The poetry of cruelty

The poet, notwithstanding this discouragement, begg'd hard that he might exhibit a specimen of his performance; and being restricted to a few lines, he repeated the following stanzas, with the most rueful emphasis.

Where wast thou, wittol Ward, when hapless fate
From these weak arms mine aged grannam tore:
These pious arms essay'd too late,
To drive the dismal phantom from the door.
Could not thy healing drop, illustrious quack,
Could not thy salutory pill prolong her days,
For whom, so oft, to Marybone, alack!
Thy sorrels dragg'd thee thro' the worst of ways?

Oil-dropping Twick'nham did not then detain
Thy steps, tho' tended by the Cambrian maids;
Nor the sweet environs of Drury-lane;
Nor dusty Pimlico's embow'ring shades;
Nor Whitehall, by the river's bank,
Beset with rowers dank;
Nor where th' Exchange pours forth its tawny sons;
Nor where to mix with offal, soil and blood,
Steep Snowhill rolls the sable flood;
Nor where the Mint's contaminated kennel runs:
Ill doth it now beseem,
That thou should'st doze and dream,
When death in mortal armour came,
And struck with ruthless dart the gentle dame.

Her lib'ral hand and sympathising breast,
The brute creation kindly bless'd:
Where'er she trod grimalkin purr'd around,
The squeaking pigs her bounty own'd;
Nor to the waddling duck or gabbling goose,
Did she glad sustenance refuse;
The strutting cock she daily fed,
And turky with his snout so red;
Of chickens careful as the pious hen,
Nor did she overlook the tomtit or the wren;
While redbreast hopp'd before her in the hall,
As if she common mother were of all.

For my distracted mind,
What comfort can I find?
O best of grannams! thou art dead and gone,
And I am left behind in sad funereal lay,
Ah! woe is me! alack! and well-a-day!

These interjections at the close of this pathetic elegy, were not pronounced without the sobs and tears of the author, who looked wishfully around him for applause, and having wiped his eyes, asked the chairman's opinion of what he had read.

(Peregrine Pickle, Chapter CII.)

*

Snow Hill, area with a water conduit, in the City of London. Presumably the "sable flood", however, were the foul waters of the adjacent River Fleet, still uncovered in 1751. This was near to Smithfield Market, evidently the source of the offal, etc.
The Mint:  a notorious slum area in Southwark (it had been a "liberty" for debtors until 1723).

*

The irony is, this is clearly supposed to be a very bad poem, but from the arresting over-alliteration of the first line, I find that I at once begin to read it with more attention and enjoyment than most other poems of that age. I'm even touched. (After all, I adored my own grandmothers, and I've written poems to them.) I was touched, too, by the redbreast hopping at her feet. For Smollett, that kind of naturalism, in a poem, was evidently crashingly bathetic.

In both Peregrine Pickle and the later pamphlet Habbakkuk Hilding, Smollett makes personal attacks on Sir George Lyttelton* (politician and patron of the arts) and on his favoured author Henry Fielding. Lyttelton had kept the young Smollett dangling with unfulfilled promises concerning his play The Regicide. No-one really knows what Fielding had done to become the target of Smollett's venom. Smollett portrays Lyttelton as a vain poetaster susceptible to the crudest flattery, and implies that Fielding profited from venal practices attached to his Westminster magistracy (practices that Fielding in fact was instrumental in stamping out).

These lines are based on Lyttelton's once-admired Miltonic elegy "To the Memory of a Lady lately deceased", written in 1747 following the death of his young wife Lucy in child-bed (Smollett's stanzas correspond to stanzas 7,8,11 and 17 of Lyttelton's 19-stanza poem). Smollett's burlesque is commonly called "cruel". And indeed, however little we may think of the original poem, such a record of personal grief hardly seems fair game. 

Smollett was temperamentally combative. An opponent's distress tended to make him more merciless. But he usually regretted his assaults, and was not intransigent. He later wrote generously of Lyttelton in the Continuation of his History of England, and of Fielding in his introduction to the translation of Don Quixote.

[Info from Scott's excellent 1821 note on Smollett:

http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/BiographyRecord.php?action=GET&bioid=4563

]

*

Anyway, Smollett did induce me to read through Lyttelton's poem. The first stanza, at least, has a broken plainness of thought that I liked very much.

I.
At length escap'd from ev'ry Human Eye,
From ev'ry Duty, ev'ry Care,
That in my mournful Thoughts might claim a Share,
Or force my Tears their flowing Stream to dry,
Beneath the Gloom of this embow'ring Shade
This lone Retreat, for tender Sorrow made
I now may give my burden'd Heart Relief
And pour forth all my Stores of Grief,
Of Grief surpassing ev'ry other Woe
Far as the purest Bliss, the happiest Love
Can on th' ennobled Mind bestow,
Exceeds the vulgar Joys that move
Our gross Desires, inelegant, and low.

Also the sixth, about the couple's children:

VI.
Sweet Babes, who, like the little playful Fawns,
Were wont to trip along these verdant Lawns
By your delighted Mother's Side,
Who now your Infant Steps shall guide?
Ah! where is now the Hand whose tender Care
To ev'ry Virtue would have form'd your Youth,
And strew'd with Flow'rs the thorny Ways of Truth?
O Loss beyond Repair!
O wretched Father, left alone
To weep Their dire Misfortune, and Thy own!
How shall thy weaken'd Mind, oppress'd with Woe,
And drooping o'er thy LUCY'S Grave,
Perform the Duties that you doubly owe,
Now She, alas! is gone,
From Folly, and from Vice, their helpless Age to save?

These are the subsequent passages that Smollett most closely parodies:

VII.
Where were ye, Muses, when relentless Fate
From these fond Arms your fair Disciple tore,
From these fond Arms that vainly strove
With hapless ineffectual Love
To guard her Bosom from the mortal Blow?....

VIII.
Nor then did Pindus, or Castalia's Plain,
Or Aganippe's Fount your Steps detain,
Nor in the Thespian Vallies did you play;
Nor then on Mincio's Bank
Beset with Osiers dank,
Nor where Clitumnus rolls his gentle Stream,
Nor where through hanging Woods
Steep Arno pours his Floods,
Nor yet where Meles, or Ilissus stray. ....

[XI.]
...Ev'n for the Kid or Lamb that pour'd its Life
Beneath the bloody Knife,
Her gentle Tears would fall,
As She the common Mother were of All.

XVII.
For my distracted Mind
What Succour can I find? ...

*

I get confused by this titles thing.

I think "Sir George" would have been the correct form in 1751. George became baronet on the death of his father in that year, but I dare say had already been knighted (at that time, the automatic right of a baronet's eldest son on reaching the age of 21). A few years later, following a stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was raised to the peerage, thus becoming Lord Lyttelton.

It feels misleading to apply a later
honorific when talking about an earlier period in someone's life. That would be like talking about Sir Paul McCartney setting fire to a condom in Hamburg.

But this can get over-pedantic. The author of Rob Roy was plain Walter Scott at the time, but it would be ridiculous to object to Penguin Books putting "Sir Walter Scott" on the jacket. That's become his author-name, regardless of chronology.

And of course women authors have mostly preserved their author name, ignoring later marriages, never mind honorifics. (The Shakespearean scholar Ann Righter was an exception, confusing generations of students by publishing her later books as Ann Barton.)