by William Blanchard Jerrold (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.2 #42 (11 Jan 1851).
Mr. Blackbrook lived in a world of his own. It was his pleasure to believe that men were phantoms of a day. For life he had the utmost contempt. He pronounced it to be a breath, a sigh, a fleeting shadow. His perpetual theme was, that we are only here for a brief space of time. He likened the uncertainty of existence to all the most frightful ventures he could conjure up. He informed timid ladies that they were perpetually on the edge of a yawning abyss; and warned little boys that their laughter might be turned to tears and lamentation, at the shortest notice. Mr. Blackbrook was a welcome guest in a large serious circle. From his youth he had shown a poetic leaning, of the most serious order. His muse was always in deep mourning—his poetic gum oozed only from his favourite graveyard.
He thought "L'Allegro" Milton's worst performance; and declared that Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" was too light and frivolous. His life was not without its cares; but, then, he revelled in his misfortunes. He was always prepossessed with a man who wore a hatband. The owl was his favourite bird. A black cat was the only feline specimen he would admit to his sombre apartment; and his garden was stocked with yew-trees. He revelled in the charm of melancholy—he would not, if he could, be gay. His meditations raised him so great a height above his family, that little sympathy could exist between them. Eternity so engaged him, that his brothers and sisters—mere phantoms—did not cost him much consideration. His youthful Lines to the Owl, in the course of which he called the bird in question "a solemn messenger," "a dread image of the moral darkness which surrounds us," "a welcome voice," and "a mysterious visitant," indicated the peculiar turn of his mind. His determination to be miserable was nothing short of heroic. In his twenty-second year a relation left him a modest fortune. His friends flocked about him to congratulate him; but they found him in a state of seraphic sorrow, searching out a proper rhyme to the urn in which he had poetically deposited the ashes of his benefactor. On looking over the lines he had distilled from his prostrate heart, his friends, to their astonishment, discovered that he had alluded to the bequest in question in the most contemptuous strain:—
Why leave to one thy velvet and thy dross,
Whose wealth is boundless, and whose velvet's moss?
So ran his poetic commentary. His boundless wealth consisted of intellectual treasures exclusively, and the sweet declaration that moss was his velvet, was meant to convey to the reader the simplicity and Arcadian nature of his habits. The relation who had the assurance to leave him a fortune, was dragged remorselessly through fifty lines as a punishment for his temerity. Yet, in a fit of abstraction, Mr. Blackbrook hurried to Doctors' Commons to prove the will; hereby displaying his resignation to the horrible degree of comfort which the money assured to him. It was not for him, however, to forget that life was chequered with woe, that it was a vale of tears—a brief, trite, contemptible matter. The gaiety of his house and relations horrified him; they interfered, at every turn, with his melancholy mood. He sighed for the fate of Byron or Chatterton! Why was he doomed to have his three regular meals per diem; to lie, at night, upon a feather-bed, and the recognised layers of mattresses; to have a new coat when he wanted one; to have money continually in his pocket, and to be accepted when he made an offer of marriage? The fates were obviously against him. One of his sisters fell in love. How hopefully he watched the course of her passion! How fondly he lingered near, in the expectation—the happy expectation—of a lovers' quarrel. But his sister had a sweet disposition—a mouth made to distil the gentlest and most tender accents. The courtship progressed with unusual harmony on both sides. Only once did fortune appear to favour him. One evening, he observed that the lovers avoided each other, and parted coldly. Now was his opportunity; and in the still midnight, when all the members of his household were in bed, he took his seat in his chamber, and, by the midnight oil, threw his soul into some plaintive lines "On a Sister's Sorrow." He mourned for her in heart-breaking syllables; likened her lover to an adder in an angel's path; dwelt on her quiet grey eyes, her stately proportions, and her classic face. He doomed her to years of quiet despair, and saw her fickle admirer the gayest of the gay. He concluded with the consoling intelligence, that he would go hand in hand with her along the darkened passage to the grave. His sister, however, did not avail herself of this proffered companionship, but chose rather to be reconciled, and to marry her lover.
Mr. Blackbrook found some consolation for this disappointment in the composition of an epithalamium of the most doleful character on the occasion of his sister's marriage, in the course of which he informed her that Jove's thunderbolts might be hurled at her husband's head at any period of the day; that we all must die; that the bride may be a widow on the morrow of her nuptials; and other equally cheerful truths. Yet at his sister's wedding-breakfast, Mr. Blackbrook coquetted with the choice parts of a chicken, and drowned his sorrow in a delectable jelly.
When for a short time he was betrayed into the expression of any cheerful sentiment, if he ever allowed that it was a fine day, he quickly relapsed into congenial gloom, and discovered that there might be a thunderstorm within the next half-hour. His only comfort was in the reflection that his maternal uncle's family were consumptive. Here he anticipated a fine field for the exercise of his poetic gifts, and, accordingly, when his aunt was gathered to her forefathers, her dutiful nephew laid a sheet of blank paper upon his desk, and settled himself down to write "a Dirge." He began by attributing all the virtues to her—devoting about six lines to each separate virtue. Her person next engaged his attention, and he discovered, though none of her friends had ever remarked her surpassing loveliness, that her step was as the breath of the summer wind on flowers (certainly no gardener would have trusted her upon his box-borders); that she was fresh as Hebe (she always breakfasted in bed); that she had pearly teeth (her dentist has maliciously informed us that they were made of the very best ivory); and, finally, that her general deportment was most charming—so charming that Mr. Blackbrook never dared trust himself in her seductive presence. Having proceeded thus far with his melancholy duty, the poet ate a hearty supper of the heaviest cold pudding, and—we had almost written—went to bed—but we remember that Mr. Blackbrook always "retired to his solitary couch." He rose betimes on the following morning, looking most poetically pale. His dreams had been of woe, and darkness, and death; the pudding had had the desired effect. Again he placed himself at his desk, and having read over the prefatory lines which we have endeavoured to describe, he threw his fragrant curl from his marble forehead, and thought of the funeral pall, the darkened hall,—of grief acute, and the unstrung lute. He put his [aunt's sorrowing circle in every possible position of despair. He represented his surviving uncle as threatening to pass the serene portals of reason; he discovered that a dark tide rolled at the unhappy man's feet; that the sun itself would henceforth look dark to him; that he would never smile again; and that, in all probability, the shroud would soon enwrap his manly form. He next proceeded to describe minutely the pearly tears of his cousins, and the terrible darkness that had come over their bright young dreams. An affecting allusion to his own unfathomable grief on the occasion, was concluded by the hope that he might soon join his sainted aunt, though he had never taken the least trouble to pay her a visit while she lived in St. John's Wood. This touching dirge was printed upon mourning paper, and distributed among Mr. Blackbrook's friends. The death of an aunt was an affecting incident, but still it fell short of the brink of despair. Mr. Blackbrook's natural abiding-place was the edge of a precipice. His muse must be fed on heroic sorrows, hopeless agony, and other poetical condiments of the same serious nature. The course of modern life was too level for his impetuous spirit; but in the absence of that terrible condition to which he aspired, he caught at every incident that could nerve the pinion of his muse for grander flights. A dead fly, which he found crushed between the leaves of a book, furnished him with a theme for one of his tenderest compositions. He speculated upon the probable career of the fly,—opined that it had a little world of its own, a family, and a sense of the beautiful. This effusion met with such fervent praise, that he followed it up by "Thoughts on Cheese Dust," in which he dived into the mysteries of these animalculse, and calculated the myriads of lives that were sacrificed to give a momentary enjoyment to the "pampered palate of man." His attention was called, however, from these minor poetic considerations, to a matter approaching in its gravity to that heroic pitch of sorrow which he had sought so unsuccessfully hitherto.
His cousin was drowned by the upsetting of a pleasure-boat. At such a calamity it was reasonable to despair—to refuse comfort—to leave his hair uncombed—to look constantly on the ground—to lose all appetite—to write flowing verse. Mr. Blackbrook entered upon his vocation with a full sense of its heroism. At least one hundred lines would be expected from him on so tremendous an occasion. The catastrophe was
so poetical! The sea-weed might have been represented entangled in the golden tresses of the poor girl, had the accident happened only a little nearer the Nore; and the print of her fair form might have been faintly traced upon "the ribbed sea-sand." This was unfortunate. In reality the "melancholy occurrence" took place at Richmond. Mr. Blackbrook began by calling upon the willows of Richmond and its immediate vicinity to dip their tender branches in the stream in token of their grief. Mr. Blackbrook, felicitously remembering that Pope once lived not far from Richmond, next invoked that poet's shade, and begged the loan of his melodious rhythm. But the shade in question not answering to the summons, all that remained for the sorrowing poet to do was to take down his dictionary of rhymes, and tune his own lyre to its most mournful cadences. He set to work. He called the Thames a treacherous stream; he christened the wherry a bark; he declared that when the pleasure-party embarked at Richmond Bridge, Death, the lean fellow, was standing upon the beach with his weapon upraised. Asterisks described the death; and some of his friends declared this passage the best in the poem. He then went on to inform his readers that all was over; but by this expression the reader must not infer that the dirge was brought to a conclusion. By no means. Mr. Blackbrook had made up his mind that his state of despair required at least one hundred lines to give it adequate expression. He had devoted twenty to the death of a fly—surely, then, a female cousin deserved one hundred. This logical reflection spurred him on. He pulled down the blinds, and in a gloom that suited well with his forlorn state of mind, he began a picture of his condition. With the aid of his dictionary, having asserted that the shroud enwrapped a cousin's form, he reflected that he envied the place of the winding-sheet, and was jealous of the worms. He felt that he was warming into his subject. He tried to think of the condition in which the remains of his relative would speedily be; and having carefully referred to an eminent medical work as to the length of time which the human body requires to resolve itself into its original earth, (for he was precise in his statements,) he proceeded to describe, with heart-rending faithfulness, the various stages of this inevitable decay. That was true poetry. He declared that the worm would crawl upon those lips that the lover had fondly pressed, and that the hand which once touched the harp so magically was now motionless for ever. Having brought this tragic description to a conclusion, he proceeded to number the flowers that should spring from his cousin's grave, and to promise that
-- from year to year,
Roses shall flourish, moistened by a tear.
This vow evidently eased his heart a little, and enabled him to conclude the poem in a more cheerful spirit. He wound up with the reflection, that care was the lot of humanity, and that it was his duty to bear his proportion of the common load with a patient though bruised spirit. He felt that to complete his poetic destiny he ought to wander, none knew whither, and to turn up only at most unseasonable hours, and in most solemn places. But unhappily he was informed that it was necessary he should remain on the spot for the proper management of his affairs. Fate would have it so. Why was he not allowed to pursue his destiny? He was one day mentally bewailing the even tenour of his way, when a few kind friends suggested that he should publish his effusions. At first he firmly refused. What was fame to him—a hopeless, despairing man on the brink of the grave! His friends, however, pressed him in the end into compliance; and in due time Mr. Blackbrook's "Life-Drops from the Heart" were offered to the public for the price of ten shillings—little more than one shilling per drop.
An eminent critic wrote the following opinion of our friend and his poetry:—
"We notice Mr. Blackbrook as the representative of a school—the Doleful School. He draws terrible pictures; but what are his materials? He does not write from the heart, inasmuch as, if he really felt that incessant agony, which is his everlasting theme, we should find in his performances some original imagery—something with an individual stamp. We rather hold Mr. Blackbrook to be a very deliberate, vain, and calculating being, who takes advantage of a domestic calamity to display his knack of verse-making; who composedly turns a couplet upon the coffin of his
mistress; whose sympathy and sensibility are only the ingenious masks of inordinate self-esteem. His view of the poetic is only worthy of an undertaker. He sees nature through a black-crape veil. He describes graves with the minuteness of a body-snatcher; and when he would be impressive is disgusting. You see the actor, not the poet. He admits you (for he cannot help it) behind the scenes. His rhymes are not the music of a poetic faculty but rather the jingle of a parrot. He is one of a popular school, however; and while the public buy his wares, he will continue to fashion then. Materialist to the back-bone, he simpers about the littleness of human dealings and human sympathies. He who pretends to be melted with pity over the fate of a fly, would use his mother's tombstone as a writing-desk. He deals in human sorrow, as his baker deals in loaves. Nervous dowagers, who love tears and 'dreadful descriptions;' who enjoy 'a good cry;' and who have the peculiar faculty of seeing the dark side of everything, enjoy his dish of verses amazingly. To sensitive young ladies there is a terrible fascination in his inventories of the tomb and its appendages; and children are afraid to walk about in the dark, after listening to one of his effusions. The followers of his school include one or two formidable young ladies, who enter into descriptions of death—that is to say, the material part of death—with a minuteness that must excite the envy even of the most ingenious auctioneer. When bent upon a fresh composition, these terrible young poetesses, having killed a child, proceed to trace its journey to the tomb—its return to earth. How they gloat over the dire changes!—how systematically the painful portrait is proceeded with! In this they rival Chinese artists. And people of ill-regulated sympathy, who, containing within them all the elements of spiritual culture, are yet affected only by sensual appeals, regard these doleful effusions as the outpourings of true human suffering.
"Mr. Blackbrook and his disciples are hapless materialists, verse-makers without a sense of the beautiful. They are patronised by those to whom they write down; and the effect of their lucubrations is to enchain the imagination, to debase the moral capacity, to weaken that spiritual faith which disdains the horrors of the churchyard. Mr. Blackbrook's adventures in search of despair were undertaken, to our mind, in a cold-blooded spirit. A resolute determination to discover the gloomiest phase of every earthly matter, a longing for the applause of a foolish clique, and a confused idea that Chatterton was a poet because he perished miserably, while Byron owed his inspiration to his domestic unhappiness—make up that picture of a verse-writer which we have endeavoured to delineate. When extra-ordinary vanity is allied to very ordinary ability, the combination is an unwholesome, ascetic, weak and deformed mind:—such a mind has Mr. Blackbrook. He endeavours to drag us into a vault, when we would regard the heavenly aspect of death. Ask him to solve the great mystery, and he points to the fading corpse. His tears suggest the use of onions; and his threats of self-destruction, remind us of the rouge and Indian ink of an indifferent melo-dramatic actor. We have no respect for his misfortunes, since we find that he esteems them only as opportunities for display: we know that despair is welcome to him. He turns his back to the sun, and rejoices to see the length of shade he can throw upon the earth. Nature to him is only a vast charnel-house—so constructed that he may sing a life-long requiem. He would have us journey through life with our eyes fixed upon the ground, scenting the gases of decay. But wiser men—poets of the soul—bid us look up to heaven, nor disdain, as we raise our heads, to mark the beauty of the lily—to gather, and with hearty thanks, the fragrance of the rose."