H. G. Somerville

“ The stranger was a poor mender of shoes, who lived in a squalid garret, at the top of an old house, overcrowded with lodgers; a foolish lazy fellow enough, without a principle of honesty, or a care for respectability or cleanliness in his entire composition, but withal a kindly one. Necessity drives sternly. The boy looked at his companion’s dirty linen and unwashed face and neck, and with a glance at the river, a longing, despairing look, which did not escape the stranger’s quick observation, turned and reluctantly went with him. ”

“ The young fellow, forced to the proctor’s desk, quite angry with the drudgery, theatre-stricken, poetry-stricken, writing dramatic sketches in Barry Cornwall’s manner, spouting ‘Leonidas’ before a manager, driven away starving from home, penniless and full of romance, courting his beautiful young wife.... Then there comes that pathetic little outbreak of despair, when the poor young fellow is nearly giving up, his father banishes him, no one will buy his poetry, he has no chance on his darling theatre, no chance of the wife that he is longing for. Why not finish life at once? ”

“ Precisely in the degree in which any painter possesses original genius, is at present the increase of moral certainty that during his early years he will have a hard battle to fight: and that just at the time when his conceptions ought to be full and happy, his temper gentle, and his hopes enthusiastic—just at that most critical period, his heart is full of anxieties and household cares: he is chilled by disappointments, and vexed by injustice, he becomes obstinate in his errors, no less than in his virtues, and the arrows of his aim are blunted, as the reeds of his trust are broken.... ”

“ The picture of this truly great man being obliged to wear out the last years of his life by unceasing labour when he should have been enjoying a well-earned rest, is excessively sad and touching—but the sadness is to some extent relieved by the heroic nature of the act. The melancholy end of the man is swallowed up in the imperishable name he has left behind, which name, for generations to come, will serve as the synonym of honour. Sad, far more sad, were the closing days of Sheridan, whose last moments were also darkened by impecuniosity, but utterly unrelieved by any acts of self-sacrifice ”

“ There is no doubt that Douglas Jerrold cherished the memory of this honourable impecuniosity as he did everything else that was noble and pure, for in his slashing satire levelled against those meaningless decorations or orders of the wealthy he clearly shows his lasting sympathy for poverty with honour. He says: “The Order of Poverty—how many sub-orders might it embrace! As the spirit of Gothic chivalry has its fraternities, so might the Order of Poverty have its distinct devices.” ”

“ 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 shilling 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 ”

“ Is it not the stony heart of the world’s injustice knocked at by poverty? What haggardness is in his face! What a blight hangs about him! There are more years in his looks than in his bones. Time has marked him with an iron pen. He wailed as a babe for bread his father was not allowed to earn. He can recollect every dinner—they were so few—of his childhood. He grew up, and want was with him, even as his shadow. He has shivered with cold, fainted with hunger. His every-day life has been set about by goading wretchedness. ”

“ 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 bacchanalian 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 noble and great, he ran a serious risk of dying at home through starvation. ”

“ With a couple of companions Watty Scott was in the unenviable position of being left high and dry on the strand of impecuniosity. Moreover the three jolly sailors had run up an immense bill at a tavern on the Point, the settlement of which haunted them by day and by night. In their recklessness, almost amounting to despair, they still went on living high, and steeping recollection of their liabilities in the fumes of baccy and the odours of the flowing bowl. ”

“ What delight I had to sit there in the evening hovering as it were over the immense city, from which a loud, hoarse murmur incessantly ascended, especially when there blended with it the noise and tumult of some great storm.” But there were two sides to this life, and time revealed both. With peace and time, bread and cheese and dreams of glory, the poet was content and happy, even when thin and pale; he grew every day so weak that his father used to say frequently, “I shall soon bury you.” ”

“ He was the heir of the famous Sir Robert Scott of Thirlestane, a cadet of the House of Buccleuch. Sir Robert Scott lived in the time of the sixth James of Scotland, and was a man of noble character, though of iron will and fiery blood, and little knew the awful cloud that gathered over his house when he married his second wife. Scott of Thirlestane had a son by his first marriage, and the heir was loved by the father with all the intensity and tenderness of a strong man’s nature. ”

“ So slowly came the fame and prosperity he sought so laboriously and patiently, and at last so honourably won, that when he was in his fortieth year he actually contemplated opening a small-ware shop to aid him in bringing up and educating his family. Indeed had it not been for John Ruskin, to whom he applied for advice as to whether he should reluctantly abandon his beloved art or persevere in its practice, the profession would have lost one of the most powerful of our modern masters in landscape. ”

“ One day, while sitting in his garret, needle in hand, eyeing lugubriously the rent in his trousers, and thinking over some bitter misanthropical verses which he was then writing, a letter was brought to him. It seemed a letter of consequence—the handwriting was strange. Trembling with excitement, he broke the seal. Joy! joy! joy! The Senator Bonaparte desired to see him!
“It was not,” he wrote, “my fortune that I first thought of, but Glory! My eyes were full of tears, and I thanked God, whom in my moments of prosperity I never forgot.” ”

“ The Poor Knight of Windsor might have fared better, but every penny except those laid out for absolute necessaries of life was capitalised in the promotion of an absorbing and quixotic scheme. Regular attendance at St. George’s Chapel was Dinely’s duty; and the long blue mantle which the Poor Knights wore covered his shabby habiliments, as the dingy morning cloak hid red herrings and farthing candles. ”

“ The taverns were their clubs, bread and cheese their fare: and if the rent of their garret homes were not forthcoming, they slept in the streets, and, careless Bohemians that they were, laughed together over the strangeness, or the dangers, of their nocturnal exposures. That their lives often found tragic endings may readily be known. Many a terrible story is extant of their heart-sickness and despair, of last awful struggles silently, heroically continued against overwhelming odds, and of lingering sufferings endured with martyr-like patience. ”

“ At the time that this poet could neither walk the streets nor be seated at the convivial board without listening to his own songs and his own music—for in truth the whole nation was echoing his verse, and crowded theatres were applauding his wit and humour; while this very man himself, urged by his strong humanity, founded a ‘Fund for Decayed Musicians’—he was so broken-hearted, and his own common comforts so utterly neglected, that in despair, not waiting for nature to relieve him from the burden of existence, he laid violent hands on himself ”

“ In this letter to his mother he said nothing of being without the commonest necessaries of life, of being ashamed to go out by daylight because his clothes were so shabby, of passing entire days without food—on one occasion no less than three.
There was in poor old Gerald Griffin no signs of that “indolence, or contemplation if you like,” which Thackeray considered “no unusual quality in the literary man.” With despair in his heart he still wrote on, simply because the labour in which he had delight physicked the pains of impecuniosity. ”

“ To train and teach them is a task which sorely tries the patience of the super-master, and their lazy, poverty-stricken, and generally not too cleanly aspect is provocative of contempt and dislike amongst the actors. Their pay is not extravagant, being usually a shilling a night, but their histrionic pride is great, and their reverence for the actors profound, while for one to stand a little closer to the footlights than his fellows do, and consequently nearer the audience, or to be selected to go on alone to deliver a letter or receive a message, is the very summit of his ambition ”

“ As months and years rolled away, the incidents of a busy life and the assiduous practice of his profession crowded out of John Holt’s memory the recollection of his strange and facetious adventure at the hostelry on the Oxford road. Holt’s habits changed. He became the wise and impartial judge, so admirable and so competent, that even his stern Tory father (spite of the son’s Liberal politics) grew proud of the man who in his youthful career at Oxford had been the wildest of the wild, and the most erring of the erring. ”

“ The sad side of impecuniosity is, unfortunately, so vast a subject that it would require an entire volume, instead of part of a chapter, to properly record the miseries of mind and body endured by those in past ages, who, not unknown to fame, have been permitted to pine and die in despair. ”

“ Lamentable as is the contemplation of these lost lives, there is yet a sadder picture still, for pitiable as it is to think of men, indifferent alike to their well-being in this world and in that which is to come, the sadness is intensified when the object of pity is a woman, one who has been referred to as “a sort of female Otway, without his genius.” ”

“ Some years after, when Angelica Kauffman had become famous, and was living in England, welcomed with pride and enthusiasm in the highest society, and sought after by the noblest and most gifted, she met this peer in one of the most brilliant circles of the fashionable world, who with great amazement recognised in the elegant woman and famous artist the humble pedestrian of the Swiss mountains. ”

“ I have been very poor the greater part of my life and have borne it, I believe, as well as most people; but I can safely say I have been happier for every guinea I have earned.”
Doctor Johnson, in addition to alleging that “Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult,” maintains that “poverty takes away so many means of doing good, and produces so much inability to resist evil, both natural and moral, that it is by all virtuous means to be avoided.” ”

“ And yet of such men as these Thackeray wrote: “Bread is the main incentive. Do not let us try to blink this fact or imagine that the men of the press are working for their honour and glory or go onward impelled by the inevitable afflatus of genius.” ”

“ Gentle faces, pleased old men, stopping by the way; young lads, venturing a purchase with their last remaining farthing; why here was a world in little with its fame at the sizar’s feet! ‘The greater world will be listening one day,’ perhaps he muttered as he turned with a lighter heart to his dull home.”
Johnson’s sympathy with Goldsmith was, no doubt, warmed and quickened by the remembrance of his own early struggles with the foul fiend impecuniosity. ”

“ If it were, as some will doubtless say, “a sin and shame” that an artist of Peter Stokes’s ability should have to turn itinerant vendor of pennyworths of pudding, the old adage “Be sure your sin will find you out” was at fault for once; but to make up for the omission in his case, how wonderfully true was the proverb in the romantic history of Lord Chief Justice Holt, whose impecuniosity caused him to commit an act that resulted in a truly tragic finale. ”

“ No actor was ever better acquainted with poverty than that extraordinary man Edmund Kean. Endowed with rare genius, and a potency of will, that impelled him to surmount any obstacle lying in the pathway leading towards fame, this player’s fate [Pg 100] was yet infelicitous. Maternal solicitude, moral training, and those circumstantial influences which induce regular habits, were alike denied him. All the regularities, vicissitudes, vexations, disappointments, sorrows, trials and romance common to the lives of strolling players, characterized the early career of Edmund Kean. ”

“ When we remember, however, how impecuniosity has been produced, how that it has been brought about by misfortune, extravagance, heroism, want of principle, want of foresight, inadequacies of justice, eccentricity of character, extreme benevolence of disposition, and by other equally varied causes, it is not surprising that there should be found considerable connection between it and romance, more especially as the consequences of the condition have been crime of every description, from comparatively venial offences against society to the universally reprobated sins of forgery and murder. ”

“ The director of the Louvre, M. Jousselin, declared that while she was there forming her judgment, and training eye and hand, he had never before witnessed such untiring eagerness and ardour. In her case, the impecuniosity which Ruskin regards as so often fatal to the aspirations of young and ambitious artists, appears to have been the strongest incentive. Surrounded and stimulated by the glorious creations of great artists, the first to enter the gallery, and the last to leave it, her strongest desire was to aid her artist father in his weary struggle for the support of his family ”

“ Samuel Smiles is of opinion that “nothing sharpens a man’s wits like poverty. Hence many of the greatest men have originally been poor men. Poverty often purifies and braces a man’s morals. To spirited people difficult tasks are usually the most delightful ones. If we may rely upon the testimony of history, men are brave, [Pg 3] truthful, and magnanimous, not in proportion to their wealth, but in proportion to the smallness of their means.”
With this I agree to a certain extent; but I claim for impecuniosity certain charms and characteristics not associated with poverty. ”

“ 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. ”