Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/800

794  opinions are of less value than Mr. Procter's, were as far from the pretension of idealizing them. Country life told favorably upon susceptibilities which he regarded as more important: he fell in and out of love, and cultivated his imagination, and even began to write verses.

About 1807, at the age of twenty, he came to London to live, and for the first eight years he seems to have been sufficiently occupied with living. He did not work at his profession; he can hardly be said to have worked at literature: oddly enough, it was his acquaintance with three literary men whom he could hardly admire, that first made him aware that he too was capable of literature. He had no ambition, and a great awe for authorship in the abstract; but when this awe was worn away by experience, he was attracted by a refined amusement which lay within his reach. In 1815, he began to contribute poetry to the Literary Gazette. In 1816 his father died and left him what seems to have been a handsome independence for a bachelor, which he enjoyed without impairing it, though some temporary embarrassment connected with his partnership with a solicitor of the name of Slaney made him, about 1821, dependent upon his literary earnings, to his great disgust. He kept a hunter, he took boxing lessons from Cribb, he went to the theatre. In his youth, he says himself, he had some courage and some activity. These years of freedom and enjoyment were also the years in which he made his mark as a poet: the "Dramatic Scenes," "Marcian Colonna," the "Sicilian Story," "Mirandola, a Tragedy," and "The Flood of Thessaly, all appeared between the years 1819 and 1823. Then, too, he laid the foundation of the lyrical collection which was published in 1832 and continued to receive additions for many years. One almost fancies that the Barry Cornwall of those years was the true Procter, and that then his life and imagination were of a piece, and that the irony, now paradoxical and now pathetic, of the later years, was due to the contrast between the old life and the new—the true self flashing through the veil which custom and courtesy and prudence had woven over it. Mr. Procter wrote a poem in the manner of "Beppo," and there is a whole side of his poetry which reminds us of Byron; only in him the revolt, natural to a simple, vivid spirit in its hours of exaltation against second-hand systems of doctrine and proprieties of conduct, was not inflamed by a morbid organization or poisoned by personal excess. It may be doubted whether he had force enough to sustain him in his revolt; and the temper of rebellious scorn was subdued by the influence of a dutiful and prosperous life, till his best friends doubted whether it was more than a poetical caprice, just as he doubted himself whether Godwin's magnanimity had any existence except on paper.

It is noticeable that he seems to have thought "Don Juan" was Byron's great poem. Perhaps its realism attracted him: one can fancy his disliking the rather rhetorical mysticism of "Childe Harold," and the rather theatrical heroism of "The Giaour" and "The Corsair." He had the sense of measure and of sanity, if not exactly of reality; he disliked what was vast and vague and pretentious. He was capable, which Stothard was not, of. a genuine imaginative sympathy with passion; but subject to this limitation we might adopt the biographer's graceful parallel between them. "In their characters, even more than in their works, there is a quality rarely found elsewhere, except in sensitive, single-hearted (and slightly 'spoilt') children; children who are confident of their company, and have not been laughed or frightened out of knowing and speaking their own minds. These alone express themselves with such directness, concreteness, and naïve limitation; often attaining, in their artlessness, to humor, wit, and grace which are the artist's envy. The greatest point of resemblance between Stothard and the poet is that last named—a narrow limitation of the sphere of thought and feeling; a sort of voluntary ignoring of all that might clash with or contradict the habitual mood or idea." "Stothard and Mr. Procter are alike chargeable with sometimes giving the effect of hard outlines where no outlines really exist; and this through no incapacity of touch, but by an artistic idiosyncrasy; an insistance on the beloved limitations; a protest against the vastness, variety and inscrutability of fact."

In Mr. Procter's case the protest was accentuated by his innate energetic right-mindedness. "Few men surpassed him in the unpretentious and untalkative wisdom and fidelity of a right direction of heart and mind." And for this very reason he had a curious dread and distrust of public opinion, which is always too noisy to be quite sincere, and is always insisting on more than it really wants, and pretending to more than it really has. 'Those who have the power of being leaders without the vocation of being martyrs, make the