The Bon Gaultier Ballads
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William Edmonstoune Aytoun >> The Bon Gaultier Ballads
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9 THE BOOK OF BALLADS
EDITED BY
BON GAULTIER
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES_
ILLUSTRATED BY
DOYLE, LEECH, AND CROWQUILL
NEW EDITION
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMIV
_All Rights reserved_
PREFACE.
A further edition of this book--the sixteenth--having been called for, I
have been asked by the publishers to furnish a preface to it. For
prefaces I have no love. Books should speak for themselves. Prefaces
can scarcely be otherwise than egotistic, and one would not willingly add
to the too numerous illustrations of this tendency with which the
literature of the day abounds. I would much rather leave the volume with
the simple "Envoy" which I wrote for it when the Bon Gaultier Ballads
were first gathered into a volume. There the products of the dual
authorship of Aytoun and myself were ascribed to the Bon Gaultier under
whose editorial auspices they had for the most part seen the light. But
my publishers tell me that people want to know why, and how, and by which
of us these poems were written,--curiosity, complimentary, no doubt, but
which it is by no means easy for the surviving bard to satisfy. It is
sixty years since most of these verses were written with the light heart
and fluent pen of youth, and with no thought of their surviving beyond
the natural life of ephemeral magazine pieces of humour. After a long
and very crowded life, of which literature has occupied the smallest
part, it is difficult for me to live back into the circumstances and
conditions under which they were written, or to mark, except to a very
limited extent, how far to Aytoun, and how far to myself, separately, the
contents of the volume are to be assigned. I found this difficult when I
wrote Aytoun's Life in 1867, and it is necessarily a matter of greater
difficulty now in 1903.
I can but endeavour to show how Aytoun and I came together, and how for
two or three years we worked together in literature. Aytoun (born 21st
June 1813) was three years older than myself, and he was known already as
a writer in 'Blackwood's Magazine' when I made his acquaintance in 1841.
For some years I had been writing in Tait's and Fraser's Magazines, and
elsewhere, articles and verses, chiefly humorous, both in prose and
verse, under the _nom de guerre_ of Bon Gaultier. This name, which
seemed a good one for the author of playful and occasionally satirical
papers, had caught my fancy in Rabelais, {vii} where he says of himself,
"A moy n'est que honneur et gloire d'estre diet et repute Bon Gaultier et
bon Compaignon; en ce nom, suis bien venue en toutes bonnes compaignees
de Pantagruelistes."
It was to one of these papers that I owed my introduction to Aytoun.
What its nature was may be inferred from its title--"Flowers of Hemp; or,
The Newgate Garland. By One of the Family." Like most of the papers on
which we subsequently worked together, the object was not merely to
amuse, but also to strike at some prevailing literary craze or vitiation
of taste. I have lived to see many such crazes since. Every decade
seems to produce one. But the particular craze against which this paper
was directed was the popularity of novels and songs, of which the
ruffians of the Newgate Calendar were the accepted heroes. If my memory
does not deceive me, it began with Harrison Ainsworth's 'Rookwood,' in
which the gallantries of Dick Turpin, and the brilliant description of
his famous Ride to York, caught the public fancy. Encouraged by the
success of this book, Ainsworth next wooed the sympathies of the public
for Jack Sheppard and his associates in his novel of that name. The
novel was turned into a melodrama, in which Mrs Keeley's clever
embodiment of that "marvellous boy" made for months and months the
fortunes of the Adelphi Theatre; while the sonorous musical voice of Paul
Bedford as Blueskin in the same play brought into vogue a song with the
refrain,
"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"
which travelled everywhere, and made the patter of thieves and burglars
"familiar in our mouths as household words." It deafened us in the
streets, where it was as popular with the organ-grinders and German bands
as Sullivan's brightest melodies ever were in a later day. It clanged at
midday from the steeple of St Giles, the Edinburgh cathedral; {ix} it was
whistled by every dirty "gutter-snipe," and chanted in drawing-rooms by
fair lips, that, little knowing the meaning of the words they sang,
proclaimed to their admiring friends--
"In a box of the stone jug I was born,
Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn;
My noble father, as I've heard say,
Was a famous marchant of capers gay;"
ending with the inevitable and insufferable chorus,
"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"
Soon after the Newgate Calendar was appealed to for a hero by the author
of 'Pelham,' who had already won no small distinction, and who in his
'Paul Clifford' did his best to throw a halo of romance around the
highwayman's career. Not satisfied with this, Bulwer next claimed the
sympathies of his readers for Eugene Aram, and exalted a very common type
of murderer into a nobly minded and highly sentimental scholar. Crime
and criminals became the favourite theme of a multitude of novelists of a
lower class. They even formed the central interest of the 'Oliver Twist'
of Charles Dickens, whose Fagin and his pupil "the Artful Dodger," Bill
Sykes and Nancy, were simultaneously presented to us in their habits as
they lived by the genius of George Cruikshank, with a power that gave a
double interest to Dickens's masterly delineation of these worthies.
The time seemed--in 1841--to have come to open people's eyes to the
dangerous and degrading taste of the hour, and it struck me that this
might be done by pushing to still further extravagance the praises which
had been lavishly bestowed upon the gentlemen whose career generally
terminated in Newgate or on the Tyburn Tree, and by giving "the
accomplishment of verse" to the sentiments and the language which formed
the staple of the popular thieves' literature of the circulating
libraries. The medium chosen was the review of a manuscript, supposed to
be sent to the writer by a man who had lived so fully up to his own
convictions as to the noble vocation of those who set law at defiance,
and lived by picking pockets, burglary, and highway robbery, diversified
by an occasional murder, that, with the finisher of the law's assistance,
he had ended his exploits in what the slang of his class called "a
breakfast of hartichoke with caper sauce." How hateful the phrase! But
it was one of many such popularly current in those days.
The author of my "Thieves' Anthology" was described in my paper as a
well-born man of good education, who, having ruined himself by his bad
habits, had fallen into the criminal ranks, but had not forgotten the
_literae humaniores_ which he had learned at the Heidelberg University.
Of the purpose with which he had written he spoke thus in what I
described as the fragments of a preface to his Miscellany:--
"To rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around
the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the
Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to
clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,'
and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the
general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage
and the drawing-room, has been the aim and the achievement of many
recent authors of distinction. How they have succeeded, let the
populous state of the public jails attest. The office of 'dubsman'
[hangman] has ceased to be a sinecure, and the public and Mr Joseph
Hume have the satisfaction of knowing that these useful functionaries
have now got something to do for their salaries. The number of their
pupils has increased, is increasing, and is not likely to be
diminished. But much remains to be done. Many an untenanted cell
still echoes only to the sighs of its own loneliness. New jails are
rising around us, which require to be filled. The Penitentiary
presently erecting at Perth is of the most commodious description.
"In this state of things I have bethought myself of throwing, in the
words of Goethe, 'my corn into the great seed-field of time,' in the
hope that it may blossom to purposes of great public utility. The
aid of poetry has hitherto been but partially employed in the spread
of a taste for Conveyancing, especially in its higher branches. Or
where the Muse has shown herself, it has been but in the evanescent
glimpses of a song. She has plumed her wings for no sustained
flight. . . .
"The power of poetry over the heart and impulses of man has been
recognised by all writers from Aristotle down to Serjeant Talfourd.
In dexterous hands it has been known to subvert a severe chastity by
the insinuations of a holy flame, to clothe impurity in vestments
'bright with something of an angel light,' to exalt spleen into
elevation of soul, and selfishness into a noble scorn of the world,
and, with the ringing cadences of an enthusiastic style, to ennoble
the vulgar and to sanctify the low. How much may be done, with an
engine of such power, in increasing the numbers of 'The Family' may
be conceived. The Muse of Faking, fair daughter of the herald
Mercury, claims her place among 'The Mystic Nine.' Her language,
erewhile slumbering in the pages of the Flash Dictionary, now lives
upon the lips of all, even in the most fashionable circles. Ladies
accost crossing-sweepers as 'dubsmen'; whist-players are generally
spoken of in gambling families as '_dummy_-hunters'; children in
their nursery sports are accustomed to 'nix their dolls'; and the all
but universal summons to exertion of every description is 'Fake
away!'
"'Words are things,' says Apollonius of Tyana. We cannot be long
familiar with a symbol without becoming intimate with that which it
expresses. Let the public mind, then, be in the habit of associating
these and similar expressions with passages of poetical power, let
the ideas they import be imbedded in their hearts and glorified in
their imaginations, and the fairest results may with confidence be
anticipated."
In song and sonnet and ballad these views were illustrated and enforced.
They served the purpose of the ridicule which it was hoped might operate
to cure people of the prevailing toleration for the romance of the slums
and the thieves' kitchen. Naturally parody was freely used. Wordsworth
did not escape. His
"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour,"
found its echo in
"Turpin, thou shouldst be living at this hour,
England hath need of thee," &c.
And his "Great men have been among us," &c., was perverted into
"Great men have been among us,--Names that lend
A lustre to our calling; better none;
Maclaine, Duval, Dick Turpin, Barrington,
Blueskin and others, who called Sheppard friend.
. . . .
. . . Now, 'tis strange,
We never see such souls as we had then;
Perpetual larcenies and such small change!
No single cracksman paramount, no code,
No master spirit, that will take the road,
But equal dearth of pluck and highwaymen!"
Nor did even Shelley's magnificent sonnet "Ozymandias" escape the profane
hand of the burglar poet. He wrote,--
"I met a cracksman coming down the Strand,
Who said, 'A huge Cathedral, piled of stone,
Stands in a churchyard, near St Martin's Le Grand,
Where keeps Saint Paul his sacerdotal throne.
A street runs by it to the northward. There
For cab and bus is writ 'No Thoroughfare,'
The Mayor and Councilmen do so command.
And in that street a shop, with many a box,
Upon whose sign these fateful words I scanned:
'My name is Chubb, who makes the Patent Locks;
Look on my works, ye burglars, and despair!'
Here made he pause, like one that sees a blight
Mar all his hopes, and sighed with drooping air,
'Our game is up, my covies, blow me tight!'"
The versatile genius of the poet was equally at home in the simpler lyric
region of the Haynes Bayley school. Taking for his model the favourite
drawing-room ballad of the period, "She wore a wreath of roses the night
that first we met," he made a parody of its rhythmical cadence the medium
for presenting some leading incidents in the career of a Circe of "the
boozing ken," as thus,--
"She wore a rouge like roses the night that first we met;
Her lovely mug was smiling o'er mugs of heavy wet;
Her red lips had the fulness, her voice the husky tone,
That told her drink was of a kind where water was unknown."
Then after a few more glimpses of this charming creature in her downward
progress, the bard wound up with this characteristic close to her public
life,--
"I saw her but a moment, but methinks I see her now,
As she dropped the judge a curtsey, and he made her a bow."
But it would be out of place to dwell longer upon those reckless
imitations. The only poem which ultimately found a place in the Bon
Gaultier volume was "The Death of Duval."
The paper was a success. Aytoun was taken by it, and sought an
introduction to me by our common friend Edward Forbes the eminent
Naturalist, then a leading spirit among the students of the Edinburgh
University, beloved and honoured by all who knew him. Aytoun's name was
familiar to me from his contributions to 'Blackwood's Magazine,' and I
was well pleased to make his acquaintance, which rapidly grew into
intimate friendship, as it could not fail to do with a man of a nature so
manly and genial, and so full of spontaneous humour, as well as of marked
literary ability. His fancy had been caught by some of the things I had
written in this and other papers under the name of Bon Gaultier, and when
I proposed to go on with articles in a similar vein, he fell readily into
the plan and agreed to assist in it. Thus a kind of Beaumont and
Fletcher partnership was formed, which commenced in a series of humorous
papers that were published in Tait's and Fraser's Magazines during the
years 1842, 1843, and 1844. In these papers appeared, with a few
exceptions, the verses which form the present volume. They were only a
portion, but no doubt the best portion, of a great number of poems and
parodies which made the chief attraction of papers under such headings as
"Puffs and Poetry," "My Wife's Album," "The Poets of the Day," and
"Cracknels for Christmas."
In the last of these the parody appeared under the name of "The Jilted
Gent, by Theodore Smifzer," which, as "The Lay of the Lovelorn," has
become perhaps the most popular of the series. I remember well Aytoun
bringing to me some ten or a dozen lines of admirable parody of "Locksley
Hall." That poem had been published about two years before, and was at
the time by no means widely known, but was enthusiastically admired by
both Aytoun and myself. What these lines were I cannot now be sure, but
certainly they were some of the best in the poem. They were too good to
appear as a fragment in the paper I was engaged upon, and I set to work
to mould them into the form of a complete poem, in which it is now known.
It was introduced in the paper thus:--
"There is a peculiar atrocity in the circumstances which gave rise to
the following poem, that stirs even the Dead Sea of our
sensibilities. The lady appears to have carried on a furious
flirtation with the bard--a cousin of her own--which she, naturally
perhaps, but certainly cruelly, terminated by marrying an old East
Indian nabob, with a complexion like curry powder, innumerable lacs
of rupees, and a woful lack of liver. A refusal by one's cousin is a
domestic treason of the most ruthless kind; and, assuming the
author's statement to be substantially correct, we must say that the
lady's conduct was disgraceful. What her sensations must be on
reading the following passionate appeal we cannot of course divine;
but if one spark of feeling lingers in her bosom, she must, for
four-and-twenty hours at least, have little appetite for
mulligatawny."
The reviewer then quotes the poem down to the general commination, ending
with
"Cursed be the clerk and parson,--cursed be the whole concern!"
He then resumes his commentary:--
"This sweeping system of anathema may be consonant to what the
philosophers call a high and imaginative mood of passion, but it is
surely as unjust as any fulminations that ever emanated from the
Papal Chair. No doubt Cousin Amy behaved shockingly; but why, on
that account, should the Bank of England, incorporated by Royal
Charter, or the most respectable practitioner who prepared the
settlements, along with his innocent clerk, be handed over to the
uncovenanted mercies of the foul fiend? No, no, Smifzer, this will
never do! In a more manly strain is what follows."
The remainder of the poem is then given, ending with,
"Rest thee with thy yellow nabob, spider-hearted Cousin Amy!"
and the critic resumes:--
"Bravo, Smifzer! This is the right sort of thing--no wishy-washy
snivelling about a wounded heart and all that kind of stuff, but
savage sarcasm, the lava of a volcanic spirit. In a fine prophetic
strain is that vision of Amy's feelings as the inebriated nawab
stumbles hazily into the drawing-room, steaming fulsomely of chilma!
And that picture of the African jungle, with Smifzer _in puris_
mounted on a high-trotting giraffe, with his twelve dusky brides
around him,--Cruikshank alone could do it justice. But the triumph
of the poem is in the high-toned sentiment of civilisation and moral
duty, which, esteeming 'the grey barbarian' lower than the 'Christian
cad,'--and that is low enough in all conscience,--tears the
captivating delusions of freedom and polygamy from the poet's eyes,
even when his pulse is throbbing at the wildest, and sends him from
the shades of the palm and the orange tree to the advertising columns
of the 'Morning Post.' This is indeed a great poem, and we need only
add that the reader will find something like it in Mr Alfred
Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall.' There has been pilfering somewhere; but
Messieurs Smifzer and Tennyson must settle it between them."
How little did I dream, when writing this, that I should hear the parody
quoted through the years up till now almost as often as the original
poem! Smifzer was wiser than Tennyson, for he never spoiled the effect
of his poem by admitting, like Tennyson in his "Locksley Hall, Sixty
Years After," that it was a good thing that "spider-hearted" Amy threw
him over as she did.
Luckily for us, not a few poets were then living whose style and manner
of thought were sufficiently marked to make imitation easy, and
sufficiently popular for a parody of their characteristics to be readily
recognised. Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" were as familiar in the
drawing-room as in the study. Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," and his
two other fine ballads, were still in the freshness of their fame.
Tennyson and Mrs Browning were opening up new veins. These, with Moore,
Leigh Hunt, Uhland, and others of minor note, lay ready to our hands, as
Scott, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Moore, Wordsworth, and Southey had done
to James and Horace Smith in 1812, when writing the "Rejected Addresses."
Never, probably, were verses thrown off with a keener sense of enjoyment,
and assuredly the poets parodied had no warmer admirers than ourselves.
Very pleasant were the hours when we met, and now Aytoun and now myself
would suggest the subjects for each successive article, and the verses
with which they were to be illustrated. Most commonly this was done in
our rambles to favourite spots in the suburbs of "our own romantic town,"
on Arthur Seat, or by the shores of the Forth, and at other times as we
sat together of an evening, when the duties of the day were over, and
joined in putting line after line together until the poem was completed.
In writing thus for our own amusement we never dreamed that these "nugae
literariae" would live beyond the hour. It was, therefore, a pleasant
surprise when we found to what an extent they became popular, not only in
England, but also in America, which had come in for no small share of
severe though well-meant ridicule. In those days who could say what fate
might have awaited us had we visited the States, and Aytoun been known to
be the author of "The Lay of Mr Colt" and "The Fight with the Snapping
Turtle," or myself as the chronicler of "The Death of Jabez Dollar" and
"The Alabama Duel"? As it was, our transatlantic friends took a liberal
revenge by instantly pirating the volume, and selling it by thousands
with a contemptuous disregard of author's copyright.
For Aytoun the extravagances of melodrama and the feats and
eccentricities of the arena at Astley's amphitheatre had always a
peculiar charm. "The terrible Fitzball," the English Dumas, in quantity,
not quality, of melodrama, Gomersal, one of the chief equestrians, and
Widdicomb, the master of the ring at Astley's, were three of his
favourite heroes. Ducrow, manager of Astley's, the most daring and
graceful of equestrians, and the fair Miss Woolford, the star of his
troupe, had charms irresistible for all lovers of the circus. In
Aytoun's enthusiasm I fully shared. Mine found expression in "The
Courtship of our Cid," Aytoun's in "Don Fernando Gomersalez," in which I
recognise many of my own lines, but of which the conception and the best
part of the verses were his. Years afterwards his delight in the glories
of the ring broke out in the following passage in a
too-good-to-be-forgotten article in 'Blackwood,' which, to those who may
never hope to see in any circus anything so inspiring, so full of an
imaginative glamour, may give some idea of the nightly scenes in the
halcyon days of Astley's:--
"We delight to see, at never-failing Astley's, the revived glories of
British prowess--Wellington in the midst of his staff, smiling
benignantly on the facetious pleasantries of a Fitzroy
Somerset--Sergeant M'Craw of the Forty-Second delighting the _elite_
of Brussels by the performance of the reel of Tullochgorum at the
Duchess of Richmond's ball--the charge of the Scots Greys--the
single-handed combat of Marshal Ney and the infuriated Life-Guardsman
Shaw--and the final retreat of Napoleon amidst a volley of Roman
candles and the flames of an arsenicated Hougomont. Nor is our
gratification less to discern, after the subsiding of the showers of
sawdust so gracefully scattered by that groom in the doeskin
integuments, the stately form of Widdicomb, cased in martial apparel,
advancing towards the centre of the ring, and commanding--with
imperious gesture, and some slight flagellation in return for dubious
compliment--the double-jointed clown to assist the Signora Cavalcanti
to her seat upon the celebrated Arabian. How lovely looks the lady,
as she vaults to her feet upon the breadth of the yielding saddle!
With what inimitable grace does she whirl these tiny banners around
her head, as winningly as a Titania performing the sword exercise!
How coyly does she dispose her garments and floating drapery to hide
the too-maddening symmetry of her limbs! Gods! She is transformed
all at once into an Amazon--the fawn-like timidity of her first
demeanour is gone. Bold and beautiful flushes her cheek with
animated crimson--her full voluptuous lip is more compressed and
firm--the deep passion of the huntress flashing in her lustrous eyes!
Widdicomb becomes excited--he moves with quicker step around the
periphery of his central circle--incessant is the smacking of his
whip--not this time directed against Mr Merriman, who at his ease is
enjoying a swim upon the sawdust--and lo! the grooms rush in, six
bars are elevated in a trice, and over them all bounds the volatile
Signora like a panther, nor pauses until with airy somersets she has
passed twice through the purgatory of the blazing hoop, and then,
drooping and exhausted, sinks like a Sabine into the arms of the
Herculean master, who--a second Romulus--bears away his lovely burden
to the stables, amid such a whirlwind of applause as Kemble might
have been proud to earn."
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