Curiosities of Impecuniosity Part 13

"Humph! Not every leaf made out, hey?--not every blade of gra.s.s? What else? Out with it, man."

"Why then--a--His--His Majesty thinks--a--that the price is--is--is a great deal of money."

Wilson took him by the b.u.t.ton-hole, looked cautiously round, and in a comical whisper said,--

"Tell His Majesty I do not wish to distress him, I will take it by instalments--say a guinea a week."

Neglect and disappointment soured Wilson's temper, and made him a very surly, irritable man, sometimes quite misanthropical; as well they might, considering his great talents and his extreme poverty. It is said that one of his most famous historical paintings, on which he had expended many months of thought and labour, was sold under the influence of absolute necessity for a pot of beer, and the remains of a Stilton cheese!

Mortimer, an artist who used to sometimes occupy an armchair by Wilson's fireside, and there hear him in splenetic humour moralise like another melancholy Jaques, making cynical strictures upon that scoundrel man, would say, "Come, come, my old Trojan--come, old boy--I wish I could set you purring like old puss there."

Angelo tells how a friend of Dr. Johnson's, hearing of Wilson's distress, said to Mr. Taylor, the artist, "I wish I knew how to send him ten pounds in some delicate way which could not give him offence. Do you think he has some very trifling sketch I could buy for that sum? I have no taste for pictures, but I would give him a commission if my income were not too slender. I am so distressed that so great a genius should be entirely without means." Taylor told this story delicately to Wilson, who was much touched by it, and said, "I have no sc.r.a.p such as your friend desires to have, but if the thing were not bruited about I would be happy to send him one of my easel pictures, which you know I never sell for less than sixteen guineas." The result was that Wilson received the ten pounds, Dr.

Johnson's friend the sixteen-guinea picture, which it is said he gave away the same evening to one of the waiters at Vauxhall.

At the close of his life, when worn out by indifference and neglect, he was reduced to solicit the office of librarian to the Royal Academy, of which he was acknowledged to be one of the brightest ornaments. He died in May 1782, his death accelerated, if not produced, by want; and, sad to state, just previous to his decease, help came to him, when it was, alas, too late!

As is well known, William Hazlitt, the critic, began life as an artist, and was indeed an artist in taste, judgment, and knowledge, all his life.

He speaks of his painter's experience with enthusiasm in one of his papers, saying, "One of the most delightful parts of my life was one fine summer, when I used to walk out of an evening to catch the last light of the sun, gemming the green slopes of the russet lawns, and gilding tower or tree, while the blue sky, gradually turning to purple and gold, or skirted with dusky grey, flung its broad mantle over all, as we see it in the great master of Italian landscape." Hazlitt abandoned the brush for the pen when he found that he could not realize his own conceptions, nor satisfy his own critical judgment; but it is evident from the following extract that his early art-life was not free from the imputation of being impecunious. He says, after receiving the money for a portrait he had finished in great haste for the sake of getting the cash, "I went to market myself and dined on sausages and mashed potatoes; and, while they were getting ready, and I could hear them frying in the pan, read a volume of 'Gil Blas' containing the account of the fair Aurora. This was in the days of my youth. Do not smile, gentle reader. Neither M. de Verry nor Louis XVIII. over an oyster _pate_, nor Apicius himself, ever understood the meaning of the word luxury better than I did at that moment."

Daniel Maclise--the son of a Scotch cobbler, who had been a soldier and had settled in Ireland--was sent adrift in the world at a very early age, and became a bank clerk. In 1828 he came to London, where he succeeded in getting a students.h.i.+p in the Royal Academy. The money which enabled him to do this was earned by a portrait-sketch he made stealthily from Sir Walter Scott, while the great Wizard of the North was in the shop of a bookseller, named Bolster. Bolster afterwards saw the sketch, and showed it to Sir Walter, who, pleased with the lad's talent, attached his autograph to it. The drawing was lithographed, sold in Bolster's shop, and with his share of the profit Maclise started himself in his art career.

Poor Benjamin Haydon--odd compound of greatness and littleness, bravery and cowardice, genius and folly, now patient, now despairing, now bitterly envious and jealous, and anon sympathetically gleeful over a brother's triumph--sipped many a cup of bitterness through his constant state of impecuniosity; which chronic condition, he sorrowfully admits in his diary, was the result of borrowing, as shown by this extract. "Here began debt and obligation, out of which I have never been, and never shall be, extricated as long as I live." Haydon, as I said, was a strange mixture, and though possessed of a nature truly poetical, he was in some things wondrously practical; for the bailiffs put into his house he utilized as models. One sat, he tells us in his diary, "for Ca.s.sandra's head, and put on a Persian bracelet. When the broker came for his money, he burst out laughing. There was the fellow, an old soldier, pointing in the att.i.tude of Ca.s.sandra, upright, and steady as if on guard. Lazarus's head was painted just after an arrest: Eucles finished from a man in possession: the beautiful face in Xenophon in the afternoon after a morning spent in begging mercy of lawyers: and Ca.s.sandra's head was finished in agony not to be described, and her hand completed from a broker's man."

Sculptors, like artists, have frequently found art a very hard school; and amongst others of whom this is true may be mentioned Peter Scheemakers, the master Nollekens studied under. When a youth, so fervent was his desire to study in Rome, that he actually endured the fatigue of travelling from Antwerp into Italy on foot. Unfortunately in Denmark he fell sick, and when again fit for the road, he was compelled to sell his s.h.i.+rts from his knapsack to procure food; but he was none the less joyous when, footsore, haggard, and hungry, he at last entered the Eternal City.

This was in 1700. The fine figure of King Edward VI., which used to stand in the courtyard of St. Thomas's Hospital, was the production of Scheemakers.

Another sculptor whose history furnishes something curious in connection with impecuniosity is John Bacon, who, born in 1740, commenced life as an ordinary workman in a Lambeth pottery, where he taught himself to paint on china. Afterwards he went as modeller to Mrs. Coade's artificial stone manufactory, and when he began to display remarkable talent as a sculptor, Johnson, who built Berners Street, was very kind to him. He took premises for him in Newman Street, and told him to start at once in business for himself. Young Bacon was astonished, and frightened. "How could you do so?" he exclaimed. "I am not fit for anything of the kind. How can I ever hope to pay you the money back?" Johnson, however, insisted upon the trial being made, and said he was quite willing to lose the money if Bacon were never able to repay him. The result was that Bacon flourished so well that when his first great benefactor had become a banker in Bond Street, and feared a serious run upon his house, the sculptor came forward eagerly to his aid with a loan of forty thousand pounds!

This was truly a freak of fortune, and as a companion picture may be mentioned a freak of misfortune, which is attributed to Capitsoldi, a talented sculptor, who came from Italy to this country in the last century. It is a.s.serted that when he was living in a garret in Warwick Street, Golden Square, he had no furniture beyond a table and two chairs; but he painted on the walls a suite of furniture with window curtains, pictures, and statuary in such excellent perspective, and with such an aspect of relief and solidity, that the mean apartment actually appeared to be most handsomely and completely furnished.

To return to our subject--the impecuniosity of artists. The experience of John Zoffany, R.A., may be cited. He came to England from Frankfort in 1735, and about that time there was a celebrated maker of musical clocks, named Rimbault, living in Great St. Andrew's Street, who was asked one day by some one he employed if he could find work for a poor starving artist who occupied a garret in the same house. Rimbault desired the man to send him, and Zoffany was ultimately engaged to paint clock faces. A portrait he painted of Rimbault won him a better engagement of 40 a year as a.s.sistant to a portrait painter named Benjamin Wilson, who was employed by Garrick, the actor. Garrick, being struck by the sudden and remarkable improvement which immediately ensued, suspected the truth, and, causing enquiries to be made, discovered Zoffany, employed him direct, introduced him to his wealthy friends, and gave him that new start in life which brought him fame and honour, and made Sir Joshua Reynolds his friend.

Zoffany is now chiefly known in connection with his excellent character-portraits of famous old actors and actresses.

The last, but by no means the least celebrated of the artists I shall mention, whose fortunes, or the reverse, have been curiously a.s.sociated with lack of means, is James Barry--at whose state funeral in St. Paul's Churchyard poor Wilkie cut such a queer figure in Haydon's coat. Barry was as eccentric as he was poor. Unlike Richard Wilson, to display his poverty was a matter of pride rather than pain; open reproach to those who neglected his talent, and embittered his life, rather than shame to him.

His house at 36, Castle Street, Oxford Market, was a standing disgrace to the thoroughfare, every window in it was either cracked or broken, and part of the roof had fallen in. The iron railing before it was rusty for want of paint, broken, and sloping partly inward and partly outward; the doorsteps were cracked and broken, the door thickly coated with mud and dirt. The room in which he painted had been a carpenter's shop, and the dust-covered shavings were still in it, while cobwebs hung like thick dust-coloured drapery from beams and rafter, and were suspended in festoons from every corner, while here and there the daylight shot long rays into its dingy, dust-laden atmosphere, through holes where the tiles had been broken, or had slipped aside. It had a small fireplace just large enough for the glue-pot it was constructed for, and boasted one three-legged old deal table, hardly large enough to eat a meal from. Here he painted, and etched, and printed his own proofs from a little old printing press; and here he received the Right Honourable Edmund Burke on that memorable occasion when he was, at his own particular request, invited to dine with the painter, and take "pot luck."

Barry owed much to the generosity of Burke, who had been one of his earliest friends and patrons. It is said that he once quarrelled with the great statesman for attacking the then anonymous work 'An Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful,' every line of which the young Irish painter, being unable to buy the book, had copied, and he would entirely have lost control of his temper if Burke had not with a laugh transformed his rage into a whirlwind of delight and pa.s.sionate admiration, by confessing himself its author.

When Burke arrived, on the evening appointed, at the ruinous, dirty, shabby house in Castle Street, Barry had altogether forgotten the appointment. However he ushered him into his studio-wilderness of dust and cobwebs, gave him a seat, made up the fire, which was smoking, and while it burnt up, went out to purchase some steak, and brought it in wrapped in a cabbage leaf. Placing the meat on a gridiron, he spread a towel over the little round table, and on it placed a couple of plates, a salt-cellar, a little roll of bread, and a dish, which nearly filled it; then, putting the tongs into his visitor's hands, bade him turn the steak while he went out to fetch the beer. He came back quickly, swearing and grumbling at the wind because it had blown off the frothy head of the stout as he was crossing t.i.tchfield Street, and produced from his pocket a couple of bottles of port. The meal was enjoyed, the evening pa.s.sed merrily; and Burke afterwards confessed that he had never enjoyed himself more, nor eaten more heartily, even at the most sumptuous feast.

Owing to his impecunious circ.u.mstances, Barry had been accustomed to take his meals in cookshops and coffee-houses of the cheaper kind; and Angelo notes as one of his eccentricities his always insisting upon paying for his meal at coffee or cookshop rate wherever he might chance to feed. On one occasion he was invited to dine with Sir William Beechy and some n.o.ble guests, and rose at nine o'clock to depart, having as usual placed two s.h.i.+llings upon the table where he had been sitting. The lively knight, who knew "his customer," followed him from the dining-room into the hall, leaving the door of the former open that his friends might hear.

"What are these for?" asked Sir William, presenting the coins.

"How can you put so preposterous a question? For my dinner to be sure, man."

"But two s.h.i.+llings is not fair compensation, Barry. Surely it was worth a crown."

"Baw-baw, man! You know I never pay more."

"But you have not paid for your wine."

"Shu-shu! If you can't afford it, why do you give it? Painters have no business with wine."

"Barry," says Angelo, "who boasted of making his dinner on a biscuit and an apple, had no mercy for those who lessened their means by self-indulgence. He was once highly indignant with a lord, who when dining at 'Old Slaughter's' in St. Martin's Lane--a famous resort of artists and their patrons--had straw laid down before the house to deaden the noise of pa.s.sing vehicles."

He used to say, as he may have said on the memorable evening with Burke, "Half the common dishes would supersede turtle and venison, if your old, pampered peers and mighty patricians were to peep and peer into their own cook's pot."

CHAPTER VIII.

IMPECUNIOSITY OF AUTHORS.

That memory of William Makepeace Thackeray upon which I care least to dwell is the low estimate he had of men of genius in his own profession.

It may be that this was with him, as it was with Doctor Johnson, a species of mock modesty; but it is none the less unpleasant for one to remember who so enthusiastically admires his great works. Men of letters have never lacked more than enough to slander them and magnify their peccadilloes, to sneer at their pride, and lower their social status, without finding such enemies in their own camp. You may remember how, in his lectures on the English humourists of the last century, Thackeray denied that there was any lack of goodwill and kindness towards men of genius in this country, or that they often failed to meet with generous and helping hands in the time of their necessity. Ignoring all but men of one cla.s.s (whose follies and vices were after all those of their age), and painting these in his darkest colours and most repulsive forms, he asked,--

"What claim had one of these of whom I have been speaking but genius?

What return of grat.i.tude, fame, affection, did it not bring to all?

What punishment befell those who were unfortunate among them but that which follows reckless habits and careless lives? For these faults a wit must suffer like the dullest prodigal that ever ran in debt. He must pay the tailor if he wears the coat; his children must go in rags if he spends his money at the tavern; he can't come to London and be made Lord Chancellor if he stops on the road and gambles away his last s.h.i.+lling at Dublin, and he must pay the social penalty of these follies, too, and expect that the world will shun the man of bad habits; that women will avoid the man of loose life; that prudent folks will close their doors as a precaution, and before a demand should be made on their pockets by the needy prodigal."

There is no gainsaying all this, it is so highly respectable, and I would endorse its application as heartily as those did who once so loudly applauded it, if (and there is, you know, _much_ virtue in an "if") the discouragement spoken of had really been awarded to the vices and follies and not to the genius; whereas it must be patent to all who have studied the social life of the last century, as Thackeray did, that the direct reverse of this was the case--that such bad habits and such loose lives were absolutely the chief conditions upon which the wits of society were patronised and encouraged. Therefore a degree of hardness and cruelty in the rigid and virtuous superiority of this great writer, who, happily, born in a more refined and purer time, so magnifies the vices of the unfortunate dead, in order to lessen the pity and respect which their greatness won for them. It is this which I do not like to a.s.sociate with the memory of our great novelist.

Poor, half-starved Robert Burns, chained to the oar of impecuniosity, toiling like a galley-slave, as he said, for the means of supporting his parents and seizing every spare moment for such intellectual improvement as was within his reach, had written most of his finest works before the patronage of the great introduced him to their baccha.n.a.lian revels, and carried him as a wonder, and an extraordinary novelty (a peasant poet), into the very best Edinburgh society for a season; during which, by dining out with the n.o.ble and great, he ran a serious risk of dying at home through starvation.

It can hardly be said that eighteenth-century patronage and appreciation did much for him, or for us. It won him perhaps the dangerous and trying occupation of exciseman, at a salary of 70 a year: it matured, if it did not absolutely create, the bad habits which plunged him into pecuniary cares and difficulties, weakened his intellectual stamina, and destroyed his self-respect. He was witty, eloquent, amusing, a genius, and a wonder; but when he ceased to be a novelty, the idol of society was ruthlessly cast aside, to live or die, any how he could, and we find him copying music to procure food for himself and those dear to him. Dissipation and trouble carried him off in the prime of his manhood, and the full maturity of his genius, when without such patronage as Thackeray believed in, seemingly, he might have achieved triumphs loftier than those in the full pride of which every patriot has a share.

An extract from a letter written by Burns to Thomson on the 19th of July, 1796, says:

"After all my boasted independence, cursed necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process and will infallibly put me in jail. Do for G.o.d's sake send me that sum, and by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness; but the horrors of a jail have made me half disheartened; I do not ask all this gratuitously; for upon returning health I promise, and engage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen."

Robert Bloomfield did not find those generous and helpful friends of genius whom the imagination of Thackeray created to people the eighteenth century. He, like Burns, was a farmer's boy, who afterward became a shoemaker's errand-boy, living in a garret at 7, Fisher's Court, Coleman Street, in which he and four others, one being his brother, worked, and slept on "turn-up" beds. There he fetched the dinners from the cookshop, did the inferior part of the work, and ran errands; taught himself to read by the aid of borrowed newspapers and a little dictionary, bought for him at a second-hand stall, for fourpence, by one of his fellow-workers, and by listening to an eloquent dissenting minister named Fawcett, acquired the proper p.r.o.nunciation of words. He began verse-writing at sixteen, and at that age also began to instruct his brother and his partners in the Fisher's Court garret (for which they paid five s.h.i.+llings a week), and in another "parlour next the sky" in Blue Hart Court, Bell Alley, where a fellow-lodger made him inexpressibly happy by the loan of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and Thomson's 'Seasons.' When he fell in love with a young woman named Church, daughter of a boat-builder in the Government Yard at Woolwich, he sold his most precious possession (to purchase which he had practised much self-denial), his fiddle, on which he had taught himself to play. Writing to his brother, he said, "I have sold my fiddle and got a wife."

His brother says, "Like most poor men, he got a wife first, and had to get household stuff afterwards." It took him some years to get out of ready furnished lodgings. At length, by hard working, etc., he acquired a bed of his own, and hired the room up one pair of stairs at 14, Bell Alley, Coleman Street; and there, as he worked unaided by costly writing materials, amongst the noise and bustle of seven other workmen who, conjointly with himself, had hired a garret in the same house as their work-room, he composed his famous poem 'The Farmer's Boy,' the latter portion of his 'Autumn,' and the whole of his 'Winter.' Not a line of either was committed to paper before each was corrected, altered, improved, and finally completed.

The poet Crabbe was another eighteenth-century genius who failed to find the generous, ever-ready patronage and friends.h.i.+p, whereof Thackeray said, "It would hardly be grateful to alter my old opinion that we (men of letters) do meet with good will and kindness, with generous and helping hands, in the time of our necessity; with cordial and friendly recognition." Having failed in his medical practice at Aldborough, in Suffolk, where, in 1789 he was born, Crabbe borrowed five pounds, and with that sum came to London. Taking lodgings near the Exchange, he began his literary career full of hope and vigour. But the booksellers, Dodsley and Becket, civilly declined his productions; and when he published some poems cheaply at his own expense his publisher failed; and the poor poet's little, carefully husbanded money being exhausted, he applied to Lord North for a.s.sistance,--in vain. Then he addressed verses to Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who said in reply, "his avocations did not leave him leisure to read verse." For a time he lived by selling his clothes, and p.a.w.ning his watch and surgical instruments; then his books were reluctantly sold, and then debt came, and he was threatened with imprisonment. In the midst of these anxious cares, fears, and sufferings, with starvation staring him in the face, he bade the muse a sorrowful adieu, and sought work as a druggist's a.s.sistant. He had but eightpence in the world when he wrote to Edmund Burke, and himself left the letter at that eminent statesman's house in Charles Street. Begging letters from starving poets and literary men were familiar enough in those days, and Burke received more than his fair share of them. Crabbe has himself told us how, weary, penniless, and hungry, being afraid to go back to his lodging, he traversed Westminster Bridge all throughout the night following the delivery of that letter until daybreak. The letter itself, a memorable curiosity of impecuniosity, I here append:

"_To Edmund Burke, Esq._

"SIR,--I am sensible that I need even your talents to apologize for the freedom I now take, but I have a plea which, however simply urged, will with a mind like yours, sir, procure me pardon. I am one of those outcasts on the world who are without a friend, without employment, without bread.

"Pardon me a short preface. I had a partial father who gave me a better education than his broken fortune would have allowed, and a better than was necessary, as he could give me that only. I was designed for the profession of Physic; but not having the wherewithal to complete the necessary studies, the design but served to convince me of a parent's affection and the error it had occasioned. In April last I came to London with three pounds, and flattered myself this would be sufficient to supply me with the common necessaries of life till my abilities should procure me more; of these I had the highest opinion, and a poetical vanity contributed to my delusion. I knew little of the world and had read books only. I wrote, and fancied perfection in my compositions; when I wanted bread they promised me affluence and soothed me with dreams of reputation, whilst my appearance subjected me to contempt. In time reflection and want have shown me my mistake. I see my trifles in that which I think the true light, and whilst I deem them such have yet the opinion that holds them superior to the common run of poetical publications.

"I had some knowledge of the late Mr. Na.s.sau, the brother of Lord Rochford; in consequence of which I asked his lords.h.i.+p's permission to inscribe my little work to him, knowing it to be free from all political allusions and personal abuse. It was no material point to me to whom it was dedicated, his lords.h.i.+p thought it none to him, and obligingly consented to my request.

"I was told a subscription would be the more profitable method for me, and therefore endeavoured to circulate copies of the enclosed proposals.