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Art. 4.-THE AUTHOR OF VATHEK.'

1. The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (Author of Vathek). By Lewis Melville. Illustrated. London: Heinemann, 1910.

2. Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents; in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of Europe. London: Printed for J. Johnson, MDCCLXXXIII. (Reprinted in 'The History of the Caliph Vathek and European Travels.' London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1891.)

3. An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript: with Notes Critical and Explanatory. London:

Printed for J. Johnson, MDCCLXXXVI.

4. Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal. By the Author of Vathek.' Two vols. London: Bentley, 1834. 5. Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha. By the Author of Vathek.' London: Richard Bentley, 1835,

6. Memoirs of William Beckford, of Fonthill. [By Cyrus Redding.] Two vols. London: Skeet, 1859.

7. The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century. By Martha Pike Conant, Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908.

WHEN he was about eighty years old, William Beckford professed that he had never in all his life known a moment's ennui. Many men would give a good deal to learn his secret. This is not, of course, to say that he was never bored; for boredom implies an external agent, not always evitable, whilst ennui springs from within. Beckford possessed in a high degree the capacity for being bored, but he escaped whenever possible-even at the cost of broken chairs. When a 'personage of some political importance and a distinguished graduate of the University of Coimbra 'pressed him too resolutely for his opinion upon some passages in Blackstone's Commentaries, Beckford made a strategic retreat with his chair; but this determined bore pushed his after me with such vehemence that a conflict must have ensued, perhaps to my total discomfiture, had not his chair been killed under him; both back and legs gave way, and down he fell flat on the gritty floor.' To suffer fools gladly was the last

thought that would occur to so perfect a hedonist; he shunned them as he would the pestilence.

It was probably this resolute avoidance of the claims and penalties of conventional society that eventually earned him the reputation of eccentricity, lunacy, even monstrous defiance of moral laws. We believe that the explanation of his strange life is rather to be found in the one word sincerity. From his boyhood he had resolved to be true to his ideal; and whatever hindered his purpose he simply cut off from his life. Whether his ideal was good or bad is not the question. The essential point is that he had certainly formed it when he was barely seventeen years old, and that he clung to it immovably till he died. There is not a trace of inconsistency from beginning to end. Beckford merely lived the life he intended to live, and allowed nothing seriously to interfere with the execution of his plan. What was 'expected' of him, from his wealth and position, his intellect and accomplishments, and his early achievements in literature-all this went for nothing in his estimation. He knew what he wanted, and so far as possible he got it. What other people thought he ought to want and to get did not matter.

He had the supreme advantage, from his point of view from others it may seem even a curse-of being born to such a position that within necessary limits he could shape his life as he chose. He knew that when he came of age he would be perhaps the richest commoner in England, with a million in cash and an income of over a hundred thousand a year. The only son of the stout Lord Mayor of London, who bearded George III with paralysing abruptness on the rights of the people, he might be expected to choose a parliamentary career; but though he held a seat in the House of Commons for many years, he seldom sat, and probably never spoke. The whole business of politics was utterly distasteful to him. 'The news of the World' (he wrote in 1780, when he was not yet twenty) 'affects me not half so much as the chirping of a sparrow or the rustling of withered leaves. . . . I wish not to eclipse those who retail the faded flowers of parliamentary eloquence. My senate house is a wood of pines, from whence, on a misty evening, I watch the western sky streaked with portentous red, whilst awful whispers amongst the boughs

above me foretell a series of strange events and melancholy times.'

Had his father lived, he might possibly have been forced into the conventional mould, been sent to Eton and Christ Church, have held office, and endowed schools and hospitals. He would at all events have become a much more useful person than he was. The Alderman evidently meant him to be a pillar of the State, for he secured the elder Pitt as godfather to the boy, and induced Lord Camden and the 'good' Lord Lyttelton to interest themselves in his future.

But Alderman Beckford died before his son was ten; and the widow had a mother's fears concerning the perils of public schools and universities. She was a Hamilton, of the Abercorn line; and from her Beckford derived his marked aristocratic instincts-they shine forth from his portraits by Romney-instincts poles apart from the principles which had nerved his father to make the famous speech to the throne, engraved upon his monument in the Guildhall, in which, said Chatham, 'the Spirit of Old England spoke.' Beckford boasted that, through his mother's pedigree, he was descended from every one of the Magna Charta barons who had issue; and his interest in genealogy and heraldry-which he said was 'a useful study before the time when the Visitations ceased,' since when the heralds have dispersed a vast quantity of spurious gentility'-led him to compile a 'Liber Veritatis' in which, anticipating Mr J. H. Round, though doubtless with imperfect learning, he so ruthlessly exposed the pretended lineage of many distinguished families that the work perforce remains still decently secluded in manuscript. But, if the noble ancestry of the mother overshadowed the Alderman's popular principles and made their offspring an aristocrat, an 'intellectual,' and a contemner of democracy, there may yet have been a determining or (to speak Mendelianly) 'dominant' strain on the father's side. The Beckfords, whatever their origin-the pedigree is sadly marred by the intervention of a tailor at Maidenhead in the seventeenth century-had been for three generations leading planters in Jamaica, where the family wealth was built up; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that, in spite of the robust energy of the Alderman, there may have lurked a

tendency, which appeared in his son, towards the indolence and languor of an enervating climate.

Whatever his inborn tendencies, Beckford's bringing up did little to check them. He evidently had his own wilful way; and the story is related how the old Duchess of Queensberry once rebuked him for his pertness. She sent for the great family Bible and made the boy read a passage from Proverbs. There it was, young man,' she said impressively, that I learnt my manners.' His tutor, Lettice, a clergyman whose very name speaks amiable repose and whose survival to the age of ninety-four rewarded the even current of his vitality, read the classics and philosophy with him assiduously, and to good purpose, for he turned out a pupil who was well read not only in Greek and Latin, but in French and English, and knew his Don Quixote' and his Gil Blas' as well as his Horace and Homer. But the tutor, though he held his pupil's affection, could not bind his romantic tastes. Probably he made no such attempt, but was wisely content to let the boy develope on his own lines, which were at least innocent and intellectual.

Lord Chatham wrote to William Pitt, in 1773, when 'little Beckford, my young vivid friend,' was thirteen, 'He is just as much compounded of the elements of air and fire as he was. A due proportion of terrestrial solidity will, I trust, come and make him perfect.' Chatham's hope came to nothing; there was little of solid earth about Beckford at any time, though fifteen years afterwards the Duchess of Berwick thinks from the tone of our conversation in the morning that I am now a little sobered, and may possibly get through this thorny world without losing my wits on its briars. When he recorded this slightly comforting judgment, he had still seven years to play with before the day when he ran races with the maids of honour at Queluz at the command of the Infanta of Portugal, and danced the bolero with the enchanting Antonita, 'like one of us,' as Donna Carlotta expected he would-'for I abhor unsuccessful enterprises.' He was still all air and fire,' and never permitted himself unsuccessful enterprises; so he won his race and danced his bolero with the same enthusiasm that made him 'spring' and 'bound' and 'run' when other folk were content to walk, or at the most

discreetly trot. 'You English are strangely given to locomotion,' remarked the Prior of St Vincent, and I perceive that of all English you are not the least nimble.'

He was a well of enthusiasm-' fiery enthusiasm, without which life is dull and stagnant,' as he says; and whether its object were the beauty of nature, 'the glorious scenery of the clouds,' the magic of the gale, the melancholy of the pine-wood; or the swift excitement of coursing a sprightly Irish girl, to the dismay of the less favoured Açafatas of the Queen of Portugal's household; or the penetrating wail of Jomelli's Requiem; or in later life the winning of rare folios against the competition of the formidable Bohn;-that passionate zeal remained with him all his life. It was the secret of his amazing vitality. Vivid intellectual interests and intense joy of life kept his age green in spite of years beyond the ordinary span.

6

The common impression about Beckford, we fancy, is that he was an eccentric genius who wrote a clever tale -of that old-fashioned imitative Oriental style which nobody now reads-at one sitting, when he was scarcely more than a boy, and never afterwards did anything except build foolish towers, collect books and pictures, and shut himself up in suspicious, if not disreputable, seclusion behind impenetrable walls. It was probably a misfortune for its author that Vathek' made the sensation it produced on its publication in 1786. It secured its author a reputation akin to that of one-speech Hamilton.' It was not indeed such a tour de force as Cyrus Redding, probably misunderstanding a reminiscence of Beckford's own, made it out to be; for, instead of three days and two nights of hard labour,' during which he never took off his clothes, the tale occupied Beckford through several months of 1782 and was still undergoing revision and expansion for three years more. Nor did it spring complete from its writer's brain without much preparatory study. Dr Conant, in her elaborate and admirable history of The Oriental Tale in England,' has shown that some at least of the most striking ideas in 'Vathek,' such as the sinners with the flaming hearts in that stupendous description of the Hall of Eblis, which is the one supreme stroke of genius in the tale, are derived from Gueulette's collection of 'Mogul Tales' or Bignon's 'Adventures of Abdullah, son of Hanif.' There are signs