Читать книгу: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876», страница 16
T.S. PERRY.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP
A REMINISCENCE OF MACAULAY
It was in June, 1857, that I had the good fortune to meet Macaulay at dinner at the house of my dear friend, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, then principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea. The brilliant career of the great talker and essayist was drawing to its close, and it is partly on this account that I make now what record I can of my single meeting with him. He was beginning to give up society, so that only at the houses of his oldest friends was there any chance of seeing him. Besides the especial attraction of Macaulay's presence it was an interesting company that was gathered that evening around my friend's hospitable board. One felt that the English dinner, that choicest of all opportunities for exchange of thought, was here to be enjoyed in high perfection. Among the guests were Mr. Blore, an elderly gentleman, one of whose distinctions was that he had been a friend of Sir Walter Scott and the architect of Abbotsford; Mr. Helmore, the well-known writer on choral music; Mr. Tremenheere, who had traveled in America and had written on the subject of education in our country; and Mr. Herbert Coleridge, the gifted son of Sara Coleridge—young man of the highest promise, who had taken a double first-class at Oxford. Alas! that his mother, herself of such brilliant powers, had not lived to know of this high achievement of her son!—she whose love and thought for her children, and unwearied efforts for their intellectual advancement, are so abundantly shown in the Memoir and Letters which her daughter has lately published! Alas! too, that the son for whom such high hopes had been cherished, and whose opening manhood was of such promise, was himself cut off three years after the time of which I now write! Miss Edith Coleridge, the other child of Sara Coleridge, was also present. She was even then meditating the memoir of her mother, that work of filial duty which three years ago she accomplished with a grace and propriety beyond all praise.
Of my host, Mr. Derwent Coleridge, and of Mrs. Coleridge, my dear and honored friends of so many years, I must not permit myself to speak. I may note only the brilliant conversational power of Mr. Coleridge, and the fact that as I listen to him I perfectly understand the marvelous gifts in this way of his father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Again and again I have been held as if under a spell by the flowing stream of his delightful monologue. He had been the friend in boyhood of Macaulay, and almost the first published words of the afterward famous writer had appeared in conjunction with a like youthful effort of Derwent Coleridge. Mr. Coleridge has been the biographer of Winthrop Praed and the editor of his poems, and only a year ago he published a touching tribute to John Moultrie. These two poets were also the companions in youth of Macaulay, and each was in a way a stimulus to the others in their first intellectual efforts. My place at the table was just opposite to Macaulay, and I need not say with what keen interest I looked at him and watched his countenance as he became animated in conversation. His face was round, and his complexion was colorless, one might almost say pallid: his hair, which appeared to have been of a brownish hue, had become almost white. He was no doubt then beginning to break in health, and perhaps this, which could only be called a premature decay, was the penalty he was at length paying for the years he had spent in India. His neck was short, and his figure was short and ungainly. His eye had a quick flash, and his change of expression was rapid; his head, too, had a quick movement; and altogether there was a look of vivacity which showed that his intellect was as keen as ever. He was always ready to speak, whatever the subject, but he showed no disposition to take all the talk. There was no moment of pause in the flowing after-dinner discussions, for our host, as well as several of his guests, was abundantly able to hold his own with this marvelous and every way delightful talker—this prince in the domain of London social life.
There was some conversation about Nollekens the sculptor, whose inordinate love of money was such a curious blemish in his character. Macaulay told one or two stories illustrating his parsimony. Then he came to speak of art in general, and said he did not think the faculty for it a high gift of mind. This opinion was strongly combated by Mr. Blore the architect and others, but I remember Macaulay gave, as in some sort an illustration of his theory, a story of Grant the portrait-painter, then of chief eminence in London. Cornewall Lewis was to sit to him, and Grant, knowing he had written books, desired to get at least a smattering of them before the sittings began. But some one, perhaps mischievously, told him Lewis was the author of The Monk, and this book he accordingly read. He took an early opportunity to refer to it to his sitter, who to his no small discomfiture disclaimed it. As conclusive proof of the truth of this denial, Lewis stated further that the book was written before he was born. Everybody was amused that Cornewall Lewis, so famous for abstruse learning, should have deemed it necessary to appeal thus to dates to show he was not the author of a novel.
Macaulay persisted in his theory that artistic power was not an intellectual faculty, but I could not quite determine whether he was not putting it forth as mere paradox. One could fancy the paroxysm of rage into which Haydon would have been thrown had such a theory been advanced in his presence; or Fuseli, who, as Haydon reports, exclaimed, on first seeing the Elgin Marbles, with his strange accent, "Those Greeks, they were godes." But the thought of Michel Angelo and of Lionardo was a sufficient answer to the theory.
Macaulay, in further support of his general proposition, maintained that a man might be a great musical composer and yet not in the true sense a man of genius. He instanced Mozart, who, he said, was not claimed to have been of high intellectual ability. Mr. Herbert Coleridge said he thought this a mistake, but he urged that full details were wanting in regard to his mental capacity as shown in other ways than in music. Macaulay replied that Mozart was the Raphael of music, and was both a composer and a wonderful performer at the age of six. "Now," said he, "we cannot conceive of any one being a great poet at the age of six: we hear nothing of Shakespeare or Milton at the age of six."
The conversation turned to Homer and the question whether the Homeric poems were the product of one mind. Macaulay maintained they were. It was inconceivable, he said, that there could have been at the Homeric period five or six poets equal to the production of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Great poets appeared at long intervals. As he reckoned them, there had been but six given to the world—Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Sophocles and Æschylus. With the exception of the last two, there had been great spaces of time between these. Could it be supposed that at the very dawn of history there was a group, as it were, of men each in the highest degree gifted with "the vision and the faculty divine"? Then as to the Iliad and Odyssey being both the production of Homer: if we admitted one to be, that the other was would follow as a matter of course. It was the old test of Paley over again—the finding the watch, and the presumption from it of a maker; and in this case there was the watchmaker's shop close by. He urged, too, that Homer was the only great poet who did not in narrating past events use the present tense—speak of them as if happening at the moment. He quoted long passages from Paradise Lost to show how Milton would fall into the present tense, though he might have begun in the past. The fact that throughout the many thousand lines of Homer no instance of the sort could be found seemed to make it clear that but one mind produced them. It was very interesting to hear Macaulay recite Milton, for whom he had such passionate admiration. He made quotations also from Burns and from old ballads in illustration of some theory which I do not recall, but showing his wonderful memory. He had, indeed, an altogether marvelous facility in producing passages as he might need them for whatever subject he was discussing. Greville, writing of him in 1836, says that he displayed feats of memory unequaled by any other human being, and that he could repeat all Milton and all Demosthenes and a great part of the Bible. "But his great forte," Greville adds, "is history, especially English history. Here his superhuman memory, which appears to have the faculty of digesting and arranging, as well as of retaining, has converted his mind into a mighty magazine of knowledge, from which, with the precision and correctness of a kind of intellectual machine, he pours forth stores of learning, information, precept, example, anecdote and illustration with a familiarity and facility not less astonishing than delightful."
Our evening was all too short. The talk had never flagged, and so the time had gone quickly by. I may note that in the discussions about Homer, Mr. Herbert Coleridge had shown the utmost familiarity with the subject, making him seem in this respect quite on a level with Macaulay.
The time came for us to join the ladies in the drawing-room, but Macaulay's carriage was announced, and he declined going up stairs again, saying that his shortness of breath warned him it was dangerous to do so. This symptom was doubtless due to that affection of the heart which two years and a half later ended his life. As I have said, he was beginning to give up dining out on account of his failing health. But his delight was as great as ever in the society of his near friends among men of letters, and these he continued to gather at the breakfasts he had long been in the habit of giving—Dean Milman, Lord Stanhope, the bishop of St. Davids (Thirlwall), our host, Mr. Coleridge, and others. Occasionally he gave dinners to two persons. His apartments were in Piccadilly, at what is known as the Albany. His emoluments from his Indian appointment were ten thousand pounds a year, and though he held the position little more than three years, it was understood that his savings from it gave him an income of a thousand pounds. This was before his English History brought him in its great returns. His Parliamentary life, Mr. Coleridge said, had not been a success: he did good to neither party—indeed, was dangerous to both. I may note a characteristic remark of his which was mentioned to me by Mr. Coleridge: it was to the effect that what troubled us most in life were the lesser worries and vexations: great perplexities and calamities we somehow nerved ourselves to contend with. "If a thousand megatheriums were let loose upon the world, in twenty-four hours they would all be in museums."
E.Y.
UNVEILING KEATS'S MEDALLION
I have just returned from a little ceremony of which I think that the readers of these pages will be pleased to have some permanent record—the uncovering of the medallion portrait of Keats, which Mr. Warrington Wood, the well-known sculptor, has generously given for the purpose of adorning his tomb. I have recorded in a previous number of this Magazine the steps which were taken last year for putting the poet's celebrated grave and gravestone in a proper state of repair, and the singular circumstances that showed how on both sides of the Atlantic a similar thought had with truly curious simultaneousness occurred to the lovers of the poet's memory. The very striking scene which took place to-day marked the completion of the purposes which were then inaugurated.
A printed notice had invited all English and Americans in Rome, interested in the subject, to attend at the English cemetery at three o'clock, the day having been fixed by the fact that it was the anniversary of the day of Keats's death. It was also, as it happened, the second day of our boisterous and rollicking Carnival, and those who attended had to absent themselves from the attractions of the Corso. Nevertheless, the gathering was a large one, and the contrast between the scene passing in that remote and quiet corner of old Rome under the cypresses and in the shade of the pyramid of Caius Cestius, and that which was at the same time being enacted in the Corso, was about as great as can well be conceived. We had it all to ourselves. With the exception of the coachmen, who remained lazily dozing on the boxes of the carriages which had brought us from the living Rome of to-day to this far-away spot, there was not a soul on the ground save English and Americans.
It must be quite needless to remind those who have ever seen it of the features of that most poetically suggestive spot, and I can hardly hope to enable any who have not seen it to form an adequate idea of its exceeding beauty. It is just within the city wall, niched in an angle of it, in the immediate vicinity of the Porta San Sebastiano, but it is difficult to imagine that one is within the limits of a great city; and it was especially so when the noise and racket of a city in Carnival time had just been left behind one. But the fact is, that large tracts of space, utterly uninhabited and unoccupied save by scattered masses of the ruins of ancient Rome, lie between the inhabited parts of the modern city and this far corner. The most marked characteristic of the spot is its perfect quietude. The ivy-grown city-wall, a group of fine cypresses, a few stone-pines with their lovely velvet-like verdure, the gray old pyramid of Caius Cestius immediately behind the cemetery, and a glimpse of the dreamy-looking Alban Hills on the farther side of the Campagna, make up a landscape which no artistic eye can rest on without being deeply penetrated by the charm of it. February as it was, the day might have been deemed a summer day anywhere to the northward of the Alps. It was the very perfection of weather—warm, genial, still, and breathing the sweet breath of a thousand wild flowers. The violets which abundantly covered the grave were in full blossom, even as they had bloomed beneath those old walls when the sight of them there had induced the poet, prescient of his coming end, to wish that he might sleep his long sleep beneath them.
When we had all taken our places, and a eucalyptus plant, sent for the purpose by Mr. Marsh, the American minister, had been planted on the turf just behind the grave, the sheet which covered the medallion was withdrawn, and a murmur of pleasure and admiration ran through the crowd as they looked on the strikingly characteristic and individualized presentment of the young poet's very remarkable and striking features. I had seen the medallion before, and was therefore at liberty to watch the effect which it produced on others; and I was struck by the evidences in the faces of those around me that it spoke very clearly to the hearts and imaginations of the spectators.
General Sir Vincent Eyre, who had chiefly undertaken the trouble of directing all that had been done for putting the gravestone into perfect repair, adorning it with flowers and plants, and putting up the medallion, was on the ground together with Miss Clarke, who had been entrusted with a similar labor of love from America, and who had co-operated "heart and hand," as Sir Vincent said, with him throughout the whole business. As soon as the pleased murmur of the crowd had subsided he stepped in front of the persons assembled and gave a succinct account of what had been done, and a narrative of the singular coincidence which had led to our co-heirs in the legacy bequeathed to us by the poet being co-operators in the work. He concluded a very neat and appropriate address by stating that the subscriptions sent in for the restoration of the grave had left a sum of about sixty pounds sterling in his hands, and that he proposed that this should be augmented by about as much more, which would suffice to place a bust of the poet in Westminster Abbey. The proposal met with the warm approval of the assembly, and it was determined that Dr. Stanley, the dean of Westminster, should at once be communicated with on the subject.
An interesting and affecting letter from Mr. Severn, the loving and faithful friend of Keats, was read by Sir Vincent Eyre with much feeling. It contained a few simple words to the effect that the writer would much have wished to be present on the occasion of the unveiling of the medallion, but that he feared to be overcome by the pathos of the circumstances, strong emotions not being easily borne at the age of eighty-two years. There were many moistened eyes in the assembly as Sir Vincent read the communication from the poet's venerable friend and survivor.
T.A.T.
GINO CAPPONI
GINO CAPPONI, whose death, on the 3d of February last, has been noticed in all the principal journals of Europe and America, belonged to a family that has been honored in Florence for more than five hundred years, and whose name occurs on almost every page of its history. He was born in that city on the 14th of September, 1792. His name in full was Gino Alessandro Giuseppe Gaspero, but no one ever heard of him save as Gino. At seven years of age he shared the exile of his parents, who followed their sovereign, the grand duke Ferdinand, when he was driven from his dominions by the victorious arms of France. He was little more than twenty when he went as a member of the embassy sent to Napoleon I. immediately after the battle of Leipsic, on which occasion he is recorded to have had a long conversation with the emperor. After the restoration of the Tuscan sovereign at the fall of Napoleon he traveled extensively in England, Germany and France. Returning to his country, he was continually eager in using his large hereditary wealth for the promotion of education among all classes of his countrymen. He was one of the principal founders and supporters of the celebrated periodical, the Antologia, which played so large and conspicuous a part in preparing the public mind for the awakening which finally issued in that resuscitation of Italy which we have all witnessed.
In 1841 he mainly contributed to the foundation of the Archivio Storico Italiano, the fruitful parent of various other publications of the same kind which have within the last thirty years done infinitely more for students of Italian history than all the three centuries which preceded them. The famous bookseller Vieusseux, who himself did much and suffered much in the cause of the nascent Italian liberties, undertook the material portion of this enterprise, which was rewarded by a large measure of literary success, and by the fear and enmity of the oppressors of Italy throughout the Peninsula.
Capponi, however, would fain have avoided revolution could it have been avoided without sacrificing liberty. In July, 1847, when the general state of Europe was bringing home to the minds of rulers the cogent necessity of becoming reformers or of vanishing, Capponi was made a councillor of state, and at the close of that year was employed by the grand duke to draw up a scheme of representative institutions for Tuscany. To give anything approaching to a complete account of Capponi's activity during the troubled period which followed would be to write the history of Tuscany during that period. The general progress of affairs was precisely that which history has had so often to recount. The sovereign, frightened, obstinate, and little able to appreciate the forces opposed to him, was wavering, fickle, timid, yet stubborn, and, above all, untrustworthy. The people were bent on pushing matters to extremes to which those who had so far been their leaders were unwilling to go, and, as usual, the best of those leaders were shunted from the road, happy if they were able, as Capponi was, to retire in safety to the tranquil seclusion of studious life. When, after the flight of the grand duke from his dominions and his subsequent restoration by Austrian bayonets, a regular government was once more established in Florence, Capponi was constant, though wholly unconnected with public life officially, in tendering counsel to the grand duke which, had it been listened to, might have saved his throne and changed all the future of Italy. But he was disregarded, and even suspected; and, as we all know, the end came in the memorable 1859. After the union of Italy under Victor Emmanuel, Capponi was at once named a senator and decorated with all the honors the sovereign had to bestow. But, alas! they were bestowed on a blind old man, whose misfortune incapacitated him from taking any part in public life. From the time when the Italian revolution was consummated the life of Gino Capponi was that of a retired and laborious student. The loss of his sight by no means involved in his case the abandonment of literary labor; and his last great work, published but a year or two ago, the History of the Republic of Florence, is the second great historical work which in our own time has been produced by an author deprived of eyesight.
Capponi began his literary life at twenty by the publication in 1812 of Observations on a Critical Examination of Amerigo Vespucci's First Voyage to the New World: he ended it, as has been said, by the publication at eighty of his Florentine History. To give even the titles of all the works he published in the interim would occupy more than two of these columns. He has left in manuscript a History of the Church during the First Centuries and Records of the Years 1814-16, 1821, 1831, 1847-49. It is to be hoped that the latter of these works will see the light: Capponi's account of the memorable years in question would be no small boon to the historian.
It is needless to say that the funeral, and obsequies of this great citizen were surrounded by every observance that could help to mark the nation's sense of the greatness of the loss it had sustained. It would be hardly possible to name a corner of Italy that has not by deputation or special official message sought to associate itself with the task of doing him honor.
T.A.T.
