For about a hundred years the name of Dibdin was a pleasant name in the ears and eyes of the English people. The Dibdin proper, son of a silversmith, was born at Southampton in the year of the Scotch Rebellion, 1745. The event belongs almost to ancient history, but there are men not yet so very old who can remember in their childhood the once ‘tuneful Charley,’ who became for ever mute in the year 1814.
The name is a local one. There is a place called Dibden (originally Deep Dene), a place of some importance at the time of the Conquest, situated in a thickly wooded dell in Southampton Water. Charles Dibdin was Hampshire born and Hampshire bred. His father, silversmith and parish clerk, sent him to Winchester School, but he was more especially of the Winchester Cathedral choir. He was ‘intended for the Church,’ as the phrase goes, but instead of a bishop writing charges, he became a composer arranging musical scores. In the Church he probably would have written a few indifferent sermons. On and for the stage, and the world, he penned and melodised hundreds of popular songs. Some of these are as good as sermons; others are as unintelligible; there are many of them that are infinitely better. Dibdin knew as much about a ship as many curates know about religion; and now and then he got into the same sort of mess accordingly. On the whole, however, he pulled through successfully. The backbone of all his songs was ‘loyalty.’ It was like insisting on ‘faith’ in sermons. He perhaps would have been a popular preacher, had he not preferred being a popular song-writer—Tyrtæus instead of Calchas.
Charles Dibdin was neither sailor nor parson, but the family was destined to contribute both to the wide-apart professions respectively. Charles had an elder brother who took to sea and became captain of an East Indiaman. Years after, but in the same year, 1775, a son was born to each, and each son was named Thomas. The captain’s son was born at Calcutta. He was put to the law with the object of making a Lord Chancellor of him, but the young fellow turned to the Church, and did not become an archbishop. Nevertheless, he is well remembered as the Rev. Thomas Frognal Dibdin, author of the ‘Bibliomania,’ the ‘Biographical Decameron,’ and many other works of a similar nature. The Rev. Thomas died, a popular preacher, rector of St. Mary’s, Bryanstone Square, in 1847.
The Rev. Thomas’s cousin, Tom, was born in Peter Street, Holborn. You will look for street or house in vain. New Oxford Street has swept it all down. Peter Street was the third of a street which had three names. At the Holborn end it was Bow Street; at the Montague House, or Museum, end, it was Queen Street. The middle portion was Peter Street, which New Oxford Street has knocked out of existence. But for this, you might yourself have knocked at the very house door, as Mr. Garrick did, on the day of Master Tom’s christening, when Roscius was godfather, and he brought with him a hamper of wine, and Frank Aickin, as second godfather. This was ‘Tyrant Aickin,’ as Frank was called, from his having always to play the swaggering, low-mouthed Maximinus of the drama. The godson of the two actors never had the good luck in life of either of his godfathers. He never had a living that made him socially equal with his cousin the rector. The cousins were alike in one point only. Each wrote his own biography, both of which are worth the reading. Thomas Frognal Dibdin, D.D., became one of the founders of the Roxburgh Club. Tom Dibdin of Peter Street was often a guest at the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks. T. F. D. was a popular lecturer, but no lecture of his had such vogue as his cousin Tom’s song, ‘When Vulcan forged the bolts of Jove.’ Tom’s father never wrote a better.
But Tom’s father is waiting, and it is his story that has to be briefly told. After all, Charles Dibdin the elder began life, or would have begun it, with the Church—as organist. He was a candidate for the office at Bishop’s Waltham, in his native county. He was then only fourteen years of age. He was self-taught, save some elementary instruction from Mr. Fussel, the organist of Winchester Cathedral. The village judges, finding him competent, duly rejected him on account of his youth! He was looking at the ruins of the episcopal palace with a humble church officer, who told him it was built by King Stephen’s brother Henry de Blois. ‘And you are a descendant of his,’ said Charles. ‘That’s more than I ever knew before,’ replied his companion. ‘It’s quite true though,’ rejoined Dibdin; ‘are you not Henry the organ-blower?’
The outlines of Dibdin’s career are soon told. He came up to London as poor as Whittington, but with little of his luck. He earned a couple of guineas by composing ballads for music-sellers, by which they made hundreds; and he tuned pianos, and taught how to play on them. At length, wearied with this, he made his first appearance on the stage (he says) at the Richmond Theatre, on the Hill, in 1762, when he was seventeen years of age. Dibdin, however, also states that he first appeared at Birmingham, and Jesse records that Dibdin and Bannister came out originally at Marylebone Gardens. Dibdin speaks of the old Richmond house as the ‘Academy’ and the ‘Histrionic Academy.’ This was one of the names given to the theatre by Theophilus Cibber before a licence had been got to open it. Theophilus called it at first the Cephalic Snuff Warehouse. Snuff, in minute quantities, was sold at the various entrances, and admission followed gratis. It was on this stage that Dibdin is said to have made his début, as Damætas, in ‘Midas’; a thing the more difficult to believe, as ‘Midas’ was not produced in England till 1764, namely, at Covent Garden, and then Damætas was played by Fawcett.
Victor pronounced Charles Dibdin’s Mungo to be ‘as complete a low character as was ever exhibited.’ Isaac Bickerstaffe as highly praised the musical composer as Victor did the actor. ‘The music of this piece,’ he wrote in the preface to it, ‘being extremely admired by persons of the first state and distinction, it would be injustice to the extraordinary talents of the young man who assisted me in it, was I not to declare that it is, under my direction, the entire composition of Mr. Dibdin, whose admirable performance in the character of Mungo does so much credit to himself and me, as well as to the gentleman whose penetration could distinguish neglected genius, and who has taken pleasure in producing it to the public.’ Dibdin’s elder son was named after his father, the character he played, and the author of ‘The Padlock’—Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin. The author of ‘The Thespian Dictionary,’ writing of the second son, Thomas Dibdin, adds to the fact, ‘but not acknowledged by his father!’
Dibdin’s success as an actor was so complete, that we can only wonder at his leaving it so soon for authorship, musical composition, and entertainments in which he was the sole performer. He was the original Ralph, in ‘The Maid of the Mill,’ and straightway London fluttered with ‘Ralph handkerchiefs.’ Dibdin’s Mungo, in ‘The Padlock,’ another creation, was so naturally and thoroughly to the purpose, it was said that the performer had gone to Jamaica and spent weeks there in order to study the manners and speech of the negroes! The fact is, that he combined impulse with intelligence, and never lost an opportunity. The very first sea-song of his which took the national ear and the national heart, was ‘Blow high, blow low!’ and this, if he did not compose, he imagined, not in the open stormy ocean, on board a man-of-war, but on board a Calais packet which took thirteen hours on a stormy passage across the Straits of Dover.
In nearly all cases of composition, with Dibdin, his method was most singular. In his musical entertainments, he introduced hundreds of songs, words and music by himself. But when he seated himself at the piano, before the public, not a note of the accompaniment was written. He improvised, and never thought of putting a single note down on paper till the music-sellers wanted copy for the engravers.
Dibdin went abroad in the early part of his career to study music; but he merely practised by himself, and noted little but the manners and morals of the people amongst whom he was thrown. The English society at Calais, during his sojourn there, he describes as consisting of three or four fraudulent bankrupts, two or three too successful duellists, a few rich smugglers under strong suspicion of having committed murder, which was the most likely thing in the world, and a high official personage, guilty of forgery, and ‘the father of a nobleman who was afterwards singularly remarkable for having publicly exhibited the hand and head of Struensee.’
Dibdin exchanged Calais for ever pleasant, and then especially pleasant, Nancy. He makes a very curious observation on one incident of his sojourn there. He saw the Emperor of Germany, Joseph, brother of Marie Antoinette, pass through the old capital of the province which had once belonged to the imperial house of Hapsburg Lorraine. There was an outburst of the old affection of the Lorrainers at the sight of the descendant of their old dukes; and such expression was given to this manifestation that Dibdin states his conviction that if the Emperor of Germany were once resolved to relieve Lorraine from the oppression of the French yoke, the inhabitants of the old duchy would give him their enthusiastic support.
We will not follow out Dibdin’s professional career. The biographical dictionaries and his own works tell of his struggles, his ups and downs, his reverses and his triumphs. We rather care to look at him in some of his picturesque moments. We seem to see and to hear him when we look in at St. Bride’s—a mere lad, playing the congregation out with such exquisite power, that instead of departing, they remained to listen. We seem to see the young fellow’s enraptured look when he first heard the crash of an overture. What emotion there must have been in the young soul when he discovered that from simply hearing the combination and working of sounds in that overture, he had grasped the secret of composition; and later, on returning home from some grand musical banquet, he could write out the whole score from memory, with very few errors indeed. It was only natural after Dibdin had composed a great part of the music to ‘Love in the City,’ and to ‘Lionel and Clarissa’—as we write the words, Tom Cooke’s manly voice seems to fill the house with ‘I’ll love thee ever dearly!‘—it is natural, we say, that ‘Charley’ should find himself growing famous. We find him in strange company the year after ‘Lionel and Clarissa’ was produced.
Perhaps the last place in which one would expect to find Dibdin is, not indeed with Dr. Johnson, but in Boswell’s life of the erudite savage. Boswell had composed a ‘little epigrammatical song’ which, he says, he was ‘volatile enough’ to repeat to Johnson, adding, ‘that Garrick had, a few days before, got it set to music by the ingenious Mr. Dibdin.’ This was in 1769, when Charles was four-and-twenty; and this is what he had to go to work upon:—
A MATRIMONIAL THOUGHT.
In the blithe days of honeymoon,
With Kate’s allurements smitten,
I lov’d her late, I lov’d her soon,
And call’d her, ‘dearest kitten!’
But now my kitten’s grown a cat,
And cross, like other wives;
Oh, by my soul, my honest Mat,
I fear she has nine lives!
Doubtless, Dibdin’s music was better than Boswell’s words—it could not be worse. Johnson confined himself simply to literary criticism. ‘My illustrious friend,’ Boswell remarks, said, “It is very well, sir, but you should not swear.” Upon which, I altered “Oh by my soul” to “Alas, alas!”’
It was in this year, 1769, that Dibdin lifted Sedaine’s ‘Deserter’ to the English stage, after which all the sweet throats in town were warbling ‘Somehow, my spindle I mislaid.’ Just ninety-nine years ago this last month of August, Dibdin produced ‘The Waterman,’ which has now entered its hundredth year, and which is as fresh as a pure flood-tide on a bright morning. Many of us may remember having seen in our childhood the original Tom Tug, for Bannister lived half a century after he created the part. And what a whole crew of Tom Tugs have warbled on the boards and concert-room since then! Do you remember, on Edmund Kean’s benefit, June 3rd, 1822, how touchingly he sang ‘Farewell, my trim-built wherry’? Can you not see Braham, so like an amateur waterman? Can you not hear him so like something sweetly superhuman, trilling forth, ‘And have you not heard of a jolly young waterman?’ Only a few nights ago we saw the piece and heard the songs, and were tempted to say as Ophelia says about the things that had been and the things that be. It is ninety-eight years since Dibdin himself, as Solomon, sang his own song, ‘The lads of the village shall merrily, ha!’ in ‘The Quaker,’ and it remains an exquisite song still, but it demands an exquisite voice and tact in the singer.
Charles had a way of his own in adapting French musical pieces to the English stage. He took the pieces, but he fitted them with music by himself. After all, this sort of thing has been done by composers with reference to other composers of the same country. There was, for instance, a ‘Barber of Seville,’ by Paisiello. Well, Rossini appropriated the story, composed his own fresh and immortal music for it, and extinguished Paisiello’s barber for ever. When Dibdin brought out ‘Rose and Colin,’ a piece which had been ‘set’ by Philidor, he was asked why he had not retained the clever Frenchman’s sparkling music. ‘Because,’ answered Charles, ‘Philidor is famous enough, and I have a reputation of my own to make!’ Philidor’s reputation is now more connected with chess (for he was the Philidor) than with music. Nevertheless, he is bracketed with Duni and Monsigny as one of the founders of modern comic French opera; and the song for Medusa, in his opera of ‘Persée,’ ‘J’ai perdu la beauté qui me rendait si vaine,’ remains a masterpiece of harmony. Philidor was better known than Dibdin himself, in London, where he died, indifferent that Charles and others were ‘stealing his thunder,’ with the reputation of being one of the best-tempered, most upright, and most disinterested men that ever lived.
From 1765 to 1775 was Dibdin’s best time in connection with the drama. Subsequently he became erratic. He was proprietor, manager, at the head of a company, or constituting a whole company in himself, now with audiences, now sadly in want of them: now flourishing like a prince, living like three, and falling into bankruptcy and rheumatic gout. He has given an account of his wanderings, in which there is an incident or two worth the telling, when they refer to musical or to theatrical matters. From this book we learn that Shuter had an amusingly sententious critical way with him. When Reddish (George Canning’s stepfather) first played Posthumus (in ‘Cymbeline’), Shuter simply remarked, ‘Henceforth, let every villain be called Posthumus Leonatus.’ And, being asked what he thought of Macklin’s Macbeth, he solemnly replied: ‘The time has been that when the brains were out the man would die, and there an end!’
One day, when Dibdin was near the Land’s End, he passed through a village where he saw several men carrying books and instruments to church. To his questions, they replied that they were going to practise for the Sunday service. ‘Very good,’ said sympathising Charley; ‘and whose music do you sing?’ ‘Oh, Handel, Handel!’ was the rather bold answer of the leader of the choir. ‘Handel!’ rejoined Dibdin, in much amazement; ‘don’t you find him a leetle difficult?’ ‘Well,’ replied the Cornish minstrel, ‘we did at first; but, you see, we altered him, and so we get on very well with him now.’ Charles, who hated Garrick and despised Handel, changed the scene of his dramatic incident to Bath; but it was originally told of the Cornish singers.
It was principally for Dibdin’s own entertainments, not for ‘Dibdin at Home,’ that he wrote and composed his famous sea-songs. How Dibdin came to write and compose sea-songs is accounted for by a tradition. Among the crew of a ship which came into Southampton Water was a cabin-boy who, disgusted with the tyranny of which he was daily the subject, took the first opportunity to escape. The boy remained hid in Southampton till his ship had sailed, and then he appeared in the streets singing naval ditties for bread. The lad sang so sweetly that people got interested in him. His name, he said, was Incledon, and he came from near the Land’s End, Cornwall. Dibdin and Incledon became known to each other, and the Cornish cabin-boy furnished the naval properties which the Hampshire poet put into his naval songs.
But this yarn won’t hold water. Incledon, the silvery-toned son of a Cornish doctor, was articled to the celebrated composer, Jackson of Exeter, at eight years of age. The boy was the petted favourite of the musical people of Exeter for about seven years. At the end of that time, weary of the cathedral choir discipline, for which town popularity could not compensate, Incledon, in 1779, entered as a common sailor on board the Formidable. He served in the West Indies, took part in hard fighting, and, after the lapse of about four years, he determined to go upon the stage as a singer. It was about the year 1783 that Incledon made his first appearance in Southampton and on its stage, at which time some of the best of Dibdin’s sea-songs had long been familiar in the public ear. In 1790 Incledon first appeared in London, as Dermot in ‘The Poor Soldier,’ and for thirty subsequent years he shared with Braham the glory of being the first of English melodists. No one ever did, or ever will, sing Stevens’s ‘Storm,’ or Andrew Cherry’s ‘Bay of Biscay,’ as Incledon sang them and other manly songs; and no couple of vocalists ever did or ever will sing as Braham (Valentine) and Incledon (Fitzwalter) sang the former’s important duet, ‘All’s Well’ to Tom Dibdin’s words. There was so much of the sea in Tom’s songs that some of the best have been frequently attributed to his father.
It was lucky for that father and the nation that he quarrelled with managers, wrote, sang, and played on his own hook, and composed the naval ditties especially, that will make his name last till the New Zealander seats himself on the ruined arch of London Bridge. These songs caused Dibdin to be a power in the country, and his services were not altogether without acknowledgment. Pitt encouraged and paid him to write, sing, publish, and give away loyal war-songs in the old fighting time—testimony enough of the minstrel’s value. George III. rewarded his loyalty by granting him a pension, of which a succeeding Addington ministry deprived him. The bust of the skilled son of song was appropriately placed in Greenwich Hospital, where the singer himself might as appropriately have found a home. Lord Minto patronised an edition of Dibdin’s songs for the use of the navy. They have not been quite slap-banged out of use by the crapulous music-halls. At public dinners far better than the meat is it to hear Ransford sing ‘Yeo heave ho!’ or Donald King ‘Tom Bowling’—the touching monody to the author’s good brother the captain of an East Indiaman. It is said that our Queen conferred a small pension on Dibdin’s suffering daughter, a lady honourably connected with literature. If this be true, let us be glad that all literary annuities, if we may so speak, are not granted to persons far too well off to require them—or to receive them, one would suppose, without a sense of humiliation.
The religion of Charles Dibdin’s sailors ebbs and flows like the sea, and that even in one song. Take, for instance, ‘Poor Jack,’ which has been praised on the very ground of its religious beauty. In the first verse Jack has more comfort than faith. He is careless, on the chance of others caring for him:—
Avast! nor don’t think me a milksop so soft
To be taken for trifles a-back;
For they say there’s a Providence sits up aloft,
To keep watch for the life of poor Jack!
In the second verse Jack has heard the chaplain palaver one day, ‘about souls, heaven, mercy, and such.’ It was, Jack says, as unintelligible to him as high Dutch. Nevertheless, Jack got at some instruction from the reverend gentleman:—
For, he said, how a sparrow can’t founder, d’ye see,
Without orders that come down below;
And a many fine things that prov’d clearly to me
That Providence takes us in tow.
For, says he, d’ye mind me, let storms e’er so oft
Take the topsails o’ sailors a-back,
There’s a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft
To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.
In the next verse Jack is worldly again. When Poll is ‘sniv’ling and piping her eye’ at the idea of parting from him, he says tenderly—and we can hear the voice of T. P. Cooke saying it—‘Why, what a damn’d fool you must be!’ Then comes the change in his religious philosophy:—
Can’t you see the world’s wide, and there’s room for us all,
Both for seamen, and lubbers ashore?
And if to Old Davy I should go, dear Poll!
You never will hear of me more.
What then? all’s a hazard!... &c.
Perhaps he ‘may laughing come back,’ and he supports this doctrine of chances by means of the doctrine of election, in the figure of the cherub up aloft with his protective power over Jack; and which cherub, in the last verse, is commissioned, at the end of all things, to ‘look out a good berth’ for the same theological sailor.
To be sure, such loose theology was to be expected in sailors who had such chaplains to teach them, as Dibdin delineates in another of his songs, ‘There’s nothing like grog’:—
T’other day, as the chaplain was preaching,
Behind him I curiously slunk;
And while he our duty was teaching,
As how we should never get drunk,
I show’d him the stuff, and he twigg’d it,
And it soon set his rev’rence agog;
And he swigg’d, and Nick swigg’d,
And Ben swigg’d, and Dick swigg’d,
And I swigg’d, and all of us swigg’d it,
And swore there was nothing like grog!
At a time when old English ballads are supposed to portray English history, we may point to the above as untruly reflecting naval manners in England in the last century. It is more of a caricature than a naval scene in a pantomime, and the morality is as ‘shaky’ as that in another ballad, ‘When faintly gleams the doubtful day,’ where humanity in hunting matters is illustrated by hunting the hare to the point of death, but then protecting ‘the defenceless creature’ by calling off ‘the well-taught hounds:’—
For cruelty should ne’er disgrace
The well-earn’d pleasures of the chase!
Again, of the fox it is said, ‘Unpitied shall the culprit die’:—
To quell his cruel, artful race,
Is labour worthy of the chase;
as if the quelling was not the last thought of squires who breed foxes. It was very good policy of Dibdin to teach that ‘Every bullet has its billet,’ but in ‘A sailor and an honest heart’ war’s dangers are the sailor’s chances, and his philosophy is to ask no more than ‘grog aboard and girl ashore.’
Ben Backstay and Anna piping their eyes at parting are but sickly sentimentalities. Bill Bobstay, with his purse always open and his veins to the same tune, shedding his blood for the king, is like the stagiest of stage sailors; and Jack Rattlin heaving a sigh as he sits on the ‘pendant yard,’ and dying for love, with his eyes uplifted, when he comes down from it, is not the man who could hand, reef, and steer better than any mate afloat. Indeed Dibdin’s sailors in love are generally great spooneys; in ‘The Boatswain calls’ there is a whole shipload of them. Fancy an entire crew heaving ‘fervent sighs’ as they leave looking at the girls ashore, to turn for consolation to the windlass with ‘Yo heave ho!’ But even these soft ones are to be preferred to the tipplers who declare that ‘the best sort of sounding is sounding the bowl.’ The best side of Dibdin’s philosophy is where he metrically teaches that ‘a brave British sailor should never despair,’ and pays a compliment to the bold royal tar, the Duke of Clarence, who got it made into a law that ‘each tar of his rhino should have his full share,’ and should no more be cheated of his pay, as he used to be. But there was a lack of sincerity in most of Dibdin’s sentimental sea-maxims for sailors, and for one who is cheered in dying for love there are a dozen who are encouraged to find in every port a wife:—
I’ve a spanking wife at Portsmouth Gates,
A pigmy at Goree,
An orange-tawny up the Straits,
A black at St. Lucie;
Thus, whatsomdever course I bend,
I leads a jovial life;
In ev’ry mess I finds a friend,
In ev’ry port a wife.
To our thinking, Charles Dibdin, celebrated as he was for his sea songs, deserves far higher praise for quite another sort of country song, of which we will give an example. His sailors are too much addicted, when storms rage and billows roll, to sling the flowing bowl; landsmen might fancy that Jack’s life consisted of thinking of Nancy afloat, hugging her ashore, drinking to her health unceasingly, and taking a turn of duty with a hornpipe sort of air, as if the galleries were clapping him enthusiastically. It is all good and picturesque in its way, but tuneful Charley is more to our liking when he gets into an English corn-field, strolls down an English lane, or sits at the door of an English cottage. He is then as natural as Moreland treating the same subjects on canvas. The fragrance of the fields comes on the wings of his song, and his English home and peasant are still more truly English than his English ships and sailors. Take, for example:—
THE LABOURER’S WELCOME HOME.
The ploughman whistles o’er the furrow,
The hedger joins the vacant strain,
The woodman sings the woodland thorough,
The shepherd’s pipe delights the plain.
Where’er the anxious eye can roam,
Or ear receive the jocund pleasure,
Myriads of beings thronging, flock,
Of Nature’s song to join the measure;
Till, to keep time, the village clock
Sounds sweet the lab’rer’s welcome home!
The hearth swept clean, his partner smiling;
Upon the dining-table smokes
The frugal meal—which, time beguiling,
The ale the harmless jest provokes.
Admire his lot. His children playing,
To share his smiles around him flock,
And faithful Tray, since morn, that straying,
Trudged with him, till the village clock
Proclaim’d the lab’rer’s welcome home.
The cheering faggot burnt to embers,
While lares around their vigils keep,
That Power that poor and rich remembers,
Each thanks, and then retires to sleep.
And now the lark climbs Heav’n’s high dome,
Fresh from repose, toil’s kind reliever;
And furnish’d with his daily stock—
His dog, his staff, his keg, his beaver—
He travels till the village clock
Sounds sweet the lab’rer’s welcome home!
Here the pictures are perfect; each is in its way a little Bewick. If there is once or twice a slight roughness in the metre, it is such as may be met with in Cowley; and if the introduction of ‘lares’ at an English hearth startles us a little, it is just such surprises as come upon us in Cowley and the poets of his time. The charm of the above song is greatly enhanced by the music. We have no such songs nor any such music for English people generally in these days. Music-hall ruffianism woos the public ear with beastly innuendo, worse than downright speaking, and the Hurlingham husseydoms, after assisting at the butchery of doves, talk music-hall slang and play Champagne Charley quadrilles.
Let us now add a word respecting another child of song, born in Southampton, and still living when Charles Dibdin came there into the world—Isaac Watts. Isaac Watts and Charles Dibdin! Why not? They are not so far apart as you may think. Isaac, the Southampton Nonconformist schoolmaster’s son, lived from 1674, reign of Charles the Second, to 1748, reign of the second George. Charles Dibdin was, at the latter period, three years old. The piety of Watts is no more questionable than the loyalty of Dibdin. Watts upheld piety by simple means in an impious age. Dibdin sustained loyalty at a time when revolutionary ideas were struggling into activity at home, and when there were enemies abroad who found moral support in such a struggle. If Dibdin’s allegiance found occasionally exaggerated expression, so Watts’s piety sometimes found a rather arrogant utterance. Dibdin, however, was—strange as it may appear—more humble and contented than Watts. In a ballad in ‘The Old Woman of Eighty,’ Dibdin makes a crowd of poor unlearned country folk sing:—
Come here, ye rich; come here, ye great;
Come here, ye grave: come here, ye gay;
Behold our blest, though humble fate,
Who, while the sun shines, make our hay.
Therein is Christian philosophy with content. Watts makes his well-born Christian child an insufferable prig, who would have scorned Dibdin’s half-starved wretch; for example, in the ‘Praise for Mercies’:—
While some poor wretches scarce can tell
Where they may lay their head,
I have a home wherein to dwell
And rest upon my bed.
In Dibdin’s ‘True Courage’ Bob Bounce is ready to eat an enemy alive, but the minstrel humanises him, and inculcates the maxim that all men are brothers:—
That my friend Jack or Tom I should rescue from danger,
Or lay my life down for each lad in the mess,
Is nothing at all; ’tis the poor wounded stranger,
And the poorer the more I shall succour distress.
This may be rough morality, but it is of better quality than the following selfish sample in Watts:
Lord, I ascribe it to thy grace,
And not to chance, as others do,
That I was born of Christian race,
And not a heathen or a Jew.
While Dibdin’s Tom or Jack is for ever seeing, after his fashion, a merciful Providence, Watts’s model child can discern only one armed with terrors and tortures. Isaac had no idea of one of Charley’s ‘sweet little cherubs’ sitting aloft watchful to preserve; the Nonconformist’s feverish eye beheld only a demon:—
’Tis dangerous to provoke a god!
His power and vengeance none can tell:
One stroke of his Almighty rod
Shall send young sinners quick to hell.
In the sailor’s philosophy all is harmony; but Watts finds discord where other men find none. Jack does not believe that ‘dogs delight to bark and bite,’ nor that ‘God hath made them so.’ A pat on the head from a master’s hand is the supreme delight of the ever-faithful dog. And if ‘bears and lions growl and fight,’ it is not that ‘it is their nature to;’ any more, at least, than it is the nature of man. It was Nelson who told the young midshipman, as part of his duties, to ‘hate a Frenchman like the devil!’ Dibdin only allowed such feeling in the heat and fury of battle:—
’Tis a furious lion in battle, so let it!
But, fury appeased, ’tis in mercy a lamb!
Watts is always readiest with unpleasant figures. Ordinary parents forgive lovingly the faults of children, but Watts tells each little angelic rebel that—
The ravens shall pick out their eyes,
And eagles eat the same!
Moreover, Watts forgets grace, occasionally, for chance, as in the couplet:—
If we had been ducks, we might dabble in mud,
Or dogs, we might play till it ended in blood,
So foul and so fierce are their natures.
But Thomas and William, and such pretty names,
Should be cleanly and harmless, as doves or as lambs,
Those lovely, sweet, innocent creatures.
Watts’s intentions were as honest as Dibdin’s, and both, no doubt, often erred; but the silversmith’s son was never so loose in logic, philosophy, truth, and metre, as the dwarfish son of the schoolmaster is in the sample just given. It must have been some such sample that soured the spirit of ‘bold Bradbury,’ another dissenting minister, who suspected Watts of not being a good Trinitarian. Once Bradbury’s clerk gave out one of Watts’s hymns, to be sung before the sermon. The minister looked down from the pulpit and said: ‘No, sir, none of Watts’s whims here, if you please.’ In one of the anniversaries of 1688 Bradbury sang, at a public dinner, ‘The Roast Beef of Old England!’ Had he lived long enough he would have sung with equally loyal zest, Tom Dibdin’s famous anti-invasion song, ‘The tight little Island.’
We are not disposed to touch upon Dibdin’s domestic story. A good deal is said in the words that his children loved, honoured, and reverenced their mother. His life led him too much, too far, and too long away from home for the fine domestic sympathies to have ardent play. Even before his melancholy death in 1814, his sons, Charles and Thomas, had distinguished themselves, but they lacked the grace and power of musical composition so remarkable in the father. But in dramatic composition they were his equals, and Tom especially was nearly equal with, though not so prolific as, his father in song-writing.
How Charles the younger caught the ‘trick’ of his father may be seen in a song (published as his in ‘My Spouse and I’), of which here is one stanza:—
We tars have a maxim, your honours, d’ye see,
To live in the same way we fight;
We never give in, and when running a-lee,
We pipe hands the vessel to right.
It may do for a lubber to snivel and that,
If by chance on a shoal he be cast,
But a tar among breakers, or thrown on a flat,
Pull away, tug and tug, to the last;
With a yeo, yeo, yeo, &c.
It was the old Dibdin philosophy of ‘Never say die.’
Tom Dibdin is generally supposed to have adopted the stage for a profession only after he had tried another calling—apprentice to an upholsterer. This is not quite correct. Tom made his first appearance on the stage before he went to school. He acted, or, rather, represented, Cupid in a pageant in which Mrs. Siddons sat as the goddess Venus. As the great actress took him in hand to rectify his dress, little Tom heard the first words from her lips that ever fell on his ear. They were directed to a female dresser, and they were solemnly enunciated: ‘Ma’am, could you favour me with a pin?’ Tom, as he sat at her feet in the pageant, felt a sort of stage-fright, but Sarah kept him under control by repeated murmured promises that if he were a good boy there was barley-sugar in store for him.
As an upholsterer’s apprentice Tom vexed his master’s soul and injured all his materials. The lad was barely eighteen when he made his plunge into the drama. Only the other day, we looked with interest on the front of the old Eastbourne Theatre, in the centre of the village, away from the modern sea-town. It has still, or had a little while ago, a dramatic-looking exterior. Richland, one of the managing partners of the house, had a nephew, a handsome lad of fourteen years of age, who printed the bills, did general business, and was called ‘Little Jerrold.’ When little Jerrold got to York as a manager, he put a fine handle to his name, and was thenceforth known for some time as Mr. Fitz-Jerrold. Tom Dibdin proposed to come out at the Eastbourne Theatre as Norval. Jerrold, on preparing the play-bill, asked him in what name Tom intended to appear. Dibdin replied, ‘My name is Norval!’ ‘I know it is,’ said Jerrold, ‘on the Grampian hills, but what is it in Sussex?’ The name adopted was Merchant. After all, instead of ‘journeying with this intent,’ and playing Norval, Dibdin ‘gilded his humble name’ by playing Valentine, in one of his father’s numerous musical pieces, and singing ‘Poor Jack,’ to the delight of the Eastbourne audience. The handsome Jerrold above alluded to was the father of Douglas Jerrold, whom John Kemble, as Rolla, once carried on his shoulder as Cora’s child, and who ended his career too early, leaving behind him a reputation for wit second to none.
The most amusing portion of Tom Dibdin’s reminiscences are the illustrations of social as well as dramatic life with which it abounds.
Tom belonged to one of those Beef Steak Clubs (this one was theatrical) which seem never to have had the dish on the table from which the name was supposed to be derived. One of their intellectual sports consisted in a member naming an actor, and then calling on another member for a quotation which should be applicable to the actor named. In this way some one named Incledon, whose talk was a bubbling talk, interlarded with ‘my boy,’ and ‘my dear boy,’ as is the traditionary manner with familiar players still. Incledon being named, Const, the magistrate, being called upon, instantly quoted the line ‘Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing.’ Nothing could be apter. Then another member, naming George Frederick Cooke, called on Irish Johnstone for the illustration, and Jack, without hesitation, enunciated ‘Load o’ whisky,’ giving this appropriate turn to the name of an operatic drama then in vogue—‘Lodoiska.’ Emery was once called upon in connection with his own name; but he was tired and embarrassed, and at length he stammered forth, apologetically, ‘Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me!’ unconscious that he had fulfilled all conditions, and had illustrated himself in a line from Shakespeare.
These intellectual exercises were not confined to the ‘Beef Steaks.’ There was in Tom Dibdin’s days a certain ‘Ad Libitum Club,’ where the intellect was as much exercised as the more sensual appetites were liberally gratified by supper and punch. At these jovial meetings, some one happening to name an individual in course of conversation, would be met by a cry of ‘Skull!’ which implied that the member was to consider the individual dead, if he were not so already; at all events, he was to furnish on the instant that individual’s rhymed epitaph. Tom Dibdin once chanced to refer to Isaac Read, the scholar and antiquary. The cry of ‘Skull’ was immediately raised, and Tom as instantaneously replied to it as follows:—
Reader! by these four lines take heed,
And mend your life, for my sake!
For you must die, like Isaac Read,
Though you read till your eyes ache.
On another occasion Tom, without thinking of the consequences, made some allusion to the materials for writing his own life. He was, in one breath, pronounced to be dead, and with the cry of ‘Skull!’ he was challenged to recite his own epitaph. It was furnished in the lively style that follows:—
Longing, while living, for laurel and bays,
Under this willow a poor poet lays.
With little to censure and less to praise,
He wrote twelve dozen and threescore plays,
He finished his ‘Life’ and went his ways.
While on the subject of epitaphs we may as well give a sample of Tom’s father in this department of literature. The following, penned in all seriousness, is to be found in Lee churchyard, near Blackheath, the tribute of Charley to Parsons, the comic actor:—
Here Parsons lies! Oft on life’s busy stage,
With nature, reader, hast thou seen him vie.
He science knew; knew manners, knew the age,
Respected knew to live—lamented, die.
Thomas Frognall Dibdin, son of ‘Tom Bowling,’ seems to have been early influenced by a desire to show that the Dibdin power of rhyming was in him as well as in his cousins. In 1797 Booker published his ‘Poems.’
Two years after this mild flirtation of the reverend cousin with the Muses, Tom Dibdin made an adaptation from ‘Kotzebue,’ and brought it out with songs, as ‘Of Age To-morrow.’ Our then young grandmothers were soon singing Miss de Camp’s song, ‘Oh no, my Love, no!’ and juvenile actors were all longing to come out in Bannister’s part of Frederick, Baron Willmhurst. Miss de Camp had come from the sawdust of the Surrey Circus, to charm the town; and when she was Mrs. Charles Kemble she became the mother of Fanny Kemble.
They are all gone, these Dibdins, of whom Charles of Southampton was the one whose fame will be the most lasting. Like all men, he is to be judged by his best. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link; a boiler is only as thick as its thinnest part; but a poet is to be measured by his best—the best teachings of the best of his poetry. By this standard the oldest of the Dibdins will rank foremost among those bards and minstrels who have swept the harp and raised the voice to quicken human trust in God, to fan into flame the slumbering but never dead fire of patriotism, and to inculcate loyalty to the powers that be. Dibdin taught perseverance in well-doing with the fervour of a St. Paul, and if he allowed a little too much of the bowl, he was earnest in upholding, when serious, courage and honesty in man, and undying fidelity to woman.
When the youngest of the vocal, musical, and dramatic Dibdins died, in 1841, some one was found to fling, as it were, a stanza or two of sympathy on his tomb. From some lines, called ‘Poor Tom,’ dated from Vienna and printed in the ‘Bath Journal,’ we take the last eight to close our article:—
Poor Tom! As late I wander’d by the Rhine,
I saw its banks in Winter’s mantle clad,
Gaunt, grim, and naked stood each shiv’ring vine—
It was a sight to make the soul feel sad.
‘How many a heart,’ I said, ‘is now made warm
By the bright produce of the joyous tree,
Here left by man to struggle with the storm!’
I sigh’d, Tom; went my way; and thought of thee!