Martin Farquhar Tupper - My Life as an Author

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His discovery, or rather ingenious hypothesis, quite new to me, is, that
some of the one hundred and fifty-four in that collection are by other
writers than Shakespeare, though falsely printed under his name, and
that some more (though by him) were written impersonately in the
characters of Essex and Elizabeth; which would account for an awkward
confusion of the sexes hitherto inexplicable. Mackay thinks that the
publisher included any sonnets by others which he thought worthy of the
great bard, as if they were his, and so caused the injurious and wrong
appropriation; most of them are exquisite, and many undoubtedly
Shakespeare's; some I have said probably by another hand. Critically
speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the
conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes;
but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a
distich. Milton's eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian
sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his model in more than four
hundred instances of very various degrees in merit.

As I am writing a short memoir of my books, I may state that my own
small quarto of sonnets grew out of the "Modern Pyramid."

CHAPTER XIV.

AN AUTHOR'S MIND: PROBABILITIES.

My next book, published by Bentley in 1841, is in some sort a
psychological curiosity,--its title being "An Author's Mind, the Book of
Title-pages;" and when I add that it contains in succession sketches of
thirty-four new brain-children, all struggling together for exit from my
occiput, it may be imagined how impelled I was to write them all down
(fixt, however briefly, in black and white) in order to get rid of them.
The book is printed as "edited" by me; whereas I wrote every word of it,
but had not then the courage to say so, as certain things therein might
well have offended some folks, and I did not wish that. I think I will
give here a bit of the prefatory "Ramble," to show how the emptying out
of my thought-box must have been a most wholesome, a most necessary
relief:--

* * * * *

"Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself. Here
beginneth the trouble of authorship, but it is a trouble causing ease;
ease from thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, which never cease to make one's
head ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night and
reveries by day (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion's
children, or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army),
harassing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, a
definite life,--ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum of
aerial forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded. O happy unimaginable
vacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want of thought! O mental
holiday, now as impossible to me as to take a true schoolboy's interest
in rounders and prisoner's base! An author's mind,--and remember always,
friend, I write in character, so judge not as egotistic vanity merely
the well playing of my _role_,--such a mind is not a sheet of smooth
wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions,--no empty
tenement, but a barn stored to bursting--it is a painful pressure,
constraining to write for comfort's sake,--an appetite craving to be
satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted,--an impetus that longs to
get away, rather than a dormant dynamic--thrice have I (let me confess
it) poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a real author,
real, because, for very peace of mind, involuntary,--but still the
vessel fills,--still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a better
harvest, seeds of foreign growth,--still these Lernaean necks sprout
again, claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and
controvert, to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly it were
enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,--to be fitted with a
colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaides might not
keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to
ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal,
perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often
cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of
a man, fret, wear, worry him,--to be irritable is the conditional tax
laid of old upon an author's intellect; the crowd of internal imagery
makes him hasty, quick, nervous, as a haunted, hunted man--minds of
coarser web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a
texture,--they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a
tougher scabbard,--the river, not content with channel and restraining
banks, overflows perpetually,--the extortionate exacting armies of the
ideal and the causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make a
patriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace. I write
these things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd
increase,--I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and
Elijah with the priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my mental
nurslings; a dire resolve has filled me to effect a premature
destruction of the literary populace superfaetating in my brain,--plays,
novels, essays, tales, homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and
poetics, politics and rhetorics, will I display no more mercy than
sundry commentators of maltreated Aristotle. I will exhibit them in
their state chaotic,--I will addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not
chirp,--I will reveal, and secrets shall not waste me; I will write, and
thoughts shall not batten on me."

The whole volume, as before-mentioned, is an epitome or quintessence of
more than thirty works,--perhaps the best being "The Prior of Marrick,"
a story of idolatry; "Anti-Xurion," a crusade against razors; and "The
Author's Tribunal," an oration; but I confess, not having looked at the
book since my hair was black (and now it is snow-white), and considering
that I wrote it forty-five years ago, I am surprised to find how well
worth reading is my old Author's Mind. It may some day attain a
resurrection: possibly even, in more than the skeleton form of its
present appearance, muscles and skin being added, in a detailed filling
up and finishing of these mere sketches, if only time and opportunity
were given to me. But I much fear at my time of life that my Tragedy of
Nero must remain unwritten, as also my Novel of Charlotte Clopton, and
that thrilling Handbook of the Marvellous; not to mention my abortive
Epic of Home, and sundry essays, satires, and other lucubrations which,
alas! may now be considered addled eggs. In a last word, I somewhat
vaingloriously claim for authorship, as thus:--

_The Cathedral Mind._

"Temple of truths most eloquently spoken,
Shrine of sweet thoughts veil'd round with words of power,
The Author's Mind in all its hallowed riches
Stands a Cathedral; full of precious things--
Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken,
Cloister and aisle, dark crypt and aery tower;
Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches
And secret stores, and heaped-up offerings,
Art's noblest wealth with Nature's fruit and flower.
Paintings and Sculpture, Summer's best, and Spring's,
Its plenitude of pride and praise betoken;
An ever-burning lamp shines in its soul;
Deep music all around enchantment flings;
And God's great Presence consecrates the whole!"

Probabilities.

In this our day, Agnosticism, if not avowed Atheism, seems to be making
great way, and destroying the happiness of thousands. It may be a truth,
though partly an unpleasant one, that "he has no faith who never had a
doubt," even as "he has no hope who never had a fear." Well, in my short
day and in my own small way I seem to have been through everything, and
there was a time when I was much worried with uninvited difficulties and
involuntary unbeliefs. Such troublesome thoughts seemed to come to me
without my wish or will,--and stayed too long with me for my peace:
however, I searched them out and fought them down, and cleared my brain
of such poisonous cobwebs by writing my "Probabilities, an Aid to
Faith;" a small treatise on the antecedent likelihood of everything that
has happened, which did me great good while composing it, and has (to my
happy knowledge from many grateful letters) enlightened and comforted
hundreds of unwilling misbelievers. The book, after four editions, has
now long been out of print; however, certainly I still wish it was in
the hands of modern sceptics for their good. The scheme of the treatise
is briefly this: I begin by showing the antecedent probability of the
being of a God, then of His attributes, and by inference from His
probable benevolence, of His becoming a Creator: then that the created
being inferior to His perfection might fall, in which event His
benevolence would find a remedy. But what remedy? That Himself should
pay the penalty, and effect a full redemption. How? By becoming a
creature, and so lifting up the race to Himself through so generous a
condescension. I show that it was antecedently probable that the
Divinity should come in humble form, not to paralyse our reason by
outward glories,--that He might even die as a seeming malefactor; this
was the guess of Socrates: and that for the trial of our faith there are
likely to be permitted all manner of difficulties and mysteries for us
to gain personal strength by combating and living them down. Many other
topics are touched in this suggestive little treatise, whereanent a few
critiques are available; as thus, "The author has done good service to
religion by this publication: it will shake the doubts of the sceptical,
strengthen the trust of the wavering, and delight the faith of the
confirmed. As its character becomes known, it will deservedly fill a
high place in the estimation of the Christian world."--_Britannia._ And
similarly of other English journals, while the Americans were equally
favourable. Take this characteristic instance, one of many: the
_Brooklyn Eagle_ maintains that "the author is one of the rare men of
the age; he turns up thoughts as with a plough on the sward of
monotonous usage." And _Hunt's Magazine_, New York, commends "this
reasoning with the sceptical, showing that if they consider
probabilities simply, then all the great doctrines of our faith might
reasonably be expected."

* * * * *

An extract from the book itself, as out of print, may be acceptable, the
more so that it takes a new and true view (as I apprehend) of Job and
his restored prosperity:--

"One or two thoughts respecting Job's trial. That he should at last give
way was only probable: he was, in short, another Adam, and had another
fall, albeit he wrestled nobly. Worthy was he to be named among God's
chosen three, 'Noah, Daniel, and Job,' and worthy that the Lord should
bless his latter end. This word brings me to the point I wish to touch
on,--the great compensation which God gave to Job. Children can never be
regarded as other than individualities, and notwithstanding Eastern
feelings about increase in quantity, its quality is, after all, the
question for the heart. I mean that many children to be born is but an
inadequate return for many children dying. If a father loses a
well-beloved son, it is small recompense of that aching void that he
gets another. For this reason of the affections, and because I suppose
that thinkers have sympathised with me in the difficulty, I wish to say
a word about Job's children lost and found. It will clear away what is
to some minds a moral and affectionate objection. Now this is the state
of the case.

"The patriarch is introduced to us as possessing so many camels and
oxen, and so forth, and ten children. All these are represented to him
by witnesses, to all appearance credible, as dead; and he mourns for his
great loss accordingly. Would not a merchant feel to all intents and
purposes a ruined man, if he received a clear intelligence from
different parts of the world at once that all his ships and warehouses
had been destroyed by hurricanes and fire? Faith given, patience
follows: and the trial is morally the same, whether the news be true or
false.

"Remarkably enough, after the calamitous time is past, when the good man
of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his patience by the double
of everything once lost--his children remain the same in number, ten. It
seems to me quite possible that neither camels, &c., nor children,
really had been killed. Satan might have meant it so, and schemed it;
and the singly coming messengers believed it all, as also did the
well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say that these
things happened; but that certain emissaries said they happened. I think
the devil missed his mark--that the messengers were scared by some
abortive diabolic efforts; and that (with a natural increase of camels,
&c., meanwhile) the patriarch's paternal heart was more than compensated
at the last by the restoration of his own dear children. They were dead,
and are alive again; they were lost, and are found. Like Abraham
returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the resurrection in a
figure.

"If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were
real, therefore similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply,
that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the
other, bodily. In the latter case, positive personal pain was the gist
of the matter--in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind
be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction
as the children's deaths amount to. God's mercy may well have allowed
the evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how
double was the joy of Job over these ten dear children!

"Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job
at the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has
ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth,--I must, in answer,
think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us as the verity of it would
have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so numerically nor
vicariously consoled--and it is, perhaps, worth while here to have
thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case, if only to
rescue such wealth as children from the infidel's sneer of being
confounded with such wealth as camels. Moreover, such a paternal reward
was anteriorly more probable."

CHAPTER XV.

THE CROCK OF GOLD, ETC.

The origin of the "Crock of Gold" is so well given in a preface, written
by Mr. Butler of Philadelphia, for his American edition of my works in
1851, that I choose here to reproduce it, as below. Our cousins over the
water were characteristically very fond of the "Crock of Gold," and some
editions of "Proverbial Philosophy" were published by them as "by the
author of the 'Crock of Gold'" on the title-page, whereof I have a copy.
Moreover, it was dramatised and acted at "the Boston Museum, Tremont
Street"--a playbill which I have announcing the twenty-first
representation, November 1, 1845; the writer sent it to me in MS., where
it lies among the chaos of my papers. In England it has been issued five
times in various forms, and a printed play thereof as adapted by
Fitzball, who wrote for Astley's and the like, was acted (without my
leave asked or granted) in November 1847, at the City of London Theatre
in the East End: I did not stop it, as on a certain private scrutiny I
saw that the influence of the play upon its crowded audiences seemed a
good one. Unseen and unknown in a private box I noted the touching
effect of Grace's Psalm (ch. viii.) and the sobs and tears all over the
theatre that accompanied it; so it was a wisdom not to interfere with
such wholesome popularity and wholesale good-doing. It was a fair
method of preaching the Gospel to the poor, for that crowd was of the
humblest.

The "Crock of Gold" has been translated complete as a _feuilleton_ both
in French and German by newspapers; and I have copies somewhere,--but I
know not who wrote the French, the German authoress having been the
Fraulein Von Lagerstroem.

What Mr. Butler says in his preface, no doubt after speech with me, for
I was his visitor at the time in 1851, is this:--

"All who have had the good fortune to meet Mr. Tupper during his visit
here have been struck with his characteristic impulsiveness. In
accordance with this feature of his mind, nearly all of his most
successful performances have been occasioned by something altogether
incidental and unpremeditated--the result of an impulse
accidentally--shall we not say, providentially?--imparted. It was so
with the first work in this series (four volumes) respecting the
composition of which he has given to me in conversation the following
account. Some years ago he purchased a house at Brighton. While laying
out the garden, he had occasion to have several drains made. One day
observing a workman, Francis Suter, standing in one of the trenches wet
and wearied with toil, Mr. Tupper said to him in a tone of pleasantry,
'Wouldn't you like to dig up there a crock full of gold?'--'If I did,'
said the man, 'it would do me no good, because merely finding it would
not make it mine.'--'But suppose you could not only find such a
treasure, but might honestly keep it, wouldn't you think yourself
lucky?'--'Oh yes, sir, I suppose I should--but,' after a pause, 'but I
am not so sure, sir, that it is the best thing that could happen to me.
I think, on the whole, I would rather have steady work and fair wages
all the season than find a crock of gold.'

"Here was wisdom. The remark of the honest trench-digger at once set in
motion a train of thought in the mind of the author. He entered his
study, wrote in large letters on a sheet of paper these words, 'The
Crock of Gold, a Tale of Covetousness,' and in less than a week
that remarkable story was written. By the advice of his wife, however,
he spent another week in rewriting it, and then gave it to the world in
its finished state."

In the same Butlerian volume occurs the following MS. notice written by
me (in about 1853) respecting the origins of my two other tales, the
three being issued together:--

"As in the instance of my 'Crock of Gold,' both 'The Twins' and 'Heart'
were undoubtedly the outcome in after years of early observations,
anecdotes, and incidents, whereof memory kept in silence an experimental
record. Very few artists succeed in the delineation of life without
living models; but no good one servilely will betray the forms they
rather get hints from than actually copy. Thus though I sketched Roger
Acton from one Robert Tunnel, an Albury labourer, and took the cottage
near Postford Pond as his home,--adding thereto Mr. Campion's park and
house at Danney, near Hurst (I was then living at Brighton) as the model
for Sir John Vincent's estate,--as well as Grace, Ben Burke, and so on
from persons I had seen,--I need not say that my sketches from nature
were but outlines to my finished work of art. Simon Jennings, however,
is an exact portrait of a man I knew at Brighton. So also with these
tales, and others of my writings."

About "The Twins" a curious and somewhat awkward coincidence happened,
in the fact that my totally ideal characters of General Tracey and his
family were supposed to be intended for some persons whom the cap (it
seems) fitted pretty accurately, and who then lived at the southern
watering-place I had too diaphanously depicted as Burleigh-Singleton. It
is somewhat dangerous to invent blindly. However, my total innocence of
any intentional allusion to private matters whereof I was entirely
ignorant was set clear at once by an explanatory letter; and so no harm
resulted. In the case of "Heart" similarly, I invented the bankruptcy of
a certain Austral Bank, which at the time of my tale's publication had
no existence,--the very name having been taken some years after. This is
another instance of the literary perils to which imaginative authors may
be subject; for _litera scripta manet_, especially if in printer's ink,
and, for aught I know, that offhand word might be held a continuous
libel. For all else, by way of notice, the stories speak for themselves;
as, Covetousness was the text for "The Crock of Gold," while Concealment
and False Witness are severally the _morale_ of "The Twins" and "Heart."
I once meditated ten tales, on the Ten Commandments, these three being
an instalment; and I mentally sketched my fourth upon Idolatry, "The
Prior of Marrick," but nothing came of it. The Decalogue hangs together
as a whole, and cannot be cut into ten distinct subjects without
reference to one another.

In the chapter headed "The find of the Heartless," I find a manuscript
note perhaps worth printing here:

"If I had been gifted with the true prophetic power, hereabouts should
my heartless hero have stumbled on a big nugget of gold (I wrote before
the Australian gold discovery), even as the shrewd Defoe invented for
his Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, where gold has not yet been
found, though it may be. However, I did not originally make the splendid
guess, and will not now in a future edition surreptitiously interpolate
such a suggestive incident, after the example of dishonest Murphy in his
prognostic of that coldest January 7th. It may be true enough that, for
my story's sake, I may wish I had thought of such a not unlikely find:
for the uselessness of the mere metal to a positively starving man in
the desert might have furnished comment analogous to what was uttered by
Timon of Athens; and would have been picturesque enough and
characteristic withal."

Here may follow a bit of notice for each tale from two critics of
eminence,--as copied from one of my Archive-books, for memory is
treacherous, and I must not invent. Of the "Crock of Gold" Mr. Ollier
wrote as follows:--

"A story of extraordinary power, and, which is a still greater eulogy,
of power devoted to a great and beneficent purpose. Mr. Martin Tupper
(the author) is already known to the world by his 'Proverbial
Philosophy,' and other works which indicate an extraordinarily gifted
mind and an originality of conception and treatment rare indeed in these
latter days,--but he has never demonstrated these qualities to such
perfection as in his present deeply interesting work, wherein romance is
united to wisdom, and both to practical utility. Terror is there in its
sternest shape--the hateful lust of gold is shown in all its hideous
deformity and inconceivable meanness, and through the awful suspense
that hovers over the incidents, occasional gleams of pure and hallowed
love come to humanise the darkness. This is cue of the few fictions
constructed to stand the shocks of time."

And of the other tales we find the following from the pen of the
celebrated Mr. St. John, when he was editor of the _Sunday Times_. He
speaks of the three tales together:--

"In every page of this work there is something which a reader would wish
to bear in his memory for ever. For power of animated description, for
eloquent reflections upon the events of everyday life, and for soft,
touching, pathetic appeals to the best feelings of the heart, these
tales are worthy of a place on every library table in the kingdom. They
are well calculated to add to the author's already established
reputation."

Of this trilogy of tales, undoubtedly the best is the "Crock of Gold:"
"The Twins," though written from living models, is very inferior, as the
hero is too goody-goody and the villain too hopelessly wicked: "Heart"
has more merit, and has been much praised by a celebrated authoress for
its touching chapter on Old Maids. Much of it also is autobiographical,
as with "The Twins."

CHAPTER XVI.

AESOP SMITH.

"AEsop Smith's Rides and Reveries" is one of the books which, really
written by me from beginning to end, is nominally only edited. It is a
volume of self-experiences, to be read "through the lines,"--and almost
every incident and character therein is drawn from living models and
actual facts. It grew naturally out of the simple circumstance that I
used daily to ride out alone on one of my horses--more exactly,
mares--Minna and Brenda, and jotted down my cantering fancies in prose
or verse when I got home. Hurst & Blackett were its publishers in
1858,--and it soon was all sold off, but did not come to a second
edition in London, though reproduced widely in New York and
Philadelphia. The fact is that, between an independent publisher who
sells a little over cost price, and a Gargantua purchaser of thousands
at a time, like Smith or Mudie, the poor author is sacrificed: he has
received his fee for the edition (I got L100 for this first and only)
and forthwith finds himself dismissed, while the reading public is made
glad by easy perusal instead of costly purchase: and thus he is cheated
of his second edition. Most authors know how their interests are
affected wholesale by that modern system of subscription libraries: but
cheapness pleases the voracious multitude, and so in this competitive
free-trade era the units who feed those devourers are swallowed up
themselves. However, "what must be, must,"--_che sara sara_,--and I care
not even to complain of what cannot be helped, and wins fame to the one,
whilst it does good to the many, though financially unprofitable to
individual authorship.

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