The Press. — London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

I 1262 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 25,1858. yittraturt. Memoirs of William Beckford, of Fonthill, Author of " Vathelt." Two Vols. London : Skeet. THE department of Biography probably includes some of the best and worst that has ever appeared under the name of literature. And there is one singular fact connected with it, that it has not, generally speaking, shared in the improvement by which most kinds of writing have been affected. The execution of poetry—whatever may be the value of the ideas it embodies—is, at the present day, usually respectable ; often, indeed, of cloying smoothness. Cho no longer appears down at heel, but is often splendid, or at least ornate, with the sinus of her robe full of curious things, the result of patient research. Little compilers imitate the blaze of Macaulay or the coruscation of Carlyle, and, at any rate, do their best. And the standard of scientific and philosophical pro duction is constantly advancing, and both research and originality are (le rigueur in all that relates to Mind or Nature. But Biography, if it has a zenith, when measured by the Lives of Schiller, Goethe, or Arnold, has also a nadir of terrible profundity—a Malebolge of bookmaking, where the hack and the compiler wallow in wild confu sion, without ever seeming to catch even a re flected ray of better light from the greater masters of their art. Yet such is the curiosity we all feel about our neighbour's affairs, that such books are doubtless good speculations, and will probably continue to be so. We all like gossip about private tastes and habits, anecdotes of strange people and celebrated places, and even if they are ill told it matters little. And there may be a total want of perception of character or judiciousness of moral estimation— but then the reader is flattered by thinking he can supply this for himself, and the greater is his credit if he can do so with scanty or ill-arranged materials. So Biographies, of a certain sort, are produced out of Malebolge with unremitting assiduity, and are read, it seems, by a much enduring public. In the lamentable crew which shoots them forth, the author of the volumes before us must, we fear, be reckoned as one of the worst offenders. Of qualifications for his task he possesses but one,—that of having some indifferently Amod materials to work with. In all el se h e i s sadly to seek. His style is as bad as bad can be; always trivial and vulgar, and frequently ungrammatical. He has taken the furorbiographicus in its most viru. lent form, and thinks it incumbent on him to adopt all his hero's tastes and dislike s , an d t o imply that all he did not care for was not worth having. He treats the peculiar subject of his reputation with marked disingenuousness, and, to fill his pages, extracts or abridges in the coolest fashion vast quantities of Beckfbrd's published works. What he says ex penu suo is trashy and inconse quent, and the only readable parts of his volumes are the portions of which Mr. Redding—not himself a model of style—and other " indivi duals," as he calls them, have permitted him to avail himself. But the life of Beckford was worth writing, and as, possibly, those better quali fied might have I - 1 reasons fir disliking the task, we ought perhaps to feel grateful to a writer who has rushed in and unveiled the treasures of the pre-Adamnite sultans and their singular master to the gaze of a generation which had begun to forget all about him. But we must utter a protest, in limine, against the first two chapters of the book. One, entirely filled with names and dates, gives the supposed Beckford pedigree, including collateral branches, in its full extent; another is equally copious on the doings and sayings of the celebrated Lord Mayor. The biographer tries to connect his hero's ancestors with the Conquest. There is a village near Tewkesbury called Beckford, and there were Beckfords in the reign of Henry VI. " After which," says this ingenious genealogist, `• there is a blank of '217 years in the history of " the family to be supplied, . . if it be the " mute family." With equal naivete he takes up the family again only in the person of Peter Beckford, who in 1702 was lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, and died in 1710, leaving behind him two sons, Peter and Thomas. It is possible, however, to go a little higher than this. Mr. Jeaffreson, in his " Novels and Novelists," tells us that the first known progenitor of the race was a tailor at Maidenhead in the early part of the seventeenth century. He had two sons, Thomas and Peter. Thomas became Sheriff of London, was knighted, and married a baronet's sister. All we hear of Peter is, that he had a son who entered the army, and made judicious presents to Pepys, the diarist. This son was the lieutenant-governor above mentioned, and great grandfather of the author of " Vathek." We subjoin the pedigree in a note.* The fifteen pages devoted to an enumeration of the Beckford family, lineals and collaterals, are most clumsily put together. At p. 4 we are told that " Peter Beckford, the son who had become " Speaker of the House of Assembly, died in " 1735, having married Bathsua, daughter of " Colonel J. Hering, who died in 1750, and "he [who ?] left issue, Charles, Priscilla, and " Elizabeth." Six lines further, it is stated that " Peter Beckford, the above Speaker, &c., had " thirteen children." Again, at p. 15 the writer says, " It will now be proper to return to Wil " Liam Beckford the elder, of Fonthill, second " son, awl Speaker of the Jamaica House of " Assembly "—while, a few lines below, he tells us that William Beckford " was sent from " Jamaica to England at the age of fourteen." Seventy pages of Vol. I. bring us to the death of Alderman Beckford, several of whose speeches —including the famous one to George 111., which he probably did not deliver—and even the toasts he proposed at a ten-thousand-pound dinner at the Mansion .house in 1770, are given in extenso. This remarkable man, who, the writer tells us, in spite of his " multifarious duties," was not " without finding time for mo " derate dissipation," had several natural chil dren, to whom he was rich enough to give 5,000/. apiece. That all their names are not "abstracted in chief," as lawyers say, is a fortu nate circumstance, to which not the "will," we suspect, but the " poverty " of the present writer has consented. William Beckford the younger was born at Foothill on the 29th September, 1759, and was educated there by a Dr. Lettice, whose instruc tions were of the ordinary classical character. Between twelve and sixteen he seems to have gone through with his tutor the principal Greek and Latin classics, but, except that his quickness was above the average and his memory good, we do not find that he showed any signs of especial precocity. Lord Chatham and Lord Lyttleton were consulted about his education, and it was probably by the advice of the former that the study and practice of English declamation formed a part of it. Young Beckford, while staying at Burton Pynsent, the great orator's residence, repeated a speech he had translated from Thucy dides, with so much success that Lord Chatham rose, embraced him, and Exclaimed, turning to young William Pitt, " May you, my son, some " day make as brilliant a speaker !"—Beck ford's least praiseworthy leanings, as his friends thought, were his inordinate taste for "blood," and his fondness for Oriental literature. The nobility of his ancestry on the side of his mother, who was of the Abercorn branch of the Hamilton family, turned his mind to genealogical matters, and he attempted to trace his ancestry on one side or other up to John of Gaunt !—the only ground for this absurd notion being that his father had bought a castle once the property of " time-honoued Lancaster." It does not appear to have struck the biographer that, if there had been the slightest truth in the suggestion that the Beckfords of Jamaica could be connected with the family who flourished near Tewkesbury before the Conquest, or even with the Sir Richard Beckford who fought at Bosworth Field, their presumed descendant would have been sure to have discovered it.—His addiction to Eastern fiction was disapproved by Lord Chatham, who did not think a deep acquaintance with the Ara bian Nights a good training for a Liberal M.P. ; but Beckford's tastes were anything but classical, • Bock/ord (the tailor) and it was useless to try and make them so • h fastened w i th avidity on all allusions in tra ve l s 'e then or elsewhere which brought before him the sta i o n f a t h i o ts n , expectedvi s ions fortune whose splendourposstposs i bly vi . sh . magn . magnificence of the countries which occupied I v:sta ll :s ag s inspired him with a hope of realizing. Ile was doubtless a brilliant youth, with good looks, a fair share of solid information, and a more than ordinary share of accomplishments and knowledge of society; but he was spoiled, conceited, and petulant. Whil e v i s i t i ng t h e Duke l and Duchess of Queensber r y i n hi s tent h year he received a lesson the repetition of which would have done him no harm. He had been rather sarcastic about some of her grace's peculiarities of etiquette. His octogenarian hostess --seated probably in her beehive straw-chair,—sent for the family Bible and made him read a passage from the Book of Wisdom :—" There it " was, young man," said she, when he had finished, " that I learned my manners : 1 hope " you will remember what you have read." Mrs. Beckford was prejudiced against Oxf or d and Cambridge, and sent her son at seventeen to finish his education in the house of a relative at Geneva, under the care of his tutor.—Before this time, however, his satiric ability had begun to display itself, if we are to believe what he told Mr. Cyrus Redding, that his "Biogra phical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters" was composed at the age of seventeen. The book was not, at any rate, published till his nine teenth year, after his return from the Continent. It is difficult not to imagine that Dr. Lettice, who furnished his pupil with a copy of verses for the album of the Grande Chartreuse, had alsm some hand in the first work he gave to the public. Tim idea, of course, was originally suggested at home. The old housekeeper at Fonthill resembled, it would seem, the stately personage who glides in black silk through the apartments of a certain lordly scat in Sussex, and informs visitors from adjacent watering places that this or that group of banditti "is by Salvolatile Rosica: "—She was far to seek in her knowledge of ancient masters, and her mistakes suggested to Beckford an elaboration of them on a very extended scale, which he is said to have presented to her as a handbook-. But the lives of Waterzouchy of Amsterdam,' Og of Basan,' and Sucrewasser of Vienna,' are surely well enough known to have enabled the present biographer to have dispensed with the thirty odd pages which he has devoted to an abridgment of them, with copious extracts. But this is not the last specimen we shall meet with of his genius for book-making. At Geneva, or in exclusions in the neighbour hood, young Beckford made the acquaintance of De Saussure, Bonnet. lluber, and Voltaire,—the latter, then eighty-four years of age, "a very " dark-complexioned, shrivelled, thin old man, " stooping much from age," but with remarkably large and penetrating eyes. What his young visitor thought of him we are not informed. The former does not seem to have taken very kindly to the company of the savans. The society at the baths of Evian, where the company met every morning at seven to drink the waters and dance to music in the open air, was much more in his way, and scenery, in which he always delighted, furnished him with more congenial topics fbr the " Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of Europe," which he subsequently published in 1783. In a year and a half he returned home, and before setting out on the regular "grand tour " travelled through various parts of England — making a sort of progress from one country-house to another, "enchanted" when the mansion was venerable, and "exhibiting that proud scornful " lip which to the last he slowed when indicating " contempt for anything," when it was too modern to please. The ideas which found then subsequent expression in the splendour o f Font hill may be traced in embryo during this journey —where we find that the three things which delighted him most were Sir C. Fynte's baronial hall at Hazel!, Lord Courtenay's tower in Powder ham-park, and the ruins of Furness Abbey. Tho.nas Peter Peter (Limit:Goy., d. 1710) In 1780 he set out on the tour of Europe, — visited Holland, Belgium, the Rhine, the Danubt. Munich, the Tyrol, Venice, Bologna, and t he rest of the Italian cities. At Naples he met w itb the first Lady Hamilton—not the syren who In vented the shawl dance and fascinated Nelson, — but a lady of pure mind," who died in 1782. Peter (Speaker, rd. 1735; Tho:nas illiam (I.d. Myr. of Ludn., 4.1770) Wtm.ram (4. 1814)