Читать книгу A Georgian Pageant - Frank Frankfort Moore - Страница 10

Henry Thrale was a man of humble origin—a fact that revealed itself almost daily in his life—and he was incapable of loving any one except himself. He certainly never made a pretence of devotion to his wife, and it is equally certain that, although she did more for him than any other woman would have done, she never loved him. It might be going too far, considering the diversity of temperament existing among womankind, to assert that he was incapable of being loved by any woman; but beyond a doubt he was not a lovable man. He was a stiff, dignified, morose, uncongenial man, and he was a Member of Parliament into the bargain. What could a pretty, lively, brilliant girl of good family see in such a man as Thrale to make her love him? She never did love him—at times she must have detested him. But she married him, and it was a lucky day for him that she did so. Twice she saved him from bankruptcy, and three times she induced his constituents, who thoroughly hated him, to return him to Parliament as their representative. He never did anything in Parliament, and he did little out of it that was worth remembering. It is customary to make large allowances for a man of business who finds that his wealth and a charming wife serve as a passport into what is called society, though latterly such men do not stand in need of such a favour being shown to them. But if a man betrays his ignorance of certain social usages—not necessarily refinements—his friends excuse him on the ground that he is a first-rate business man. Thrale, however, was unworthy of such a title. He inherited a great scientific business, but he showed himself so incapable of appreciating the methods by which it had been built up, that he brought himself within a week or two of absolute ruin by listening to a clumsy adventurer who advocated the adoption of a system of adulteration of his beer that even a hundred and fifty years ago would have brought him within sight of a criminal prosecution.

His literary wife, by her clever management, aided by the money of her mother and of sundry of her own, not her husband's, friends, succeeded in staving off the threatened disaster. But the pig-headed man did not accept the lesson which one might imagine he would have learned. Seeing the success that crowned other enterprises of the same character as his own, he endeavoured to emulate this success, not by the legitimate way of increasing his customers, but by the idiotic plan of over-production. He had an idea that in the multiplying of the article which he had to sell he was increasing his business. Once again he was helped from the verge of ruin by his literary wife.

He must have been a dreadful trial to her, and to a far-seeing manager whom he had—a man named Perkins. Of course it was inevitable that the force of character possessed by this Mr. Perkins must eventually prevail against the dignified incompetence of the proprietor. The inevitable happened, and the name of Perkins has for more than a hundred years been bracketed with Barclay as a going concern, while the name of Thrale has vanished for ever from “the Borough.”

It was this Mr. Perkins who, when the brewery was within five minutes of absolute disaster, displayed the tactics of a great general in the face of an implacable enemy, and saved the property. As a reward for his services his master authorised the presentation to him of the sum of a hundred pounds. His master's wife, however, being a more generous assessor of the value of the man's ability, ventured to present double the sum, together with a silver tea-service for Mrs. Perkins; but she did so in fear and trembling, failing to summon up sufficient courage to acquaint her husband with her extravagance until further concealment was impossible. She was so overjoyed at his sanctioning the increase that she at once wrote to her friends acquainting them with this evidence of his generosity.

This episode was certainly the most stirring in the history of Thrale's brewery. The Gordon rioters had been terrorising London for several days, burning houses in every direction, as well as Newgate and another prison, and looting street after street. They had already overthrown one brewery, and they found the incident so fascinating that they marched across the bridge to the Southwark concern, raising the cry that Thrale was a Papist. The Thrales were at this time sojourning at Bath, and were in an agony of suspense regarding their property. They had left Dr. Johnson comfortably ensconced at their Streatham house in order that they might learn in dignified language how things were going on.

This is Johnson's thrilling account of the incident:

“What has happened to your house you all know. The harm is only a few butts of beer, and I think you may be sure that the danger is over. Pray tell Mr. Thrale that I live here, and have no fruit, and if he does not interpose am not likely to have much; but I think he might as well give me a little as give all to the gardener.”

There was a double catastrophe threatening, it would appear: the burning of the brewery and the shortage in the supply of Dr. Johnson's peaches.

This is how Mrs. Thrale describes the situation:

“Nothing but the astonishing presence of mind shewed by Perkins in amusing the mob, with meat and drink and huzzas, till Sir Philip Jennings Clerke could get the troops, and pack up the counting-house, bills, bonds etc. and carry them, which he did, to Chelsea College for safety, could have saved us from actual undoing. The villains had broke in, and our brew-house would have blazed in ten minutes, when a property of £150,000 would have been utterly lost, and its once flourishing possessors quite undone.”

It seems almost incredible that Johnson, living at Streatham as the guardian of Mr. Thrale's interests, should require the lady to write to him, begging him to thank Perkins for his heroism. But so it was.

“Perkins has behaved like an Emperor,” she wrote, “and it is my earnest wish and desire—command, if you please to call it so—that you will go over to the brew-house and express your sense of his good behaviour.”

Mrs. Thrale was unreasonable. How could Johnson be expected to take any action when he was deprived of his peaches?

It will strike a good many modern readers of the account of this and other transactions that if it was Perkins who saved the brewery for Mr. Thrale, it was Mrs. Thrale who saved Perkins for the brewery. Possibly it was her prompt gift of the silver plate to Mrs. Perkins that induced this splendid manager to pocket the insult of the beggarly two hundred guineas given to him by Mrs. Thrale—though this was double the amount authorised by the “master.” Thrale never sufficiently valued the services of Perkins. If he had had any gratitude in his composition he would never have made Johnson one of his executors. What a trial it must have been to the competent man of business to see Johnson lumbering about the place with a pen behind his ear and an ink-pot suspended from a button of his coat, getting in the way of everybody, and yet feeling himself quite equal to any business emergency that might crop up. He felt himself equal to anything—even to improve upon the auctioneer's style in appraising the value of the whole concern. “Beyond the dreams of avarice” remains as the sole classic phrase born beneath the shadow of a brew-house.

In the matter of the premium to Perkins, Thrale should have felt that he had a treasure in his wife, to say nothing of all that she had done for him upon another occasion, involving a terrible sacrifice. A quarrel had broken out among the clerks at the brewery, which even the generalship of Perkins was unable to mollify. Had Mrs. Thrale been an ordinary woman she would not have jeopardised her own life and the life of her child—her thirteenth—in her husband's interests. As it was, however, she felt that the duty was imposed on her to settle the difficulties in the counting-house, and she did so; but only after many sleepless nights and the sacrifice of her child. “The men were reconciled,” she wrote, “and my danger accelerated their reconcilement.”

If Henry Thrale was deficient in the best characteristics of a business man, his qualifications to shine socially can scarcely be regarded as abundant. There were stories of his having been a gay dog in his youth, but assuredly he and gaiety had long been strangers when he married his wife, and upon no occasion afterwards could he be so described even by the most indulgent of his friends; so that one rather inclines to the belief that the dull dog must have been a dull puppy. We know what his eldest daughter was, and we are convinced that the nature of that priggish, dignified, and eminently disagreeable young lady was inherited from her father. In Miss Thrale as a girl one feels that one is looking at Henry Thrale as a boy. The only story that survives of those mythical gay days with which he was accredited is that relating to the arrival of the Gunnings to take London by storm. It was said that he and Murphy thought to make these exquisite creatures the laughing-stock of the town by introducing them to a vulgar hanger-on of Murphy, in the character of a wealthy man of title and distinction. Possibly the two young men were put up to play this disgraceful prank upon the Gunnings by some jealous female associate; but however this may be, it not only failed most ignominiously, it recoiled upon the jesters themselves, for Mrs. Gunning, herself the sister of a nobleman, and destined to become the mother-in-law of two dukes and the grandmother of two more—the parent of a peeress in her own right, and an uncommonly shrewd Irishwoman into the bargain—“smoaked,” as the slang of the period had it, the trick, and her footman bundled the trio into the street.

The story may be true; but as both the Gunning girls were married in 1752, and Thrale did not meet Hester Lynch Salusbury till 1763, it was an old story then, and it was not remembered against him except by the Duchess of Hamilton. If it represents the standard of his adolescent wildness, we cannot but think that his youth was less meteoric than his wife believed it to be. At any rate, we do not know much about his early life, but we do know a great deal about his latter years, and it is impossible to believe that his nature underwent a radical change within a year or two of his marriage.

He became the host of a large number of the most notable people of that brilliant period at which he lived, and we perceive from the copious accounts that survive of the Streatham gatherings that he was greatly respected by all his visitors. He never said anything that was worth recording, and he never did anything memorable beyond stopping Johnson when the latter was becoming more than usually offensive to his fellow-guests. He had no ear for music any more than Johnson had, and it does not appear that he cared any more for painting, although he became a splendid patron of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he commissioned to paint several portraits of his distinguished friends for the decoration of the library at Streatham. To his munificence in this respect the world owes its finest portraits of Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick, the painter himself, and Mrs. Thrale.

The debt which we feel we owe to Thrale on this account is, however, somewhat discounted when we learn that this enthusiastic patron of art never paid the painter for his work. He left the pictures and the obligation to pay for them as a legacy to his widow—and to pay for them at more than the current rate for each into the bargain. Sir Joshua Reynolds was as good a man of business as Thrale was an indifferent one. At the time of his painting the portraits his price for a three-quarter-length picture was £35, but in the course of a year or two he felt it necessary to charge £50 for the same size, and this was the price which the unfortunate widow had to pay for her husband's pose as the munificent patron of the Arts.

Men of the stamp of Thrale usually have no vices.

They are highly respected. If they had a vice or two they would be beloved. He had a solitary failing, but it did not win for him the affection of any one: it was gluttony. For years of his life he gave himself up to the coarsest form of indulgence. He was not a gourmet: he did not aim at the refinements of the table or at those daintinesses of cuisine which in the days of intemperate eaters and drinkers proved so fatally fascinating to men of many virtues; no, his was the vice of the trough. He ate for the sake of eating, unmindful of the nature of the dish so long as it was plentiful enough to keep him employed for an hour or two.

The dinner-table of the famous Streatham Park must have been a spectacle for some of the philosophers who sat round it. We know what was the food that Johnson's soul loved, and we know how he was accustomed to partake of it. He rioted in pork, and in veal baked with raisins, and when he sat down to some such dainty he fed like a wild animal. He used his fingers as though they were claws, tearing the flesh from the bone in his teeth, and swallowing it not wholly without sound. It is not surprising to learn that his exertions caused the veins in his forehead to swell and the beads of perspiration to drop from his scholarly brow, nor can any one who has survived this account of his muscular feat at the dinner-table reasonably be amazed to hear that when so engaged, he devoted himself to the work before him to the exclusion of every other interest in life. He was oblivious of anything that was going on around him. He was deaf to any remark made by a neighbour, and for himself articulation was suspended. Doubtless the feeble folk on whom he had been trampling in the drawing-room felt that his peculiarities of feeding, though revolting to the squeamish, were not without a bright side. They had a chance of making a remark at such intervals without being gored—“gored,” it will be remembered, was the word employed by Boswell in playful allusion to the effect of his argumentative powers.

Thanks to the careful habits of some of the guests at this famous house we know what fare was placed before the Gargantuan geniuses at one of these dinners. Here is the carte du jour, “sufficient for twelve,” as the cookery book says:

“First course, soups at head and foot, removed by fish and a saddle of mutton; second course, a fowl they call galena at head and a capon larger than some of our Irish turkeys at foot; third course, four different sorts of ices, pine-apple, grape, raspberry and a fourth; in each remove there were fourteen dishes.” The world is indebted to an Irish clergyman for these details. It will be seen that they did not include much that could be sneered at as bordering on the kickshaw. All was good solid English fare—just the sort to make the veins in a gormandiser's forehead to swell and to induce the lethargy from which Thrale suffered. He usually fell asleep after dinner; one day he failed to awake, and he has not awakened since.

Of course Johnson, being invariably in delicate health, was compelled to put himself on an invalid's diet when at home. He gives us a sample of a diner maigre at Bolt Court. Feeling extremely ill, he wrote to Mrs. Thrale that he could only take for dinner “skate, pudding, goose, and green asparagus, and could have eaten more but was prudent.” He adds, “Pray for me, dear Madam,”—by no means an unnecessary injunction, some people will think, when they become aware of the details of the meal of an invalid within a year or two of seventy.

It was after one of the Streatham dinners that Mrs. Thrale ventured to say a word or two in favour of Garrick's talent for light gay poetry, and as a specimen repeated his song in Florizel and Perdita, and dwelt with peculiar pleasure on this line:

I'd smile with the simple and dine with the poor.

This is Boswell's account of the matter, and he adds that Johnson cried, “Nay, my dear lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with the simple! What folly is that? And who would feed with the poor that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise and feed with the rich!”

Quite so; beyond a doubt Johnson spoke from the bottom of his heart—nay, from a deeper depth still.

Boswell was amazed to find that Garrick's “sensibility” as a writer was irritated when he related the story to him, and in Mrs. Thrale's copy of Johnson she made a note—“How odd to go and tell the man!”

It was not at all odd that Boswell, being a professional tale-bearer and mischief-maker, should tell the man; but it is odd that Garrick should be irritated, the fact being that the sally was directed against a line which he did not write. What Garrick did write was something very different. The verse, which was misquoted, runs thus:

That giant Ambition we never can dread;

Our roofs are too low for so lofty a head;

Content and sweet Cheerfulness open our door,

They smile with the simple and feed with the poor.

Such a muddle as was made of the whole thing can only be attributed to the solidity of the Streatham fare.

It was inevitable that Thrale could not continue over-eating himself with impunity. He was warned more than once by his doctors that he was killing himself, and yet when he had his first attack every one was shocked. He recovered temporarily, and all his friends implored him to cultivate moderation at the dinner-table. A touch of humour is to be found among the details of the sordid story, in his wife's begging Johnson—Johnson of the swollen forehead and the tokens of his submission to the primeval curse in the eating of his bread—to try to reason the unhappy man out of his dreadful vice. After wiping from the front of his coat the remains of the eighth peach which he had eaten before breakfast, or the dregs of his nineteenth cup of tea from his waistcoat, Johnson may have felt equal to the duty. He certainly remonstrated with Thrale. It was all to no purpose, however; he had a second attack of apoplexy in the spring of 1780, and we hear that he was copiously “blooded.” He recovered and went to Bath to recruit. It was during this visit to Bath that the brewery was attacked by the Gordon rioters. On returning to London he failed to induce his constituents to remain faithful to him, and he continued eating voraciously for another year. He began a week of gorging on April 1st, 1781. His wife implored him to be more moderate, and Johnson said very wisely, “Sir, after the denunciation of your physicians this morning, such eating is little better than suicide.” It was all to no purpose. He survived the gorge of Sunday and Monday, but that of Tuesday was too much for him. He was found by his daughter on the floor in a fit of apoplexy, and died the next morning.

Such was the man whose memory was outraged by the marriage of his widow with Piozzi, an Italian musician, whose ability was so highly appreciated that his earnings, even when he had lost his voice, amounted to £1200 a year, a sum equal to close upon £2500 of our money. And yet Johnson had the effrontery to suggest in that letter of his to Mrs. Thrale, which we have quoted, that she would do well to live in England, so that her money might be under her own eye!

The truth is that Mrs. Thrale was in embarrassed circumstances when she married Signor Piozzi. Her worthy husband left her an annuity of £2000, which was to be reduced by £800 in the event of her marrying again; and also £500 for her immediate expenses. Johnson wrote to her, making her acquainted with this fact, in order, it would seem, to allay any unworthy suspicion which she might entertain as to the extent of her husband's generosity. But his last will and testament cannot have wholly dispersed the doubt into which her experience of Mr. Thrale may have led her. For a man who had been making from £16,000 to £20,000 a year to leave his wife only £2000 a year, with a possibility of its being reduced to £1200, would not strike any one as being generous to a point of recklessness. When, however, it is remembered that Thrale's wife plucked him and his business from the verge of bankruptcy more than once, that she bore him fourteen children, and that she lived with him for eighteen years, all question as to the generosity of his bequest to her vanishes. But when, in addition, it is remembered that the lady's fortune at her marriage to Thrale amounted to £10,000, all of which he pocketed, and that later on she brought him another £500 a year, that it was her mother's money, added to the sum which she herself collected personally, which saved the brewery from collapse—once again at the sacrifice of her infant—all question even of common fairness disappears, and the meanness of the man stands revealed.