Martin Farquhar Tupper - My Life as an Author

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For the fourth promised specimen, the best excuse is that Garbet really
did utter the words quoted,--and the answer he received about love is
exact, and became famous:--

"'Didst e'er read Dante!'--Never. 'Cruel man!
Take, take him, Williams,--I--I never can.'"

_N.B._--Williams was the other examiner. Garbet went on with a further
question nevertheless,--as he was affectedly fond of Italian:--

"'Dost know the language love delights in most?
If thou dost not, thy character is lost.'
'Yes, sir!'--the youth retorts with just surprise,
'Love's language is the language of the eyes!'"

In those days, as perhaps also in these, like Pope, "I spake in
numbers," verse being almost--well, not quite--easier than prose. In
fact, some of my critics have heretofore to my disparagement stumbled on
the printed truth that he is little better than an improvisatore in
rhyme. And this word "rhyme" reminds me now of a very curious question I
raised some years after my Oxford days in more than one magazine
article, as to when rhyme was invented, and by whom: the conclusion
being that intoning monks found out how easily the cases of Latin nouns
and tenses of verbs, &c., jingled with each other, and that troubadours
and trouveres carried thus the seeds of song all over Europe in about
the ninth century, until which time rhythm was the only recognised form
of versification, rhyme having strangely escaped discovery for more than
four thousand years. Is it not a marvel (and another marvel that no one
noticed it before) that not one of the old poets, Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
and I think Sanscrit, Arabic, and Celtic too, ever (except by manifest
accident, now intentionally ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of
terminating their metres with rhyme? Where is there any ode of Horace,
or Anacreon,--where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any
heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of
Lucretius,--decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too
frequent ornament of rhyme?

* * * * *

I have just found among my old archived papers, faded by nearly six
decades of antiquity, a treatise which I wrote at nineteen, styled by me
"A Vindication of the Wisdom of Scripture in Matters of Natural
Science." This has never seen the light, even in extracts; and probably
never can attain to the dignity of print, seeing it is written against
all compositor law on both sides up and down of a quarto paper book.
Therein are treated, from both the scriptural and the scientific points
of view, many subjects, of which these are some: Cosmogony, miracles (in
chief Joshua's sun and moon), the circulation of the blood revealed in
Ecclesiastes, magnetism as mentioned by Job, "He spreadeth out the
north over the empty space and hangeth the world upon nothing," the
blood's innate vitality--"which is the life thereof," the earth's
centre, or orbit, and inclination, astronomy, spirits, the rainbow, the
final conflagration of our atmosphere to purify the globe, and many
other matters terrestrial and celestial. Some day a patient scribe may
be found to decipher this decayed manuscript and set out orderly its
miscellaneous contents. I began it at eighteen, and finished it when at
Oxford.

There is also now before me another faded copybook of my early Christ
Church days containing ninety-one striking parallel passages between
Horace and Holy Writ; some being very remarkable, as Hor. _Sat._ i. 8,
and Isaiah xliv. 13, &c., about "making a god of a tree whereof he
burneth part:" also such well-known lines as "Quid sit futurum eras,
fuge quaerere," and "Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernae crastina summae
Tempora Di superi?"--compared with "Take no thought for the morrow" and
"Boast not thyself of to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may
bring forth." With many more; in fact I collected nearly a hundred out
of Horace, besides a few from others of the classics.

CHAPTER VIII.

SUNDRY PROVIDENCES.

Carlyle somewhere gives utterance to a truism, which the present scribe
at least can most gratefully countersign, that "it takes a great deal of
providence to bring a man to threescore years and ten." Not only are we
in peril every time we take breath, both from the action of our own
uncertain hearts and from the living germs of poison floating in the
air, but from all sorts of outer accidents (so-called, whereas they all
are "well ordered and sure") wherewith our little life is compassed
from, cradle to grave; in truth, trifles seem to rule us: "the turning
this way or that, the casual stopping or hastening hath saved life or
destroyed it, hath built up or flung down fortunes." Every inch and
every instant, we are guided and guarded, whether we notice it or not:
"the very hairs of our heads are all numbered." Here shall follow some
personal experiences in proof. Nearly seventy years ago I knew a small
schoolboy of seven who accidentally slit his own throat while cutting a
slate-frame against his chest with a sharp knife; there was a knot in
the wood, the knife slipped up, a pinafore was instantaneously covered
with blood--(though the little semisuicide was unconscious of any
pain)--thereafter his neck was quickly strapped with diaculum
plaister,--and to this day a slight scar may be found on the left side
of a silvery beard! Was not this a providential escape? Again--a lively
little urchin in his holiday recklessness ran his head pell-mell blindly
against a certain cannon post in Swallow Passage, leading from Princes
Street, Hanover Square, to Oxford Street, and was so damaged as to have
been carried home insensible to Burlington Street: a little more, the
doctors said, and it would have been a case of concussion of the brain.
The post is still there "to witness if I lie," as Macaulay's Roman
ballad has it,--and here grown to twice its height, thank heaven! am I.
Then again, some ten years after, a youth is seen careering on a
chestnut horse in Parliament Street, when a runaway butcher's cart
cannoned against his shying steed, the wheel ripping up a saddle-flap,
just as the rider had instantaneously shifted his right leg close to the
horse's neck! But for that providence, death or a crushed knee was
imminent.

Yet again, after some twenty years more: "AEsop Smith" was one dark
evening creeping up a hill after a hard ride on his grey mare Brenda,
when he was aware of two rough men on the tramp before him, one of whom
needlessly crossed over so that they commanded both sides, and soon
seemed to be approximating; which when AEsop fortunately noticed, with a
quick spur into Brenda he flashed by the rascals as they tried to snatch
at his bridle and almost knocked them over right and left whilst he
galloped up the hill followed by their curses: was not this an escape
worth being thankful for?

Once more: the same equestrian has had two perilous dog-cart accidents,
noticeable, for these causes; viz.--broken ribs, and a crushed right
hand, have proved to him experimentally how little pain is felt at the
moment of a wound; which will explain the unconscious heroism of common
soldiers in battle; very little but weakness through loss of blood is
ever felt until wounds stiffen: further, a blow on the head not only
dazes in the present and stupefies further on, but also completely takes
away all memory of a past "bad quarter of an hour." At least I
remembered nothing of how my worst misadventure happened; and only know
that I crawled home half stunned by moonlight for three miles, holding
both sides together with my hands to enable me to breathe: no
wonder,--all my elasticity was gone with broken ribs. Though these two
accidents cost me, one three months, and the other much longer of a
(partly bedridden) helplessness, were they not good providences to make
one grateful? I write my mental thanksgiving with the same healed broken
hand.

So much of perils by land, by way of sample: here are three or four by
sea, to match them. Do I not remember how a rash voyager was nearly
swept off the _Asia's_ slippery deck in a storm, when a sudden lurch
flung him to cling to the side rail of a then unnetted bulwark, swinging
him back again by another lurch right over the yawning waves--like an
acrobat? Had I let go, no one would have known of that mystery of the
sea,--where and when a certain celebrity then expected in America, had
disappeared! Captain Judkin after that always had his bulwarks netted;
so that was a good result of my escape: I was the only passenger on
deck, a favoured one,--the captain being on his bridge, two men at the
wheel in their covered house, the stormy wind all round in a cyclone,
and the raging sea beneath,--and so all unseen I had been swept
away,--but for good providence.

Once again; do I not shudderingly recollect how nearly the little
Guernsey steamer was run over by an American man-of-war in the Channel,
because a tipsy captain would "cross the bows of that d---- d
Yankee:"--the huge black prow positively hung over us,--and it was a
miracle that we were not sunk bodily in the mighty waters. What more?
Well, I will here insert an escaped danger that tells its own tale in a
sonnet written at the time, the place being Tenby and the sea-anemone
caverns there, accessible only at lowest neap tide.

"An hour of peril in the Lydstep caves:
Down the steep gorge, grotesquely boulder-piled
And tempest-worn, as ocean hurrying wild
Up it in thunder breaks and vainly raves,--
My haste hath sped me to the rippled sand
Where, arching deep, o'erhang on either hand
These halls of Amphitrite, echoing clear
The ceaseless mournful music of the waves:
Ten thousand beauteous forms of life are here;
And long I linger, wandering in and out
Among the seaflowers, tapestried about
All over those wet walls.--A shout of fear!
The tide, the tide!--I turned and ran for life,
And battled stoutly through that billowy strife!"

Perhaps this is enough of such hairbreadth 'scapes both by land and
water: though I might (in America especially) mention many more. Then
there are all manner of the ordinary maladies of humanity, which I
pretermit. Carlyle was quite right; it _does_ require "a good deal of
providence" to come to old age.

CHAPTER IX.

YET MORE ESCAPES.

But there are many other sorts of peril in human life to which I may
briefly advert, as we all have had some experiences of the same. Who
does not know of his special financial temptation, some sanguine and
unscrupulous speculator urging him from rock to rock across the rapids
of ruin, till he is engulfed as by Niagara? Or of the manifestly
disinterested and generous capitalist, who gives to some young legatee a
junior partner's free arm-chair, only that he may utilise his money and
keep the house solvent for yet a year or two, utterly unheeding that ere
long the grateful beneficiaire must be dragged down with his chief to
poverty? Or, which of us has not had experience of some unjust will,
stealing our rights by evil influence? Or of the seemingly luckless
accident killing off our intending benefactor just before that promised
codicil? Or of the ruinous investment? Or of the bankrupt Life
Assurance? Or of the unhappy fact of your autograph, "a mere matter of
form," on the back of some dishonoured bill of one's defaulting friend?
Yet all these are providences too,--lessons of life, and parts of our
schools and schoolmasters.

And there are many like social evils besides. Let me delicately touch
one of them. I desire as an Ancient, now nearing the close of my
career, at least in this the caterpillar and soon to be chrysalis
condition of my being, to give my testimony seriously and practically to
the fact (disputed by too many from their own worse experience) that it
is quite possible to live from youth to age in many scenes and under
many circumstantial difficulties, preserving still through them all the
innocent purity of childhood. True, the crown of greater knowledge is
added to the Man; but although it be a knowledge both of evil and of
good, theoretically,--it need not practically be a guilty knowledge. If
one of any age, from the youngest to the oldest, has not the power of
self-control perpetually in exercise, and the good mental help of prayer
habitually at hand to be relied on, he is in danger, and may fall into
sin or even crime, at any hour, unless the Highest Power intervene. But,
if the senses are trained to resist the first inclinations to
unchastity, by the eye that will not look and the ear that will not
listen, then the doors of the mind are kept closed against the enemy,
and even "hot youth" is safe.

We live in a co-operative cycle of society; and amongst other
co-operations are all manner of guilds to encourage, by example,
companionship and the like, divers great virtues, and some less
important fads and fancies of the day: let me not be thought to
disparage any gatherings for prayer, or temperance, or purity; though
individual strong men may not need such congregated help as the weaker
brethren yearn for. Many a veteran now, changed to good morals from a
looser life in the past, may well hope to serve both God and man by
preaching purity to the young men around, by vowing them to a white
ribbon guild, and giving them the decoration of an ivory cross. But he
is apt to forget what young blood is, his own having cooled down apace;
anon he will find that Nature is not so easily driven back--_usque
recurrit_--and he will soon have to acknowledge that if the higher and
deeper influences of personal religion, earnest prayer, honest
watchfulness, and sincere--though it be but incipient--love of God and
desire to imitate Christ, are not chief motives towards the purification
of human passion, this brotherhood of a guild may tend to little except
self-righteousness, and it will be well if hypocrisy and secret sin does
not accompany that open boastfulness of a White Cross Order. After all
said and done, a man--or woman--or precocious child--must simply take
the rules of Christ and Paul, and Solomon, as his guide and guard, by
"Resisting," "Fleeing," "Cutting off--metaphorically--the right hand,
and putting out the right eye;" so letting "discretion preserve him and
understanding keep him;" but there is nothing like flight; it is easy
and speedy, and more a courage than a cowardice. Take a simple instance.
Some forty years ago, an author, well-known in both hemispheres, then
living in London, received by post a pink and scented note from "an
American Lady, a great admirer of his books, &c. &c.: would he favour
her by a call" at such an hotel, in such a square? Much flattered he
went, and was very gushingly received; but when the lady, probably not
an American (though comely enough to be one), after a profusion of
compliments went on to complain of a husband having deserted her, and to
throw herself not without tears on the kindness of her favourite author,
that individual thought it would be prudent to depart, and so promptly
remembering another engagement he took up his hat and--fled. He had
afterwards reason to be thankful for this escape, as for others. _I,
fac simile_; as no doubt you have done, and you will do, for there are
many Potipheras; ay, and there exist some Josephs too.

Other forms of evil in the way of heterodoxy and heresy have assailed
your confessor, as is the common case with most other people, whether
authors or not. The rashest Atheism or more cowardly Agnosticism are
rampant monsters, but have only affected my own spirit into forcing me
to think out and to publish my Essay on Probabilities, whereof I shall
speak further when my books come under review. But beyond these open
foes to one's faith, who has not met with zealous enthusiasts who urge
upon his acceptance under penalty of the worst for all eternity if
refused, any amount of strange isms,--Plymouth, Southcote, Swedenborg,
Irving, Mormon,--and of the other 272 sects which affect (perhaps more
truly infect) religion in this free land? I have had many of these
attacking me by word or letter on the excuse of my books. Who, if he
once weakly gives way to their urgent advice to "search and see for
himself," will not soon be addled and muddled by all sorts of
sophistical and controversial botherations, if even he is not tempted to
accept--for lucre if not godliness--the office of bishop, or apostle, or
prophet, or anything else too freely offered by zealots to new converts,
if of notoriety enough to exalt or enrich a sect; such sect in every
case proclaiming itself the one only true Church, all other sects being
nothing but impostors? We have all encountered such spiritual
perils,--and happy may we feel that with whatever faults and failings,
there is an orthodox and established form of religion amongst us in the
land. For my own part, I go freely to any house of prayer, national or
nonconformist, where the Gospel is preached and the preacher is capable:
all I want is a good man for the good word and work--and if he has the
true Spirit in him, I care next to nothing for his orders: though to
many less independent minds human authorisation may be a necessity. From
cradle hymns to the more serious prayings of senility, my own religion
in two words is crystallised as "Abba, Father;" my only priest being my
Divine Brother; and my Friend and Guide through this life and beyond it
the Holy Spirit, who unites all the family of God. May I die, as I have
lived, in this simple faith of childhood.

My "Probabilities" has, amongst others apposite, this sentence about the
origin of evil, and the usefulness of temptation: "To our understanding,
at least, there was no possible method of illustrating the amiabilities
of Goodness and the contrivances of Wisdom but by the infused permission
of some physical and moral evils; mercy, benevolence, design would in a
universe of Best have nothing to do; that universe itself would grow
stagnant, as incapable of progress; and the principal record of God's
excellences, the book of redemption, would have been unwritten. Is not
then the existence of evil justified in reason's calculation? and was
not such existence an antecedent probability?"

CHAPTER X.

FADS AND FANCIES.

In a recent page I have alluded to sundry "fads and fancies of the day,"
some of greater and others of lesser import, and I have been mixed up in
two or three of them. For example;--as an undergraduate at Oxford I
starved myself in the matter of sugar, by way of somehow discouraging
the slave-trade; I don't know that either Caesar or Pompey was any the
better for my small self-sacrifice; but as a trifling fact, I may
mention that I then followed some of the more straitlaced fashions of
Clapham. Also, when in lodgings after my degree, I resolved to leave off
meat, bought an immense Cheshire cheese, and, after two months of
part-consumption thereof, reduced my native strength to such utter
weakness as quite to endanger health. So I had to relapse into the old
carnality of mutton chops, like other folk: such extreme virtue doesn't
pay.

Of course abstinence from all stimulant has had its hold on me
heretofore, as it has upon many others,--but, after a persistent six
months of only water, my nerve power was so exhausted (I was working
hard at the time as editor of "The Anglo-Saxon," a long extinct
magazine) that my wise doctor enjoined wine and whisky--of course in
moderation; and so my fluttering heart soon recovered, and I have been
well ever since.

Now about temperance, let me say thus much. Of course, I must approve
the modern very philanthropic movement, but only in its rational aspect
of moderation. In my youth, the pendulum swung towards excess, now its
reaction being exactly opposite; both extremes to my mind are wrong. And
here let me state (_valeat quantum_) that I never exceeded in liquor but
once in my life: that once serving afterwards as a valuable life lesson
all through the wine-parties of Christ Church, the abounding
hospitalities of America, both North and South, through two long
visits--and the genialities of our own Great Britain during my several
Reading Tours. If it had not been for that three days' frightful
headache when I was a youth (in that sense a good providence), I could
not have escaped so many generous hosts and seductive beverages. That
one departure from sobriety happened thus. My uncle, Colonel Selwyn,
just returned from his nine years' command at Graham's Town, South
Africa, gave a grand dinner at the Opera Colonnade to his friends and
relatives, resolved (according to the fashion of the time) to fill them
all to the full with generous Bacchus by obligatory toasts, he himself
pretending to prefer his own bottle of brown sherry,--in fact, dishonest
toast and water; but that sort of practical joke was also a fashion of
the day. The result, of course, was what he desired; everybody but
himself had too much, whilst his mean sobriety, cruel uncle! enjoyed the
calm superiority of temperance over tipsiness. However, the lesson to me
(though never intended as such) was most timely,--just as I was entering
life to be forewarned by having been for only that once overtaken. I
have ever since been thankful for it as a mercy; and few have been so
favoured; how many can truly say, only that once? But I pass on, having
a great deal more to write about temperance. On my first visit to
America in 1851, all that mighty people indulged freely in strong drinks
of the strangest names and most delicious flavours: on my second in
1876,--just a quarter of a century after,--there was almost nothing to
be got but iced water. Accordingly when I was at Charleston I took up my
parable,--and spoke through a local paper as follows: I fear the extract
is somewhat lengthy, but as an exhaustive argument (and the piece,
moreover, being unprinted in any of my books), I choose to give it here
in full, to be skipped if the reader pleases. It is introduced thus by
an editor:--

"In these days of extreme abstinence from wine and spirits, it is
refreshing to see what the strong common-sense of an eminent moral
philosopher has to say about temperance. We make, then, a longish
extract, well-nigh exhaustive of the subject, which occurs in a
lecture, entitled 'America Revisited--1851 and 1877,' from the pen
of Martin Tupper, explaining itself. The author introduces his
poetic essay thus:--'Since my former visit to the States
twenty-five years ago, few changes are more remarkable than that in
the drinking habits of the people; formerly it was all for
spirituous liquors, and now it is "Water, water everywhere, and
every drop to drink!" The bars are well-nigh deserted, and the
entrance-halls of most houses are ostentatiously furnished with
plated beakers and goblets ensuring an icy welcome: in fact, not to
be tedious, intemperance has changed front, and excess in water has
taken the place of excess in wine.'" To an Englishman's judgment
the true "part of Hamlet" in a feast is the more generous fluid,
and the greatest luxuries are simply Barmecidal without some
wholesome stimulant to wash them down; accordingly, my too
outspoken honesty protested thus in print against this form of
folly in extremes, and either pleased or offended, as friends or
foes might choose to take it.

"Temperance? Yes! true Temperance, yes!
Moderation in all things, the word is express;
'Nothing too much'--Greek, 'Meden Agan;'
So spake Cleobulus, the Seventh Wise Man;
And the grand 'golden mean' was shrewd Horace's law,
And Solomon's self laid it down for a saw
That 'good overmuch' is a possible fault,
As meat over-salted is worse for the salt;
And Chilo, the Stagyrite, Peter, and Paul,
Enjoin moderation in all things to all;
The law to make better this trial-scene, earth,
And draw out its strongest of wisdom and worth,
By sagely suppressing each evil excess--
In feasting, of course, but in fasting no less--
In drinking--by all means let no one get drunk--
In eating, let none be a gluttonous monk,
But everyone feed as becometh a saint,
With grateful indulging and wholesome restraint,
Not pampering self, as an epicure might,
Nor famishing self, the ascetic's delight.

"But man ever has been, and will be, it seems,
Given up to intemperance, prone to extremes;
The wish of his heart (it has always been such)
Is, give me by all means of all things too much!
In pleasures and honours, in meats, and in drinks,
He craves for the most that his coveting thinks;
To wallow in sensual Lucullus's sty,
Or stand like the starving Stylites on high,
To be free from all churches and worship alone,
Or chain'd to the feet of a priest on a throne,
To be rich as a Rothschild, and dozens beside,
Or poor as St. Francis (in all things but pride),
With appetite starved as a Faquir's, poor wretch!
Or appetite fattened to luxury's stretch;
Denouncing good meats, on lentils he fares,
Denouncing good wine, by water he swears--
In all things excessive his folly withstands
The wise moderation that Scripture commands.

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