducks, hot rolls and b.u.t.ter, coffee-pot and tea-urn--as sensible a breakfast, in short, as the most unpoetical of men could desire.
Procter is indebted to his poetry for a very charming wife, the daughter of Basil Montague, well known as a collector of choice literature, and the friend and patron of literary men. The exquisite beauty of the Dramatic Sketches interested this lovely woman in his favor before she knew him, and, far from worldly-wise as an attachment so grounded would seem, I never saw two people with a more habitual air of happiness. I thought of his touching song,
”How many summers, love, Hast thou been mine?”
and looked at them with an inexpressible feeling of envy. A beautiful girl, of eight or nine years, the ”golden-tressed Adelaide,” delicate, gentle and pensive, as if she was born on the lip of Castaly, and knew she was a poet's child, completed the picture of happiness.
The conversation ran upon various authors, whom Procter had known intimately--Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, and others, and of all he gave me interesting particulars, which I could not well repeat in a public letter. The account of Hazlitt's death-bed, which appeared in one of the magazines, he said was wholly untrue. This extraordinary writer was the most reckless of men in money matters, but he had a host of admiring friends who knew his character, and were always ready to a.s.sist him. He was a great admirer of the picturesque in women. He was one evening at the theatre with Procter, and pointed out to him an Amazonian female, strangely dressed in black velvet and lace, but with no beauty that would please an ordinary eye. ”Look at her!” said Hazlitt, ”isn't she fine!--isn't she magnificent? Did you ever see anything more t.i.tianesque?”[12]
After breakfast, Procter took me into a small closet adjoining his library, in which he usually writes. There was just room enough in it for a desk and two chairs, and around were piled in true poetical confusion, his favorite books, miniature likenesses of authors, ma.n.u.scripts, and all the interesting lumber of a true poet's corner.
From a drawer, very much thrust out of the way, he drew a volume of his own, into which he proceeded to write my name--a collection of songs, published since I have been in Europe, which I had never seen.
I seized upon a worn copy of the Dramatic Sketches, which I found crossed and interlined in every direction. ”Don't look at them,” said Procter, ”they are wretched things, which should never have been printed, or at least with a world of correction. You see how I have mended them; and, some day, perhaps, I will publish a corrected edition, since I can not get them back.” He took the book from my hand, and opened to ”The Broken Heart,” certainly the most highly-finished and exquisite piece of pathos in the language, and read it to me with his alterations. It was to ”gild refined gold, and paint the lily.” I would recommend to the lovers of Barry Cornwall, to keep their original copy, beautifully as he has polished his lines anew.
On a blank leaf of the same copy of the Dramatic Sketches, I found some indistinct writing in pencil, ”Oh! don't read that,” said Procter, ”the book was given me some years ago, by a friend at whose house Coleridge had been staying, for the sake of the criticisms that great man did me the honor to write at the end.” I insisted on reading them, however, and his wife calling him out presently, I succeeded in copying them in his absence. He seemed a little annoyed, but on my promising to make no use of them in England, he allowed me to retain them. They are as follows:
”Barry Cornwall is a poet, _me saltem judice_, and in that sense of the word, in which I apply it to Charles Lamb and W.
Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the authors of which, I should not yet feel impelled so to designate.
”The faults of these poems are no less things of hope than the beauties. Both are just what they ought to be: i. e. _now_.
”If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn him that as poetry is the ident.i.ty of all other knowledge, so a poet can not be a great poet, but as being likewise and inclusively an historian and a naturalist in the light as well as the life of philosophy. All other men's worlds are his chaos.