CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE[46]
To as late as the winter of 1850–51 there was to be seen occasionally in the streets of Edinburgh an old gentleman, very peculiarly attired in a faded surtout of utterly antique fashion, with a large and bulging cravat round his throat, the lower curls of a light-brown wig visible between his hat and his smooth and still ruddy cheeks, pumps on his thread-stockinged feet instead of shoes or boots, and in his hand a green silk umbrella. This, you were told, if you did not know it already, was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. The mere name probably conveyed some information to you; and on a little inquiry you could learn more. For nearly forty years, you could learn, he had been one of the notabilities of Edinburgh: resident since about 1843 in his present house, No. 28 Drummond Place, where he lived in a recluse manner, with a wonderful museum of antiquities and artistic curiosities about him; but remembered for his more active connection with Edinburgh society in that prior period, between 1813 and 1840, when his house had been in No. 93 Princes Street.
It was mainly in this Princes Street portion ofKirkpatrick Sharpe’s Edinburgh life, bringing him from the thirty-third year of his age to the sixtieth, that he had made his reputation. A strange and mixed reputation it was. A zealot in Scottish antiquities and editor of some Scottish historical books, an occasional scribbler also in other and semi-private ways on his own account, a dilettante in art and collector of pictures and engravings, a facile master of the pencil in portrait and whimsical caricature, a Tory of the most pronounced old type and hater of everything Whiggish in the past or the present, he was notorious above all as a Sir Mungo Malagrowtherredivivus, delighting in scandalous anecdote and reminiscence, and in a habit of cynical sarcasm on all sorts of persons, living or dead. A special distinction of a large segment of this portion of his life, you could not fail to be told, had been his intimacy with Sir Walter Scott. The death of Scott in 1832, removing as it did the one man whose companionship he had always prized most, and whose influence on him had been strongest, had, in fact, turned the rest of his life in Edinburgh into a comparative blank. Still in friendly enough relations, however, with some of the best-known of Scott’s survivors in the literary society of Edinburgh, especially Thomas Thomson, David Laing, and Robert Chambers, and admitting to his acquaintance now and then a junior of kindred antiquarian tastes, such as Hill Burton, he had continued to prefer “New Athens,” as he liked to call it satirically, to any other home. And so, quitting No. 93 Princes Street in 1840, he had, after a brief intervening habitation somewhere in the Old Town, taken up his final abode, in 1843, as has been said, in No. 28 Drummond Place, becoming more andmore of an invalid and a recluse there, till at last he had shrunk into that “lean and slippered pantaloon,” or rather that old gentleman in the antique blue surtout and light-brown wig, who is remembered as Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe by most of those now living in Edinburgh that can remember him at all. He was not so very old a gentleman, either; for, when he died in March 1851, he had not quite completed his seventieth year.
The best sketch of Kirkpatrick Sharpe in his prime is that given in Lockhart’sLife of Scott, in the form of an extract from Scott’s Diary, under the date of Sunday, the 20th November 1825. It chanced that William Clerk and Kirkpatrick Sharpe had dined with Scott that day in his house in Castle Street; and the Diary, after describing Clerk, thus describes the other:—
“Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe is another very remarkable man. He was bred for a clergyman, but never took orders. He has infinite wit, and a great turn for antiquarian lore, as the publications ofKirkton, etc., bear witness. His drawings are the most fanciful and droll imaginable,—a mixture between Hogarth and some of those foreign masters who painted temptations of St. Anthony and other grotesque subjects. As a poet he has not a very strong touch. Strange that his finger-ends can describe so well what he cannot bring out clearly and firmly in words. If he were to make drawing a resource, it might raise him a large income. But, though a lover of antiquities, and therefore of expensive trifles, C. K. S. is too aristocratic to use his art to assist his revenue. He is a very complete genealogist, and has made detections inDouglasand other books on pedigree, which our nobles would do well to suppress if they had an opportunity. Strange that a man should be curious after scandal of centuries old! Not but Charles loves it fresh and fresh also; for, being very much a fashionable man, he is always master of the reigning report, and he tells the anecdote with such gusto that there is no helping sympathising with him,—a peculiarity of voice adding not a little to the general effect. My idea is that C. K. S., with his oddities, tastes, satire, and high aristocratic feelings, resembles Horace Walpole; perhaps in his person also in a general way.”
This description, which C. K. S. must have himself read on its first appearance inLockhart,[47]had to serve as a sufficient account of him for the general public so long as he lived, except in so far as it might be filled up by impressions from his own writings. After his death there were obituary sketches of him, of course, in the Edinburgh newspapers; and he figured posthumously, under the thin disguise of “Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq.,” as one of the typical Edinburgh bibliomaniacs so cleverly described by Hill Burton in hisBook-Hunter, published in 1862. Not till 1869, however, was there any adequate commemoration of him. In that year there was published by Messrs. Blackwood a sumptuous large quarto entitledEtchings by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with Photographs from Original Drawings, Poetical and Prose Fragments, and a Prefatory Memoir. The volume sufficed in every respect for those who still felt an interest in Kirkpatrick Sharpe and his memory, save that it contained hardly any representation of his extensive epistolary correspondence. The defect has been amply supplied in the two large new volumes now before us. TheMemoirwhich they contain is substantially a reproduction of that in the now scarce volume of 1869; but they consist chiefly of a selection of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s preserved letters, and of letters to him, through the long period of fifty-two years extending from 1798 to 1850. The careful editor, Mr. Allardyce, has erred rather by excess than by defect in his selection. A good many of the letters of Sharpe’scorrespondents which he has thought worth giving might well have been spared. With that exception, however, the editing is admirable; and in the main, the collection is as variously amusing, and here and there as startlingly and laughably odd, as anything of the kind that has been published in Great Britain for many a day.
By far the largest proportion of the letters belong to what has been hitherto the least known period of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s life: to wit, the period preceding his definite settlement of himself in Edinburgh in 1813. From these, together with Mr. Bedford’s prefixedMemoir, we obtain the following facts:—
Born in 1781, at Hoddam Castle, in Dumfriesshire, the third son of Charles Sharpe, Esq., of Hoddam, and with a pedigree, both on the father’s side and on the mother’s, of specially marked connections with some of the oldest houses of the Scottish aristocracy, and some of the most memorable events of Scottish history, the boy had grown up to his sixteenth year, one of a large family of well-educated brothers and sisters, imbibing the family tastes, and strongly influenced also by the traditions and legends of the antique family-dwelling itself, and of the adjacent scenery of that old West Border region. Drawing, howsoever learnt, must have been one of his earliest accomplishments; and one of the most interesting memories of his boyhood was that, in consequence of his father’s friendly relations with the poet Burns, he himself had seen and spoken with the poet familiarly more than once. It was in the winter after the poet’s death that Kirkpatrick Sharpe added to his home education by attendinga class or two in the University of Edinburgh. The intention for the time, however, being that he should become an English clergyman, he was sent, in 1798, at the age of seventeen, to Christ Church, Oxford. Mainly here we see him for the next eight years, taking his B.A. degree in 1802 and his M.A. in 1806, and meanwhile forming intimacies with a select number of his young College and University coevals. Chief among these were Earl Gower, afterwards Duke of Sutherland, Viscount Newtown, afterwards Earl of Lanesborough, Lord Lewisham, afterwards Earl of Dartmouth, the Rev. J. J. Conybeare, afterwards Oxford Professor of Poetry, Mr. R. A. Inglis, afterwards the well-known Sir Robert Inglis, and Elijah B. Impey, son of the famous Indian Chief-Justice Impey. In the society of these, and of other young Oxonians, he seems to have made a strong mark, and to have been greatly liked,—a dandyish young fellow, but with eccentric ways and bookish tastes, a very shrill voice and abundant sarcasm in the use of it, no end of knowledge of art subjects, and an inimitable power of portrait-sketching and caricaturing. Incidents of the same college period at Oxford were some contributions by Sharpe to theAnti-Jacobin, and the beginning of his acquaintance with Scott, first by correspondence, and then personally. Through the next seven years, when he was passing out of his twenties into his thirties, we see him, though he still kept up his connection with Oxford and was occasionally in residence there, yet moving about a good deal,—sometimes at Hoddam, sometimes in Edinburgh, sometimes in London, but with frequent visits to the country-houses of his aristocratic friends. His habits of letter-writing were now at their briskest;and among his correspondents through those seven years, besides the Oxonian friends already mentioned, none of whom forgot him wherever he was, one notes the Margravine of Anspach, and her son, the Hon. Keppel Craven, the Marchioness of Stafford, the Countess of Dalkeith, the Count de Gramont, the Marchioness of Queensberry, Lady Charlotte Campbell (afterwards Lady Charlotte Bury), Miss Campbell of Monzie, and the Duchess of Buccleuch. What ended this desultory life of wandering and fashionable acquaintance-making in England was the death of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s father in 1813. The lairdship of Hoddam having then descended to the eldest son, General Matthew Sharpe,[48]the old Hoddam household was broken up, and Kirkpatrick Sharpe, at the age of thirty-two, began, on an allowance from his brother, that long residence in Edinburgh which has been sketched sufficiently already.
If we were to regard Kirkpatrick Sharpe as a kind of Scottish Horace Walpole, it would not be because his correspondence furnishes, to anything like the same extent as Walpole’s, a continuous comment of gossip on what was most central in the history of his time. Even the Edinburgh portion of it will disappoint, if what is looked for in it is a record of the most important occurrences in Edinburghthrough the time traversed. Some of the most notable persons in the society of Edinburgh, and even in its literary society, between 1813 and 1851, are either barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. The truth is that Kirkpatrick Sharpe moved through the world in a track, or in a series of tracks, determined by a few affinities of his own constitution, which led him sometimes into social companionship, but at other times left him stranded, and at leisure to find amusement in counting over the stray beads of past memories. Hence, though his correspondence does contain a good deal of historical gossip at intervals, its chief interest will be missed by those who read it only for that kind of recompense, and do not also find pleasure in it as a revelation of Kirkpatrick Sharpe himself.
Kirkpatrick Sharpe was, as we have hinted, a born Sir Mungo Malagrowther. From his first youth, whether in consequence or not of some constitutional peculiarity, such as might be supposed to be indicated by his thin and shrill voice,—by the bye, Sir Walter, when he introduces the original Sir Mungo in hisNigel, expressly notes that the voice of that original was “high-pitched and querulous,”—the lad of elegant accomplishments from Hoddam Castle was marked by a disposition to snarl at things, express shrill and sarcastic views of things, ventilate the absurdest little momentary animosities. In the very first of his letters, which is of date November 1798, and announces to his mother his entry into Christ Church College, his description of the young men of the college he has yet seen is that they “are all ugly, conceited, and putting themselves in postures like Mr. Don, and have the worst legs I ever beheld, crooked thirty different ways,east, west, north, south, that it is a very shame to be seen”; and in a later letter the Rev. Dr. Cyril Jackson, the head of the college, is described as “an inspired swine.” These irreverences and causticities, characteristic from the first of the conversation and the letters of a young fellow of indubitable natural talent otherwise, and of gentlemanly tastes and belongings, must, in fact, have been one cause of that zest for his society when it could be had, and for continued epistolary intercourse at other times, which was felt by so many of his college comrades of the most aristocratic set, and communicated by them to the seniors of their families. In English country-houses, and among great ladies, what more privileged person than the weak-voiced young Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with his witty cynicisms and budget of queer stories? And so to the end, with only the difference made by change of residence back to Scotland, increasing age, and increasing carelessness in dress,—always a privileged person, just because he was recognised as so amusing a Malagrowther. Here, from the abundance in the volumes before us, are a few of his characteristic Malagrowtherisms, arranged in the chronological order of their subjects:—
Character of the Countess of Mar, his own ancestress.—“Her good qualities were not proportioned, as is generally the case, to her rank. She basked all her life in the beams of royalty, with a pension from the Crown, and yet cultivated the Kirk, and hounded out her whelps to bark and bite in favour of the Solemn League and Covenant.”
Milton.—“I think Milton’sParadise Losta heap of blasphemy and obscenity, with, certainly, numberless poetical beauties. Milton was a Whig, and in my mind an Atheist. I am persuaded his poem was composed to apologise for the Devil, who certainly was the first Whig on record.”
Mrs. Siddons.—“I met Mrs. Siddons at dinner one day, just before the death of her spouse,—’twas at Walter Scott’s,—and you cannot imagine how it annoyed me to behold Belvidera guzzleboiled beef and mustard, swill streams of porter, cram up her nose with handfuls of snuff, and laugh till she made the whole room shake again.”
Madame de Stäel.—“Her face was that of a blackamoor attempted to be washed white. She wore a wig like a bunch of withered heather, and over that a turban which looked as if it had been put on in the dark; a short neck, and shoulders rising so much behind that they almost amounted to a hump. With all this ugliness all the airs of a beauty,—for ever tormenting her shawl into new draperies, and distorting her fingers as you see them in the ridiculous French portraits by Mignard and his followers.”
Queen Caroline.—“Her eyes projected, like those of the royal family. She made her head large by wearing an immense wig; she also painted her eyebrows, which gave her face a strange, fierce look. Her skin,—and she showed a great deal,—was very red. She wore very high-heeled shoes, so that she bent forward when she stood or walked: her feet and ankles were dreadful.”
Shelley.—“We have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here [at Oxford], before whom our former luminaries must hide their diminished heads,—a Mr. Shelley, of University College, who lives upon arsenic, aquafortis, half-an-hour’s sleep in the night, and is desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson.”
The Rev. Dr. M’Crie.—“The villainous biographer of John Knox.” “That villain, Dr. M’Crie.”
The Rev. H. Philpotts (afterwards Bishop of Exeter).—“A hideous fellow of the name of Fillpot.”
Sir Walter Scott:—(1)First Sight of Scott at Oxford in 1803.—“The Border Minstrel paid me a visit some time since on his way to town, and I very courteously invited him to breakfast. He is dreadfully lame, and much toopoetical. He spouts without mercy, and pays compliments so high-flown that my self-conceit, though a tolerable good shot, could not even wing one of them.” (2)Opinion of the Waverley Novels in 1839, seven years after Scott’s death.—“As to Sir Walter’s harmlessromances,—not harmless, however, as to bad English,—they containnothing: pictures of manners that never were, are, or will be, besides ten thousand blunders as to chronology, costume, etc. etc., which must mislead the million who admire such captivating comfits.”
Rachel and Jenny Lind.—“I have seen and heard Misses Rachel and J. Lind. The Jewess has a good voice,—far inferior, however, to that of Mrs. Siddons,—but an ungraceful and often vulgar action. As to Miss Jenny, she sings very prettily; but her highest note is a downright squall, and the buzz like a bee she can make (I have heard boys in Annandale do something like it) is a trick,—not music.”
These are specimens of what may be called the Malagrowtherism of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s disposition,—his readiness to snarl and snap at everything; but they leave unrepresented the two special forms of his Malagrowtherism which strike one most constantly and startlingly in his correspondence. Like Swift, one of his constitutional resemblances to whom was an extreme personal fastidiousness,—an extreme sensitiveness to anything about himself that was offensive to eye, ear, or nostril,—he tended, in a most inordinate degree, in his writings and letters, as if by revenge against this constitutional nicety, to descriptions and imaginations of the physically nasty; and, like Swift also, and probably from some similar radical cause, he tended, in a most inordinate degree, to sexual allusions, and to all scandals and speculations of the sexual order. Illustrations will not be expected here, but will be found in sufficient number in the volumes which Mr. Allardyce has edited. Mr. Allardyce has been a bold editor; for there are in the volumes passages of both the specified kinds that verge on the bounds of what many people nowadays might regard as the unpublishable. Some of these passages, it is curious to observe, occur in letters to Sharpe’s lady-correspondents; one or two of whom, it is also curious to remark, do not seem at all discomposed, but even,—those were the days of the Regency!—reciprocate with due elegance. The worst of the matter is that poor Sir Walter himself, honest man! does not escape uninvolved. In one or two frank moments, knowing his friend’s tastes, he had sent him communications which he thought would suit them; and lo! these now in printed black and white! Hurrah for old Peveril all the same! What can ever smirchhim?
It would be wrong to leave our readers with the impression that Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe was nothing more than a Sir Mungo Malagrowther of the first half of the present century. At the back of his Malagrowtherism, as appears from plenty of testimony in these volumes, there was much gentlemanly courtesy, a good deal of kindliness and willingness to oblige, a highly cultivated critical judgment in minute matters of art and literature, a sensitiveness to whatever of the fine and poetical in Scottish tradition he could discern amid the gross and scandalous, and, most especially, a real sense of humour. In this last particular his fondness for little scraps of whimsical or nonsensical verse may be taken as a sure sign. There must have been some heart of intrinsic fun in the man who could go about in the streets, or sit alone in his room, repeating to himself, as we know he did, such scraps as these:—
“Yours till death, till death doth come,And shut me up in the coldtum.”“What is impossible can’t be,And never, never comes to pass.”“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,Fatharalinkum feedle;Mony better, few waur,Fatharalinkum feedle.”
“Yours till death, till death doth come,And shut me up in the coldtum.”“What is impossible can’t be,And never, never comes to pass.”“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,Fatharalinkum feedle;Mony better, few waur,Fatharalinkum feedle.”
“Yours till death, till death doth come,And shut me up in the coldtum.”
“Yours till death, till death doth come,
And shut me up in the coldtum.”
“What is impossible can’t be,And never, never comes to pass.”
“What is impossible can’t be,
And never, never comes to pass.”
“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,Fatharalinkum feedle;Mony better, few waur,Fatharalinkum feedle.”
“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,
Fatharalinkum feedle;
Mony better, few waur,
Fatharalinkum feedle.”
Above all, we must remember how many attached friends Kirkpatrick Sharpe had drawn around him in the course of his life, and how all that survived of the earliest of these kept up their liking for him, and an affectionate intercourse with him, to the last. In September 1831, when the dying Scott was departing on his final journey to the Mediterranean in quest of health, almost the last friend he wrote to was his “Dear Charles”: and the letter contained these words—“Ishould like to have shaken hands with you, as there are few I regret so much to part with. But it will not be. I will keep my eyes dry if possible, and therefore content myself with bidding you a long, perhaps an eternal, farewell.” That, surely, is a testimony by itself. All in all, then, need we wonder at the rumour that there are some persons in Edinburgh now so peculiarly tempered, or so ill-satisfied with their present mercies, that they would be willing to exchange any three or four of those whom they are pleased to characterise as the more insipid present celebrities of the town for the re-apparition among us of that crabbed old gentleman who was to be seen forty years ago in the Edinburgh streets, with his light-brown wig, faded blue surtout, ribbon-tied pumps, and green silk umbrella?